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After Christianity
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From
Vattimo says both Nietzsche's proclamation of God's death and Heidegger's of the end of metaphysics have contributed critically to the postmodern resurgence of religion. The death of God allows philosophy to engage religion in a pluralistic world by eliminating the need for philosophical atheism, with its paradoxical affirmation-by-denial of God. Indeed, God's death obviates the proclamation of any absolute (hence the end of metaphysics), and that is consistent with a Christianity centered on love, as in Augustine's injunction, "love, and do what you will." Such a Christianity "takes the shape of hospitality" and "must limit itself almost entirely to listening," thereby "giving voice to the guests." In a time when xenophobic conflicts proliferate, it is refreshing to see a politically engaged philosopher--Vattimo is a member of the European Parliament--articulate a philosophy that is realized in hospitality. If his proposal that the museum be taken as a "symbolic model of democracy" seems rather odd, it still prompts rethinking democracy as the substance of Christianity metamorphoses "from universality to hospitality." Steven Schroeder
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Review
This volume presents a philosophical inquiry as well as a personal account of the way in whcih the author recovered his faith through the works of Nietzsche and Heidegger.
(Journal of Contemporary Religion )Vattimo can certainly sling it with the best of his fellow European philosophes.
(San Francisco Bay Guardian )In this remarkable book, Gianni Vattimo engages in an unyielding analysis of the state of life in the West after Christianity.
(W. David Hall Journal of Religion )
11/07/2009
Vattimo's readable and likable (and short) work provides a dynamic philosophical argument for a new post-metaphysical authentic Christianity. After the age of metanarratives and metaphysics, Vattimo claims, the space is cleared for the Biblical God, a God of creativity and peace that contradicts the violence of grand philosophical and political claims. We are now residing in Joachim of Fiore's Age of the Spirit, an age of creative interpretation and ongoing discernment in the moment where authority rests in the peaceful dialogue of the community of faith, not the Ground of Being or the Magisterium of the Church.
Of course, the Anabaptists have known this all along.
28/03/2003
Vattimo's "After Christianity" could be titled "After Blumenberg". Of course I am referring to Hans Blumenberg's "The Legitimacy of the Modern Age". Blumenberg's thesis, as I found it relevant for the philosophy of relgion, is that the secularization that occurs in Modern philosophy is a direct result of William of Ockhams'emphasis upon radical divine omnipotence combined with a form of realist skepticism. Hence, secularization is the result of Christianity's internal incoherence. The modern age is hence a legitimate construct independent of Christian theology.
Vattimo argues almost the exact opposite. The secularization of European culture, YES! European Culture, is the result of the kenotic emptying of the Christian God in Christ. The increased generalization, abstraction, and emptying the concept of God that characterizes Modernity is not the result of Christianity's internal incoherence. Just the opposite, not only is Modernity's secularization and its emptying all the content from the concept of God coherent with Christianity, but also the "postmodern" (here Vattimo means nihilism) condition is a coherent development of the workings of Christianity's kenotic God.
I'll leave you to "After Christianity" to figure out how Vattimo pulls this off and what he thinks its implications are. The signficance of Vattimo for contemporary philosophy of religion cannot be overrated. Certainly his works raises major questions about theological movements like "Radical Orthodoxy" and the theology of John Milbank.
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