Father Alexander Men, one of the prophets of our time, states in one of his books that “Christianity has only just begun.” This is obviously a sobering statement. The first interpretation is strictly quantitative: after all, Christianity is just under two thousand years old, which is not very long in the long history of mankind, and even in comparison with religions such as Hinduism and Judaism. It is safe to assume, however, that Alexandre Men’s assertion goes far beyond this quantitative statement. But what is he trying to tell us? How and why does this statement speak to us?
A First Approach to the Unground
To answer these questions, perhaps we should remain in the spiritual realm of Russian Orthodoxy and turn to one of its religious philosophers, Nicholas Berdyaev, who inspired Alexander Men in his effort to think of Christianity in terms of “freedom”—a concept which, for him, has little to do with “political” freedom as we in the West understand it from declarations of rights, but which has a much deeper metaphysical value. With this in mind, Berdyaev meditates on a notion peculiar to Meister Eckhart and the Rhineland mystics, Jakob Boehme in particular: the Ungrund.
The Ungrund: literally meaning, the “Unground,” the “Bottomless.” For this school of mysticism, which is more or less joined by several other mystical schools of Christianity under a slightly different term, the Bottomless is the most original state of the world, the beginning of the metaphysical and ontological beginning. It is not just a beginning. As the most original state of the world, it continues, in a more or less veiled way, to govern it, so that the universe can only be thought of from the Bottomless. This statement may come as a surprise from Christians so deeply committed to their faith. Indeed, the dominant discourse of Christianity has rather accustomed us to considering that, for a Christian, God is at the beginning and end of everything. Is not the installation of the ” Bottomless” in its place a kind of “discouragement of God?”
This would be the case if the Bottomless could be understood positively as, for example, “emptiness” or “nothingness.” For the “void” and “nothingness” that, for traditional Western metaphysics, characterize exactly non-being, are not, in fact, devoid of positivity. “Emptiness” and “nothingness,” as they are generally understood, express what remains when Being has withdrawn. “Emptiness” and “nothingness” therefore still belong to the realm of being. They are the withdrawal of Being, which participates in being, even if this participation is problematic and paradoxical. They are, in depth, memory: memory that being was, or at least that it is possible, but that it is not, or that it is no longer.
The Bottomless is quite different. It could perhaps be objected that the Bottomless is, in relation to “substance,” in the same situation as emptiness and nothingness are in relation to Being. But the originality of the Bottomless makes the memorial dimension of “emptiness” and “nothingness” impossible. The ” Bottomless” is original insofar as it is prior to any background, and in particular to time. But this is a misnomer. Of itself, the Bottomless is prior to nothing. It is only from time, i.e., from the first foundation of things, that the Bottomless is apprehended as anterior to any ground. In other words, the Bottomless is “origin,” but only for us who experience time. To say that the Bottomless is the beginning of the beginning is already to engage in the metaphysics of being, and thus to “betray” the Bottomless. But it is true that, without this temporalized representation of the Bottomless, we would not be able to express ourselves positively about it.
Perhaps this is what the Bottomless expects of us—that we can say nothing positive about it, so that it remains enigmatic as presence, or absence. If this is the case, then we can better appreciate the audacity of those mystics who dare to base their impulse on that which has no substance, that which does not name itself but maintains itself in the withdrawal of its enigma, which opens onto endless questioning, questioning of questioning and so on, which never concludes. I speak of the “audacity” of these mystics because the whole of mainstream Western metaphysics, whether Christian or non-Christian, starts from principles and presuppositions that are exactly the opposite of the Bottomless. It is based on the idea that there is “substance” from the start, and even that the origin is “substance.”
The Meaning of a Discourse
Whatever the diversity of beginnings and ends it identifies, Western metaphysics does indeed proceed from substance. Background is the condition of meaning, and meaning is what enables metaphysical discourse to discourse, since the purpose of this discourse is to enunciate the true meaning of things, starting from their foundation. Metaphysical discourse represents itself as a foundation—the foundation of the intelligibility of the world—and, as such, is only interested in the foundation of things, in order to extract their meaning. In this respect, traditional Christian theology is no different from other metaphysical discourses, insofar as the object of its discourse—the God of Christians—can, according to it, only be apprehended from its own foundation, which is to give meaning to the world.
Nor do the “modern” forms of metaphysics, which assert their critical virulence and the “rupture” they are supposed to introduce, distinguish themselves from this common background of metaphysics. On the contrary, they rather constitute its exacerbated form, insofar as they present themselves as a critique of all previous representations of the world in the name of a more intelligible representation of it. “Deconstruction,” the principal form of Western philosophy since Descartes, does not deconstruct meaning and substance. On the contrary, it aims to consolidate both by positioning them on a more solid site. Ultimately, then, “modernity” is nothing more than an archaeological effort to rediscover the world’s original authentic foundation, overlaid by a whole sedimentation of inauthentic representations, governed by false representations. From this point of view, even the most apparently radical critical discourse, that of Nietzsche, does not dispense with substance and meaning. It is simply content to base substance and meaning on randomness, contingency and play, as if randomness, contingency and play were not also intelligible forms—as if chance were not the simple logical antithesis of determination.
