The historian’s job is an important one. It does matter whether people existed or not and what they were like and what they did. Yes, our gods, Greek, Roman JudaeoChristian-Muslim are fictions, myths that are part of our heritage. Yes, we remember them rather like dead people. But the human beings who worshipped and fought over them, who struggled to make sense of their own lives, who inhabited the same spaces that we do now, were real and it is both interesting and respectful to care about the reality of their lives. But the dead are dead. Above all, let us believe in life before death, respect the living and enjoy being with each other and fellow creatures here and now. 1. Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (Flamingo, London 1999). sof 74 November 2005 The US moral philosopher, Jeffrey Stout, notes that, ‘academic theology seems to have lost its ability to command attention as a distinctive contributor to public discourse in our culture.’1 This situation creates what Stout calls the ‘theologian’s dilemma’: the more theologians adhere to meaningful patterns of public discourse, the less distinctive is the theological contribution they make to public life, and thus the less able they are to voice the traditional concerns of the religious communities they are meant to serve. But the more they are seen to be voicing these concerns the less public relevance is accredited to their utterances. Church leaders and academic theologians who contribute to public debate will have a public audience only if the utterances they make could just as well have been uttered by humanists who need never have encountered theological sources of meaning. Consequently, philosophy tends to call for the privatisation of religious belief. In my workshop presentation at this year’s SoF Conference, of which this article is a reduced version, I quoted Richard Rorty, Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls in support of this call. My aim, however, is to present an alternative call from the Italian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, which offers theology a way to recover its public voice.
According to Rorty, theology’s privatisation is necessitated by our acceptance of a Darwinian story of human origins. Darwinism has made philosophical pluralism seem irresistible by undermining our confidence in the philosophical heritage of orthodox Christian theology. This heritage posits an ingredient special to humans which connects us to a realm of reality beyond the surrounds of our immediate material environment. The existence of such a realm made the notion of a non-human authority, such as a divine voice in scripture, seem plausible. Without it such a notion ceases to convince and theology loses its public plausibility. For Rorty, ‘The main reason why religion needs to be privatised is that, in political discussion with those outside the relevant religious community, it is a conversation-stopper.’2 Ending a political conversation is about the worst thing anyone can do in an open liberal society based on ‘argumentative reason’ and nothing ends such conversation more comprehensively than a word or two from God. Interpretations of the Bible, like interpretations of poetry, will be a meaningful but private affair.
Gianni Vattimo, however, can be interpreted as offering an alternative to privatisation. He draws on the language of incarnation and salvation but skilfully evades its tendency to be authoritarian and metaphysical by insisting that Christian theology will not be heard in the public square until people of religion have thought through, and included in their utterances, all the implications of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God.
Vattimo’s philosophy begins with the truth of hermeneutics (interpretation) in both senses of the genitive. He explores the type of truth which belongs to hermeneutics and the truth that hermeneutics brings to philosophy once we accept Nietzsche’s claim that ‘there are no facts, only interpretations; and this is an interpretation.’ For Vattimo, hermeneutical truth – the truth of interpretation – responds to the history that Heidegger called ‘the history of being’ and which Vattimo reads as a history of weakening. This means that any reconstruction of a tradition’s future cannot evade the influence of its past and, for Vattimo, this means that we need to accept that:
All the principal traits of western civilisation … are structured by their relation to Judeo-Christian Scripture, the text upon which this civilisation is based. While, our civilisation no longer explicitly professes itself Christian … it is nevertheless profoundly shaped by that heritage at its source.3 For Vattimo, recovering theology’s public voice is a matter of recollecting that Christian texts and associated experiences belong within a historical trajectory which constitutes our own secular, pluralistic culture where public debate is transacted. Indeed, Vattimo believes that secularism and philosophical pluralism can be neither fully understood nor argued for persuasively without a recognition of their provenance in biblical revelation and that consequently hermeneutics, secularism and a nihilism which undermines the strong structures of ‘being’ don’t merely identify the vocation which ‘being’ has for us today but are also the maturation of the Christian message.
Vattimo notes:
The Judeo-Christian message … speaks of an occurrence of being, which has a history, and this history is the history of creation (God creates a being other than himself, a being who is free even to deny God) and salvation (God becomes man in abasement and humiliation, and dissolves his own transcendence – the event that St. Paul calls kenosis).4 The Kenosis of God Philip Knight introduces the work of Gianni Vattimo, who brings to the centurieslong philosophical conversation about ‘being’ the Pauline idea of kenosis: the ‘emptying’ of God.
