Weak Thought or Weak Theology? A Theological Critique of Vattimo’s Incarnational Ontology
Jens Zimmermann
1. Introduction
Vattimo’s conflation of Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology with the central Christian doctrine of the incarnation justifies and requires a deeply theological response to Vattimo’s basic question: “Can we really argue, as I believe we must, that postmodern nihilism constitutes the actual truth of Christianity?” – Assuming the “we” to refer to Christians, my short answer to this question is “no, we cannot and must not.”
Let me say from the outset that I believe Vattimo’s general project of an incarnational ontology to be a philosophically bold move which offers important insights for thinking through the West’s current cultural crisis (a move perhaps reminiscent more of Hegel*1 than of Joachim de Fiore). Our cultural situation seems characterized by the exhaustion of secular reason on the one hand and the return of religion, accompanied by the fear of fundamentalism and religiously motivated violence, on the other. Vattimo tries to articulate Christianity within this context and rightly stresses the historical and interpretive nature of the Christian faith to forestall dogmatism, escapism and the church’s segregation from the world.*2 To this end, Vattimo tirelessly points out the need for hermeneutic reflection not only within Christian belief but in all areas of political and civic life. For Vattimo, hermeneutic philosophy is not a parlor game conducted by academics sequestered in lecture halls; rather, the hermeneutic philosophy of weak thought he developed on the basis of Nietzsche and Heidegger not only unveils the intrinsic causal connection between metaphysics and violence but weak thought also offers a way to proceed beyond metaphysics and its subject-object opposition altogether.*3
Yet in equating weak thought with the essence of Christianity, Vattimo, much like his main sources Nietzsche and Heidegger, reacts against stifling cultural examples of Christianity but fails to preserve the gift introduced into Western thinking by the Christian concept of the incarnation. This gift is the balanced correlation of transcendence with immanence, the alliance of divine otherness with human finitude, of radical difference with identity, and this gift has acted as a potent relativiser of absolute categories in Western thinking. Yet this relativising -- or as Vattimo might say “weakening” effect -- depends on maintaining a careful balance of transcendence and immanence. Vattimo loses this balance. To put it with the kind of reductive bluntness justified only under the duress of a public presentation: My worry is that in Vattimo’s incarnational ontology, divine revelation becomes encapsulated in a certain post-metaphysical ontology and becomes a purely immanent, faceless, impersonal and monological principle without the transforming and emancipating power Vattimo desires.*4
In other words, Heideggerian ontology determines Christology to such an extent that Vattimo’s end product, the weakening of all structures in the name of charity as the eventing of historical Being, loses the very transcendent quality which gives emancipation a charitable, human-divine face. To state this theologically: when faith in Christ becomes faith in a modalistic kenotic principle, kenosis is no longer Christian. Unless there is some room for real personal transcendence in hermeneutic ontology, Vattimos brilliant adaptation of the incarnation for hermeneutic ontology risks slipping back into Heidegger’s directionless Seinsgeschichte or Nietzsche’s arbitrary affirmation of life with all the ethical impotency implied by such a move.*5 In the following three sections I want first to outline in some detail Vattimo’s incarnational ontology; second to list its main problems and then, third, to suggest that a post-metaphysical faith is more properly grounded in traditional Christology than in Heidegger’s thinking of Being. A proper understanding of Christology yields an incarnational hermeneutic which does not have to sacrifice transcendence on the altar of interpretation.
2. Description of Vattimo’s Incarnational Ontology (or his post-metaphysical faith)
Vattimo’s central idea, which he has developed in his four major publications The End of Modernity,*6 Beyond Interpretation,*7 Belief*8 and After Christianity*9 is to read Heidegger’s postmetaphysical philosophy of Being as weak ontology or weak thought. For Vattimo, the development of Western thought shows that Being manifests itself essentially as a weakening in theoretical and social structures. “The recollective retracing of the history of Being is a philosophy of history too, which is directed by the idea of weakening: i.e. consummation of strong structures on the theoretical level (from the metaphysical metanarrative to local rationality; from the belief in the objectivity of knowledge to the awareness of the hermeneutic character of truth) and on the level of individual and social existence (from the subject centered on the evidence of self-consciousness to psychoanalysis’ subject; from the despotic State to the constitutional state and so on).” *10
The latest development in Vattimo’s thinking, is his “discovery” that this weakening characteristic of Being is not accidental but was put in motion by Christianity itself, or, to be more exact, by the incarnation. Vattimo has rediscovered Christianity by realizing that the incarnation was the beginning of weak ontology and the end of metaphysics:
"I have begun to take Christianity seriously again because I have constructed a philosophy inspired by Nietzsche and Heidegger, and have interpreted my experience in the contemporary world in light of them….The fact of the matter is at a certain moment [] I found myself thinking that the weak reading of Heidegger and the idea that the history of Being as a guiding thread to the weakening of strong structures….was nothing but the transcription of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation of the Son of God." *11
For Vattimo, this discovery of a post-metaphysical faith has at least three liberating effects. The first effect is that weak ontology sounds the death-knell of philosophical atheism. The end of metaphysics is the end of scientistic and historicist rationalism, and this means that “today there are no longer strong, plausible philosophical reasons to be an atheist, or at any rate to dismiss religion.”*12 Vattimo concedes, of course, that philosophy is still conspicuously silent about God, but for him this is merely because most philosophers are habitual atheists whose “silence with respect to God has no basis in any philosophically relevant principle.” Together with the metaphysical God of Christians announced by Nietzsche, his counter part, the God of scientific objectivism which propped up naturalism and scientism has also died.*13 To put it simply: no metaphysics, no philosophical atheism.
