The Frankfurt School On Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers (review)

With this collection of essays on the topic of religion by major figures in the Frankfurt school, Eduardo Mendieta adds substantially to the current debate on the religious turn in the academy because these texts offer at least two important reminders concerning the relation of religion and culture. The first is their reciprocal relationship. Religion is always enculturated and culture, in turn, reflects—even shapes—religious convictions and traditions. The second reminder is that the present debate concerning culture and religion, if it is to overcome dualistic oppositions in speaking to a common human experience, is essentially about reason.

Mendieta addresses the first aspect, the reciprocal relationship of religion and culture, in his clear and concise introductory essay on the origins and research aims of the Frankfurt school and its substantial critique of modernity and the cultural effects of scientific positivism. Contrary to similar postmodern criticisms of modernity, however, the cultural critics of the Frankfurt school already recognized the limitations of cultural materialism and the importance of culture as "mediator between the material and the mental, between the economic and the socio-political" (5). It may astonish some readers to find that the Frankfurt school on the whole seeks to recover religion for Marxism, not least because thinkers like Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer recognize the eschatological religious dimension of Marx's own thought.

Moreover, in contrast to naïve forms of secularism, these thinkers are aware that Christianity in its theological reflections and institutionalized social structures constitutes the main root of Western culture and values. Consequently, they recognize religion as an essential tool of cultural criticism, and they acknowledge theology, even if restricted to negative theology, as a legitimate form of reason.

The importance of religion for human reflection and cultural criticism constitutes the second important reminder offered by this volume to the current debate concerning the return of religion: if religion is to be integrated seriously once again into academic research, this integration will have to occur based on a redefinition of reason that is open to religion. In this sense, Joseph Ratzinger's insistence in his Regensburg address on a common human logos is not so very different from the Frankfurt school's concern to continue the Enlightenment project of critical reason by reversing its attitude toward religion from one of segregation to co-operation: "Today the Enlightenment lives on by recruiting the services of theology to rescue reason through religion by unmasking the idolatry and fetishism of the market and technology and by returning to the subject of subjective freedom" (8). Ernst Bloch essay "On the Original History of the Third Reich" undertakes such an unmasking of fetishism by tracing the Christian notion of progressing toward a fully redeemed humanity in Christ from early Christianity through the Enlightenment and Lessing's representative "Education of the Human Race" to Christian and Marxist socialism all the way to Nazi ideology. Today's cultural critics can learn much from this analysis, even if it tends to caricature Christianity as an inward religion whose social transformative potential is surpassed by a this-worldly, concrete, and hence more powerful, Marxist utopia (39).

The Frankfurt school's focus on a religious critique of reason in a secular age is reminiscent of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's religionless Christianity. "In the Frankfurt school," writes Mendieta, "we find a non-secular critique of religion for the sake of religion. It is a critique that uses reason against religion, not so as to reject religion, for reason can no more do this than it can reject itself, but for the sake of reason itself" (9). Like Bonhoeffer, the Frankfurt school argues that the value of religion and the voice of theology reach their genuine importance only in a secular culture.

Unlike Bonhoeffer, however, the "theology" of the Frankfurt school excludes positive revelation as inherently dangerous. Its theological activity is conducted in the spirit of Ernst Bloch's dictum that "only an atheist can be a good...