Hegelianism and Meta-Religion: Ernst Bloch’s Archetype of the Fall 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 ath

Abstract

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.