The second salutary effect Vattimo finds in weak ontology is that far from opposing Christian revelation, the secularization of the West actually constitutes it. Vattimo argues that secularization is the inner and necessary development of the Judeo-Christian revelation, manifested in the weakening of Being and the consequent dissolution of metaphysics. Vattimo acknowledges as the main inspiration behind this idea the medieval mystic and biblical commentator Joachim de Fiore, who suggested that a historical unfolding of revelation would eventually lead to an age of spirit without institutionalized religion under the rule of charity. Vattimo adopts this idea to argue that secularization, rightly understood, is not the Enlightenment’s movement towards universal reason and the abandonment of God, but the historicizing kenotic force of the incarnation itself.*14 Because this weakening effect was set in motion by God’s self abasement that culminated in the crucifixion, the weakening of all structures moves towards non-violence: “secularization is the way in which kenosis, having begun with the incarnation of Christ, but even before that with the covenant between God and ‘his’ people, continues to realize itself more and more clearly by furthering the education of mankind concerning the overcoming of originary violence essential to the sacred and to social life itself.”*15 Vattimo’s incarnational ontology can now assure us that the weakening of being follows a purposeful and somehow benign developmental trajectory issuing from a good event. With the incarnation as the driving principle of weak ontology, secularization is not the enemy of Christian revelation but its very substance.
The third advantage Vattimo gains from his equation of incarnation and weak ontology is a universal Christian message which avoids conflict and violence because it renounces any claims to positive doctrine. Vattimo argues rightly that the crucial task “facing the Christian world (the West) today is the recovery of its universalizing function without any colonial, imperialist, or Eurocentric implications. It is difficult to imagine that this task might be accomplished by stressing [Christianity’s]*16 dogmatic, ethical, and disciplinary implications.”*17 Vattimo follows a currently popular trend of equating any substantive religious doctrine with fundamentalism. For him, the church’s obsession with positive doctrine stems from its fateful adoption of an onto-theological model of objective truth. This fall into objectifying metaphysics forces the church into the false choice between a) either entrenching itself behind the walls of metaphysical claims to truth (fundamentalism) or b) relinquishing all universal truth claims by retreating into communitarian cliques and fostering a tribal mentality. Vattimo’s solution: rid ourselves of dogma, church discipline and moral teachings because they are at the root of religious conflict. Only when we give up the “dogmatic and fundamentalist forms that have characterized Christianity to date,” can we avoid religious fanaticism and violence*18 and fundamentally change the church’s mission.
According to Vattimo, the church’s former perceived tasks of proclamation and mission were wrongly based on the universality of truth claims. In today’s spirit age of post-metaphysical existence, however, Christianity’s universality consists not in doctrines but in the enactment of unfolding kenotic truth. Instead of finding confidence in the universality of its doctrinal claims, Christianity should move from “universality to hospitality,” by limiting itself from a proclamatory role “almost entirely to listening, and thus giving voice to its guests,” always assuming that the other may be right. Vattimo has learned from Heidegger that Christianity should not allow itself “to be define by any positive content on the plane of faith or by any positive obligation on the moral plane.”
The church’s participation in the universal kenotic weakening of Being thus requires what Vattimo calls a “reduced faith.” With Heidegger, Vattimo believes that faithfulness to the Apostle Paul’s teaching, consists in “leaving aside the substantive elements of revelation”*19 and settles for a general feeling of dependence reminiscent of Schleiermacher’s religious feeling.*20 From this follows the dissolution of doctrine and institutional Christianity according to kenotic weakening and its law of charity. Only when Christianity is prepared to historicize itself to the fullest extent of the law of weakening can it react properly to the current pluralist cultural climate and recover its missionary vocation.
What, however, are then to be the limits of the dissolution of doctrine, the limits of interpretation? To his credit, Vattimo sees this problem clearly. He writes: “If the relation between the history of salvation and the history of interpretation is understood in this way, will not salvation and interpretation be configured just as processes of drifting, in which there seem to be no limits, no criteria of validity, no risk of defeat, and finally, no space for freedom and responsibility?” *21 Vattimo has lived long enough to understand that “not every secularization is good and positive, and neither is every interpretation valid; it must be valid for a community of interpreters” (67).
How does this appeal to community help us? How is this not relativism merely augmented to a communal scale? *22 Vattimo seeks to avoid this dilemma in referring back to the kenotic principle as the universal driving force of all human history, and hence applicable to every community.*23 Jesus himself already demonstrated this interpretive key: “The interpretation given by Jesus Christ of Old Testament prophecies, or (better) the interpretation which he himself is, reveals its true and only meaning: God’s love for his creatures.”*24 In a beautiful passage, Vattimo presents us with an Augustinian hermeneutic of charity as the irreducible limit of interpretation. Augustine’s motto “love and do what you will” “expresses clearly the only criterion on the basis of which secularization must be examined.”*25 The problem, however, with adopting Augustine’s hermeneutic of charity as a criterion of discernment is that – at least for Augustine and the early church – Christian charity depends on participation in divine transcendence. Vattimo, however, has a decisive allergy to transcendence.
3. Problems With Vattimo’s Incarnational Ontology
The main problem with Vattimo’s incarnational ontology is his false equation of orthodox Christian theology with metaphysics, and his wholesale rejection of transcendence as violence. Most likely he inherited this misunderstanding from Heidegger’s false condemnation of the entire Christian theological tradition as an onto-theological adventure, deeply embroiled in the wrong, objectifying kind of Greek metaphysics and therefore complicit in the forgetfulness of Being and in the birth of scientific objectivism.
Yet Vattimo’s equation of transcendence with metaphysics and metaphysics with Christianity is theologically and historically inaccurate. Nor is his interpretation of secularization as the anti-metaphysical substance of Christianity convincing. Indeed, a good case has been made that beginning with nominalism in the thirteenth century, secularism as the disintegration of theology is responsible for the rise of scientific objectivism.*26 It is false, in other words, simply to equate Christian theology with objectifying metaphysics and onto-theology. As Paul Ricoeur and many others have pointed out, such a view tends to forget that Greek metaphysics always underwent a radical transformation in their appropriation by Christian theologians.*27
Perhaps the most important transformation of this kind is the incarnation’s infusion of personal transcendence into ontology. In accordance with this innovation in Western thought, God can indeed be analogically described in ontological terms but remains irreducible to ontology. Heidegger’s assertion in Introduction to Metaphysics that Christianity’s identification of the person Jesus with the Greek logos signifies the fall into objectifying ontology either willfully or ignorantly misses the significant insertion of personal, social categories of transcendence into ontology.*28 This crucial shift has many philosophical implications and has prompted almost all great theologians within Christianity to define faith primarily (but not exclusively) as participation or relational trust in God rather than as objective knowledge.*29 As perceptive as Heidegger’s criticism of onto-theology and scientific objectivism may be, Christians should be rather cautious in adopting his decidedly non-incarnational, impersonal ontology as interpretive paradigm of Christianity.
