Without God

by Louis Betty

  Buvet’s loss of faith may say more about the state of Catholicism in France than it does about the fate of religion in the West. France’s peculiar relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, marked by revolution, violence, and political upheaval, has contributed to an environment in which Catholicism, long associated with social privilege and political obscurantism, no longer appeals to most contemporary French men and women. The church’s refusal to adopt basic elements of Western modernity (for instance, by forbidding Catholics to use condoms) does not help its chances in a country where the Catholic contestation of secular political authority was a cause of division and violence for centuries. Buvet’s defunct parish is the result not so much of a general decline of religion, but rather of a slackening of the social significance of an increasingly obsolete and socially irrelevant Catholicism. In The Map and the Territory, Houellebecq confirms his account of the plight of the priesthood:

  Inheritors of a millennia-old spiritual tradition that nobody really understood anymore, once placed in the front rank of society, priests today were reduced, at the end of terrifyingly long and difficult studies that involved mastering Latin, canon law, rational theology, and other almost incomprehensible subjects, to surviving in miserable material conditions. They took the metro alongside other men, going from a Gospels-reading group to a literacy workshop, saying mass every morning for a thin and aging audience, being forbidden all sensual joy or even the elementary pleasures of family life, yet obliged by their function to display day after day an unwavering optimism [ . . . ]. Humble and penniless, sneered at by everyone, subjected to all the problems of urban life without having access to any of its pleasures, young urban priests constituted, for those who did not share their faith, a puzzling and inaccessible subject. (59)

  Priests in Houellebecq’s novels are a dying breed whose social utility appears to have run its course. They are historical anachronisms, anthropological curiosities whose presence on the Paris Metro is as uncanny as that of an escaped animal that wanders into a restaurant. Buvet’s parish, it should be noted, lies in the suburban city of Vitry, a Parisian banlieue home to a large population of Muslims. The presence of a religious alternative in the community likely does not help matters for poor Buvet.8

  Whatever is a novel that shows more than it tells. The reader is able to understand Buvet’s spiritual collapse as a consequence of religious change—the decline of Catholicism in France—and his own personal experience, rather than as evidence of a more general decline of religious belief and sentiment among Westerners. The murder of his elderly parishioner, though certainly horrific, can be understood as an exaggerated rendering of moral secularization in a post-Christian or post-Catholic social and cultural context, rather than as the kind of materialist horror we find in the suicides of such characters as Annabelle, Djerzinski, and Daniel1. In this respect, then, it would be a mistake to go too far in reading Houellebecq as a sort of crypto-Catholic reactionary writer bent on proclaiming a return to traditional morality (see Lindenberg 2002, 23). Indeed, his subsequent novels, particularly The Possibility of an Island and The Elementary Particles, display such an overt embrace of classical accounts of secularization that one would have difficulty finding anything reactionary about them; rather, in these novels, the damage to traditional religion is total and irreversible, and there can be no going back to previous times.

  Houellebecq admits to Lévy in Public Enemies that he found Catholicism compelling as a young man (2011, 137–38), perhaps even up to the point of writing Whatever. But from the appearance of The Elementary Particles until only very recently,9 Houellebecq’s tone was clearly one of thoroughgoing atheism. As Houellebecq states in his 2001 interview with Lire, “God doesn’t exist, and even if you’re stupid you end up realizing it.” Since Whatever, then, Houellebecq has tended to generalize his atheism in his novels, with the effect that these texts stand as fictionalized accounts of theories of secularization that are themselves fictions. Characters such as Bruno and Michel Djerzinski are exaggerated and somewhat lampooned victims of the materialist worldview that Houellebecq’s novels identify as typical of the age, and they offer gripping portrayals of a certain kind of contemporary mentality. But we should avoid the temptation to view such characters as exemplary of prevailing worldviews, and should instead understand them as particular variables in Houellebecq’s materialist horror experiment. Houellebecq’s novels provide morally compelling fables of the psychosocial horrors of materialism, which we should consider to be experimental explorations of the individual and collective psychological consequences of God’s death and which we should avoid reducing to sociological documents.

