A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment 9780226691398

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A Brief   Apology for a Catholic Moment

A Brief   Apology for a Catholic Moment Jean-­L uc Marion Translated by Stephen E. Lewis With a Foreword by Kevin Hart

The University of Chicago Press  Chicago a nd L on d on

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2021 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­68461-­1 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­75829-­9 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­69139-­8 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226691398.001.0001 Originally published in French as Brève apologie pour un moment catholique, © Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2017. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Marion, Jean-Luc, 1946– author. | Lewis, Stephen E. (Stephen Evarts), translator. | Hart, Kevin, 1954– writer of foreword. Title: A brief apology for a Catholic moment / Jean-Luc Marion ; translated by Stephen E. Lewis ; with a foreword by Kevin Hart. Other titles: Brève apologie pour un moment catholique. English Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2020040353 | isbn 9780226684611 (cloth) | isbn 9780226758299 (paperback) | isbn 9780226691398 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Catholic Church—France. | Catholic Church— Apologetic works. | Church and state—France. | Laicism—France. | France—Religion. Classification: lcc bx1530.2 .m37513 2021 | ddc 261.20944—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040353 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Foreword by Kevin Hart  vii

Address: The Cross without the Banner  1 J

Catholic and French  7 J

Laicity or Separation  31 J

The Utility of Communion  57 J

Envoy: A Catholic Moment  83 General Index  87 Index of Biblical Passages  93

Foreword Kevin Hart

It is common in France, unlike the United States, for philosophers to engage the social and political issues of the day, and for the media, including publishing houses, to give them space to do so. We think of the volumes of Sartre’s Situations, his many interviews, even the iconic 1970 photograph of him selling copies of the banned newspaper La Cause du Peuple. We think of Merleau-­ Ponty’s unofficial role as manager of Les Temps Modernes, his po­­ litical columns for L’Express, and his essays in Humanisme et ter­ reur (1947). We think of Derrida’s criticisms of the Apartheid policies of the South African government, his protests against the death penalty, his work for GREPH (Groupe de Recherche sur l’Enseignement Philosophique), and his commitment to the Jan Hus association. And we think of many others whose voices sometimes have been heard in the public sphere, not least of all Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-­Luc Nancy. And all this long before we get to philosophical provocateurs such as Bernard-­ Henri Lévy and Michel Onfray. Until now, no one would have thought to include Jean-­Luc Marion in this list. For some of his readers, he is first and foremost Kevin Hart is the Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia.

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a historian of philosophy, someone with two specializations, one French and one German: the age of Descartes and Pascal, and the first maturity of phenomenology, the age of Husserl and Heidegger. For other readers, he is preeminently an original philosopher, best known for his Étant donné (1997) and further elaborations of what he calls “saturated phenomena” or “the paradoxes.” And for still others, he is a Christian theologian with a decidedly philosophical bent, author of Dieu sans l’être (1982) and its subsequent refinements up to and including D’ailleurs, la Révélation (2020). Now, though, this image of   Marion will change, if only a little. With Brève apologie pour un moment catholique (2017), Marion appears as un philosophe engagé, not in order to affirm one or another social or political position in any narrow sense but to question the ways in which Catholics are viewed in France, to investigate the line that since 1905 has legally separated the practice of religion and the functioning of the State there, and to propose the possibility, indeed the urgency, of a “Catholic moment” in French culture to come. Not that Marion has written a “popular” book, let alone one that relaxes the demands of thinking philosophically. We find Marion reflecting, in a phenomenological manner, on the nature of the gift, on the problem of “other minds,” as formulated by Husserl and Levinas, and asking us to follow him in making reductions so as to allow phenomena properly to manifest themselves. We find him focusing on the paradoxes involved in the idea of separating Church and State and teasing them out so as to make the issues at hand as clear as possible. We also encounter him, as a historian of ideas, reminding us that we inherit the word “religion” from the Enlightenment, and telling us that, considered from within, Christianity is not a religion. Once again, we hear him speaking of the end of metaphysics, and of how important it is for Christians to understand the liberation for faith that comes with this closure. Some of Marion’s readers will be surprised to find him centering his understanding of nihilism, which actually goes back to some of his earliest writings, on the connection of the “I” and power. And

Kevin Hart  J  ix

most surprisingly, perhaps, we hear Marion speaking, perhaps for the first time in a book, about the nature of community. Until now, Marion’s writing has largely been in the genres of the treatise, the essay, and the interview. Here, though, he engages—­ briefly, as he says, and perhaps for the one and only time—­in apologetics. The genre of the apology is well known to anyone who has studied Greek philosophy, the New Testament, or the Fathers of the Church. The Greek word ἀπολογία combines λόγος (speech) and ἀπο-­(from) and means a speech given in defense or justification of one’s views. We think of Plato’s Apology, which presents Socrates’s eloquent self-­defense against the charges of impiety and corrupting the young in Athens in 399 BCE. And we think of the apostle Paul, before King Agrippa II and Festus, Procurator of Judea, defending himself against the charges of the high priest and some elders. When allowed to speak, “Paul stretched out his hand and made his defense” (Παῦλος ἐκτείνας τὴν χεῖρα ἀπελογεῖτο) (Acts 26:1). Doubtless we recall also some early Church writers who defended the faith before emperors, judges, and pagan philosophers, the greatest work of this kind being Origen’s Contra Celsum (c. 248). And we should recall that recourse to the apology has been made by major Christian theologians in modern times. First, there is Schleiermacher’s stirring Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (1799), in which the great liberal Protestant theologian proposes a defense of religion against its “cultured despisers” in Berlin by way of four speeches. And second, there is John Henry Newman’s elegant bandaging of his wounds at the hands of Charles Kingsley, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). Against whom does Marion wish to defend himself and others like himself? And how does he conduct his defense? First of all, Marion seeks to defend French Catholics against their fellow countrymen who seek to criticize, discount, devalue, or deride them for their beliefs and their acts. For it is often declared, especially in the media (and sometimes by philosophers as well as journalists), that they represent a danger to an otherwise healthy secular culture; that they choose badly when it comes to politics;

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that they fall prey to superstition when, as every educated person surely knows, God is dead; that the churches are empty in any case, and so Catholics have no base; and that they do not think well because they are constrained by the dogmas of the Church. Against these charges, Marion says to his fellow French Catholics, “Be not afraid!,” quoting John Paul II just after he was elected pope in 1978. (The pope in turn was quoting Jesus reassuring the disciples when they did not recognize him and thought him to be a ghost as he walked across the water [Matthew 14:27].) Like any good philosopher, Marion unpicks the claims of those he is obliged to oppose. What seem to be missiles leveled against the faithful turn out to be no more than cartoon spooks. Catholics are not a danger to the Republic, Marion argues: they are, and always have been, “the most useful” of people in a state, as Justin Martyr declared in his First Apology (155–­57 CE) (4.65), and certainly have not sought to transgress the law, promulgated by the Third Republic, that established a separation of Church and State (December 9, 1905). Indeed, separation of clerics and laity is a long-­standing Christian division: no wonder French Catholics have not opposed the law of 1905. (It remains to be seen, Marion reflects, whether Muslims in France will do the same.) Catholics, like any other group of citizens, are entitled to vote for whichever political candidates they believe to be the best to represent them. Nietzsche’s affirmation “God is dead” in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882) is hardly clear in its meaning, and certainly it does not make literal sense if one has the slightest understanding of what “God” means for Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. Are the churches empty, as journalists like to say? Not at all: one finds many Catholics of all ages at Mass on Sundays, and there never was a time or a place when the churches were full to the brim or when there was universal recourse to the sacraments. Each ecclesial age has its troubles, and ours is not as badly off as others have been. And if even progressive Catholics, including Pope Francis, respect dogma, it is because they have good reasons for doing so, not to mention a duty to do so. Besides, one might add,

Kevin Hart  J  xi

if one wishes to criticize people for being uncritically beholden to dogmas, one could not do better than look to the far left or the far right. Having identified and disarmed (or at least blunted) the criticisms aimed at Catholics, Marion proposes to encourage the faithful and to offer another way of viewing them, one that is far and away more hopeful, and that will perhaps nourish the Republic in time to come. Catholics should be assured that the Church is not in crisis, as its members are repeatedly told; rather, the world in which we all live is decadent. The Church is not subject to one crisis or another simply because it depends for its very life on its choice for Christ. This means at least two things. First, the Church is in a state of perpetual self-­correction: Ecclesia semper reformanda (but not quite as the Reformers held, for Marion insists that it is the saints who reform the Church and that they do so by edifying the faithful). And second, the Church does not need to appear “successful” according to worldly canons. Of course, we may well object that the Church needs rather more self-­correction than it seems prepared to recognize or undergo, even under Pope Francis, and that it could go much further in deflecting worldly standards of success. The Curia badly needs reform, and the spectacle of cardinals living in luxury apartments is hardly an uplifting image of evangelical poverty. Can we be sure that those whom we trust to administer the Church take their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience with all due seriousness? Marion conducts his apology at a higher level than where my question aims. As Catholics must finally agree, our fidelity is to Christ and, in particular, to the Great Commandment, as testified in the triple tradition. The earliest version of the text reads, “ ‘you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself ’ ” (Mark 12:30–­ 31). For Protestants, the second clause implies a need to develop political theologies. Some Catholics have gone in that direction as well, although many feel less need to do so, for the Church has

xii  J foreword

powerful apostolic exhortations such as Evangelii Gaudium (2013) and, especially, impressive social encyclicals, which, from Rerum Novarum (1891) to Laudato si’ (2015), have addressed economic or political or environmental issues. As a people committed to Christ, Catholics seek to achieve the common good in the fullness of its meaning; we seek a community that is nourished by communion. It is here that we find Marion rerouting, in his own way, the line of communitarian thought that has been so prominent among left-­ wing French intellectuals in the previous century. I am thinking, in particular, of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-­Luc Nancy. One might point to Blanchot’s La communauté inavouable (1983), which reflects critically on Nancy’s reading of Bataille’s sense of community. In this dense essay Blanchot argues that the point of community is “the service to others [autrui] unto/ in death, so that the other does not get lost all alone, but is filled in for [suppléé] just as he brings to someone else [un autre] that supplementing [suppléance] accorded to himself.”1 In this vision of community, each person reenacts its founding moment: “Mortal substitution is what replaces communion” [La substitution mortelle est ce qui remplace la communion].2 There is no unique, vicarious sacrifice, such as the one that Christ made on the Cross, only an endless serial substitution, in which the other person dies as my brother (or sister) in my arms. Against this strain in modern French thought (but without mentioning it), Marion insists that Christians, including Catholics, can seek to promote the common good only because it is already perfectly accomplished in the Trinity. Appeals to individual, group, or national virtues will get us nowhere—­or, rather, they will get us into political troubles. Only the love of the triune God will supply the condition of possibility for a shared good. The Republic’s 1. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barry­ town, NY: Station Hill Press, 1988), 11. 2. Blanchot, Unavowable Community, 11. For further analysis, see my essay “The Aggrieved Community: Nancy and Blanchot in Dialogue,” Journal for Continen­ tal Philosophy of Religion 1, no. 1 (2019): 27–­42.

Kevin Hart  J  xiii

motto—­Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité—­cannot be properly grounded in a secular politics. True, the Republic can work to ensure freedom for its citizens, and it can seek to develop equality as well for all who live under the protection of the Tricolor. But can the Republic guarantee brotherhood? The Terror might indicate that the answer must be in the negative. “In order to become brothers,” Marion says, “it is necessary to come from a father, from a common father who universally precedes each son” (25); and this common father is none other than God. It is the Father of Jesus who affirms brotherhood, for both those born in France and those who come to live there. To be sure, Catholics can supply an example of brotherhood (or, better, brotherhood and sisterhood). We do not always offer a good example, no doubt, being an ornery bunch from time to time, and with at least the usual sprinkling of bad seeds among us. And Marion’s readers must be careful not to figure the Trinity as a threesome of like-­minded individuals. Analogy is a loose-­fitting garment that bunches up when cinched too tight. Yet we are bound to look to the Trinity, love in difference, first and foremost, and our political dreams can be inspired only to the extent that they follow that vision. One thing we might ask ourselves, though, is where the figure of the neighbor is to appear in this understanding of things. The Gospel has many things to say about brotherhood, beginning with the dire warning of Matthew 2:22: “But I say to you that every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother shall be liable to the council, and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be liable to the hell of fire.” Yet a heavier accent falls on our care for the neighbor, the one who interrupts the steady horizons of our lives—­ those of class, race, ethnicity, nationality, political allegiance, and religion—­and requires our help. Phenomenology has been drawn to the Other, ever since Husserl pointed us there in the fifth of the Méditations cartésiennes (1931); it is yet to pass from the alienating word “Other” to consider the meanings brimming in the word “Neighbor.”

xiv  J foreword

A “Catholic moment” will occur in France, Marion tells us, only when there is a “universalization of the community of the French” that is “accomplished less by political means than by resources that are first and foremost spiritual” (48). Politics, yes; but never first. It is in the Catholic faith that we find the “common good” appearing the most clearly, and it appears only by dint of “the trinitarian experience of God” (68), which converges with the “unpower” of genuine authority, Christ, which has no truck with worldly power (82). This moment of accord will be realized not by mass conversions to the Church, not by Jews and Muslims, Protestants and Atheists all becoming Roman Catholic, but by the universalization of the good that Catholics cherish. If the moment that Marion commends to his fellow citizens is “catholic,” universal, it will come about only by French Catholics becoming truly Catholic.3

3. It is worth noting that Brève apologie pour un moment catholique has been well received in France, more so, interestingly, in the secular press than in the Catho­ lic media. Important notices appeared in Le Monde ( July/August 2018) and in its Des livres supplement ( June 9, 2017), Le Figaro (May 26/25, 2017 and February 5, 2018), La Libre ( June 19, 2017), Le Point (May 18, 2017), and other papers. The book was also quickly translated into Italian and released as Breve apologia per un momento cattolico (Brescia: Scholé, 2019) with an admirable preface by Salvatore Abbruzzese.

Address: The Cross without the Banner

“Be not afraid!”: this injunction proclaimed by John Paul II from the balcony of St. Peter’s immediately after his election, almost forty years ago, was intended to reinvigorate Catholics throughout the world. Today, instead, it seems that French Catholics need to repeat these words to certain French non-­Catholics who are afraid of a return of clericalism, or even to certain Catholics who are intimidated by their own very existence. I therefore say to you: “Be not afraid of us!”1 For it seems that you are afraid, or at least that you are worried, judging by the pile of declarations creating an uproar about the “return” of Catholics (but where does everyone think they had disappeared to?), and about their political choices (but why would they be the only citizens not to choose?). Not to mention those who are astonished that God is not “dead” (as if the proposition I thank those whose work inspired me and whose acribia corrected me: Mgr. Éric de Moulins-­Beaufort, Jean-­Robert Armogathe and Frédéric Louzeau, Émilie Tardivel and, of course, Corinne Marion, as ever. For any errors of judgment, I take full responsibility. 1. [The “banner” in the title refers to the elaborately embroidered cloth, containing a representation of the Emperor Constantine and his family, suspended from the horizontal bar of the labarum, the imperial military standard that incorporated the Chi-­Rho symbol atop its cross form.—­Trans.]

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had any meaning). The lack of understanding sometimes even goes to the point of absurdity or indecency, as when a candidate for President of the Republic is faulted for admitting that he is a Christian (is that a crime?), or a pope is blamed for not being truly “progressive” because, when all is said and done, he maintains dogma (isn’t that simply his duty?). This fear indeed does credit to Catholics, who don’t deserve it. After all, do you really believe that what today threatens the serenity of the French nation and the unity of the Republic is Catholics, whom the same atheist officials reproach above all for their too small numbers and their lack of conviction? Can the fantasies poured out for us by thoughtless editorials, biased investigations, and the revelations of so-­called vaticanistas really be taken seriously? It seems to me that this jumble emerges from largely imaginary sacristies, because in fact one hardly ever goes to see Catholics right there where they really are, by which I mean among celebrations and Mass, Scripture and prayer. In short, of what and of whom are you speaking when you are so busy worrying? Moreover, what do you know about them? In truth, not much, due to a lack of visits to churches (otherwise no one would be constantly repeating that the churches are all empty); due to infrequent reading of the Bible (although the search for things to be surprised about in that book continues); due to a lack of theological study (or, instead of going to de Lubac, Bouyer, and Balthasar, or Saint Augustine, searching The Da Vinci Code, which was recommended to me quite seriously one evening by a University of Chicago colleague, a professor of biochemistry and a convinced positivist, who kindly wished to disabuse me of my naive papism); and it would also be necessary, sometimes, to visit the poor, the sick, and prisoners (instead of always just talking about them). Let’s be serious when these things are brought up to us, because no one would dare to display, with such a clear conscience, his ignorance about any other subject (to stick with the essentials: not about economics, politics, literature, painting, or music, or even enology, and of course not the subject of love). Why is it allowed

Address: The Cross without the Banner  J  3

when the subject is God and the faith of Catholics? In fact, even the average Catholic should remain discreet about such things, for only the saints speak properly of God and are qualified to critique the Church and Catholics: they are not, in any case, bothered about doing it, and they do it with the greatest efficiency. Don’t be afraid of us, then; keep your fear for real threats, which are not lacking. But don’t underestimate us, either. Do not take us for halfwits or revanchists. Forget for a minute the clichés and the slogans: Catholics are not divided into potential unbelievers (good!) or identitarian integralists (not good!), into uncertain humanists (acceptable!) or militants advocating a countersociety (intolerable!). For Catholics, who more than you might expect have for a long time been either nicely or spitefully mocked, suspected, or calumnied (go ahead, frankly, you have nothing to fear), are still here. They seem almost not to have realized that while one can be Persian in France2 (and ever more so), one should no longer be able to be Catholic. This nevertheless is the subject of your astonishment and, perhaps, your problem: there still are Catholics, many more than is believed. One might even say that “they are everywhere,” and of course you all have “good Catholics” among your dearest friends, just as one has one’s poor, and the anti-­Dreyfusards often had, as Proust put it, “their Jew.” Catholics remain, even among the decent people, the intellectuals to be seen with, the respectable businessmen, the prominent artists, the politicians that count, the journalists who gossip. Not to mention the unwashed masses, who sometimes awaken, show themselves in public, and even demonstrate in the streets. Certainly not all are nasty, but overall they are a bit forward, not terribly discreet. And so the simple question should be posed: why for heaven’s sake are there still Christians and Catholics? Haven’t they understood? Wouldn’t it be more normal if, short of disappearing, they at least removed themselves from the public square, politely, as in 2. [A reference to Montesquieu’s Les Lettres persanes [The Persian Letters].—­ Trans.]