Because the discourse of Western metaphysics never changes, despite appearances, we can consider that there is no such thing as “modernity,” because there has never been a “rupture.” Philosophers and theologians of all persuasions agree that the “Enlightenment” marked a radical “rupture” in the spiritual history of the West, and therefore of the world, insofar as this so-called “rupture” suits them—some to construct a narrative of progress, others to deplore, on the contrary, the loss of the blessed times of faith and the “natural” order of the world. But, in reality, this theatrical rupture serves to mask the profound continuity of Western metaphysical discourse based on substance, perhaps more so in our time than ever before, precisely because we sincerely believe ourselves to be freed, “liberated,” from this discourse.
This continuity is in fact logical: insofar as, as I said, Western metaphysics has intelligibility as its immovable foundation, it can only discuss the world by presupposing its intelligibility and the intelligibility of each of its parts. Once this point has been established, it can deploy its mechanics for apprehending the totality of states—and the totality of states as their own being—on the basis of conceptual categories such as necessity, functionality and generality. Establishing necessity on the basis of functionality, so that each being is no more than the serial product of its functional generalization, constructing categories and reducing the universe to an articulation between categories, constitutes the routine mechanics of Western discourse on the world and, particularly in our time, of the so-called “human sciences,” which today constitute the most operative and therefore most widespread form of this discourse.
This discourse is obviously not pure illusion. It can give an account of a certain state of the world, but this state of the world cannot be confused with its “truth.” On the contrary, our ever more “learned” explanation of the world may well be no more than a means of avoiding having to confront the question of truth, so that as long as we believe we have “understood” the world because we explain it more, our minds will remain ever further removed from the truth and the essential questions that truth carries with it.
Why does the ever-deeper investment of the world by intelligibility lead us away from truth? The combination of necessity, functionality and generality that constitutes intelligibility guides our view of the world. It inevitably leads us to erase the being that presents itself to us behind the data. A datum is that which must be there, that which has no choice but to be there, whose destiny is to be placed there, waiting for the observer to take an interest. But a datum is also the most general category of things, insofar as everything, absolutely everything, can be a datum. Thus, to be a datum is to lose one’s singular essence, to become just another thing, distinguished in nothing, by nobility or dignity, from other things, and which, because it is no longer distinguished in anything, because it is commonplace, authorizes all manipulations in advance. Lastly, data can be isolated: its environment plays only a marginal role in its determination, which, incidentally, blurs the view—on the contrary, the sooner we isolate the thing, the sooner we dissociate it from its environment, the more intelligible it will be, and therefore the more it will be, from the point of view of science and philosophy.
The combination of necessity, functionality and generality thus gives rise to a representation of the world as a sum of objects placed there, divisible, passive, none of which is substantially different from the rest of the world. This representation gradually erases the real world. It articulates itself with a dynamic that postulates that the forcing of states of being, through an ever more systematic and thorough use of the categories of necessity, functionality and generality, thus increasing the intelligibility of the world, constitutes a happy process, a progress.
Why does this dynamic constitute progress? Firstly, because greater intelligibility of things is in itself a good thing, reinforcing man’s status as the great decipherer of the universe. Above all, this increased intelligibility makes it possible to determine things in their entirety, i.e., to control them in such a way as to shape them in a direction useful to mankind. The representation of a thing as a given confers on man (or on those who are supposed to represent the human community) a monopoly on deciding how to use it. If everything is a given, man is accountable only to himself for its use. In the world, there is nothing transcendent, nothing sacred or even simply superior—there is only data, ruthlessly equalized in status on the sieve of intelligibility, equally usable and manipulable. Data may well differ quantitatively, be worth more or less quantitatively; it may well differ in its external qualities, appearance, form, content and so on. But the underlying substance is the same everywhere. Each time, we are dealing with objects, i.e., passive forms whose intelligibility expresses their deeper meaning, i.e., the destination that man may assign to them.
From Meaning to Tool, from Tool to Power, from Power to Profit
The object exists only from man and for man. Man is therefore entitled to use it without ever considering it for itself, by reducing it to the utility he assigns to it. This assignment can be technical, economic, legal, even aesthetic. In all cases, it is an assignment that forbids the object to be valuable in its own right, forcing it to pass through the intermediary of human desire, knowledge and will, in order to acquire a value that varies according to the variations in human desire that decide this value, sometimes causing it to evolve from zero to infinity, and vice versa. In particular, we will have recognized the economic functioning of our world, which, through a mechanism it believes to be “scientific” and “objective”—the market—assigns and then de-assigns a value to the “good,” without always realizing that this “value” is essentially nothing more than the result of an aggregation of volatile and perfectly subjective desires liable to change at any moment.
