Published in Nouvelles Clés (2003) —
Interview by Marc de Smedt and Patrice Van Eersel —
New Keys: God is not dead, you say, he is metamorphosing. The sacred is taking on new faces… or donning very ancient garb, but in any case, the result, according to you, is that we are currently experiencing “one of the greatest religious transformations that humankind has ever known.” A transformation that would resonate with the 16th century and the Renaissance, that is to say, with the beginnings of modernity, which you are careful to distinguish from its later developments. So there have been several modernities?
Frédéric Lenoir: Who were the first modern thinkers? People like Pico della Mirandola, for whom humankind must be perfectly free in its actions and choices, including religious choices—which, at the time, was a considerable revolution—everyone must exercise their reason, their critical thinking… but this doesn't close them off to the sacred, quite the contrary! The free being, aware of their incompleteness, is in search of something greater than themselves. They become passionate about all the sciences, all languages, all traditions. They reread the Bible, delve into the Kabbalah, experiment with alchemy, astrology, and all the symbolic languages that human cultures have explored and which they discover, dazzled, are available to them. This emergence into freedom of conscience, this desire to experience everything, is accompanied by an immense thirst for tolerance. Here we find Montaigne, who knows how to combine his deep Catholic convictions with an acceptance of opinions that are the most different, even the most opposed to his own.
This initial modernity, I think we are rediscovering its spirit right now, but enriched by five centuries of a wild journey – hence my proposal to call it “ultra-modernity”: it is not a “post-modernity” that would break with the ideals of the Renaissance, quite the contrary: the primary characteristic has not changed, it is the autonomy of the subject, the individual remains THE reference point. On the other hand, I distinguish it from a second modernity, which slowly emerged in the 17th century, asserted itself in the 18th, to become hegemonic in the 19th century… With Descartes, in fact, the world is split in two: on one side, faith in God, the imagination, the symbolic, which become private matters, without influence on the physical world; on the other side, science, in full ascent, which studies a disenchanted nature, inhabited by machine-men endowed with reason, and which is about to seize power. This second phase of modernity was systematized by the Enlightenment. Kant and Voltaire were as devout as Descartes, but their God, the distant and cold architect of the universe, now held only moral authority over humankind. Their primary quest, guided by reason and entirely consumed by a secularization of the Decalogue (Kantian law) and by scientific research, had nothing to do with symbolism or Kabbalah. A century later, scientism reigned, the driving force behind the great atheistic systems and the logical outcome of the split between faith and reason. Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, each in their own way, drew the lesson of the Enlightenment: if the “great architect” no longer had any real connection with the world, if we could no longer even reason about him, then we could do without him; he was nothing more than an idol! This was the apotheosis of the myth of modernity. Its caricature. Man fails to realize that he is cutting himself off from nature, from his own body, becoming nothing more than a kind of brain that, ultimately, has an answer for everything and can bring happiness to all of humanity. The illusion of rational progress triumphs with Marxism and its radiant future… Then, humanity is confronted with the most violent century in human history – from Auschwitz to cloning, by way of the Gulag and Hiroshima – and we find ourselves, at the dawn of the third millennium, asking ourselves questions.
To question the foundations of modernity, starting with individual freedom? Certainly not. But to revisit the divide between humanity and nature, between mind and body, between reason and emotion? Absolutely. The new modernity is therefore modest and mature. Adult. Tolerant. That is to say, it accepts the limits of the rational, the scientific, and technology, and consequently, the sacred becomes possible again. This is also why I believe that the researchers who have worked on the imagination, on myth, on archetypes, etc.—Carl G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, Gilbert Durand, or Edgar Morin—are those who have best understood the essence of modernity stripped of its own myth. They have been able to restore to us the dimension from which we had been deprived.
As if a cycle were coming full circle?
It is true that, for the last thirty years or so, we have often had the impression of living through a Renaissance – with its good and bad sides: openness to all possible explorations and transdisciplinarity, mixing of cultures, but also religious wars and the enslavement of entire peoples…
The three vectors of modernity in the 16th century have never been more present than they are today: individualism, critical reason, and globalization. They are even regenerating everywhere. Why? Because we have abandoned the myth of triumphant modernity. Scientism, whether liberal or Marxist, is collapsing. It was a utopia. As a result, critical thinking is awakening and, in contact with reality, is realizing that it is far more complex than previously thought. We are rediscovering the distinction made by the ancients of Thomistic scholasticism between ratio and intellectus: the former is pure, mathematical logic, while the latter, in the Eastern manner, incorporates sensibility, emotion, and contemplation. Today, from all quarters—from scientific research to the business world—the idea is emerging that we must replace cold, cortical intelligence with a more vibrant, more emotional intelligence: neuropsychologists even say that we have multiple brains, linked to our gut or our heart! And we are realizing that it is perfectly possible to live autonomously, with critical reasoning, while simultaneously pursuing a quest for meaning rooted in bodily experience. In all this, we are returning to the early modernity of the Renaissance.
A Mirandola Peak would feel perfectly at home today!