The poverty of Heideggerian ontology for the recover of Christianity becomes particularly clear when Vattimo advocates a postmetaphysical, procedural ethic which would translate received ethical precepts into Heidegger’s “language of overcoming metaphysics as oblivion of Being,” to open up new ethical possibilites.*30 Vattimo rightly employs Heidegger’s stress on historical development against the disincarnate and traumatic alterity of Derrida and Levinas,*31 yet he overlooks that especially in Levinas this flight into otherness is a flight from Heidegger’s impersonal ontology as much as from Nietzsche’s arbitrary becoming, or, for that matter, from Vattimo’s own immanent view of the secular. Does not Levinas speak precisely to the problem raised by Vattimo’s conviction that interpretations of doctrine “change in accordance with the becoming of history?” *32
Even when one shares Vattimo’s passion for hermeneutics and applauds his incarnational critique of Levinas, can we simply dismiss Levinas’ fear that the becoming of history may opt for racial superiority? Opposition to the idol of race and capital usually grows from a strong sense of human dignity – what if that too is weakened by the becoming of history? Levians’ fears are shared by other theologians such as Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eberhard Jüngel, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac who were life witnesses to the fact that Trinitarian theologies that leave divine transcendence behind often end up declaring some social or political developments or organization as absolute.*33 In effect, for all his dislike of mysticism and the ineffable, Vattimo’s reduced faith is not very far from Levinas’ otherness or Derrida’s never arriving indeconstructible messianic and justice. At least Levinas can root human dignity in a “place” outside of ontology we can resort to in case negotions in a procedural ethic turn ugly. It is not at all clear to me how Vattimo’s own idea of kenosis as universal principle and its concomitant notion of hospitality are any more substantive or helpful than those of Levinas and Derrida. *34
Perhaps Vattimo believes his appeal to the incarnation as kenotic teleology counters the ethical deficiencies of Nietzsche’s arbitrary becoming and Heidegger’s impersonal Being. Yet with his remark that the relationship between hermeneutics and faith means that secularization is inscribed positively as a ‘drift’ in the notion of kenosis, Vattimo effectively allows Heideggerian ontology to shape the Trinity rather than consider at least a reciprocal influence -- he stacks the interpretive cards in favour of becoming and of immanence.*35
Vattimo’s exclusion of transcendence from his incarnational ontology results in a monological, immanent, and flat conception of ontology which undermines some of the very things he desires. I can only list a few here. For example, his univocal interpretation of kenosis*36 identifies God and world, the incarnation and secularization. Is not this simply the inverse of what American evangelicals do when they confuse certain politics with true Christianity? Does not Vattimo’s conflation of salvation and secular history play into the hands of religious radicals? Should we not rather insist on their distinction? Moreover, how can Vattimo’s univocity account for the relative autonomy of the secular we so desperately need if we ever want to sort out church-state relations in a pluralistic society? And, speaking of pluralism, how does his universal kenotic weakening not turn our to be exactly the kind of unifying straight jacket he wants to avoid? Immanence, after all, cannot account for new ‘revelations’ which challenge the system, it cannot account for difference, but only such difference enables dialogue and makes plurality possible.” *37
I conclude this list of problems with a number of dualisms which spring up when transcendence is eradicated from ontology. Contrary to his intentions, Vattimo’s immanent overdetermination of the incarnation leaves us with the opposition of Spirit to doctrine and ecclesial structures, of contemplation to action, of transcendence to ethics, of unity to difference. Vattimo’s signature confession of faith, “I believe that I believe,” arises itself from perhaps the most tragic dualism which characterizes not just Vattimo but also much of continental religious philosophy: either a substantial faith with real contours, or a virtual fideism.
The problem with Vattimo’s recovery of Christianity is the underlying opposition running throughout his recovery of religion: substantive transcendence equals metaphysics, metaphysics equals doctrine and doctrine equals conflict which inevitably issues in oppression and violence.*38 Vattimo, like other Christians who still want to believe in a post-metaphysical world and desire to be active in politics, tries to counter the popular charge of fundamentalism against Christianity. Unfortunately, he does it by translating its incarnational essence into Heideggerian ontology -- but the “languages” are simply too different. The very essence of the incarnation, the balance of transcendence and immanence, gets lost in this translation.*39 I humbly suggest a better way, one indicated by the fact that Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics was itself inspired by the Christian tradition. In fact, even the briefest look at this tradition will show that Vattimo’s opposition of transcendence and ethics, or particular doctrine and hermeneutic openness are unnecessary.
4. Christological (hermeneutic) Ontology
Contrary to Vattimo’s belief, we will not arrive at a truly hermeneutic and ethical conception of the Christian faith by avoiding transcendence but rather by defining it Christologically. We will briefly look at Augustine and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to establish that in the biblical tradition, faith defined Christologically is first of all participation in divine transcendence or the Christ event which upholds both kenosis and transcendence. We find here a non-foundationalist foundation for an interpretive, incarnational faith that does not eradicate hope by conflating God and history.
