After Christianity (review)

Two unlikely heroes, Heidegger and Joachim of Fiore, carry much water for Vattimo as he urges philosophy to treat religion as a secular equal. A weakened state of Being is at last enabling us to enter the mode of the spirit (as Joachim predicted) without embarrassment or fear. Heidegger made the pivotal move of representing this weakened state as liberating rather than entropic. Sensing a "deep family resemblance" between "the Western religious tradition and the idea of Being as event with the destiny of weakening," Vattimo identifies "event" with the kenosis of God, the incarnation, which allows religion to enter secular life and be subject to critical, though not hostile, perspectives. Richard Rorty, in these pages, once referred to religion as "a conversation-stopper," but Vattimo views it as a legitimate partner in the public conversation of intellectuals as envisioned by Gadamer or even, I would suggest, Habermas. Is Vattimo himself now a believer? His earlier work Credere di Credere (1999) was translated under the title Belief, but "believing that one believes" is Vattimo's own translation—and it is easy to believe that the "after" in his title After Christianity does not mean "post" but instead, "the chase for" or "quest for." Like Nietzsche, he is a seeker; unlike Nietzsche, he holds that love and charity empower mortals to talk about the incarnate divine with passion but no violence. Vattimo's career began with a quest to twist modernity into something livable, and I suspect that that quest is continuous with his recent attempt to overcome secularity.