  With the social significance of Christianity having declined steeply in many European countries, it is legitimate to wonder if deinstitutionalized religious belief, of the sort found among many French men and women, will remain merely personal or if it will some day coalesce into more collective forms. Religious vacuums are historical oddities, and past efforts to forcibly secularize societies have not only failed but have also been responsible for a tremendous amount of bloodletting (as have been attempts to spiritualize societies). Is it possible, then, that the twenty-first century will see the rise of a new religion in the “post-Christian” West? The Possibility of an Island is concerned with just this question. I turn to this novel in the next chapter.

  2

  The Future of Religion

  Political or military events, economic transformations, aesthetic or cultural mutations can all play a role, sometimes a very big role, in the life of men; but nothing, ever, can have any historical importance compared to the development of a new religion, or to the collapse of an existing one.

  —Houellebecq 2007

  But such a state of uncertainty and confused agitation cannot last forever. The day will come when our societies will know once again hours of creative effervescence, in the course of which new ideals will be born and new formulae emerge which will for a time serve as a guide to humanity.

  —Durkheim 1994

  One of the most provocative aspects of Houellebecq’s fiction is its willingness to engage religion as a serious antidote to contemporary existential malaise. Long an atheist and now a self-identified agnostic, Houellebecq is nonetheless a deeply and unavoidably religious writer, and not to read his work religiously is to read it only partially, if not simply poorly. Just as he was for Comte, man for Houellebecq is an “animal of the religious type,” and ignoring this dimension of human nature risks everything from individual destruction to social collapse. As Douglas Morrey has written, “If we are to avoid the kind of collective suicide that Houellebecq repeatedly envisions in his fiction, it may well require a solution with the organizational structure and the force of conviction of a religion” (2013, 151). On a similar note, if we are to avoid reading Houellebecq inaccurately, we must acknowledge that perhaps no other living French writer exhibits a comparable sensitivity to the psychological, social, and political stakes of religious change in France, if not in Europe and the West in general.

  Morrey’s insight finds notable confirmation in Houellebecq’s fourth novel, The Possibility of an Island, which, structured much like the Bible,1 tells the story of the Elohimite sect, a new religious movement that emerges in Western Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century and attracts adherents with a promise of physical immortality through cloning. Miskiewicz, the scientific leader of the movement, describes the Elohimite version of immortality to a gathering of converts:

  The human being is matter plus information. The composition of this matter is now known to us, at least in principle: It is based entirely on DNA, that of the nucleus and that of the mitochondria [ . . . ]. Why not directly manufacture an adult human being, from the necessary chemical elements and the schema provided by the DNA? [ . . . ] The men of the future will be born directly into an adult body, a body aged eighteen, and this is the model that will be subsequently reproduced, it is in this ideal form that they will reach [ . . .
] immortality. (2007, 167)

  In the course of the narrative, Elohimism grows to become the largest religion on the planet, and much of the movement’s success relies on its ability to appeal to, rather than condemn, contemporary materialism. The religion favors euthanasia as a remedy to the “miseries” of old age and encourages total sexual freedom among its members; moreover, the Elohimites eschew supernatural reality and the existence of an immortal soul, preferring to limit “transcendence” to the immortalizing of the physical body and the transfer of neural information from one clone to the next. Daniel25, the twenty-fifth in a series of clones that begins with the novel’s protagonist, Daniel1, explains, “[Elohimism] was adapted perfectly to the leisure civilization in which it had been born. Imposing no moral constraints [ . . . ] it did not hesitate [ . . . ] to make its own the fundamental promise at the core of all monotheistic religions: victory over death. Eradicating any spiritual or confusing dimension, it simply limited the scope of this victory [ . . . ] to the unlimited prolongation of material life” (248).

