ludger hagedornand a concomitant loss of the world as well as the transcendence and
gaining of a new life have their original meaning. Nevertheless, it
seems that there is nothing exclusively reserved to the religious dimen-
sion that could not also be experienced elsewhere. The com parison of
religious experiences with the field of art, as Waldenfels suggested,
would then be fully justified and adequate. And, indeed, this also
seems to be Patočka’s position: the third movement of human exist-
ence is laden with allusion to religious experiences^16 but it is quite
easily imaginable without any such reference to and loans from reli-
gion. History and politics, art and literature fully bear witness to the
same phenomena.
But then it is only here in Patočka that a special subtext of Christian
motives comes into play. Heretically, one could say that it is a Christian
message after the end of Christianity, an intellectual challenge that can
only be taken up after Christian belief is in decline. Corresponding to
the double shape of the third movement there is also a doubling of the
significance of Christian themes: one relates to the source or the motivat-
ion for this movement, the second gives a name to its concrete outcome
and its manifest change.
As for the first reference, Christianity to Patočka is characterized by
one central trait that has strong (anti-)philosophical implications: the
truth for which the soul struggles is not the truth of intuition but
rather the truth of its own destiny; that leads — as Patočka puts it — to
an “abysmal deepening of the soul” and makes Christianity “thus far
the greatest, unsurpassed but also un-thought-through human out-
reach” (Heretical Essays, 108). Christianity has a sense of problematic-
ity that can be compared to the Socratic questioning that once gave
birth to European philosophy and history. But it seems that, for
Patočka, the strongest challenge to regaining this philosophical quest
is not philosophy itself but the Christian heritage. In a discussion with
students he says:
- It is not only a vocabulary like metanoia [conversion], universal life, self-sacri-
fice, etc., that is strongly reminiscent of a Christian context. If one thinks e.g., of
Rudolf Otto’s description of the “trembling” in relation to the Holy, it becomes
obvious that also the basic figure of “shaking” is very close to an originally reli-
gious meaning,