Vattimo cites Augustine’s motto “love and do what you will” as the only defensible ethical maxim of incarnational ontology. Yet the radical difference between Augustine and Vattimo’s use of charitable hermeneutics is that Augustine never divorces ethics from the Christian’s continual encounter of God through the mediation by the church. One way to grasp this difference is their diverging views of the Eucharist. Vattimo, together with the majority of evangelicals dismisses the Catholic insistence on Eucharistic presence as an outmoded, fetishist notion, a relic of objective metaphysical ontology which seeks to resist temporality.*40 For Augustine, and for the early church, by contrast, the Eucharist served as enactment of the Christian’s participation in the eternal Trinitarian communion with Father, Son and Spirit. Participation in divine transcendence through Christ’s presence at the communion table served as re-orienting reminder of participation in the new humanity inaugurated by Christ’s incarnation, death and resurrection. Augustine thought that the pervading tendency in us toward individualism and selfishness requires the continual help of God’s Spirit. One does not have to adopt Augustine’s definition of original sin to follow his participatory line of thinking.*41 The apostle Paul already expressed the participatory nature of the Christian faith with the phrase “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” The very activity of proclaiming this news, Paul tells us, depends on the power “of the one working in me in power.” *42
For the early church, encountering the presence of “this one” and being reminded of one’s identity as part of the new humanity or “ecclesia” in no way entailed a radical discontinuity with the rest of humanity. On the contrary, participating in divine transcendence is an ontological connection to the one who “died for the life of the world,” and who “summed up in himself” all of humanity for the purpose of utter and complete reconciliation (Shalom). Augustine could say that in Christ, “we are all one human being.” The church’s universal mission before all else is to proclaim this “good news” and to realize the reconciliation achieved by not only by Christ’s kenosis but also by his resurrection and glorification.*43 Augustine understood the church as a graft of the new humanity onto the “pain-ridden body of humankind. And the graft is but a fragment taken from the reconciling power of the cross.” *44 The church as community and every Christian mediates this ministry of reconciliation in following the pattern of the incarnation as “being-for” and “suffering-with” humanity for the sake of peace. According to Augustine, the entire purpose of the church is to heal humanity. Encountering in the Eucharist the one who gave his life for humanity, structure’s the Christian’s very being as “being for others.” Obviously, this ideal has to be unfolded hermeneutically and in light of conflicting responsibilities, but our main point should be clear: Christian ethics is intrinsically connected to the encounter with divine transcendence. This transcendence is not onto-theology and its definition as personal encounter discredits Heidegger’s almost unbelievably naïve assertion that by identifying logos with Christ, Christians have objectified the logos. Nor does this Christological transcendence put one at the mercy of radical hospitality or subjects one to the trauma of becoming a hostage. These Levinasian hyperboles become unnecessary when humanity and each concrete human other is mediated by the ultimate third other, the crucified and risen human-divine Word of reconciliation.
Finally, we turn to Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a theologian who stood firmly in the in incarnational tradition we just outlined. We only have to recall his definition of the church as “nothing but a piece of the new humanity, in which Christ has truly taken shape” to recognize his endorsement of Augustine’s ontological connection between the transcendence of God and ethics. Bonhoeffer, in fact, develops a Christological ontology and fully fledged Christian hermeneutic epistemology.*45 Especially in the context of Vattimo’s incarnational kenotic ontology as a postmodern recovery of Christianity, it is crucial to understand the Christological context of Bonhoeffer’s own interaction with Heideggerian ontology. This caution is necessary to avoid the common error to misunderstand Bonhoeffer’s famous statement that “a God who is there does not exist” (einen Gott den es gibt, gibt es nicht). *46 Bonhoeffer is in no way arguing for an absent God, but rather for his presence in ontological categories of personhood, relation and participation. The sentence immediately following his rejection of objectifying ontological discourse is often overlooked: “God ‘is’ in personal relation, and being is his being a person.” *47
Bonhoeffer shares Heidegger’s criticism of German idealism but he ends up transforming Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology into an interpretive Christian faith. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had already established such a hermeneutical view of truth in his attempt to define the place of revelation within ontology in his habilitation thesis Act and Being. In this book, he admires Heidegger for finally having overcome the dualism between existence and reflection which blinded German idealist philosophy and liberal Protestant theology– and still blinds historical criticism today – to its own subjectivism. This subjectivism stems from an autonomous understanding of the self and its concomitant notion of reason as distinct from ontology, and hence detached from tradition and historical development. Yet by trying to remove truth from the tainting influence of history and culture, the interpreter is unwittingly caught in the circle of his own presuppositions, now dressed up as the supposedly theologically neutral dictates of rational inquiry. Theology, Bonhoeffer argues, has tended to follow this dangerous path by opposing revelation to being, by proposing a pure transcendentalism of revelation in opposition to the ontological realm of history and culture. Not only Lessing’s ugly ditch but all exclusively apophatic theologies fall prey to this error. Instead, Bonhoeffer attempts to “unify the concern of true transcendentalism and the concern of true ontology in an ‘ecclesiological form of thinking.’"*48 He credits Heidegger for having brought together ontology and reason in an existential ontology, by arguing that self-understanding is disclosed through the existential structures we inhabit, such as care and being-unto-death. He agreed with Heidegger that human subjectivity alone cannot offer adequate self-understanding but requires a transcendent source from outside of oneself. Both thinkers recognize that the hermeneutics of self-knowledge require a vantage point of unity, a hermeneutic whole in light of which individual existence makes sense. The human mind and self reflection on its own cannot arrive at such unity. The early Heidegger set this unity artificially as being-towards-death, but later emphasized more strongly that Being itself provides this horizon of meaning.
Yet Bonhoeffer realizes that Heidegger’s atheism arbitrarily rejects God as the exterior point of reference which provides unifying meaning for human existence. Against the Heidegger of Being and Time, Bonhoeffer argues that
"This unity of human existence is derived solely from the Word of God. This Word allows man to understand himself as existing in Adam or in Christ, as being in the community of Christ, so that the foundation of unity through the Word is identical with the foundation of unity through the being in Adam or in Christ. This too is not merely a datum of experience but is given as revelation to faith. Only in faith does the unity, the ‘being’ of the person become evident." *49
Faith, however, is not an idealist notion of mental recognition but results from a state of being in communion with God.*50 Bonhoeffer’s solution to conjoining act and being while upholding God’s otherness in this correlation is the definition of authentic human existence as “being-in” Christ. To put it more philosophically, Bonhoeffer suggests a participatory ontology based on God’s revelation as person which is experienced and reflected on communally in the church. Bonhoeffer’s overarching goal to arrive at a theologically accurate notion of human identity begins with describing faith as participation (Teilhabe) in God’s self-revelation in Christ. Bonhoeffer’s christological starting point is the incarnation: God in complete freedom entered ontology, being, history, and time in order to tie himself to humanity. In the incarnation, God affirms (becoming human), judges (the cross), and redeems humanity toward its ultimate fulfillment in the eschaton (resurrection).
