From Violent Sacrality to Post-metaphysical Caritas: Toward a Non-religious Theological Anthropology in Gianni Vattimo

Abstract

This article investigates Gianni Vattimo’s proposal of a non-religious theological anthropology through a critical dialogue with René Girard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The research starts from the ambiguous problem of religion as a phenomenon capable both of legitimizing and intensifying violent practices and of functioning as an instrument of liberation and the containment of violence. Using a philosophical-hermeneutical method combined with critical bibliographical review, the article argues that secularization, understood by Vattimo as the historical realization of Christian kenosis, constitutes a progressive weakening of violent sacrality and of the metaphysics of foundations. It further contends that the history of Western nihilism can be interpreted as a history of Christian salvation, in which caritas becomes fully possible only with the dissolution of the sacrificial-metaphysical structures of the sacred. Finally, it proposes that confronting the violence identified in Vattimo’s thought requires clarifying the notion of a non-religious theological anthropology, which offers an ethical-political horizon in which religion ceases to legitimize violence and instead operates as a principle for deactivating victimizing mechanisms.