A Farewell to Truth

Nobody ever really starts from zero, and a God of that kind is virtually meaningless from within the (Heideggerian) perspective of the end of metaphysics. I pose the problem of God, of what this noun signifies for us, within a determinate historical condition; even those who don’t live the life of a Church or have religious experience of any kind still face the aftermath of the problem of God as it was posed in the religions that historically existed and in the Christian West that was the Church. Heidegger implies as much in a course he taught in the academic year 1919–1920, Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion. In it he moves from general notions about religion in the first part to a commentary on one of the Pauline letters in the second part, without even bothering to explain why (Heidegger 1920–1921b). Having demonstrated at length in the first part that one can only speak of religion out of a concrete existential experience of it, he will not have felt the need to account for narrowing in on Saint Paul, because he will have assumed that he and his hearers of that era had all had experience of that kind. If anything, what does stand out in hindsight is the persistence of a few prejudices arising out of phenomenology, especially the idea that in order to speak of the Christian experience it is necessary to backtrack to some original, generative moment. What does the example of Heidegger, what does all that we have learned from him, mean for us today? Just that we are compelled to pose the problem of God at this particular moment in salvation history in relation to our experience of the Church and Christianity in the here and now.

Now, our daily experience of salvation history is greatly affected by fundamentalism—and I am quite well aware of the problem in saying “we,” but it is either that or discourse of a purely intimistic and solipsistic kind, however empirical it might pretend to be. There is the fundamentalism of the so-called Islamic terrorists, who are, to a large extent anyway, just rebels fighting against Western domination, which the West keeps ratcheting up the more threatened it feels. But above all there is the fundamentalism that bulks larger and larger in Western religion itself, perhaps in part as a reaction against the liberation struggles of the formerly colonial peoples. I don’t think this is just an Italian particularity. Phenomena of secularization have grown increasingly frequent everywhere, and the Church seems to react the same way everywhere. We here in Italy can certainly testify that the Catholic Church never stops pressing its agenda to have its authority recognized, the rationale being that the Christian revelation empowers it to defend the authentic “nature” of mankind and civil institutions. Christian thought may struggle to remain current, and even the Catholic hierarchy may strive to read the signs of the times and speak to those living in the present. But there is no doubt that, deep down, it sees modernity as the enemy. Countless pontifical pronouncements about these problems confirm it. There is the battle being waged—and still undecided as I write—by the ecclesiastical hierarchy to have the Christian roots of our civilization mentioned explicitly in the European Constitution. There is the recent opposition to any legislation that gives an inch on topical issues in bioethics like genetic engineering, assisted pregnancy, euthanasia, or homosexual families. There are the priestly thunderbolts directed from papal and episcopal sees at the perils of “relativism,” by which they really mean the liberal society we are living in. All these are symptoms, telling us that the Church finds the modern world, with its prevalent laicity, a harsh environment. For the Church, the ideal society remains one in which God is the foundation of human coexistence and where the Church’s claim to speak on his behalf goes unchallenged. Not only is this last profession incompatible with a multicultural society that is by definition egalitarian and neutral with respect to the ethical variations between one culture and another, but the very notion of a God “grounding” the human world, though the matter might not be put in such bluntly metaphysical terms, clashes frontally with a culture that largely rejects the very notion of foundation or ground, at any rate when the problem is posed in sufficiently explicit terms. What immediately comes to mind is that phrase from the late Heidegger about “letting go of Being as ground.”¹ But this goes beyond Heideggerianism. Here we see the Church rejecting a huge area of contemporary philosophy in the name of a monotheistic metaphysics, which it maintains is inseparable from Christianity and therefore the only possible portal to salvation.

Aggiornamenti on the Church’s part come and go, yet it is no exaggeration to say that they are still where they were when they put Galileo on secret trial. They may have given up attempting to make the Bible account for the cosmos and the laws of motion of the heavenly bodies, but they still prate about a “biblical anthropology” to which the laws of the State must conform if human nature is not to be violated. That is why they fight so hard against divorce, abortion, and homosexual unions and why genetic engineering, even for therapeutic ends, horrifies them so much. (Habermas and the pope seem to be converging on issues like these.) Another proof of the fact that the Church hasn’t really got past the stage of the Galileo trial is that those who are abandoning Christianity are doing so for reasons that boil down to the ecclesiastical claim to know what the true nature of man, the world, and society is. That is the source of the unending debate about creationism and anticreationism, which is an analogue of the Galileo trial. It’s the same old story of their wanting to affirm that the God of Jesus is the maker of the material world and thus the source of its regulatory laws, a sort of supreme clockmaker who always needs a theodicy because, strictly speaking, miracles ought to be beyond his power and because he owes us an explanation for all the ills he permits. In this respect, the reflections of Jewish theologians after Auschwitz have something to teach their Christian counterparts: not only can God not be omnipresent and good at the same time, but it may no longer be possible to think of him as the Platonic demiurge, as the producer of the material world and thus answerable for the sometimes dreadful way it functions. Today the defense of creationism, even in the face of the (adequately) proven Darwinian theory of evolution, acts as a barrier, a pietra di scandalo or “pebble of scandal,” as we say in Italian, to the acceptance of Christianity. But it’s the same pebble on which many believers stumble when they find themselves rationally unable to accept the sexual and family ethics preached by the pope, just as they found totally unacceptable John Paul II’s repeated prohibition on the use of condoms, in disdain of the potentially lethal effects such a ban might have, and may indeed have had, on a world ravaged by AIDS. What keeps on recurring is the “scandal,” in one form or another, of Christian preaching claiming to dictate the “truth” about how matters “really stand” with nature, mankind, society, and the family: God is the foundation, and he speaks through the Church, which has been authorized by him to decide in the last instance.

Not to face up to these difficulties or to the scandal that the Church’s teaching provokes in those trying to believe in Jesus Christ—never mind the immorality on the part of the priesthood and the hierarchy that so frequently makes the headlines—is to retreat into fundamentalism. Whether this holds good everywhere and always I do not know, but it seems obvious to me that today the Church’s true vocation should be to escape from fundamentalism. Its resistance to modernity is reaching such extremes that it will inevitably lead to a backlash. Even believers who do not feel doubt and do accept the preaching and the discipline succeed in doing so only by setting brackets in their minds around these brazenly reactionary attitudes. Today only a tiny fraction of self-described practicing Catholics, ones who take the sacraments assiduously, say that they accept and try at least to practice the sexual ethics promoted by the pope.² They just don’t take it seriously, any more so than the hordes of young people who turn up at his rallies but certainly use condoms in their sexual relations. If this is, as I take it to be, a faithful portrait of the situation, then it would seem that the effort of the Church hierarchy to combat secularization by adopting a stricter code of discipline is having a paradoxical effect, tending to create an attitude of weary resignation among the faithful, who don’t break with the hierarchy only because they aren’t really listening any more. One recalls all that has been said over the ages about the flexible manner in which the Catholics of southern Europe believe and practice their religion. Mediterranean Catholicism has always been regarded as a form of religiosity less serious than that which drove Protestantism and caused the wars of religion in early modern Europe. In the north, the mass and the prayer book were translated into the living tongues so that the faithful would make a firmer commitment to their doctrinal content; in the south, Christianity was professed as pure and simple membership in a common and unquestioned culture. Today, faced with the harm that fundamentalism is doing in the Christian world, for example by reigniting the dispute between science and belief or between Church and State on matters of civil legislation (as in the bioethical domain), we may well think that the flexible religiosity of traditional Catholicism has a lot to be said for it. If the Church continues to think of faith as a deposit of truths more certain than those ascertained by science, continues to profess a more or less literal creationism, and continues to try to impose its own biblical anthropology on the State, it is fated to dwindle away, in a world where science and human rights are becoming universal.

