Sjoerd Griffioen's study of the German secularization debate examines the dispute over the place and value of religion in modernity as it unfolded between Hans Blumenberg, Karl Löwith, and Carl Schmitt. Following up on the polemics of these three, the book traces echoes and receptions of their ideas in the broader German intellectual discourse between the 1950s and the 1980s. It is divided into four main parts: The first reconstructs the Löwith-Blumenberg debate and finds that the two scholars were more in agreement with each other than previous studies have suggested. Part two adds Carl Schmitt to the controversy and thematizes the transformation of the secularization debate into one about political theology after 1968, identifying “different lines of agreement as well as different lines of contestation” (149) between these intellectuals. The third part follows the traces of agreement and disagreement on secularization raised by Löwith, Blumenberg, and Schmitt in the philosophy, historiography, theology, and politics of the second half of the twentieth century. Griffioen suggests that the original debate these three scholars advanced seems to have both anticipated and pre-structured the coming broader “intellectual need . . . for coming to terms with the past and achieving a diagnosis of the present condition” (197). In the fourth section, methodological considerations are presented. The author refrains from proposing his own theory of secularization. Instead, he strives to systematize and evaluate the concepts he has analysed in the preceding chapters. Referring to the idea of “philosophical historiography,” complemented by transnational perspectives, he makes a strong case for the notion of Geistesgeschichte. According to Griffioen, the legacy of the original discussion extends well into post-secularism.
Since secularization and its effects are today often dealt with in anthropology, sociology, and historiography, it seems a worthwhile endeavour to include historical-philosophical perspectives that have been seminal to the whole topic of secularization. Griffioen does so by drawing on an impressive number of scholars and their works from a variety of disciplines, including Reinhart Koselleck, Hanno Kesting, Wilhelm Kamlah, Walter Jaeschke, Hermann Lübbe, Hermann Zabel, Eric Voeglin, Rudolf Bultmann, Jacob Taubes, Odo Marquard, and others, relating their ideas to one another, and offering insightful analysis and conclusions in a well-structured narrative. Not all quotations from the German originals are translated, though, which will pose a problem for those who are not proficient in German but still hope to follow the dense argumentation. An important finding is that within a tightly woven web of common interests, themes, and motifs, of cordial acquaintances, friendly correspondences, and solid antipathies surrounding secularization and its sometimes highly disparate interpretation in the German intellectual landscape of the time, one can nevertheless hardly speak of opposing camps. Rather, internal heterogeneity must be taken into account, as this book clarifies.
Although the author has written a philosophical study (his 2020 dissertation at the University of Groningen), he himself raises a crucial question on which this reviewer, who is a historian, will comment. Griffioen asks whether the whole debate can really “ever reach valid conclusions when it is only waged on an abstract level” (223), or whether historical research inevitably has to be part of such an endeavour. He answers this question affirmatively by incorporating source material from the published written estates of the intellectuals under study and by favouring an intellectual-historical approach. Such a plea for linking historical and philosophical methods and perspectives on secularization seems essential to this reviewer. If this approach had been applied more consistently throughout the book, a slightly more nuanced picture might have emerged. Here are some examples: The extensive historical research on secularization is only briefly touched upon in this volume. Had it been taken up more broadly, the philosophical debate could have been embedded in a larger historical-conceptual context. Also, the reader is told several times that Löwith, Blumenberg, and Schmitt were affected by war and totalitarianism, without learning how this concretely affected their theories. The same applies to antisemitism (Löwith's and Blumenberg's families were wholly or in part of Jewish descent, and Schmitt cultivated a more or less hidden antisemitism, see Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt und die Juden: Eine deutsche Rechtslehre. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp [2005]), which again is mentioned only in passing.
Finally: Among the many authors considered in this study, different confessional backgrounds and identities are at play, which are not explicitly spelled out. However, one common denominator seems evident: All were White, male, and stemmed from a particular social and educational milieu. They all participated in a rather exclusive, if nuanced discourse on religion, modernity, and progress. The extent to which these class-, gender-, and race-specific elements of the debates about secularism and secularization reflect the self-conceptions of those primarily involved in them, and what impact they had on their works and the entire secularization debate deserves further attention. (For the larger context, see Manuel Borutta, “Genealogie der Säkularisierungstheorie. Zur Historisierung einer großen Erzählung der Moderne,” Geschiche und Gesellschaft, Vol. 36, No. 3 (2010): 347–376; Joan Wallch Scott, Sex and Secularism. Princeton: Princeton University Press [2017].) Sjoerd Griffioen's comprehensive book, which vividly reconstructs the controversies and polemics about secularization in German, more specifically West German, intellectual circles since the 1950s, draws attention to the original debate and its legacies, provides helpful interpretations and propositions, and stimulates further reflection on the aforementioned points.