The example of the market suddenly takes us back from the depths of philosophical analysis to the most trivial realities of our world. The assignment imposed on objects cannot be confined to the field of institutional economics and so-called “commodities.” It applies to the totality of human actions since, for the contemporary Westerner, the perception of the world as a collection of data is not just a spontaneous reflex; it has become the only possible perception of the world, the right and authentic perception of it, so that we confuse it with nature, calling “nature” this collection of data instead of the universe; since it is the nature of things, every Westerner feels obliged to propagate and intensify it ever more, because he equates this movement of propagation and intensification with “progress” and, in essence, to be a Westerner today is to want this perception more and more, and to impose it ever more on the rest of the world.
Contemporary Western “nihilism” is therefore not a matter of “evil thoughts,” murderous impulses or perverse desires. On the contrary, it is the very expression of the most virtuous Western thinking, of the cult of progress and Enlightenment, of the unshakeable conviction that, by imposing this perception and naturalizing it, the West is giving humanity the greatest gift of all. That is why he calls the moral formalization of his perception “humanism.” It is true that, as I have already written, metaphysics formally positions man as the great and only decipherer of the world. But this royal positioning has a counterpart. At the same time, man himself becomes the object of study, and even the main object of study. He, too, is subjected to the same treatment he thought was reserved for things. He too is discredited, isolated from his environment, categorized. He too becomes a given.
The rise of the “sciences” of man, whether social or psychological, or a combination of the two, reflects this disregard for man, who, at the very moment when he is theoretically elevated to the status of master of the universe, finds himself practically assigned the status of a datum, controllable and manipulable. Our time is thus torn between the ability to legitimately will anything, which is seized upon by the ideologues of our world, for whom man has never been so “free” to shape and order the world in the way that suits him, and the concrete reality of our existences governed almost entirely by stimulation and manipulation. There is thus a formidable contradiction—which, if we were not so alienated, would shake us all—between the official discourse that emphasizes “free choice,” “consent” and “individual decision” in everything, and the concrete experience of lives in which the proportion of freedom constantly recedes before that of determination. This observation is valid at every level—in general economics, where we are ordered to defer to the blind and incomprehensible divinity of the market; in the singular economy of our desires, where we almost always desire only the object we have been told to desire, because it is normal and natural, we are told, to desire this object.
This fundamental dichotomy explains why our age, more than any other before it, is the age of power, i.e., the age when it is possible to extend the scope of power to almost infinite proportions. The general discourse on the absolute freedom of each individual, materializing in new “rights” always to be conquered, always to be refreshed by inventive ingenuity, allows us to conceal the effective control that is exerted more and more on each “subject” every day, teaching him to consume what we wish to see him consume, to desire what we wish to see him desire, to distract himself from the distractions that are so strongly proposed to him, to be tracked down and configured in his emotions. The subject thus conforms more and more each day to his status as a given, taking pride in his undivided power over the “world,” without realizing that he himself is part of this “world,” and that freedom is only “granted” to him insofar as we are certain he will make the required use of it.
In contrast to the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, so easily identified by their chain rattling and the common bellowing of slogans, modern or post-modern totalitarianism is infinitely discreet. It promotes a regime of absolute rights in order to be absolutely effective in its silent control of things. This effectiveness derives from its invisibility, resulting in particular from the perfect internalization of norms—everyone knows, deep down, what is expected of them. As a result, they are vigilant guardians of themselves. Penalties for deviations are also silent, and therefore formally invisible. There is no inscription of the offence in any legal code but, in practice, a universal social exclusion, tacitly recognized and practiced by all, aimed at instilling in the transgressor a feeling of incurable guilt that no amount of repentance will ever fully assuage.
Christianity as the Spiritualist Sigh of Our World
What becomes of Christianity in this context? Official Christianity, that which has permission to call itself such, is perfectly incapable of taking the measure of the totalitarianism I describe. It is incapable of doing so because it shares, up to a point, the objective of reifying things in the service of man, because official Christianity is one humanism among others. Its metaphysics postulates that there is a foundation in this world that gives meaning to things and is oriented towards man, his rights, his fulfillment. There is a nature of things, which is their configuration in the service of man, a natural right, a natural use of the world to which to conform, an un-perverted essence of the world that corresponds to God’s “project” for man. In this system, God is ultimately no more than a Guarantor—the Guarantor of the natural order of things, the just order, to which we need only conform in order to save ourselves and the world. Official Christianity spiritualizes humanist metaphysics, but only spiritualizes it. The system of this metaphysics works with or without this spiritualization, which has no substantial character. In reality, spiritualization is merely a matter of feeling, a matter of taste, a question of sensibility, and no longer a vital question. Hence the theme, dear to Christian humanism, of bringing together “men of good will,” the sharing of humanist ideals being, in the final analysis, more significant than the addition, or otherwise, of the spiritualization supplement.