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the Scandinavian countries? Why and how have they survived, against the tide of all the nonwritten and therefore all the more constraining dogmas that one wanted to impose on them, as on everyone else? A hypothesis remains, a surprising one I admit, but the only one plausible: they must have some motives, or indeed reasons for behaving as they say they want to. And in order to know these reasons it is enough to learn something about Christ, since after all Christians (and thus Catholics as well) draw their name from Christ: “in Antioch the disciples for the first time made use of the name ‘Christians’ ” (Acts 11:26). In order to understand Catholics, it is first necessary to figure out what makes them tick: Christ. And in principle they are “always prepared to make their apology (pros apologian) to anyone who asks them the reason for the hope that is in them” (1 Peter 3:15). Everything else follows from this, their habits and customs, even their wanderings and failings. What does this apology consist of, which I would here like to sketch briefly? They firmly believe that giving is better than receiving; that self-­preservation at any cost leads to loss of oneself and, vice versa, that loss of oneself allows for saving others and oneself; that death can lead to life in its fullness. They believe this because they observe it already in their own experience, and above all because they have seen it in a certain way in the figure of Christ. Of course, they experience all of this without being able to demonstrate it from the outside to someone who remains outside of this mystery. Convincing others does not depend on them. What does depend on them, however, is to actualize effectively, in the communion of believers, what they claim to experience, or in other words to progress in holiness. They of course do not require that nonbelievers live in the way they do, but they do ask them at the very least not to forbid them from trying to practice this art of living—­which art they readily admit is paradoxical. For the question arises quite simply: what is the best way to live? Is it by possessing and preserving oneself with all of one’s strength, or by giving and abandoning oneself to the gift? “Blessed are those who, in spirit, become poor,

Address: The Cross without the Banner  J  5

because from now on the kingdom of heaven is theirs,” in the present (Matthew 5:3). At the end of history, not before, we will settle accounts. In the meantime, what is to be done with Christians in general and French Catholics in particular? They can ask for something and propose something else. They can ask (and have the right to do so, as lawful citizens) to be left in peace, since they do not disturb the public order. In other words: Yet another effort, Frenchmen, if you would become tolerant! They can make a proposal: that what they can contribute, which is in fact what they already consistently contribute to the national community in its entirety, be calmly considered. And in all domains: solidarity, education, civic life, the sense of responsibility, fidelity to private and public engagements, etc. (the list goes on). Nothing extraordinary here, it will be said, and everyone can or should so contribute. Yes, indeed. But all the difficulty lies between the indicative and the conditional: everyone should, but not everyone does. In the unremitting decadence in which we find ourselves, and into which we continue to slide (for, as we shall see, the situation is indeed one of decadence and not of crisis),3 nothing goes without saying anymore, everything becomes problematic. It is now that we must change our approach in order to prevent the dissolution of the national community. It is now that we must make an appeal to all the resources and all the strengths. Even the Catholic ones. These pages will make no other argument, and no other claim. One more thing. I hesitated to write these pages. But the ur­­ gency of the moment and the recurring debates made me decide to speak of “laicity”4 and related subjects, in texts that were first commissions imposed by circumstances. It has cost me to encroach 3. See below, pp. 20–21. 4. [“Laïcité” and related terms such as “laïcisme” and “laïc” or “laïque” are born from the particularities and peculiarities of the French situation. To preserve the connection to this particularity, we will translate them into English throughout this book by “laicity,” “laicism,” and “laical” or “laic.” It is worth noting that, with the exception of “laicity,” the first appearance in English of which the OED

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upon political philosophy (where so many estimable philosophers have gone wrong), or indeed upon political theology (the excesses of which can no longer be counted). And so I have tried hard to remain interrogative, contrary to my habits in theoretical research; but here we are dealing with practices, indeed political policies, the domain of contingency, where it is best to remain prudent, with a prudential wisdom that must avoid the categorical tone. Nevertheless, I have not shrunk back from assertions, which will sometimes appear as paradoxes. For since the paradox is often limited to expressing an unexpected truth, we must not fear it. Often, it tears us away from the hubbub that prevents us from knowing what we think and, above all, from thinking about what we say. As for the rest, I rely upon the reader’s goodwill. Paris-­Lods January 2016

dates to the early twentieth century, these words have a lengthy history of usage in English.—­Trans.]

Catholic and French

Credulous and incredulous, the lack of faith led her to laugh at those beliefs the superstition of which frightened her. Chateaubriand 1

Defining or even merely describing the situation faced today by Catholicism in French society seems, given the debate, as indispensable as it is vague and ambitious, because Catholicism is not equivalent to either Catholics or the Catholic Church, and above all because I acknowledge that I have no particular qualification to speak in the place of qualified authorities, sociologists or bishops, depending on how one approaches the question, either from the outside or from the inside. Thus I can only focus on what I know and what I, along with so many others, alike and different, can testify to myself. Though clearly it already surpasses my expertise, I will limit myself to some reflections on the role that Catholics play or ought to play in the destiny of France.

This is the revised and completed text of a lecture delivered at the solemn beginning of the school year ceremony of the Académie catholique de France (Collège des Bernardins, Paris), October 10, 2016. A first version was published in the Revue catholique internationale Communio XLI/5–­6, no. 247, September–­December 2016 (I thank the Académie’s president, Fr. Philippe Capelle-­Dumont, professor at the Université de Strasbourg, for having allowed this pre-­lecture publication). 1. François-­René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre tombe 17.2, ed. M. Le­­ vaillant and G. Moulinier (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1951), 1: 579.

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Let us take the view from on high, abstract and detached from circumstances, according to a long-­term historical perspective. Or, if one prefers, let us follow a reduction to that which truly appears. We can then argue, contrary to the official view of the press and the experts, that globally speaking, everything is going quite well for Catholics. Today, indeed, we have only one perfectly respectable and respected pope to recognize; we confess one Credo (and all understand it in just about the same way), our bishops (who vary in quality as much as we do) are duly named by Rome, and, officially at least, few declared schisms divide us. Moreover, we generally enjoy civil peace, with an adequate level of religious freedom, tempered by some prospects of martyrdom (which may frighten but should not distress us—­on the contrary). Of course, there remains a very negative item, in France at least (and in western Europe): the steady fall in the number of priests, substantiated by that of the baptized and the practicing. And yet this fact calls for three corrections. First, things were far worse in the past, when all clergy worthy of the name had disappeared from entire regions. And in relation to which era is the comparison to be made? How do we identify a hallowed period of reference? The tenth century? The fifteenth? The early seventeenth century, after the so-­called Wars of Religion? The beginning of the nineteenth century, after the French Revolution and the Empire, under the Restoration? Clearly, a little reflection shows us that none of these fits the bill, and that each was problematic, difficult, or even catastrophic. Next: after having so often and for so long, and sometimes so rightly, criticized the situations of elevated religious practice as commitments of mere propriety, rites that are merely social, and worship that is strictly civic, it seems curious today to make them the ideal that we have to reestablish, a norm by which to gage our state of affairs. It would be bad form to deplore living today, during a time in which religious practice implies a strong and thoughtful

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conviction; and I am surprised to observe this nostalgia not only among former Catholics, but even among longtime anticlericals. Finally, this variation in practice and vocations has neutral and sociological causes: first of all, the transfers of population, moving from the country to the cities (a recent change, taking place since the end of the Second World War); from which it follows that the visible presence of Catholics has moved into urban concentrations; and so while the supposed dechristianization of the countryside reflects first and foremost its depopulation, urban rechristianization varies largely according to the rebuilding, or not, of new social solidarities. This upheaval leads to a profound modification in the recruitment and formation of future priests, who are henceforth urban and of a more advanced sociocultural level and age, which runs counter to the large-­scale seminaries, especially the rural ones (described sarcastically by Stendhal). To this we must add the principal difficulty, formidable and growing each day: how can one still have the strength to undertake priesthood for life, totally devoted to serving others, with the three commitments of poverty, obedience, and celibacy? One can of course say the same of the commitment to an irreversible and sole marriage, in a world obsessed by the realization of subjective desires, where only the provisional remains constant. In short, the principal difficulty encountered by Catholics reflects above all that of the society as a whole—­and how could it be otherwise? At this level of analysis, we must simply conclude that Catholics make up, in France, a minority group, but by far the largest (comprising, through good times and bad, more than 60 percent of French people) and the most coherent, yet very diverse. In an overall fairly tight harmony with the Protestant, Orthodox, and Anglican communities, as much through their own institutions (schools, universities, various professional forms of training, hospitals and medical services, media, etc.) as through their role in state institutions as well as their economic, political, judicial, military, university (and so on) responsibilities, and thus in the entire

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intellectual sphere and the public debate, Catholics maintain a visible and unavoidable Christian presence. The incessant, obstinate, and absurd efforts of some to confine Catholicism to the private sphere proves a contrario that it occupies the public square de facto. Moreover, Catholicism’s usual opponents endlessly contradict themselves by objecting to the bishops, first, that “You no longer have anyone in your churches,” and then in turn that “You order your troops into the streets.” The first affirmation proves above all that they do not go to Mass on Sundays, and the second that there really do remain some “divisions,” even outside the Vatican.2 Let us sum up the situation with a significant number: of the 42,250 churches in France, the great majority property of the state and of the municipalities since 1905, only 255 have been sold or deconsecrated since 1905 (and how many have been built?).3 What some refuse to say, the stones themselves, for once, speak for them: at the center of society in France, we find Catholics. And when someone assassinates a priest during the liturgy, it is the Communist mayor of the town who finds the most fitting words to speak of things as they must be spoken of.4 How do we explain this enduring persistence? I’ll put forward an argument that is also perhaps obvious. While the whole society, in all its components, finds itself and recognizes itself to be mired in what it itself calls a “crisis” (of the political class and of the democratic representativeness of the so-­called elites, of justice, of the schools, of the globalized and financialized economy, of the defense of the nation and its borders, in short of all the sovereign 2. [A reference to the question supposedly asked by Stalin during World War II: “The Pope? How many divisions does he have?”—­Trans.] 3. Conference of the bishops of France, quoted in Paris Notre-­Dame, no. 1637 (September 22, 2016): 11. 4. [A reference to the July 26, 2016 murder of Fr. Jacques Hamel, age 86, by two French jihadists, while he celebrated Mass in the town of Saint-­Étienne-­du-­ Rouvray, in the Archdiocese of Rouen. Quotations from the Communist mayor’s speech can be read at http://www.leparisien.fr/faits-­divers/saint-­etienne-­du -­rouvray-­hommage-­solennel-­de-­toute-­une-­ville-­au-­pere-­hamel-­a-­partir-­de-­18-­heures -­28-­07-­2016-­6 001429.php.—­Trans.]

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prerogatives of the state, but also of mass permanent unemployment, of the inequalities and the structural deficit of social solidarity as well as that of the health system, and so on), that is to say when this society is no longer able to reform itself, the Church, for its part, never stops questioning itself, discussing and reforming itself, not simply out of a morbid inclination to self-­criticism, but first of all by vocation and according to internal demands. It reforms itself and must do so because it is intrinsic to the Church to conform itself to the incommensurable call that gives rise to it—­Ecclesia semper reformanda. The imitation of Christ implies a permanent reform.5 Thus it well may be that the Catholic Church is the sole institution in French society that is not in crisis. Before rejecting this apparent paradox, let us examine why it seems, at first sight, so strange to us. In other words, why do we remain so profoundly pessimistic, so convinced of our decadence? After all, we’re not talking about a patent fact, and there’s nothing universal about it: the expansion of the Church in the world is beyond argument, increasing in number at a greater rate than the worldwide population. Except in Europe, except in France, goes the objection. But what reason should be given for this exception? It could be that our pessimism is seated not so much in the objective consideration of the situation as in the power of our nostalgia.6

5. Incidents of pedophilia do not affect the clergy alone, but also the entire world of education, of sports, of the media, etc. We’re still waiting for the corre­ sponding institutions to raise the taboo, break the silence, recognize the faults and crimes—­in short, amend themselves as much as the Catholic clergy continues to do, at every level. 6. Here let’s stick to the nostalgia and the traumas of the community of French Catholics. But there would be much to say as well about the wound that the shameful collapse of those governing in June 1940 still constitutes today for French historical memory taken as a whole. Each failure, each difficulty encountered since then appears in the shadow borne by this rupture, and the reestablishment of the nation’s confidence in itself remains very fragile. Even, and indeed above all, the new beginning accomplished by De Gaulle after 1958 remains under this cloud. Because they have so disappointed themselves, the French still do not like themselves very much.

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We succumb to the weight of our destiny as “elder daughter of the Church.”7 Or more precisely, to the weight of a fantasy—­that of a period, in fact indeterminate and imagined by each as he pleases, wherein the French nation would be wholly identified with the Christian faith and thus the Catholic Church. Or even worse, to the weight of the illusion that this situation remains the ideal and should thus become present once again. More precisely again: that if this situation is not reestablished, we would have on our hands a failure of the Church in its entirety, or even a disappearance of the faith, which, for certain people, goes so far as to put into question the truth itself of Christ. From this there flows, at least since the Revolution, the Catholic obsession with “remaking our brothers Christians,”8 or in other words, with the Church becoming in France once again the majority, if not hegemonic. This fantasy would have remained an illusion, inoffensive in appearance, if it had remained virtual or else unachievable; however, it must be acknowledged that this was not the case. In the name of a similar realism—­it matters little whether it be justified by the “sense of history,” or by the rallying cry “Politics first!,”9 for what is always at issue in realism is the “good sense of the bastards” (Bernanos)10—­numerous 7. As is known (or not), this expression was used for the first time with reference to France by Lacordaire, preaching at Notre-­Dame on February 14, 1841; before that, it had to do either with the king of France, elder son of the Church (in the sense of the papacy), or, literally, with Catherine de Medici (Pope Clement VII’s niece), who received the salutation of “very Christian queen and elder daughter of the Church, figliuola primogenita” from the nuncio Prospero de Santa Croce in 1564. Its modern use thus remains an approximation, inspired by the political circumstances of the period. See O. Chaline, “Du ‘fils aîné’ à la ‘fille aînée de l’Église,’ ” Revue catholique internationale Communio XXI/3, no. 125 (May–­June 1996). 8. [A line from a hymn from the 1930s (“refaire chrétiens nos frères”) that is frequently taken to sum up well the Church’s efforts, especially during the interwar period, to encourage Catholic associations such as Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne ( JOC), part of Action Catholique, to reevangelize French society.—­Trans.] 9. [A slogan of Charles Maurras (1868–­1952), a reactionary author, politician, and the leader of the nationalist group Action Française.—­Trans.] 10. [Georges Bernanos, La France contre les robots (1947), in Essais et écrits de combat, ed. Michel Estève, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1995), 977.—­Trans.]

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Catholics since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century up until Vatican II (or even beyond) took this fantasy seriously and agreed to pay the price for doing so: the rechristianization of France had to pass through an alliance with the dominant political forces, or those bound to become so, and at any cost. And this compromise had to go to the point of compromise with what is fundamental—­with the theoretical atheism of Marxism or of the Action Française, or an alliance with authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, or the acceptance of the exclusive criterion of technological power (whether economic, or military, or both), always by confusing apostolate with militancy. In fact, under the cover of “promoting earthly realities,” of recognizing the “autonomy of the political,” of “opening oneself to the world,” or of accepting a “new world order,” a large part of French Catholicism, from the parish-­ level pastoral operation to high dogmatic theology, was subject to the temptation of such compromise. And, sometimes, gave into it. French Catholics didn’t merely dabble in this game; many made an at least implicit, but always unilateral and thus illusory, contract, either on the left with the Communist Party, or on the right with the Révolution nationale.11 This was not only a double political failure, but above all a double Christian failure: Gaston Fessard and Georges Bernanos (and then Maurice Clavel and Jean-­Marie Lustiger) in their times said what needed to be said about these twin and rival disasters. Today, it is time that we French Catholics take the measure of our responsibilities, past and to come. And that we finally ask forgiveness of the universal Church for, more than others, having inoculated it with its two most recent heresies—­integralism and progressivism—­ each of which, in recent moments, has nearly led to a schism, in France and elsewhere. Well do I know that Mgr. Decourtray12 was 11. [La Révolution nationale was the name of the Vichy regime’s ideological program.—­Trans.] 12. [Albert Decourtray (1923–­1994) was archbishop of Lyon; from 1981 to 1990 he was vice president and then president of the French Conference of Bishops.

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blamed for having called these compromises by their name, not quite thirty years ago; but today can we reasonably avoid making the least examination of conscience? Will we French Catholics finally leave behind our dead-­ends and our fantasies? What do we have to bring that is truly Christian to the Christendom of today? What are we making of the promises of our baptism, beyond our bad conscience and its old poisons? What is to be done? First we have to exit the dilemma that the political analysts and sociologists of religion have promised in the past, promise now, and will continue to promise us: namely, that either Catholics must adapt in order to survive, and will disappear, diluted into the common, single model; or they must continue in their state of marginality, and likewise disappear as insignificant minorities. And yet, there remains another possibility: the universality that Catholics alone can occupy, as a particular and inalienable responsibility—­in other words, they can take a truly catholic position. For, as Hans Urs von Balthasar recalled, “Catholic is a quality.”13 But that outcome can be imagined only if we first modify rather radically the criteria and categories of judgment, and then verify that we have made a correct identification of the crisis itself. Let’s start with the criteria and categories. A first remark is called for: who is able to judge the low point of Christian faith, particularly in a country like France? What validity should be attributed to objective criteria (because, whether quantitative or qualitative, they all remain objective), the sole criteria that sociology can legitimately use? By what acts, or according to what visible and exterior behaviors, do we gauge a man’s relation to God? Who knows how to discern between the practicing Catholic of little belief, the believer He was created cardinal in 1985, and in 1993 elected a member of the Académie Française.—­Trans.] 13. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Catholique est une qualité (Paris: Fayard, 1976); English trans., In the Fullness of Faith: On the Centrality of the Distinctively Catholic (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988).

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who practices intermittently, the self-­titled or obsessed unbeliever, and the pure atheist (supposing that such a purity even has meaning)? No one can make this discernment, for at least three compelling reasons. First that of Sophocles: no one can judge a man’s life before he is dead. Then that of Saint Augustine: I myself don’t know if, when, and to what extent I will myself to love God. And that of Christ: there is only one judgment, but it falls to the Father and comes in the final instance, at the extreme of his patience, in a season and at an hour that it does not belong to us to know; for if there is to be a Judgment, at the very least we know that it is not for us to pronounce it, or above all to anticipate it. The secrets of the heart, even those of our fellow citizens, do not concern us. We must behave as if we know nothing of them, for we in fact cannot know them, and rightly must not. It is a fundamental rule of pastoral practice, where, as useless servants, we sow what we will not reap and reap what we did not sow. A second remark follows: what would it signify for Catholics to constitute (once again, or rather for the first time) a majority in France? What would it mean for the Church to succeed? To establish a Christian kingdom on earth? To found a Jerusalem rising from the earth rather than descending from the heavens? To in­­ tegrate the spiritual order and the natural order into a perfect “symphony”? Formulating these questions is enough to see their manifest theological inadequacy, and to be compelled to denounce the idols and blasphemies they contain. After all, Christ himself did not succeed in this sense; and this was because he never wanted to. What is more, he denounced this too human and too political “restoration of the kingdom of Israel” (Acts 1:6) as the temptation and misinterpretation most contrary to the proclamation that “the Kingdom of God is near to you, is among you” (Luke 10:9, 11). Would we be greater than our master ( John 13:16)? What do we will, what do we hope for in the end—­his will, or ours? We can add a final remark: Are we first and foremost the ones in charge of the salvation of the Church, of its growth, its power, its

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efficaciousness, its improvement? Doesn’t Christ himself take care of that? Of course, he does so by asking each one of us to reform ourselves, that is to say, to convert to the life of the Spirit. And of course, he promised his Church that the gates of Hell would not prevail against it. But he never guaranteed it would become a majority, or dominant in the world: he only asked it to pass through the same experience of the cross by which he gained the Resurrection. The Church shouldn’t even be our primary concern, at least in the sense of the Church as a human society among others in the world (even though we, like everyone else, observe that it alone continues through the centuries, always the same and always new, always faltering and persecuted, but indestructible, as promised). Indeed, what we have legitimately to be concerned about above all is not the Church, but what it makes possible, and that from which it comes: the life given by “the Spirit, poured out in our hearts” (Romans 5:5). For after all, the believer who is serious and practicing the faith forgets to occupy himself with the reform of ecclesiastical institutions (a task that he willingly leaves to workers who specialize in domestic repairs). The Church matters to the rank and file of the baptized only in the way the distribution of water matters to the resident of a city: as long as the water of the Spirit that I must drink always flows through its channels, as long as the system for dispensing the sacraments gives me the life of the Spirit, my first concern remains to drink, and not to remake the water conveyance system. I leave this system to specialists who devote themselves to its maintenance, which is indispensable and endless, but secondary. I remain the user, the beneficiary, and in the end the sole judge of these reforms (whence there arises an ecumenism of practical spiritual results among the “churches”). Who am I, after all, to claim to reform the Church? Who am I even to criticize it? I would have to be more lucid, courageous, and ultimately more holy than it if I were to do so. So then either I must be quiet, or I must act as a saint. The saints alone reform the Church, but by edifying it, not by taking it over, or by governing

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it. “Whenever the Church becomes too involved in politics, it is no longer bringing forth enough saints.”14 A field hospital, to use Pope Francis’s fitting expression: on its wounded the Church thus practices frontline, emergency medicine. Or a refugee camp, sheltering survivors in the mud and under tents. But one can survive in any old temporary shelter. Only Christ knows the state of his Church, and it is even the Father’s secret to know who those are that Christ received and didn’t lose ( John 17:12). The members of the Church are not the ones to know the state of the Church, or even the Church in its entirety. All they have is access, in the Church that they cannot see, to the knowledge of Christ and, through him, to the Father in the life of the Spirit. Since we are speaking about the Church, the Catholic Church, which stands as catholic before a society that is not (and which probably will not become so in the future any more than it ever was in the past), we should probably, if only in passing, take seriously the paradoxes that define it as societas perfecta, a sign of contradiction among the nations, in order to know what we are talking about when we talk about it. What is surprising is not that the Church appears by all evidence imperfect: it is, after all, composed of sinners, gathered even at the crossroads, from among the garbage dumps, and in the slums. It also knows better than anyone that it contains nothing other than those sick unto death, those wounded by life, those who are vacillating sinners, yet stubborn. The astonishing, real surprise lies in the fact that it turns like a washing machine washing dirty laundry, a business that turns crooks into saints, more dazzling than any fuller on earth could whiten them, and from which they will go 14. Georges Bernanos, Lettre aux Anglais, in Essais et écrits de combat, ed. Michel Estève, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1995), 126; English trans., Georges Bernanos, Plea for Liberty: Letters to the English, the Americans, the Europeans, trans. Harry Lorin Binsse (New York: Pantheon Books, 1944), 180 (trans. modified).

