The Future of Religion

THE PHILOSOPHICAL TRUTH of hermeneutics, namely its claim to be a more “valid” thought than other philosophies—for example, to be a more “truthful” philosophy than neo-empiricism or historical materialism, et cetera—evidently cannot be maintained on the basis of a description of what, according to it, the state of affairs really is. That, as Nietzsche writes, “there are no facts, only interpretations,” is not an objective, metaphysical proposition. This proposition too is “only” an interpretation. If one reflects on the meaning of this statement, one realizes how much hermeneutics has (in deed) changed the reality of things and transformed philosophy. As is well known, Martin Heidegger, right from the beginning of his career and then more and more consistently and deliberately in the subsequent elaboration of his thought, did not provide “proofs” for his propositions. Instead, he put them forth as responses to situations in which it—his thinking, he himself—found itself involved, thrown into. The existential analytic of Being and Time does not constitute a description of the nature and structure of human existence; it is already, in every sense, an interpretation, that is to say, a listening and a replying to what we ourselves are, while we are, and entirely from within. If there is a difference between an “early” and a “late” Heidegger (a difference for that matter recognizable in Heidegger’s own terminological usage), it lies in an increasingly explicit awareness that the Being, into which we are thrown and to which we respond from within, is intensely characterized in historical terms. Thus in the late Heidegger one seldom or never finds the term “Eigentlichkeit [authenticity]” ; however, the etymological root “eigen” is still used to characterize the Ereignis, the appropriating event of Being. This observation, which might seem reducible to the level of a mere lexical accident, expresses rather well the general meaning of the ontological radicalization undergone by hermeneutics in the development of Heidegger’s thought.

What I wish to bring out by analyzing the situation in which we find ourselves placed, on the basis of the results of the existential analytic, is the following: (a) The existential analytic (section 1 of Being and Time) makes us aware that knowledge is always interpretation and nothing but this. Things appear to us in the world only because we are in their midst and always already oriented toward seeking a specific meaning for them. In other words, we possess a preunderstanding that makes us interested subjects rather than neutral screens for an objective overview. And (b) interpretation is the only fact of which we can speak. As one of the classic authors of twentieth-century hermeneutics, Luigi Pareyson, wrote: “the ‘object’ manifests itself to the degree to which the ‘subject’ expresses his or herself, and vice versa.” I am not espousing some kind of empirical idealism à la Berkeley. In interpretation the world is given, there are not “subjective” images alone. Yet the Being of things (the ontic reality) is inseparable from the being-there of the human being. Both points, (a) and (b), may also be maintained without too much difficulty from a Kantian perspective. Nevertheless, the claim that the knowing subject is not a neutral screen but an interested subject is already a departure from Kant’s teaching; above all, it opens the way for point (c), which I would like to stress, namely that the more we try to grasp interpretation in its authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), the more it manifests itself in its eventlike, historical character (ereignishaft). Then, (d): if the statement that “there are no facts, but only interpretations” is, as Nietzsche lucidly recognized, an interpretation too, then this interpretation can only be argued as an interested response to a particular historical situation—not as the objective registration of a fact that remains external to it but as itself a fact that enters into the makeup of the very historical situation to which it co-responds.

What I mean, expressed more concisely, is that one cannot talk with impunity of interpretation; interpretation is like a virus or even a pharmakon that affects everything it comes into contact with. On the one hand, it reduces all reality to message—erasing the distinction between Natur and Geisteswissenschaften, since even the so-called hard sciences verify and falsify their statements only within paradigms or preunderstandings. If “facts” thus appear to be nothing but interpretations, interpretation, on the other hand, presents itself as (the) fact: hermeneutics is not a philosophy but the enunciation of historical existence itself in the age of the end of metaphysics. The “validity” of Heidegger’s thought is equivalent to its capacity, superior to that of other philosophies, to correspond to the epoch, to let the event speak: the same event that Nietzsche calls nihilism and that for Heidegger is the end of metaphysics. This event comprises the end of Eurocentrism, the critique of ideology, the dissolution of the evidentness of consciousness through psychoanalysis, the explicit pluralization of the agencies of information, the mass media, which, as Heidegger had anticipated in his essay, “The Age of the World-Picture” (“Die Zeit des Weltbildes”), make the idea of a “unique” world picture impossible. Lyotard later labeled all this the end of the metanarratives. Nevertheless, the part of Heidegger’s doctrine that we must not forget, but that Lyotard overlooked, is that the end of the metanarratives is not the unveiling of a “true” state of affairs in which the metanarratives “no longer are”; it is, on the contrary, a process of which, given that we are fully immersed in it and cannot regard it from outside, we are called upon to grasp a guiding thread that we can use in order to project its further development; that is, to remain inside it as interpreters rather than as objective recorders of facts.

