I believe the time has come to stop evading the question of Christianity in contemporary thought. The very idea of “Europe,” bound up as it is in that history, stands to gain. We in present-day Europe must determine what Christianity has contributed, transformed, discovered, or covered up in thought. We must determine what lies totalized (labeled) in the -ity of Christianity, which we see couched amid so many other -ities and -isms. I say evading [évitement] because the astonishing, even aberrant, affair known as Christianity is, in an ambient manner, a collective embarrassment to us. There is no denying this. We would like to see it over and done with, filed away. We would like to believe it to be a historical matter. And so we tacitly skirt the issue. But can we be rid of it? From Lacan to Mitterrand, a Mass is, in fine, perhaps not out of the question. . . . Even as we bother with so many false questions – questions that no longer deserve the name, questions that we keep alive in artificial debates – we shut our eyes to the matter of genuine import in this troubling heritage of ours. Officially declaring our society to be secular has hardly unburdened us of Christianity, that “thing” we now find so difficult to grasp. Though a massive majority of us no longer “believes” – or, at any rate, no longer “practices” (there are so many passive Christians) – we have hardly obliterated Christianity’s imprint from our thought. We know this, of course, but how deeply do we wish to know it? Even if all that remained were a relic, we would still have to wonder what part of Christianity we could not get past. I wonder, in fact, if this evasion doesn’t extend into the Church itself, more comfortable now with ecology and humanitarianism than with the question I do not see being asked: What has Christianity done to thought?
Needless to say, I will not enter into the matter of Christianity with the traditional question: to “believe” or not. “He who believed in heaven / He who did not”2 seems to me a somewhat outmoded dilemma. I will not first delve into Christianity from the standpoint of “faith.” Even the question whether “God” exists seems to me to have run its course. Though still of interest for the history of thought, it has bogged down completely. Perhaps it will recover some of its relevance later on, in some other configuration of the mind, but for present-day thought it is a dead issue, with no further effect. Christian philosophers themselves, drawing a lesson from Kant, have shown that all imaginable proofs for the existence of God lead nowhere. Christianity has no use for the crutch of demonstration. That said, neither will I seek refuge in the history of thought, a field in which I have no competence. Nor, more generally, will I consider Christianity from the scholarly, remote, disinterested perspective of the social sciences. Such exteriority no longer stands in relation to its cultural tradition. It stems from an adopted “objective” position, and would necessarily quash whatever existential gain I might draw from Christianity’s thought. To explore such potential gain we must enter into Christianity’s thought – but does “entering into” mean adherence? How, then, can we develop a philosophy that is no longer Christian per se – as honorable as such philosophy is, thanks to many great names (Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and, today in France, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Michel Henry) – but is instead a philosophy of Christianity? A philosophy whose perspective is not the traditional one of apologetics and criticism, defense and denunciation? After all, we have before us a question that does not run through the rift and concerns us all equally: do the coherences of Christianity, the mostly paradoxical coherences, still have a use in thought, especially in the thought of existence? In other words, how might they remain pertinent if, in fact, we are no longer required to believe?
A quick doubling-back to warn of paths that I will not follow. There are at least three, forming a triangle. First off, to undertake a philosophy of Christianity is not to subject it to philosophical reason, or to bend it to reason’s criteria. Nor is it to reduce Christianity to the most reasonable, or most acceptable, moral content. This would reduce Scripture to the most elementary of teachings, for purely practical use. Christianity’s sole article of faith would then be “obeisance out of love for thy neighbor,” its sole credo that “there exists a supreme being that loves justice and charity” (Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise). It is one thing to take faith and boil it down to its supposed minimal content, like Spinoza, and thereby forsake what might be the most singular and inventive aspects of Christian teaching. It is another to enter into Christian thinking, as I am proposing to do, without first passing through faith, and by the same token without losing – in the manner of a minimalist (rationalist) reduction – what are potentially the most daring, and therefore most fertile, aspects of its conception. It is true that Spinoza, even as he undertook his rationalization, thought it necessary to conduct a rigorous, linguistically and historically buttressed, exegesis, so as to judge the texts’ authority critically, with a focus on “meaning” instead of “truth.” Already with Spinoza, then, we have a promising start. He opened the way to jettisoning the traditional, preliminary criterion of belief.
At the same time, a philosophy of Christianity needn’t run counter to Spinozism, serving as its flipside, and give up the cause of reason. It needn’t illustrate Christianity by invoking the poetry or the bigger soul3 it has brought to the human experience (like Chateaubriand in The Genius of Christianity). The “soul” would never be content with an explanation, which will always come up short. It would cry out for “mystery”: “The most marvelous sentiments are those that stir a certain confusion in us.” This facile binary, in which the “vagueness” of the religious offsets the rigor of science, is suspect by its very convenience. The peal of evening bells in the countryside (or the Latin chants of the Church, or the paintings of Fra Angelico, etc.) might indeed convey emotion, but before drawing an argument from this we must declare what makes it religiously specific. The Christian religion, says Chateaubriand, has tended the “secret,” developed a “sense of the sacred,” but couldn’t we say the same of many other religions? And, in praising Christianity by comparison, we would fall, as Chateaubriand inevitably falls, into the trap of ethnocentrism. As we now know, the way of comparison with other religions leads nowhere. It rests entirely on ignorance of other cultures or, worse, on contempt for the Other, who serves only as the negative of his own affirmation. “The Romans,” says Chateaubriand, “were a horrible people.” This eulogy a contrario holds up only inasmuch as we enter into one coherence rather than the other – the comparison is justified only from within the extolled religion. Chateaubriand, partaking of the nascent Romanticism, did indeed begin to develop the concept of modernity. He also brought out the subjectivity that was effectively being promoted in Christianity. But what religion anywhere in the world lacks its own “genius”?
The inverse path, doubling back to Spinozism, albeit from a different angle, is the path of demystification. Here, rather than extoll Christianity, we must denounce Christianity’s “mystery.” We must reveal its illusion, and to do that we must reduce it to its “essence” (Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity). Spilling over the “national” framework and ethnic limits of the God of Israel, the nature of Christianity, says Feuerbach, has been to raise human aspiration, perceived in its universality, to the heights of the absolute. In other words, Feuerbach established the primacy of the subjective (sentiment: das Gemüt) over objectivity (as determined by science), to the point of reducing the one to the other. In still other words, he took the satisfaction of subjective (affective) needs and objectified them in God. This betokens the triumph of “love” over the “law” – whether nature’s or society’s.