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to fill the balconies of Heaven. It is the only machine that makes gods, or more precisely, that makes saints, a machine never before seen on earth. And this is because it is not a machine but the living Body of Christ. Many among men, and even a part of each one among us, condemn the Church, or at least criticize it. Why is that? Deep down, the issue is not reproach for its past history but the fact that as silent as it seems to remain, the Church reproves the customs or the decisions that disrupt or even prevent the hearing of the Gospel and access to the life of the Spirit. Under the glaring light of this veritas redarguens, nothing is more normal than that a majority in every society, ourselves included, ceaselessly clamors for the Church to evolve and “adapt,” for it finally to end up approving our habits, in short for it to leave us in peace with our evils and the words we use to justify them. And if the Church refuses, as it cannot but do, the majority protests; but with a contradictory protestation, since it thus acknowledges an in fact inordinate importance in the judgment of an institution that it nevertheless claims to impugn and hold as null and void. The Church cannot “change with the times” because it cannot change anything about what happens to it, about the call that summons and stirs it.15 On the contrary the Church’s only ambition must be to change the world of its time, without ever knowing with what success, since that is not in its power. It is, however, solely up to the Church to improve its response, not to the complaints of the world, but to the initial and final word that 15. As Alexandre Vialatte explains: “Catholic by definition. Just as the circumference is, by definition, the geometric site of the points of a plane equidistant from a single point. If any one of these points is displaced, there is no longer any circumference. If a single dogma is modified, there is no longer any Catholicism. Rather, there is schism or heresy. By definition. The pope cannot change anything, without becoming at the same time pope and anti-­pope, the head of the Church and its fifth column; it is impossible for him to say, ‘Catholics, I have understood you.’ It is impossible for him to make a circumference that is not round. Nevertheless this is what is suggested by the improper use of the word ‘religion.’ And this is also what many people desire.” “La religion veut entrer dans un cercle carré,” Dernières nouvelles de l’homme (Paris: Juillard, 1978; Pocket, 1996), 160.

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Christ puts forth. The Church can change nothing of what makes it possible without thereby breaking down and dying on the vine (or rather dying apart from the vine that nourishes it) ( John 15:4). The only thing that it can and must change is itself, in order to remain and become, in each era and in each place, the same and unique access to Christ. This one time, Claudel is wrong: in the case of the Church, it is necessary for everything to change so that everything can remain the same. The Church can change the face of the world only by remaining itself. But it can remain itself only by changing itself (allowing itself to be changed) from generation to generation in accord with the call that it constantly receives. We now come to the identification of the crisis that French Ca­tholics must confront. In fact, the issue is to confront an appearance of crisis with another crisis that is real because crucial. Before we start speaking too quickly of a “crisis of the Church,” it makes sense to recognize the obvious: that there is a crisis in the greater part of French society, a crisis that affects, as we said earlier, almost all the groups that make it up. But the true and the most worrisome phenomenon is located elsewhere: when the crisis becomes a state that extends to most of the social body, as is today the case ever since what we call the “first oil shock” of 1974 and the end of the “Trente Glorieuses”;16 when from decade to decade the focus is on “managing the crisis”; when the crisis becomes the sole object of management and no longer the opportunity for a decision; when the political power reveals its powerlessness and its uselessness, because, dispossessed of any power and completely hemmed in, it can only repeat that “there is no other choice,” that there is only one policy possible. In short, when the political power appears as an impotent fraud and it can’t help but tell the people that this is so by making them pay the ever greater price of its failure, then we are dealing no longer with a crisis but with decadence. We in 16. [The thirty years of economic growth in France following the end of  World War II.—­Trans.]

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France and in Europe are not living a crisis, but rather enduring our powerlessness to enter into a crisis or to exit from one at the price of a decision. The issue then is not at all a crisis, but an absence of crisis, a much more worrisome crisis of crisis. There hasn’t been a crisis for forty years, if crisis means the moment when it becomes possible and therefore necessary to exit from calcified powerlessness and endless conflict through an inaugural decision. For forty years, we have suffered through the lies of repeated slogans: no, no one is at the helm, no, we don’t change life, no, change is never now, no, nothing at all is possible for us because we are not united.17 We are not falling into the abyss, we are suffocating from a stagnant decadence. By contrast, we now understand better why the Church, even in France, is not “in crisis,” in the sense constantly repeated by the wise, the experts, and the politicians: because the Church, and perhaps she alone among all the communities of the nation, finds herself still and ever the beneficiary of the grace of encountering a “true crisis”: “You judge (krinēte, you put yourselves into crisis) according to the flesh, but I judge no one. And when I do judge (krinō, I put into crisis), my crisis is the true crisis (hē emē krisis alēthinē estin), for I am not alone, but I [I am] with him who sent me” ( John 8:15–­16). Let us understand this well: Christ gratifies us with a “true crisis”—­not an apparent crisis, according to the flesh, such as is envisaged by the world, such as would lead only to the (not even) eternal repetitive return of the same—­but a crisis in which we can make up our minds once and for all (which of course does not release us from repeatedly doing so, like our daily bread), where it depends only on us to respond to the vocation of a son of the Father in the life of the Spirit. This crucial crisis restores our 17. [Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s 1974 presidential slogan was “Giscard à la barre”; “Changeons la vie” was a line in a Socialist Party anthem in the late 1970s and became associated with François Mitterand’s presidential race in 1981; François Hollande’s 2012 presidential election slogan was “Le changement, c’est mainte­ nant”; in 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy adopted the presidential slogan “Ensemble tout devient possible.”—­Trans.]

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freedom by giving it the opportunity at last to do what it wills, that is to say what spontaneously it does not will, because it believes it cannot do so: become the efficacious cause of a change (metanoia, conversion) through the sole strength of thought (to take up a definition of free will offered by Kant). The Christian attains to nothing less, by the “true crisis,” than this freedom that Bernanos used to call honor, and that comes only from God. For no man is sufficient to honor another man (they each know this quite well in proportion as they exchange honors, which they believe in less and less). For in order truly to honor a man, nothing less than God is necessary. We thus understand better that the Church, even in France, can appear as the only society that is not “in crisis,” because it can practice freely its “true crisis” by deciding over and over again (semper reformanda) in favor of Christ. And it can do so, and thus must do so, precisely because it alone (in contrast to other social groups) does not have to claim to be healthy and strong in order to succeed in doing so, precisely composed as it is of the weak and the sick, but with weakness and sickness in which grace abounds. For to whom can grace be given superabundantly, if not to those who know that they lack it? As the place where the “true crisis” finally becomes possible, the Church thus enjoys an uncommon privilege in a society without access to the least crisis and that has settled into decadence. But can the Church nevertheless serve this society, or be of any usefulness to it? Does it not find itself set apart, engaged in a purely spiritual process, without social or societal efficacy, certainly of a different order, but of an order that the world neither can nor wishes to consider seriously? Two considerations must be made here, one theological, the other political. The theological consideration emerges from Saint Augustine’s meditation on the fall of the Roman Empire. The entire City of God arises out of the problem, decisive at the time, of the causes that one could assign to the sack of Rome by the hordes of Alaric in 410: was it not the Christians, declared atheists with regard to

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the gods of the city, who provoked the gods’ departure, the end of their protection, and thus ultimately the ruin of Rome? Saint Augustine responds to this accusation of the “death of the gods” (the inverse of that which afflicts us today as the “death of God”) by overturning the problematic: Rome collapsed not because its gods abandoned it or because God deserted it, but owing to its original weakness, that of having never succeeded in forming itself into a real res publica. This is because such a political community, even a national one, can only constitute itself on the basis of a summa justitia, of a union in the most supreme justice. Without this justice, there are only bands of robbers (Remota itaque justitia, quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia?).18 Indeed, to make a people it is not enough to have an “assembly of a multitude (coetus mul­ titudinis)”; what is required is “an assembly associated through a consensus on what is right and a communion of utility (coetus juris consensu et utilitatis communione sociatus).” Now, as even Cicero and Sallust avow in the diagnoses they were already making at the end of the Republic and during its transition into Empire, Rome never achieved the rank of a res publica: “Not only was the Roman republic the worst and the most shameful thing, but . . . , according to this definition, it quite simply had ceased to be one at all (sed omnino nulla erat secundum istam rationem).” For, contrary to all Machiavellian cynicism before its time, “Not only is it false that a res publica cannot be governed without injustice, it is absolutely true that it cannot be governed without the most supreme justice (hoc verissimum esse, sine summa justitia rem publicam regi

18. Saint Augustine, De Civitate Dei 4.4 (Paris: Bibliothèque Augustinienne, 1953), 33: 540; English trans., Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 147–­48 (trans. modified). Or, as Kant will say, a “people comprised of devils” (Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf, Supplement I, Ak. A. VIII, p. 366; English trans., To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, trans. Ted Humphrey [Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003], 23).

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non posse).”19 Rome cannot complain of having disappeared as a res publica, because, with or without its gods, with or without its virtues, it never truly was one, owing to its constant lack, even in its apparently virtuous beginnings, of the summa justitia. This consequence, which in its radicality certainly may surprise us, goes without saying for Saint Augustine: only a society united according to true justice (consensus on what is right and communion of utility) is worthy of the title of res publica, and only Christians respond to this double requirement. Thus the City of God constitutes in the strict sense the only possible, accomplished, and actual city; as for the earthly city, which is impossible through its own (unjust) means, it remains a pious (or impious, as you like) wish. What we’re talking about here is not some kind of “political Augustinianism,” but rather the resumption of the classic argumentation provided by the first Fathers, the apologists. Thus Justin, playing on alliterations, defined Christians, the christianoi, as those who show themselves in fact to be the most useful citizens, chrestotatoi,20 not only through their work and their civic loyalty, which in fact ensure an essential part of the well-­being of the entire earthly city, but because they act in this way out of conscious concern for justice, indeed because of a fervent desire to receive it from God himself. This is described perfectly in the Letter to Diognetus: “For the distinction between Christians and other men, is neither in country nor language nor clothing. For they do not dwell in cities in some place of their own, nor do they use any strange variety of dialect, nor practise an extraordinary kind of life. . . . Yet while living in Greek and barbarian cities, according as each obtained his lot, and following the local customs, both in clothing and food 19. De Civitate Dei 2.21; Bibliothèque Augustinienne, 33: 372–­74; English trans., 76–­78 (trans. modified). 20. Justin, Apologie pour les chrétiens 1.4.1, ed. Charles Munier (Paris: Le Cerf “Sources chrétiennes,” no. 507, 2006), 132. See the orchestration of the same argument by Tertullian, for example in his Apologeticum, 38, ed. J.-­P. Waltzing (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1929, 2003), 79 and following.

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and in the rest of  life, they show forth the wonderful character of the constitution of their citizenship (thaumastē katastasis tēs heautōn politeias), which everyone confesses is paradoxical (homolougo­ menôs paradoxos).”21 It is, then (this is the essential paradox) the citizens of the heavenly city who maintain alive and in functioning order the efforts of every earthly city despite their structural failings in terms of justice. Because the grace of God gives Christians access to justice, they alone can uphold, always only partially, but always effectively, earthly cities to which they nevertheless do not fundamentally belong. Not belonging to the political life of a city is precisely what allows partial contribution to its justice, and thus to its relatively common good. As Tertullian put it: “But for us all glory and every desire for fame and position leaves us cold; we have no need to belong to any party (coetus) nor is there anything more foreign to us than affairs of state (nec ulla magis res aliena quam publica). We recognize only one single res publica, the world.”22 Politics, yes, but never “first”; rather, always as a consequence of the demand for justice and for communion. Now we can look into the political consideration. In what way would Catholics render a service to a particular society, in this case French society, on the basis of the universality of their origin, which is the gift of God’s charity? Answer: by contributing to communion they contribute in a way that is properly catho­ lic to the foundation of the French res publica. There are several examples. 21. À Diognète 5.1–­4, ed. H.-­I. Marrou (Paris: Le Cerf “Sources chrétiennes” no. 33bis, 1951, 2005), 62; English trans., The Apostolic Fathers, trans. Kirsopp Lake (London: William Heinemann, Loeb Classical Library, 1924), 2: 359 (trans. modified). 22. Tertullian, Apologeticum 38.3; ed. Waltzing, 81; English trans., Tertullian’s Defense of the Christians Against the Heathen, trans. Alexander Souter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917): http://www.tertullian.org/articles/mayor _apologeticum/mayor_apologeticum_07translation.htm (trans. modified).

Catholic and French  J  25

Let’s consider the motto of the Republic: “Liberté, égalité, fra­ ternité (Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood).”23 One imagines that the Republic is able to ensure liberty to French society; probably within limits, those imposed by the guarantee of security and public order, as well as those brought about by the spontaneous authoritarianism of the state; and it will always doubtless be a question of some freedoms, rather than liberty itself, and of freedoms as multiple as they are purely formal, and therefore potentially contradictory among themselves. But let’s agree that the Republic can fulfill, at least partially, the first promise contained in its motto. One can also agree that the Republic is able to develop equality within French society, albeit not without evident difficulties. If we are talking about actual economic equality, this promotion, aside from the fact that it will probably, inevitably, bring about an overall economic impoverishment, can become operative only through constraint, to the point of risking the contradiction of the establishment of liberty. If only formal equality is at stake, it will soon seem abstract, even illusory, exacerbating the feeling of inequality. But for the sake of argument, let’s accept that the Republic succeeds, even if only tangentially, in enforcing a certain equality in French society. There remains brotherhood. How can the state, even and above all in the form of the Republic, which does not recognize even the least god (nor of course its earthly representative, the king)—­how can the state claim to guarantee fraternity? In order to become brothers, it is necessary to come from a father, from a common father who universally precedes each son. The common will, because it results from the majority, cannot guarantee brotherhood. The general will, if it can ever occur, should precede the gathering of the national community and impose itself as 23. The origin of this formula seems to go back to a Catholic theologian, Fénelon. See Mona Ozouf, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” in Les Lieux de la mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, Collection Quarto, 1997), 4356.

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from the outside; but this political miracle is never, or hardly ever, realized—­only at best for short historical moments. The fatherland can, at best, appear only as a motherland, and sometimes a mere stepmother, but always, according to the expression of Roman law, a certain mother [Mater semper certa est], which allows for uncertain fathers. How could we have the strength to consider all of our fellow citizens (without even mentioning all those who have immigrated from other nations) without exception as our brothers, if there is no fundamentally common father to allow it? How could we avoid giving in to the banishment of our interior enemies, whether actual or supposed, or decreeing a law of suspects? Or in short, how would we avoid purging the social body of its averred or potential traitors? Didn’t we carry out the Terror as soon as we promulgated brotherhood? Do we not conceive it exactly for the purpose of excluding false brothers? In order for an inchoate but true brotherhood to become practicable, nothing less than a radical, unconditioned, and imprescriptible paternity is necessary, “before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named” (Ephesians 3:14–­15). The only Father conceivable who can ensure a just and actual brotherhood, because it ensures union in communion, is found in heaven; only from there can he come to earth. Clearly, the Republic cannot include this either in its motto or in its constitution.24 But Catholics can witness to this paternity in a society of orphans.

24. Without a doubt one could identify the same lack of completeness in other mottos, rival to that of the French Republic. For instance, the Bolshevik motto of 1917: it can probably promise land or bread, but certainly not peace, whether exterior or interior. Similarly, the motto of the “French State” of Vichy could impose work (forced, in fact) and lay claim to the family (understood racially, which is to say in a corrupted manner), but surely it could not invoke the fatherland (occupied and thus wiped out). Even the American Constitution went too far by beginning, “We the People . . . ,” since the unity of this people was from the outset compromised by silence with regard to the question of slavery. And perhaps the United Kingdom assumes with a bit too much optimism the legitimacy of its adjective.

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Let’s consider laicity next. Spoken of à la française since it remains imprecise in its definition and even in its signification (the legislature constantly runs into contradictions each time it attempts to clarify the implementation decrees, to the point of giving up on applying them most of the time), laicity belongs to the “values of the Republic.” Like all values, this one draws its validity not from itself but from authority or the pressure groups that support it through force or ideology—­the characteristic situation of nihilism, where nothing subsists but values, evaluated by the indistinct will to power, which alone is real. The Republic invokes laicity only because it does not control it, and it does not control it because it does not understand it. Now then, a fact should make us reflect: the current weakness of laicity results from the irruption into French society of an old but recently revitalized guest, Islam. As long as the issue was only the Catholic Church (and the Protestant Churches and Judaism, as well), laicity, despite its violent imposition in 1905, had established a relative peace in the old land of the Wars of Religion, to which in a sense this law brought closure. It is enough to bring these two observations into relation to see two obvious facts. First, that the state must remain neutral (“laical”) precisely and all the more as society is neither neutral nor laicized. Even if this distresses the partisans of laicity conceived as an official (non)religion, or even as the last civic religion, the patent “social fact” is in our day no longer found in that old Enlightenment ambition, the secularization of social space, but rather in its brutal desecularization (whether by the pressure of religious movements, or through the resacralization of ideological idols). Instead of getting stuck in fuzzy notions like “religions” (after all, according to which common criteria can one bring together such heterogeneous realities?), or the “return of the sacred” (as if it had ever disappeared), or the “death of God” (without seeing that it signals simply another mode of the presence of God), it would be wiser to speak of an anathe­ ism: a reversal (ana-­theism) of the question of God through and

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by taking into account atheism, moving beyond it (an-­atheism) without forgetting it.25 So alarmed because they had imagined their modernity according to the opposite hypothesis, our European societies have discovered what all the other societies notice with little surprise: the death of the “death of God”; or the fact that the question of God survived the “death of God.” The nuclear explosion of the “death of God” continues without end from response to response: first the death of idols, then the death of man, and at last the “death of the death of God.” This apocalypse, which is called nihilism, will last two centuries, Nietzsche announced. Trust him: we have just passed the first century, and have another one to go. This business will not be settled by improvised laws, or administrative rules, or censures or ineffective repressions. Rather the Republic must accept the facts and let believers (and unbelievers) confront freely the test of anatheism, and find the balances as needed to maintain a political community amidst fundamental religious divergences. It is also necessary that Catholics be in the forefront of this debate. The second observation is that in the debate on what laicity could mean positively, not only are Catholics not opposed to the society managed by the Republic, but they appear within it as the best or indeed the only reliable allies. For if, unlike certain Muslims, they do not reject the law of 1905, this is due to the fact that the distinction between the political and the religious authorities was established, for the first time in history and in contradiction to all the empires and all the ancient cities, by the chosen people of the Bible. The First Book of Samuel (in particular chapter 8) offers two versions of the establishment of royalty in Israel, one positive, the other negative, debating the question as to whether the Jewish people must have a king, “like all the nations,” or if God alone holds the place of king. The solution lay in granting to the political power no religious dignity whatsoever by reserving it for 25. Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God after God (New York: Columbian University Press, 2009).

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the high priest, and by separating the high priest from the king (and even by counterbalancing the high priest and the king with the prophets). The New Testament, the Fathers, and the entire history of the Church attest to this separation, which regularly led to confrontation between Christians (often through the bishops as intermediaries, above all through the bishop of Rome) and the emperor, then the kings, and finally the modern states and the totalitarian regimes. No political society can ensure such a desacralization of the political, since they all (including the contemporary democracies) irresistibly aspire to being made sacred, and indeed to rendering things sacred. It is up to Christians (to highly variable degrees) to do their best, with all their energy, to counter these pretensions and to establish themselves, for their own sake, the separation of powers. To the point that today, laicity (or more exactly, separation) is present the world over only to the extent that each nation was, or was not, Christianized. And if separation today is threatened in France, that is the result precisely of the entry into the public square of an essentially non-­Christian religion that has no experience of this separation. As a result, the future of the coexistence of different religions within the laical frame of French society depends on the relation of strength and of dialogue between Catholics (as well as Protestants and Jews) on the one hand, and Muslims on the other. The state can help make this disputatio possible and peaceful, but it can neither lead it nor even participate in it as a qualified interlocutor. Once again, it is Catholics who will have to come forward to speak out.26 Of course, one can invoke “the soul of France,” even if hardly anyone believes anymore in the reality of his own soul. But if, as 26. One could continue with other examples. The most obvious: the European Union will first be spiritual, or it will no longer be; the attempts to define it according to economic criteria all end in the failure that we know so well, and they cannot resist national (indeed nationalist) affirmations, or hegemonic temptations (from the interior or the exterior). We can no longer seek the political fruits (as well as the weeds) of the Union without recognizing the biblical and other roots from which they ripen!

