The World of Religions, September-October 2005 —
"Why the 21st century is religious." The title of this back-to-school issue's major feature echoes the famous phrase attributed to André Malraux: "The 21st century will be religious or it will not be." The phrase hits the mark. Rehashed by all the media for twenty years, it is sometimes transcribed as "the 21st century will be spiritual or it will not be." I have already witnessed oratorical fights between supporters of the two quotes. A vain fight... since Malraux never pronounced this sentence! There is no trace of the phrase in his books, his handwritten notes, his speeches, or his interviews. Better still, the person concerned himself constantly denied this quote when people began to attribute it to him in the mid-fifties. Our friend and collaborator Michel Cazenave, among other witnesses close to Malraux, reminded us of this again recently. So, what exactly did the great writer say that led us to think of putting such a prophecy into his mouth? Everything seems to have been decided in 1955 around two texts.
Responding to a question sent by the Danish newspaper Dagliga Nyhiter concerning the religious basis 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 that humanity has ever known, will be to reintroduce the gods." In March of the same year, the journal Preuves published two reissues of interviews published in 1945 and 1946, which it supplemented with a questionnaire sent to the author of The Human Condition. 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 quotes that the famous formula was constructed – without anyone knowing by whom. However, this formula is highly ambiguous. For the "return of religion" that we are witnessing, particularly in its identitarian and fundamentalist form, is the antithesis of the religion to which General de Gaulle's former Minister of Culture alludes. The second quote is, in this respect, extremely explicit: Malraux announces the advent of a religious problematic radically different from those of the past. In many other texts and interviews, he calls, in the manner of Bergson's "soul supplement," for a major spiritual event to lift man out of the abyss into which he plunged himself during the 20th century (see on this subject the beautiful little book by Claude Tannery, L'Héritage spirituel de Malraux – Arléa, 2005). This spiritual event, for Malraux's agnostic mind, did not constitute a call for a revival of traditional religions. Malraux believed religions to be as mortal as Valéry believed civilizations to be. But for him, they fulfilled a fundamental positive function, which will continue to function: that of creating gods who are "the torches lit one by one by man to light the path that tears him away from the beast." When Malraux asserts that "the task of the 21st century will be to reintroduce the gods into man," he is thus calling for a new surge of religiosity, but one that will come from the depths of the human spirit and that 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 toward an exteriority, as was often the case with traditional religions. In other words, Malraux was waiting for the advent of a new spirituality in the colours of man, a spirituality which is perhaps in embryo, 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 welcome the appointment of Djénane Kareh Tager as editor-in-chief of Le Monde des Religions (she previously held the position of general secretary of the editorial staff).
PS 2: I would like to inform our readers of the creation of a new collection of very educational special issues of Le Monde des Religions: "20 keys to understanding". The first focuses on the religions of ancient Egypt (see page 7)