While rumors of God’s death have been greatly exaggerated in modern times, few deny that Western history has witnessed epochal changes in the social locus and function of religion. Today these changes are reflexively understood as a passage from “Christendom” to “modernity.” The latter generally distresses Christians and other religious folk, even as they recognize that “Christendom,” with its capacity for crusades and witch trials, fell deplorably short of the kingdom of God.
Since no shortage of commentary has accompanied this momentous passage, I was skeptical that Gauchet’s volume would state something not already found in the voluminous literature on “secularization” or in the writings of classic secularization theorists like Comte, Durkheim, or Weber. As the title indicates, the book is certainly indebted to such predecessors, but it transcends them in significant ways; for while Gauchet, an avowed atheist, is convinced that “the religious” has reached the end of its line, he also wants to persuade his readers that religion is the heart and soul of Western culture, even in our religiously deracinated (post) modern age. In particular, he argues that one must recognize the “unusual dynamic potentialities” of Western monotheism, and especially the Christian idea of Incarnation, in order to comprehend the genesis and character of modern secular political culture.
A welcome peculiarity in an age of specialization, the book can only be described as intellectual history of the most speculative, Hegelian sort. Generalizations, profunditites, and obfuscations lie together, embedded in prose as formidable as that of The Phenomenology of Spirit.
Gauchet’s book is divided into two parts. In part 1, “The Metamorphoses of the Divine: The Origin, Meaning, and Development of the Religious,” he attempts a general definition of religion and proceeds to trace the emergence of the distinctive features of Western monotheism from a primordial religious past. Throughout, he argues against “the idea of religious development,” the notion—dear to nineteenth-century liberal Protestants—that the Western religious spirit had progressively advanced from time immemorial to the present, purifying itself from superstition and ignorance along the way. In stead, Gauchet asserts that “religion’s most complete and systematic form is its initial one; later transformations … progressively call the religious into question.” The essence of the religious in its “pure” form, Gauchet contends, is an “antihistorical frame of mind” and “an absolute dependence on the mythical past.” In this state, no distinction exists between human social sphere and the divine. There is one inviolable sacred cosmos, hierarchically arranged, with no sense of divinity’s otherness.
A distinction between the social sphere and divinity appears because of the emergence of the State, the “City of Man” in Augustine’s terminology. While Gauchet unfortunately does not propose exactly how or why ancient states emerged, he is convinced of their absolute importance for reshaping humankind’s relations to the divine: “The State ushers in the age of opposition between social structure and the essence of the religious. Political dominion, which decisively entangles the gods in history, will prove to be the invisible hoist lifting us out of the religious.”
The development of Hebrew monotheism (and later Christianity) represents for Gauchet the most pronounced case of the split between heaven and earth wrought by the State. A radical dualism replaces the primeval unity of the cosmos: God is now “above,” human beings “below.” Gauchet labels this “ontological duality” and sees its emergence as constituting a “revolution in transcendence,” which contains, in embryo, the modern secular understanding of the world, an understanding based not on unity and hierarchy but on human self-reliance and equality: “the end result of ontological duality [will be] the restoration of the social bond to human control, an achievement unique to western history. This history is religious to the core.” In short, “ontological duality,” precipitated by the establishment of state power and developed best in Judaism, is the most momentous cultural legacy handed down to Christianity.
Gauchet works out the long-term political ramifications of this legacy in part 2, “The Apogee and Death of God: Christianity and Western Development.” The chapters here are the richest and most suggestive in the book. Gauchet argues that the idea of Incarnation, especially as it was developed in the Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries, is of singular significance in shaping Western culture and laying the intellectual foundations for modernity.
In particular, the doctrine of hypostatic union, affirmed at the Council of Chalcedon (451), represents for Gauchet the decisive step away from the religious “hierarchical principle” toward modern equality. Orthodox Christology invested human temporality with infinite worth, while simultaneously proclaiming its radical shortcoming in light of the “Kingdom of God.” Owing to the doctrine, denizens of an incipient Christendom were compelled to live with “axiomized ambiguity,” profoundly esteeming a saeculum dignified by God’s intervention on its behalf, but denying it any final purpose apart from Christ.
As the Roman world passed into the Middle Ages, the Church be came the curator of the world-to-come and the State took charge of this world. These two powers represent for Gauchet the logical historical structuring forces of the “axiomized ambiguity” manifest in the doctrine of Incarnation. Of course, the State, as mere temporal power, came to stand in the shadow of the Church’s sacred power. In this religious-political arrangement, Gauchet observes a “new form of collective being” (i.e., the Church) and an “ultimately decisive reorganization of political power’s relation to religious authority.”
The new relation of secular-political power to the Church, and the former’s eventual triumph over the latter in the form of the modern nation-state, is Gauchet’s concern for roughly the last third of the book. Thumbing through the Middle Ages, Gauchet settles on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as a period in which an “in visible revolution contain[ing] the beginnings of modern politics” occurred: political power, by gradually developing the idea of the “divine right of kings,” began to wrest control from the Church’s monopoly of sacred authority. “As strange as it may appear,” Gauchet explains,
representative power was distantly but directly related to the initial metamorphosis sacralizing the king, made possible by Christian duality. … This was no brutal rupture, but an imperceptible evolution, where the continuity of appearances conceals the most crucial shifts.