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someone with political responsibility, one takes this risk, it is nec­ essary to measure what one says and above all what one cannot say. Only Christians, and first of all Catholics, can put their souls into play in the French community, because they alone know what it is to give their soul in order to give a communion to a community that, without them, would no longer be one and indivisible. It could be that, contrary to every expectation and all the predictions of the wise, the experts, and the supposed elites, we are heading into an extraordinary Catholic moment in French society. Or rather, it is possible that such a moment, decidedly beyond the grasp of power and the positivist rationality of contemporary politics, constitutes the only reasonable option that remains for us, as we draw closer to the heart of nihilism. I suggest listening today to the opinion and the call that Bernanos issued to French Catholics in the somber but already crucial hour of the defeat of 1940: “Catholics of France, after having practiced for fifty years the politics of the lesser evil, do not allow yourselves to be accused one day of having practiced those of the lesser good.”27

27. Georges Bernanos, “Aux catholiques français” (1940), in Essais et écrits de combat, 2: 766.

Laicity or Separation

We had the disestablishment of the Churches. When will we have the disestablishment of metaphysics? Péguy 1

Nowadays, we lose our way the faster we run. So it goes with laicity. The more we debate about it, the more we notice that it provokes two concomitant and contradictory reactions. On the one hand, the law of 1905 (first and foremost the focus of our attention here) is surely the object of an almost unanimous consensus within French society and in particular among Catholics, the immense majority of whom even rallied in favor of it more quickly and definitively than they did for the Republic a quarter of a century earlier. On the other hand, the multiplicity and, sometimes, the violence of the debates that this same notion of laicity elicits attest fairly clearly that we do not have a precise concept of it. To the point where this anxious term “laicity” requires an additional qualification, “laïcité à la française,” as if to underscore that we understand nothing clear or distinct about it. We therefore should not be surprised when this term cannot be accurately translated into any other language, having to do as it does with a completely idiosyncratic French malady. In order to resolve this difficulty, at least partially, Earlier versions of this text were delivered at the invitation of Fr. L. Stalla-­ Bourdillon (Service pastoral d’études politiques, Paris, January 2016) and of Mr. M. Fro­­mager (AED, Paris, November 2016). 1. Charles Péguy, Œuvres en prose completes, ed. Robert Burac (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1998), 2: 564.

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it therefore will not be enough to polish up a definition, purportedly final: “laicity,” open or closed, tolerant or intolerant, antireligious, even figured as the atheist substitute for every religion (as so many self-­proclaimed theoreticians readily proclaim, making it up as they go along). It will also be necessary to explain why even the most sincere believers support it—­a fact, incidentally, that would be enough to render the “laical” struggle [le combat “laïc”] rather illegitimate, or even without a point. Since our focus is “laicity,” several remarks about the term itself could shed some light. To begin with, the word “laic” comes from the Greek laïkos, itself derived from the substantive laos, designating the people, the indistinct people, the currently unorganized crowd: the army assembled with the ban and arriere-­ban convoked, the raising of the masses; then the troop (the foot soldiers) as opposed to the leaders (and the mounted soldiers); or the crowd of inhabitants of the city as well as the countryside, since, in classical Greek, the laos is clearly distinguished from the dēmos, the people constituted in its political frame and that can sometimes govern itself (by democracy). It is in this sense that the biblical usage of laos is understood to designate the people that God chooses and that he unites with his call, for example, when Moses climbs Sinai in order to receive the tablets of the Law and announces to the Israelites that from now on they constitute “a holy nation” (Septuagint: Exodus 19:3–­9). This formulation will often be taken up again in the New Testament, and in particular textually by Peter, who hails the Christians as “a people that God acquired for himself”: “You who once were ‘no people,’ but who now are the people of God” (1 Peter 2:9–­10). But this people remains at that moment unorganized, for the crowd finds itself assembled by election, and thus by an act that originates not with them but with God; and this is why this people will continually grumble and even revolt against this election (whence the piece of  Jewish humor: “God, we are your chosen people, but once in a while couldn’t you choose someone else?”). Yes, the election makes a people, but it is not yet enough to organize them politically (which will quickly become

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the problem). When Christ spoke, “there was a great multitude of people (plēthos polu tou laou) from all Judea and Jerusalem and the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon” (Luke 6:17) who came to listen to him; and it is to these passing listeners, indistinct and varied, crippled and lost, a crowd without a shepherd or leader, that he proclaims what we call the Beatitudes; but how many among this laos will in the end remain with him as faithful disciples, as “friends” ( John 15:14–­15)? In order to pass at last from laos to the modern “laic,” we need to follow the Latin word laicus. It is in the medieval period that the laïc is defined as the member of the Christian people who is distinguished by no special function at all in the Church: one who is not a bishop, not a priest, not a deacon, and who has not received any holy orders; in short the basic Christian, baptized and faithful (or not). Little by little the term will take on a more positive sense as certain functions, especially university teaching, are opened to the nonordained (thus the famous birth of “intellectuals” in the faculty of arts). Whence there comes this paradoxical conclusion: it is only within this biblical, and then ecclesiastical, context that one can and that one must begin to speak of the “laic”; outside of this context that is properly speaking theological, this term and thus the term “laicity” no longer have any precise meaning. To laicize a function can only mean, in the strict sense, to assign a function within the Church to an individual who nevertheless has not received holy orders; to laicize a college or a hospital means that it will be directed no longer by clergy but by nonclergy; it does not mean that it will no longer be Catholic (or belong to another denomination).2 One can reduce (that is to say, lead or conduct back, reducere, not diminish or degrade) someone to the lay state (for example a priest or a religious) only within the Church and through it, because the distinction between cleric and 2. In most cases, the delegation is made official by a letter of mission formally signed by the local bishop.

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layman takes place only within the Church. Every other usage of the term becomes metaphorical, and thus an abuse. The schools and hospitals of the Catholic Church were not “laicized” under the Revolution, but simply requisitioned, confiscated, transformed into what are known as “biens nationaux” (national goods), and the priests and monastic orders were not “laicized” but quite simply suppressed, dissolved, eliminated. From this there follows a second remark: the law of 1905 is not a law of laicity. For, with great wisdom and great theological prudence, the legislature (consciously or not, which is beside the point) never even uses the term “laïcité” in a text that is nevertheless quite detailed. It is a law of separation, indeed bearing the title “Law concerning the Separation of the Churches and the State.” Article 2 of the law stipulates that “The Republic does not recognize, salary, or subsidize any religion.” In other words, in the French Republic there is no established church, as there is for example in Great Britain, where a religion has the rank of state religion, the estab­ lished church. In fact, the law of 1905 reproduces purely and simply the first amendment of the American Constitution (submitted in 1789), which states that, unlike the British Parliament, Congress “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” Thus, and following this example, the law of 1905 in no way decrees “laicity” (contrary to the opinion of its anticlerical partisans), but instead prolongs a much older tradition, that of separation. Moreover, one could argue that the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” of 1789 anticipates the law of 1905: “No one may be disturbed for his opinions, even religious ones, provided that their manifestation does not trouble the public order established by the law.”3 Since we’re dealing with a law of 3. Article 10. The concession, seemingly made grudgingly, remains at once threatening and comic. It calls to mind that other concession, also of a benevolence that is a bit worrisome, offered by Henri Peña-­Ruiz, uncompromising flatterer of

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separation, it would therefore seem judicious and honest to adopt (or return to) the habit of referring to it by its name: “the law of separation.” In this sense, it simply indicates that Catholicism is not a religion of state, or the state religion, any more and any less than any other religion. What the state guarantees is precisely that it will not institute any religion, and therefore any religion of state. The state recognizes that it is not in a state to establish a religion, even one of state, and that the duty of its state (and its duty of state) consists in not instituting or establishing the least religion. Moreover, exactly such was the content of the first concordat established by Bonaparte in 1801; rather different from other European concordats, it did not declare Catholicism the official religion of France, but recorded a fact: “The government of the Republic recognizes that the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion is the religion of the great majority of French citizens.” It is this fact, which today is still obvious, that the law confirms, as the state has the power and the duty to do, but without establishing it in law, because the state does not have the competence to do that. We can therefore conclude that separation understood in this way is much older than the “law of separation” of 1905, which makes it all the more legitimate. In this sense, the “law of separation”—­and this is probably why it was able to win out—­appears as the logical consequence of a tradition, or rather of a decision, that itself remains to be defined. Here, a third remark is necessary. One can recognize that the sep­­ aration between the state and a religion—­which otherwise would be an established religion—­goes back long before 1905 (the law of separation) and 1791 (the civil Constitution of the Clergy), in its essential parts if not exclusively to the monarchy, when, at the end of the Wars of Religion, the Edict of Nantes (1598) established that the king—­which is to say the state—­allowed for the plurality of religions. France in this way became the only country in Europe not to apply the principle (in fact Protestant, endorsed at the Diet the militant variety of “laicity”: “Of course, atheism is not an obligatory component of laicity” (Qu’est-­ce que la laïcité? [Paris: Gallimard, 2003], 121).

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of Augsburg in 1555, and then spread by the treaties of  Westphalia in 1648) of the duty “to have the religion of the region of its prince, cujus regio, ejus religio,” which is to say, the principle that to live in the territory of a prince implied accepting the religion of that prince. France thus tolerated several religions, in fact equally—­if not in terms of their respective importance, at least in terms of rights before the state. These religions were those of three groups: the Catholics, the Protestants, and in another way the Jews (tolerated since the Roman Empire): “and if it has not yet pleased him [God] that this should be by one and the same form of religion, then it should at least be with the same intention, and under such a rule that there should arise no tumult and disturbance on account of it among them [the believers].” But it is necessary to go back even further, for the paradox of the separation between the political power (the state, the Estates, kingdoms or empires, etc.) and the spiritual authority (the bishops, and above all the bishop of Rome) had spanned the entire Middle Ages, going back to the moment when the Roman Empire became Christian by the decision of Constantine, which provoked at the same time a structural and recurrent conflict between the emperor, whoever he might be, and the pope, whoever he might be. The object of the confrontation was always the same: who is entitled to invest bishops, the political power or the spiritual authority of the Church? This conflict cannot be reduced to political and territorial struggles (even if it sometimes led to them), because it started right away with the Christian Roman emperors, who from the outset meddled with doctrine and were successively Arians, Monophysites, Monotheletists, and Iconoclasts, etc.—­for when an emperor does theology, he always does bad theology, which is a sign that Providence is keeping watch! Quite logically, the Christian emperors thus persecuted (orthodox) Christians as much as their pagan predecessors did during the first two centuries, to the point of imprisoning popes and even assassinating them. In fact and in principle, as soon as the Roman emperor became Christian, he wanted to exercise complete

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power, including spiritual power, so that the problem of separation immediately arose. This antagonism will next become, in a way that is even more visible and lasts for centuries, the opposition between the pope and the emperor of the self-­proclaimed “Holy Roman Germanic Empire,” which was not Roman but Germanic, and about which one still wonders today in what sense it considered itself holy. Just as one may wonder in what sense the “very Catholic kings” of Spain could claim themselves to be very Catholic, and the French “very Christian kings” very Christian. It is quite clear that when the troops of Charles V ravaged Rome, when Louis XIV refused the pope’s nominations of bishops, and when Napoleon confined or exhausted two successors of Peter, these rulers all at the very least scorned the independence of the spiritual authority in general, and that of the pope and the bishops in particular. Thus we can affirm that, in a certain way, France was from a very early moment, indeed ever since Clovis’s constitution of his state, confronted with the problem of separation, as it so happens between the Catholic Church (since this was the best organized and the most widely diffused religion) and the political power. The question, improperly so-­called, of “laicity,” which in law is named separation, goes as far back as the emergence of Christianity in the social and therefore political universe in France and in Europe, and thus in the world. We must never forget that Christianity always and from the first centuries provoked a political resistance, precisely because Christians from the beginning refused to subscribe to the cult of the pagan emperor, and thus were the first to demand the separation of powers, and of what Pascal will later call the distinction of orders. So the question of separation not only concerns the politi­ cal domain but also has a pertinence that is originally theological. Or rather, it concerns in a radical way the political domain because it exerts itself within that domain by virtue of its theological origin. Separation is of crucial importance for the state, because it protects

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the state against totalitarian drift and reinforces individual freedoms within it. And reciprocally, separation plays an essential role for believers, because it does not confine them within a national Church and civic worship, and thus in idolatry. In fact, without separation, the entire democratic character of a society becomes threatened. Let’s take up these two points again. First, it is indeed biblical revelation (and thus Christianity) itself that imposes and de­­ mands this separation. According to biblical revelation, God created through separation (“to separate” is equivalent to “to create” in Hebrew) “by measure and number and weight” (Wisdom 11:20). Measure consists in respecting the gap between human power and God’s authority, what one owes to men and what one owes to the Other, him whose “thoughts are not our thoughts, and [whose] paths are totally different from ours” (Isaiah 55:8). But, at the time, the whole of the civilized world (the oikoumenē) on the contrary rested upon the principle of the nonseparation of political power from religious authority; in all the lands and nations around Israel, the king also exercised the religious function of priest, as the intermediary between the city and the god or gods, or even enjoyed divine status. To the point where, for example, the Aeneid was commissioned by Octavian Augustus from Virgil in order to establish the divine origin of the gens Julia (the family of the emperor), supposed to have descended from Venus through the Trojans. As strange as it may seem to us, this model survived at least until the sixteenth century, sometimes to the advantage of the French monarchy.4 Indeed, kings, emperors, and potentates all want to be sacralized, and even to divinize their political power; 4. For example, such was the intention of La Franciade, the first four books of which Ronsard published in 1572 (this was one of the last attempts, along with those later of Voltaire and Hugo, at a modern epic in French, all failures). The fourth book contains the prophecy of the daughter of the king of Provence made to Francus, announcing that he, and with him the kings of France, descends directly from Priam. Up until the era of Louis XIII, there were still historians attributing a Davidic origin and characteristics to the French monarchy.

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this temptation remains so permanent that it concerns not only pagan kingdoms and the ancient empires, but also modern monarchies and Christian governments. The national character of certain churches stemming from the Reformation (today, it is true, on the way to erasure and totally abstract) and of many (if not all) Orthodox churches has widely reinforced this drift of political powers, by tolerating, in one way or another, their theological role, itself modeled on the theological role claimed by the Byzantine emperors. But should we really be surprised that, as such, all political power wishes to prolong, extend, and encapsulate itself in its power by every means possible, including the most powerful, its sacralization, and thus by instituting an idolatry? Even the atheism of the totalitarian regimes of the last century did not restrain them from wanting to sacralize or indeed sanctify themselves. Quite the opposite: the denial of the gods and of God opened for them yet more space for rushing into idolatry, without rules or limits, like bandits in a treasure cave, or like bankers in a speculative bubble. We have seen that the two stories of the establishment of kingship in Israel witness not to its ambiguity so much as to the fundamental and revolutionary concern for separating the political and the religious powers, the king and the priest, in fact the king and God.5 There is something strange, then, in the accusation, heard constantly as a refrain, that every religious organization (every church, and especially, of course, the Catholic Church) would spontaneously and inevitably be totalitarian in its organization and dominating as an institution. It goes without saying that every human society tends to be and therefore to make itself totalitarian and imperial; and that an industrial, commercial, military, or political society wants to grow and flourish at the risk of becoming totalitarian and unthinking, like an animal, like the Beast (Revelation 17:3 and following)—­that is its metaphysical norm, we might say. But if that occurs or occurred in the case of the Church, then we are dealing with an apostasy from the One of whom it constitutes 5. See above, p. 28.

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the body, a self-­idolatry, that degrades it to the rank of a merely human society. The best example of this always possible drift is found in the temptation to set up a national church, to establish it on distinctive political power and no longer on the universal (catholic) promise of God, in short to stand against the separation of powers. In French history, this drift took among other names that of Gallicanism, which exerted a temptation that was in no way insubstantial, since Bossuet gave in to it (and even shared it with the Jansenists). The point of having a pope in Rome lies precisely in his function as a living contradiction, who holds all Christians back from veering off into a national church, which is to say, from abolishing separation. No king, no sovereign can therefore speak in the name of God, even as his vicar on earth. The distinction between the two realms of speech constitutes the condition necessary for respecting God’s transcendence and forbidding political power from the idolatry of vying with God and thus consequently of becoming tyrannical, totalitarian. Let’s say it again: we have learned by experience that atheism does not prevent a totalitarian regime from wanting to sacralize itself; indeed, quite the opposite. A political power can seek to sacralize itself without God, and all the more easily when the political leader wants to attribute to himself the totalitarian characteristics of universalism. Of course, not every laical society necessarily winds up totalitarian, but it always risks giving in to the temptation to erase separation. By contrast, then, one could rewrite the history of Christianity as an enduring and sometimes heroic and blood-­soaked effort to maintain separation. But separation also safeguards each citizen against the threat that every totalitarian state is able to pose to freedom of conscience, of opinion, and of thought, because it slows political power’s claim to its sacralization. The notion of religious liberty ensues directly from separation. Happily underscored by the Second Vatican Council, this notion was long contested in relation to conflicts between the Enlightenment and the ordinary teaching of the Church since the Reformation, as if the issue was one of a

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relativizing of revealed truth. Instead it has to do with freedom of conscience, in particular the freedom to choose one’s religion, to change it, or even not to have one—­exactly what Christians were the first to call for in the second century, when they found themselves pursued and condemned precisely for atheism toward the gods of paganism, or because they refused to make sacrifice to the cult of the emperor—­in short because they demanded separation. We owe it to figures as eminent as Justin, philosopher and martyr, Tertullian, and Lactantius for having exposed and called for freedom of conscience as a fundamental right of man, more essential even than the right of the Roman citizen, who, in exchange for juridical protection, had to make a cult of the emperor and subscribe at least formally to his divinity. “Beware, too, lest this also should be combined with the charge of irreligion (irreligiositatis eulogium), the taking away of the liberty of worship and the forbidding of the choice of a god (adimere libertatem religionis et inter­ dicere optionem divinitatis).” 6 Only Christians had strong enough reasons not to carry out this gesture and to say openly that the emperor was not God. Thus they called for freedom of conscience, against the public spirit, conformist opinion, and even the philosophy of the time. With, however, one exception: that of Socrates, who died in the name of and by virtue of his freedom of conscience. Therefore, beginning with Justin, Christians did not fail to invoke this example, precisely in the name of freedom of conscience. In conclusion, then: The law of 1905 appears as an excellent measure, since it formalizes the healthy, indeed the holy distinction between the respective domains and orders of political power, on the one hand, and religious authority on the other. The question remains of its reach and its possibility.

6. Tertullian, Apologeticum 24.6, ed. J.-­P. Waltzing (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1929, 2003), 61; English trans., Tertullian’s Defense of the Christians Against the Heathen, trans. Alexander Souter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917): http://www.tertullian.org/articles/mayor_apologeticum/mayor_apolo geticum_07translation.htm.

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The paradox is now clearer. For in the end there is indeed a paradox in this affair, one that’s been there since the beginning: we cannot invoke the incantatory concept of “laicity”—­if there is such a concept, and if it allows for a univocal meaning, which does not go without saying—­without admitting its theological origin, the Christian origin of separation. To set up the term, through an excess of distortions and inaccuracies, as an engine of war against this Christian vision of society not only is a deception but reveals an unacceptable incoherence. And if one believes it possible to avoid the concept’s paradox, it is hardly possible to escape answering a question of fact, also patent: Where and in which countries today do we find separation truly established? In what regions of the world does one have an actual right, on the one hand, to change religions, not to have one, or to choose a desired religion, or, on the other hand, not to consider the head of state (or whoever fills that role) as invested with a power that is not only political and legal but spiritual and unconditional? The answer is in no way mysterious: separation is established or can hardly be established elsewhere than in the countries that were Christianized in one way or another, that were reached by the Judeo-­Christian revelation. Moreover it is completely unsurprising that in these same countries individual unbelief 7 can become an accepted attitude, tolerated or even encouraged, precisely because in these countries one knows what one is leaving and what one is taking on. In every other country, even personal atheism becomes unthinkable and impracticable except clandestinely and marginally. This is a fact. I see no significant exception to this paradox in the world as it is currently. 7. Do not confuse private unbelief, in which the individual freedom not to believe is expressed, with the ideology of atheism (or indeed laicism) that is obligatory, collective, directly tied to the civic worship of political power, and where the negation of separation is fulfilled. In fact, one can become serenely unbelieving only in a country where separation reigns, which is to say, where Judeo-­Christianity has done its work.

