ERIK
MEGANCK
Catholic
University, Leuven
Paper Title: "Secularisation and Violence".
Abstract
Vattimo holds nihilist secularisation to be the
ultimate meaning of Christianity. It diagnoses actuality as the dissolution of
transcendence that is always violent, be it metaphysical or religious. This is
an extrapolation from Girard’s desacralisation, proposing Christianity to be
the dissolution of sacred violence. To Girard, secularisation is the modern
interpretation of desacralisation. Both Vattimo and Girard agree that
secularisation is inherent to Christianity; that the ultimate meaning of
Christianity is love; that hitherto this message has not reached the ‘masses’.
But they radically disagree on the source of love and violence. To Vattimo, the
divine is violent because of its transcendence and only a nihilist world can
become non-violent. To Girard, human culture is a source of violence and love
is divine. How can these two models, starting out together, suddenly become
each other’s opposite? And is there a way of ‘deciding’ between them? There are
reasons to believe that radical secularisation will betray its own premises, as
is the case with Vattimo. Perhaps ‘senseless violence’ points at an original
violence that cannot be understood and controlled by current socio-political
systems. This presentation looks for traces of the difference between desacralisation
and secularisation and defends the transcendent source of love.
Dr. Erik Meganck holds the Brothers of Charity chair
of Metaphysics and Philosophy of Religion at the Institute of Philosophy in
Louvain, Belgium. He studied philosophy, theology, psychology and pedagogy in
Louvain, Ghent, Antwerp and Rome. His research concerns contemporary
continental philosophy (of religion) and critique of metaphysics. He recently
published ‘Nulla in Mundo Pax Sincera … Secularisation
and violence in Vattimo and Girard, in: International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 74 (2013) 5, 410 – 431.