Christian faith lives from participation in this incarnational event. Bonhoeffer recovers the dogmatic concept of fides directa for his participatory ontology of belief. Like any personal relation, faith is “enacted consciously by a person but cannot be reflected on.” Faith is “being in the greater objectivity of revelation in Word and sacrament,” but the person’s “being in Christ” need not “become self-conscious but is rather wholly taken up into completion of the act itself.”*51 It is the actus purus which is passively received and partaken in:
"Faith meets with an existence prior to its act [of reflection], it is suspended from this existence, because it knows itself drawn into a special determination of this existence. This mode of being is not dependent on faith, on the contrary, faith knows this existence’s independent from itself. . . . All depends on this that faith understands itself as not somehow determining or creating [this existence] but precisely as being created and determined by this existence. " *52
Thus like Heidegger, Bonhoeffer avoids the dualism of act and being but unlike Heidegger, he succeeds in uniting transcendence and immanence with a genuinely holistic understanding of the self by defining faith as a mode of being in Christ as community (actus directus) out of which the actus reflexus, that is, preaching, sacraments, dogma and theology as reflective mind and memory of the church arise. *53
Bonhoeffer’s Christology lectures in 1933 continue to expound the theological significance of the incarnation for human identity. Christ appears again as the new humanity but more clearly now also as the center of nature, history, and the church, a position which will find greater application in the final work, Ethics and an apparent new phase in Bonhoeffer’s “prison” theology, the infamous idea of “religionless Christianity.” *54
Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on our human identity as being-in-Christ also explains why Bonhoeffer rejects preset ethical principles for a more hermeneutical conception of ethics. For him ethics, we recall, is Gestaltung, the formation of Christ, the new human being formed in us, not by striving to become like Jesus, but through the transforming encounter with him: “to be conformed to the one who has become human – that is what being really human means.”*55 The central message of Ethics is a call to Christian life in freedom and realistic responsibility to the new humanity in Christ, to find and work out this human identity in participation with the incarnated, crucified, and risen one. Consequently, the church is not a merely a religious society*56 but represents this new humanity in embryo; it is the place which calls the world to its true identity: “The church is nothing but a piece of the new humanity, in which Christ has truly taken shape. . . . The church is the new human being who has been incarnated, judged, and brought to new life in Christ.” *57
Finally, this focus on the incarnation as the source of humanity’s and the world’s identity also persists in Bonhoeffer’s last thoughts when he contemplates the idea of a this-worldly or religionless Christianity. With this provocative concept, Bonhoeffer more clearly articulates the hermeneutic project of applying the triadic dynamic of the new humanity in Christ (incarnated, judged, resurrected) to the world. For Bonhoeffer, Christ, as the new human being, is the ultimate center of reality from whom the penultimate world derives its worth. Therefore participating in the new humanity in Christ does not mean escaping the world but, following God’s incarnational pattern itself, living in and for it. Consequently, Christianity “is not about the world beyond but all about this world, as it is created, preserved, and renewed. What transcends this world in the gospel wants to be for this world; I don’t mean this in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystical, pietistic or ethical theologies, but in the biblical sense of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection in Christ.”*58 Participation in the new humanity of Christ enables one to be truly human in this life and the life to come.
It should have become clear that Bonhoeffer stresses the incarnation just a much as Vattimo but with entirely different results. Unlike Vattimo, Bonhoeffer’s incarnational ontology preserves a balanced correlation of transcendence and immanence. For him, Christian faith as knowledge of God is first of all participation in the very same incarnated, crucified and risen Christ who gave his life for the world and for humanity. This participation patterns the Christian ethos after the Christ event in threefold form: the incarnation as affirming humanity, the cross as judging human evil, and the resurrection as the redemptive new life achieved by Christ. All three elements equally inform Bonhoeffer’s hermeneutical ethics.*59 This communal participation is a state of being prior to any metaphysics and is then hermeneutically unfolded through acts of reflection which call for every rational means of discernment. Following the Christ pattern, the believer’s mode of being is re-oriented with the incarnation as “being-for” and “suffering-with-the-other.” Flowing from this existence, the necessary hermeneutical reflection and ethics refuse pre-established ethical solutions but require well informed political and social responsibility. We recall here Bonhoeffer’s well known phrase that the holy is found only in the profane, the revelational only in the rational. It is well know that this phrase derives from Bonhoeffer’s suggestive idea to view all of reality as united in the Christian logos and correlated in the believer’s experience as ultimate and penultimate realities. This concept is too complex to introduce it even briefly here, but I cannot resist to hint at its great potential, which I think Professor Vattimo’s ontology lacks, to establish the relative autonomy of the secular, and therefore to retain a healthy distance to the religious interpretations of history of which fundamentalists of all stripes are so fond.
I hope that my brief examples have at least made plausible my argument that Gianni Vattimo’s incarnational ontology rests on too simplistic an equation of Christian transcendence with metaphysics and thus of dogma with violence. Especially Bonhoeffer’s Christology shows us that the presence of God in the communion of the saints, in preaching and the sacraments has very little to do with onto-theology. We should appreciate Vattimo’s insistence on a hermeneutical, post-metaphysical faith, but its derivation from Heidegger’s ontology is neither necessary nor desirable. As both Paolo Flores D’Arcais and Jean Grondin have pointed out in their commentaries on Vattimo’s philosophy, Vattimo couples a nihilistic view of reason with an irrational hope in salvation through the process of history. The very emancipation he hopes for may turn out to be nothing more than a Christian nostalgia for values stemming from the very doctrinal Christianity he rejects.*60 Yet as our example of Bonhoeffer has shown, positive Christian doctrine offers a model of engaging the world that is not metaphysical but nonetheless contains substantive views on human dignity and freedom which in their very historicity are transcendent of either ontology or a faceless Being as becoming.
Vattimo’s outright rejection of doctrine blinds him to a properly Christological understanding of the incarnation: if our times do indeed demand the inclusion of religion into philosophy, and if we truly want to recover the Christian religion, we need strong, not weak doctrine; we don’t need to wrestle with Heidegger’s last god. God has already come and is still coming. What we really need is Christians willing to act and think as if this was actually true.
