been forgotten. His followers would have wasted and squandered themselves.
They would have gone down in darkness. Also, religious positivism has its
survival value. Instead of forgetfulness, there came into being the positive
religion, the Church as a successful organization, which has lasted through
twenty centuries and which has also been rich in educational results. Without
such religious positivism, nothing would have remained. The good and bad
deeds and institutions of Christianity would not have been registered in any
history book. Of course, even in a positive religion good people can waste
and squander themselves and can be forgotten.
C. Beyond the Religious and the Secular
After Auschwitz and Treblinka, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all the horror
and terror of the slaughterbench of the 20th century, which these names indi-
cate, the critical theorists could not share any longer with Hegel the Jewish,
Christian, and Islamic prophetic presupposition, that Divine Providence, Plan,
Purpose, Law and Judgment govern the world as nature and history (Hegel
1986k). Thus, the critical theorists also found it impossible to share with Hegel
the Greek-Anaxagorian metaphysical presupposition, that Reason governs
the world. Jerusalem and Athens were equally criticized, not to speak of
Rome: the three seedbed societies of the Western civilization.
Traces of the Religious
In this sense, the critical theory of society is definitely post-religious and post-
metaphysical (Habermas 1990; 1988). But the critical theorists still discover,
in terms of Adorno’s micrology, traces or ciphers of the religious and the
metaphysical in the smallest detail of the life world. In this sense, the criti-
cal theorists move on the modern continuum between the religious extreme,
represented, e.g., by Gershom Scholem’s mystical theology or by Theodor
Haecker ’s theology of history on one hand, and the secular extreme, repre-
sented, e.g., by Bertolt Brecht’s historical materialism and epical or dialecti-
cal theater, on the other (Hegel 1986m; Scholem 1957; 1977; 1973; Horkheimer
1988c; Brecht 1961). Being post-religious and post-metaphysical, the critical
theorists, nevertheless, do not fall victim to the dominant positivism in its
many forms, by the dull conformity with which they are horrified (Adorno
1970; 2003). Such positivism sometimes even creeps into the otherwise most
critical poetry of Brecht (Adorno 1970a; Benjamin 1978). Then critical theorists
Toward a Dialectical Sociology of Religion • 77