Now, let's talk about the new religious wars. Most media outlets have it all backwards. They say, "Today, what dominates religions is fundamentalism, fanaticism, and violence." But no! Let's open our eyes: what dominates, beyond the superficial firestorm, is just the opposite! Everywhere, in every culture, people are inexorably appropriating religion, each in their own way. This includes Islam: from Morocco to Indonesia, by way of Iran, young people want to practice their religion freely, sometimes without even realizing it. This is what, ultimately, in all religions, drives the very small minority of fundamentalists mad, ready to commit acts of unimaginable violence rather than accept the evolution toward freedom. Whether the latter stands against the cultural domination of the West is another story – or against that of the elders: thus it can happen that young girls claim the right to wear the veil to defy their parents, such as the two sisters from Aubervilliers, whose father is an atheist Jew and whose mother is a Kabyle Catholic!
Don't the fundamentalists themselves invent completely new forms, no more faithful, for example, to original Islam than the Nazis were to prehistoric Germanic culture?
Of course, there is reconstruction. And it's no coincidence that the first Algerian "bearded ones" came more often from science faculties or institutes of technology than from schools of theology or philosophy: their "return to their roots" is often self-taught, ignorant, and fantastical. In any case, in the very long term, what will be remembered from our era in the evolution of religion is the shift from great cultural traditions dependent on groups, ethnicities, nations… to personal practices, of individuals eager to appropriate meaning. They may remain Catholic, Jewish, Muslim—it will be a cultural affiliation. But they will experience this Catholicism, this Judaism, or this Islam each in their own way. It's a colossal revolution. And a considerable crisis for the Churches. Two-thirds of Europeans and three-quarters of Americans consider themselves believers, but practice their faith less and less.
However, this movement seems irreversible…
If everyone creates their own "religious kit," the syncretic confusion will be total…
First, no religion has escaped syncretism. Buddhism is a syncretism. And Christianity, a formidable blend of Jewish faith, Roman law, and Greek philosophy! And Islam, therefore, an extraordinary alloy of ancient Arab beliefs and Jewish and Christian borrowings! All religions are syncretic. However, there are two types of syncretism. The first develops a new coherence by confronting the contradictions, or the accelerations, that its unique combination brings. The second remains in the flabbiness of an undigested collage. Unintelligent. Inorganic. Without a backbone. Hence the formidable challenge of modernity: for each individual to know how to organize their own coherence, and this in a world where the “religious offering” becomes plethora and where the possibilities for confused collages multiply.
You said that a Pico della Mirandola would feel at home today. With his eclecticism and his taste for the marvelous, we would therefore find him in the new age networks – to which you also dedicate a central chapter.
Except that Pico della Mirandola and the great humanists of the Renaissance possessed an intellectual rigor that most of those often condescendingly lumped together under the term “New Age” lack—a syncretism, it must be said, that is particularly weak, especially in the United States. Mental confusion seems to me to be one of the main flaws of this movement—the other two being egotism (the world reduced to my happiness) and relativism (the lazy idea that all beliefs are equal across space and time). That said, I find the intention of the New Age very good: it consists of seeking out in all traditions what can speak to us and allow us to have an awakening experience. But the expression “New Age” seems to me to have run its course. I prefer “re-enchantment of the world,” where I see the best of this very broad movement, which indeed plays a crucial role in spiritual ultra-modernity. What is it all about?
The first to speak of the “disenchantment of the world” was Max Weber. For him, the process was quite ancient, since he traced its origins back to the Bible and the Jewish tendency to rationalize the divine. I disagree, but one thing is certain: with the “second modernity” I mentioned earlier, that of the “Great Watchmaker” of the Enlightenment philosophers, the world gradually lost its immense magical aura—which contributed to extinguishing all sorts of connections linking people to nature, to lived experience, to the body. This disenchantment reached its peak in the 20th century. It culminated in the nausea of consumer society, where everything is observable, manipulable, decipherable, rationalizable, commodifiable… May ’68 can be interpreted as a need for re-enchantment. But, long before that, it was the entire Romantic movement! Indeed, from the 18th century onwards, some minds rejected the “cooling” of Cartesian or Kantian modernity.
