Monaco Philosophical Meetings: Redemption
Monaco Philosophical Meetings continue with the theme of Redemption on Thursday 15 January 2026 at 7 pm in the Princess Grace Theatre.
Religious rites and practices share many formal similarities. Regardless of the religion, they all include initiations, prayers, offerings, sacrifices, readings of sacred texts, celebrations, festivals, songs and hymns, and places for the gathering of the faithful. What distinguishes one religion from another, and what makes the living heart of each, is the form and content of salvation which, in relation to the Absolute, to Transcendence, to God, to the Prophet, to the Messiah, to the son of God, is offered to men, namely the liberation or deliverance from the evil which in some way is inherent in the human condition, due to original sin, the grip of a world deemed evil, the fatality of cyclical time and the cycle of rebirths, the sufferings of exile, both physical and metaphysical, of a “covering of sins” which did not occur, or even of the very imperfection of humanity, redeemed by divine love and forgiveness. Each religion defines salvation in its own way, whether individual or collective, and precisely outlines the paths that lead to it: through adherence to the cosmic order governed by the gods (ancient religions or Mesopotamian cosmogonies), liberation from cyclical time (wisdom traditions or Far Eastern religions), or participation in divine life (monotheistic religions). But in everyday language, the very terms salvation and redemption retain a certain ambiguity. This is because a semantic similarity links the greeting one gives to the salvation bestowed by the savior, or because *salus*—Latin for health, the preservation of life—combines salvation as deliverance and salvation as fulfillment. As for the notion of redemption, it retains a “material” origin which weighs upon it: redemption – redemptio: from re- (back, again) and emere (to buy, to acquire) – referred in Antiquity to the price that one had to pay to free a slave or redeem a prisoner, to the acquisition, by means of money, of a public office, to the fine that one paid to replace a corporal punishment, to the redemption by a relative of a family property that had been sold, or even to the duty to avenge the life or honor offended of a member of one’s family. Thus, a great distance appears between these “matters of money” and pure love, kindness, mercy, sacrifice, and forgiveness, through which God accomplishes the redemption of original sin (Catholicism), the “covering of faults,” which gives the repentant person the possibility of setting out again on the straight path (Judaism), or, for the faithful who know how to worship Him sincerely and exclusively and submit to His will, spiritual preservation from sin and eternal beatitude (Islam). In his time (the 12th century), Maimonides had already condemned the self-serving nature of the hope of redemption, seeing it as a calculation of “profit return” that had nothing to do with divine service out of pure love for God (in fact, Moses never called himself a redeemer). If redemption, in fact, contains a profound and authentic call for regained freedom, restored dignity, returned peace, the alleviation of suffering or the feeling of guilt that gnaws at us, the possibility of a “new beginning”, if not the repair of the world, however partial it may be, it cannot be limited to waiting for a God to save us. We might then be tempted to think of other saving forces, a miscellany of credulity and substitutes for religion, all of which are illusory and distort our vision: magic, spiritualism, superstition, conspiracy theories, the “providential man”… But, in a secularized world, threatened, brought down by the tyranny of pure force, destined for an uncertain future, damaged by the blind dynamics of profit, eaten away by nihilism, would it not be possible to expect salvation from ourselves, not from God or some worldly savior, but from women and men of goodwill, bold and clear-sighted enough to want, despite everything, to take care of the world and society? But how can we rekindle the will when reason, or myth, to ignite it, points to an Archimedean point—the fulcrum for lifting the Earth—a future perpetually postponed, a Philadelphia forever to come, an end of times that never arrives? How can we ensure that redemption and salvation are not “what we always wait for”? How (and should we) separate them from their eschatological dimension? Walter Benjamin associated the notion of “messianic redemption” (Erlösung) with that of “remembering” (Eingedenken). He thereby invited us to change our perspective, to turn it around, to conceive of redemption as the remembrance/commemoration of the vanquished of the past, the forgotten, the erased, the voiceless, to whom a secret pact binds us, or should bind us, making it our duty to redress the injustices and sufferings suffered by the past.
Robert Maggiori
