THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL?sion of religion, of the dimension that constitutes the relations human beings establish
with the world? The fact that differences of opinion are now recognized to be legitimate
does, of course, have a symbolic meaning, but only, it would seem, within the limitations
of a political system that guarantees every individual the right to enjoy the respect he
must show others. What philosophical thought strives to preserve is the experience of a
difference that goes beyond differences of opinion (and the recognition of the relativity
of points of view that this implies); the experience of a difference that is not at the disposal
of human beings, whose advent does not take placewithinhuman history, and that cannot
be abolished therein; the experience of a difference that relates human beings to their
humanity, and that means that their humanity cannot be self-contained, that it cannot
set its own limits, and that it cannot absorb its origins and ends into those limits. Every
religion states in its own way that human society can only open onto itself by being held
in an opening it did not create. Philosophy says the same thing, but religion said it first,
albeit in terms that philosophy cannot accept.
Philosophy’s critique of religion is therefore ambivalent. Whereas, for example, it
rejects the truth that the Christian churches find in Revelation and, in theory, escapes the
authority of the Text and refuses to accept the image of a God who comes down to earth
and is incarnated in the person of his Son, it does not assume that untruth is a lie or a
lure. Nor, when it remains true to its inspiration, does it want to preserve untruth for the
simple reason that it may contain beliefs that help to preserve the established political
order. What philosophy discovers in religion is a mode of portraying or dramatizing the
relations that human beings establish with something that goes beyond empirical time
and the space within which they establish relations with one another. This work of the
imagination stages [met en sce`ne] a different time, a different space. Any attempt to reduce
it to being simply a product of human activity is doomed. Of course, it bears the mark of
human operations in that the script for the performance bears witness to a human pres-
ence and borrows from human sense experience. Human beings populate the invisible
with the things they see, naively invent a time that exists before time, organize a space
that exists behind their space; they base the plot on the most general conditions of their
lives. Yet anything that bears the mark of their experience also bears the mark of anordeal.
Once we recognize that humanity opens onto itself by being held in an opening it does
not create, we have to accept that the change in religion is not to be read simply as a sign
that the divine is a human invention but as a sign of the deciphering of the divine or,
beneath the appearance of the divine, of the excess ofbeingoverappearance. In that sense,
modern religion or Christianity proves to be teaching the philosopher what he has to
think. He rejects religion insofar as it is the enunciator of Revelation but, insofar as it is
a mode of the enunciation of the divine, he at the same time accords it a power of
revelation that philosophy cannot do without, if, that is, it ceases to divorce the question
of human nature from the question of human history.
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