1 - See here Anthony C. Sciglitano’s article which draws attention to this connection and claims that Vattimo, just like Hegel, seems just to know a little too much about the nature of the divine from an allegedly radically interpretive standpoint. Sciglitano argues that “to the extent that his system is Hegelian, Vattimo’s philosophical theology falls well short of the criterion he sets for all theology: it falls short of love.” This shortfall is the depersonalization of God, Sciglitano enumerates in seven similarities between Hegel and Vattimo: “(1) The Trinity is depersonalized; (2) the divine-world relation is given a modalistic and ultimately monistic reading; (3) Passibility is radical and history becomes constitutive, or stronger, determinative of divine being; (4) Scriptural revelation is overcome by a ‘spiritual sense’ reading that envisions a reconciliation between divine being and the being of the world, thus asserting some form of identity; (5) Jesus’ historical existence becomes religiously insignificant; (6) Resurrection does not lead to exaltation and ends kenosis, and does not apply to Jesus as an individual, but rather continues kenosis as a general diffusion of divine Being into the secular or as the secular; (7) Divine will, election, and missions are excised from theological reflection” (“Contesting The World And The Divine: Balthasar’s Trinitarian ‘Response’ To Gianni Vattimo’s Secular Christianity” Modern Theology 23:4 October 2007, 525-559, 538).
2 - On the question of doctrine this desire is very clear: “Above all, returning to the question of doctrine, it is not, for me (or for anyone else who has a similar trajectory through secularization in modernity), a matter of rediscovering the literality of the truths of faith as they are often so preached by the Church. I am persuaded, an not merely out of attachment to my passions, that if I have a vocation to recover Christianity, it will consist in the task of rethinking revelation in secularized terms in order to ‘live in accord with one’s age,’ therefore in ways that do not offend my culture as, to greater or lesser extent, a man who belongs to this age. This is the exact opposite of returning to the father’s house (as a Catholic discipline), filled with repentance, prepared to abase oneself and to mortify one’s intellectual pride” (Belief, 75).
3 - “One departs from metaphysics and the violence connected to it by letting it recall – and not only negatively – the dissolution that the Gestell places upon the subject and object of metaphysics”
4 - Vattimo is familiar with this criticism: “Fine, one might say (among other things), won’t this recovery of Christianity be an effort to give power to weak thought, that is, to a particular philosophy, thus legitimating and recommending it as authentic heir of the prevalent religious tradition which is domant in Western society?” He realizes that critics must indeed wonder whether “from my perspective, the link between post-metaphysical thought, weak ontology and nihilism on the one hand, and Christian doctrine on the other, is in the end resolved in favour of one or the other term?” (Belief, 91). His answer boils down to a confession of faith which believes in partaking in an event which he trusts to have the kenotically benevolent quality and his residual sympathy for the Christian religion (ibid., 92).
5 - This is, of course, not what Professor Vattimo wants. Indeed his entire project of an incarnational hermeneutic ontology follows Joachim of Fiore’s inspiration of folding the kenotic quality of God into the historical process precisely to structure weakening as a positive force of charity rather than a completely arbitrary one. In this way, the death of God weakens and eventually dissolves strong metaphysical and social structures for the benefit of humanity. Joachim of Fiore may not be, however, the best inspiration for a post-metaphysical Christianity because in him one can already detect the Hegelian death trap of incarnational ontology: the depersonalization of God into a immanent, monological historical principle.
6 - Gianni Vattimo. The End of Modernity (1985). English Translation Jon R. Snyder, Polity Press 1988. Cited edition: Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1991.
7 - Beyond Interpretation. The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy (1994). Transl. David Webb. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.
8 - Belief (1996). Transl. Luca D’Isanto and David Webb. Standford: Stanford UP, 1999.
9 - After Christianity. (no original Italian publication date given). Transl. Luca D’Isanto. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
10 - Vattimo describes this weak ontology as follows: “Ontological hermeneutics replaces the metaphysics of presence with a concept of Being that is essentially constituted by the feature of dissolution. Being gives itself not once and for all as simple presence; rather, it occurs as announcement and grows into interpretations that listed and correspond (to Being). Being is also oriented toward spiritualization and lightening, or, which is the same, toward kenosis. It is quite probable that ontological hermeneutics, which is generated from the dissolution of the metaphysics of presence, is not only a rediscovery of the Church but also, and mainly, the retrieval of Joachim of Fiore’s dream” (AC 68). For Vattimo, the history of Being as the history of secularization is the history of salvation (ibid., 24). He states clearly that he is engaged in “a recovery of religion – summed up as the manifestation of Being as the destiny of weakening at the end of metaphysics” (ibid. 38).
11 - Belief 35-36. A related passage: “This [Vattimo’s weak ontology] approach emphasizes that the weakening of Being is one possible meaning – if not the absolute meaning – of the Christian message, through the radical reading of incarnation as kenosis. This message speaks of a God who incarnates himself, lowers himself, and confuses all the powers of this world” (After Christianity, 80).
12 - (Belief 28).
13 - “If the meta-narrative of positivism no longer holds, one can no longer think that God does not exist because his existence cannot be established scientifically. If the meta-narrative of Hegelian or Marxist historicism no longer holds, one cannot argue that God does not exist because faith in God belongs to an earlier stage within history of human evolution, or because God is just an ideological representation at the service of domination” (AC 86).
14 - Vattimo also acknowledges here his indebtedness to Rene Girard’s religious anthropology: “In my view, Girard has persuasively demonstrated…that if a ‘divine’ truth is given in Christianity, it is an unmasking of the violence that has given birth to the sacred of natural religion, that is, the sacred that is characteristic of the metaphysical God” (AC 38).
15 - Belief, 48.
16 - Original text has “its” [Christianity’s]
17 - After Christianity, 110.
18 - After Christianity, 102.
19 - AC 135; for a fuller description see Belief , 77 ff.
20 - Belief, 78: “Is what Schleiermacher called the pure feeling of dependence the only sense left in the use of the term ‘father’? Probably yes, and once again this is the kernel that, in my view, cannot be an object of reduction or demythification” (78). Indeed, nor can it be the object of any qualification.
