Two Theologies
In a book boasting superior documentation and entitled Les problèmes de l’athéisme366 (Seuil, 1972), theologian Claude Tresmontant displays greater precision. This is what he writes: ‘Christianity has not been attacked solely by those who struggled on behalf of the poor and the oppressed, in the name of justice and against having some men oppress others. It has equally been hated and attacked by those who have blamed it for having introduced into the world a revolutionary element that acts as a leaven in the uprising of oppressed classes against the caste of their masters. Independently of all misunderstandings, misinterpretations, crimes, deceptions, and errors, there is a certain opposition to Christianity whose essence is spiritual, one that advocates an averse spiritual preference’.
As a result of this, Tresmontant set out to define atheism not as hostility to faith, but indeed as a belief that consists in professing the idea that the universe represents a self-sufficient whole, just as Empedocles once did in Greece.
He then goes on to say that the antagonism between atheism and monotheism is but ‘a violent opposition, an inexpiable war between two theologies: the Hebraic theology, which declares that the Absolute Being is separate from the world, and the theology of nature, which is embodied by the most ancient Hellenic theology and bestows upon nature a divine character’.
Prior to their colonisation at the hands of Christendom, Indo-European peoples were not atheistic. They were, in fact, profoundly religious peoples for whom participation in communal acts of worship was closely tied to civic life (one was thus born into a religion in the same manner that one is born into a community, and it is for this very reason that the ancient Romans considered Christian universalism to be profane). In their eyes, divinity was present throughout the world. It was indistinguishable from the latter and personal gods and goddesses were but different manifestations of it.
The inability to conceive of God outside the framework of Christianity is thus synonymous with remaining very Christian indeed. ‘I cannot help feeling a certain indignation at the sight of the word irreligious being used as a synonym of non-Christian. When will the pious and iniquitous Christians at long last understand that there are wise men who remain too religious to ever desire to deify a man?’ exclaims August-Wilhelm von Schlegel.367
First of all, Christianity is not the only possible religion, and on the other hand, the notions of God, the sacred and transcendence are highly different conceptions whose merger with one religion or another is only partial (or secondary). Most Christians, incidentally, are reluctant to arrogate to themselves the monopoly of the sacred. Nowadays, few people are willing to believe that the other religions of our world, and particularly the ancient religion of Europe, are but a collection of uncultured superstitions; nor are they ready to affirm that there is neither religion nor faith outside Christianity.
Hence the opinion espoused by Mr Maurice Clavel,368 according to whom ‘every culture may well embody an option towards the absolute…, an absolute that cannot, in its ultimate essence, be limited to Christianity itself’ (in Le Nouvel Observateur, 13th September, 1976).
There are, therefore, as many kinds of ‘unbelief’ as there are forms of theism. One may be anti-Christian as a result of considering Christianity to be false, or because one perceives it as a harmful sort of ideology, an ideology that is responsible for the introduction (and acclimatisation) of the egalitarian mythos into European thought. As for the notion of God, it may be as indispensable to our understanding as both zero and infinity are to the mathematician. When reduced to a mere absence of faith, atheism is ‘as unthinkable as it is thoughtless’: for believing in something is in the very nature of the evolved animal that man is.
Those who do not believe in God believe in something, or someone, else that acts as God’s surrogate. The real question is thus not that of wondering whether one believes, but that of asking: How does one believe? And why? And in what?
Mr Chabanis concludes his book with an interview with God. It turns out to be a monologue, of course. God does indeed exist, but solely for those who believe and no one else.
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Dieu existe-t-il? Non, répondent…, an inquiry conducted by Christian Chabanis. Fayard, 409 pages.
La métaphysique et le langage, an essay by Louis Rougier. Denoël, 244 pages.
Les problèmes de l’athéisme, an essay by Claude Tresmontant. Seuil, 441 pages.
