Weber, M. (1965) T Belief and Secularization

Weber, M. (1965) T

Belief and Secularization:

On Religion’s Status in Post-Metaphysical Society

Dan Lazea

The intellectual scene of the last fifteen years was marked by a revival of the interest towards religious phenomenon both in popular culture and in the academic world. The fall of the communist system together with its atheistic ideology, the new religious conflicts (some of them in the heart of secularized Europe), the rise of fundamentalist movements around the world: such facts and events shaped the public debate and focused the spotlights of the media and academics on the human religiosity.

On the one hand, the religion’s revival could seem a very surprising fact. For, numerous cultivated people, at least in Europe and North America, had shared the conviction that the religious phenomenon belongs to history and the modern age of reason and science surpassed it. On the other hand, it is quite debatable if the modernization has ever had such a univocal direction. Now it seems, on the contrary, that the secularization has never touched large masses of people and that the basic elements of the religious faith have never disappeared but only have been transformed in new forms of practicing.

In the academic world the revival of the religious studies seems to be even more spectacular. I would like to introduce here only few examples. In the field of sociology, one of the most authoritative voices is Peter L. Berger. One of the promoters of the “secularization theory” during the 1950s and 1960s, Berger arrives at the end of the 1990s to the conclusion that the literature produced by him and his fellows was “essentially mistaken” simply because the world is “a furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more than ever” (Berger 1999, 2). What turned out to be wrong is the main idea of the secularization theory, namely that “modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals” (Berger 1999, 2-3). Therefore the new idea of Berger is explicitly put in the title of the book he edited: Desecularization of the World points out to the insights of a new theory of religion.

A second example is that of philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who for several decades was the main defender of modernity’s project. In October 2001 Habermas received the Peace Prize of German Booksellers’ Organization and the lecture he delivered to that event on the relation between faith and reason throws a shadow on its confidence in the power of reason to foster a communicative action. The next opportunity to clarify his position was occasioned by the dialogue with the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, a perfect counterpart for Habermas to discuss such issues. During that meeting Habermas made unequivocal statements like that referring to the need of the liberal constitutional state to release the potentials of meaning encapsulated by religion, as, for example, the foundation of human dignity in the Judeo-Christian tradition¹.

The third and last example refers to a book edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo in 1996 as the first issue of the yearly European journal Philosophy. The name of the book is simply Religion and it collects the procedures of the 1994 seminar in Capri dedicated to the same theme. The most striking contributions to this book are those of the editors themselves, because their “postmodernist” label was considered to be incompatible with the subject of belief and religion. Both Derrida and Vattimo showed themselves committed to approach this subject without any prejudices, with the awareness of the inescapable character of the religious perspective in the post-metaphysical world. In the essay “The trace of the trace” Vattimo explores for the first time the theme of religious revival of our time, a theme on which he will return several time ever since². However, one can find here already some of the most important characteristics of his approach to the problem. One of them is the idea that the revival of religion has, apart from the reasons of the public consciousness mentioned at the beginning, good historical and philosophical reasons:

It is (only) because metaphysical meta-narratives have been dissolved that philosophy has rediscovered the plausibility of religion and can consequently approach the religious need of common consciousness independently of the framework of Enlightenment critique. (Vattimo 1998, 84)
The end of metaphysical meta-narratives and the return of religion are both, not by chance, the marks of our time. Taking Heidegger’s lesson seriously, philosophical thought should be able to listen and to interpret such events in a non-reactively manner, as traces of the destiny (Ge-schick) of Being.
Secularization: between tradition and modernity
In the following, I will analyze more closely the ideas of Gianni Vattimo regarding the return of religion in our time and the meaning of this return for our society.

The book Credere di credere (Belief) from 1998 develops the ideas from the essay The trace of the trace but, in the same time, introduces new and surprising theses, which from the very beginning, received either positive reviews or tough critiques³. This is for sure a book which requires a previous contact with some continental philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger. Otherwise it will simply look like a very provocative essay, if not a true lack of reverence in approaching the Christian beliefs and dogmas. And this is because the peculiar idea of this book is the Vattimo’s claim to interpret the history of European secularization as the proper developing of the Christian message.