Official Christianity is ultimately complicit in the process leading to modern nihilism. That it is so without being aware of it is no excuse in this respect. As an objective accomplice to this process, it has less and less effective control over our world. Its purely moral and virtuous criticism of the sharing of wealth, the economy at the service of mankind, etc. remains, like that of all the other professionals of virtue in our world, a rhetorical criticism, devoid of any performative character. This effective impotence is, more or less consciously, deliberate, because, inwardly, official Christianity approves of the Western world as it is, including the process of secularization of our societies, seeing in it a “liberation” of mankind and an “opportunity” for Christianity, without fully realizing that the process of secularization is only one aspect of a general mechanism aimed at radically desacralizing the world, and man within the world, in order to be able to exploit both to the full.
For power is not the exclusive purpose of our world. It is, in turn, at the service of profit, which, in turn, underpins power. Of course, the quest for profit has always been part and parcel of capitalism. But this quest acquires an entirely new, neurotic dimension, insofar as modern nihilism, by placing the entire universe under the empire of manipulable and orientable data, configures absolutely everything, and in particular that which is supposedly the most “free” and “disinterested”—desire, leisure, art, culture, morality—in the direction of profit, steering the human and collective psyche so that it generates ever more desire to consume, and thus profit, enriching those who conceive and determine the steering of data, and thus legitimizing their power.
But official Christianity will never say anything about all this. It will never say anything about the commercial exploitation of desire and “rights,” the reduction of politics to a market, the self-serving debasement of morality and culture, the atomization of individuals—because it simply cannot say anything about it. Its virtuous, fastidious humanism confines itself to noting that, since men are formally free, they are necessarily and effectively free.
A question inevitably arises. Why, beyond the context of our time, which admittedly lends itself particularly to its expression, has this official Christianity been almost always dominant throughout the history of Western Christianity? There could be a fascinating study to be conducted on the subject. However, let us venture a hypothesis—while in the Scriptures, God affirms: “I am What I am,” making it impossible to assign Him a name, and therefore a function, in the history of Christianity, an alternative representation very quickly imposed itself, translating the God of the Scriptures into the terms of Western metaphysics, by proceeding to an intelligible determination of God. This intelligible determination defined God as first principle, motor. In this way, it made God the founder from whom the world comes into being. Let us take a closer look at this intelligible form. The founder is the one who inaugurates, but what he inaugurates is never nothing. He inaugurates a project that has meaning and will unfold over time. The meaning of this project is not yet explicit, but in its essence, it is already entirely contained in the founder’s act. The founder creates a city. We do not yet know the destiny of this city, but we do know that it will have a destiny.
Thus, God, understood as the Founder of the world, provides it with meaning. He is the world’s Purveyor of meaning. But this also means that, as with every founder, His task is already accomplished. Thus, since then, God can rest in His essence. He has fulfilled His function. Thus, while God may be the Founder and Bringer of meaning, He is not fundamentally different from other beings. He too fulfills a function; that is, He obeys an intelligible determination. And, because He is subject to this determination, because He is governed by it, this positioning opens the way to two possibilities for confining and contesting Him. Either we consider that He originally served a purpose, but that His function is now useless, because meaning is forever grounded. All we want is for Him to fulfill a passive function as the ultimate guarantor of the system, the “master of the clocks.” Or we may consider that, from the outset, He has lied to us because, contrary to what we have been taught, the meaning of the world is that the world has no meaning. These two propositions reveal the characteristics of Western secularization, which constantly oscillates between the rejection of God and His sanitization, His devitalization.
There is a world between this metaphysical representation and the God of the Gospels. The episode in the Acts of the Apostles where Saint Paul speaks before the Areopagus of Athens makes this infinite distance perfectly perceptible. The wisdom of Athens accepts perfectly well the presentation of an unknown god, an exciting subject of curiosity and determination. On the other hand, it finds it unbearable to be told about the resurrection of the body (“on that, we will hear from you another time”), because for Greek wisdom (the wisdom that took over from Greek thought, which did think, whereas Greek wisdom merely reproduced), the god who takes refuge in the depths of the ideal world has nothing but disdain for the body. God has no interest in the trivialities of the senses, which are the domain of the contingent, the temporal, the profane, the vulgar—the non-divine par excellence.
Why did Athenian wisdom take its revenge on Paul in Western Christianity, and why does it continue to take its revenge today, imposing ever more strongly the representation of God as Founder and Guarantor of nature, of the social and symbolic order of things, of the intelligibility of the world, of the law and rights? Perhaps because, deep down, human beings, at least those who profess to think and decide, have always been less interested in meeting the God “who is He who is,” than in being reassured about the meaning of the world and the solid foundation of things on which to build an order—their order.