  Elohimism’s unswerving commitment to materialism reflects Houellebecq’s fascination with the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte. Religion in the Comtean view constitutes the central facilitator of social unity, and under ideal conditions it need not require any reference to supernatural entities at all. The only proper object of religious worship in Comte’s system is society itself, condensed in all its myriad manifestations into the Great Being. Humanity is the only reality (Comte 1968, 334) and can stand in place of God both as a source of epistemological and moral authority and as a focus of veneration. Summarizing Comte’s social understanding of the role of religion in “Préliminaires au positivisme,” composed as an introduction to Auguste Comte aujourd’hui (Bourdeau et al. 2003), Houellebecq writes:

  Man belongs to a social species; this fact is at the foundation of Comte’s thought, and we must never lose sight of it if we want to have a chance of understanding its evolution. In his examination of the human species’ social formations, their various forms of organization, their future, Comte is almost exhaustive [ . . . ]. But of all the structures produced by a society, and which in turn form its basis, religion appears to him to be the most significant, the most characteristic, and the most threatened. Man, according to Comte, can more or less be defined as a social animal of the religious type. (2009, 251, my translation)

  On the other hand, positivism maintains, if only implicitly, a doctrine of rigid mind-body physicalism. Recognizing the social importance of religion, though considering traditional beliefs in immortality to be “childish illusions” (Comte 1968, 347),2 Comte attempts to elaborate a religion of humanity capable of unifying social life around reverence for the social body and the veneration of ancestors. Nonetheless, no provision is made in Comte’s system for the human desire for immortality, other than an abstract notion of eternal life in the memory of human beings: “The noble emulation aroused by the continuous glorification of our predecessors will push everyone to merit [ . . . ] this irrevocable incorporation into the immense and eternal being [ . . . ]. The new public education will have soon inclined all positivists to feel, in such a reward for all honorable conduct, a full equivalent to the vain hopes that drove their precursors” (346). In other words, satisfaction with having contributed to the flourishing of the Great Being and with having emulated society’s most honorable members is to be adequate compensation for the eternal life promised by Christianity, a doctrine that Comte identifies (falsely, as I suggested in chapter 1) as increasingly obsolete.

  Houellebecq may share Comte’s allegiance to mind-body physicalism, but he is profoundly skeptical that a religion without the supernatural—specifically, without the notion of an immortal soul—will ever be taken seriously. He writes,

  Comte had indeed recognized that the mission of religion was to unite humanity and to rule over its actions; he had planned the sacraments and the calendar. He had perhaps not grasped the depth of man’s innate desire for immortality [ . . . ]. Abstract immortality inscribed in human memory nonetheless failed to convince his contemporaries—not to mention us—who were hungry for a promise of more material survival. Indeed, let us suppose that the prerequisites of Comte’s system have been realized [ . . . ]. In what way will we have advanced [ . . . ] toward the establishment of a common religion? In what way will the notion of humanity, or of the Great Being, be more desirable to individuals? And what will be able to lead them, aware of their individual extinction, to be satisfied with participation in this theoretical fetish? Who, in the end, can be interested in a religion that does not make a guarantee against death? (2009, 251–52, my translation)

  Elohimism proposes a solution to the inadequacies of Comte’s religion of humanity, even as it upholds the basic tenets of the positivist view of religion. Elohimism not only unites its followers around a common hope for immortality, embellished by rituals and practices dedicated to affirming that hope, but, even more important, it is able to promise its members eternal life where Comte’s religion of humanity cannot—though in this case without appeal to the supernatural. Through cloning, the immortality once thought to be the exclusive domain of immaterial transcendence can now be realized technologically: not only does the Elohimite Church store its followers’ DNA, but it also pledges to transmit their memories to future clones by means of a “molecular transfer” (Houellebecq 2007, 27). Religion becomes possible when achieving immortality becomes a matter of scientific innovation. The positivist system of religion and the cult of the Great Being are only sustainable if the promise of personal immortality can be included in the package. Elohimism is able to offer such spiritual goods, though one naturally wonders what Comte, who claims that living for others constitutes the supreme form of happiness (1968, 353), would have thought about its unrestrained hedonism.

