Published in Nouvelles Clés (2003) —
Comments collected by Marc de Smedt and Patrice Van Eersel —
Nouvelles Clés: God is not dead, you say, he is metamorphosing. The sacred is taking on new faces... or else donning very old clothes, but in any case the result is, according to you, that we are currently experiencing "one of the greatest religious mutations that man has ever known." A mutation that would put us in resonance 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. There have been several modernities?
Frédéric Lenoir: Who were the first moderns? People like Pico della Mirandola, for whom man must be perfectly free in his actions and choices, including his religious choices – which, at the time, was a considerable revolution – everyone must exercise their reason, their critical mind… but that does not close them off from the sacred, quite the contrary! The free being, aware of his incompleteness, is in search of something greater than himself. He is passionate about all sciences, all languages, all traditions. He rereads the Bible, delves into the Kabbalah, experiments with alchemy, astrology and all the symbolic languages that human cultures have explored and which he discovers, dazzled, are at his disposal. 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 those most opposed to his own.
I think we are rediscovering the spirit of this first modernity at this very moment, but one enriched by five centuries of crazy journeying – hence my proposal to call it “ultra-modernity”: it is not a “post-modernity” that would be a break with the ideals of the Renaissance, quite the contrary: the number one characteristic has not changed, it is the autonomy of the subject, the individual remains THE reference. 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, we split the world in two: on one side, faith in God, the imaginary, the symbolic, which become private matters, without a hold on the physical world; on the other side, science, in full rise, which studies a disenchanted nature, inhabited by machine-men endowed with reason, and which will take power. This second period of modernity is systematized by the Enlightenment. Kant and Voltaire are as religious as Descartes, but their God, the distant and cold architect of the universe, has only a moral ascendancy over men. Their principal quest, guided by reason, entirely taken up by a secularization of the Decalogue (Kantian law) and by scientific research, no longer has anything to do with the symbolic or the Kabbalah. A century later, scientism reigns, the driving force behind the great atheist systems and the logical outcome of the split between faith and reason. Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, each in their own way, draw the lesson of the Enlightenment: if the “great architect” no longer has a real relationship with the world, if we can no longer even reason about him, then we can do without him, he is nothing more than an idol! It is the apotheosis of the myth of modernity. Its caricature. Man does not realize that he is cutting himself off from nature, from his body, to become nothing more than a sort of brain which, ultimately, has the answer to everything and can bring happiness to all of humanity. The illusion of rational progress triumphs with Marxism and its radiant future... On this, humanity is faced with the most violent century in human history – from Auschwitz to cloning, via the Gulag and Hiroshima – and we find ourselves, at the dawn of the third millennium, asking ourselves questions.
Questioning the foundations of modernity, starting with individual freedom? Certainly not. But revisiting the divide between humans and nature, between mind and body, between reason and emotion? Certainly yes. 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 as a result, the sacred becomes possible again. This is also why I believe that the researchers who have worked on the imaginary, on myth, on archetypes, etc.—Carl G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, Gilbert Durand, or Edgar Morin—are those who best understood the essence of modernity, stripped of its own myth. They were able to give us back the dimension from which we had been amputated.
As if a cycle were closing?
It is true that, for the past thirty years, we have often had the impression of living through a Renaissance – with its good and bad sides: openness to all possible explorations and transdisciplinarity, cultural mixing, but also religious wars and the enslavement of entire peoples...
The three vectors of modernity in the 16th century have never been as present as 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 crumbling. It was a utopia. As a result, the critical spirit is awakening and, upon contact with reality, realizes that it is much more complex than we believed. We are rediscovering the distinction that the ancients of Thomistic scholasticism made between ratio and intellectus: the former is pure, mathematical logic, while the latter integrates, in the Eastern manner, sensitivity, emotion, and contemplation. Today, from all sides—from scientific research to the business world—we are hearing the idea that we must replace cold, cortical intelligence with a more vibrant, more emotional intelligence: neuropsychologists even say that we have several brains, linked to our stomach or our heart! And we are realizing that we can perfectly live in autonomy, in critical reason, while advancing in a quest for meaning rooted in the experience of the body. In all this, we are joining the first modernity of the Renaissance.
A Pico della Mirandola would feel perfectly at home today!