21 - AC 67. Earlier Vattimo had already asked: “But will the same secularization not be rather a ‘drift’ inscribed positively in the destiny of kenosis? As regards the meaning of dogmatic Christianity, it is to this question that the recognition of a ‘substantial’ relation with hermeneutics ultimately leads” (Beyond Belief, 51).
22 - Which has always been the problem of Stanley Fish’s interpretive approach.
23 - He insists, though, that we cannot appeal to this idea as the metaphysical ground of all being which we then yield as a club in our attempt to Christianize the nations.
24 - Belief, 65. This principle does, of course, have to spiritualize away the ‘hard sayings of Jesus,’ by further spiritualization as history progresses to overcome Jesus’ upholding and sharpening of principles Vattimo does not endorse (for example Jesus’ affirmation of marriage and hatred for divorce).
25 - Belief, 64. See here also his understanding of the concern Christians may have with this stance: “Aside from the objections that refute the very idea of modernity as secularization (such as Blumenberg’s) – and which seem untenable to us by virtue of the fact that they do not give sufficient consideration to the historical roots of modernity in the ancient and medieval tradition—the objections that in general, above all by believers are raised against this vision of the secularization as a destiny ‘proper to Christianity’ concern the possibility of establishing a criterion that permits the distinction of secularization from phenomena that confine themselves to applying the Christina tradition, often in a distorted fashion, yet which are themselves outside or indeed in opposition to it. Yet it is precisely there that one should rediscover the ‘principle of charity’ which, perhaps not by accident, constitutes the point of convergence between nihilistic hermeneutics and the religious tradition of the West. Secularization has no ‘objective’ limit: the Augustinian ‘ama et fac quod vis’ holds even for the interpretation of the scriptures. For dogmatic Christianity (that is the substance of the New Testament revelation) recognition of its relation with nihilistic hermeneutics means the emergence of charity as the single most decisive factor of the evangelical message” (Beyond Interpretation, 51).
26 - See for instance de Lubac’s assertion that compartmentalization of natural and supernatural, as well as the abstraction of natural ends was not part of traditional Christian doctrine. Not even the scholastics, with their “absolute realism proposed such a thing.” Lubac concludes that “Excessive naturalism and essentialism belong much more to the stream of modern philosophy – which has t some extent invaded the manuals of scholasticism, but in doing so has perverted the traditional teaching it was intended to transmit” (Lubac, Henri de. The Mystery of the Supernatural, Milestones in Catholic Theology. New York: Crossroad Pub., 1998, 63). See also here Philip Blond’s review of Vattimo’s Belief in Modern Theology 18:2 April 2002, 277-85.
27 - Ricœur, Paul. Figuring the Sacred : Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Translated by David Pellauer. Edited by Mark I. Wallace. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995, 268.
28 - “Logos in the new Testament does not, as in Heraclitus, mean the being of the essent, the gathering together of the conflicting; it means one particular essent (ein besonderes Seiendes), namely the son of God. And specifically it refers to him as mediator between God and men. This New Testament notion of the logos is that of the Jewish philosophy of religion developed by Philo whose doctrine of creation attributes to the logos the function of mesites, the mediator…a hole world separates all this from Heraclitus.” Heidegger, Martin. An Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven,: Yale University Press, 1987, 134. The whole point of Heideggers effort is, of course show how the wrong identification of the ‘essent’ Christ is objectifying God and makes Christianity ‘Platonism for the People’ (ibid., 106).
29 - This is, for example, one of the reasons why Luther and Aquinas are actually a lot closer in their definition of faith than is often supposed, a fact which also modifies Aquinas’s supposed Aristotelianism. In the words of one commentator, “The philosophical notion of supreme, first truth and the Thomistic ‘first truth’ as the formal motive for our faith have nor more than the name in common….First truth, for Aquinas, is not an impersonal essence, but a personal God.,,,Faith, then, is not a simple agreement of our intellect with a supreme metaphysical truth, but is in the first place the hearing and acceptance of this word of his….Thus it becomes clear that the import of veritas prima for Aquinas is completely new by comparsion with the philosophical notion of the supreme metaphysical truth.” In: Pfürtner, Stephan H. Luther and Aquinas on Salvation. New York,: Sheed and Ward, 1965, 70-73. Thomas therefore, “discovers a function of the intellect which the Greeks did not know in this express form. ‘Reason’ is no longer, as it was for them, more or less exclusively a capacity for knowing facts; it is also a power of the soul fro knowing persons, able to grasp the truthfulness, the fidelity and the trustworthiness of the one whom I know. It is obvious that we are here concerned with a relationship of trust: Intellegere in faith is to base oneself on God’s trustworthiness” (ibd., 77). It is therefore no accident that Luther’s annoyance with Aristotelian terminology began with this very notion of apprehending truth as intellegere which did not, to him, convey the biblical notion of personal trust.
30 - Nihilism and Emancipation, 67 and 69.
31 - AC, 38.
32 - After Christianity, 121 (emphasis mine).
33 - This sentence is a paraphrase of the same statement by Anthony Sciglitano Jr. in (“Contesting The World And The Divine: Balthasar’s Trinitarian ‘Response’ To Gianni Vattimo’s Secular Christianity.” Modern Theology 23:4 October 2007, 525-559, 546.
34 - Indeed as Marie L. Baird argues, Levinas actually borrows from Rabbi Haim a distinct notion of divine kenosis as incarnational ethics that is not onto-theological, does not ignore the incarnation (as Vattimo alleges) and which also collapses the distinction between profane and sacred history and even rejects negative theology. She concludes in her comparsion of Vattimo and Levinas that for the latter “Ethical responsibility, hospitality, and charity are not mere philosophical abstractions, be they diachronic and transcendental or anchored in the recognition of Being as event. They refer to real relationships of love, fidelity, and the exercise of virtue. On this final point all three thinkers [i.e. Levinas, Derrida and Vattimo] would agree.” Baird also wonders, as I have, why Vattimo does not see similarities between his own notion of the church’s new universal vocation of hospitality and Derrida’s idea. See “Whose Kenosis? An Analysis of Levinas, Derrida, and Vattimo on God’s Self-Emptying and the Secularization of the West.” Heythrop Journal (2007), pp. 423-437, 435 and 433.