  Houellebecq’s portrayal of Elohimism also invokes questions about the definition of religion that go back to the very beginnings of sociology. In the classical Durkheimian (1994, 147) view, religion’s two functions are to unite the social body and to explain the nature of reality; worship of and belief in supernatural entities is incidental to the worship of society, and thus it is possible to consider a wide variety of social movements as religious in form, even if they do not have supernatural qualities. Since Durkheim, however, various and often competing definitions of religion have emerged, some of which part ways significantly with Durkheim’s original formulation. Rodney Stark (2004, 2), for example, has argued that Durkheim errs rather grievously in his exclusion of belief in the supernatural from the definition of religion. Other (perhaps less polemical) attempts to define religion prefer instead to avoid the notion of a singular “essence,” proposing a series of dimensions or common characteristics that religions typically possess.3 All religions might, for example, be expected to make provision for “solace in the face of suffering and death” (Benthall 2008, 22), to “appeal to supernatural entities” (40), or to provide “moral imperatives based on altruism” (44). More critical formulations, such as Talal Asad’s (1993, 27–54), view religion as an anthropological category that was “disembedded” from a more holistic, unified polity as Western culture emerged from medievalism into modernity.4 My goal in this chapter, in part, is to subject Elohimism to examination according to these various renderings of the definition of religion.

  Finally, and perhaps most significantly, The Possibility of an Island raises serious questions about the future of religiosity in Western societies. Should we expect a fringe cult movement to rise up and supplant a decayed European Christianity? Is this fundamentally or necessarily inconceivable? Or, beginning from the premise that religious vacuums are historically much more the exception than the rule, should not such a possibility strike us as rather alarmingly plausible? I argue that The Possibility of an Island offers more than an exploration of religious change and innovation in a purportedly post-Christian Europe. Despite the anxieties the novel identifies (and at least seemingly tries to pallia
te) in the “secular” Western psyche, Possibility may also be read as a more subtle attempt on Houellebecq’s part to imagine a religious alternative not to a defunct Christianity, but rather to a real and considerably more formidable competitor: Islam.

  The Return of Religion

  The Possibility of an Island is perhaps Houellebecq’s most philosophically dense novel. It is only in this text that his criticism of materialist culture—and along with it the West’s principal humanist alternatives to Christian civilization, socialism and liberalism—culminates in a sustained exploration of a religious solution to human suffering. The novel tells the story of two parallel historical developments in twenty-first-century Western civilization: the triumph of the cult of youth as the focus of a moral, political, and economic consensus, and the birth of a new religion, Elohimism, that panders to the prevailing materialism of the age. Caught up in the sweep of these transformations is Daniel, the novel’s narrator, a sex-obsessed, aging comedian who has made a fortune thanks to his outrageously offensive sense of humor and calculated indifference to taboos.

  The aesthetic values of Daniel’s time are utterly debauched. The comedian’s most successful sketch, “We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts” (33), achieves critical renown in an artistic environment in which morality has been put to death and where “[a]ny form of cruelty, cynical selfishness, or violence was therefore welcome—certain subjects, like parricide or cannibalism, in particular” (36). Houellebecq offers this description of the last comedy show of Daniel’s career:

  Bizarrely entitled Forwards Snowy! Onwards to Aden!, my last show was subtitled “100% Hateful” [and . . . ] it was in no way hyperbole. From the outset, I got onto the subject of the conflict in the Middle East [ . . . ] in a manner which, wrote the Le Monde journalist, was “singularly abrasive.” The first sketch, entitled “The Battle of the Tiny Ones,” portrayed Arabs—renamed Allah’s vermin—Jews—described as “circumcised fleas”—and even some Lebanese Christians, afflicted with the pleasing sobriquet of “Crabs from the Cunt of Mary.” [ . . . ] The rest of the show included a screamingly funny playlet entitled “The Palestinians Are Ridiculous,” into which I slipped a variety of burlesque and salacious allusions about sticks of dynamite that female militants of Hezbollah put around their waists in order to make mashed Jew. (41)