Phenomenology and Religion: New Frontiers

auto-immunity or transcendence

been overcome with the rise of secularism and rationalism but may
even appear to have increased. The contrast, at least, between the
purity and sobriety of the “rational age” and its orgiastic outbursts of
violence is no less striking than the apparent conflict of Christian
religious wars with the gospel of love and charity. In one of his Heretical
Essays, Jan Patočka refers to exactly this aspect of modern civilization
when he writes:

War is... the greatest undertaking of industrial civilization, both

product and instrument of total mobilization... , and a release of

orgiastic potentials which could not afford such extreme of intoxication

with destruction under any other circumstances. Already at the dawn

of modernity... that kind of cruelty and orgiasm emerged. Already

then it was the fruit of a disintegration of traditional discipline and

demonization of the opponent — though never before did the demonic

reach its peak precisely in an age of greatest sobriety and rationality.”^4

What is so interesting about these sentences and what fascinated
Derrida — in his Gift of Death he almost exclusively refers to the fifth
Heretical Essay by Patočka already quoted — is not only that their
explanatory power of destruction and self-destruction comes close to
Derrida’s own notion of “auto-immunization.” They also tackle the
question of Christianity and its meaning for the history of modern
Europe, the complex relationship of religion and the modern secular-
scientific worldview, undermining the traditional contrast of faith’s
obscurity on the one hand and enlightened thinking on the other — all
of which bears a strong resemblance to Derrida’s attempt to understand
religion beyond the dichotomy of myth and enlightenment.
For Patočka, this was a life-long theme. As early as in a major project
on the philosophy of history, which he was working on during the
Second World War, but which remained a fragment, he declares that
the main focus of his work is the attempt to understand the shift from
a Christian to a post-Christian epoch that took place in Europe be-
tween the 15th and 18th to 19th centuries.^5 Patočka argues that modern

4. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. Erazim Kohák,
   Chicago: Open Court, 1996, 114.


5. The most important of these studies have been published in German in: