Abstrakt
While numerous modern authors have claimed that religion is not capable of surviving modernity, Luhmann maintains that religion is better adapted to this challenge than any other system. Paradoxically, the reason for this stems from the fact that religion has a distinctly antimodern tendency.
Offering a counternarrative to modernity, it enables subjects to remain true to reality because it offers a utopian vision, a discourse of transcendence. In fact, this utopianism makes a discourse about reality possible because it offers a perspective that evades the self-enclosed modern social landscape.
Curiously, as a modern system, the system of religion is itself autopoietic without surrendering to the logic of autopoiesis. The reason for this is that it is based on the idea that the true beginning and the true originator are by definition beyond themselves.
Thus, while it is autopoietic, religion's strength lies in the fact it does not understand itself as autopoietic. Eventually, the main strength of Luhmann's conception lies in his analysis of mystical communication.
Mystic communication offers the opportunity to communicate the incommunicable through "processing" the blind spots on which any communication depends.