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The Philosophical Faculty at the Salesian Pontifical University of Rome has published a series of massive volumes under the general heading When Christians Question Atheism. It is Abbe Jean-François Six, a professor of theology at the seminary of the Mission of France at Pontigny, who has taken charge of the French edition. Two series have thus far been published: L’athéisme dans la vie et la culture contemporaines369 (two volumes, Desclée, 1967–68) and L’athéisme dans la philosophie contemporaine370 (two volumes, Desclée, 1970–71). Despite having obviously been written with an apologetical intention, these works still manage to attract a certain interest thanks to the very size of the investigations that they reflect.
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The Problematic of the Soul
If one were to take an individual and strip him of all his quantitative and qualitative characteristics, of both his form and structure, what would be left of him? Nothing at all, the rationalists state. Everything, according to believers: his essence, his being, his soul.
Catechism states that ‘man is a reasonable creature made out of a soul and a body’. This view is advocated by all major dualist religions, which contrast the world of the senses with the kingdom of God: the soul’s reality differs from the body’s; and it is the soul that accounts for the activity of man’s consciousness and thought, having the ability to subsist independently of the body itself, thus outliving the latter beyond death.
Mr Claude Tresmontant questions this definition from the perspective of faith, considering it to be both simplistic and deceptive.
Mr Tresmontant has, for a few years now, been exerting an effort of remarkable clarity in reviving some of the major theological problematics. He has published several works through Seuil editions: La doctrine morale des prophètes d’Israël371 (1958), Les idées maîtresses de la métaphysique chrétienne372 (1962), Comment se pose aujourd’hui le problème de l’existence de Dieu373 (1966), L’enseignement de Ieschoua de Nazareth374 (1970), and others.
The doctrine of the soul is found in the Upanishad and in most salvational religions that stem from the Old Testament. And yet, during the Mosaic period, up until the era of the Maccabee kings, no mention of it is made in any biblical text.
Ecclesiastes states: ‘For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence over a beast: for all is vanity’ (9:5).375 Mr Tresmontant adds: ‘The Hebrews have no notion of any substantial duality between the soul and the body’. The Hebrew language even lacks a proper term to refer to the body as understood by Plato and Descartes,376 both of whom describe it as a substance that remains distinct from the soul’.
Among the Greeks, the conception of the immortality of an uncreated soul, a soul that is entirely separate from the body which incarnates it on a temporary basis, is present in Plato’s teachings, the Orphic cults and the astral religion of the Pythagoreans.
What Aristotle opposes to this conception, which is characterised by a radical opposition between the soul and the body, is a more functional notion that renders this opposition relative: the soul is but the formal and organising principle of each individual body. This is what he states in his treatise entitled On the Soul: ‘The soul is to the body what sight is to the eye’. He also states: ‘The soul does not exist independently of the body’. Such was the opinion of most Ancients: The Roman anima and the Greek psyche were not something that outlived the body, but, on the contrary, the breath of life that animated it on eart
h.
Plato’s radicalism is encountered in Gnostic beliefs. In the eyes of the Manicheans, the human soul, whose essence is divine, ‘turned and looked below, towards matter’ (El Khatibi). It fell into the detestable world of physical appearances, a world from which the initiate must liberate himself.
‘This metaphor is found in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre,377 when, in his Existentialism is a Humanism, he states that “man did not create himself”, but was “cast into the world”’, remarks Mr Tresmontant.
In his Treatise on Man and Discourse on Method, Descartes is equally categorical. Making no distinction between the organic and the mechanic, nor between living substance and physical substance, he affirms that the soul ‘is of a nature that bears no connection to the extension,378 dimensions or properties that define the matter of which the body is composed’, defining the soul-deprived body as a machine, an ‘organism devoid of organisation’.
There are, in fact, no common aspects between man-made machines and living organisms. Therein lies the entire difference between all that relates to macrophysical systems and everything that falls under the category of biological ones.