Unfortunately for them, Christian revelation speaks not of order, but of life and truth. This is where the word of the Bottomless can once again be heard.
The Tragedy of Freedom
What does this word tell us? Firstly, that things could not have been and that, at any moment, they may not be. This is the opposite of the metaphysics of intelligibility and necessity, and of the ever-growing effort to control the world and turn it into an instrument at man’s service. Things might not be—awareness of such a possibility introduces us to an entirely different universe than our own. A universe where nothing is certain, because man has no control over what is essential. This is the universe of the Old Testament prophets, but also of Aeschylus and the great early epics, and for those who experience it, it has a name that describes it in its entirety—it is tragic. It is tragic because man has no effective power of determination over it. Our world bases its legitimacy on its ability to make things predictable and to organize them so that they provide us with the ration of enjoyment we need to entertain ourselves. The tragic universe, on the other hand, guarantees us nothing—at any given moment, everything is possible, beauty and horror, ecstasy and drama.
True, authentic freedom can only be found in awareness of the tragic nature of the universe. The perception that things might not be is, for man, the most demanding revelation, for it disconnects him from the evidence of meaning and the assurance of intelligibility. It forces man to take a stand, to give his assent to things or to refuse it, even when the alliance of intuition and reason constantly tells him he has no choice. In Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky wrote pages, whose depth has never been surpassed, about the freedom that suddenly comes when man does not resign himself, even at the cost of infinite solitude, madness and even fear. Our societies which boast of the term “freedom,” uttered constantly, while, in practice, our freedom is constantly being reduced, do not even have the idea that there are times and men for whom freedom is not a rhetorical proclamation, or a simple calculated choice, but a perilous commitment of the whole soul, the only thing capable, through its radicality, of rising to the level of the tragic and its demands.
With freedom comes evil. In the universe of the Bottomless, evil is not an exogenous factor that can be dealt with through the education of consciences and the religion of human rights. Evil is inherent in the universe, because the principle of freedom makes it possible for evil to erupt at any moment. Evil can never be exorcised. It will always return, either as a faculty of history or as a temptation of individual consciousness. Man must therefore learn to live with the disturbing presence of evil, as if he were living in the same room as a poisonous snake. “Learning to live” means that, at every moment, man must make up his mind about evil. Not just in terms of his own ability to commit evil. War, violence and suffering, but also loneliness and the tearing apart of impossible loves, are man’s constant companions, and he himself recognizes his kinship with these scourges, since he himself is immersed in sin.
The irreducibility of evil calls for a radically different prophylactic approach to that which prevails in our world. The latter, convinced that evil can be cured, constructs and reconstructs rules, whether moral, legal or economic, which it believes will ensure that, if respected, evil will disappear from the world. Humanism is nothing more than the systematization of this belief in the virtue of rules. Provided we rely on reason, we will identify, for example, legal principles and, in particular, a catalogue of rights which, if sufficiently general and enlightened, will enable mankind to emancipate itself from evil, or at least from social evil. As for the evil which, in the form of disease for example, affects the individual, the combination of science, economics and psychology will enable us to get to the bottom of it.
But since our world is not the world as it is, but only a formalized representation of it, evil takes its revenge on these naive efforts to extirpate it. It comes to infect, preferably and by a dark irony, the principles supposed to deliver us from it, so that in the modern age, the worst manifestations of evil infiltrate through the most apparently virtuous principles. Historically, the deadliest aspect of Western modernity has been its periodic purifying crises, in the name of science, progress, humanity, equality.
Conventions, Artificiality, Civility
Insofar as evil is irreducible, no human production, whether empire or work of the mind, is immune to evil. This lack of immunity explains the contingent nature of all human production. Contrary to what we are told, no institution, no instrument forged by man, is connected with the categories that express the absolute: truth in itself, good in itself, reason in itself, nature in itself. There is always an element of arbitrariness in human creations, even those that appear to be the wisest, which makes it impossible to find perennial and universal foundations. This arbitrariness can easily lend itself to manipulation, which is all the more formidable when it is hidden behind big words like “truth,” “the good,” “reason” and “nature.” In fact, the less sensitive we are to the presence of arbitrariness in human creations, the more we believe in them, the more dangerous they can prove to be. “Human rights,” to take probably the most revered institution in the West today, can, as we see on a daily basis, turn out to be a perfect instrument of power and of the seizure of essential freedom, as soon as the individual is sufficiently trained to exchange the worry and questioning inherent in this essential freedom for the mess of porridge of the accumulation of increasingly theoretical and artificial rights whose aim is not to be effective but to entertain human consciousness by occupying it.
