By contextualising the striking similarities in Feuerbach and Kierkegaard’s conceptions of sin as infinite qualitative difference, and the related question of the individual and the species as a shared response to the Hegelian Entzweiung, this article seeks to offer a new framework for understanding Feuerbach’s critique of Christian theology and of Kierkegaard’s famous articulation of the infinite qualitative difference as simultaneously ontological, hamartiological, and soteriological. It argues that Kierkegaard offers a modification of the Feuerbachian account to argue against Feuerbach’s conclusion that the Christian doctrine of sin negates qualitative differences between individual humans, and to conversely affirm that sin differentiates not just God and humans, but each single individual too. Kierkegaard might be said to at once uphold Feuerbach’s critique of Hegelian theology, while inverting Feuerbach’s anti-theological programme by harnessing the ambiguities that appear in Feuerbach’s account of sin. It is thereby shown how both Feuerbach and Kierkegaard make use of Hegelian logic, both through their formal application of the concepts of quality and quantity, as well as their creative appropriation of the notion of Entzweiung.
This paper concerns Ernst Bloch’s notion of “meta-religion,” which is an attempt to inherit the religious without inheriting religion, while distinguishing itself from a merely secular atheism. I assert that the key to this meta-religious inheritance is the structural abandonment of the Fall. Focusing chiefly on Bloch’s late work Atheism in Christianity, I provide an account of Bloch’s appraisal of Feuerbach as a progenitor of his meta-religious project, before moving on to what I argue is the key problem for what Bloch terms the “meta-religious” inheritance of Christianity: the question of the Fall. I argue that as Bloch’s own thinking regularly suggests, the archetype of the Fall is a necessary correlate of the archetype of freedom, and actually grounds an important aspect of Bloch’s meta-religious inheritance of both Christianity and Hegel as part of the same dialectical theorisation of the sources of Marxism.
This essay connects Benedict Anderson’s analysis of print capitalism as the enabling feature of modernity for the emergence of nationalism with an account of pre-modern sacral imaginings. It argues, following Bronislaw Szerszynski, that the contemporary post-modern ordering of the sacred vis-à-vis nature and culture designates a ‘partial-return’ to pre-modern imaginings and a reterritorialisation of religions which engenders emerging multiplicities and co-existing differences. It argues furthermore that the nation state (and its corollaries), an institution of modernity cannot adequately respond to the antagonisms generated by the post-modern ordering of human communities and their identities. However, though this new ordering may be conceived, following Robert Bellah, as neo-archaic, it may also be conceived as neo-medieval. Accordingly, this essay proposes that the most congenial configuration to the post-modern ordering is the neo-medieval model of fuzzy borders and overlapping jurisdiction, particularly as it pertains to Albanian national identity and EU integration as a post-secular alternative to secular national-determination on the one hand, and neo-Ottomanist theocracy on the other.
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