Inherited discussions of ‘science and religion’ too much assume an interaction between two historically constant phenomena in terms of stories of ‘progress’ and ‘conflict’. Instead, it is better to recognise long-term and varying modes of tension between three different approaches to nature, pivoted about attitudes to ‘enchantment’ and to transcendence versus immanence. Within such a perspective, it appears that the dominant model of science as ‘disenchanted transcendence’ is a Newtonian one that historically quickly proved inadequate. Alternative and earlier traditions of ‘natural magic’ later returned under new guises and are closer to the essence of the ‘ergetic’ or experimental attitude that lies at the real core of ‘science’. The Newtonian model also implausibly suppressed the realities of motion, time, change, substantial form and secondary qualities. But contemporary physics points towards their restoration and to nature as a vital habit and form-shaping process, as well as to the ‘magical’ character of powers and causes. Magic, rightly understood, is a necessary mediator between religion as theory and science as practice and is a crucial aspect of an ergetic understanding of ‘enchanted transcendence’ which is the most promising perspective for today.

Samuel Moyn has rightly argued that post–World War II notions of human rights were blended with incompatible notions of human dignity under Christian influence. However, where he sees a contamination of rights by dignity, I see the opposite. The modern Christian traditions around dignity were linked to a personalist politics that sought to refuse both liberalism and fascism and was not simply fascist-tending. The stability of the postwar settlements owed much to their influence. But that they have now broken down is somewhat to do with their over-dilution by liberalism from the outset.

Prelude: liberalism, sovereignty and political economy

Political economy, the most developed form of liberalism, was, in the longest perspective, built upon two specifically modern concepts: first of all rights, and secondly sympathy. The notion of sympathy is in many ways in tension with the notion of rights and even derives from sources resistant to ideas of subjective right and cognate concepts of social contract as founding the political order. Indeed, for the most part a direct, interpersonal exercise of sympathy was relegated by Adam Smith and other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment to the sphere of ‘civil society’ which lies outside the economic order, even though the latter was still crucially regarded as embedded within it – an assumption later lost to view within a later, more drastic elaboration of the liberal credo. Already for Smith, within the order of the properly ‘economic’, sympathetic, mutual goals are to be achieved indirectly, through a ‘providential’ and unintended co-ordination of sheerly egotistic purposes, politically legitimated in terms of ideas of subjective entitlement.

Such a notion of ‘right’ grounds the politically economic idea of person, property and contract. But here one can claim that, whenever the notion of sympathy was subordinated through indirection – or, in other terms, the idea of a reciprocalist pursuit of common ends is denied to be constitutive of the political foundation – then the idea of individually based natural rights, appealing to the normativity of negative freedom, was from the outset correlated with an absolutist account of the sovereignty of the centralised state. In the case of Scots political economy this link re-emerges with James Stewart, who gave a more honest account than Adam Smith of the role that the state, empire and military conquest must play in processes of primacy accumulation. He explicitly stated that ‘the Republic of Lycurgus [ancient Sparta] represents the more perfect plan of political economy – anywhere to be met with, either in ancient or modern times’.

Plant’s contribution to this volume raises a question about the nature of religion in public discourse, especially in the context of a post-metaphysical philosophy. In this chapter I will ask whether Habermas (and inevitably Kant) can be questioned about the very presuppositions that guide the framing of such a question.

Was fehlt?, asks Jürgen Habermas in the course of his now famous debate about post-secularity, faith and reason with the Munich Jesuits (Habermas et al., 2010). What lacks to us today, in an age supposedly governed by reason? Here Habermas takes up the post-religious lament of Brecht and Adorno: how do we supply the role that religion once fulfilled?

But he takes it up in a very different key, because he is newly aware, in the early twenty-first century that, far from going away, religion is if anything returning – in terms of numbers in the Third World, and in terms of public influence in the West. This return is by no means always benign: religious extremism is returning also. Yet in a new combination, secular extremism has reached a new pitch of intensity and we are also seeing the rise of an increasingly militant naturalism. Both these phenomena Habermas understandably regards as threatening to a reasonable humanism. In the face of this threat he wishes to defend and refortify its neutral, secular ground. However, he continues to be haunted by the Brechtian lack. And in the face of this lack he no longer suggests merely a novel substitute for lost faith, but rather that reason must continue to draw upon faith’s resources. Religion is not going to go away and we need not only reasonable forms of religion but also a rational respect for faith if human beings and the planet are to have a sane future.

Traditionally, in Greek, Christian and Jewish thought, evil has been denied any positive foothold in being. It has not been seen as a real force, or quality, but as the absence of force and quality, and as the privation of being itself. It has not been regarded as glamorous, but as sterile; never as more, always as less. For many recent philosophers, however (for example, Jacob Rogozinski, Slavoj Zizek, J.-L. Nancy) this view appears inadequate in the face of what they consider to be the unprecedented evil of the twentieth century: the mass organisation of totalitarian control and terror, systematic genocide, and the enslavement of people who are deliberately worked to the point of enfeeblement and then slaughtered. Such evil, they argue, cannot be regarded as privative, because this view claims that evil arises only from the deliberate pursuit of a lesser good. Power directed towards extermination, however, suggests destruction and annihilation pursued perversely for its own sake, as an alternative end in itself. Such a motive towards the pure negation of being, as towards the cold infliction of suffering – that may not even be enjoyed by its perpetrators – suggests that the will to destroy is a positive and surd attribute of being itself and no mere inhibition of being in its plenitude.

This supposed positive evil for its own sake is often dubbed ‘radical evil’ following a term used by Immanuel Kant in his book Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. With some plausibility, Kant’s account of evil is seen as encouraging a break with the traditional privation view focused upon being in general in favour of a view focused purely upon the finite human will.

This chapter re-examines the post-Kantian character of modern theology. Its aim is to indicate how pervasive are its transcendentalist presuppositions and to suggest that these be eradicated. At the same time it argues that the possibility of theology ‘at the end of epistemology’ has to be construed at once as a historicism and as a ‘metaphysics’.

In the first part of the paper I shall examine the way in which Kant is considered to have put a critical block in front of the ‘way of eminence’ and of what one might call the ‘discourse of participated perfections’ as discovered, especially, in Thomas Aquinas. Having shown that the basis of critique is here itself dogmatically metaphysical, and in a disguised fashion, political, I shall then proceed in the second section to suggest that theology proceeding in the wake of transcendentalism is partially reducible to a liberal rights ideology. This verdict will be applied both to theologies seeking for themselves epistemological foundations, and to theologies which assume that ethics has some extra-theological and well-grounded autonomy. In the final section I shall ask whether the recent revival of a neo-Aristotelian ‘ethics of virtue’ and a specifically theological exposition of ‘the good’ as prior to ‘the right’ points a way towards the retrieval of the ‘discourse of participated perfections’. But the answer given will insist that there can be no relapse towards pre-modernity; rather, any retrieval must assume a post-modern, metacritical guise.

In his book God As the Mystery of the World Eberhard Jungel seeks to escape not only from Cartesian foundationalism, but also from Kantian transcendentalism.