You have to take do your part. Human creations are never anything but conventions, whatever they may be and whatever dignity they may claim. Convention is not just local custom. Convention is also any device that can sometimes acquire the complexity, variety and size of an intellectual galaxy, and appear to occupy the entire space in which individuals move. To take just a few telling examples: conventional arrangements: the law; conventional arrangements: the market and, more broadly, the rules governing economic exchange; conventional arrangements: political institutions; conventional arrangements: the notion of the subject, i.e., an autonomous, lucid individual, free to make his or her own decisions and choices.
Conventions should not be denigrated. If they are judicious, they serve to ensure the collective virtue of civility, i.e., the ability to live properly in society, even with those who are the strangest to us and whose tastes are the most unsympathetic. In this respect, conventions play an essential pacifying role, not by eliminating evil, but by limiting and regulating it. But this role, important as it is, tells us nothing significant about truth, goodness, nature or reason.
This does not mean that all conventions are equal. I have mentioned their more or less “judicious” character. This is assessed in terms of the goal of pacifying relations between men, of overcoming original violence, which they all pursue without being clearly aware of it. But even the wisest, even the most sophisticated, do not in themselves contain any truth other than a relative truth, which can be measured by relating it to other relative truths. This is why human activities and the reflection on their organization, whether political, legal, economic or simply sapiential, have absolutely nothing to do with the effort of the spirit when it resolutely confronts the mystery of the world. The former and the latter belong to different orders that do not mix, because their domains are radically different. Reflection on human activity and its organization is and will always remain in the realm of the relative, and as such has no access to the truth of truth.
This distinction explains why the most profound thinker, the most fervent, committed to risking everything in the quest for truth, is also, in some respects, the most skeptical of men. From this point of view, frequenting the great disenchanted men of history, Tiberius on the pagan side or De Gaulle on the Christian side, who knew how to act precisely because, deep down, they did not believe in the metaphysical value of action, reading those great cynics constituted by the Preachers of the Grand Siècle, represents for the mind the least unsatisfactory form of education.
Why Nothing is Equal
However, this skepticism of principle, proper to anyone who knows that the phrase “truth beyond the Pyrenees, error below” is the only general statement about history that does not lie, is reversed when it comes to meditation on the Bottomless. It would be a mistake to believe that this meditation is limited to the “last ends.” In truth, such meditation reverberates on all beings, illuminating them with a new light. Under this light, they radically change their status. They become gifts, offering themselves at every moment, in the awe we should feel at their emergence into the world.
The seizure of being as data inevitably introduces an equalization and neutralization of them under the gaze of the observer who inspects them. In Western ideology, this equalization and neutralization are valued as evidence not only of the scientific nature of our gaze, but also of the superior tolerance that accepts all objects and recognizes their equal dignity. But, in reality, this equanimity only applies if the beings first acknowledge their defeat and accept that they have been reduced to the rank of objects, i.e., passive forms that take on meaning only from the orientation assigned to them by the “subject.” As one of today’s mantras puts it, “everything is equal,” whether in terms of practices, cultures or religions, because everything is equivalent in the form of interchangeable supports at the service of the subject. And because everything is equivalent, indifference to the world inevitably takes hold of the subject, who is only awakened from his torpor by the fake novelty of advertising discourse, which generates something new only to immediately downgrade it in favor of something even newer, so that, by a paradox that is only apparent, the falsely enchanted universe of world consumption increases the territory of indifference day by day.
Quite different is the perception of being as a gift. This introduces recognition and, therefore, attention. Attention, in turn, engenders an existential seriousness that engages man. This existential seriousness requires us to question each being, not to classify and use it, but to go towards its singularity and, from the recognition of this singularity, to produce a value judgment.
To understand this demand for attention and judgment, let us take the topical example of “man” and “woman.” In reaction to traditionalist discourses on the subordination of women, Western modernity considers men and women to be strictly equal—but this equality derives from their fundamental identity, in the form of substitutable and manipulable objects at the service of the subject, who reduces them to mere social signs. This is the conceptual basis of the notion of “gender” and the hegemony it has recently acquired in the West, erasing “male” and “female” being behind their social formalization, so that, in fine, there are no longer men and women but representations of men and women. On the contrary, the perception of “man” and “woman” as gifts leads us to respect these beings over and above the interplay of social conventions, and to question what man really is, what woman really is, and the link that unites their differences.
“Questioning”: once we perceive beings as gifts, it is not a matter of forcing them to explain themselves, to give an account of themselves. The work of the mind is not a search for intelligibility through objectification. Rather, it is a search for an answer to the question that will never be definitive, so that questioning never ends. What is it about this being that makes it a gift? A gift cannot be confused; it is unique. But what is unique about “man” and “woman?”