To speak of a “kenotic” or relativistic God is to fully accept that the age of the Bible as a deposit of knowledge, the truth of which is guaranteed by divine authority, is over and gone, and that this is not an evil to which Christianity must temporarily adapt while waiting for the moment of revanche but is part of salvation history. Gustavo Bontadini, a great Italian Catholic philosopher who taught for many years at the Catholic University of Milan, used to say that when the Church feels weak it talks about freedom, and when it feels strong it talks about truth. The insistence, even in the encyclical Deus caritas est, on the inseparability of charity from truth is a sign that the Church continues to long for its former position of strength, from which it could impose the truth that it believes that God has handed down to it. But is the world now, and in the foreseeable future, really ready to acknowledge Catholic truth and give the Church of Rome back its “strength”? Today there are signs that the major religions are drawing closer to one another. But to the extent that is the case, it certainly isn’t happening in the areas of dogma and doctrine. Are we Christians really supposed to think that humanity will be saved only when all men believe that God is three persons and one at the same time and that the Virgin Mary was raised up bodily into heaven? I am not recommending that the pope be more “realistic” and less intransigent with the other religions so as to edge them closer to acceptance of the message of Jesus. It seems to me that the stripping away from the gospel message of all that keeps it at a distance from the men and women of the various cultures who are encountering and confronting one another in our time is a new phase in the history of Christian salvation. It is the incarnation understood as kenosis that is being realized more fully today, as Christian doctrine sheds the elements of superstition that have characterized it in the distant and recent past. And of these superstitions the most grave and dangerous is the belief that faith is objective “knowledge” of God (did he really intend to reveal to us what his “nature” is like?) and the laws of creation, from which all the norms of individual and collective life derive. Superstition of that kind may be no more than an innocent attachment to outdated ideas, but it is far more likely to spring from a tendency to authoritarianism that has never disappeared from the Church’s tradition. It is the claim to exert command in the name of the nature of the world and mankind that enables the Church to attempt to impose its own principles even on nonbelievers, in opposition to the principles of laicity, tolerance, and even charity.

Even if one looks at the world situation in general, not just the history of Christianity, the idea of kenosis, which for Christians is the very meaning of the incarnation and is thus at the center of the history of salvation, is ineluctable from the point of view of the destiny of metaphysics. The dissolution of the reasons for fundamentalism is a general fact; in Heidegger’s theory, metaphysics is destined to finish at the moment at which its domination culminates. This thesis is broadly similar to that of Adorno, in which the “truth” of Hegelianism, in which “totality is the truth,” is upended or reversed into its contrary at the moment when the “totalization” of the real becomes a fact. Likewise metaphysics for Heidegger culminates and finishes in the world of Ge-Stell, of the total organization realized in late capitalism and in the triumph of quantifying rationality. At this point it becomes impossible to think Being as objective rationality because, thought in that way, it would just be the ground of the dehumanization of the world, where all that exists is functionality predetermined by a colossal mindless mechanism.

Seen in this light, the kenosis that is the original meaning of Christianity signifies that salvation lies above all in breaking the identification of God with the order of the real world, in distinguishing God from (metaphysical) Being understood as objectivity, necessary rationality, foundation. Even to think of God as the creator of the material world is to subscribe to this metaphysical conception of the divine, which today has come to an impasse precisely on account of the totalitarianism being realized all around us in the disciplined society of economic integration and pervasive monitoring employing the latest information technology. A God “different” from metaphysical Being can no longer be the God of definitive and absolute truth that allows no doctrinal variation. That is why he may be called a “relativistic” God. A “weak” God, if you will, who does not show us our weakness as a way of asserting (against rational expectation, as a mystery to which we must submit, as the ecclesiastical discipline we must accept) that he is luminous, omnipotent, sovereign, and awesome, that he bears all the traits of the threatening and reassuring personage of natural-metaphysical religiosity. Christians are called to experience God differently than that in the world of the explicit multiplicity of cultures; the alternative of claiming to think the divine as absoluteness and “truth” in violation of the precept of charity is no longer an option.

