Religion and secular modernity

a historical perspective on the Ratzinger-Habermas encounter, 19 january 2004

Julio Jensen

pp. 158-189

in: Lars K Bruun, Gert Srensen, Karl C. Lammers, Gert Sørensen (eds), European self-reflection between politics and religion, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

One of the central crises of Europe is the duality religious-secular. Throughout the modern age Europe has lived with this division which has in some respects been fruitful, but which has also caused a vast amount of conflict and suffering.¹ A series of narratives can be followed as regards the origins and development of modernity. One possibility is to regard modernity as the period when humanity has endeavoured to understand itself exclusively on the basis of its own forces. The principal tool to reach autonomy from humanity's self-imposed nonage (Kant) is a notion of self-founded and self-sufficient reason. Since religion implies the reference to an Other who precedes and defines humankind, it is entirely logical that modern thought has — at least in some of its traditions — avoided the integration of religion into its different manifestations.² Tacitly or explicitly, to be modern has been understood as entailing the apostasy of religion.³ This prejudice against religion finds a conspicuous expression in the current of thought that has been termed the hermeneutics of suspicion (Ricoeur). In this modern tradition, religion is regarded as having a merely substitutive function. Either religion is the concealment of ideology (Marx), is the consequence of resentment and will to power (Nietzsche) or it is the manifestation of a psychic need for wish fulfilment (Freud).

Cited authors

Kant Immanuel

Ricoeur Paul

Nietzsche Friedrich

Marx Karl

Freud Sigmund

Habermas Jürgen