For the man who perceives the universe as a gift, each being is an adventure in search of a singularity that gives itself and yet will never quite give itself, because as soon as we think in terms of seizure, arraignment, the being retracts and moves away. We will never know what “being a man” and “being a woman” really are. But we are allowed to question them, and to question them again, as civilizations have done, without ever concluding their questioning. For, from this perspective, to know is not to determine. Essential knowledge is not oriented towards the intelligibility of things, i.e., towards the detection of the possibilities of power they conceal. It presupposes a quality of attention to things that, in other fields, we call “love.” Whereas knowledge, in its dominant sense, normally requires a process of cold distancing, known as “objectification,” and which is actually required for the thing to come to terms with its status as object, essential knowledge sympathizes with things from the outset, requiring us, in turn, to give the thing the attention it needs to let us glimpse its being.
Then, through this attention that is love, doors are unlocked. The world appears for what it is, not the world of determination, necessity, function and generality, but its reverse: the world of what resists determination. To go towards the being of things is to encounter that mysterious force which, in things, resists the power of determination and, through this resistance, affirms. Affirms what? Nothing other than life. Life, understood metaphysically (i.e., not as a biological phenomenon but as a spiritual principle) is in things. It is not also in things. There are things for which the function of use has practically stifled all forms of life. There are others, on the contrary, that are almost entirely absorbed by life. They are what earlier ages called the sacred—a notion that has become almost incomprehensible to us.
To think in terms of things is to love them all as a gift given to us personally. But this love does not mean that all things are equivalent. There is a hierarchy in the dignity of things, which is not a hierarchy of form but of substance, and the love we have for them demands precisely that we do them justice by identifying this hierarchy and respecting it. Hence the existential seriousness I mentioned earlier, which is the opposite of modern indifference to the world, clumsily masked by the emphatic bias of “tolerance” and “openness.” To truly love things is to want, at every moment, to give them back what is due to them—no more, no less.
From Temporality to Salvation
But how do we give things their due? By estimating them on the basis of time. The knowledge of determination ignores time, even though it talks about time all the time. It confuses time with its measurement, or it produces discourses that aim to determine time, to make it finally predictable, notably through the belief in progress, which is nothing other than an attempt to capture time. On the contrary, to perceive things and the world as gifts, constantly actualizing themselves as gifts, presupposes seeing them as they really are: a continuous emergence manifesting the double dimension of time, at once the universal passage of everything in the emergence that abolishes itself as soon as it claims to last, and eternity, through the movement of the eternally reinvented gift.
To experience the world as a gift is to feel both the ephemeral nature of everything and the eternity that remains in the perpetual passage of everything, to experience the life that infuses the world through the channel of time. Then, for those who rise to this altitude, things reveal their true value—those whose ephemeral nature is a mere anecdote incapable of opening onto eternity; those, almost immobile, which clumsily try to resist the passing of time and, little by little, collapse; and, finally, the highest which, assured of their eternal nature, fearlessly consent to the flow of the ephemeral and ceaselessly renew themselves while always being themselves.
The perception of the absolute temporality of things gives rise to a cosmic awareness of the world. This cosmic awareness stems from the movement of life, which eternally, through time, awakens things and creates a solidarity within them that nothing can ever abolish. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a thing-in-itself. The thing-in-itself is a residue of the knowledge of determination, which needs to isolate things in order to determine and exploit them. But for essential knowledge, things are links that constantly unite and reunite, so that to isolate the thing is to reduce it to its formalization, operated from the life that is in it and constantly configures it as a living link.
The universe itself is an infinite network of links. This infinite network aspires to generate ever more links, to be ever more living solidarity, but it is confronted, in the original freedom of the Bottomless, with the opposite principle of evil. Evil aims to break the bonds, to oppose the lightness of the binding with the heaviness of the Bottomless, which weighs things down with a power of repulsion, striving to transform this power of repulsion into closure, which becomes the unhappy destiny of the thing. The thing tenses up and exhausts itself in constituting itself against the universe, enclosing itself in what mystics call a “bad infinity.”
In The Satin Slipper, Paul Claudel castigates Protestantism, which reduces the relationship between man and God to a private transaction, concluded in the dark recesses of the conscience, to which he contrasts the demand for Catholic redemption of the entire universe. Indeed, in the world we are talking about here, there is an immense longing for salvation, shared by all things and undeterred by the temporary triumph of evil. This Salvation will be universal or it will not be. Each of us, at his or her own level—which is both modest and of infinite value—contributes, or fails to contribute, to the salvation of the universe, and saves himself by participating in the redemption of the world, or condemns himself by refusing this redemption, by withdrawing from it.
