Postmodernism and religious faith

The article is devoted to inter-relations between postmodern discourse and religious faith in the context of a new reading of Buddhist and Christian philosophy. The subject of the study is the coincidence of criticism by the typical for classic era postmodern philosophy of "onto-theo-teleo-andro-phono-logocentrism", which includes premodern and modern (in the postmodern classification of epistemological paradigms) with epistemological paradigms of Buddhist and Orthodox Thomist (Catholic) philosophy. We have considered reception by Thomas Aquinas Aristotle’s main epistemological postulate that the human consciousness takes all its content from the sensuous world and the whole wealth of concepts and judgments is the fruit of intellectual creativity, but not the immediate contemplation of the world of ideas, as Plato and those who followed him believed. Hence the conclusion is that extremely nominalistic and relativistic postmodern philosophy coincides with the concept of Buddhist awareness of the phenomenal world illusory nature and with the doctrine of Aquinas about the created being and activity of human consciousness as a purely creative sphere, open total freedom of self-identification and self-actuating. Christian (and Islamic, of course) theism and purely oriental (Hindu and Buddhist) pantheism can found in Thomist understanding of God as the Being of all things common point for mutually enriching intercultural dialogue between the two religious traditions. And not only that. This Thomist concept allows us to overcome the contradictions of religious and atheistic thinking, because both Catholic Thomism and irreligious radical postmodern liberalism see in human existence nothing more than the embodied freedom (or at least the tragic awareness of the lack of freedom and, in one way or another, the call for it), and high calling for infinite creative freedom in the human, in which he is both a subject and an object of his creativity.