Once this shift occurred, Gauchet contends, it was only a matter of time before secular authority ceased seeking legitimacy in “divine rights” and started finding it simply in the body politic and in the ruler’s ability to ad minister it healthily and happily. The rhetoric of “divine rights” eventuated in a radically revised (and modern) vision of the political order. The ruler’s putative divine rights were secularized and, later, transferred to the ruled. The early modern monarch, Gauchet sums up,
gradually evolved from incarnating sacral dissimilarity into realizing the collective body’s internal self-congruence. He slowly changed from being a symbol of dependence on the organizing other into a legal representative and coercive force bringing the political community (of the nation) into line with its autonomous reason for existence and its own principle. The development of the political in the modern age was the practical deployment of this symbolic turnaround. … Political power was obliged to accept full responsibility for the whole of collective life refracted in it; and it only had the right to exist by establishing a connection between the parts of the social whole, from top to bottom. There were thus two prominent incarnations of the beyond’s difference and the correlative autonomy of the here-below, as originally revealed and instituted by Jesus.
As suggested here, Gauchet takes great pains to show that his story is not about the “secularization” of an autonomous political sphere. Rather, he wants to demonstrate that the evolution of modern politics, with its patently secularizing effects, represents the continuous outgrowth of Christian theological ideas: the Western liberal state bespeaks, historically, a “transfusion of sacrality into politics.”
Yet, Gauchet is equally persuaded that Christianity, finally, is “a religion for departing from religion” and that ours is a “post-theological” age. In the last sections of the book, he attempts to clarify exactly what he means by such claims, which seem to contradict many prior statements. Here, he is less original. Resorting to a standard sociological distinction between religion as a social phenomenon versus private belief, Gauchet recognizes that the latter will long outlive the former. He even muses that one could plausibly imagine a society whose members are driven by sincere faith but whose material, political, and intellectual axes derive from necessities outside “the religious.” Despite the persistence of private belief and despite the fact that modern secularity has explicitly religious roots, Gauchet concludes that “the age of religion as a structuring force is over”: the modern West is made up of a plurality of “autonomous domains” whose profoundly religious origins have been superseded. Still, he hastens to remind readers that the supersession of religion was made possible only because of the West’s peculiar religious path.
Gauchet is generally pleased at the outcome, at what we might call the “cunning of the secular.” In his view, the modern secular State, weaned from religious sanctions, ably guarantees its citizens the “stable legibility” of their world, an achievement formerly impeded by “devotion of the god’s sacred plans.” While he concedes that today “routine administration ends up defeating sublime doctrines,” he reasons that ours, if not the best of possible worlds, is nonetheless satisfactory.
The Disenchantment of the World is an impressive, if unusual and abstruse, achievement. Because of the richly suggestive nature of many passages, I am inclined to concur with Charles Taylor’s remark in the foreword that the book should be important reading for those now rethinking the architectonic divides between the religious and the secular, Christendom and modernity. Still, the work lends itself to several criticisms. I will suggest two.
First, Gauchet practically equates Western civilization with Christian theology and its transmuted-secularized continuation in the modern era. There is certainly much to be said for this view (as is made clear in much of Taylor’s own work), and I, for one, am thankful to see an adept secular thinker sensitive to the profoundly religious recesses of our political order and thought-world. But in making this assumption, Gauchet neglects other important dimensions of Western culture. Most significantly, he says very little about Greco-Roman antiquity and its revival in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Surely, modern-day political realities and habits of thought derive in important ways, not just from the internal outworking of Christianity, but also, if not more so, from classical antecedents.
Second, Gauchet’s appraisal of “the modern world” is unwarrantedly optimistic. Since it is apparent that the telos driving his story is in the origin of the Western European welfare state (the United States for him is not yet weaned from “the religious”), one wishes that he would have said something more about the specter of twentieth-century totalitarianism besides dismissing its instances as political atavism. What is more, he even claims, puzzlingly, that today we need no longer fear “the state moloch escaping collective control to enforce its own dominion for it is one of those giants whose benevolence and gentleness in crease with its size.” While few would attribute purely sinister purposes to the modern State, no such law of growth guarantees its perpetual beneficence. Furthermore, totalitarianism, as Hannah Arendt and others have argued, is an unmistakably modern phenomenon, dependent on bureaucracy, mass media, electoral politics, and the like. Indeed, where the first half of this century fits in Gauchet’s tale is, to say the least, unclear. If Hitler and Mussolini had fared better, what might Gauchet’s story look like? Even if the totalitarian threat has receded in recent years, one wonders if it is prudent to represent the modern State’s evolution and ubiquitous impact in anything but ambivalent terms.
Further, Gauchet pays no attention to the ongoing discussion, in Europe and America, about the modern State and civil society: Are democratic institutions and practices sustainable in an environment where the encroachments of the modern State have attenuated the “mediating structures” of family, church, and voluntary association, which Alexis de Tocqueville deemed essential to American democracy?
In the final analysis, Gauchet provokes thought even as he frustrates. Yet so long as one braces for an idiosyncratic, highly interpretive, and unapologetically nonspecialized approach to “the religious” in the formation of Western political identity, one will find this book—at least substantial parts of it—genuinely insightful and its author a valuable conversation partner for pilgrims of many sorts as we press on into the next millennium.
Thomas Albert Howard is assistant professor of history at Gordon College. He is the author of Religion and the Rise of Historicism, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
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