ludger hagedornreligious experience can be understood as an encounter with another
side of life, one that can never be integrated or functionalized. Reli-
gion, in other words, has an intrinsic ability to “open up” and to
transcend the boundaries of fixed worldviews. Religion is about tran-
scendence — that is more than a self-evident platitude, especially if the
emphasis of this transcendence is put not on the transcendental as
such but on the capacity for transcending, on its potential of “shak-
ing.”
This intrinsic potential does not only affect our notion of rational-
ity but also the relationship between different religious traditions and
their respective cultural settings. Religion, therefore, does not have to
be seen as one more auto-immunizing institution doomed to compete
with other worldviews, be they divergent creeds or our modern ration-
al-scientific culture. Rather, it can be considered as an out standing
manifestation of and testimony to the inner tension of human life it-
self.
Within the predominantly secular realm, religion represents the
most radical potential to articulate some kind of protest, a protest that
is directed against the merely anthropocentric world of individual and
social self-affirmation. The religious perspective, in its very transcend-
ence, involves a critical distance to this world. As such, it implies a
critical challenge to a superficial satisfaction with human finitude, as
expressed in the short quote by Patočka that provides the leitmotif for
this article: “Dieu en nous sanctionne notre finitude”^6 (“God within
us sanctions our finitude”). Religion, in this sense, can be seen as one
of the most powerful challenges to the deification of the human, all
too human, world. Today, the rights of rationalism seem to be unshak-
able. Such a view, however, neglects the other side of the scale. In fact,
the familiar “crisis of liberalism” might be explained by the fact that
rationality, taken as the only guideline and principle of human life, has
nothing in common with what could be called a final decision, i.e.,
with a relation to the ultimate limit of “the all too human.” It may
well be that rationality, particularly in its secular-scientific version,
cannot subsist as a single leading principle, that it is insufficient for
- Patočka, Jan, Liberté et sacrifice. Ecrits politiques, trans. Erika Abrams, Grenoble:
Millon, 1990, 23.