Lyotard and other theoreticians of postmodernism have neither noticed nor stated, however, that Nietzsche and Heidegger speak not only from within the modern process of dissolution of the metanarratives but above all from within the biblical tradition. It is not so very absurd to assert that the death of God announced by Nietzsche is, in many ways, the death of Christ on the cross told by the Gospels. Elsewhere, I have stressed the significance of Dilthey’s reconstruction of the history of metaphysics in his Introduction to the Human Sciences (Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, 1883).¹ According to Dilthey, it is the advent of Christianity that makes possible the progressive dissolution of metaphysics that, from his perspective, culminates in Kant but that is also Nietzsche’s nihilism and Heidegger’s end of metaphysics. Christianity introduces into the world the principle of interiority, on the basis of which “objective” reality gradually loses its preponderant weight. What Nietzsche’s statement that “there are no facts, only interpretations” and Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology actually do is to draw the extreme consequences from this principle. So the relationship between modern hermeneutics and the history of Christianity is not limited to the fact that reflection on interpretation has an essential nexus with the reading of biblical texts, as has often been observed. Rather, what I am suggesting here is that hermeneutics—expressed in its most radical form in Nietzsche’s statement and in Heidegger’s ontology—is the development and maturation of the Christian message.

The title “The Age of Interpretation” summarizes the general, ontological aspects of what I’ve said so far (and which I have discussed more extensively in After Christianity). What I would like to develop now, from these premises, is the relationship between the two aspects of the link between hermeneutics and Christianity that I have just mentioned and that seem to me specifically relevant to this essay. What is the relationship between hermeneutics as a technique and discipline of interpretation (from Luther’s sola scriptura to Schleiermacher and Dilthey) and hermeneutics as a radically “nihilist” ontology, in the sense conveyed by Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s assertions? More concretely: What does hermeneutic ontology tell us about the reading and interpretation of biblical texts, about their presence and meaning in the existence of our societies? Can we really argue, as I believe we must, that postmodern nihilism constitutes the actual truth of Christianity?

If we look at the history of the modern churches—and here I am speaking mainly of the Catholic Church, though I may not be far off as regards the history of other Christian confessions as well—it is plain enough that the main challenge faced by the Church has been science’s claim to be regarded as the only source of truth. The debates on miracles, on the very possibility of demonstrating the existence of God, and on the reconciliation of divine omnipotence and omniscience with human freedom have always been inspired by the idea that the truth that shall make us free—as Scripture says—could only be the objective truth. The Church too adopted this conception of truth more or less explicitly, with the consequence that it had to attribute objective truth to the statements of the Bible, even ones that expressed the astronomy and cosmology of the ancient world (in the case of Galileo and heliocentrism, for example, Joshua’s command to the sun, outside Jericho’s wall, to cease moving). Naturally, the Church’s “literalism” changed over time, owing in part to a hermeneutic that grew increasingly attentive to the “spiritual” meanings of Scripture. But at the same time, both to respond to the challenge presented by modern science and to lay the foundations for preaching Christianity to far-flung areas and cultures, the Church elaborated a whole doctrine of preambula fidei, entangling itself more and more in a metaphysics of the objectivist kind, which by now—as we see even in recent encyclopedias—has become inseparable from the authoritarian claim to preach laws and principles that are natural, hence valid for all and not for the faithful alone. The disputes that are arising in many countries all over the world concerning bioethics constitute the terrain on which the Church’s claim to speak in the name of humanity, rather than in the name of a positive revelation, is made most forcefully. The consequence of this may well be the occurrence of further “Galileo cases” and other confrontations between ecclesiastical authority and the contemporary world, owing purely to the stubborn faith of the Church in the contents of a culture that is certainly more ancient and habitual but that has no claim to be considered the eternal truth. Here it suffices to cite the notorious example of the denial of the priesthood to women, which the pope defends not so much on the basis of opportunistic reasons or historical custom, as would be understandable, but by reference to women’s “natural” vocation, a notion that at this point can only be taken seriously from a metaphysical and essentialist position. Problems involving its relationship to science, or to demands for emancipation, as in the case of feminism, are not the only ones the Church faces today. There is also, and perhaps mainly, the ecumenical problem—not only among Christian confessions but also among the religions generally. As long as the Church remains trapped in the web of its “natural metaphysics” and its literalism (God is “father,” and not mother, for example?), it will never be able to dialogue freely and fraternally, not just with the other Christian confessions but above all with other major world religions. The only way open to the Church not to revert to being the tiny fundamentalist sect it necessarily was at the beginning of its history, but to develop its universal vocation, is to assume the evangelical message as the principle that dissolves all claims to objectivity. It is not a scandal to say that we do not believe in the gospel because we know that Christ is risen, but rather, that we believe that Christ is risen because we have read it in the gospel. This reversal is indispensable if we are to avoid falling into a ruinous realism, into objectivism, and into its corollary, the authoritarianism that has characterized the history of the Church. A statement such as this becomes possible precisely in the age of interpretation, when—according to my hypothesis—Christianity has brought to bear its full antimetaphysical effect, and “reality” in all its aspects has been reduced to message. In this process of reduction there are two inseparable elements: Christianity only makes sense if reality is not first and foremost the world of things at hand (vorhanden,) objectively present; and the meaning of Christianity as a message of salvation consists above all in dissolving the peremptory claims of “reality.” Paul’s sentence, “Oh death where is thy victory?” can rightfully be read as an extreme denial of the “reality principle.”