Goethe, for example, clearly had an intuition of the dangers of scientistic modernity. Later, so did Lamartine. Or Hugo. Those who most sought to reintroduce the sense of myth, of the imagination, and of the sacred, to rehabilitate that part of humanity denied by the Enlightenment, were certainly the great German Romantics, from Novalis to the Brothers Grimm. But the Industrial Revolution was only just beginning, and the Romantics—among whom we must include the first American environmentalists, Thoreau, Emerson, and others—were relegated to the category of harmless poets. So much so that the philosophical message they carried would pass to other types of social actors: the esoteric circles of the late 19th century, of which the Theosophical Society is one of the most accomplished expressions—along with the anthroposophical extension of Rudolf Steiner…
Steiner, whom you readily compare to Pico della Mirandola, him again…
Yes, indeed, he's an astonishing figure, whose eclecticism is reminiscent of the Renaissance spirit! And so the New Age—the Re-enchantment of the World—doesn't emerge from nothing: it's part of a specific historical current. A current that is resurfacing everywhere today and that, in my opinion, can't be properly analyzed using the frameworks of mainstream religious sociology, but rather through the lens of a psychosociology yet to be invented. I find that the old categories—Catholicism, Judaism, freethinking, atheism… or New Age—are too reductive and miss the essential point. When we analyze lived experience, contemporary religious phenomenology shows us that, fundamentally, there are two types of religiosity that permeate all other categories: the first open, the second closed. The latter group encompasses all those who have a vital need for certainty and absolute truths: this includes fundamentalists, extremists, and orthodox adherents of virtually every religion—and this certainly includes a multitude of sects, but also militant atheists. The first category, on the other hand, concerns individuals who, while maintaining a profound connection to the sacred, embrace the uncertainty of mature modernity, which entails doubt and a perpetual quest: they hold convictions, but acknowledge that these may be provisional and that different convictions can be equally legitimate—and this therefore includes many agnostics in search of answers. And you will notice this: all those with an open religiosity get along well with one another, regardless of their traditions. The same is true, incidentally, for those with a closed religiosity—even if their way of “getting along well with one another” might involve hatred and war, like the Bush-style Protestant fundamentalists and the Bin Laden-style Muslim fundamentalists.
I suppose you place yourself in the open category… Could you tell us a little about your own background?
I was fortunate to grow up in a family with a very open Catholicism, not practicing but deeply engaged in moral inquiry. My father is close to Jacques Delors and the personalist movement. I owe him a great deal. I was thirteen when he gave me Plato's Symposium. I was immediately captivated by philosophy. Until I was seventeen, the Pre-Socratics, Epicurus, the Stoics, and Aristotle wonderfully answered the existential questions I was asking myself. I then felt the need to turn to the East, and it was once again—via Arnaud Desjardins—an extraordinary journey, leading to my discovery of Chögyam Trungpa and the Tibetan Buddhists, as well as the mystics Maharishi, Shankara, and others. Having reached that point, I realized it was unreasonable to know nothing about Jung. Reading it led me to delve into astrology—which offers a fascinating symbolic discourse on humankind—and into the wondrous world of mythologies and the laws of synchronicity that govern them. I was nineteen at the time and fascinated by all religions except Catholicism. For me, it was truly the last tradition that could interest me! I found it puritanical, rigid, pointless, in short, "Catholic." What happened to me then was completely unpredictable.
I had agreed to spend a few days in a Breton Cistercian monastery to experience writing in silence. A beautiful place, where I immediately felt at ease, among monks and nuns who radiated health and intelligence. I began to work when a feeling of unease suddenly arose. A growing unease that gave me a fierce desire to leave. I was about to do so when my conscience challenged me to find an explanation for what was happening. My taste for a challenge and a certain sense of pride thus made me stay.
What was I supposed to confront? An old, dusty Bible was lying there. I opened it at random and landed on the Prologue of Saint John. I had barely begun to read it when the sky fell on my head: weeping uncontrollably, I felt an incredible love rising within me. I wanted to embrace the whole world! I was twenty years old. I had just encountered the cosmic Christ of whom Saint John speaks. Twenty years later, I can say that what was imprinted on me that day is indelible.
Yet you are best known for your writings on Buddhism!
My intellectual journey, however, continued, in philosophy and sociology. My thesis on “Buddhism and the West” was a way to bring my interests into dialogue. Conceptually, there is nothing more different than Buddhism and Christianity. It was perfect. I always gravitate toward the opposite of what I believe in order to test my convictions. So I explored two worlds foreign to each other, which nourished me on different levels. But my deepest convictions remained unchanged. I pray to Christ every day.
A somewhat abstract Christ…?
Oh no! The Jesus of the Gospels, whom I believe is also a Christ who transcends all religions, including Christian revelation: the Logos who enlightens all people and who, at a certain point, became incarnate in this form. That's why I call myself a Christian. Otherwise, I would be agnostic. That said, I also practice Zen meditation, simply because it helps me disconnect from worries, from my restless mind. For twenty years now, every day, I assume the posture and practice a breathing technique… a bit Indian, actually! Then I place myself in the presence of Christ, I open the Gospel, I read a passage, and finally I pray, facing a small icon. For me, religion is fundamentally defined by the practice and experience of multiple levels of reality…
…whose center is there, within us, and yet always eludes us?
Our conception of the “center,” that is, of God, has evolved considerably in just a few generations. For a growing number of our contemporaries, the divine is now conceived much more in a kind of immanence, of extreme intimacy. And at the same time, paradoxically, we have sought out in the East philosophical categories such as “emptiness” or the “transcendence of duality,” which have allowed us to rethink monotheism in a more eloquent, but also more impersonal, way. Moreover, we have rediscovered there an entire approach to alternative Western religiosity: that of Meister Eckhart or the neo-Flemish mystics, for whom God is above all ineffable and can only be defined negatively, by all that he is not.
This brings us back to this characteristic of ultramodernity: the acceptance of uncertainty, with sufficient maturity not to panic in the face of the idea of the Unknowable.
1. Published by Fayard.