But what does “secularization” exactly mean in this context? Since the terms “secular”, “secularism”, and “secularization” were coined, they have been used in different ways by various thinkers. The lack of a precise and unique meaning of these terms is a serious problem in interpreting the sociological, philosophical, and theological literature of today. I will try to address these problems and to show their importance for an appropriate understanding of Vattimo’s ideas and consequently their contribution for an understanding of the place of religion in post-metaphysical society. Then I will suggest that his interpretation on the return of religion is consistent not only with the philosophical assumptions of his thinking, but also with the ideas of theorists coming from different theoretical perspectives.

The Western historians of culture shared the basic assumption that the entire world was radically changed once the modern Europe emerged. The beginning of the process of modernization is however a controversial issue. From a philosophical point of view, one could find at least two books, of different authors, to put at the outset of the modern philosophical thought. One of them is Novum Organum (1620) by Francis Bacon; the other one is The Discourse on Method (1637) by René Descartes. In spite of the well-known differences between them, there is at least one feature that unites them: the common concern about method. It was the need for an infallible method for reaching the truth that both Bacon and Descartes initially aimed at. And this need was the result of progressively loosing trust in the premodern worldview’s legacy, at the same time with the birth of a new source of authority: reason. Ever since, the reason and its counterpart, the science, dominated the modern way of conceiving our living in the world and our dealing with it.

Secularization means in this context the process by which reason, the new authority of modernity, eliminates the creeds, traditions, and institutions of Christian religion (because, historically, secularism starts in Christian Europe) from the public space, and transforms the public space in a rational and open scene for debate and decision-making. Yet, “secularization” is a word very strongly related to the problem of time, not only by its etymology. Coming from the Latin word saeculum, the term “secular” (“of the age”) has its opponent in the idea of eternal truth of religion. Moreover, it seems to be that what is at stake here is not only a certain religion, but the whole Platonic metaphysics based on a dual order of entities: the order of immutable essences as opposed to the temporal, thus fugitive and perishable, human world.

The qualitative difference between the sacred and the profane, to use Mircea Eliade’s words (Eliade 1957), shapes our understanding of secularization in a very temporal way. Before modernity, any society described itself as based on an event coming from another kind of time, essentially different, a sacred time. This event sets the foundations of the profane order of things as coming from outside the “age” or “century” (saeculum). Which is the same thing to say that the linearity of the profane time exists only because it is based on the vertical event dating back to the sacred time (the mythic time of heroes, Gods, or Founding Fathers). Charles Taylor insists on the idea that, with the modern world, something essential was shifted in the understanding of the foundation our society is based on:

Secularization: the genuine message of Christianity?

Now we can turn on to Vattimo and his so unusual interpretation of secularization as the proper evolving of the Christian essence. Secularization for Vattimo has little to do with the idea of reason’s liberation from the authority of religious faith. For the reason itself proved to be able to act in a more authoritative and oppressive manner than the old institutions of religion, just to think to the secularized, bureaucratic, and “disenchanted” rule of Fascist or Soviet political systems. Rather we have to interpret the modern emphasis of reason as just a step in a larger historical movement.

Nietzsche was the first thinker who comprehensively denounced the violent uses of reason and its character of mask for the human power of will, as in the little chapter entitled “How the Real World at Last Became a Fable” from The Twilight of the Idols. For Vattimo, we are able to understand the full meaning of such a text, because in the meantime the idea that “disenchantment has also produced a radical disenchantment with the idea of disenchantment itself” (Vattimo 1998 18/10⁵) became a rather common idea. The constant suspicion⁶ of reason towards all kind of pre-judgements finally turned to itself and unveiled its character of pre-judgment. This means that the modern ontology, based on the authority of reason and science, proved to be just another “fable”, more dangerous because behaves as the unique and ultimate possible metaphysics.