It is difficult to grasp and express all the possible implications of these premises. For example, one of these implications could be summed up with Wittgenstein’s phrase that philosophy (for us, this would be the postmetaphysical philosophy made possible by Christ) can only free us from idols. A task not irrelevant at all in our contemporary world, even at the level of politics: the idols include the laws of the marketplace and the purportedly natural rules that prevent the passage of more humane and fraternal legislation (for example, in Italy and elsewhere we have the problem of same-sex unions) or even the drive for domination on the part of this or that group of “technocrats,” of experts, of people who feel entitled to decide on our behalf. In general, a democratic regime needs a non-objective-metaphysical conception of truth; otherwise, it immediately becomes an authoritarian regime. Should it recognize that the redemptive meaning of the Christian message makes its impact precisely by dissolving the claims of objectivity, the church might also finally heal the tension between truth and charity that has, so to speak, tormented it throughout its history. The traditional Aristotelian slogan “amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas” can no longer hold good for Christians. A character in Dostoevsky says, if I had to choose between Christ and truth, I would choose Christ. But the alternative vanishes if we grant all the consequences of the biblical message. The truth that, according to Jesus, shall make us free is not the objective truth of science or even that of theology: likewise, the Bible is not a cosmological treatise or a handbook of anthropology or theology. The scriptural revelation was not delivered to give us knowledge of how we are, what God is like, what the “natures” of things or the laws of geometry are, and so on, as if we could be saved through the “knowledge” of truth. The only truth revealed to us by Scripture, the one that can never be demythologized in the course of time—since it is not an experimental, logical, or metaphysical statement but a call to practice—is the truth of love, of charity.

In contemporary postmetaphysical philosophy, including the neopragmatism of Rorty or the philosophy of communicative action of Habermas, the proximity of truth to charity is anything but an extravagant idea. For both thinkers, and for many of our contemporaries, no experience of truth can exist without some kind of participation in a community, and not necessarily the closed community (parish, province, or family) of the communitarians. As in the case of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, truth comes about as the ongoing construction of communities that coincide in a “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung), which has no insuperable “objective” limit (like that of race, language, or “natural” belongings). What appears to be increasingly obvious in contemporary postmetaphysical thought is that truth does not consist in the correspondence between propositions and things. Even when we speak of correspondence, we have in mind propositions verified in the context of paradigms, the truth of which consists above all in their being shared by a community.