Belief in the importance of sexuality in human life is gradually waning. Those who are still clinging to it are psychoanalysts and the clergy (in the generic sense, not just the Catholic priesthood). That pairing might seem counterintuitive, but it has literal validity to the extent that these two groups of “believers in sex” are in fact representatives of social authority and the imperative norm of an order still largely based on the Oedipal rule, which governs the reproduction of social life and the self-perpetuation of society. The power of this social normality depends on the lack of an alternative model of the family, of education, of the theory and practice of authority. Conservatives assert that this lack is actually proof that the “Oedipal” order is the only natural one. We in Italy are faced every day with the “naturalism” of the Catholic Church, but I don’t imagine that in the United States, never mind the Islamic world, things are very different. The Catholic Church’s campaign in Italy against legislative proposals to confer legitimacy on the “civil partnerships” of unmarried couples, gay or straight, is based on the conviction that the family is “naturally” heterosexual. The State is therefore barred from recognizing any right to form unions that diverge from that natural model: otherwise it would be furthering the dissolution of the basis of the whole social order, which is protected exclusively by the monogamous, heterosexual, reproductive, and (if possible) indissoluble union that is the traditional family in the Christian West. The key point in the Church’s obstinate persistence in emphasizing homosexuality as the worst of perversions is not, as one might be tempted to think, a matter of internal discipline, given all the scandals involving pedophile Catholic priests that have come to light in recent years and the problems that obviously arise in all-male institutions like seminaries. The point is that the Church is fully aware that its hard-line stance to the effect that only reproductive sexuality is legitimate is the cornerstone of its claim to stand for the “natural” order handed down by the Creator himself. Original sin disrupted it, but then Jesus came to restore it by giving the Church the means of salvation: the sacraments it administers and the truth it teaches. The Church’s battle against homosexual “marriage” is actually many battles in one; fundamentally it sees the “nature” of the human being under threat from biotechnology and genetic engineering, and there is a good deal of validity in that stance. On this matter an unexpected ally has recently rallied to the Church’s side, in the person of Jürgen Habermas, with his talk about “human nature.” This is rather surprising coming from a philosopher who has hitherto had a humanistic-historicist, and consequently Hegelian-Marxist, vision of Being. Habermas’s concerns overlap with those of the pope only to a degree: for him, defending human nature means halting the reduction of human life, the body, embryos, the genetic code, and so on to commodities susceptible of being patented and bought and sold on the market. For the pope, it is a question of keeping faith with the essence of the human being that God the creator established. But the Church used exactly the same rationale to hinder biologists from performing autopsies in the Middle Ages, and there has never been a time when it didn’t oppose the efforts of scientists to know nature better and to manipulate it with technology for the good of humanity. This is why the Church is so heavily invested in sexuality; one of the latest public pronouncements from the conference of Italian bishops states that sexuality as far as they are concerned is something “that cannot be changed,” a sort of natural limit that has to be observed even if, or because, it cannot be changed. What we have here is the customary naturalistic error on which so much of Catholic ethics is based, a clear violation of what is known as Hume’s Law, in that it derives a norm from a fact. Now that it is becoming increasingly possible to change even this aspect of nature, and the “natural fact” is no longer a fact, where do we seek the will of God? All these observations on sexuality, nature, and the will of God are closely linked to nihilism and postmodernity. The point of view that I have been advancing here is that nihilism is the postmodern interpretation, or version, of Christianity—in my opinion the only one that can save it from ebbing away to nothing or ending violently in a universal religious conflict. To put it another way: the death of God proclaimed by Nietzsche is nothing more than the death of Jesus on the cross. In Nietzsche, the death of God signifies the final dissolution of supreme values and metaphysical belief in an objective and eternal order of Being. That is nihilism in a nutshell. This is not the place to spell out how Heidegger develops the concept of nihilism in the context of his theory of the end of metaphysics. I would point out, though, that his struggle against metaphysics was more than theoretical, since it was ethically motivated by a refusal to accept the totalitarian social and political order (die totale Verwaltung, in Frankfurt parlance) that was coming about as metaphysics culminated in positivism and scientism.

Nihilism equals Christianity because Jesus came into the world not to demonstrate what the “natural” order was but to demolish it in the name of charity. Loving one’s enemies is not exactly what nature prescribes, and more than that it isn’t what “naturally” happens. So when the Church defends the natural order of the monogamous reproductive family against any act of charity whatsoever toward (naturally) gay persons or bars women from the priesthood (once again, because women are supposed to have a different natural vocation), it shows its preference for the God of the natural order over the message of Jesus. It is no surprise that a Church oriented in that way is also “naturally” reactionary, always defending the (dis)order in place except when it infringes on specific rights of the clergy: the history of Italy in the late nineteenth century and the Lateran Pacts between the Church and the Italian State in 1929, are textbook examples. Gioacchino da Fiore (Joachim of Fiore) was a true prophet when he taught in the Middle Ages that the history of salvation passes through moments and phases. Adapting his terminology, we could say that we are living in the age of the Spirit, which is as much as to say that we are living in an epoch that through science and technology can dispense with metaphysics and a metaphysical God: a nihilist epoch. An epoch in which our religiosity can finally develop into the form of charity no longer dependent on truth. There is no longer any reason to say, “Plato a friend but the truth a greater friend.” In the past, the Church (the Churches, rather) put a whole range of heretics to death for just the reason encapsulated in that phrase. There is not, and ought not to be, anything more than charity, a welcoming, toward the other.

But back to our topic. In the age of the Spirit, the age of the end of metaphysics, why on earth should Christian believers still be worried about the “natural order”? With the mists of objective, authoritarian, reactionary metaphysics dissipated, the natural order is simply the way things usually go. Bear in mind that even a still metaphysical thinker like Kant based the need for a life after death on his rejection of the ethical disorder we see in nature.

But what about God the creator? One of the main points of contention between Christian thought and science (modern and indeed premodern) has always been the question of creation. Is it still? Are we still meant to believe that Jesus was persuaded that he was the son of God the creator of the world? Today there is a broad swathe of agreement that even the qualification of God as Father can be demythologized without causing the Christian faith to crumble. Why shouldn’t the same hold good when it comes to the origin of the material world? There is truth to the positivist claim that the development of the natural sciences gradually causes the field of theology to shrink. Research into the origins of the material world is a scientific matter, like the laws of astronomy and the alternative between the Ptolemaic and Copernican models. The Bible is not a manual of natural science; even the Church now concedes that, having lifted the condemnation of Galileo. Just think how different the Christian faith could be if it weren’t saddled with the mission of defending a specific description of the way the world came about.

The inevitable atheistic impact of modern cosmological knowledge about things like the time scale of the physical world, the possible multiplicity of universes, and extraterrestrial life would practically disappear. The Christian revelation is about just one thing, the possible salvation of our souls—not in terms of physical survival but rather as experience of the fullness of earthly life illuminated by a hope of resurrection, the Parousia. How many Christians today still believe literally in a life after death, pictured as a continuation of this one but enhanced with eternal beatitude or eternal punishment? “The kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:21) may perfectly well mean that eternal life in grace is something available to experience here and now. I am on record as combating the atheistic impact of modern cosmology by rejecting the claims to objectivity and hence truth of experimental natural science. It functions on the basis of paradigms that are wrongly taken as if they were “a gaze from nowhere.” Science’s linguistic game is completely detached from that of religion, and neither can arrogate to itself the right to the last word. I still hold that view, but I am prepared to concede that my stance vis-à-vis the objectivity of the natural sciences is free to be a lot less rigid once I have fully absorbed the fact that scientific cosmology poses no threat to my faith. In many ways, what the Catholic Church is doing today in relation to sexuality, and generally in its entrenched defense of “nature” (see above passim on the family, genetic engineering, biblical anthropology), is the same thing it did against Galileo and Copernican cosmology. The pope insists on imposing a vision of the natural world that is continually controverted by science, as in creationism versus Darwinism. It is entirely possible that Darwinism might be controverted, but certainly not on the basis of the literal truth of the text of the Old Testament.

Can we really do without biblical mythology, New Testament or Old? I don’t believe so. I wouldn’t want a Church without saints or Christmas and Easter rituals. But I don’t want to be compelled to accept an elaborate doctrine like transubstantiation just so I can go to Mass. To take Christian mythology as though it were a description of a reality alternative to that of science is an authoritarian abuse that the Church ought to abandon, because it scandalizes the faithful.

