Secularization as Kenosis

198 | postmodern condition and secularity
which to judge this history. The history of salvation can therefore not be separated
from profane history: “The history of salvation calls into being the history of interpretation.
But at the same time the history of salvation happens and shows itself only as
the history of interpretation.” 112 Profane history has a meaning because it is intertwined
with the history of salvation. The latter continues as the history of interpretation. This
has not only to do with the fact that there is an obvious historical gap between the facts
of the history of salvation (Jesus, Scripture etc.) and present and future generations,
but as well with a certain productivity in the process of interpretation. Interpretation
goes beyond the original intention of the author and adds something of meaning and
truth to the facts, the text. This too is a shared feature of the Judeo-Christian tradition
and Western culture. The idea present in both Christianity and European hermeneutical
philosophy is that interpretation is not something secondary and accidental, but
essential. 113 To see secularization as a ‘positive secularization’ is to acknowledge its
dependence on Christianity. “As a hermeneutic and saving event, the incarnation of
Christ (the kenosis, the self-emptying of God) is . . . itself an archetypical form of secularization.”
114 Vattimo regards secularization as ‘the constitutive trait of an authentic
religious experience.’ 115 Secularization is not the decline of religion, not the adaptation
of religion to the standards of modern science, but an authentic religious experience.
Vattimo’s interpretation of what it means to be secular consists in a return to religion
as secularization.
To think of the return to religion in terms of kenosis, as Vattimo has in mind, implies
a certain norm. Not just any religious revival is welcomed by Vattimo. There are
signs of a rebirth of religion that contradict this experience of finitude. There is a religious
revival in Italy, for example, which is to Vattimo’s mind too much a right-wing
effort to return to a pre-modern religion of eternal certainties. For Vattimo, the return
of religion can not be a return to the past, but must stay post-modern, must continue
to realize that the God of the metaphysical tradition is dead. Every form of fundamentalism
is a return to a metaphysical religion and therefore at odds with the rationality
proper to the postmodern condition. For Vattimo, the history of Western thought provides
a norm, for what can be thought after Christianity and after modernity. Vattimo
says that philosophy has to take seriously the character of interpretation inherent in
theory. Every philosophy is historically determined and finite. That is the reason for
Vattimo’s emphasis on hermeneutics – understood as the philosophy of interpretation
– as the only possible philosophy of postmodernism. 116
5.2.3 Secularization and the Truth of Christianity
This section evaluates Vattimo’s proposal to interpret secularization as an application of
the gospel of the weakening of the logos. In the first place I will criticize Vattimo’s usage
of the concept of kenosis with an argument from biblical theology. In the second place
112 Vattimo, After Christianity, 62.
113 Vattimo, After Christianity, 67.
114 Vattimo, After Christianity, 70.
115 Vattimo, Belief, 21.
116 Martin Weiss, ‘Hermeneutik der Postmoderne. Metaphysikkritik und Interpretation bei Gianni Vattimo’,
Ph. D thesis, Universität Wien (2005).