From a scholastic perspective, theologians espouse a more nuanced position. Thomas Aquinas adopts Aristotle’s doctrine, but adds to it the notion of the soul’s immortality: ‘The human soul is a form that does not depend on the body with regard to its existence’ (Summa Contra Gentiles). The Council of Vienne379 (1311–12) formulated the idea that ‘the soul’s attachment to the body is of an immediate nature, and it is the principle of life and of all movement within the body’. This definition would thereafter be readopted in 1512 by the Lateran Council, and then by Pope Pius IX in 1860.
In accordance with Aristotelian thinking and in contrast with the views of Descartes and Plato, biologists and physiologists have both established the existence of a link between consciousness and cerebral activity.
Professor Grassé, author of Toi, ce petit dieu!,380 writes: ‘The mind is intimately and indissociably tied to living matter’.
As for Mr Tresmontant, he is of the opinion that Christians must acknowledge scientific conclusions. He does, however, think that the debate between spiritualists and materialists has now become obsolete, for the soul and the spirit, known as anima and animus in ancient Rome, have long ceased to be subject to confusion. Almost half a century ago, Alfred Binet381 had already made this remark when targeting Bergson382 (in L’âme et le corps,383 Flammarion, 1928). The theologians themselves are well aware of the fact that ‘the blood is spirit’ (Nietzsche), and that ‘every living being, every single organism has a mental dimension’. One must thus ‘distinguish, within every living being, both matter and a formal principle, with the two wholes constituting a single organised body’.
A Perceptional Fact
What about the soul in its strictest definition, then? Mr Tresmontant proposes an audacious hypothesis in this regard. ‘When one states that man is made of a “soul” and a “body”, one unknowingly resorts to the term “soul” twice when mentioning the “body”: once explicitly and consciously, and then again implicitly and without being aware of it. For every living body is either an animate one or nothing at all. Once the soul has departed, it is not a body that is left, but a cadaver, meaning a stack and mere multitude of chemical elements that vanish and disperse. The famous issue of the relation between the “soul” and the “body” has no meaning whatsoever under the conditions in which it is raised. Indeed, a living and specific body is nothing but a soul informing matter and organising it’.
In other words, not only does the brain ‘produce’ thoughts, but it also attempts to ‘comprehend’ them. And owing to their very existence, living beings thus act as the reflection of ‘a creative intelligence that governs all biochemical and biological processes from the very moment the egg is fertilised’. As a result, the sole significant problematic is ‘that of the relations between the soul and the subsisting form, meaning the matter that it informs so as to turn it into an organised and living body’.
The conclusion is that ‘one must not say “I have” a soul, for such a stance would be synonymous with differentiating between the subject that possesses the soul and the soul that is thus possessed. One must, instead, say: “I am a living soul”. Furthermore, the words “I am a living soul” and “I am a living body” amount to the same thing, for the living body that I am is nothing but my own living soul informing matter’.
Such a definition enjoys the obvious advantage of resolving the issue of the soul’s ‘substantiality’: it is no longer necessary to demonstrate the latter, since it has now become a perceptional datum. Mankind as a whole is thus, in a manner of speaking, put into the Golem’s position. It is difficult to venture further into the negation of a person’s autonomy.
Is this ‘perceptible soul’, however, one that has been reduced to ‘the reality embodied by structure’, truly the soul that theologians speak of? Scientists, in whose eyes man is also a ‘psychosomatic unit’, refer to the organising principle capable of renewing the elements of which we are composed as a ‘subsisting structure’. By taking their observations into account, does Mr Tresmontant not risk having the domain of transcendence yield to that of biology?
If the soul is nothing but the principle of life, what is it then that sets man apart from animals? Since the atoms that make up their bodies are all renewed in the course of their existence, do they not have a ‘subsisting substance’ of their own? Last but not least, if the soul is a constituent element of the body and of the matter that it informs, how can one state that it outlives matter once the latter is no longer being informed?