Now, let's talk about the new religious wars. Most of the media have it all backwards. They say, "Today, what dominates religions is fundamentalism, fanaticism, violence." But no! Let's open our eyes: what dominates, beyond the fire of appearances, is just the opposite! Everywhere, in all cultures, people are inexorably appropriating religion, each in their own way. Including in Islam: from Morocco to Indonesia, by way of Iran, young people want to practice their religion freely, sometimes without really realizing it. This is what, deep down, in all religions, drives mad the very small minority of fundamentalists, ready for acts of unheard-of violence rather than accept the evolution towards freedom. Whether the latter stands up against the cultural domination of the West is another story – or against that of their elders: thus it can happen that young girls demand to wear the veil to defy their parents, like the two sisters from Aubervilliers, whose father is an atheist Jew and whose mother is a Kabyle Catholic!
Are not the fundamentalists themselves inventing 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 is no coincidence that the first Algerian “bearded men” came from science faculties or technology institutes rather than from schools of theology or philosophy: their “return to origins” is often self-taught, ignorant, and fanciful. In any case, in the very long term, what we will remember of our era in the evolution of religion is the transition from great cultural traditions dependent on groups, ethnicities, nations… to personal practices, of individuals wishing to appropriate the meaning. They can 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 is a colossal revolution. And a considerable crisis for the Churches. Two-thirds of Europeans and three-quarters of Americans say they are believers, but practice less and less.
However, this movement seems to have no return...
If everyone builds a “religious kit” to their own measure, the syncretic confusion will be total...
First, no religion has escaped syncretism. Buddhism is a syncretism. And Christianity, a formidable mixture of Jewish faith, Roman law, and Greek philosophy! And Islam, an extraordinary alloy of ancient Arab beliefs and Judaic and Christian borrowings! All religions are syncretic. Only, there are two types of syncretism. The first develops a new coherence by confronting the contradictions, or accelerations, that its singular combination brings. The second remains in the softness of an undigested collage. Unintelligent. Inorganic. Without a backbone. Hence the formidable challenge of modernity: it is up to each individual to know how to organize their own coherence, and this in a world where the “religious offering” is becoming plethoric and where the possibilities for confusing collages are multiplying.
You said that a Pico della Mirandola would feel at home today. With his eclecticism and taste for the marvelous, we would therefore find him in the New Age networks – to which you devote a central chapter.
Except that Pico della Mirandola and the great humanists of the Renaissance had an intellectual requirement that most of those we group together, often condescendingly, under the term “New Age” do not have – a syncretism, it must be said, particularly soft, especially in the United States. Mental confusion seems to me to be one of the main faults 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 live an experience of awakening. But the expression New Age seems to me to have had its day. I prefer “re-enchantment of the world,” where I see the best of this very vast impulse, which indeed plays a crucial role in spiritual ultra-modernity. What is it about?
The first to speak of the “disenchantment of the world” was Max Weber. For him, the process was very old, since he attributed it to the Bible and the Jews’ propensity to rationalize the divine. I don’t agree, but one thing is certain: with the “second modernity” I was talking about earlier, that of the “Great Watchmaker” of the Enlightenment philosophers, the world gradually lost its immense magical aura – which contributed to extinguishing all kinds of connections linking people to nature, to life, to the body. This disenchantment reached a paroxysm in the 20th century. To the point of nauseating consumer society, where everything is observable, manipulable, decipherable, rationalizable, commodifiable… May 68 can be deciphered as a need for re-enchantment. But, well before that, it was the entire Romantic movement! Indeed, from the 18th century onwards, certain minds rejected the “cooling” of Cartesian or Kantian modernity.
A Goethe, for example, clearly has an intuition of the dangers of scientistic modernity. Later, a Lamartine too. Or a Hugo. Those who will most seek to reintroduce the sense of myth, of the imaginary and of the sacred, to rehabilitate this part of man denied by the Enlightenment, are certainly the great German Romantics, from Novalis to the Brothers Grimm. But the industrial revolution has barely begun and the Romantics – among whom we must count the first American ecologists, Thoreau, Emerson, etc. – are relegated to the category of harmless poets. So much so that the philosophical message they carry will 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 – with the anthroposophical extension of Rudolf Steiner…
Steiner, whom you don't hesitate to compare to Pico della Mirandola, him again...
