This year's Seeley lectures, hosted by the Cambridge Centre for Political Thought, were given by Axel Honneth, one of the leading proponents of using the concept of recognition to understand social and political formation. Honneth examined the role played by recognition in the three different philosophical contexts of Britain, France and Germany. Somewhat ironically, considering coincidental setting of the lectures in the Runcie Room in the Faculty of Divinity, there was almost no mention of the role of religion with respect to the concept of recognition. Christianity provided only a cursory negative foil in that, by the early modern period, it was increasing proving insufficient to foster social integration. It was in response to this that Honneth suggested individual identity and social integration came to be seen as dependent upon the recognition of others, albeit not always in explicitly those terms.

Risto Saarinen, in Recognition and Religion: A Historical and Systematic Study, challenges the assumption, made by Honneth and indeed many others, that Christianity has not played a significant role in the intellectual history of recognition. Instead he seeks to push back the roots of the concept of recognition into classical, medieval and early modern religious sources. For those interested in the concept of recognition from a religious or theological perspective, this is a helpful and much needed corrective. It is the first attempt to do this work by getting behind what is for many an indelibly modern concept in response to an ineluctable modern problem. In doing so it acknowledges the fundamental difficulty of the attempt. This is that the term itself, whether as Anerkennung in German, reconnaissance in French or ‘recognition’ in English, is not one that can easily be pushed back behind the modern philosophical context while carrying the same valance.

In order to meet this difficulty Saarinen draws a distinction between the narrowly semantic ‘concept’ and broadly interpretable ‘conception’. He then approaches the broad conception of recognition analytically, drawing out its salient features. These are that recognition has a ‘cognitive component’, that it involves some form of ‘attachment’ by means of an evaluative assessment entailing a social relation and finally that it requires ‘availability’ whereby persons are available to recognise and be recognised. The level of generality that this generates is helpful in terms of being able to locate in various texts and contexts something like recognition as it is now understood. This reading back and finding traces of what comes to conceptual clarity in the modern era is fruitful and engaging.

However, Saarinen claims to identify a conceptually coherent notion of ‘religious recognition’ that has a distinctive profile, differing from philosophical uses of the concept. This is less clearly sustainable despite constituting a central thesis of the book. After a helpful survey (chapter 1) Saarinen proceeds to an analysis of antecedent terms and texts in theological writings from what he calls the Latin traditions (chapter 2) and the Modern era (chapter 3). He then argues that this history yields ‘paradigms’ of specifically ‘religious recognition’ (chapter 4). These are, first, that religious recognition takes place within a ‘conversion narrative’, the second is that it involves the ‘promise of self-preservation’ often expressed in terms of salvation or justification, and the third is that of ‘existential attachment’, whereby recognition in a religious sense entails some sort of a relationship with God.

Saarinen's approach is a form of Begriffsgeschichte that seeks to move behind the particularity of the modern concept of recognition but still use linguistic or conceptual analysis in order to do so. By defining in advance the structural features of recognition he is able to locate them in cognate antecedents while arguing for a distinctiveness within these antecedent ‘religious’ uses. Although this enables a measure of precision according to how ‘recognition’ is defined, there is a risk that broader features of interpersonal recognition within the Christian theological tradition (although not necessarily to ‘religion’ per se) are missed by the narrowness of the linguistic analysis. To what extent traditional doctrinal formulations and theological foci can be recast or reinterpreted in light of the conceptual clarity afforded by the concept of recognition remains a much broader and potentially immensely fruitful project.

Saarinen's helpful corrective starts the work of drawing theology into conversation with contemporary uses of the concept of recognition. It points both towards theological antecedents and to the potential for contemporary theological appropriations of the concept of recognition. There is much work to be done in this area and Saarinen provides a good start from an interesting methodological standpoint.