RISTO SAARINEN

Recognition and Religion: A Historical and Systematic Study, Oxford University Press, 2016.

Religious life is typically shaped by acts of interpersonal recognition. Other people grant us access to religious communities and initiate us in their practices. God appears as the supreme ruler who acknowledges us, loves us, and even creates our very being. While such acts are common in Jewish-Christian tradition and their meaning has been extensively discussed in the history of theology, scholars have not paid attention to the long history of religious recognition in Christian sources. Recognition and Religion undertakes the task of writing the first intellectual history of recognition in Western religious thought. Starting from the New Testament and Greco-Roman antiquity, Risto Saarinen clarifies the Latin terminology of recognition from the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions to the European Reformations. He then connects the emerging French, English and German theological vocabularies with the philosophical innovations of Hobbes, Locke, Fichte, and Hegel. This history stretches to the contemporary legal and ecumenical understanding of mutual recognition.

In its conducting chapter, the study outlines the distinctive profile of religious recognition. This profile includes personal conversion, the promise of self-preservation, and existential attachment. While it also alludes to mutual bonding, respect, and status change, it emphasizes the transformation of the recognizing subject. Religious recognition is thus both a predecessor of Hegelian philosophical modernity and a distinctive theological current that complements the Enlightenment views of toleration and autonomy.