Abstract

If Zarathustra were to descend once again from the mountain, what would he make of the recent religious revival? Would he admit that he had been wrong, that “Deus absconditus” has now reappeared? Does this revival mean that the Enlightenment theory of religion was wrong? In view of the significance of religion, it is necessary to reassess that Enlightenment theory of religion and to inquire into the possible role jf religion in a reconstructed project of modernity. Yet, to overestimate the importance of religion in the modern world can result in two extreme and equally unsatisfactory consequences. An unreconstructed secularism, assuming that the criticism of religion is not yet complete, would postulate again the criticism of religion as the premise and the primary task of critique.