Back to sexuality. Like the institution of the family in history, sexuality too has undergone profound transformations in terms of cultural practices and the freedom of individuals. Why, for example, should a Christian not accept that one is free to change one’s sex? As for the kinds of abuse that cause Habermas enough concern to turn him “papist,” let’s try to be clear. Habermas thinks it would be a violation of nature, of the “natural” liberty of the infant, if he or she were genetically engineered to be predisposed to, or adept at, some activity like music or flying airplanes. But on that basis, we ought also to prevent parents from intervening in any direct way to keep an infant from being born with a disease or some grave deformity. Examples like that reveal that it is impossible and inhuman to decide bioethical questions on the basis of “respect for nature.” Such criteria may be helpful, but it is increasingly evident that Habermas’s worries can really only be met through concrete legislation based primarily on the consensus of all those directly concerned. I know that sounds too simplistic and limited, but a detailed inquiry into the matter would show that it is possible to establish proper norms in bioethics without reference to vague criteria like “nature.”

Heidegger’s objection to metaphysics also begins here, with the observation that even in deciding to be objective, we always assume a definite, defined position, a vantage point or viewpoint that delimits but that is also indispensable for our encounter with the world. Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics as a claim to define the truth as an objective datum starts from that observation and then goes on to focus on the ethicopolitical aspects of metaphysics: the “rationalized” society of the early twentieth century against which the historical avant-gardes of the time struggled. Heidegger realized that even the pretended objectivity of the sciences is inspired by a determinate interest, such as to describe the movement of gases in such a way that others will be able to discuss it too and advance knowledge of the behavior of gases; Lukács says the same from a Marxist perspective. Scientists are not driven by an impulse of truth, and it is not possible to imagine the relation between the world and knowledge as the world and the mirror of the world. Rather, we imagine it as the world and someone who stands in the world and takes his bearings in it utilizing his cognoscitive capacities, in other words choosing, reorganizing, substituting, and so on.

The whole concept of interpretation lies right there. There is no experience of truth that is not interpretive; I know nothing unless it interests me, but if it interests me, evidently I don’t gaze upon it in a disinterested fashion. In Heidegger, this concept enters into his thinking about the historical sciences, as one sees in the early sections of Being and Time and in many other texts from the same period. Hence I am an interpreter inasmuch as I do not gaze upon the world from outside; I gaze on the world outside me precisely because I am inside it. If I am inside it, however, my interest is far from straightforward. I cannot state exactly how matters stand, only how they look from where I stand, how they appear to me, and how I believe them to be. If I have an idea that leads to a successful experiment, that doesn’t mean that I gained exhaustive, objective knowledge of that aspect of reality. What I did—and the philosophy of science backs this up—was to make the experiment work, on the basis of certain expectations and premises. When I do an experiment, I already dispose of a set of criteria and instruments that make it possible for me, and for anyone whose ideas differ from mine, to tell whether the experiment worked or not. The criteria and the instruments are already in place and undisputed when I start. No scientist studies all of physics from scratch; they all learn from textbooks and build on that. This is universally accepted. So I don’t want to hear any more of this talk about how scientists describe the world objectively. They describe it with rigorous instruments, which are nonetheless determined and historically qualified. I would even hazard, knowing full well that this proposition will not command universal assent, that the possibility of verifying a scientific proposition, or falsifying it (as Popper would say, but in this case it comes to the same thing), depends on the fact that we use the same language, use analogous instruments, take the same measurements, etc. Otherwise we could not communicate at all. We didn’t invent this ensemble of premises and paradigms from scratch; we inherited it. All this is interpretation: being within a situation and confronting it like someone who didn’t arrive from Mars five minutes ago but who has a history, belongs to a community. Some maintain that to study physics is not to study the truth of physics; that it’s more like being trained to become a member of a secret, or public, society. That’s not so far fetched: to get someone to understand a scientific demonstration, you first have to teach her the rudiments. Are these rudiments natural knowledge, or are they knowledge of a particular science that could also be different? All this is mixed up with cultural anthropology and structuralism. Heidegger was not yet acquainted with the structuralism of Levi-Strauss, but what was going on in the interval between Kant and Heidegger? The whole nineteenth century, with the discovery that cultures vary widely, and the beginnings of the scientific study of them. Cultural anthropology goes back to the second half of the nineteenth century. According to Kant, to know the world humans require certain a priori, as he calls them, structures that we cannot derive from experience and through which we organize experience. To use a down-to-earth simile, I learn to see by discovering a pair of eyes, but I already need a set of eyes to discover them.

Space, time, and the linked categories of judgment are part of me; like my eyes, they are structures of reason. Overall, though, Kant and many neo-Kantian philosophers have always taken it for granted that reason was unvarying. Cultural anthropology brings about a more mature discourse about the differences among the structures with which cultures, societies, and different individuals confront the world. At bottom, Heidegger’s twentieth-century existentialism may be viewed as Kantianism that has undergone cultural anthropology. As a finite being, I am born and die at certain points in history. How can I possibly be the bearer of the sort of absoluteness that would allow me to assert that two plus two indubitably make four? There are peoples who consume human flesh, and European thought exhibits an array of differences. Early cultural anthropology accepted the existence of other cultures but classified them as cultures “preceding” our own. In short, the primitives don’t yet know mathematics, but we arrive in their countries, teach them science, and install our governments. Where are the “primitives” now? Who is there still willing to heed that narrative?

Let me put it this way: interpretation is the idea that knowledge is not the pure mirroring of the datum but an interested approach to the world using schemes that have varied over time. And that is supposed to extend even to Christianity? How did a philosopher ever go so far as to posit that? According to other philosophers with whom Heidegger was fairly closely linked, like Dilthey, the first blow of the hammer against the edifice of metaphysics as objectivity was delivered by Christianity. In his view, Kant realized centuries later what Christianity had asserted as early as Saint Augustine, that in interiore homine habitat veritas, that truth resides within the individual human being. It is pointless to strive to view the order of the ideas the way Plato did: the objectivity, the beauty of the cosmos, and so on. That won’t save us; we save ourselves only by directing our gaze inward and seeking the profound truth within ourselves. With that, according to Dilthey (Heidegger never comes out and says so, but he always accepts this sketch of the history of philosophy), there commences an attention to subjectivity that entails things like the redemption of the poor. The modern world’s literary realism is seen by Erich Auerbach (1946) as an expression of Christianity, which is a religion of intimacy, and so, tendentially, the intimacy of every man and woman. Hence each of us is equal to every other. For that matter, the philosophies of late antiquity are a bit like that: Epicureanism and Stoicism are more subject-oriented philosophies. It is certainly true that it is Christianity that in many ways undermines the peremptoriness of the object and favors attention to the subject. And so, says Dilthey, we arrive at Kant: truth lies not in things, which always present as random, but in human reason and its schemes, and in coming to perceive them we become aware that knowledge of truth is something we make. Today philosophers of science tell us that individual phenomena (the pot of water that boils at one hundred degrees centigrade) are not better known, as individual phenomena, when science manages to generalize them in formulas. In generating mathematical formulas, science transcends the individual phenomenon after a fashion and locates it within an entirely artificial system. In other words, a thermometer doesn’t help me to know the boiling of water better; it helps me to generalize about the matter within a broader framework. Abstraction is not a way of peering deep into the phenomenon and perceiving its essence, as medieval science, with its Aristotelian roots, maintained (up to a point anyway). The essence at which we arrive is the general structure of a certain world of phenomena, which becomes true in some way when one steps back from individuality. I don’t stand there watching the pot forever; I take measurements, correlate them, and create a system. This, once again, is fundamentally a Kantian mode of thought. With respect to the immediacy of that which I perceive, I construct a system composed of linkages, connections, and calculations: all this is truth for Kant. In the wake of cultural anthropology and thought on the finiteness of existence, mathematics too may be just a mathematics. Early in the twentieth century there appeared alternative mathematics, non-Euclidean geometries. Why someone came up with these things I do not know, but they are evidently systems, logicomathematical constructs that work and in which it is possible to demonstrate theorems. When it turns out that they may account for certain natural phenomena more adequately than others (we are given to understand that certain non-Euclidean geometries are a better fit with cosmic space), we start to see that there may exist various languages that treat different phenomena differently.