But yes, he is an astonishing character, whose eclecticism recalls the spirit of the Renaissance! And so the New Age – the Re-enchantment of the World – does not come out of nowhere: it is part of a specific historical movement. A movement that today is surfacing almost everywhere and that, in my opinion, cannot be properly analyzed according to the grids of global religious sociology, but according to those of a psychosociology that has yet to be invented. I find, in fact, that the old categories – Catholicism, Judaism, free thought, atheism… or New Age – are too reductive and miss the essential. When we analyze real life, contemporary religious phenomenology shows us that, fundamentally, there are two types of religiosities, which cut across all other categories: the first open, the second closed. The latter includes all those who vitally need certainties and absolute truths: we find fundamentalists, extremists, orthodox people of absolutely all religions – and this of course includes a swarm of sects, but also militant atheists. Whereas the first category concerns individuals who, while living a deep relationship with the sacred, assume the uncertainty of mature modernity, which implies doubt and a permanent quest: they have convictions, but tell themselves that they are perhaps provisional and that different convictions can also be legitimate – and this therefore includes many agnostics in search. And you will notice this: all people of open religiosity get along well with each other, whatever their traditions. The same goes for those of closed religiosity – even if their way of “getting along well with each other” may be to hate each other and make war on each other, like the Protestant fundamentalists of Bush's style and the Muslim fundamentalists of Bin Laden's style.
I guess you yourself fall into the open category... Could you tell us a few words about your own background?
I was fortunate to grow up in a family environment of very open Catholicism, non-practicing but in great moral search. 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 passionate about philosophy. Until I was seventeen, the pre-Socratics, Epicurus, the Stoics, Aristotle wonderfully answered the existential questions I was asking myself. I then felt the need to turn to the East and it was again – via Arnaud Desjardins – an extraordinary journey, until my discovery of Chogyam Trungpa and the Tibetan Buddhists, and also the mystics, Maharishi, Shankara, etc. When I got there, I told myself that it was unreasonable to know nothing about Jung. Reading the latter pushed me to delve into astrology – which holds a formidable symbolic discourse on man – and into the prodigious universe of mythologies and the laws of synchronicity that regulate them. I was nineteen years old at the time and I was passionate about all religions, except Catholicism. For me, it was really the last of the traditions that could interest me! I found it puritanical, blocked, useless, in short “Catholic”. What happened to me then was totally unpredictable.
I had accepted the idea of spending a few days in a Breton Cistercian monastery, to experiment with writing in silence. A superb place, where I immediately felt very good, among monks and nuns who exuded health and intelligence. I began to work when a sudden unease arose. A growing unease, which gave me a furious desire to leave. I was about to do so when my conscience challenged me to find an explanation for what was happening. So my taste for challenge and a certain self-esteem made me stay.
So what was I to face? A dusty old Bible was lying around. I opened it at random and came across the Prologue of Saint John. I had barely begun to read it when the sky fell upon me: weeping all the tears in my body, I felt an incredible love rise within me. I wanted to embrace the whole world! I was twenty years old. I had just met 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!
It's that my intellectual journey continued, in philosophy and sociology. My thesis on "Buddhism and the West" was a way of bringing my interests into conflict. On a conceptual level, in fact, there is nothing more different than Buddhism and Christianity. It was perfect. I always go towards the opposite of what I believe to put my convictions to the test. So I explored two universes foreign to each other, which nourished me on different levels. But I haven't budged in my deep conviction. I pray to Christ every day.
A somewhat abstract Christ…?
Oh no! The Jesus of the Gospels, whom I believe is at the same time a Christ who transcends all religions, including Christian revelation: the Logos who enlightens all men and was incarnated at a given moment in this form. This is why I call myself a Christian. Otherwise, I would be agnostic. That said, I also practice Zen meditation, quite simply because it helps me disconnect from worries, from the agitated mind. For twenty years, every day, I have taken the posture and practiced breathing... a bit Indian, in fact! 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 several levels of reality...
…whose center is there, within us, and yet always escapes us?
Our conception of the “center,” that is, of God, has evolved considerably in 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 in the East philosophical categories such as “emptiness” or “overcoming duality,” which have allowed us to rethink monotheism in a more meaningful, but also more impersonal, way. We have also found there a whole 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 everything he is not.
Which brings us back to this characteristic of ultramodernity: the acceptance of uncertainty, with sufficient maturity not to panic when faced with the idea of the Unknowable.
1. Fayard editions.