The Turin Shroud On this view, Christian history – biblical history, the story of creation, incarnation and salvation – is ‘the history of being’ as seen now in secularisation and the weakening of the strong structures of ‘being’ expressed in the hermeneutic rendering of truth over metaphysics, the growth of democracy over monarchy, and pluralism over absolutism. Vattimo twists the Christian story of creation, incarnation and salvation in the direction provided by the biblical idea of kenosis (God’s own self-emptying and dissolution) and away from metaphysical authority. In the process he gives voice to an inheritance which should not, and cannot, be excluded from public debate since it is just this biblical inheritance which makes public debate possible in an age where metaphysics is everywhere in decline. The following three points will explain Vattimo’s thinking.
First, Vattimo acknowledges that philosophical pluralism marks the end of a period of thought dominated by metaphysics during which time ‘being’ was understood as the objective foundation of reality and truth. However, Vattimo argues that metaphysics cannot be directly rejected.
If we are to overcome ‘being’ understood in terms of metaphysical foundations we must, Vattimo urges, think of ‘being’ in terms of its historicity as a process of weakening and withdrawal symbolised in the biblical idea that God is friend rather than master, self-emptyingly creative and incarnate throughout the world, and continuingly dissolving today in the processes of secularisation. For Vattimo, secularisation is the destiny of Christianity understood as the kenosis of God. He notes: … modern hermeneutic philosophy is born in Europe not only because here there is a religion of the book that focuses attention on the phenomenon of interpretation, but also because this religion has at its base the idea of the incarnation of God, which it conceives as kenosis, as abasement and, in our translation, as weakening.’5 Secondly, Vattimo sees no need to refute Rorty’s claim that the ‘history of being’ unfolds within a contingent human canon of Western productivity but he does refute Rorty’s insouciance about the need to understand philosophical pluralism in the light of this canon’s heritage.
Only in this light, Vattimo argues, can philosophical pluralism hope to be read as an effective critique of metaphysics in the forms of humanism, technology and the will to power that it takes today. As Vattimo sees it, the problem of postmodernity is how to express the truth of the end of metaphysics without speaking of this truth in metaphysical terms. To treat the shift from metaphysics to hermeneutics, as Rorty does, as of little philosophical interest, not only misses its vital connection with the past – the biblical and Christian past – but also leaves hermeneutics and pluralism unable to negate the selfreflexive tendency of metaphysics to turn against those who reject it. Vattimo believes that without a connection to a history – ’the history of the weakening of being’ originating in the biblical drama of divine kenosis through creation and incarnation – we will never fully succeed in questioning the mastery of metaphysics in the form of humanism. Vattimo writes:
My friend Richard Rorty has expressed his sympathy for my reading of kenosis … though without finding it any reason to feel any closer to Christianity. Now … I do maintain that … even his non-foundationalism is possible – presentable as a reasonable thesis – only because we are living in a civilisation shaped by the biblical, and specifically Christian message. If this were not the case, Rorty would, paradoxically, be obliged to supply demonstrative proof for his non-foundationalism as an ‘objective’ thesis, that is, to argue that in reality there are no foundations – forgetting the additional clause in Nietzsche’s sentence: ‘there are no facts, only interpretations and this is an interpretation, [Rorty] does acknowledge a spontaneous preference for a worldview that rejects foundationalism and is thus more desirable because less authoritarian and more open to human freedom. But what can we do when we find this spontaneous preference for a humane and democratic society lacking?6 For Vattimo, what we do is offer a reading of ‘the history of being’ as a history of the Christian message of salvation from the strong structures of ‘being’ through kenosis which manifests itself today in the historical appearances of secularisation, pluralism, democracy and the nihilistic (interpretative) view of truth. It is this that allows us to think beyond foundationalism and the metaphysics of modernity encountered in humanism and techno-science.
Thirdly, it is for the sake of a secularised public life of pluralism and democracy free of metaphysical influence that Vattimo reinvents Christianity as biblical revelation.
