The original Italian title of this book is "Credere di credere" (Believing that one believes).
"Belief" - which is the English translated title - is perhaps more succinct, but it's also one sided, and misses the philosophical and theological double intention of the Italian.
"Believing that one believes" is paradoxical because it means both to have faith, conviction and certainty in something, but to also think uncertainly about something.
In a chapter entitled "The substance of faith", near the end of this book, Gianni Vattimo - a professor of hermeneutic philosophy at the University of Turin (Italy), member of the European Parliament, and a framer of the European constitution - writes of how he came upon his book's title.
Vattimo describes how one hot afternoon he made a telephone call, from an ice cream shop near a bus stop in Milan, to Gustavo Bontadini, "a distinguished representative of 'neoclassical' Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy." The phone call regarded the competitive examination for a university chair. Since both Vattimo and Bontadini were members of the examining commission, they had some confidential academic business to discuss.
It was an enjoyable conversation. The two philosophers had not seen each other for awhile so they played catch-up. At one point during the conversation Bontadini asked Vattimo whether he still believed in God. Vattimo, aware of the paradoxical moment in which the question arose, noticed next to the telephone a table of women eating ice cream and drinking orange juice in the midday heat.
Vattimo responded "I believe that I believe."
Stylistically, Vattimo's book is written in an engaging, personal and informal (although not "chatty") fashion -- similar to the a mood and spirit of the reader sitting at a cafe table in an ancient dusty, sunwashed Roman piazza and drinking Cinzano in front of the Colosseum, or St. Peter's Basilica and the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, or the Spanish Steps, and perhaps throwing some coins for good luck into Trevi Fountain, all the while listening to one of Italy's best and brightest philosophers candidly talk about his philosophy and rekindled faith.
Intellectually, for Vattimo, an Italian Catholic, raised in the post Second World War milieu, it surely must have been a circuitous route with many spiritual meanderings, before settling into some serious philosophy study in the university. It was there, in the halls of academia, where Vattimo was swayed away from his christian faith by the nihilism of Nietzsche, Heidegger and others who were antimodern and anti-Christian, before cozily settling into hermeneutics.
Now comes Vattimo's "rediscovery" of Christianity. Through studying Nietzsche and Heidegger, Vattimo is paradoxically led back to Christianity.
Vattimo asserts that once again there is room for faith, now that the "end of modernity" has been ushered in. Those philosophies such as scientific positivism, Hegelian and Marxist historicim, which claim to be able to prove the non-existence of God, and have done away with religion, today are no longer strong reasons to be an atheist. For Vattimo, we are free again to hear the words of the Scripture. Christianity is under reconsideration. A postmodern-faith (belief) arises - an authentic christian philosophy for post-modernity.
What sort of belief is possible in these times? For Vattimo, it is "weak belief."
Drawing on his own interpretation of contemporary hermeneutical ontology, Vattimo acknowledges a positive tie with nihilism - meant as the weakening of metaphysical categories - in which God is dead (as Nietzsche states).
"Weak ontology" finds a connection to Christianity specifically through the lowering of God to the level of humanity, which is called "kenosis" in the New Testament.
In Philippians 2:7 one may read that Christ "emptied himself." Most kenoticists believe that by becoming incarnate, Christ gave up his sovereign dominion. Some Protestants view the Incarnation as a Divine self-emptying, and a self-limitation of the God's omniscience and omnipresence.
Kenosis is an idea that never flourished under classical metaphysics - but in our new, post-metaphysical age, Vattimo has conceived a secularized interpretation of Christianity thanks to kenosis.
Vattimo spends much of his book fashioning a secularized outline for contemporary belief out of Heidegger's "weak ontology" - the undoing or "weakening" of Being in the classical metaphysical sense. For Vattimo, Heidegger's concept of "weakening" parallels the essence of the christian message. Through charity - via kenosis- christian belief and its spiritual structures are secularized Kenosis itself is viewed as the act of charitable self-exhaustion.
Christianity and its very grounds of belief are weakening. Since the idea of a universal truth is abandoned, spirituality is now seen as a personal sense of being, as opposed to the grandiosity of revelation. What matters is a personal sense of satisfaction rather than the belief of a universal truth. Man is urged to find security and connection through charity. This notion of charity is very hermeneutical - meaning that it is provisional, never absolute or ultimate, and interpretive of fragmentation in its search for wholeness and unity between disparate entities or bodies of knowledge or the sacred and secular, etcetera.
For Vattimo the essence of belief is the continual secularization of spiritual structures. Belief is the "weak belief" in the possibility of belief.
Considering that Vattimo is presently a functional member of the European Parliament, it should be interesting to see whether any of his hermeneutical studies of Nietzsche, Heidegger or Gadamer should trickle their way somehow into European law and edict.
Perhaps in the future this author will also write books on government, genealogy and power.
Meanwhile, we readers should keep throwing our philosophical coins into Traki Fountain - legend has it that it's good luck and may help guarantee safe passage to whatever world or worlds are out there beyond the stars after this one.
Bon Voyage! Ciao!
-- Alex Sydorenko

