Secularization as Kenosis

of history. In this sense, modern secularization is itself a myth. 72
secularization as kenosis | 189
5.2.1 Postmodernism and the Secularization of Progress
In the twentieth century, the philosophy of Heidegger has often been interpreted in an
atheistic sense: as a philosophy that turns away from the Hinterwelterei of Christianity
to a more authentic understanding of human agency, as for example in Sartre’s existentialism.
Vattimo does something completely different in his nihilistic interpretation of
Heidegger. He sees certain analogies between Heidegger’s attack on metaphysics and
a development in the Christian religion itself. He denies that Christian theology is as
such onto-theological. Christianity may have been often stated in an onto-theological
vocabulary, but in that same tradition, we can find a critique of the identification of the
sacred and violence and of the idea of God as merely a highest being. In the New Testament,
for example, Christ is shown in weakness and he suffers the death of a victim.
But also in later theological traditions, as in Joachim of Fiore’s trinitarian interpretation
of history, we can witness a dissolution of the strong and violent character of the sacred
to a more spiritual understanding. This tendency to a weaker rationality can be called
a secularization. Vattimo discusses secularization as a term that explains the Western
philosophical tradition from metaphysics, through historicism to postmodernism. Secularization
is a process at work in various transitions of Western culture. In modernity
the transition from a religious understanding of the world to a more scientific and immanent
understanding of the world can be seen as a secularization. But it does not stop
there. In Marxism and Bloch’s utopianism, for example, the belief in a transcendent goal
of humanity is replaced by a historical goal, the victory of the proletariat. Vattimo sees
this historical awareness as yet another secularization. The transcendent metaphysics
is replaced a belief in progress. 73
In the wake of Nietzsche, Vattimo problematizes and contextualizes the modern
notion of history and asserts that the conditions for the possibility of the modern, historical
outlook are no longer present. In postmodernity, we see the dissolution of the
very notion of progress itself. Once the belief in a transcendent God goes, the idea of
a goal in history loses its plausibility. The idea of a unitary, teleological history is replaced
by countless other narratives, corresponding to as many particular perspectives.
Secularization thus ultimately leads to a dissolution of history. In postmodernity, secularization
indicates a ‘historization of historicity.’ In one sense this can be interpreted
as a break with modernity, in another it is a continuation of modernity, a more radical
application of its historical outlook. In line with Nietszche’s critique, modernity can
no longfer be thought of in terms of a linear history, rather the ideal of a cumulative
progress is exposed as itself a historically contingent notion. The secularization of historicism
cannot be taken to mean simply the falsification of historicism. In a sense the
postmodern approach tries to overcome the older mode of historicity. But this cannot
simply be the next stage of history. In a postmodern approach we are constantly aware
72 “The realization of the universality of history has made universal history impossible. Consequently,
the idea that the course of history could be thought of as enlightenment, as the liberation of reason from the
shadows of mythical knowledge, has lost its legitimacy. Demythologization has itself come to be seen as a
myth.” Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 39.
73 Vattimo, End of Modernity, 8.