In my Wisdom of the World, I began with four ideal-typical models: the “Timaeus” model (broadly speaking, the main current of ancient philosophy from Plato to Proclus, including the Stoics), Epicurus, “Abraham,” and Gnosticism. Building on generally similar descriptions of the world, each of these proposes a different response to the question “What we are doing on this earth?” Are we imitating the beautiful order of the heavenly bodies; comfortably settling in on an island of humanity within an indifferent universe; drawing ourselves closer to the creator of a good world, but obeying his law or following his Son; or, finally, fleeing, not, as Mallarmé invites us, là-bas, but to on high, toward an alien God, escaping an imperfect or prison-like world? The ancient and medieval model, which held firm for a good millennium and a half, emerged out of a compromise between “Timaeus” and “Abraham.” What interests me is not so much its description (even if I have had to pursue a description in some detail), but rather the problem posed by its disappearance with the modern age. It left us alone. Nothing in the physical world responds to man’s ethical demands.
(...) In A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), John Locke preached in favor of a gentlemen’s agreement among the English Protestant churches. He excluded the Catholics as agents of a foreign prince, the pope. He also excluded atheists. His reason might seem odd, but it is profound: atheists are incapable of swearing an oath, for on what could they swear? “Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, although but even in thought, dissolves all.” We may smile at this, but when we do, we are like the “unbelievers” who laugh when Nietzsche’s Madman announces the death of God to “those who do not believe in God.” In fact, though, behind the somewhat anecdotic question of oaths there lies the entire question of meaning.
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(...) If life is an affair not worth the cost, as Schopenhauer insisted, all parents are outright criminals. If we bring children into the world so they will support us in our old age, it is even worse: it would be impossible to push the utilization of another as a means to a more radical level. If it is in order to permit others to make a “delightful excursion through reality,” bravo. But it remains to be shown that life—all life—is a good so incommensurable that it can balance the suffering it involves. Suffering that, by definition, cannot be known by someone who has not been born. The only way out of all of this is through a metaphysics.
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(...) Many of those who think themselves rationalists and even write highly useless screeds against people whom they call irrationalists (who do not read their writings) are, in the final analysis, just as irrational as their targets. They think that reason is simply an epiphenomenon of the irrational—for example, the result of natural selection among a given living species. That species—called Homo sapiens—and life itself being the result of a series of chance happenings during the course of evolution. Let me give the last word on the subject to Father Brown, the priest-detective of Gilbert Chesterton’s novels: “I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is just the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God Himself is bound by reason.”
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(...) The pagan divine is present everywhere. It is part of the furniture. The Greek gods are “the gods of Greece” (as Schiller says); they are a part of the landscape. For this reason, it is not necessary to “believe” in them. The God of the Bible concentrates all sacrality in himself, which can lead to the impression of a desacralization or a disenchantment of the world, as Max Weber has taught us to say, creating an impression that can very well produce a sort of nostalgia. That said, sacrality pertains to things, not to a liberty. No liberty can be sacred. In contrast, it can be holy. When the God of the Bible is presented as a personification, what occurs is not simply a desacralization of the world. It is also a transformation of sacrality into holiness.
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(...) Faith is, so to speak, the appropriate organ for perceiving the divine, just as the eye registers colors or the mind registers concepts. The question is then to know whether to accept taking that step toward the holy or remain with the sacred. In the latter case, one must either accommodate to a disenchanted world or (something that I find even more dangerous) attempt to reintroduce, forcibly, an artificial sacredness into that same disenchanted world.
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(...) More specifically, I have no esteem for belief in and of itself. I detest the recent habit of considering the act of belief as having a value in itself, independent of its content. And I mistrust those who attempt to discover connections between “believers,” even to lump them together, without asking themselves what they believe in. One can believe in flying saucers, after all! There were sincere Nazis and convinced Leninites. And the Carthaginian fathers who had their sons burned alive as a sacrifice to the god Moloch (the scene is narrated by Flaubert, but the facts are true) must have “believed in it” strongly. For me, a belief is as good as its object, neither more nor less.
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(...) Since I’m somewhat immoderately fond of provocation, I would go so far as to demand the right to hate a religion. I am thinking of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an Israeli of universal interests and erudition who died a few years ago. He declared in an interview, “Je hais le christianisme [I hate Christianity].” The French translator, who is among my friends and to whom I owe the anecdote, told me that when he suggested the verb détester, Leibowitz, who spoke an impeccable French redolent of the eighteenth century, responded, articulating clearly, “Non, ani soneh, je hais.” I hasten to add that Leibowitz was, in practical life, the most inoffensive man imaginable. In politics he was a sort of hyper-dove who demanded the immediate evacuation of occupied territories and compared the government of his own land to that of Nazi Germany! And he bears Christians no hate. Christian as I am, that phrase in no way pleases me. I deplore it; I regret it. I think it based on an error. But I prefer it to the instantaneous fervor of certain professional participants in interreligious “dialogues.”
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