THE CONCEPT OF RELIGIONLESS RELIGION

 

When we speak about resistance in the second world war we always speak about the French resistance but we must not forget that there was a German resistance as well against Nazi Germany made of refined German intellectuals, philosophers and avant garde theologians. Such was the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

While a German in the prison of Tegel he composed sublime letters on theology. He basically created a theological testament for the church of the future. In his cell he had the revelation of the concept of religionless religion.

He realized the growing religiouslessness of our age and therefore the urgency to preach religion in a non-religious way to be understood in a godless world. Therefore in the solitude of his cell he built another Christ for modernity that he called The Lord of the religionless.

Bonhoeffer set up the avant garde theology by asking the right questions such as= what is a secular God? Why to live without God is to live in him? How to speak of God in a Godless world? By being the first to speak of religionless religion he was the first to act on the great religious revolution of our times which is the apparition of God in religiouslessness.

UMBERTO ECO

 

Visiting the Sacra di San Michele where Umberto Eco filmed The Name of the Rose. It is moving to see this pulpit carved in the rock 3000 feet in the air on which William of Ockham might have preached his forbidden philosophy which is Nominalism. It is interesting that the most important religious revolutions have happened inside the church and not against the church. The legacy of Nominalism who raised against Scholasticism is enormous and inspired Luther, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, it is even considered by some as the father of phenomenology. What a legacy for a monk from the fourteen century!

William of Ockham showed that the appropriation by the church of the philosophical quest for universal essences by Aristotle and Plato was wrong. For Ockham the reality of essences is only nominal, meaning it is just a word, what exist is only subjectivity. Therefore if God were to be found anywhere it is not in knowledge but in experience.

What Umberto Eco does not say is that William of Ockham was the developer of Nominalism but not the inventor of it. The inventor of Nominalism was Roscelin de Compiegne a French Monk from the twelve century. His theory that God might be just a word got him persecuted by the church, he had to leave France and became protected by the University of Oxford.

The simple opposition between religion and atheism is intellectually very poor but on the other hand the opposition of religion against religion is fascinating. To enrich theology we need the religious opposing religion and a new atheism opposing the old atheism. Or even in contemporary philosophy I dream of a nihilism which could rise against nihilism.