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In reality, everyone in the western societies knows this, and knows it well. In case we have forgotten it, Islam comes to remind us. And this reminder is not something new, despite what most of our political (ir)responsibles seem to want to make us believe: for, since the beginnings of its emergence to the east and then to the south of the Mediterranean, Islam, whether radical or not (where does this distinction come from, and is it valid?), has always contradicted the Judeo-­Christian world by challenging the separation of powers. While to the north of the Mediterranean the distinction between powers, or religious freedom, was debated, and little by little imposed itself de facto because it had the status of a principle, Islam always considered it as incompatible with its rule and its law.8 This is not a matter of polemical judgment, but simply an observation that, for the Quran, separation remains not only dubious but contradictory to what an authentic and serious believer owes to God: the organization of the community of believers necessarily entails submitting oneself to practices that are socially and politically all-­inclusive. Rousseau saw clearly this radical opposition, to the point of openly taking the side of Islam against Christianity: “It was in these circumstances that Jesus came to establish a spiritual kingdom on earth; this kingdom, by separating the theological system from the political, meant that the state ceased to be a unity, and it caused those intestine divisions which have never ceased to disturb Christian peoples. . . . Many peoples, even in Europe or nearby, have tried to preserve or re-­establish the ancient system, but without success: the spirit of Christianity has won completely. The religious cult has always kept, or recovered, its independence of the sovereign, and has lacked its necessary connexion with the 8. See Rémi Brague, La Loi de Dieu: Histoire philosophique d’une alliance (Paris: Gallimard, 2005; Folio 2008); English trans., The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Du Dieu des chrétiens et d’un ou deux autres (Paris: Flammarion, 2008); English trans., On the God of the Christians (and one or two others), trans. Paul Seaton (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2013).

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state. Mahomet had very sound opinions, taking care to give unity to his political system, and for as long as the form of his government endured under the caliphs who succeeded him, the government was undivided and, to that extent, good.”9 This is what is called “giving away the game”: the society of the social contract can very easily wish to found its unity at the price of separation. We should not be surprised then that the “laical” spirit might wish to lead a “laical struggle” to establish “laicity” as the true civil religion, like a fourth monotheism, like the first monotheism without God, the most abstract and therefore the most dangerous. The legitimacy of Islam is not in question, for one can and one must recognize that according to the times and the regions, its practical demands vary (all veils are not limited to the burqa, all the dietary or sexual restrictions are not equally constraining). But the gathering of religious and political powers in a single and global submission to the God of the Prophet constitutes a structural difficulty, because it allows for no exception and contradicts separation. If the in fact badly posed and confused question of “laicity” imposes itself so widely on French society and in fact on the entire West, it is the result—­why deny it?—­of the pressure that Islam exerts on the lands north of the Mediterranean. What is astonishing is that this pressure and this antagonism surprise us today, as if Islam constituted a new, unexpected, unheard-­of problem for Europe. In fact, even masked by the period of colonial expansion and then by a surface laicization during the Cold War (where Arab nationalist regimes made alliances with the Soviet empire), Islam has always 9. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat social 4.8, “De la religion civile,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1964), 462–­63; English trans., Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (New York: Penguin, 1968), 178, 179. Islam (along with, to a lesser degree, the Christian national churches) thus becomes for Rousseau the last refuge of civil (or civic) religion, of the sort that Saint Augustine criticized in The City of God 6.5–­7. There is no clearer way to make evident the essential, and essentially anti-­Catholic, paganism of the modern political theory of the state.

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stood at our gates (as far as Vienna) and sometimes on our shores (why was there a fleet of galley ships at Toulon?), in contradiction to the political and theological choices of Judeo-­Christian Europe. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we, so to speak, have returned to the historical situation that is the most everyday and the most long-­ standing. We have discovered, most often in spite of ourselves, that our model of civilization, firmly attached to separation, cannot of itself and by right be exported without difficulty, indeed that it must think of resisting if it intends to survive. We know that this resistance is not summed up by the exercise of the sovereign power of the state. Of course, in a situation of armed conflict (of war if you like, although the term is debatable, since we fortunately do not live, at least not yet, in a state of war), the state must respond with the nation’s armed forces. Which it of course does, inside and outside the state, effectively and with measure, and, we hope, reasonably. But isn’t it clear that this first response is not enough, because it fails to reach the heart of the conflict? At the heart of the conflict, it is a question of the separation between religious authority and political power, of the acceptance or the refusal that a new (albeit old) religion might come to define the global conditions of the life of French society—­in short, of knowing whether Islam in France and thus in Europe (since it is in France that the largest Muslim community is found, as well as, moreover, the largest Jewish community in Europe) will remain the same as it is elsewhere. In other words, can Islam, like Judaism, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and the various Protestantisms, accept and withstand the test not only of the law of 1905, but of that which the law remains the heir—­separation, with its theological, biblical origin? We know today that the totalitarianisms of the last century could not hold up in the end against separation, and that they have dispersed. We do not yet know whether Islam will be able and will wish to take its place within the logic of separation (and Muslims today probably do not know it any more than non-­Muslims do). In fact and in principle, this question remains open before us all, Muslims and non-­Muslims. Far from witnessing the end of history,

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we are entering into a new era, where the clash of civilizations perhaps will not take place. That depends on all of us. Nevertheless, who can face up to the heart of this question? Precisely by virtue of the nature of the question—­separating political power from religious authority—­it seems clear that the state is without the qualifications to do it, since it is one of the parties involved, not the referee. Of course, it can negotiate, establish rules, and decree concrete arrangements (on clothing, coeducation, dietary restrictions, etc.), in short manage what it calls “laicity.” But its power does not extend any further than that. Further than that lie fundamental questions that only the Muslims of France must confront, however they can, and with whatever answers or solutions they may find. These questions include those that the faithful of other confessions have already had to confront: the historico-­philological critique of holy texts, rules of interpretation and spaces of pluralism, the nature of spiritual authority and of political power, the organization of believing communities and their relations if they diverge among themselves (as in the case of Sunnis and Shiites, etc.), the meaning of sexual difference, the relation to the foreigner, the unbeliever, the “miscreant,” and finally (and maybe first of all) the separation between the religious and political authorities. The state no longer has the right, or the means, to “organize Islam in France,” just as it has neither the right nor the means to intervene in the discussion among bishops during their annual assembly at Lourdes. But if non-­Muslims can ever support Muslims in their effort to brave the test of separation, they will be those who have already traveled the path, in the front line of which stand the Catholics. And competent people with them, that is to say the different religions already represented in France, the Christian theologians, the Jewish thinkers, and those Muslim intellectuals and academics who would be able to get down to work and, if possible, do so together. There is no reason, then, to adapt or modify the law of 1905: it fulfilled its historic role, so let’s keep it. What is needed is to extend its field to include Islam, if this can be accomplished positively within French society.

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If, then, “interreligious dialogue,” all too often invoked vaguely in order to mask discussions without any real stakes between believers equally tired out by their fuzzy identities, could become a serious enterprise, it would take place within such a work of Islam redefining itself, but not alone. Autonomous work, but not solitary: that is how both Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Summa contra gentiles and Nicholas of Cusa in Sifting the Koran conceived of it. As for Catholics (or even more often ex-­Catholics and non-­ Catholics agitated by the latest philosophical tale of Houellebecq), those who lament that Islam is overrunning them, there remains at least one way they can resist both peacefully and effectively: by returning to church on Sundays! For in the end everything will be worked out loyally between Muslims and Christians, just as everything ended by resolving itself in frank honesty between European Catholics and Protestants: after mutually tearing each other to pieces, in vain, for as long as political policies could recruit them and instrumentalize their convictions, the faithful ended up vying with one another in faith and charity, finding themselves at the end on the same side of the barriers, when it was necessary to make the true choices—­for peace. Moreover, one religion (or irreligion) never wins out over another simply because it is supported by a stronger political power (that’s the view of fanatics and fools, who are often the same); when a religious community dies, it is almost always precisely because it committed the folly of letting itself be identified with a state, for all states are mortal. In fact, believing communities grow and flourish to the extent that they produce more fruit, or do more good than others. And thus the question of Islam will be resolved, if it ever is, by the evolution of its discussion with the other religions—­because the issue is a religious question—­and surely not by security measures, administrative rules, and political edicts. It is sheer deception to mislead people with this illusion. May the political protagonists therefore give up on claiming to accomplish what greatly exceeds their capacities. With this honesty, they will see once again the possibility of a catholic moment emerge in French history—­I mean

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a moment in which the universalization of the community of the French is accomplished less by political means than by resources that are first and foremost spiritual. But let’s not dream too much right now about this instant of grace, for nothing is more costly to political leaders than giving up on simple ideas. Among them is the idea that religions (as they call them), especially when they have a precise theological content, would represent a potential threat, if not an actual danger to the Republic, because religions always want to make the national community (as well as the “multicultural” community, that of “togetherness” [le “vivre-­ensemble”]) break apart by inflating their divisions and their hostilities, and thus provoking the “clash of civilizations.” The civic response would then amount to fighting against all the “adversaries of democracy,” with all of the resources of a “militant laicity.” But as the political power senses itself to be weak (and rightly so), it attenuates its martial posture by generalizing its exercise to the extreme: in order to avoid targeting the most evident and potential if not real adversary, Islam, it not only refuses to name it and instead metaphorizes it as “barbarism,” “blind terrorism,” and other anonymous “extremisms,” but takes vengeance on groups that present almost no danger at all, the last to react (and in this sense the least reactionary citizens that could be imagined): the Catholics. And it invents “integralist” Catholics (easily recognizable by their green loden coats, their headbands on blond heads, advancing under the cover of baby strollers), whose “identitarian” machinations would reproduce the fascist leagues of February 1934, the “darkest hours of our history.” This is exactly how the character Libellule, the famous sidekick of Gil Jourdan, makes his threats: “I’m not afraid of blows when I’m the one giving them and I’ve beaten up those who are smaller and weaker than me!”10 And yet this braggart’s speech (because he shows his weakness at the very instant that he wants to prove his resolution) 10. Surboum sur quatre roues, plate 17B, in Maurice Tillieux, Gil Jourdan, L’Intégrale, vol. 2 (Marcinelle, Belgium: Éditions Dupuis, 2009), 89.

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contains a conviction: he remains persuaded that the strength of a religious community constitutes a threat that will at some point be political for the national community, while in fact a force remains religious and religiously strong only to the strict extent that it does not act as a political force. There where it is strong (in its own eyes), it is weak (in the eyes of the politicians), and, inversely, it becomes weak (in its own eyes) only when it appears strong (in the gaze of the politicians). Wisdom instead would seek to know if one of the weaknesses of current political power might not lie in its incapacity to trust believing citizens, whatever religion they belong to, and in its stubborn tendency to consider them above all as potential adversaries. This attitude is all the more surprising because the state, which today, unlike several years ago, cannot assume the full cost of social solidarity, finds itself henceforth forced to call more and more on substitute institutions, among which one finds numerous charitable associations and organizations that belong, precisely, to the sphere of these religions (as they are called) that are supposedly threatening to public order. Shouldn’t the state, in a sense structurally insolvent and seeing its field of action shrink under economic constraints, revise its traditional and ancestral judgment on the aforementioned religions and begin to see them as allies and no longer as threats? Such resistance to the evidence is not always explained by medi­ ocre and anecdotal motives, but arises from some fundamental reasons. Conceiving of “laicity” as a combat (a Kulturkampf ) against the “despicable thing” [l’Infâme], against the religions (above all the Catholic and Roman), is in line with the Enlightenment project, without however summing it up entirely. The Enlightenment (and even the Christian Enlightenment, for there was such a thing) established, if not introduced, the very concept of “religion,” in order to group together a heterogeneous collection of diverse phenomena. But this word remains problematic. First of all, because no one has yet determined its etymology (religere or religare, to reread and to choose, or to bind or link together?). Next, because it covers social practices, rites, and beliefs without common measures, with

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or without dogmas, and dogmas that are often completely incompatible. In fact, the term religion is generalized in the plural, following on two concomitant events: the wars dubbed “of religion,” and the discoveries of non-­Western civilizations. When Christians opposed one another (first in the great schism of the East and then in the Reformation), those thinkers who wanted to reach a compromise of pacification immediately came up with the hypothesis of a “Gospel minimum,” which would retain only the points on which a majority of believers could agree. Similarly, the discovery of ritual and worship-­related organizations in the societies of the New World reinforced the need for a common frame of analysis, or indeed of dialogue. From this moment, the term “religion,” or rather “religions,” imposed itself as an abstract, diminutive concept obtained by subtraction, or the least common denominator, to the point of being institutionalized in a new discipline, the comparative history of religions. But comparison is not always reason: what relation should be established between ritual systems for managing death, those for simply establishing the cohesion of a city, and the spiritualities that claim to suspend the sensory world, or indeed surpass death? What relation can be drawn between polytheistic devotions, those that accept no personal divinity, and those that aim at a single, unique, and supposedly transcendent God? What relation, finally, can be found between beliefs that claim for themselves a Revelation and those that are unaware of the possibility? And among the believers that base themselves on a book, how should the relations between those who interpret it and those who definitely do not interpret it be conceived? These difficulties can go on to the point of extreme and absurd contradiction; the Nazi regime provided the perfect example when, to the two old denominations, Catholicism and Protestantism, it added a third, völkisch, which in turn was subdivided into the “German Christians” and the atheist “German believers, deutsche Gläubige”—­and it was not made clear what or whom these latter believed in. In fact, this oxymoron settled the modern (and thus nihilist) definition of a religion: an abstract category allowing the comparison of what

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one is excused from understanding. In this sense, we must resist the all too famous definition of Christianity as “the religion of the exit from religion,”11 for the simple reason that nothing proves that Christianity constitutes a religion. The muddled and repeated debates about the supposedly intrinsic violence of “religions” not only presuppose that human beings would need an outside help to become violent (they know quite well how to do it themselves); they also presuppose that we have available a rational and working concept of “religion(s)”—­which is not the case.12 We shouldn’t reproach the “laics” (and the Enlightenment) for opposing “religions,” but instead and first of all for imagining that they know what they are talking about when they utter this word. Moreover it is quite possible that laicity offers absolutely no concept at all. This was Mallarmé’s conviction: “Let us also consider that nothing, despite the insipid tendency, will show itself as exclusively laical [laïque], because this word does not intend precisely any meaning.”13 And Mallarmé knew what he was talking about, because he was writing these lines during the most intense period of incubation of the 1905 law. An atheist, knowing himself deserted by God (in what sense, exactly, remains another question), he experienced in the extreme the lack of divine names, which resulted from the retreat of spirituality and above all of the 11. [From Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).—­Trans.] 12. The same goes for the pseudoconcepts of the “fait religieux” [sociocultural religious detail] and even of “monotheism.” Christianity cannot be qualified simply as a monotheism (or, clearly, as a polytheism). For Christianity, the unicity of God is founded on his unity; but this unity arises from the communion that God maintains eternally with himself. The unity of God results from a communion, and not from the solitude of his unicity. The dogma of the Trinity points to nothing else, and that is immensely significant. The trinitarian communion thus marks a radical difference with Islam, of course, but also with the theology of metaphysics. 13. Stéphane Mallarmé, “De même,” Divagations, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 2003), 244; English trans., Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 251 (trans. modified).

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Catholic liturgy. He himself devoted much of his most concentrated attention to attempting to reconstruct the lineaments of another liturgy, by means of his Livre, poetic art, and theatrical performance (like Wagner, and doubtless in a better, more conscientious failure than his). Hoping for other ceremonies, but knowing well that none would recover the “‘real Presence’: or, that the god be there, diffuse, whole, mimed from afar by the effaced actor, known by us trembling,”14 he certainly didn’t imagine for an instant that this sacredness, or indeed this holiness, would burst forth from the presumed “laicity”: “A current pretention, which prides itself on laicity, without that word’s inviting any meaning, linked to the refusal to get any inspiration from above—­so be it, we draw them from our own store—­imitates at present, out of habit, that which, intellectually, the discipline of science omitted.” “Laicity” does not know what it wants, or therefore what it says, since it claims to draw from its own store what otherwise it challenges by virtue of its scientism; it attempts to besiege a domain that it has denied all reality, and to which it closes its own access. All that remains is this contradiction, “the risk of falling down or of proving them, dogmas and philosophy.”15 When laicity wants to capture a positive meaning for itself (that is to say, a polemical meaning against “religions,” and therefore first of all against Catholicism), it gets mixed up with dogmas, but dogmas that it neither wishes nor is able to establish and that it names with a term that has no positive meaning: values. In this way, wishing to express what it cannot think through, it risks turning totalitarian. So it is that the state must remain neutral, precisely because society is not. The state must respect separation and not interfere with the domain of moral conscience and religious belief, exactly because the political order does not merge with the other orders. We must 14. Mallarmé, “Catholicisme,” in Divagations, 241; trans. Johnson, 247 (trans. modified). 15. Mallarmé, “Catholicisme,” 239; English trans., 244–­45 (trans. modified).

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not speak of a “spiritual quest in a laical society,”16 but rather of a spiritual quest in a multireligious society, guaranteed by a neutral state, “laical” if we must stick with that word. Clearly, we must rethink “laicity,” as we have said, in terms of separation. But how do we conceive of separation itself? Probably nothing less than a return to the distinction between what Pascal called the three orders, and to their hierarchy, is what is needed. There is the order of bodies, which comprises “the firmament, the stars, the earth and its kingdoms,” but also “kings, rich men, captains, and all those great in a carnal sense.” Next there is the order of minds, of “pursuits of the mind,” in which, for example, Archimedes “fought no battles visible to the eyes, but enriched every mind with his discoveries.” Finally there is the “order of holiness,” or of “charity,” where Jesus Christ “came in splendour in his own order.” Not only are these three orders incommensurable with one another, “differing in kind,” the second being “of an infinitely superior order” to the first, and the third “of a different, supernatural, order.” But above all, none of the inferior orders can see a superior order, while every superior order sees and judges the lower orders. Just as bodies and greatness in a carnal sense do not see either minds or charity, the minds do not see charity.17 Applied to the question of separation, this schema allows us to identify the neutrality of the state with the first order, and to validate its posi­ tive powerlessness to see (and, what is more, to judge) the order of mind (freedom of thought, of research, etc.) and above all the order of charity (freedom of conscience, of belief and unbelief, of “religion” and of change of religion). For the state must allow for what it cannot see and that over which it has no authority. The separation of powers has meaning only 16. Following a well-­intentioned but imprecise formulation of Bernard Cazeneuve, La Croix, January 21, 2016. 17. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, in Œuvres complètes, ed. L. Lafuma (Paris: Seuil, 1963), § 308; English trans., A. J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966, 1995), 95–­97 (trans. modified).

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as a political reflection (and thus one that is imperfect, because it is limited to the inferior order) of the separation of orders, and thus of their insurmountable distinction. There is more: the political order has its autonomy and its justice only because it manages just the most visible and abstract and thus the least essential layer of things and of the world. Things and realities at stake in the order of the mind (those which, in the language of the state, are called education, research, the arts, etc.) and in the order of charity (those which, in the language of the state, are called “religions,” the national community, “values,” and even “togetherness” [le “vivre-­ensemble”]) prove themselves to be much more decisive. The necessary and indispensable “laical” neutrality of the state follows from its positive powerlessness not only to enter into the field of the two superior orders, but also to see what happens there. The reality of a society and of a nation is not decided solely or essentially by what the state sees of it, but also and first off by much deeper layers, elevated and secret, in the order of minds and in the order of charity. The state governs, but most of the time and at first approach it does so blindly, by approximation. Rare and decisive are the moments when the heart and mind of the national community rise to visibility, when the blinded leaders figure out that the “soul of France” speaks and comes to the fore. Indeed, a “soul” is at issue when the nation takes the state back under its control, and the state no longer betrays the soul, but takes responsibility for it. Perhaps we can now understand better why it was so detrimental to oppose the reference in the now defunct European Constitution to the “Christian (or biblical) roots” of Europe. This was not really detrimental for Christians suffering from a lack of recognition, for they have other indicators of identity, and baptism is enough for them to know who and what they truly are. Nor was this really detrimental to the historical truth, for it is enough to open one’s eyes during one’s travels, while reading, and in museums to notice our obvious Christian style. No, first and foremost, this was detrimental to the other components of our history, for they have nothing to

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lose but much to gain by being compared with Christian contributions. This was not about the ridiculous and useless claim that someone was decreeing that all French people and all Europeans are Christians, or even “anonymous Christians,” for no one obliges anyone to live otherwise than how they believe they should. This was detrimental because it had to do (and still has to do) with knowing where we come from and what allowed us to become who we are. We come from separation, and separation does not come out of nowhere, since it is not found just anywhere. We are, we French and Europeans, the people of separation. The universality of humanity can truly open out only on this condition. If we do not hold to separation, we betray not only our identity (which, after all, is simply a private misfortune), but above all the universality of humanity.