Wittgenstein, whom you couldn’t call an ally of Heidegger (I don’t believe Heidegger ever read him), says for example that if someone presents me with a calculation that yields results different from mine, it is always licit to wonder whether he has miscalculated or whether he wasn’t using a different mathematical language. This is already halfway to an acceptance of the idea of interpretation. So it isn’t true that if we accept the prevalence of interpretation, anything goes and anyone can say whatever they please. The rules don’t vanish, but they are the rules that apply in that language: in a nutshell, it’s the whole discourse of the later Wittgenstein about linguistic games, in which every language is like a game with its own rules. If science were poker, you couldn’t play it by the rules of bridge, and if you tried it would be possible to establish that you were making a mistake and violating the norms. But that doesn’t mean that poker is the only game there is. Many historians of philosophy assert that this has been made possible in the modern world by the advent of Christianity. I might also attempt to argue the point in a less philosophically refined way, like this: Thomas Aquinas knew perfectly well that Aristotle believed in the eternity of the world, and he acknowledged that that would be the more rational belief to hold. But from the point of view of biblical revelation, it was impossible: if you are going to preach a religion of free creation, salvation, grace, and miracles, then objectivity goes out the window, because definitive, metaphysical objectivity is the structure that, once discovered, we know (and cannot not know) to be the way it is (and cannot not be). So Christianity is a doctrine of interpretation for numerous reasons. One of them is that it trains its gaze inward and, so the historians of ideas tell us, brings it about that we gradually come to understand subjectivity in a Kantian manner. Basically, if it is possible to theorize this today, it is so because we live in a Christian civilization, albeit no longer in Christianity in the full sense. The whole creation myth in the Bible runs right up against the compact metaphysics of Plato, Aristotle, and the rest. And it is not alone. In the New Testament there is that extravagant episode of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Virgin Mary and the apostles … what’s that about? It answers Christ’s promise in the Johannine gospel: “I have said these things to you while still with you; but the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you” (14:25–26). This, as I see it, justifies the historical transformation of Christian truth: the message of Christianity is true because Christ presents himself as one who is there to interpret a preceding scripture (what we call the Old Testament), and the Old Testament itself is highly mysterious. It is hard to believe that Moses was inscribing his tables while God was dictating them to him from on high. No one would assert that hermeneutics starts with the New Testament, because the entire Old Testament, and Hebraism in general, are the fruit of the interpretation and reinterpretation of the writings. Walter Benjamin, for example, one of the great figures of twentieth-century philosophy, thought everything in Talmudic terms, meaning in terms of commentary on some message that had been handed down. So the origins of the idea of interpretation always lie somewhere farther back in the past. Even the evangelists did not write their accounts before 60 C.E., a good few years after the death of Jesus. One of the reasons Heidegger decided to comment on the Letter to the Thessalonians in his course on the phenomenology of religion in 1920–1921 was because it is the oldest known New Testament writing, predating the gospels by a long shot. This doesn’t mean a great deal, except that the gospels too (which we take as unalterable scripture) are already written accounts of teachings previously transmitted orally in the Christian community.

What do I take from this jumble of considerations (which reflect my reading of René Girard as well as Heidegger)? That Christianity is a stimulus, a message of liberation from metaphysics. It is something eternal. So metaphysics should never have existed and Aristotle was one hundred percent wrong? I withhold judgment about that, because any reasoning about the matter would be typically metaphysical. It would lead to maintaining that it is eternally true that metaphysics is an error. That I cannot say, nor can I say virtually anything else except by responding to messages of words, of tradition. Someone might ask, “but why are you so convinced that you should be preaching this to us if you are not a metaphysician?” To which I would reply, “but haven’t you read a, b, c, and d?” In short, the only arguments I can adduce are not ones of the traditional type but ones of transmission, language, the classics we have in common. When I say that I am convinced that God created me, I am able only to think that without the text (and the textual history) of the Bible, my life as a thinking being at this moment would have no sense. It would be like removing Dante from the history of Italian literature, but Dante’s works are composed in such a way that if you haven’t read the Bible, you don’t understand a thing, whereas the Bible you can read without having read either Dante or Shakespeare. The point is that to profess faith in Christianity is first and foremost to profess faith in the ineluctability of a certain textuality that has been passed down to us. I wouldn’t be what I am; perhaps I’d be something else, but it’s no use trying to imagine what it would be like to be, let’s say, a native of Amazonia. If I reflect on my existence, I am forced to acknowledge that without biblical textuality, I wouldn’t possess instruments for thinking and speaking. There’s a phrase in Benedetto Croce that I often comment on, bending it this way and that: “we cannot not call ourselves Christians.” We cannot speak ourselves otherwise than as Christians, because we are unable to formulate ourselves, meaning we are unable to articulate a discourse within our culture without accepting certain premises.

What about Voltaire? Voltaire was a good Christian: he defended liberty against authoritarianism, including that of the eighteenth-century Jesuits. That’s why Christianity must be non-religious, perhaps. Christianity has latent powers to liberate, and that, I make bold to say, includes liberation from the truth. If there is an objective truth, there will always be someone nearer to it than I am, someone who will arrogate to themselves the right and the duty to impose it on me. Everywhere you look, you see authoritarianism grounded in claims of a metaphysical kind, and authoritarian government displays little inclination to make the case for its policies on the basis of rational self-interest. If one had been able to say to Bush that the war in Iraq was a high-risk venture, his baffled reply would have been: “But Saddam is a bad guy.” That Saddam was a bad guy is a point one may concede, but the criteria of who’s bad and good are Bush’s. Even UN resolution 1441 is just a UN Security Council resolution: it was passed by the victors of the Second World War, not the Heavenly Father. It may be the only form of global legality we have, but that doesn’t make it sacrosanct. Therefore, on the basis of this code, we can wage preventive war.

