Secularization as Kenosis

188 | postmodern condition and secularity
interpreted by an ideology that wants to unify it at all costs in the name of a sole truth,
which some academic disciplines would have the task and capacity of knowing. 68
Vattimo thus not only defends a philosophical position as post-foundationalism,
he also links his philosophical position to a cultural ideal. He proposes a fully secular
philosophy and culture. As in the thought of Rorty, we can speak of a multi-layered
usage of secularization. The structure of a twofold secularization in the work of Rorty
is thus, as Groot has also demonstrated, 69 also present in the work of Vattimo. Gianni
Vattimo’s originality lies in his effort to extend the theory of secularization to a rereading
of the gospel as itself a phase in the history of secularization. This is a meaning
of secularization as Verweltlichung. It explains modernity in terms of a gradual incarnation
of Christianity into the profane. A central thought in the progressive use of
secularity is that it presupposes a historical progress in modernity that was preceded by
a historical consciousness in the Hebrew and Christian Bible. The idea of secularization
as Verweltlichung, however, has deep roots in the nineteenth century and can hardly
be said to be a particularly postmodern idea. The distinctiveness of Vattimo’s project
is that he extends the influence of Christianity to postmodernism. Vattimo rejects the
absolutist and unifying aspirations of metaphysics and positivist science, and opts for a
truth-pluralism and epistemological perspectivism. A direct consequence of this is that
science is bereft of tools to either confirm or falsify religious truth. For only an ‘absolute
philosophy can feel the necessity of refuting religious experience.’ 70 In the light of
his understanding of postmodernism as a condition of pluralism, secularization can no
longer be thought of as synonymous with atheism or religious neutrality. Postmodernity
has made this positivistic secularism implausible. 71 The return of religion and the
end of metaphysics are more than coincidences: they belong together as aspects of secularization.
For Vattimo, the concept of secularization refers to a continuity between
modernity and postmodernity, instead of a rupture. Postmodernity is part of modern
history and secularization is as it were its guiding thread. To describe the transition
from modernity to postmodernity as a secularization also conjures up associations with
religion. According to Vattimo, secularization can be interpreted as a fruit of religion;
as the outcome of a process that is inherent in Christianity.
What is the reason for this idea of secularization as a process that overarches both
modernity and postmodernity? Is not secularization one of the key values of the Enlightenment
and the tradition of positivism that Vattimo rejects? Indeed, there is reason
to believe that Vattimo, precisely because he gives such a central place to the notion of
secularization, sooner or later ends up in a familiar positivist pattern. His narrative on
secularization, however, is more complex and is certainly not simply another variation
of the orthodox model of secularization. He criticizes an idea of secularization as an
idealizing of the future. Secularization cannot mean, for Vattimo, a linear process toward
a unitary future. Secularization cannot give an univocal explanation of the course
68 Vattimo, After Christianity, 5.
69 Groot, 11–12.
70 Vattimo, After Christianity, 5.
71 “The end of metaphysics and the death of the moral God have liquidated the philosophical basis of
atheism. Contemporary philosophers seem to be mostly religious or irreligious as if out of inertia, rather
than for strong theoretical reasons. . . . God was denied either because his existence was not verifiable by
scientific experiment or because he was a stage ineluctably overcome in the progressive enlightenment of
reason.” Vattimo, After Christianity, 17.