The philosopher who deepens Nietzsche’s nihilism in new directions was Martin Heidegger. For him, the history of metaphysics has always been under the sign of “onto-theology”:

This means that metaphysics tried to understand the being of everything that is through a simultaneous determination of its essence or most universal trait (the “onto” in “onto-theology”), and a determination of the ground or source of the totality of beings in some highest or divine entity (the “theo” in “onto-theology”). (Wrathall 2003 2)
The importance of Heidegger for Vattimo’s theory is difficult to be overestimated. In fact, as Vattimo stressed in several places, the “weak thought” or “weak ontology” (pensiero debole or ontologia debole), expressions coined by Vattimo in the middle of the 1980’s, continues Heidegger’s idea of Verwindung. The Heidegger’s term Verwindung means for Vattimo that one can leave metaphysics (and its onto-theological history) only by a complicated acceptance-convalescence-distortion (Vattimo 1991, 189), essentially different from the modern dialectic of overcoming (Überwindung).

Vattimo’s handling of the term “secularization” is at the same time precise and original. “Secularization” was chosen by Vattimo as the term to describe the process of weakening all institutions, ideas, or morals imposed by religion or “Reason” as ultimate and universal truths. Secularization is not an entirely rational process, a method through which, once for all, the capitalized “Truth” would be discerned from mistakes. It is rather an infinite process of interpretation in which acceptance and distortion (once again Verwindung), are both present at the same time. The advantage of choosing the term “secularization” is the suggestion that in its proceeding, the subject of secularization does not simply disappear, but transforms itself and remains, yet in a secularized form, present at the end of the process. The risk of misunderstandings is, however, not easy to remove, for historical meanings of the word “secularization” may prevent the reader from comprehending Vattimo’s personal use of the term. For, to affirm that not only religion but also reason could be subject of secularization is not an intuitive idea at all.

Besides the philosophers mentioned earlier as important to understand Vattimo, there are at least two thinkers the book of Vattimo is indebted to. The first is Max Weber, who demonstrated the relation between power and violence, the second is René Girard, who formulated a similar theory on the relation between violence and the sacred. Now, using the terms power, violence, and sacred and the relations between them, we can sum up the main argument of Vattimo in four steps:

1. 
   The real process of secularization begins with the lowering of God to the level of humanity; the person of Jesus Christ embedded the whole divinity through the process of kenosis (Philippians 2:7).
   
2. 
   The old relation between the almighty God of natural religions and violence is disrupted with the moment in which God turned/transferred his entire power to humanity.
   
3. 
   The secularization process unfolds the genuine message of the Christian religion, for its sole content is the command of charity, as opposed to the former violent character of laws within natural religions.
   
4. 
   The weakening (secularization) of all the power-related structures (being either premodern/religious or modern/rationalist) is the task to be ever continued in the name of charity and tolerance.
   

To say the last, charity is now the new and unique criterion to lead hermeneutics in its never-ending process of interpreting the heritage of the past. Again, in the words of Nietzsche, “there are no facts, only interpretations”⁷. In this context we can understand how Vattimo experiences his own return to religion and why “I believe that I believe” is the only way in which he can sum up his belief.

Conclusions

Similar conclusions seem to characterize the recent dialog of Vattimo with a philosopher coming from a very different background, the pragmatist Richard Rorty. The book The Future of Religion is the result of the encounter of two philosophers that share the common interest in the role of religion in our society. For both thinkers the most visible feature of the 20^th century philosophy is its antifoundational tendency. It is not the ultimate truth of religion, nor of science, that makes life worth living, but the experience of a community passed on through generations. Therefore, a powerful and authoritative public discourse of the churches in our postmetaphysical society will oblige individuals to privatize their faith.

But this necessarily means that a total exclusion of religion from any public dialog is needed? Not at all. Rorty himself changed his position and regrets that he has labeled himself as “atheist” in the past, exactly because opposing theists and atheists implies opposing two epistemological standpoints which can not communicate each other⁸. Even though “religiously tone-deaf”, as Rorty describes himself now, he can speak about religion with a religion committed person like Vattimo, exactly because he has reconsidered his atheism as anticlericalism, that is, he has replaced a metaphysical standpoint with a more modest, political one. Hence, religious belief is a private matter which must not be politically imposed to other people. However, a “religiously tone-deaf” person has to behave with the same respect in confronting a believer or an atheist.

If the problem of religious belief should not be removed from public dialogue, can we make a step further to think that religion can play a positive role in our society? On this point Vattimo and Rorty have slightly different perspectives. For Rorty, the only positive sense of the sacred resides in the teleological image of a future society in which the command of love to be fully accomplished whereas Vattimo believes in the power of a past event to give shape the society of charity.

