Le Monde des religions, September-October 2005 —
“Why the 21st Century Is Religious.” The title of this back-to-school issue’s main feature echoes the famous phrase attributed to André Malraux: “The 21st century will be religious or it will not be.” The phrase resonates. Repeated by all media outlets for the past twenty years, it is sometimes paraphrased as “the 21st century will be spiritual or it will not be.” I have already witnessed heated debates between proponents of the two quotes. A futile battle… since Malraux never uttered this statement! There is no trace of it in his books, his handwritten notes, his speeches, or his interviews. Even more telling, Malraux himself consistently denied this quote when it was first attributed to him in the mid-1950s. Our friend and colleague Michel Cazenave, among other people close to Malraux, reminded us of this just recently. So, what exactly did the great writer say that led people to imagine putting such a prophecy in his mouth? Everything seems to have hinged on two texts in 1955.
Responding to a question sent by the Danish newspaper Dagliga Nyhiter concerning the religious foundation of morality, Malraux concluded his answer thus: “For fifty years, psychology has been reintegrating demons into man. Such is the serious assessment of psychoanalysis. I think that the task of the next century, faced with the most terrible threat humanity has ever known, will be to reintroduce the gods.” In March of the same year, the journal Preuves published two reissues of interviews that had appeared in 1945 and 1946, supplementing them with a questionnaire sent to the author of Man's Fate. At the end of this interview, Malraux declared: “The crucial problem of the end of the century will be the religious problem—in a form as different from the one we know as Christianity was from the ancient religions.”
It is from these two quotations that the famous formula was constructed – though we don't know by whom. Yet this formula is highly ambiguous. For the "return of religion" we are witnessing, particularly in its identity-based and fundamentalist form, is the antithesis of the religion to which General de Gaulle's former Minister of Culture alludes. The second quotation is, in this respect, perfectly explicit: Malraux announces the advent of a religious problematic radically different from those of the past. In numerous other texts and interviews, he calls, in the manner of Bergson's "supplement of the soul," for a major spiritual event to pull humanity out of the abyss into which it plunged during the 20th century (see on this subject Claude Tannery's excellent little book, *L'Héritage spirituel de Malraux* – Arléa, 2005). For Malraux's agnostic mind, this spiritual event was in no way a call for a revival of traditional religions. Malraux believed religions to be as mortal as civilizations were for Valéry. But for him, they fulfilled a fundamental positive function, one that will continue to operate: that of creating gods who are "the torches lit one by one by humankind to illuminate the path that leads them away from the beast." When Malraux asserts that "the task of the 21st century will be to reintroduce the gods into humankind," he is thus calling for a new surge of religiosity, but one that will come from the depths of the human spirit and will move in the direction of a conscious integration of the divine into the psyche—like the demons of psychoanalysis—and not a projection of the divine outward, as was often the case with traditional religions. In other words, Malraux was waiting for the advent of a new spirituality in the colors of man, a spirituality which is perhaps in germ, but which is still very much stifled at the beginning of this century by the fury of the clash of traditional religious identities.
PS 1: I am delighted to announce the appointment of Djénane Kareh Tager as editor-in-chief of Le Monde des Religions (she previously served as the editorial secretary).
PS 2: I would like to inform our readers of the launch of a new series of highly educational special issues of Le Monde des Religions: "20 Keys to Understanding." The first focuses on the religions of ancient Egypt (see page 7).