35 - Beyond Interpretation, 50. Jüngel’s concept of God’s being as becoming may be helpful here, but even this requires a strong sense of Being which Vattimo would most likely reject.
36 - Again, I am taking this term from Sciglitaton’s article “Contesting the World and the Divine,” 549: “THe secular describes not a reified entity, but a relationship the world has with God, that is, the world has revealed in its creatureliness and gratuitousness through this relationship. In contrast to both Hegel and Vattimo, if there is no difference as Vattimo says, then the world in fact has no autonomy vis-à-vis the divine; instead, cultural movements will be tightly tied to revelation, thus distorting both salvation and secular history to make each fit a single vision of the other. Once again, monologue will trump dialogue.”
37 - While we should appreciate Vattimo’s emphasis on the historical and on interpretation in ethics, he makes very clear that this “historical event of the incarnation” has no reality beyond its historical effect which he has already determined as “a teleology in which every ontic structure is weakened in favor of ontological Being, namely the Verbum, Logos, Word shared in the dialogue (Gespräch) that constitutes us as historical beings” (AC, 112).
38 - So, for example, Vattimo’s comment in the context of trying to reconcile peace and liberty: “What we really need to do – and this does not necessarily have to conflict with religiosity, especially Christian religiosity – is to say farewell to claims to [sic] absolute truth. In a society in which we are more and more likely to encounter ethical and religious positions and cultural traditions unlike the ones we were born into and grew up with, the best stance to adopt is that of a ‘tourist’ in a history park. The real enemy of liberty is the person who thinks she can and should preach final and definitive truth” (“Liberty and Peace in the Postmodern Condition” in Nihilism and Emancipation, 56). At the same time, Vattimo realizes that in his context, this history part is European, Western and Christian (ibid., 57).
39 - Possible word play: traductor, oris m. = on who transfers (tradition, onis f. giving up, delivering, up surrender) and traditor, oris m. = traitor).
40 - The Future of Religion, 66-67. It is indeed ironic that Vattimo is drawn toward a more symbolic Protestant view of the Eucharist at a time when many evangelicals are re-investigate a possible real presence at the Lord’ Table. Also, Protestants such as Luther and Calvin had a much “thicker” view of the Spirit’s presence than Vattimo seems to be aware of.
41 - Paul Ricoeur notes that “Augustine’s disastrous explanation [of sin] in terms of hereditary at the time of his quarrel with Pelagianism.” Ricoeur opposes Kant’s notion of freedom to Augustine without, however, giving up on the notion of a corrupt heart that is, though, balanced by a good will (Figuring the Sacred, 80-81).
42 - Collossians 1:29.
43 - Tillard, 54.
44 - Tillard, 138.
45 - I assume and agree here with Merold Westphal’s point that hermeneutics is epistemology. Westphal comments on Rorty’s attempt to oppose epistemology and hermeneutics: “By presenting hermeneutics as an alternative to epistemology [Rorty] makes it easy to specify the sense in which it is rather an alternative epistemology. To repeat, hermeneutics is epistemology” (“Hermeneutics as Epistemology,” The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology. Edited by John Greco and Ernest Sosa. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, 415-435, 417).
46 - Akt und Sein in DBW 2, 112.
47 - Ibid.
48 - DBWE 2, 32.
49 - DBW 2, 99.
50 - Bonhoeffer draws on Paul’s assertion that the church is the body of Christ: “Not ‘you are supposed to be. No, precisely you ‘are.’ God has already done everything. Out of free grace he made us the gift of being the body of Christ. That means, however, he has forged us together (zusammengeschweisst) into one life, whose power, breath, blood, and Spirit (Geist) is Jesus Christ….To belong to the church means to belong to God’s community, which is not at all (durchaus) the same as the community of our church. It means to be privileged by God to share (Teilhabersschaft) in the gifts of eternity….It means to live out of Christ, but that means out of God, out of eternity. This, however, not alone but a life with all those who love Christ. Church means community with the people of God in God himself” (Predigten und Meditationen, v.1, 167-168).
51 - DBW 2, 158.
52 - DBW 2, 114.
53 - DBW 2 127-29. “Theological knowledge is not existential knowledge; it has its object in the events stored in the community’s memory of bible, preaching, and sacrament, prayer, confession, in the words of the Christ person, which are preserved as existents (Seiendes) preserved in the historical church” (128).
54 - Bonhoeffer argues that Christ’s nature is to be in the middle of things, of our existence, of history and of nature, with, obviously, important implications for church-state relations in DBW 12, 307. Especially in the sections titled “positive Christology,” Bonhoeffer emphasizes the importance of keeping the mystery of the incarnation constantly before us, in order to ensure a proper ecclesial understanding of the new humanity as Christians (DBW 12, 340-348).
55 - DBW 6, 81; Ethics 93-94.
56 - Bonhoeffer writes that the whole reality of the world in Christ, and hence in the church. Hence “this realm of the church is not something that exists for itself but something which always already stretches far beyond itself, precisely because it is not the arena of a cultic club (Kultvereins) which has to fight for its existence in the world but because it is the place which witnesses to the foundation of all reality in Jesus Christ” (DBW 6, 49).
57 - DBW 6, 84.
58 - DBW 8, 415.
59 - This sentiment is also encapsulated in his description of the church as the new human being who has been incarnated, judged, and brought to new life in Christ. DBW 6, 84.
60 - D’Arcais suggests that Vattimo’s descire for emancipation defined as “an eternal life of charity,” as ontologically grounded in a hermeneutic progression which is, however, not warranted by his ontology: “He wants the hope of salvation to be something more than our wager/commitment, if not inscribed dialectically in history, at least standing as the rigorously preferable response to the sending (even if it is not cogent) of Being” (“Hermeneutics as the Primacy of Politics,” Weakening Philosophy, 266). For Grondin’s assertion of Gadamer’s faith in reason and rejection of nihilism in favour of a reality which transcends our interpretations of it. And indeed Grondin is right to claim that Vattimo cannot really keep his promise of total openness, for he too assumes that his own interpretation of the history of Being is the right one.” See “Vattimo’s Latinization of Hermeneutics” in Weakening Philosophy, 212-214.