Hope Without Faith

I lack the strength to make a proper contribution to the Festschrift for Thomas Schmidt, but I would at least like to recall the long relationship that has connected us since the 1980s. It goes back to the final years of his studies and his participation in my philosophical colloquium. I remember, above all, conversations with him during office hours. He had studied with the Jesuits at the Sankt Georgen Graduate School of Philosophy and Theology and then, according to a pattern already well known then in Frankfurt, came to the course of studies in philosophy at Goethe University. That was probably the reason why to this day, despite his constant protests to be recognized as a philosopher, I still perceive Schmidt also as a Catholic struggling with his faith in an almost Protestant way. From one of those first conversations with him as a student, an astonishing objection of his has stuck in my memory: There can still be serious belief in God without concepts of personal salvation and the afterlife, just as in the early days of Judaism.

Recently, during his last visit to Starnberg, I reminded the now internationally successful professor, who shortly afterwards earned my lasting respect with a systematically brilliant and analytically clear dissertation on Hegel’s philosophy of religion, of his early days as a doctoral student. The occasion was our most recent debate about this subject matter, the core of which has changed little despite our decades of continuing discussions. For me the strict separation between faith and philosophical knowledge, both of which nonetheless can remain open for communication between each other and for learning from one another, is self-evident—perhaps too self-evident. In any case, Schmidt always had reservations about this sharp distinction. If I understand him correctly, he is concerned with the conceptual encirclement of a mode of faith that is certainly changing itself in a process of relentless and unstoppable progressive secularization, but one that can stand its ground if and to the extent that believers have abandoned the institution of the Church and have lost their faith in God as Creator and Redeemer.

Most recently, in his contribution to a discussion of my book Also a History of Philosophy, Schmidt made a dismal diagnosis for the churches in our Western societies. Even if the diagnosis does not concern the worldwide Catholic Church, he gives a highly skeptical answer to the question of whether the Christian religion here, in the developed societies of the West, still “represents a present form of the Spirit which, as a sacral source of social integration, provides a potential stimulus for post-metaphysical reason and modern society” at all. In regard to Catholicism, he does not attribute the loss of authority only to the obvious ways that the legitimacy of the still-authoritarian constitution of the Church has been undermined. Interestingly, he cites as another reason the digitally altered manner of knowledge transfer and learning in general, and asks, “If digitalization uncouples the dissemination and application of theoretical knowledge from communication-oriented processes, then can a sacral complex, whose liturgical forms are still centered around texts and their analog reception, still productively come to terms with this form of knowledge of the world [Weltwissens] and compensate for its pathologies?” At first glance he appears to follow the well-known diagnosis of Charles Taylor when he expects that unchurched forms of mystical self-transcendence will spread instead in place of weakened traditional forms of liturgical practice. But evidently, with the alternative of de-institutionalized forms of faith, he has in mind a more radical change, one that reaches to the very roots of theism.

This transformation is supposed to enable the new religious consciousness and its practice to evade the danger of slipping into spiritual “salvation-narcissism” of “self-sacralization” the less it clutches a dogmatic core of a monotheistic salvationist religion, that is, the more clearly it abandons an orientation to the afterlife and an explicit divine promise of salvation. Nevertheless, Schmidt speaks even in this case of a practice of religious faith that draws confidence from spiritually renewed hopes, although these are no longer directed towards the bliss of a transcending fulfillment of everything that is innerworldly. What is supposed to grant authenticity to this attitude of faith directed back to immanence is a “self-transcending” that is set against self-sacralization and that assumes the form of love, which in turn is supposed to feed upon the source of an existentially sustained but always ecstatically rejuvenated hope.

That’s how I understood Schmidt on his last visit when we spoke about our disagreement about the conceptual consistency of his notions that bid farewell to the afterlife and salvationist hope but that are still religious practices of faith in our Christian-stamped but progressively secularized societies. After a few days, I received from him the text of an “atheist” theologian whom he had mentioned in the conversation to demonstrate theology’s renewed interest in hope as the still-defining mode of such a faith, which remains, so to speak, within the existential field of experience of human beings. This text, by Hartmut von Sass, proceeds with conceptual analysis and stands in the tradition of Jürgen Moltmann and Dorothee Sölle, who were also inspired in their time by Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope.

The author tries, however, to radically think through this politically committed theology, a theology that Adorno smugly called “topless,” all the way through. First, he distinguishes hope that is directed towards a particular goal that is realized in the future from hope as a mode of human being-in-the-world, where what is hoped for is presented not as necessary but possible. Christian hope is directed, among other things, towards the resurrection of the dead and salvation from all the evil of this world and is, in turn, dependent on faith in God’s promise. This act of faith in the fulfillment of the promise also shapes the mode of daily life. Faith in God the Redeemer, as fides qua creditur, fills the way one lives with hope—because according to the traditional teaching there arises with baptism a new life inspired by hope. But given that the author assumes the skeptical diagnosis of the day “that we have lost hope as an element of faith and as a subject matter of its dogmatic accompaniment” and says that this has shaken faith in the church in growing spheres of the population of Western societies, he proposes a reversal of the order of the traditional triad of faith, love, and hope. He calls for a revitalization of hope in a new role as a pacemaker, which even though it is not “faithful” in the traditional sense, is still a confident way of life: “He who lives, hopes. And where there is hope, there religion is also,” as Bloch writes.

The decisive step in the argument consists in this: that the fire of religious consciousness can be rekindled from the ashes of shattered or lost faith if the electrifying power of ecstatic hope is conceded primacy: “The act of hoping thus determines the mode of faith as ecstasy.” As this renewed “religion” now proceeds from hope, then in granting primacy to an uplifting or “ecstatic” force of hope that exceeds the consciousness of the individual person, this hope must however lose its particular content or object; for in the traditional teaching, it owed this hope to faith in the liberating Redeemer. Hope, without any longer being able to be informed by faith as to its object, can only take the lead as a mode of being-in-the-world; it remains strangely undetermined in content. Rapturous hope becomes its own goal: “An asymmetry exists between the act of hope and the fullness of faith, whereupon the mode of hope characterizes faith as fullness—however not vice versa.” A faith that springs from hope can for its part no longer determine the object of hope.

Even though the author does not leave it at this statement in the text at hand, I understand this argument as an explanation of an atheistically indeterminate faith practice based upon ecstatically evoked boosts of hope—and probably for this reason Schmidt brought my attention to the text. But if that were the meaning of Sass’s astute conceptual analysis, one objection would be obvious. His analysis burdens the concept of a substantively indeterminate hope with the meaning of an ecstatic experience, which is supposed to keep its religious character. But to whom could it owe this character if not to an autobiographical memory of the conditions of hope in a once vital, but now lapsed “faithful” way of life that was grounded upon the constellation of faith, love, and hope? The only one who could remember this faith, however, would be the one who held on to it, then lost it. This would restrict the circle of addressees of the teaching of a “new”—in my view, paradoxical—practice of hope to the circle of “last” Christians who suffer from the loss of their faith.

This essay serves as the introduction to Den Diskurs bestreiten: Religion im Spannungsfeld zwischen Erfahrung und Begriff (Nomos, 2025). This translation is by Robert Wyllie.