If Christianity did not set us free from objective truth, would you really be able to believe, even in part, even allegorically, what the Holy Scripture says? These days I often cite a Turinese colleague of mine as a bad example: he wrote a book in which he calculated the height that the Virgin Mary must have reached by now in her vertical bodily ascent into heaven. She was taken up in bodily form, but what was her velocity and point of arrival? Why didn’t she just vanish in a flash? To believe in the gospels, you have to believe that language does more than just denote objective reality. There is another language too, which says different things, which speaks precisely about those famous paradigms on the basis of which we interpret nature objectively. It’s like when I say that to know, to prove, a scientific proposition I require preliminary instruments. But I don’t make those instruments in turn the object of scientific scrutiny, because to do that I would need yet another set of instruments preliminary to the preliminary ones, and so on in an infinite regress. Likewise I use the language that I have inherited to speak about values, about projects, about coherence. I cannot speak outside of a certain linguistic tradition, a certain encyclopedia, a certain dictionary, and these are the bases of my existence. Thus I can understand the language of the gospels too as that which communicates to me something that is not ontic, is not given in the physical world, doesn’t even demand a realistic interpretation, but speaks (to me) of my destiny. When someone says “I love you,” the words “I love you” don’t describe any objective phenomenon. That person might answer that it does, “because I can feel my pulse pounding when I think of my beloved.” But is that really supposed to be the objectivity of the phrase “I love you”?

What is the case, is that this discourse about interpretation, about existence, matures in a historical progression that is also the historical progression of Western culture and science. Until Galileo it wasn’t so easy to be Kantian in science, in the sense that Aristotelian scientists, to caricature matters a bit, collected all the turtles and then built the theory of the turtle, without quantification. Only with modern science, with Bacon and Galileo above all, is this world constructed in a way that seems made to order for the philosophy of Kant and also tailored to confirm something that Dilthey says about Christianity achieving awareness of human action on the world. Where are we headed? We are headed for secularization, another name for which is nihilism, the idea that objective Being has gradually consumed itself. Nietzsche’s beautiful page from Twilight of the Idols about “How the Real World at Last Became a Myth” tells a story, starting with the idea of the real world, the world of the Platonic ideas. Then the real world becomes the world promised to the righteous after death (paradise), and then it becomes the world of Descartes, with the evidentness of clear and distinct ideas (but only in my mind; if God is there to protect me from error, they are also true). The succeeding stage is positivism, the world of truths experimentally verified, hence produced in an experiment by the experimenters. And I do mean produced: it is ever more difficult to imagine the scientific experimenter as one who contemplates nature; he twists it and pokes it and prods it, with the aim of achieving certain things. At this point, the world has become a story told among ourselves. All this may be hard to accept, but we are living in a world of that kind. We no longer see nature; we see mainly our world, organized by an ensemble of entities of a technological sort. When we refer to our “natural” needs, we include things like elevators and the cinema, which have indeed become natural needs for us, though they aren’t. If it’s a choice between that and survival in a world where it’s just you ranging through the forest with an animal skin around your loins, you are unlikely to opt to switch. Our natural needs are all those in which we are immersed, most of which are not in the least natural but are conditioned by advertising, stimulated by technology, and so on. We are living in a world that has become mythical and fabulous in countless ways. If you see a traffic accident, you run home and turn on the television to find out what happened, because you couldn’t see clearly what was going on from where you were standing on the sidewalk. And this is what we are living every day. That the real world has become a fable can also be expressed in terms of Nietzsche’s nihilism. The objectivity of our world has (luckily) self-consumed, giving way to an ever-widening subjective transformation, not so much at the level of the individual as at that of communities, cultures, sciences, languages. This is what I try to theorize with weak thought. If there is a possible thread of emancipation in human history, it doesn’t lie in finally realizing an essence given at the outset for all time. Are we supposed to try to be like the idea of mankind before original sin? Christianity is full of conflicting interpretations about that. What we must do is simply realize an ever greater transformation of the natural into the cultural, or the material into the spiritual. This is what Hegel meant when he spoke of making the world into a dwelling for mankind. You don’t just strew the furniture about in your home; you put things where they belong, and when something is missing you know it immediately. It is an artificial order founded by you. Baudelaire wrote, “wherever I have seen virtue, I have seen counter-nature.” That gets it exactly. Nature is the world where the big fish eat the little fish, not in the least a place where natural laws and rights obtain. Virtue is the complete opposite: it is culture, meaning something that transcends nature. Emancipation basically lies in taking secularization further, in the sense of grasping better and better the spiritual sense of Scripture. We have learned to read the Holy Scriptures spiritually. Max Weber proposed that the capitalist world was generated primarily by a certain version of the Protestant ethic: reinvestment and repression of the impulse to consume immediately were fundamental for capital accumulation. The modern world was formed by applying and transforming, and sometimes also mistaking, the content of our tradition, principally the biblical tradition. How far are we authorized to take this transformation? Are we free to do whatever we please? No, because in Scripture we also find a limit to secularization in the discourse of charity, the very thing that guides desacralization. If you read the gospels and the Church fathers, in the end the sole virtue that remains is always charity. Even faith and hope end sooner or later. Saint Augustine said, “love and do what you want,” which isn’t all that undemanding a precept, since if you follow it strictly, everything that isn’t charity is just mythology. I do not know if God is really one person and three persons at the same time. We are told that it is indispensable to believe that he is, but we no longer burn those who don’t for trinitarian heresy. We may try to convince them otherwise if we like. For that matter, no one guarantees us that God is a father or a mother or a family member of any other kind; it is clearly allegorical language. Once this point of view becomes pervasive, you feel consternation, because you don’t know where it stops. For example, can someone like me still recite the Lord’s Prayer? Yes, because when I pray I know perfectly well that I am using words that I cannot use literally, words I use more out of love for the tradition in which I stand than out of love for reality. It would be like expecting an eighty-year-old aunt to share my political ideas on interpersonal relationships. I don’t bother her about things like that, and indeed when I am speaking in her presence I respect old-fashioned decency in language, a respect inspired by charity, in disregard of any imperative to speak the truth. It isn’t even transparently clear why scientists remain inside the scientific community: is it because they love the truth or because their insider status allows them to develop their thinking and supplies them with interlocutors? Today we have a philosopher like Habermas affirming that rationality consists of presenting arguments that may decently be defended before others; he doesn’t say that what’s rational or possibly true is what comes from deep inside me or what corresponds to “the thing in itself.” Saint Augustine only got halfway to an adequate definition of truth as I see it. Granted, his precept “look within yourself” is an advance on the truth of the object. But if you turn toward your inner self, oughtn’t you also try to heed “the other as yourself”? Today, on many topics, we are unable to state the truth except when we reach agreement with others. Here’s a formula that sums up the notion: we don’t reach agreement when we have discovered the truth, we say we have discovered the truth when we reach agreement. In other words, charity takes the place of truth. Dostoevsky writes: “If I had to choose between Jesus Christ and truth, I would choose Jesus Christ.”