I said above that from the perspective that I propose here, postmodern nihilism (the end of metanarratives) is the truth of Christianity. Which is to say that Christianity’s truth appears to be the dissolution of the (metaphysical) truth concept itself. But then, to come quickly to the conclusion, why are we still speaking of Christianity? My friend Richard Rorty has expressed his sympathy for my reading of kenosis (the incarnation as God’s renunciation of his own sovereign transcendence), though without finding in it any reason to feel any closer to Christianity. Now, without in the least wishing to convert Rorty, I do maintain that—as in the case of Nietzsche and Heidegger—even his nonfoundationalism is possible—presentable as a reasonable thesis—only because we are living in a civilization 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 nonfoundationalism 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.” Naturally, in putting this point to Rorty, I am taking what he does not explicitly articulate to the extreme. From a pragmatic perspective, he is consistent in not offering objective-metaphysical proofs, but he does acknowledge a spontaneous preference for a worldview that rejects foundationalism and is thus more desirable inasmuch as less authoritarian and more open to human freedom. But what can we do when we find this spontaneous preference for a more humane and democratic society lacking? Do we merely acknowledge the insurmountable condition of belonging to different communities? There is a third possibility between, on one hand, the metaphysical demonstration of the truth of Christianity (the preambula fidei and the historical veracity of the resurrection) and, on the other, its falseness with respect to scientific reason (entailing the quasi-naturalistic acceptance of the differences among individuals, cultures, and societies): Christianity as a historical message of salvation. Those who followed Christ when he appeared to them in Palestine did not do so because they had seen him perform miracles, and even less had all those who followed him subsequently done so. They believed, as we say in Italian, “sulla parola,” that is, “they took him at his word”; they had “fides ex auditu,” faith from hearing. The commitment to Christ’s teaching derives from the cogency of the message itself; he who believes has understood, felt, intuited that his word is a “word of eternal life.”

At a time when, thanks to the Christianity that has permeated the history of our institutions as well as the history of our culture more generally, we have come to realize that the experience of truth is above all that of hearing and interpreting messages (even in the “hard sciences” there are paradigms, preunderstandings that we receive as messages), the Christian revelation has cogency insofar as we recognize that without it our historical existence would not make sense. The example of the “classics” of a literature, a language, a culture is illuminating here. Just as western literature would not be thinkable without its Homeric poems, without Shakespeare and Dante, our culture in its broadest sense would not make sense if we were to remove Christianity from it.

The authority of an such an argument seems insufficient only because we have not yet fully developed the antimetaphysical consequences of Christianity itself; because we are not yet nihilistic enough, in other words Christian enough, we still oppose the historical-cultural cogency of the biblical tradition to a “natural reality” that supposedly exists independently of it and with respect to which the biblical truth is obliged to “prove itself.” But must we really believe in Jesus Christ only if we are able to demonstrate that God created the world in seven days or that Jesus himself actually rose on Easter morning and by extension that man is by nature one thing or another or that the family is by nature monogamous and heterosexual, that matrimony is by nature indissoluble, that woman is incapable by nature of entering the priestly office, and so on? It is far more reasonable to believe that our existence depends on God because here, today, we are unable to speak our language and to live out our historicity without responding to the message transmitted to us by the Bible. One might object that this is still a specific belonging, which forgets humanity in general and closes itself off from other religions and cultures. Yet these consequences follow even more certainly if we take the Christian revelation to be tied to a natural metaphysics, which, in the wake of the marxist critique of ideology and cultural anthropology, appears as anything but “natural.”

So, with respect to Rorty’s pragmatism, what I propose is an explicit appropriation of our Christian historicity. This is what Benedetto Croce meant when he wrote that “we cannot not call ourselves Christians.” Perhaps this expression should be taken in its literal sense, even underscoring the words “call ourselves”: as soon as we try to account for our existential condition, which is never generic or metaphysical but always historical and concrete, we discover that we cannot place ourselves outside the tradition opened up by the proclamation of Christ. True, one cannot guarantee that nonbelievers would be persuaded by such an argument. It is something more, however, than an acknowledgment of an insurmountable limit that can only be regulated by reciprocal tolerance—because for that matter there is very often no reciprocity at all. Today, when all claims by historical authorities to command in the name of truth have been revealed as deceptions that absolutely cannot be tolerated in a democracy, Croce’s assertion should perhaps be interpreted in the same sense, between despair and invocation, as Heidegger’s statement that “only a god can save us [Nur noch ein Gott kann un retten].” “We cannot not call ourselves Christians” because in a world where God is dead—where the metanarratives have been dissolved and all authority has fortunately been demythologized, including that of “objective” knowledge—our only chance of human survival rests in the Christian commandment of charity.