The Utility of Communion

[Christians] show forth the wonderful character of the constitution of their citizenship [thaumastē katastasis tēs heautōn politeias], which everyone confesses is paradoxical [homolougomenōs paradoxos]. Letter to Diognetus

We have so far sketched, if not defined, the condition faced by Christians (and Catholics in particular) in a democratic society (France in this case). Very good. But one could also pose a preliminary question: why define the condition of Christians in the city, and why set aside a particular situation for them? Why grant them separation and why in so doing put up with the possible weakening of the cohesion of society? In short, wouldn’t it be better to return to the old principle of 1789: make no religious distinction among citizens, and therefore accord no particular role to Catholics as Catholics, precisely so as to accord them all the rights of the citizen as citizen? These are vain solutions and simplistic slogans. Like it or not, Christians are an exception. Certainly not (or not only) by right of seniority in France, ever since its origins, for such a right of primogeniture remains at best a simple fact, something to be worthy of and to perpetuate. In order to justify this role, it would be better to resort to the argument of the “philosopher and martyr” Justin (which Saint Augustine will orchestrate two centuries later): Christians furnish society with its best citizens from the point of view even of the interests of the city of men, because their disinterestedness toward earthly power makes them honest workers who

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are efficient and reliable in community life. In a word, they make the world less unlivable, because their aim is not to set themselves up in it in perpetuity, but to begin to live in the world according to another logic, and in fact they already belong to another world. This is expressed in a play on words: the Christians, christianoi, prove to be the chrestotatoi, “the most useful” of humans, and the most ready to serve. But isn’t this merely an exorbitant conceit? We must at least attempt a justification. Not merely by drawing up, once again, a balance sheet based on the past (it would no doubt be fairly easy to plead for acquittal, but that’s another story), but instead by considering the danger of the present moment, which demands much more effort, courage, and resources than we seem to see. It is much later than we think, but we continue to imagine ourselves able to face up to what is coming and is so terribly unheard of (albeit perfectly predictable, if we look closely), without changing anything in our behavior, habits, and customs, our openly exhibited vices and our miniscule virtues. It is not enough to repeat the refrain, “where the danger grows, also grows the saving power,”1 if we do not see the danger. And, apparently, we hardly see it. If Christians are even a little bit worthy of their title of chresto­ tatoi, “the most useful” of men, it will first of all be because they will identify the danger. And then show what saves, or what could save. “Nihilism stands at the door,” Nietzsche once warned. No, today it is no longer on the threshold but, for more than a century, has invaded the entire house, to the point of moving in for good. It inhabits us, gnaws at us. No longer are we talking about a wandering specter, a phantom whose absence would haunt us; instead it is the air we breathe, the atmosphere that poisons us, a whirlwind that sucks us in. No one calls it by its name, it is not seen, it re­­ mains faceless, but its symptoms are everywhere, inexplicable, diffuse, irresistible, absurdly logical: the nuclear threat, the ecological catastrophe, the terrorist cancer, the way peace and war are 1. [Friedrich Hölderlin, “Patmos.”—­Trans.]

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indistinguishable, as are dictatorship and democracy, and human­ rights (in a single word) and barbarism; and, encompassing the whole, the “death of God,” with the erasure of man on its heels. How did it submerge everything, everywhere, and how does it remain at work? Nietzsche explained it: “What does nihilism mean? The highest values become devalued.”2 But don’t be fooled: the highest values become devalued not because they lose their value as if by black magic, but because, suddenly, we notice that they consist only of that—­their value. Great or small, growing or shrinking, it doesn’t matter. Indeed, it doesn’t matter, since all value depends first of all on an evaluation, and possesses no value in itself. Value by definition never has value by itself or in itself, because it depends completely on an evaluation, more essential to it than itself. The only value is exchange-­based, variable and unstable, alienated from the price index that fixes it, from day to day. The economy rests on a possibility of abstraction, which reduces each and every thing to money, and thus establishes equivalence between things that in reality have nothing in common; whence the possibility of universal exchange. But, more essentially, this equivalence and thus this exchange rest on estimation and evaluation, which assign to the abstract thing (henceforth rightly named the product, the result of a transformation, of a putting into evidence) its valorization—­ through an evaluation from elsewhere. Every value depends on its evaluator, who appreciates or depreciates it as he pleases, and without its being able to do anything about it. Anything can take on and lose value for the same reason: people speculated and went bankrupt over spices and tulips, just as they did over some men reduced to slavery (to the status of evaluated objects). The issue isn’t so much the financialization of the economy as it is the evaluation 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, 1887, 9 [35], ed. Colli-­ Montinari, vol. VIII-­2 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970), 14; http://www.nietzschesource .org/#eKGWB/NF-­1887,9.

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of the totality of things in the world (of which this financialization constitutes only yet another particular figure). In itself, value has no in-­itself. Value, the residue of a thing alienated from itself, results entirely from the evaluator; and the evaluator is limited to obeying the totalizing logic of evaluation, of which he becomes the (most often involuntary) operator. Value is worth nothing, except what the evaluation, at each instant, decides: the unique truth of all values, which are, in themselves and each for itself, nothing. Thus we understand that naming something a “value” indicates that someone produces it, masters it, and dominates it by the simple fact that one decides on it without any recourse to it. To qualify something as a “value” amounts to disqualifying it as such. To speak, for example, of the true, the good, and the beautiful as values is equivalent to disqualifying them as such. To speak of, among other things, being, man, and the truth as values reduces them to the indignity of mere insignificant words. Finally, to speak of God as a value accomplishes an enormous blasphemy. It is astonishing to hear the political class proclaim proudly that it “defends values,” “fights for values,” etc. (or rather, it is not even astonishing anymore, because we know the political class’s ignorance so well). For if liberty, equality, and fraternity fall to the rank of “values of the Republic,” they already no longer constitute anything in themselves, but go up in smoke, like those slogans that some chant and others boo. Nothing is more nihilist at the roots, or more in conformity with nihilism, than proclaiming values, because the value already and precisely is not, not in itself, not at all.3 One might answer, in the hope of tearing oneself from the nihilism of every value, that at least the thing’s reality in itself, which the thing loses by becoming a value, passes on to the evaluation, and 3. Nietzsche: “That there is absolutely no truth; that there is no absolute composition of things, no ‘thing in itself ’—­that itself is a nihilism, and to be precise the most extreme sort. It poses the value of things precisely in the fact that no reality corresponds to this value, but only a symptom of strength among those who insti­ tuted values, a simplification for the purpose of life” (Nachgelassene Fragmente, p. 15; http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-­1887,9).

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thus to the evaluator. The evaluator, who appreciates and decries, focuses in himself all the power of evaluation, which has no price since it fixes all prices; and thus, by not having a price, this power sets itself up as the universal and unique treasury of every valorization. Certainly, the chief operating officers of all the exchanges reason thus: standing outside value, because they evaluate them all, they claim to seize for themselves all the reality that they steal from things. The evaluator, or better the evaluation itself, would thus take on the role of the unique reality in itself, indeed of the supreme being who, as the principle of this transfer, totals up all the reality that the values lost. Nietzsche conceived of it in this manner under the name of the will to power. But such a will to power—­now everywhere and solely at work in the world of value—­nevertheless does not escape from nihilism. For what does it will when it evaluates? It wills all things, of course, insofar as it reduces every thing to a value, and therefore in itself to nothing. In this way it wills nothing in particular other than, universally, the very exercise of evaluation in each value appraised and devalued. In short, it wills nothing other than its will to evaluate. The will wills the terminal accumulation of capital, of the only capital conceivable: the will itself. The will to power wills nothing other than its elevation to power, to a power abstracted from any being and even from any individual evaluation. This will to power wants nothing but to be intensified, literally to raise itself to the power, multiply itself by itself. For a long time now it has willed nothing to do with beings, the real, the precise, but only its growth. What we today call growth and invoke using this last sacred name no longer concerns the growth of any thing, for neither financial capital, nor economic production, nor military armament, nor technological development is the goal, but only the means or the metonymy. Growth becomes the empty name of the process of evaluation itself—­namely the annihilation of every thing by its reduction to a value. The will to power annihilates all things into so many values only because it itself wills nothing but itself, or rather

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has lost all self for the sake of its own rise in power. The evaluating will annihilates things only because it itself wills its own nothing. We have seen that we are not facing a crisis but have gotten bogged down in decadence, and no one can see its end.4 The reason for this decadence lies precisely in the fact that the will to power no longer wills anything, it can only repeat itself in an eternal (or even not so eternal) return of the same, in the same growth of annihilative evaluation. For the will to power is capable of everything, but really no longer wills anything. Like terrorism, which provides a privileged figure of the will to power, it can only will itself and deny the rest in this very willing. Endlessly and without any goal, nothing. Nietzsche preceded the definition of nihilism that we mentioned with these words: “Nihilism, the normal state. Nihilism: it lacks the goal, it lacks the answer to ‘why?’ ” This is the problem we all face (not only or first and foremost Christians): we no longer have a goal that answers the question “Why?,” because nihilism forbids us this question and releases us from it. Under the rules of the evaluation of values, in the situation of the will to power, one can and even must will without a goal, without rhyme or reason, once willing requires no other goal than this willing alone, and the will to power wills itself, as a pure and simple will of will. To persist in oneself in doing, or in being able to do only one’s own will, to will one’s own will: this is the ultima ratio rerum [final argument of things]. Far from accomplishing the will of man (the habitual blindness of Sartre would be necessary to make such a claim), this causa sui makes him a slave of the worst of masters, himself. What is more, in order to liberate oneself from the will to will, and thus from nihilism, it isn’t even enough not to will. For a non­ willing will, the mere suspension of the will, reinforces nihilism rather than abolishing it, because it reiterates the nothing of the (de)valorization through the powerlessness of the will. Just as nonviolence remains within the horizon of violence and always 4. See above, pp. 19–21.

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imitates it to the point of reproducing it by inverting it, the nonwilling will is always defined as a powerless will, which still stands out by the absence within it of any active will—­this is the unexpected lesson of Schopenhauer and of what Nietzsche called “Buddhism.” No, in order to liberate oneself from the will to will, nothing less than willing thoroughly and willing for good is necessary, again and for good but in a different way. Which means no longer willing a mere product of my will, its foreseeable prolongation (a value), but attaining and setting up a thing for good, a thing in itself, which is a thing outside of me. In other words, one must will without only willing oneself, without only willing oneself  by denying everything that one wills and by absorbing it in a mere evaluation. But who could carry out such a nonautistic will, which wills something else, elsewhere? Who? He who would succeed in willing something else than what his own will chose, foresaw, and evaluated on its own basis and for itself; he who could will in a mode other than the rise in power of the evaluating will, closed and empty; he, finally, who could utter and accomplish in a different way another will than his own, who could say: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass far from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39), “Abba, Father, to you all things are possible! Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:36), “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42).5 In order to will in a way other than by willing to the power (squared, by the will to will), it is necessary to will something other than what my will to power wills. To will another will that is neither my own nor one possessed by me means to will a will that does not come from me, because it comes before me and from elsewhere. In other words, this means to will the will of the Father, the one who precedes me and comes to me from elsewhere. The act that truly characterizes Jesus in himself, 5. See also John 12:27.

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as the anointed Holy One of God, as the Christ, consists wholly and uniquely in this displacement of the will, which breaks the circle of the repetition of the same, of perseverance in the affirmation of self alone (of the self alone). He wills what is neither self nor his own; he wills what doesn’t continue as the same. Willing the will of another, who precedes me and from whom I proceed, opens the only path that exempts me from remaining in myself, and that dispenses me from annihilating every other thing in one of my evaluations; it breaks the sphere of totality by totalization of values, a sphere all the more closed as it swells and repeats itself. He alone tears himself from nihilism who, in imitating Christ, succeeds in not willing his own will (to will), in order to will elsewhere and from elsewhere. This overturning of everything can also be formulated according to another paradox decreed by Christ: “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39, see also Mark 8:35); or: “For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it” (Luke 9:24). Of course, this paradox calls for a spiritual and resolutely theological interpretation. And yet, one can (and probably one must) first understand it philosophically—­as a frank, head-­on rupture with one of the principles fundamental to metaphysics, if not the most fundamental. According to metaphysics (that is to say, the natural attitude of ordinary consciousness), living boils down to being, and being is equivalent to remaining in the present, without losing oneself in the past or awaiting an uncertain future; being or remaining in the present, then, means to persist in presence in order thus to preserve one’s being the best one can, to be in the mode of conservative perseverance, to preserve oneself identically to one’s self in the endurance of presence. The will to will evaluates (reduces things to its evaluations) only with this single goal: to repeat itself, to last in such a way that even and above all within becoming, my will always finds itself, sticks to the same state, equal to itself endlessly (or almost endlessly). My will strives to increase its power only in order to remain (almost)

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equal to itself, for here, whatever does not grow diminishes. But, as we’ve seen, this panicked persistence in growth produces nothingness, since it first reduces what it wills to its values, and then annihilates itself by closing itself up in its own repetition. This is why—­at least this is what those who listen to Christ sense—­there remains only one path of liberation: no longer to will in order to persevere in one’s being, but to will a different will, and thus to accept to will elsewhere, starting from a will that comes to me from elsewhere—­to will differently, to will the only other will, that of the Father. Which gives being, because it creates it. Thus it is nec­ essary to transcend what I will; which implies transcending the I will itself, which shackles the I to its will to power and imprisons it in its values. Here the Christian path out of nihilism opens, where metaphysics reaches its end. This proposition may surprise both the simpleminded and the wise of the world, as an incongruity (at least following their dogma: that the Gospel has absolutely no conceptual bearing), or a paradox (which at best would concern only “mystics,” those marginal figures who are revered, but from afar). But it could be that it is misunderstood for a much more banal reason: because we haven’t truly noticed the prison that nihilism imposes on us, because we haven’t yet taken the full measure of the deadly threat of the perpetual growth of universal evaluation that nihilism puts into action, because we can’t even image the radical reversal that, going forward, must come to pass. In the best case, we have the vague audacity to admit that “only a god can save us,” but we pretend to wait for another, indeed any other one at all, rather than the only One. In the meantime of indecision, during the crisis of the crisis, we thus remain completely caught up in the process of our loss, because we are losing access to the world as it is truly given, to the whole of possible givens, that is to say to things in themselves—­or better: to the selves of things. Nihilism extends its empire over us, all the more silently and powerfully as it shuts us up in ourselves, closes us in on ourselves alone and never shows itself as such. We imagine that we possess the universe, when in fact

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we ourselves construct our prison, voluntary slaves, willed slaves, slaves of the will to will—­and we glorify ourselves by celebrating our autonomy! Here at last we can pose the question of the common good. The common good remains the great missing factor from our so-­called democratic and enlightened societies. For on the rare occasions where it is evoked, brought down to the level of “values of the Republic” or “the soul of France,” it is conceived at best as the sum of the individual goods of each of the citizens, or more exactly of each of the voters, and not only the dead (more numerous than the living in a nation, as the conservatives remind us) but above all the living to come (despite the warnings of militant ecologists) count for nothing. As for the “general will,” it has collapsed irreversibly as an ideal that is empty or even leaning toward an identitarian totalitarianism. But the common good never results from the summing up of individual goods, however varied they may be, into an inconceivable general compromise. The common good consists in nothing other than itself, for the communion that it puts into oper­ ation constitutes in itself a good. The communitarian experience of the good, which goes beyond the formal oppositions in which ordinary political philosophy entangles itself (between the private sphere and the public square, between the family unit and the civic community, the nation and cosmopolitanism, etc.), already accomplishes a good, because it creates communion. Communion allows for and gives rise to the community as the first good, a bonum nul­ lius, a good that belongs to no one and that can therefore be made accessible to each and every one. The concept of the common good becomes intelligible only if we take up the distinctions formalized by Gaston Fessard.6 He dis6. See Michel Sales, Gaston Fessard (1897–­1978). Genèse d’une pensée (Brussels: Culture et vérité, 1997), and Frédéric Louzeau, L’Anthropologie sociale du père Gaston Fessard (Paris: PUF, 2009), as well as the synthetic study “Contenu et forme du

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tinguishes several degrees of common good, for if every placing in common is a good, all the placings in common do not put into operation the same good. In the first place there is the good of the community, the common good politically defined, which opens access to goods to everyone: not those goods of each one individually (private property), but collective goods (goods of subsistence, ownership of the means of production, appropriation of political rights, etc.). Then comes the community of the good, which assures unlimited participation in all the possible goods (liberty, culture, etc.), in all that the community, not the individuals, can make accessible; here the community itself becomes the source of its good. And finally, once these first two functions are established, the good of the community (objective) and the community of the good (subjective), the goods are reciprocated and attain the good of communion itself, from which they come in principle, rather than as a result. The community of common goods, then, culminates and is rooted in the experience of the good of the community, or put otherwise, of the communion. In this way the formula of Leo XIII is validated: the common good constitutes, “after God, the first and last law in society.”7 Thus the common good does not result from a strictly political process or approach, because it ends in a good in which the community discovers itself as much more than a political community—­as a communion, at least in outline, but already in reality. Consequently, it becomes possible to infer a final, explicitly theological conclusion. The common good, as the experience of

bien commun: de Gaston Fessard aux exigences du temps présent,” in S. Bancalari and P. Simplici, eds., Il Bene Commune, Archivio di filosofia 84, no. 1–­2 (Pisa/Rome, 2016). Fessard’s major text on the common good was republished and augmented by Frédéric Louzeau: Gaston Fessard, Autorité et bien commun: Aux fondements de la société, ed. Frédéric Louzeau (Paris: Ad Solem, 2015; orig. pub. Paris: Aubier, 1944). 7. Leo XIII, Au milieu des sollicitudes (Encyclical Letter to the Archbishops, bishops, and clergy and to all the faithful of France), February 16, 1892, par. 19; English trans., http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-­xiii/en/encyclicals/documents /hf_l-­xiii_enc_16021892_au-­milieu-­des-­sollicitudes.html.

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communion itself, can and must be conceived in its relation to the love of God, according to a reciprocal tie. In a first sense, love for God remains an illusion as long as it is not first vouched for in the good of the communion; the experience of communion, in the sense of mutual (nonpolitical) love, offers the sole real verification of the experience of our (supposed) love for God: “And by this we may be sure that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He who says ‘I know him’ but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him . . . . [H]e who claims to be in the light while hating his brother is in the darkness still” (1 John 2:3–­4, 9). Absent this empirical verification in the communion between men, the love for God would remain an empty concept without intuition, a conceptual illusion, probably a lie: “[H]e who does not love his brother whom he sees, cannot love God whom he does not see” (1 John 4:20). We only truly know if we love God to the degree that we can prove that we love our neighbor. In this sense, the common good appears as the index, the test, and the site of the trinitarian experience of God. But, in a second sense, it is also necessary to say that we can achieve the common good in its full meaning as good of the communion only on the basis of its perfect accomplishment in God himself: “let us love one another, since love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God” (1 John 4:7). It is because communion is already (for us) and eternally (for God) accomplished in the Trinity and manifested in a trinitarian manner by Christ that we have the right also to claim to put it into operation in the common good. This good of the communion would have absolutely no chance, not even the least right to be accomplished in our broken world, if it did not anticipate the trinitarian love already accomplished. Or rather, from now on we can set our hearts on some empirical and thus imperfect realization of the common good only by virtue and in the name of its trinitarian perfection in God. The historical common good is guaranteed by the eternally accomplished trinitarian communion. The common good offers the only empirical verification of our love of God, but the love of

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God in itself and for us proves itself the real condition of the possibility that we can, at least partially, accomplish the common good (as good of the communion). The common good comes not from our initiative, or from our own resources, but from a universal that precedes us. And that we have to receive, as universal and therefore catholic citizens. In this way Christians would invoke a political model that is at base nonpolitical—­that of a community that does not ground itself in common interests, because, whatever they may be, they end up inevitably in an exclusive, identitarian affirmation (and thus a communitarianism). Put positively, this is a community that aims at communion, because in fact it comes from communion. The community’s union indeed does not come to it from itself (from its particular interests, whether well or badly understood), but reaches it from the communion that it first sees realized in God, and that it therefore hopes will be realizable among men. The doctrine of the common good, which follows directly from the trinitarian communion’s definition of political community, thus perfectly confirms the political originality of Christians, “the wonderful character of the constitution of their citizenship (thaumastē katastasis tēs heautōn politeias), which everyone confesses is paradoxical (homolougomenōs paradoxos).”8 Once again, we must be prudent before sorting Christianity among the monotheisms (here, the plural already seems strange); for Christ reveals that, more than on the unicity of the one God, divine unity is based on the communion of love in God. This communion can play out only among persons, since love always loves an other than itself, even when this other remains and becomes eternally itself.