It is in this sense that when the word “truth” is uttered, a shadow of violence is cast as well. Not all metaphysicians have been violent, but I would say that almost all large-scale perpetrators of violence have been metaphysicians. If Hitler had merely hated the Jews in his neighborhood, he would have set fire to their houses, and that would have been it. But he worked up a general theory to the effect that they were an inferior race and that it would be better to eliminate them completely. In other words, he reached the point of holding a theory that he believed to be true. This is not hard to understand. Nietzsche doesn’t mince words; he says that metaphysics is an act of violence that wants to appropriate “the most fertile regions” for itself, meaning the first principles that allow it to dominate all the consequences. The first lines of Aristotle’s Metaphysics say more or less the same thing: the wise man is the all-knowing man, and he knows all because he knows the primary causes, which allows him to control the effects. Our tradition is overshadowed by the idea that if we can get a grip on a stable entity, then we can finally act at will. We fix a stable entity because we want to obtain some effect or demonstrate it authoritatively and lastingly to others. Anyone claiming to tell me the absolute truth is demanding from me unquestioning submission. Where does this discourse lead with respect to Christianity?

Gadamer, it is often said, developed a religious attitude in his late years, a species of ecumenism. He focused a lot on interreligious dialogue and seemed to want to play a soothing role. That was fundamentally a good outcome for his hermeneutic discourse: if there is no truth objectively given once and for all to anyone around which everyone is supposed to form ranks willingly or not, then truth sprouts and blossoms in dialogue, because what Christ came to teach the Church was not yet all accomplished; it was there as a virtuality in his message, but the message expands with its applications in history. No one can read Plato in isolation from all the interpretations. It would be absurd, because you would fatally select the one that seemed most natural, but it would be historical like all the others. Italian teenagers who write poetry almost always sound like Pascoli. Nietzsche says that if there is something that looks absolutely self-evident to you, be on your guard, because it is undoubtedly some tale that has wormed its way into your head. The last thing you can be certain of is your most deeply rooted certainties, because those are the ones you were taught by your aunts and grandmothers, the Church, the authorities, the newspapers, advertising. Christianity is marching in a direction that can only be that of lightening and weakening its burden of dogma in favor of its practical and moral teaching. In that sense too, charity takes the place of truth. Are we really supposed to quarrel first with the Protestants and then eventually with the Buddhists and the Hindus, because they do not believe that God is three and one at the same time? When the pope meets the Dalai Lama, is he thinking that the Dalai Lama is going to hell because he isn’t Catholic? No, they discuss things like how to raise the level of spirituality in humanity, and they probably agree on a good many things. The future of Christianity, and of the Church, is to become an ever more refined religion of pure charity. There is a hymn sung in church that goes: “Where charity and love are, there God is.” Is that thought so extravagant? “When two or more of you are united in my name, I am with them”—and “in my name” may just be another way of saying, “in charity.” That is the presence of God. So it is difficult to imagine that in the end we will be damned because some are Buddhists, others Muslims, and so on. We are damned, or damn ourselves, already here on earth when we fight murderously with one another, each believing that the true God is with him. This isn’t just the usual message of tolerance: it’s the ideal of the development of human society through the gradual reduction of all the rigidities that set us against one another, including the instinct of property, blood, family, and all the problems associated with the excessive absolutization, in defiance of charity, of things naturally given. The truth that sets us free is true precisely because it sets us free: if it doesn’t free us, it is disposable. That is why I refuse to admit that weak thought, with all that it entails, is just a species of preaching of tolerance. It’s the idea of a project for the future as the progressive elimination of walls—the Berlin Wall, the wall of natural laws that they preach against the freedom of individuals, the wall of the laws of the market… I believe that ecumenism is inconceivable except as a lightening of the burden of dogma and the wider preaching of charity. This is the discourse of hermeneutics, Gadamer’s discourse, the discourse of much of the most reasonably acceptable contemporary philosophy.

Now it is incontestable that Europe is not a nation in the nineteenth-century and Romantic sense of the term; it lacks a common language, and the historical roots of the tongues spoken on the continent are separated into Romance, Germanic, Slavic, and Finno-Ugric branches, to name only the main ones. Europe’s Christian unity is just a medieval memory that was buried with the Protestant Reformation, if not before that, with the schism between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. The ideal reasons that underlie the creation of a European federation therefore appear hard to reconcile with schematic nineteenth-century nationalism; indeed, the European Union is about consigning that idea of nationhood to the past once and for all. It may have inspired the struggle for independence and the birth of many European states that have become democracies, but it also produced detrimental and negative consequences. The union of Europe is inspired less by the idea of a profound spiritual unity that is putatively expressed even at the State level than by what I would call a negative ideal: that of putting in place bonds that will prevent the repetition of the wars that, in the past, saw the national states of Europe at one another’s throats. European unity is, from that perspective, an entirely artificial idea, which cannot claim any natural basis, like the unity of a nation, a people, or a language. Europe isn’t even clearly defined in geography; the expression “from the Atlantic to the Urals” is little more than a rhetorical flourish, which is already being nullified by the foreseeable membership of Turkey in the European Union. That’s without even mentioning the countries on the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, which isn’t and never has been a barrier between them and Europe at all, more of a broad highway of communication and integration.

The topic is complex, and it would take us far afield. But it should be borne in mind if we intend to inquire into what religion, which de facto means Christianity, signifies in the Europe of today and tomorrow. My point is that we cannot start with the premise that Christianity is one of the cultural factors of European unity, not at any rate in the sense that it defines a deep-rooted identity that would legitimize political unification, the way it did in the formation of the modern national states. The common and ramified Christian roots of Europe are at odds with the “artificial” character of the notion of European unity. It is true, in a very peculiar sense which I will try to illustrate, that European unity will inevitably be Christian. But only on condition of understanding Christianity not as a positive factor of identity but on the exact contrary, as a potent summons to disidentification. To put it a little differently, I would say that Christianity can contribute to the construction of a united Europe (and therefore a more pacific, democratic, and economically competitive Europe) only if it develops its own postmodern nature. I would also say, vice versa, that the political decision to construct a federal Europe obliges Christianity to acknowledge this postmodern vocation as its own. The historically consolidated profile of Christianity in Europe is that of a plurality of Churches, each strongly characterized in terms of dogma, discipline, and social rootedness, and in that guise it was for a long time, and still is, a force for division rather than a force for cohesion and unity. Are the wars of religion that tore Europe apart in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries really locked away safely in the past? We tend to think so, but if it is true, to the extent that it is true, we owe it to the process of secularization that was given such a powerful impetus by the Enlightenment. But the fact is that in one way or another the Christian Churches, especially the Catholic Church (still the recognizable face of Christianity as far as most of the world is concerned), have never really accepted the process of secularization as a positive and liberating event. In other words, they haven’t acknowledged what to many thinkers and theologians appears to be the well-established fact that the secularization of modern society is an effect of Christianity rather than a symptom of its waning and dissolution. Not much more than one hundred years ago the papacy, in the person of Pius IX, condemned liberalism and democracy as false and pernicious in his Syllabus of Errors. And speaking of errors, many political ones committed by the Roman Catholic Church in the twentieth century, starting with its attitude to fascism and Nazism, were motivated not just by contingent reasons of convenience but by deep mistrust of any form of “modernization,” which it saw as a dangerous drift away from the sacred.