I must begin by pointing out my own prejudice: this is the book that introduced me to postmodern philosophy and, as such, it will always have a special place in my heart. That being said, this text is a fascinating glimpse inside the mind of a philosopher "returning" to Christianity. Vattimo begins by tracing his path back to Christianity through Heidegger and Nietzsche and the formulation of "weak thought." He presents a challenging critique of demythologization in a time in which that term is still being widely used in theology (one need only refer to the ever-increasing number of "historical Jesus" texts out there). Vattimo goes on to explore the role of charity and even promote the (heretical?) idea that secularization is a trend arising from the Christian understanding of the Incarnation as the kenosis or debasement of God. Throughout there is a strong critique of institutional Roman Catholicism and "tragic" existentialist Christianity.
Vattimo writes here in a very accessible first-person style that reinforces the view that religion is never something that can be discussed "objectively" but is of existential importance.
I would strongly recommend this book for both philosophers and theologians (and Vattimo appropriately weakens these distinctions). I found it to be more engaging, if less systematic, than his later book After Christianity.
Pax tecum!

This book is important to understand postmodernism. However, i don't image american readers accepting Vattimo's tesis about weak subjet right to have a place in world. Why modern civilization has impossed to us the obligation of being strong and the first in every action as the only way to be allowed as a member of this society?

This is a very saddening book in which these authors, who have helped to move our thinking away from some of the remnants of religion over which we continue to trip, express their (perhaps elderly, not to say senile) longing for old-time religion itself. Not only that, but they suggest, as opponents of postmodernism or pragmatism do, that outgrowing the tiresome remnants of religion found in the arrogant self-descriptions of scientists or ethicists actually allows (or is it causes?) "the return of religion" - an event which they claim to be witnessing although they offer little argument for its existence or desirability. They seem (and, of course, each takes a slightly different tack) to be arguing ad populum instead of admitting their desire for religion. They explain that people are scared by nuclear proliferation and environmental destruction and are turning to religion, but do not address whether such false comfort should be joined in. Rather, they simply join in it - without, however, ever quite saying so. Not one of them writes "I believe in God," but each asserts by every word he writes "God is worth writing about."

Jacques Derrida's contribution to this seminar which was held in 1994 on the island of Capri is the essay entitled "Faith and Knowledge." What is particularly interesting about this keynote address is Derrida's neologism "globalatinization" which he defines as "this strange alliance of Christianity, as the experience of the death of God, and tele-technoscientific capitalism." There is talk of religion and digitality, airborn pilgrimages to Mecca, Jerusalem and its three monotheisms watched over by the heavenly and monstrous glance of CNN, a Pope versed in televisual rhetoric, miracles transmitted live followed by commercials, and lastly the televisual diplomacy of the Dalai Lama. Because Capri is an island not far from Rome, Derrida also has some interesting things to say about religion in the Mediterranean and the Levant, as well as the Promised Land and the desert. This essay is particularly opaque and beautiful and it would definitely help the reader if he or she is familiar with Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Being And Time) as well as Beitrage zur Philosophie (Contributions to Philosophy), as JD name drops the great German philosopher's ideas here and there throughout this essay. This is definitely good beach reading.

Derrida and Vattimo's collection of essays given on the Isle of Capri truly shows how even postmodern philosophy must still come front-and-center with the question of religion. As postmodernity brings an end to the metaphysics that made God undesirable, a different type of God, a God of Life (as Unamuno would call it) must be dealt with anew. Derrida, Vattimo, Gadamar, Vitiello, Trias and others discuss the role of religion in an age that claims to be so removed from it.

My personal impression of the book is that Derrida reveals the type of religious issues that he offered us in his _Circumfessions_ and is wonderfully explicated in John Caputo's _Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida_. Vitiello's essay "Toward a Topology of the Religious" is insightful and necessary (if only Nietzsche could have read it!).

Vattimo's "After Christianity" could be titled "After Blumenberg". Of course I am referring to Hans Blumenberg's "The Legitimacy of the Modern Age". Blumenberg's thesis, as I found it relevant for the philosophy of relgion, is that the secularization that occurs in Modern philosophy is a direct result of William of Ockhams'emphasis upon radical divine omnipotence combined with a form of realist skepticism. Hence, secularization is the result of Christianity's internal incoherence. The modern age is hence a legitimate construct independent of Christian theology.

Vattimo argues almost the exact opposite. The secularization of European culture, YES! European Culture, is the result of the kenotic emptying of the Christian God in Christ. The increased generalization, abstraction, and emptying the concept of God that characterizes Modernity is not the result of Christianity's internal incoherence. Just the opposite, not only is Modernity's secularization and its emptying all the content from the concept of God coherent with Christianity, but also the "postmodern" (here Vattimo means nihilism) condition is a coherent development of the workings of Christianity's kenotic God.

I'll leave you to "After Christianity" to figure out how Vattimo pulls this off and what he thinks its implications are. The signficance of Vattimo for contemporary philosophy of religion cannot be overrated. Certainly his works raises major questions about theological movements like "Radical Orthodoxy" and the theology of John Milbank.