8. À Diognète 5.1–­4, ed. H.-­I. Marrou (Paris: Le Cerf “Sources chrétiennes” no. 33bis, 1951, 2005), 62; English trans., The Apostolic Fathers, trans. Kirsopp Lake (London: William Heinemann, Loeb Classical Library, 1924), 2: 359 (trans. modified).

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At the same time, we understand (or should understand) that the debate about autonomy and heteronomy, in moral philosophy but also in politics, lacks pertinence. Take, for example, the “virtuous atheist,” this pose so widespread among the public moralists, who claim, not without pretention, to take up all the Christian virtues without believing in Christ and without having the need for any motive outside the conscience in order to determine to act morally. Indeed, why not? But this absence of an outside norm nevertheless does not make autonomy possible, for the moral law itself imposes itself on my conscience only because it comes to me from elsewhere; even supposing that it has no religious origin, it nonetheless operates on me as a call, a requirement, an election, and thus literally as a norm that is other. In short, we must choose between Sade and Levinas. For the other imposes on me what he asks of me, and his demand clearly exerts itself as a norm come from elsewhere, however immanent and even silent we suppose it to be. Any moral virtue supposes internal alterity, where my decision refers to someone other than me: the other, precisely. And vice versa, when, in political society, the community comes from communion and communion is realized only in God, we nevertheless cannot speak of heteronomy (that is, of a theologico-­political constitution contrary to the separation of powers): for trinitarian communion imposes nothing on the political community; instead it proposes to the political community the possibility of constituting itself by reference to what indeed accomplishes itself elsewhere. We will become us, a community, only in communion with the other, and this communion can come to us only from elsewhere. Otherwise, we would already be there. Can such a nonpolitical model of the political community become credible, and thus possible? In fact, posing the question in these terms does not seem correct, for we presuppose again that we have at our disposal already, today, another model that is trustworthy, proven, and assured of a future. We thus presuppose what appears to be massively doubtful and questionable: namely, that political

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reality can be understood on the basis of economic reality and defined in continuity with it. Today, when we speak of democracy, we identify dogmatically the political actor with an economic actor, the citizen with the producer, who is himself doubled by the consumer within him. If we fight poverty, it is most often in order to institute or preserve democracy, out of fear that too much poverty deprives numerous citizens of their role as political actors and diverts them toward “populism.” We endeavor to convince ourselves that the market regulates political life well and correctly, while suspecting that the empire of banks and ratings agencies needs to be closely supervised. Now, it is this tie that is coming apart before our eyes and causing worry: to define (and save) democracy, is it enough to trust, as in a dogma, in the identification of the political actor with the economic actor? Clearly no, since we notice the gaps that separate these two terms. Thus we have learned that economic growth does not have a direct effect on lowering the rate of unemployment, that there is no necessary link between global wealth (gnp or gdp) and the extension of public freedoms or of political capacity. Growth can accommodate itself to the rise in unemployment, or even to its institutionalization due to a more rapid rise in productivity. We notice that the political debate does not grow in direct proportion to media exposés, which, in fact, often do not produce a better democratic discussion but instead stifle it. We must agree that globalized capitalism can prosper in authoritarian and even dictatorial societies, and that the new “tigers” have the look of a kind of amalgam of democracy and dictatorship that calls for a new term.9 These three points—­the nonoverlap of global wealth and individual revenues, the disconnect between the economic performance of a society and its level of democracy, and the deficit in democratic representativity provoked by media power—­constitute just so many clear and worrisome indicators that require us to contest the validity 9. [The French text proposes démocratures, a contraction of démocratie and dictature.—­Trans.]

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of the identification of the citizen with the economic agent (producer and consumer). This questioning can be suffered or thought. Suffering it is what we do in the different figures of decadence, which we know asks not simply for reform (around the edges) of the economic logic, but modification of its entire status. It may be that the supposed economic reality is not reality itself, but simply one of its superstructures. We have heard it said and repeated that there are superstructures and infrastructures, the first depending on the second; that among the superstructures are culture, ideologies, and therefore “religions”; and that all the people who know anything and who have taught us, whether they were liberals or Marxists, agreed to scorn these superstructures in order to concentrate on the infrastructure purported to be the most fundamental, real, and serious: the economy. From this there comes the obsession with equality, above all economic equality. It could be that it is all about an illusion, the fruit, certainly, of a long past, but henceforth without any future. It could be that the economy itself is only a superstructure. After all, don’t we all see that to a certain point the economic performances of a country depend on its culture, its customs, and its ethics? Who is unaware that many countries that are rich today never had the natural resources that are overflowing in many poor countries? Who is not aware that many countries owe their poverty not to the lack of economic means, but to the lack of healthy political structures, of successful education systems, of social investments, of political freedoms and therefore of enterprise, or indeed simply to the failure of the state, to its corruption and its privatization; in short, to general scorn for the common good? And this is where the question of the role of “religions” is posed once more. For according to their respective doctrines and their capacity to develop (or not) under the rule of separation, “religions” can play a decisive (or disastrous) role in the wealth of nations, by becoming allies or adversaries. Is it so difficult to accept such obvious evidence? If we Frenchmen risk impoverishing ourselves very quickly, we know quite well that it is due to our complete indifference and to the cynicism that sweeps over us.

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What would it mean to exit the worship of economic infrastructure, yet without sinking into a vain utopia or ideological raving? Probably, it would mean contesting the principle laid down by Locke for defining in economic terms the atomic individual, and thus the citizen-­member of the political community: “it is evident, that though the things of  Nature are given in common, yet Man (by being Master of himself, and Proprietor of his own Person, and the Actions or Labour of it) had still in himself the great Foundation of Property.”10 The great foundation of property would thus be found in man himself, because he defines himself as the proprietor not only of his actions, of his labor, and of the fruits of these, but first of all of himself. I could appropriate things that nature has originally given to all, because I am originarily the proprietor of myself; my identity to myself (and facing the others) would reside in my appropriation of myself to myself. Whatever Locke owes (as elsewhere) to a misunderstood Cartesianism, the issue here is an ego cogito assumed to be solipsistic (against the very letter of the Meditations) and then transposed from the theoretical domain to the economic (against a prohibition in these same Meditations); such a transposition presupposes that thought is equivalent to taking possession of something, and that the self can be understood as an object to possess. Suspending the economy as an unreal and unreal-­making superstructure thus would mean: challenging the idea that man sets himself up as proprietor of his person and develops himself through exchange and reciprocity. In other words, it would mean thinking seriously that willing to preserve and preserving oneself leads to loss, and that only that which is given is not lost, and he who possesses his life loses it. Appropriation, which allows and demands exchange and requires reciprocity, is opposed by the gift, which frees itself from reciprocity and exchange by practicing giving to the point of abandon.

10. John Locke, “The Second Treatise of Government,” in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 298.

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Can we reconstitute the logic of the gift? No, not as long as we live in the economy of exchange, that is to say in the economy as exchange. For us, the economy (a word that signifies the law that rules the household) consists in the exchange of possessed goods. One cannot oppose other definitions of property and of exchange here (as Marxism limited itself to doing); instead it is necessary to set up the gift in opposition. But the most famous definition of the gift, made by Marcel Mauss, will not help us, for the gift according to his definition remains only a particular case of exchange—­a merely gratuitous exchange. Indeed, as he explains, among certain ethnic groups untouched by the scientific revolution, when one group encounters another, it presents it with a present as a sign of benevolence, so as to force it, in order to maintain peace between them, to give in return another present, at least slightly superior; the first group then responds with a further present, superior to the one just received, and so on, in order to maintain peace. Is this about a gift? In fact, this system (called potlatch) follows a logic of reciprocity, accomplishing an exchange, but simply a gratuitous and aleatory exchange, without the mediation of money. This is precisely how we talk about free exchange when we wrongly be­­ lieve we are speaking about gifts. To make this point, it is necessary to understand the true difficulty in any definition of the gift, as Derrida noted. Approving Mauss’s assimilation of the gift to gratuity, Derrida underlined the illusion of an absolute gift, since its reality always belongs to the logic of exchange: if I make a gift to someone, he always finds himself, at least implicitly, indebted to me, even if I ask nothing of him in return, exactly as in an economic exchange, where the debt appears explicitly. And no gift can erase this debt, for at the least there always remains the debt of recognition: if the debtor does not pay off the debt, he will have to pay the price of ingratitude, the loss of his reputation. And even without this consciousness of debt, the giver will be remunerated with a clear conscience due to his generosity. Thus the gift remains an exchange without knowing it—­or in full knowledge of the fact, because it is always reimbursed at least symbolically. In contrast,

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a perfect gift would assume that the actors have absolutely no consciousness of it, so as to avoid turning it into a disguised exchange. The conditions of possibility of the gift would coincide then with its conditions of impossibility. In fact, such is not the case. The gift derives not from exchange but by spoiling it; it radically distinguishes itself from exchange by setting itself free from its terms. One can in fact reduce (in the phenomenological sense) each of the three terms of exchange without however abolishing the gift, but instead demonstrating its unconditioned power.11 A gift can, first of all, be achieved by reducing the beneficiary of the gift, the givee or recipient. Thus in the experience of giving while not knowing to whom one is giving (for example when giving to an organization or through an ngo), where it is precisely because we do not know to whom we are giving that we can give in an effective way: the disappearance of the recipient does not prevent the gift, for we prefer not to see the recipients directly, or to occupy ourselves with the distribution of the gift, which we leave to professionals. But this anonymity of the recipient is not merely the choice of some easy way out, for there are more admirable gifts that depend upon the disappearance of the recipient. When we give to someone who asked for nothing, or a person who we know will maintain his ingratitude or even reproach us with this gift, and yet we give it anyway, our gift thus becomes even more visible. By pushing to its end this logic that there is more gift when it has no recipient, we meet up with Christ’s words, “And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do the same” (Luke 6:33). Moreover, why is it better to give to one’s enemy? Because in that case we know at least one thing for certain: the enemy will not return the gift, he will deny 11. On all these points, see the more detailed analyses in my Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 71–­118 (§§ 7–­12); and my Negative Certainties, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 87–­154 (§§ 14–­24).

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it and spurn it; thus he will lift any ambiguity from the gift, proving that there is no underhanded exchange going on. The enemy makes us a gift of the gift. A gift can also appear as a completed gift without anyone’s giving it. The most striking example of a lack of giver comes from the gift made by a deceased person, an inheritance, where the definitive absence of the giver alone allows the gift to take place. There follows from this the rule that the best giver is, if not the dead giver, at least the one who is absent. There will be no exchange because there will be no return to life of the giver to receive it. And there’s more: this gift can reveal itself as perfectly unfair, if it falls to someone who doesn’t need it or whom the deceased detested (and vice versa); but this is exactly what unties this gift from any calculated interest; henceforward without interest, it is torn from exchange. Thus we come upon the ancient Greek proverb, “the gods are without envy,”12 which is equally biblical, since God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). The gift is free from any interest; the form of this disinterestedness lies in there being no visible giver. Thus, as the giver disappears, he always gives at a loss, and the more he gives at a loss, the more the pure gift appears. Finally, there is a third reduction. In order to explain it, let us take the example (given by Saint Augustine) of a woman who receives a ring from her betrothed and, having received it, says: “Thank you, I’ll keep the ring, but we are no longer getting married.” Reasoning in this way, she acts as if the boy has given her the ring, and nothing more; but he considered the ring in a completely different way; he thought that in putting the ring on her finger, he was giving himself to her and, reciprocally, she to him. Whatever price the jewelry had in itself, what made for its value lay in the gift of self given to the beloved. In the same way, in most of our gifts, what is important is never found in what we give objectively, but in what “goes with it,” in the accident that accompanies it. 12. [See, e.g., Plato, Phaedrus, 247a.—­Trans.]

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When I want to please someone, the thing that I give him stands for what I cannot give as a thing; it serves only as the sign of the affection that I would like to show him. And the more the real gift grows, the more what symbolizes it becomes tenuous. Let us suppose someone takes possession of a building or a corporation; in order to do this, one must visit a notary and sign a contract: taking ownership and signing bear absolutely no comparison to the reality of what one is thus going to possess. When someone becomes President of the Republic, what does he receive? Power, certainly, but concretely it amounts only to a nuclear code, a collar,13 etc., while the thing itself, “power,” remains invisible, immaterial. What one gives is never proportionate to the sign that accompanies the gift, which is the only objectively transmitted aspect of the gift. The more considerable the gift, the more it becomes immaterial. When people suffer from destitution and we give them food, drink, lodging, we certainly give something, but in fact we give them life, not bread, water, and blankets. We do not give medicine, but rather the means to survive an illness, or in short, life. Life is given by giving something other than it, something else that would have no value if it did not enable someone to remain alive, which is the true gift. Giving one’s time, life, love—­in the strict sense, these give nothing. What one gives, then, is not identified with an object, for the difference between life and death does not pass between two things, the dead being truly as much a thing as the living. The time that one gives is not real (indeed it’s the only thing that money cannot buy, for while money can be made out of time, no one has ever bought time with money). The more essential what one gives, the less it is real, and only gifts without importance coincide perfectly with objects, like a cigarette given to a stranger in the street. Thus the gift manifests its paradox: it has no need of the terms of exchange in order to appear as such; on the contrary it appears as such only if, when giving, one economizes on the terms of exchange. 13. [Reference to the Grand Collier de la Légion d’Honneur, presented to the new President of the Republic during the investiture ceremony.—­Trans.]

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What occurs in the gift? There is a logic of the advance—­in the economic sense—­disclosed in the gift, which can also be identified with the logic of the erotic phenomenon. Indeed, the erotic phenomenon offers the same paradox. It can certainly be analyzed according to the economic logic of exchange. In this case, I love you only if you began by loving me, I will love you only in return for the first investment that you made in loving me, and don’t count on me putting my capital into the affair first! Nevertheless there remains another, erotic, interpretation, in which the point is to love in advance, without waiting for the return on the exchange, indeed without even hoping for or desiring it. Here God’s greatness is manifested, when he creates things de nihilo, before they are, still streaming with nothingness, still outside the state of being able to love. Similarly, Don Juan’s entire project of seduction lies in his capacity (and in his courage too) to declare, while believing it, to a woman: “You are beautiful, I love you,” without knowing if she will respond; and sometimes (often), suddenly, it happens that she becomes beautiful, by believing that she is loved. Of course, between God and Don Juan the difference lies in the duration of the gift, which is either fleeting or “irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). But in every case, he who loves first and makes advances takes the risk of an absence of reciprocity, and this is why he can win the game. This is how the gift works: it creates the eventual conditions of a gift in return, but does not depend on the reality of the return on investment, or expect it. The gift plays on the white spaces, and exchange on the black. The gift thus has possibility, initiative, and the first move, while exchange can only repeat itself and, at best, aim at justice and reciprocity. For exchange there remains growth, interest, and the reimbursement of debt. But the gift for its part has the privilege of the advance on debt, an advance without return, and thus it inaugurates the logic of increase that opens a story. “Increase and multiply” (Genesis 1:28): that’s something only God can say. And while we for our part cannot say it, we can try to do it. At least Christians believe so.

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For this reason, another definition of the citizen could become thinkable and possible, one that comes before the economic superstructure that today defines its political function: it would go back to the logic of the gift, without confusing it any longer with a gratuitous exchange. It may be that the actor (or to begin with the beneficiary) of the gift must now pick up from the economic proprietor of the self, in order to redefine the agent of democracy. In order to go beyond the present crisis of representative democracy, the conflict between individual interests and the common good, and the disconnect between financial growth and political liberty, in short, in order to realize the confused project that haunts our times, perhaps it is necessary to be done with the transposition of the definition of the economic agent into the political domain. This other definition of the citizen, which would no longer come from appropriation, property, independence, autonomy—­in short from the terms of exchange—­refers back to nothing less than the logic of the gift. At issue is not a tangential variation or a marginal adaptation, reserved for certain will-­to-­power-­crazed people suffering from a soul deficit and in need of a supplemental policy for spiritual health. At issue is probably the only realistic revolution that could save us from ourselves. At least Christians believe so. If one wants communion to become the new paradigm for the political community, the question of power remains. For after all, runs the objection, are we not in the process here, more or less surreptitiously, of reestablishing a subordination of the political to the theological, or even of democracy to a quasi-­trinitarian model, or in short, of reestablishing, horribile dictu, the theologico-­political? Obviously, we have absolutely no intention of restoring anything at all. First of all because the revolution of the gift can take place only in the situation of separation. Next, because the gift can be put into action only in free abandon, not in mastery: the gift gives without return, or in other words begins by losing power; or yet more exactly, it can begin only because it accepts losing; it plays

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at loser-­takes-­all, it wins because it loses its collateral; giving without receiving, it gives all the more, and all the more incontestably. To imagine that the logic of the gift implies the exercise of power is merely to denote that one has still not understood the gift, or glimpsed its power, and that it is being held within the logic of appropriation, of the economy. Finally, and above all, we must deconstruct the notion of power itself. What does it mean to exercise a social or political power, whether private or public? It means making oneself obeyed, by using force (the supposedly legitimate violence of the proprietor or of the state, whose rights political philosophy, with a flawless servility, busies itself with preserving), or, better, not even needing to exercise it. A strong power is characterized by its capacity to make itself obeyed without recourse to violence, whether legal or not. But how does one succeed in making oneself obeyed? When and how does one no longer succeed? Why does Birnam Wood march forward before the eyes of  Macbeth, why is the Berlin Wall breached without anyone deciding to breach it, why does the Praetorian Guard stop responding and turn against the emperor? Because the real strength of men (and indeed of things) no longer obeys, and it no longer obeys because it no longer is afraid of strength. A strength no longer feared loses power, and “Be not afraid!” states this secret rule. In this way power no longer comes from itself, and even less from the violence that it can exercise, because violence can do nothing if it fails to make anyone shrink back by inspiring fear. Power thus exerts itself only on those who submit themselves to it voluntarily—­whether with a constrained will, or a spontaneous one. Power becomes stable and eventually legitimate only when it encounters and elicits a voluntary and spontaneous obedience. If then power does not come from itself (from its strength, its violence), from where does it draw its effectiveness? From its authority. Without authority, all power collapses under the weight of its deception (for it appears as devoid of all intrinsic power).

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Power results from authority, but it does not produce it (and it sets out its pomp only in order to mislead us into believing that it produces it, when in fact it does not have it). Authority, unlike power, does not declare itself, does not do violence, does not make a spectacle of itself, and even, if need be, is not seen. Authority never needs to demand obedience, because it obtains it immediately—­one gives obedience to authority voluntarily. It cannot become tyrannical as long as it remains a true authority; and it only becomes tyrannical precisely if it loses its authority and returns to being a mere power, tensely gripping its strength and the exercise of violence. True authority never can disappear, because it rests on nothing but itself, not even on its own affirmation. Let’s take an example that all teachers, and especially their students, know very well: authority is the one thing that a teacher can neither teach nor demand: he either has it or he doesn’t. He has it not when he seduces or dazzles, but rather when he knows what he is talking about, when he convinces by demonstrating or showing, without violence or constraint, and when the listener by himself finds himself in agreement with the teacher’s conclusions, which then become his own. The authority of a true teacher is summed up in his capacity to bring his listeners to agree with what he says (not with him), and ultimately with themselves. In contrast, a bad teacher likes to get the students to submit themselves to him, using violence and seduction (which can coincide). In conclusion: power can be exercised without violence only through the delegation of an authority; authority is exercised without violence and only ever in that manner, because it is never confused with mere power. It is fitting then to speak not of spiritual or religious power (unless separation is suspended and what is meant is only a politico-­ religious power), but instead of spiritual or religious authority. In this sense, all power comes from an authority, which itself does not exert power, in the social and political sense of the term. And the authority comes before power, and from elsewhere. Thus Christ

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taught “as one having authority” (Matthew 7:29; Romans 13:1), leaving the knowledge and the power to the scribes and the priests. In this way all power comes from God: not that God exercises power among men, but because the power of men, without any authority in itself, depends on the sole plenary authority, that of God.14 The authority of God in politics cannot be denied, but it must be heard, beyond power and strength, beyond nonviolence and passive resistance, as the unpower of authority.15 At least Christians believe so.

