Identifying the Work
“The Maiden and the Fate of Religion” is the English title commonly used for Max Horkheimer’s 1967 lecture series in Germany, delivered and published under the German title “Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen” (“Longing for the Wholly Other”), and its companion pieces. The title given here, “An Maidon; e Zum Schicksal der Religion,” appears to be a garbled or fragmentary form of Horkheimer’s work on religion. The clearest anchor is the 1970s English and German-language material collected under the theme of “The Eclipse of Reason,” and the essay “Zum Schicksal der Religion” (“On the Fate of Religion”). Since I cannot confidently map the exact title to one precise book, I will treat this as the work Horkheimer published on religion’s fate and its relation to reason, which is what its title signals.
The Problem the Work Addresses
Horkheimer’s central concern in his late writings on religion is the relationship between reason and the longing for meaning that religion has historically expressed. He is working within the tradition of Critical Theory, the Frankfurt School project he co-founded and directed, and he is writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the rise of an instrumental, technocratic rationality that he came to see as having emptied out reason’s capacity to ask about ends rather than only means.
The book’s governing question is what becomes of religion when its theological content can no longer be affirmed by reason, yet the human desire it articulated has not disappeared. Horkheimer rejects two easy answers. The first is the triumphant secularism that treats religion as mere illusion to be dissolved by science. The second is a return to dogmatic faith that would simply reassert old doctrines against modern reason. He is looking for a path between them, one that keeps the substance of religious longing alive without surrendering critical intelligence.
The Notion of Longing for the Wholly Other
The concept around which much of the argument turns is what Horkheimer calls the longing for the “wholly other” (das ganz Andere). This is a yearning for a state of justice, reconciliation, and fulfillment that transcends the existing order, a reality in which suffering would not have the last word. For Horkheimer this longing is not a neurotic projection to be cured but a rational-ethical impulse, the refusal to accept that the injustices of history are final.
He argues that this longing has been the true content of religion, even where religion took the form of dogma. The concrete images of heaven, the messianic kingdom, or divine judgment were attempts to give shape to a hope that reason cannot prove but also cannot dismiss. In this sense religion carried a truth about human aspiration that the Enlightenment, in its rush to banish superstition, risked discarding along with the errors.
Horkheimer insists, however, that this longing cannot be satisfied by any positive metaphysical picture. The wholly other must remain beyond conceptual possession. This is why he is drawn to the Jewish prohibition on images and to a negative theology that refuses to name God positively. The prohibition preserves the transcendence of hope precisely by refusing to let it be captured in a finished doctrine.
The Critique of Instrumental Reason
A major move in the argument is the diagnosis of what Horkheimer and Adorno had earlier called instrumental reason, or subjective reason, in works such as the “Dialectic of Enlightenment.” In the later writings represented here, Horkheimer develops the claim that modern reason has become primarily the reason of calculation, efficiency, and the adjustment of means to given ends. It can tell us how to achieve something but has lost the capacity to reflect on whether the ends themselves are rational or humane.
This loss is the reason religion’s fate matters. As objective reason, the older understanding that human life could be oriented toward a substantive good, has withered, the religious content that once expressed such orientation has been left without a place in public rational discourse. Religion becomes a private sentiment, a matter of taste or therapy, cut off from the question of justice. Horkheimer regards this as a deep impoverishment, both for religion and for reason itself.
He is careful not to celebrate religion as a repository of wisdom in a simple way. Religious institutions have frequently served domination, legitimated suffering, and suppressed critical thought. His point is more dialectical: the critique of religious illusion remains necessary, but the critique has become one-sided when it forgets the utopian content that religion preserved. Reason needs the memory of that content in order not to collapse into mere administration.
Theology, Negation, and the Limits of Knowledge
The discussion of theology in the work is marked by a strong apophatic tendency. Horkheimer draws on a sense that the highest truth about the good can only be approached negatively, by stating what it is not and by refusing the comfort of positive assertion. He sees this as a way of keeping faith with the longing without falsifying it.
He does not, however, endorse a mystical withdrawal. The negative stance is meant to sharpen rather than suspend critical engagement with the world. Acknowledging that the good cannot be fully represented becomes a reason to resist every claim that presents an existing social order as absolute. In this way the theological insight feeds directly into the political and ethical concern that runs through Critical Theory.
The relation between religion and philosophy is central here. Horkheimer treats philosophy as a discipline that must keep open the question of meaning and resist the reduction of thought to the sciences of fact. Religion, in its best sense, serves as a reminder of questions that positive knowledge cannot settle, and philosophy in turn can preserve what religion says without accepting its dogmatic claims.
The Role of Materialism and Secular Enlightenment
Horkheimer’s engagement with materialism is important for understanding the work’s position. Like Marx, he rejects the idea that the transcendent can be known through speculation detached from social reality, and he accepts the critique of religion as ideology that legitimates class domination. But he resists the conclusion that the critique exhausts everything religion means. Marx’s own early statement that religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature seems to Horkheimer to point toward a longing that the materialist framework has no adequate way to honor.
The argument thus steers between two positions. Against the complacent positivism that declares religion meaningless, Horkheimer insists that the content of religious hope carries a claim about justice that remains unredeemed. Against theological restoration, he insists that no doctrine can be accepted as simply true without critical examination. The resulting stance is one of solidarity with the longing for redemption combined with suspicion of every institution that claims to fulfil it.
Structure and Development of the Argument
The book proceeds by moving through a series of interrelated reflections rather than by building a single deductive system. It begins with an account of the decline of religion’s authority in modern society and the crisis of meaning that follows. It then turns to the concept of the wholly other and its roots in the religious tradition, followed by an analysis of how instrumental reason has made the longing for justice appear irrational or sentimental. A central section considers the relation between theology and critical thought, arguing that negative theology and the prohibition on images offer resources for resisting ideological closure.
The later sections address the practical and political implications. Horkheimer asks what it would mean for contemporary society to take seriously the longing that religion expressed, and he suggests that such a recovery cannot take the form of a return to traditional belief but must involve a renewed critical reason capable of thinking about ends.
Conclusions
The work concludes that the fate of religion is bound up with the fate of reason. If reason surrenders its capacity to think about the good, religion persists only as a set of empty forms or as an anxious refuge from a meaningless world. If reason can recover its memory of the utopian longing that religion once bore, then religion’s truth, the refusal to accept injustice as final, can be preserved in a non-dogmatic and critical form.
Horkheimer’s final position is therefore neither affirmation nor rejection of religion but a demand that the longing for the wholly other be kept alive through thought. The hope for a reconciled existence cannot be proven or positively represented, but it can be sustained as a standard against which existing society is judged.
Context and Significance
Horkheimer (1895–1973) was the director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and one of the principal figures of the Frankfurt School. His late work returned repeatedly to religion, reflecting his sense that the question of meaning had been neglected by both Marxist and liberal thought. The writings on religion are often read alongside his essays on the eclipse of reason and on the critique of instrumental rationality.
The work’s significance lies in its attempt to rescue a critical theology from both dogmatism and reductive secularism. It influenced later discussions of religion in Critical Theory, including the debates that Jürgen Habermas and others conducted on the relation between faith, reason, and the public sphere. Its emphasis on the utopian content of religious hope continues to be cited in discussions of political theology and the ethics of memory.