The exact path of this redemption remains unknown, except to a few prophetic minds. There is no philosophy of history in the sense that a combination of “objective” elements should necessarily bring about an “end” to history. This illusion belongs to the realm of deterministic knowledge. From a human point of view, the drama of the universe—the confrontation between what unites and what separates—will always continue. But it is possible to conceive of a theology of history which, without pronouncing on circumstances, envisages the signs of redemption that are already present in the time that is ours—the time of history.
Old and New Laws
This theology of history points, of course, to God. In the above-ground universe, God is no longer the Founder; He is the Giver. But affirming that He is the Giver means nothing new as long as the term “giver” is understood in terms of the usual metaphysical apprehension, i.e., intelligibility through determination. This metaphysics assigns to God the function of giver, i.e., the one who has given once, in the beginning, before moving on to what really interests Him, the penetration of beings, so that, in reality, “founder” and “giver” are governed by the same logic, of expired need. To escape this bogging down of thought, we need to think of the giver in terms of time, i.e., as the One who eternally gives, i.e., as the One who eternally repeats the act of creation, but for an ever-new gift.
However, such thinking remains insufficient. For it remains external to the figure of the giver, and therefore to the essence of what gives in the giver. To go further, we need a mediator. Christ is that mediator. This is so, first of all, because Christ is Himself entirely a gift given to the world, at once, on the level of eternity: the eternally begotten Son of the Father; and, on the level of human history: the Incarnation at a given moment in historical time. But Christ is also a mediator because He Himself is an example, and it is only by imitating this example that we enter into the mystery of the Giver.
The need to meet Christ in order to enter the threshold of this mystery explains why we must be suspicious as soon as we try to fit Christianity into a category such as “monotheism” (the same applies, of course, to “polytheism,” “theism,” etc.). For the term “monotheism” implicitly presupposes that the essence of the relationship between the believer and his God is “distance.” Yet Christianity in no way postulates distance, the distance that separates the creature from the Creator, the contingent from the transcendent. Christianity is an encounter, and not just any encounter. It is an encounter with a person, not with an allegory, a concept, a vague deity; and this is why the simplest Christian, the least educated in sacred matters, who truly encounters Christ knows infinitely more about God than the most subtle theologian or philosopher.
There is a madness (according to the dominant categories to which we all spontaneously adhere) in thinking of God as a “person,” i.e., the most singular, the most concrete, the least generalizable. And it is easy to see why Paul’s texts insist so strongly on this stubborn folly with regard to the Greek representation (which, notwithstanding the change of dominant religion, has remained our representation to this day) of a divinity that is necessarily reasonable, majestic and perfectly impersonal.
But that is the way it is. Christianity is an encounter, and an encounter with a Person. A person is not an abstraction. If we make the effort to consider him, he expresses a sensitivity and emotions—anger, joy, suffering—that are all his own, for no one acts and reacts like another, at least in the secret of his soul. The God of Christians is by no means a “wise man.” He suffers with His people; His heart is pierced by human sin; He warns against the path of perdition down which we are heading, and His anger is sometimes equal to His love. But to feel all this, we need to meet Christ.
But how do we meet Christ? The Gospel of the Emmaus Pilgrims offers us a few keys. They are like us, these pilgrims: eager for glory and triumph, discouraged by apparent failure, troubled by the noise of the world, exhausted by the trials and fatigues of life. And then, along the way, comes a Stranger who warms their hearts by explaining to them the true side of things, and whom they meet in the depths of themselves, where a moment earlier total renunciation of everything and especially of hope reigned. “Then their eyes opened and they recognized him”: this recognition, this illumination, is as sudden as a flash of lightning, but it is enough to transfigure an existence, to breathe crazy hope into the desolate territory of resignation, so that we cannot stop wanting to bring this hope to the world. Perhaps then, in this instant, these pilgrims have guessed that the bottomlessness of the world is not an infirmity or an anomaly, but the very condition for the gift to be, in the absolute of that which gives itself entirely, without calculation or anxiety about giving itself entirely, renouncing being in order to give and finding being in the gift.
Having reached this point in our reflection, perhaps we can return to Father Men’s opening words. “Christianity has only just begun.” It is only just begun, because the Christianity of the living, the Christianity of the true encounter, has almost always, in the history of mankind, been suppressed in favor of a representation of God that is formally Christian but, in depth, subject to a metaphysics that has endured in the West for perhaps well over two millennia. But beyond this, Christianity has only just begun, because it can do nothing other than begin. Every authentic encounter is a beginning, and every time Christians encounter Christ, Christianity begins anew. Everyone is free to choose the moments in the history of Christianity when Christianity began anew, in diverse and even seemingly contradictory forms: Romanesque nudity and the swirl of Roman Baroque, Russian fools in Christ and Pascal’s “Night of Fire.” Each time, and for varying lengths of time, Christianity begins, before the oblivion of the encounter causes it to drift towards the shores of ideology.
Featured: Our Lady of Humility, by Fra Angelico; painted ca. 1430.