His reinvention of Christian revelation is not a return to what Christianity was in the past. Rather, Vattimo is ‘rethinking revelation in secularised terms in order to ‘live in accord with one’s age.’7 He believes that reconstructing Christianity as a kenotic, non-metaphysical and, therefore, salvific faith provides a persuasive interpretative matrix for understanding our own times which does not succumb to a humanistic metaphysics. Whereas Habermas, Rawls and Rorty want to exclude words and phrases like ‘salvation’, ‘the events of revelation’, ‘creation’ and ‘incarnation’ from public debate, Vattimo gives them new meanings which allow them to be heard once more in this forum. For Vattimo, recollecting ‘the history of being’ as a history of weakening extends the limits of public discourse beyond the boundaries of scientific and socio-political cooperation to include not only the Christian precept of charity but also the whole biblical drama of creation, incarnation and redemption because without this biblical provenance public discourse will itself remain captive to the authorising traits of theologico-metaphysics. Pace Rorty, Vattimo notes:
An ethics of respect and solidarity can become reasonable, precise in what it says and capable of holding its own in conversation with others precisely by relating itself explicitly to its provenance.8 sof 74 November 2005 6 ‘Though he was in the form of God ... he emptied (ekenosen) himself, taking the form of a servant’ (Philippians 2:5-7). sof 74 November 2005 Vattimo suggests that philosophical pluralism can be persuasively articulated only insofar as it acknowledges its own provenance in biblical revelation. Social co-operation resulting from persuasion rather than force and an ethics based on respect and human solidarity – both marks of Rortyan public discourse – are possible in a Western postmetaphysical pluralistic culture precisely because this culture stands in relation to a heritage of biblical revelation.
Our pluralistic culture, Vattimo argues, can neither understand itself nor recognise its emergence from a period of history dominated by metaphysics unless it acknowledges its indebtedness to a biblical heritage. This heritage can no longer be received in orthodox, nonhermeneutical, or anti-pluralistic forms but while it remains mute in the public square post-metaphysical discourse is itself denied a plausible public voice.
If one believes in God – and, Vattimo notes, ‘the decline of metaphysics … has made the philosophical denial of God’s existence impossible,’9 – the recovery of religion is not a return to metaphysics and the God of realism but an outcome of their dissolution and this outcome is ‘the message of Christian salvation [consisting as it does, for Vattimo] in dissolving the peremptory claims of reality.’10 If one believes in God, this God will be a non-realist God, the God of the book ‘who does not exist as an objective reality’,11 but in the plural babble of interpretation as this is handed over to contingent history. It will be the God of the book in the story of kenosis read as the history of salvation – the history of secularisation, the weakening of the strong structures of being, the rise of interpretation, pluralism and democracy – that opens upon the truth of the Gospel which will set us free, the truth of love over power, which Vattimo fleshes out in his books Belief and After Christianity. As Vattimo notes:
We cannot not call ourselves Christians because in a world where God is dead – where the meta-narratives have been dissolved and all authority has fortunately been demythologised, including that of ‘objective’ knowledge – our only chance of human survival rests in the Christian commandment of charity.12 Nothing more publicly relevant and nothing more true. 1 Jeffrey Stout. Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents, (James Clark & Co, Cambridge, 1988) p. 163. 2 Richard Rorty. Philosophy and Social Hope (Penguin Books, London 1999) p. 171. 3 Gianni Vattimo. Belief, translated by Luca D’Isanto and David Webb (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999), p.43. 4 Vattimo. ‘After Onto-Theology: Philosophy Between Science and Religion,’, translated in Mark A. Wrathall (ed), Religion after Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003) p. 35. 5 Vattimo. Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, translated by David Webb (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1997) p. 48. 6 Vattimo. ‘The Age of Interpretation’, translated in Santiago Zabala (ed), The Future of Religion (Columbia University Press, New York, 2005) pp. 51-52. 7 Vattimo. Belief, op.cit. 1999, p. 75. 8 Vattimo. Belief, op.cit. 1999, p.45. 9 Vattimo. After Christianity, translated by E.T. Luca D’Isanto (Columbia University Press, New York, 2002) p. 15. 10 Vattimo. ‘The Age of Interpretation’, op. cit. 2005, p. 49. 11 Vattimo After Christianity, op cit. 2002, p. 8. 12 Vattimo. ‘The Age of Interpretation’ op. cit. 2005, p. 54 (emphasis added).
Dr. Philip Knight studied theology at Durham University and teaches Religious Education in Canterbury.This article is a summary of the workshop paper he gave to the SoF Conference in July 2005. An earlier, much longer version of the paper (including a bibliography) was published as ‘Pragmatism, Postmodernism and the Bible as a Meaningful Public Resource in a Pluralistic Age’ in John M. Court (ed.), Biblical Interpretation:The Meanings of Scripture – Past and Present, (T & T Clark International Continuum, London, 2003) pp. 310-325. Parts of that longer paper have been reproduced here by kind permission of the publisher.
Professor Gianni Vattimo teaches theoretical philosophy at the University of Turin, is a former MEP (left-wing democrat section of the European Socialist Group) and regularly contributes to Italian and foreign newspapers, including La Stampa, L’Unità (Italy), El Pais (Spain). www.giannivattimo.it Dante,Virgil and the 3 Beasts Illustrations to The Divine Comedy by William Blake For Vattimo, secularisation is the destiny of Christianity understood as the kenosis of God.