Secularization as Kenosis

secularization as kenosis | 195
writing. It is widely used as a concept that enables a smooth blending and blurring of
discourses that were formerly regarded as irreconcilable. 97 Vattimo uses it primarily to
interpret postmodern secularization as taking place within the context of the Christian
tradition. By specifying secularization as kenosis, he attempts to save truth from a mere
deconstruction of metaphysics. The anti-metaphysical and anti-transcendental critique
of postmodern thought does not touch upon Christian truth. For truth in a Christian
sense is incarnated and reveals itself in a historical context. For Vattimo the centrality of
kenosis has as a consequence that truth surpasses the boundaries of dogmatic religion.
Vattimo sees the possibility of a wide-ranging pluralism of religious forms that are all
legitimate interpretations of the original hermeneutic event: the incarnation.
For the paradigmatic case of such a historicist religion, Vattimo refers to Joachim of
Fiore (1135–1202), who thought of the phases in history in an evolutionary sense. After
the age of the Father and the Son comes the age of the Spirit. In the age of the Spirit
the spiritual sense of the scriptures is central and ‘charity takes the place of discipline.’ 98
For Vattimo the most important contribution of Joachim is that he thought of the Christian
truth as unfolding in history. Vattimo sees Joachim’s idea of history as a paradigm
for a postmodern philosophy of history that can unite the tradition of Christianity and
the emergence of Western culture. In postmodernity Vattimo sees a realization of the
third phase: the era of the Spirit. He sees it as bearing resemblance to postmodern
thought. 99 The theology of Joachim gives Vattimo a perspective on the end of metaphysics
as not merely ending, but entering another phase. Philosophy did not discover
the end of metaphysics itself, but is indebted for this to the Christian idea of history
as a Geschehen. The Judeo-Christian heritage is still living forth in postmodern culture.
For Vattimo, weak thought and the spiritualization of Christianity are consequences of
the same constitutive event: the incarnation. Secularization is thus an “interpretative
application of the biblical message on a level that is not strictly sacramental, sacred or
ecclesiologic.” 100 Every attempt to draw a sharp line between Christianity and modernity,
fails to do justice to the historical continuity between kenotic Christianity and
secular modernity. Secularization as hermeneutics belongs to modernity and is at the
same time the deepest meaning of Christianity.
The double origin of secularization – in religion and in the Enlightenment – produces
a paradoxical effect. The Enlightenment origins of secularization are rationalistic
and demythologizing; in its contemporary working, however, secularization results in
“the demythologizing of the myth of objectivity and creates room for myth and religion.”
101 The consequence of Vattimo’s usage of the term secularization is that it lets
reason and faith, religion and philosophy, cohere. The close alignment between nihilism,
secularization and kenosis, also allows Vattimo to distance himself from Hegelian
metaphysics, according to which Being shows itself in a dialectical process. Secularization
no longer takes place according to a ‘law of philosophy’, but a ‘law of religion’. The
97 See for some examples Frederiks, 211–222. And Laurens ten Kate, ‘Econokenosis: Three Meanings
of Kenosis in ‘Post-modern’ Thought; on Derrida, with References to Vattimo and Barth’, in: Onno Zijlstra,
editor, Letting Go. Rethinking Kenosis (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002), 285–310.
98 Vattimo, Beyond interpretation, 49.
99 Vattimo, After Christianity, 31. And seeVattimo, Beyond interpretation, 49–50. Compare this to Rorty’s
notion of the three stages of Religion, Philosophy, and Literature.
100 Vattimo, After Christianity, 48.
101 Vattimo, Beyond interpretation, 52.