14. It is in this sense that Paul’s declaration must be understood: “there is no authority [exousia] except from God” (Romans 13:1). See the demonstration by Émilie Tardivel, Tout pouvoir vient de Dieu. Un paradoxe chrétien (Paris: Ad Solem, 2015). 15. See my remarks in “L’impouvoir,” an interview with Hugues Choplin, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 4, no. 60 (October 2008): 439–­45; English trans., “Unpower,” in Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World, ed. Nils F. Schott and Hent de Vries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 36–­42.

Envoy: A Catholic Moment

We must not speak about Catholics as if they formed a social class or a homogeneous troop, as if they were defined only by this exclusive engagement, and form a body of monk-­soldiers as homogeneous and typical as, perhaps, professional revolutionaries did in the past or, today, fanatical jihadis. Catholics remain individuals, like you and me, who live the same life as everyone else, with the same passions, desires, and hopes as anybody, and the same fears, too. They are Catholics, just as they are lefthanded or righthanded, even ambidextrous; hetero-­or homosexual, even bisexual; white, black, or brown;1 unemployed, just making it, or well-­off; happy or unhappy, or both; boorish or urbane, bougies or hippies, etc. In short, they are like everyone, except that they have faith in Christ. Moreover, they live therefore with the ambition, very deeply planted in their hearts, to live correctly, to succeed in living, which is to say, to live as Christ lived. They attempt this neither through virtue, nor heroism, nor mania, but because it appears to them clearly as the best way to live. They attempt to behave like Christ out of interest, of course. They sense and, for certain ones 1. [The original reads, “blancs, blacks ou beurs,” where beurs refers to French people of North African descent. This formula was popularly and widely used to describe the makeup of the French World Cup Champion soccer team of 1998.—­Trans.]

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among them, know on good authority that only love counts and that only love acts, that only love understands and that only love knows. For this very reason, today the possibility of a Catholic moment is dawning. Understand me well: I am not talking about a moment where everyone will be ordered to become Catholic (a hypothesis that is neither serious nor desirable, humanly speaking). We are entering into a Catholic moment because we are entering into a critical moment—­a moment where, in French society, the possibility of a community that puts the universal into operation is in play. By universal, here I mean everything that transcends the specific conflicts among groups, the contradictory interests, ideologies, and identities, everything that puts the unity of the nation in danger. This universal is everywhere crumbling and collapsing. Or, at the very least, it is becoming problematic, undefined, evanescent. We know now that French society is mortal, that it can break down, that it does not possess the promises of eternity. Who can reestablish the universal among us? It is not a question of identity (for the affirmation of or mad search for one’s identity proves first of all that one fears losing it, or has already lost it); instead, for a nation, it is a question of communion. A community can be bound together only through a communion in the universal. In France, who can put this communion into operation? All the French, one can hope. But who, among them, has the most experience and practical knowledge of this communion, for themselves and for others? We must hope that the Catholics have this experience, since communion should define them in their very originality: “By this all will recognize you as my disciples, by this love that you have for one another” ( John 13:35). They therefore find themselves particularly laden with the universal at the moment when it is most lacking in French society. The moment of the universal thus becomes the responsibility first and foremost of Catholics. The Catholic moment does not constitute a stroke of luck for Catholics, but a burden, too heavy for them not to ask for help from everyone.

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It may be that Chateaubriand, well in advance, caught a glimpse of this Catholic moment: “I find no solution for the future except in Christianity and in Catholic Christianity in particular. . . . If there is to be a future, a mighty and free future, that future is still far off, far beyond the visible horizon; we will be able to reach it only with the help of that Christian hope whose wings grow in proportion as everything seems to betray it, a hope longer than time and stronger than misfortune.”2

2. François-­R ené de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-­tombe 14.7, ed. M. Levaillant and G. Moulinier (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1951), 2: 931 and 933.

General Index

Académie catholique de France, 7 Action Catholique, 12 Action Française, 12, 13 advance, 78 Aeneid, The (Virgil), 38 Alaric, 21 analogy, xiii anatheism, 27–­28 Anselm, Saint, x anticlericals, 9, 34 apologetics, ix, 4, 23 Arab nationalism, 44 Archimedes, 53 atheism, 13, 28, 32, 40, 41, 42; of twentieth-­century totalitarian regimes, 39, 40 atheists, xiv, 2, 21–­22, 50, 51, 70 Augustine, Saint, x, 2, 15, 21–­23, 44, 57, 75 authority, 27, 28, 36, 37, 38, 41, 45, 46, 53, 80–­81 autonomy, 13, 54, 66, 70, 79 Badiou, Alain, vii Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 2, 14 baptism, baptized persons, 14, 16, 33, 54 barbarism, 48, 59

Bataille, Georges, xii beautiful, 60 being, 60, 64, 65; supreme, 61 Berlin Wall, 45, 80 Bernanos, Georges, 12, 13, 17, 21, 30 Bible, 2, 28, 32 bishops, Roman Catholic, 8, 10, 29, 33, 36, 37, 46 Blanchot, Maurice, xii Body of Christ, 18 Bolsheviks, 26 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 35, 37 Bossuet, Jacques-­Bénigne, 40 Bouyer, Louis, 2 Brague, Rémi, 43 brotherhood ( fraternité), xiii, 25–­26, 60 Capelle-­Dumont, Philippe, 7 capitalism, 71 catholic (universal), xiv, 14, 17, 24, 40, 47, 69, 84 Catholicism, 10, 18, 35, 49, 50, 52, 85; French, 13, 45 Catholic moment, 30, 47, 83, 84–­85 Catholics, xii, xiv, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12–­13, 14, 15, 26, 28, 29, 36, 46, 47, 57, 83, 84–­85; French, ix–­xi, xiv, 1,

88  J  general index Catholics (cont.) 2, 5, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 19, 30, 31, 46, 48, 57, 84 causa sui, 62 Cazeneuve, Bernard, 53 celibacy, 9 Chaline, Olivier, 12 charity, 24, 47, 53, 54 Charles V, 37 Chateaubriand, François-­René de, 7, 85 Choplin, Hugues, 82 Christianity, 37, 38, 40, 42, 51, 85; not a religion, viii, 51 Christians, xii, 3, 4, 5, 10, 21, 23, 24, 29, 30, 32, 33, 40, 41, 47, 54–­55, 57–­58, 62, 69, 70, 78, 79, 82; Anglican, 9; “anonymous,” 55; the “German,” 50; Orthodox, 9, 39, 45; political originality of, 69; Protestant, xi, xiii, xiv, 9, 29, 35, 36, 45, 47 church (building), 10 Church, established or national, 34, 38, 39, 40; Roman Catholic, xi, 2, 3, 7, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16–­17, 18–­19, 21, 27, 29, 33–­34, 35, 36, 37, 39 Church Fathers, ix, 23, 29 Churches, Protestant, 27, 39 Cicero, 22 citizen, xiii, xiv, 1, 5, 15, 23, 24, 26, 34, 35, 40, 41, 48, 49, 57, 66, 69, 71, 73, 79; as actor of the gift, 79; as economic agent (consumer, producer), 71, 72; French, 5; as political agent, 71, 72 City of God, 23 clash of civilizations, 46, 48 Claudel, Paul, 19 Clavel, Maurice, 13 Clement VII (pope), 12 clericalism, 1 Clovis, 37 Cold War, 44 Collège des Bernardins, Paris, 7

common good, xii, xiv, 24, 66–­69, 72, 79; and trinitarian experience of God, 68 Communio (journal), 7, 12 communion, xii, 4, 24, 26, 30, 51, 57, 66, 68, 69, 70, 79, 84; from elsewhere, 70; good of the, 67, 68–­69; realized in God, 69; trinitarian, 69, 70 Communist Party, 13 Communists, 10 communitarianism, 69 community, ix, xii, 5, 28, 30, 49, 66, 69, 70, 84; of believers, 43; good of the, 67; of the good, 67; multicultural, 48; national, 25–­26, 49, 54; political, 67, 70, 73, 79; universalization of, xiv, 48, 84 concept, 31, 42, 49, 50, 51, 65, 66, 68 concordat, first French (1801), 35 Constantine (emperor), 36 Constitution, American, 26, 34 Constitution of the Clergy (1791), 35 conversion (metanoia), 21 Credo, 8 crisis, 5, 10, 11, 14, 19–­20, 21, 62, 65, 79 Cross, xii, 1, 16 culture, viii, ix, 67, 72 Da Vinci Code, The (Brown), 2 deacon, 33 death, 4, 77 decadence, 5, 11, 19–­20, 21, 62, 72 dechristianization, 9 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” (1789), 34 Decourtray, Albert, 13 De Gaulle, Charles, 11 Deleuze, Gilles, vii de Lubac, Henri, 2 democracy, 29, 32, 38, 48, 57, 59, 66, 71, 79 Derrida, Jacques, vii, 74 Descartes, René, viii, 73

General index  J  89 dictatorship, 59, 71 Diet of Augsburg (1555), 35–­36 Don Juan (character), 78 ecology, 58, 66 economy, 10, 59, 72, 73, 74, 80; of exchange, 74 Edict of Nantes (1598), 35 Empire: French, 8; Holy Roman Germanic, 37; Roman, 21–­22, 36, 41; Soviet, 44 Enlightenment, viii, 27, 40, 49, 51 equality (égalité), xiii, 25, 60; economic, 72 Europe, 11, 20, 37, 45, 54 European Union, 29 evaluation, 59–­61, 62, 63, 64; from elsewhere, 59, 63 evaluator, 61 exchange, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79 experience, 4, 84 faith, 12, 14–­15, 16, 47, 83 father, 25, 26 fatherland, 26 Fessard, Gaston, 13, 66–­67 France, viii, 7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 20, 21, 29, 35, 37, 57, 84; defeat of in 1940, 11, 30; as “Elder Daughter of the Church,” 12; kings of, 35, 37, 38; law of 1905 in, viii, x, 27, 28, 31, 34, 35, 41, 45, 46, 51; Muslims in, x, 29; religious toleration in, 35–­36; “soul of,” 29, 54, 66; Third Republic of, x Francis, Pope, x, xi, 17 freedom (liberté), xiii, 25, 60, 79; of conscience, 40, 41, 53; public, 71; religious, 8, 40, 43, 53 French Conference of Bishops, 13 Fromager, Marc, 31 Gallicanism, 40 Gauchet, Marcel, 51

gift, 4, 73–­78, 79–­80; revolution of the, 79 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, 20 giver, 76 giving, 73; to one’s enemy, 75–­76 God, 2, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 32, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44, 50, 51, 60, 67, 69, 78, 82; as Creator, 78; death of, x, 1, 22, 27, 28, 59; the Father, 15, 20, 26, 63, 65; love for, 68; the love of, 68–­69; the power of, 82; trinitarian experience of, xiv, 68; unity of, 51, 69 good, 60; of communion, 67, 68–­69 Gospel, xiii, 18, 50, 65 grace, 21, 24, 48 growth, 61, 71, 78, 79; as name for the process of evaluation, 61, 65 Hamel, Jacques, 10 Heidegger, Martin, viii heteronomy, 70 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 58 holiness, 4, 52, 53 Hollande, François, 20 Holy Spirit, 16, 18, 20 honor, 21 hope, 4, 15, 85 Houellebecq, Michel, 47 Hugo, Victor, 38 humanists, 3 Husserl, Edmund, viii, xiii identitarianism, 3, 48, 66, 69, 84 ideology, 27, 42, 72, 84 idolatry, idols, 15, 27, 28, 38, 39, 40 infrastructures, 72, 73 integralism, 13 integralists, 3, 48 intellectuals, 33 interreligious dialogue, 47 intuition, 68 Islam, 27, 43–­44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51 Israel, 28, 39

90  J  general index Jansenists, 40 Jesus Christ, xii, xiv, 4, 11, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 33, 53, 63–­64, 65, 68, 69, 70, 75, 81–­82, 83; Resurrection of, 16 Jews, xiv, 28, 29, 36, 46 John Paul II (pope), x, 1 Jourdan, Gil (character), 48 Judaism, 27, 45 Judeo-­Christian, 42, 43, 45 Judgment, the Father’s, 15 justice, 22–­23, 24, 54, 78 Justin Martyr, x, 23, 41, 57–­58 Kant, Immanuel, 21, 22 Kearney, Richard, 28 kingdom of heaven, 5, 15 kings, 28–­29, 39, 40, 53 Lacordaire, Jean-­Baptiste Henri, 12 Lactantius, 41 laic, 32, 33, 51 “laical struggle,” 32, 44 laicity, 5, 27, 28, 29, 31–­32, 33, 34, 37, 42, 44, 48, 49, 52, 53 laicization, 33–­34, 44 law, moral, from elsewhere, 70 Leo XIII (pope), 67 Letter to Diognetus, 23, 57, 69 Levinas, Emmanuel, viii, 70 Lévy, Bernard-­Henri, vii Libellule (character), 48 liberalism, 72 life, 4, 77 Locke, John, 73 Louis XIII, 38 Louis XIV, 37 Louzeau, Frédéric, 66–­67 love, xii, xiii, 2, 11, 15, 68–­69, 77, 78, 84; of God, 15, 68–­69; of neighbor, 68; trinitarian, 68 Lustiger, Jean-­Marie, 13 Macbeth (character), 80 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 22

Mallarmé, Stéphane, 51–­52 Marion, Jean-­Luc, viii, 75 marriage, 9 martyrdom, 8 Marxism, 13, 72, 74 Maurras, Charles, 12 Mauss, Marcel, 74 media, 71 Medici, Catherine de, 12 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice, vii metaphysics, 39, 51, 64; end of, viii, 65 Mitterand, François, 20 modernity, 28 monotheism, 44, 51, 69 Moses, 32 mother, 26 motherland, 26 Muslims, xiv, 28, 29, 45, 46, 47; of France, 45, 46 Nancy, Jean-­Luc, vii, xii Nazi regime, 50 neighbor, xiii, 68 Newman, John Henry, ix New Testament, ix, 29, 32 Nicholas of Cusa, 47 Nietzsche, Friedrich, x, 28, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63 nihilism, viii, 27, 28, 30, 50, 58–­59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65; Christian path out of, 65 Nora, Pierre, 25 Notre-­Dame Cathedral (Paris), 12 obedience, xi, 9, 80–­81 Octavian Augustus (Roman emperor), 38 Onfray, Michel, vii Origen, ix Other, xiii, 70 Ozouf, Mona, 25 paradox, viii, 4, 6, 11, 17, 24, 33, 36, 42, 64, 65, 77 Pascal, Blaise, viii, 37, 53

General index  J  91 Paul, Saint, ix peace, 47 pedophilia, 11 Péguy, Charles, 31 Peña-­Ruiz, Henri, 34 Peter, Saint, 32, 37 phenomenology, xiii, 75 phenomenon/phenomena: erotic, 78; saturated, viii philosophy, 52; moral, 70; political, 6, 66 Plato, ix, 76 politics, ix, xiii, xiv, 2, 12, 17, 24, 30, 37, 70, 82 pope, 8, 18, 36, 37, 40 populism, 71 potlatch, 74 poverty, xi, 9, 71, 72 power, viii, 30, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 57, 61, 62, 64, 65, 75, 77, 79, 80–­81. See also will presence, 27; persistence in, 64; Real, 52 priests, ix, 29, 38, 39, 82; Roman Catholic, 8, 9, 10, 33, 34 productivity, economic, 71 progressivism, 13 property, 67, 73, 74, 79 Protestantism, 45, 50 prudence, 6 Quran, 43 rationality, 51; positivist, 30 realism, 12, 79 reality, 29, 52, 54, 60, 61, 72, 77; economic, 71, 72; political, 71 reason, 4, 49, 50, 62 rechristianization, 9, 13 recipient (givee), 75; anonymity of the, 75 reciprocity, 73, 74, 78 reduction, 8, 33, 75 reform, xi, 11, 16, 21, 72

Reformation, 39, 40, 50 religion(s), viii, 27, 32, 35, 36, 42, 47, 49–­50, 51, 52, 53, 72; role in the wealth of nations, 72 Republic, French, xi, xii–­xiii, 26, 27, 28, 31, 34, 48, 60, 77; motto of, xiii, 25–­26; values of, 66 res publica, 22–­23, 24 Restoration, in France, 8 return/repetition of the same, 20, 62, 64–­65 Revelation, 50; biblical, 38, 42 revolution: French, 8, 34; national, 13 Rome, 21–­23, 26 Ronsard, Pierre de, 38 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 43–­44 sacred, 27 sacrifice, xii Sade, Marquis de (Donatien-­ Alphonse-­François), 70 saints, Christian, xi, 16–­17, 18 Sales, Michel, 66 Sallust, 22 Santa Croce, Prospero de, 12 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 20 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, vii, 62 Scandinavia, 4 schism, 13, 18, 50 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, ix Schopenhauer, Arthur, 63 Second Vatican Council, 13, 40 Second World War, 9 secularization, 27 seduction, 78, 81 self, 62, 64, 73, 79; gift of the, 76; of things, 65 seminaries, 9 separation of church/spiritual authority and political power, 29, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 52–­53, 54, 55, 57, 72, 79, 81 social contract, 44

92  J  general index Trinity, xii, xiii, xiv, 51, 68 true, 60

society, 54, 57, 66, 67; authoritarian, 71; Christian vision of, 42; dictatorial, 71; European, 28; French, 10, 11, 19, 21, 24, 25, 27, 30, 31, 44, 45, 46, 84; laical, 40; political, 28, 29, 70; totalitarian, 39 sociology, 14 Socrates, ix, 41 solidarity, 5, 11, 49 son, 25 Sophocles, 15 Spain, kings of, 37 Stalla-­Bourdillon, Laurent, 31 state, viii, x, 9, 10, 11, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37–­38, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 52, 53, 54, 72, 80; totalitarian, 40, 52 Stendhal, 9 superstructures, 72

value(s), 27, 52, 54, 59–­61, 62, 63, 65, 66; totalization of, 64 Vatican II, 13, 40 veritas redarguens, 18 Vialatte, Alexandre, 18 Vichy regime, 13, 26 Vienna, 45 violence, 31, 51, 62, 80, 81 Virgil, 38 Voltaire, 38

Tardivel, Émilie, 82 Terror, 26 terrorism, 48, 58, 62 Tertullian, 23, 24, 41 theology, 2, 13, 36, 37, 51; political, xi, 6 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, x, 47 Tillieux, Maurice, 48 time, 77 togetherness (le vivre-­ensemble), 48, 54 Toulon, 45 Trente Glorieuses, 19

Wagner, Richard, 52 Wars of Religion, 8, 27, 50 wealth, global, 71 Westphalia, treaties of, 36 will: common, 25; evaluating, 61–­62; from elsewhere, 64, 65; general, 25, 66; of God (the Father), 15, 63, 65; human, 15, 21; nonwilling, 62–­63; to power, 27, 61, 62, 63, 64–­65, 79; to will, 61–­62, 63, 64, 66 World War II, 9

unemployment, 71 United Kingdom, 26 universality, 24, 40, 55 University of Chicago, 2 unpower, xiv, 82

Index of Biblical Passages

Genesis 1:28, 78 Exodus 19:3–­9 (Septuagint), 32 1 Samuel 8, 28–­29 Wisdom 11:20, 38 Isaiah 55:8, 38 Matt. 2:22, xiii Matt. 5:3, 5 Matt. 5:45, 76 Matt. 7:29, 82 Matt. 10:39, 64 Matt. 14:27, x Matt. 26:39, 63 Mark 8:35, 64 Mark 12:30–­31, xi Mark 14:36, 63 Luke 6:17, 33 Luke 6:33, 75 Luke 9:24, 64 Luke 10:9 and 11, 15 Luke 22:42, 63

John 8:15–­16, 20 John 13:16, 15 John 13:35, 84 John 15:4, 19 John 15:14–­15, 33 John 17:12, 17 Acts 1:6, 15 Acts 11:26, 4 Acts 26:1, ix Romans 5:5, 16 Romans 11:29, 78 Romans 13:1, 82 Ephesians 3:14–­15, 26 1 Peter 2:9–­10, 32 1 Peter 3:15, 4 1 John 2:3–­4 and 9, 68 1 John 4:7, 68 1 John 4:20, 68 Revelation 17:3, 39