Mr Tresmontant remains rather evasive with regard to these issues, contenting himself with the observation that resurrection is only mentioned once in the teachings of ‘Yeshua, the Nazarene Rabbi’ (Jesus).
‘At the current stage of our analyses, we cannot, based on the nature of the soul itself, guarantee that the latter will be granted the gift of existence after death’, he adds.
Such an affirmation may well shock people or perhaps even come across as encouragement of disbelief. In response to all those for whom this might be a source of concern, Mr Tresmontant refers to both the mystery of the world and the Judeo-Christian logos.
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Le problème de l’âme,384 an essay by Claude Tresmontant. Seuil, 220 pages.
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History, Utopia and Religion
‘One should perhaps hope that our future will stem from the Saint-Simonian system or the convictions of Fourierists,385 Owenists,386 socialists, communists, unionists, egalitarianists, and so on, whose views all derive from the Babouvists387 or, further back, from Christian heresies’.
Few are familiar with these words, spoken by Chateaubriand388 and included as an epigraph in the essay that Mr Thomas Molnar has dedicated to the topic of utopia.
A professor of French at the City University of New York, fifty-six-year-old Thomas Molnar moved to the United States in 1949, having left Hungary three years earlier. He is one of the frontrunners of American traditionalism. In his book, he analyses a thought current that has always existed but whose influence has particularly been felt during periods of transformation, concern or decline; it is, in fact, a current that is now resurfacing.
He remarks: ‘Every now and then, the notion that it is indeed possible to construct an ideal society spreads among men’. This is when the most fearsome category of dreamers manifests itself: those who long to realise their dreams. They are men who feel ill at ease in their own skin, those who, in some way, suffer from being who they are. They hunger for the absolute and regard the world’s imperfections as ‘injustices’: for success always seems scandalous to all those who fail. History’s consubstantial tensions seem ‘crushing’ to them. They long to return to the Golden Age, to the Lost Paradise. They dream of a model city where all men would be brothers, universal love would reign supreme, everyone would enjoy everything they need in utter abund
ancy, and the administration of things would replace the government of men. What they dream of is, in short, a city where all streets would actually be sloped. These dreamers are utopians.
Plato, Bacon, Campanella, and Thomas More are among their ‘great ancestors’: their models range from the ‘City of the Sun’ to Fourier’s phalansteries; from medieval monasteries to the Paraguayan Jesuit Republic; from Icarian fantasies to a classless society. They only accept society as a setting for their own ‘experiences’. They detest reality whenever it negates their theories.
Among the Gnostics, hatred of the world was taken to the extreme. ‘They expressed this hatred by means of a complicated mythology in which Buddhist, Indian, Egyptian and Semitic elements mingled with Greek and Judeo-Christian speculation. They taught that the True God was infinitely distant and had not participated in the creation of the world of matter; the latter was the work of the demiurge, meaning that of evil’, Mr Molnar writes.
Utopianism is often egalitarian in its inspirations. It demands that mankind be reduced to a single model, meaning that differences be eliminated, differences that are then declared ‘superficial’ and ‘harmful’.
The ultimate objective is the ‘omega point’, where man will have lost all individuality, having been reduced to an anonymous cell in the vast ‘human tissue’. Teilhard de Chardin declares: ‘The noosphere389 tends to represent a closed system in which each element senses, sees, desires and endures the same things as the others, at the very same time’ (in Le phénomème humain).390
The Hope for a Perfect Society
In utopian visions, everything is always identical; equally ‘good’. Each day resembles the others. Events and oppositions no longer exist, and boredom reigns supreme. ‘The utopian only embraces the means of liberty so as to put liberty to death. He would rather have freedom vanish in order to ensure the triumph of equality. His penchant towards perfect cities thus leads to an appetite for desertification. It is therefore the case that these transparent societies sometimes beget benighted and miserable communities’, Mr Gilles Lapouge writes in Utopie et civilisations.391
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