Sociologists once took it for granted that religion would eventually disappear. According to sociologist of religion José Casanova, the so-called "secularization thesis" -- that industrialization and advances in modern science were driving religion away -- dominated the social sciences in the nineteenth century. The world was going through a process of "disenchantment," as Max Weber put it; "God is dead," Friedrich Nietzsche announced, "and we have killed him!"
The secularization thesis remained largely untested until sociologists like Peter L. Berger and Andrew Greeley began to scrutinize it in the 1960s. The data showed that religion was not so clearly in retreat after all -- if anything, it was resurgent around the world. Berger thus began to speak of "desecularization" in the 1990s, and other sociologists began to refer to our society as "post-secular."
Many philosophers had also assumed that religion would eventually die out, including the prominent German social theorist Jürgen Habermas. That can hardly surprise readers who remember Habermas as the revisionary Marxist of the 1960s or who think of him, more recently, as a philosopher of communication and secular champion of rationalization. It's striking, then, that such a thinker would eventually engage then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger himself in dialogue, as Habermas did in 2004. It's even more striking that he would come to emphasize the contemporary importance of a living Christian faith, grounded in the Eucharist. Habermas's evolving thought on religion culminated in a massive 2019 monograph titled Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (the first two volumes of a three-volume English translation, Also a History of Philosophy, are now available).
Why this apparent reversal? How did Habermas come to his earnest interest in religion? And what might he have to offer to Catholics, with our long tradition of engaging the insights of philosophy in the service of articulating the faith?
Habermas ranks among the master philosophers of the twentieth century. Born in Düsseldorf in 1929, he came of age as the Second World War came to an end. As he explains in a short autobiographical essay, two experiences stoked his intellectual passions. As a child, he endured multiple surgeries to correct a cleft palate. The misunderstanding and rejection he experienced because of his impaired speech gave him a keen appreciation of the importance of communication in human life. The role of mutual understanding in society and political life would become the central theme of his life's work.
The second influential experience occurred after the war, when, at age sixteen, Habermas followed the Nuremberg Trials and learned that the Nazi regime under which he grew up was "pathological and criminal." After he took up university studies, he saw how badly German intellectuals had failed, many of them having supported National Socialism. Habermas was deeply disappointed with both German academic philosophy and the regime of West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Philosophers hadn't developed the resources to effectively resist authoritarian ideology, while Adenauer failed to grasp the deep need in Germany for moral and political renewal.
In response to those deficits, Habermas, along with other philosophers of his generation, looked beyond Germany for conceptual resources and democratic models. He would eventually find what he was looking for in the American pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead -- with their communicative model of inquiry, emphasis on public deliberation, and interaction-centered analysis of the self.
The young Habermas also stuck his neck out, taking professional risks. Perhaps the most daring came in 1953, while he was still a graduate student but working on the side as a freelance journalist. In the prominent newspaper the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he publicly challenged philosopher Martin Heidegger over his lack of repentance for his Nazi past. In a new publication of prewar lectures on metaphysics, Heidegger had retained, without comment or apology, a passage that praised National Socialism for its "inner truth and greatness." In response, Habermas asked, "Is it not the foremost duty of thoughtful people to clarify the accountable deeds of the past and keep the knowledge of them awake?" Thus began his long record as a public intellectual in Germany -- with a bang.
From the start, Habermas's interests were insatiable. As a budding public intellectual, he wrote reviews and critical essays on subjects ranging from art, theater, and culture to philosophy, politics, sociology, bureaucracy, and technological society. As a student, he engaged the full gamut of German philosophy and beyond -- including German Idealism, Marxism, phenomenology, existentialism, and philosophical anthropology. His circle of interlocutors would only continue to expand over the years.
It should therefore not surprise us that Habermas's interests extended to religious thought early on, even though he lacked faith himself. Though raised Protestant, he often describes himself, using a phrase of Max Weber's, as "religiously tone-deaf." Still, even as a doctoral student, he grasped the significance of religious thought in the history of Western philosophy. He had a keen eye for philosophical "translations" of religious ideas -- a motif that would assume considerable importance in his later thought.
In his 1954 dissertation on the German idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling, Habermas traced Schelling's treatment of creation as a "divine contraction" to Christian and Kabbalist sources. Schelling's understanding of creation and the Fall would have lasting significance for Habermas, in particular for his conception of moral freedom. As he explained in an interview, divine self-limitation opens the space for an unconditionally free creature in whose eyes God's own freedom is confirmed: "[The creation] myth -- and it is more than just a myth -- illuminates two aspects of human freedom: the intersubjective constitution of autonomy and the meaning of the self-binding of the will's arbitrary freedom to unconditionally valid norms." Habermas has moral autonomy in mind here: only through relationships of mutual recognition and care can we acquire the capacity to act on moral obligations -- not as impositions from outside but as freely chosen dictates of our own conscience.