Regarding either orientations (to the future or to the past), what is here at stake is a central point for the ongoing debate on religion and its role in the public sphere. The anti-foundational and pragmatic character of the philosophies of both Vattimo and Rorty can meet here a perspective coming from the recent political theory literature.

To use the alternative proposed in the title of an article by a political theorist (Bader, 1999)⁹, we are now facing the problem of choosing between two opposing ways to conceive our society, namely secularism or priority for democracy. Secularism in this context has its most common meaning, i.e., opposed to religion, since priority of democracy means that principles, institutions, cultures, virtues, and practices of liberal democracy are more important than the competing religious, philosophical or scientific foundations of it.

For, if conceiving public morality at the beginning of modern times as “secular” was the most natural way to defend freedom to the crossed attacks of religious anti-liberals, now,
in our times, this context has changed: public morality and liberal democracy have to be defended against secularist philosophers, scientific technocrats, and expertocracy as well as against those religions that still defend absolutist and fundamentalist claims in politics. (Bader 1999, 611)
Priority of democracy means therefore that no argument can be rejected from the public sphere only because would be religious, for the religion itself could provide useful tools in fighting against the new enemies of democracy in our time. The modern theologians and religious thinkers that defend liberal democracy lead us back, to the beginning of this essay, to Habermas and his claim to release, for the benefit of our fragile society, the potentials of meaning encapsulated by religion.

A similar conclusion seems to propose the book The Future of Religion. Indeed, hermeneutics, whose attitude is common to Vattimo and Rorty¹⁰, is for the thought what democracy is for the political world: both are ways of appropriating the religious message of charity, tolerance, and solidarity.

References
Bader, V. 1999. Religious pluralism: Secularism or priority for democracy?. Political Theory 27 (5): 597-633.

Derrida, J., and Vattimo, G. (Eds.) 1998. Religion. Standford CA: Stanford University Press.

Eliade, M. 1957. Das Heilige und das Profane. Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuchverlag GmbH. (The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959).

Girard, R.1972. La violence et le sacré. Paris : éditions Bernard Grasset.

Kearney, R. 2004. “Facing Gog”: An interview with Richard Kearney by Liam Kavanagh. Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 1 (2).

Lazea, D. 2004. Ethics of non-violence: between weak thought and Christian heritage. In M. Tataru-Cazaban, ed. Theology and Politics: From the Holly Fathers to the United Europe. Bucharest: Anastasia (in Romanian).

Lazea, D. 2005. The ontological personalism of Luigi Pareyson: From existentialism to the ontology of liberty. Revue Roumaine de Philosophie (1-2) (forthcoming).

Pareyson, L. 1971. Verità e Interpretazione, Milan: Mursia.

Perl, J. M. 2005. The Future of Religion and Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert (review). Common Knowledge 11 (2): 354-356

Ricoeur. P. 1965. De l’Interprétation: Essai sur Freud. Paris: éditions du Seuil. (Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

Rorty, R. 1994. Religion as conversation stopper. Common Knowledge 3 (1): 1-6.

Taylor, C. 1998. Modes of secularism. In Secularism and Its Critics, edited by R. Bhargava. Delphi: Oxford University Press.

Taylor, C. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Vattimo, G. 1991, La fine della modernità, Milan: Garzanti.

Vattimo, G. 1998, The trace of the trace. In Religion, edited by J. Derrida and G. Vattimo. Standford CA: Stanford University Press.

Vattimo, G. 1998. Credere di credere. Milan: Garzanti (Belief. Cambridge: Polity, 1999).

Vattimo, G. 2002, “Weak thought” and the reduction of violence: A dialog with Santiago Zabala. Common Knowledge 8 (3): 452-63.

Vattimo, G. 2002, Dopo la Cristianità. Per un Cristianesimo Non-Religioso. Milan: Garzanti.

Vattimo, G. 2003. After onto-theology: philosophy between science and religion. In Religion after Metaphysics, edited by M.A. Wrathall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vattimo, G., Sequeri, P., and Ruggeri, G. 1999, Interrogazioni sul Cristianesimo, Rome: Edizioni Lavoro.

Vattimo. G. and Rorty R. 2005. The Future of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press.

Weber, M. 1946, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press

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