Recently, in an insightful article on Repubblica, Massimo Recalcati delves into the issue of widespread political hatred and traces it back to religious fundamentalism and ultimately, it seems, to religion in general. Recalcati argues that the One God inevitably leads to exclusion and violence because uniqueness hinders openness to the other, to the second, to the Two, which is instead the domain of open, secular, and democratic thought. It’s an old adage of the Enlightenment tradition that Recalcati applies to the current situation. However, it’s a thought that doesn’t consider logic, theology, or, most importantly, actual religious experience.
Recalcati’s Logic Doesn’t Hold
Logically, the narrative of a religion that is violent because it’s closed in the One, in the solitude of its belief, doesn’t hold up. Uniqueness is exclusive by nature. But this precisely means creating the other, the Two, even if in a key of exclusion and enmity. When you love only one person, you exclude others, but in order to exclude them, you must consider them. The One has no otherness and therefore cannot hate it. Parmenides’ Being is not exclusive because it is everything. Instead, it’s the dialectic of the Two that creates violence. One of the two wins and the other is overpowered, one is included and the other is excluded. This dynamic has been recognized by authors like Schelling, Florenskij, Peirce, Lévinas. They have all explained that to escape the violence of the One and the Two, a triadic principle is needed. There must be a Third for there to be justice.
Not All Theologies Are Equal
From the logical principle follows the theological one. Not all theologies are equal, not all gods are One. In Eastern religions, gods often have two faces, the good and the bad, reflecting the fact that the mystery of existence, its hidden meaning, sometimes manifests in contradictory ways. The Christian God is Trinity, that is justice or its superset, charity and love. This doesn’t mean it cannot be interpreted and experienced differently, but these are betrayals of the principle, not the principle itself.
Lastly, and most importantly, the experience. All religious individuals, of any religion, know that the relationship with God is a connection with something or someone that is beyond themselves, whose will is different from their own because it is ultimately mysterious, i.e., ultimately inscrutable, not reducible to human mental dynamics. The adjectives used by religious experience to describe God demonstrate the total otherness that humans feel: immeasurable, infinite, omnipotent, omniscient.
Even in revelatory forms, God remains a mystery and otherness. As Gianni Vattimo’s philosophy well illustrated, a revelation that completely removes the mystery of God would be pure secularization. Simply put, Augustine of Hippo said, “If you understand it, it is not God” (si comprehendis, non est Deus).
Dear Recalcati, Today’s Violence Arises from the Opposite of Religion
The violence of today’s society, its polarization, rather stems from the opposite of religion, which is idolatry and, in modern times, ideology. In the described dynamic, it means replacing God with something or someone who is not God at all, who responds or corresponds to our human thoughts, and often to our mere pleasure or desire, worshiping it as a god. It’s a god that we possess and become slaves to.
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There are idols and ideologies, big and small: social order, equality, race, class; but also success, career, pleasure, money, culture; up to the party, the group, the clan, the football team. Everything can be transformed into a god. We understand this, we know it’s not god, it doesn’t speak, doesn’t communicate anything different from what we already think, but we make it a god thinking that its affirmation is our affirmation. It’s the god of (bad) philosophers, the god of the mind that is a principle of violence, never the living God of popular traditions lived by hearts of flesh.