Certainly neither the Catholic Church, nor as far as I know any other Christian Church, has taken a stand against European unity. But the conviction that the unity of Europe can and should be founded on common acceptance of the Christian tradition is all too evident in the attitudes adopted by representatives of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and politicians promoting a Christian vision of the human species. There was a concrete example of this recently when the European Charter of Rights was being formulated, an event which, by the way, ought to have been celebrated with greater solemnity and awarded greater recognition than it was in the parliaments of the EU member states. Voices were raised in many quarters complaining that the preamble mentioned the “spiritual” heritage of the peoples of the European continent rather than the specifically religious, let alone Christian, heritage. The only explanation for this discontent is the claim that the basis of united Europe is the Christian tradition, in the sense of a set of positive dogmas—precisely the thing that shattered the unity of medieval Europe, precisely the thing that gave us the wars of religion, which had to be ended through imposed secularization. Christianity as a core of dogma cannot constitute the cultural basis of Europe’s modern identity. We see this clearly enough in various European countries, not least Italy, where a large section of the ecclesiastical hierarchy is starting to speak about Christian identity as a patrimony that needs defending against the growth of the Islamic community, to which most immigrants in most European countries belong. The bishop (and cardinal) of a large Italian diocese recently asserted that in order for foreign immigrants who are Muslim to live at peace with Italians, they ought to be taught not just the rudiments of our language and culture but the Catholic religion as well. You could see it as a reprise of sorts of the Westphalian principle cuius regio eius religio (every sovereign state imposes religious uniformity within its borders), except that the bishop in question doesn’t remotely imagine a situation of reciprocity, in which for instance Christians who emigrated to Saudi Arabia would have to become Muslim. The soil from which this idea springs, though for now it has only been floated as a vague but nonetheless significant and worrying hint, is the same missionary and colonial spirit that drove European imperialism for centuries.

I don’t bring up these facts in a spirit of theological, let alone political, altercation. For me it is a matter of acknowledging that the only way for Christianity still to discharge its own historical vocation of constituting the foundational values of modern Europe is for it to think of itself and become (even at the cost of a profound transformation of the Church or Churches) a religion of the dissolution of the “sacred” and the expanding recognition of the sole principles of liberty and charity. The Vatican has taken some quite significant strides in this direction recently. The pope has requested pardon for the condemnation of Galileo, for all those burned at the stake by the Inquisition, for the persecutory attitude toward the “perfidious Jews” (as they were called until a few years ago in the Catholic liturgy), and even for the excommunication of Luther. But if the withdrawal of the condemnation of Copernican heliocentrism implies recognition of the fact that the Bible is not a manual of astronomy, why not go further and recognize that it is not a treatise in anthropology, morality, or even theology either? The New Testament speaks of God as father, and we still recite the Lord’s Prayer with emotion. But are we really supposed to consider anathema the feminist objections to this masculinization of the divinity? When I posit that the Bible cannot be considered a theological treatise, meaning an ensemble of propositions on God, his existence, and his nature,³ I am referring to that as well. It was over questions like the sex of the angels or whether or not the nature of God entails certain relations and not others among the persons of the Trinity that the Christian Churches split apart and went on to violate in the bloodiest way the fundamental (and the only immutable) evangelical precept of charity.

Readers will have observed that when I speak of Christianity as the dissolution of the sacred, one of my references is the theories of a great Christian thinker (who is certainly not in agreement with the implications I draw from his thought), René Girard. His thesis that the incarnation of Christ was nonsacrificial in character is decisive for the vision I am proposing here of Christianity as the religion of modern and postmodern Europe. God becomes man not as the adequate victim in reparation for sin but in order to reveal that the victim mechanism, the sacrifice, that characterizes the natural religions is something primitive, barbaric, a pure invention generated by the constitution of ordered societies, which need to release violence onto a victim, the scapegoat, because otherwise it would make life in society impossible. The Judeo-Christian revelation lies in the announcement that God is not violence but love, which is a scandalous announcement, so much so that Jesus was put to death for it. It is also an announcement so far exceeding the capacity of human knowledge that it could only have come from an incarnate God. If you read the Judeo-Christian revelation in these terms, which may be far from orthodox but are reasonable and well-grounded, you start to see that modern Europe, the processes of secularization, individual rights, freedom of conscience, political democracy—all of which were brought about against the explicit resistance of the Catholic Church and often the other Churches as well—are offshoots of the penetration of society by the Christian message. But not by the dogmas and the metaphysical conceptions that, it was claimed, had to be understood as necessarily bound to faith in Jesus Christ. Appearances to the contrary, Voltaire may have been a more authentic Christian than the Jesuits of his time. The Christianity that founded modern Europe is that of respect for the person, not that of smoldering pyres of heretics and witches. It was the religion of caritas, not that of the metaphysical, theological, and moral veritates which, it was thought, required acknowledgment on pain of heresy, excommunication, and damnation.

After all I have said, the meaning of the proposition I stated at the outset will be clearer, I hope. Christianity will be able to further the constitution of a united Europe, and ultimately perhaps a united world, only if it develops its own essence as a religion of charity and not of dogma, adopting a stance of openness to all religious cultures and mythologies, keeping faith with the spirit of hospitality and dissolution of the violence of the sacred that is the core of the preaching of Jesus. Nor is the creation of Europe the only source of pressure for such a transformation. But precisely the increasing political integration of our continent and in general the countless phenomena of globalization that are irresistibly coming about in our world are a providential event of sorts, summoning the Christian churches to consume (wear out, use up, finish off) their dogmatic claims and the whole train of metaphysical convictions about the nature of the world, God, and mankind they entail. By now all that is just fodder for religious authorities attempting to influence the legislative programs of governments. You can read this as the meaning of the title of the essay by Novalis, Christianity or Europe (1799). There is a linkage of destiny, a providential link, between the unfolding of European history, including the recent drive toward the political unification of the continent, and the fulfillment of the history of salvation announced in the Bible. It is this that, as Christians and Europeans, we need to have the courage to think through in the radical manner required.