In the Shadow of Mount Sinai ,

Peter Sloterdijk is an acute philosophical commentator on contemporary culture and has much to teach theologians anxious to be in dialogue with that culture. He began as a tough Nietzschean, determined to look unpleasant truths in the face: ‘There is no longer any knowledge of which one could be a friend (philos). Faced with what we know, the idea of loving it no longer occurs to us, but we ask ourselves instead how we can manage to live with it, without being turned to stone’. Some of his remarks on the training of the human animal smacked of eugenicism. But he also showed a religious penchant, editing an anthology on Gnosticism and developing an interest in spirituality. His religious musings, focused on Gnostic and Augustinian themes, may actually weaken him as a theorist. Today, despite radical gestures, he is perhaps best characterized as a mainstream liberal (as shown in his ardent praise of Emmanuel Macron). He views religious and philosophical traditions in a naturalistic perspective, and this can lead him into crassly reductive accounts of both. His reception of Heidegger reduces the question of Being to one of the material anthropological environment. His study of monotheism as a ‘rage bank’ whisks away its doctrinal and mystical depths. Yet his appreciation of religion as a praxis of interiority, his desire to embed religious and philosophical discourse in concrete anthropological knowledge, and his worrying about the strands of violence in monotheism put him in dialogue with theology.