Essay
Plon, October 2008
Presentation
What is humanity's first religion? How did the concepts of God, sacrifice, salvation, deliverance, prayer, and clergy emerge? Why did we move from worshipping female deities to male deities? From believing in multiple gods to believing in one God? Why is violence often linked to the sacred? Why are there multiple religions? Who are the founders of the great traditions, and what is their message? What are the fundamental similarities and differences between religions?
From the earliest funeral rituals of prehistoric man to today's great religions, Frédéric Lenoir explores the teeming universe of the sacred. One question runs through this book: what are religions for, and why have they accompanied the human adventure since the dawn of time?
Translations
Italy: GARZANTI LIBRI Srl
Japan: TRANSVIEW
Netherlands: UITGEVERIJ TEN HAVE
Tunisia: NATIONAL TRANSLATION CENTER
What the press says about it
The Literary Magazine
– December 2008 “Yesterday, at dinner parties, we talked seriously about politics and readily mocked religion. Today, it’s the opposite. For twenty years, universally, in the press, in publishing, Frédéric Lenoir has played the role of a pathfinder, tirelessly explaining to the French the importance of this religious fact for which their schools have completely unprepared them. Here he delivers his lessons without lessons on God, the sacred, ritual, salvation, deliverance, in a treatise, small in size, large in pedagogical talent, which covers centuries, mysteries, revelations and wisdoms to better answer a single set of anthropological questions: why, from the origins to the present day, such a permanence of the religious fact? In what way is it consubstantial with humanity? From prehistoric tombs to the diffuse spiritualities of the New Age , the director of Le Monde des religions does not avoid any difficulty, not hesitating to delve into the ambivalence of this fact, which must be thought of between transcendence and immanence, verticality and horizontality, communion and confrontation. In doing so, he shows how worship lies at the bottom of culture and deciphers in depth the metamorphoses of a phenomenon that is always equal and always changing. This is why we follow him in this great symbolic decryption that knows how to make accessible, between the abysses of belief and the sums of faith, the very vertigo of the inaccessible. » Jean-François Colosimo
Télérama
– November 26, 2008 “The philosopher, journalist, and novelist Frédéric Lenoir is a formidable communicator. Proof of this is this ambitious work, which reads like a fascinating story, in which the most difficult concepts become crystal clear. The author covers the history of humanity and civilizations around the world, from prehistory to the present day, to trace the imprint of religious sentiment. It appears (among other things) that the birth and evolution of the gods are modeled on the birth and evolution of our societies, that if the first men who possessed nothing were the equals of natural spirits, their cultivating and sedentary successors of the Neolithic quickly began to believe in a goddess of Fertility who provided wealth... Founding funeral rituals, the anteriority of female divinities over male ones, the appearance of sacrifices of all kinds... everything becomes clear under the pen of the one who reads our human adventure as a progressive tearing away from nature, even if he paradoxically evokes the astonishing return of its cult via the reappearance of shamanism and its omnipresent spirits in our contemporary societies... After all, it is life, above all, which remains an enigma, concludes Frédéric Lenoir. » Fabienne Pascaud
La Croix
– October 25, 2008 “ No human society of which there is any trace is exempt from religious beliefs and rituals.” It is from this observation that Frédéric Lenoir, philosopher and director of Le Monde des religions , has built this book which aims to retrace the religious history of humanity. An ambitious but successful gamble, as the book is so easy to read. In a fascinating first part, the author spends a long time describing the religious phenomenon and its development up to the first millennium BC. This perspective, which plunges into the depths of history and prehistory, will allow him, at the conclusion of the book, to analyze with great finesse the religious reality of the 21st century and to question the “archaization” of religion which he discerns in the contemporary rejection of rationalization and religious organization. Between the two, a second part, more classical but not lacking in interest, undertakes to describe precisely the great religious traditions of humanity. What Frédéric Lenoir knows how to do simply, but without falling into oversimplification or abusive shortcuts. The work, which aims to be resolutely descriptive, never seeks to prove the superiority of one religion over another, nor even to pass judgment on religious feeling itself. » Nicolas Senèze