God, man, history & the totalitarian temptation
Domenach, Jean-Marie
I I BEHIND THE ATROCITIES IS AN IMMENSE NEED FOR GOD
God, man, history & the totalitarian temptation IIII lEAN-MARIE DOMENACH T HE CHURCH has fallen into the very trap it set for...
...Not peripheral in any way but upright and straightforward...
...The reason is this annul- ling of history, carried on in practice by the consumer society and in theory by structuralism and the ideology of the "sys- tem...
...and the International will be the church ol the new time...
...How can I assert my identity today without reference to this God who for Descartes grounded the veracity of the world and for me the very possiblity of saying "I...
...In France, if Thorez had taken power in 1945, the bishops, on their return from Vichy, would have gone to incense his throne...
...Everything, or almost everything, has been burned...
...But they will not draw me into this second frenzy because, from the beginning of my believing life, even in the moments of my greatest enthusiasms, I thought of myself, as sirnulfidelis et infidelis, witness and sinner at the same time...
...First they cried: "God is dead...
...He had aban- doned us, according to Hoiderlin, leaving us space and time to fill...
...T: was where he composed Eve and where he dictated to friend Joseph Lotte, on January 4, 1914, a thundering co mentary in which he curiously speaks of himself in the th person: "He placed himself instantaneously in the axis of I spiritual as well as of the carnal, in the axis of the temporal well as of the eternal...
...Proust noted that even if the observations of natural ob- jects converge and we agree on definitions (an apple tree is an apple tree, a house is a house), people see one another in very different manners...
...I seek my own salvation, and I keep the good Lord for myself...
...After a century of historical intoxication, an enormous shift is occurring, leading us precisely to this choice: either allow the Ego to become in its turn an item of consumption and manipulation, the prey of merchants, counselors, and therapists, or root it in what will be at once its foundation and its limit, the GOd of Jesus Christ...
...I prayed...
...The later importance of working-class movements makes us forget that this sediment of molten spirituality was at the origin of what the Saint- Simonian Pierre Leroux named "socialism" in 1832...
...I contemporary West in terms of Sophocles's tragedy--of that single, ephemeral moment when men and gods suddenly con- front each other, that moment when man believes he can reject the divine but instead the divine, provoked and disgusted, punishes him by withdrawing from the earth...
...Hence, man's most immediate task, entrusted to him as duty and concern, is to learn to endure this absence of GOd, the most essential fact of his presence...
...The Ego, which ought to occupy the sphere left free by the retreat of the divine, is torn in two, into an increasingly constricting social creation, on the one hand, and a phantom subject on the other, the target of amassed consumptions, and unlikely liberations...
...Nothing resembles a reaction more than another reaction...
...If 1 knew, I would be able to understand something buried deep within our epoch: its inability to be- lieve, or at least to believe on a certain level, because our age is religious in its way and more credulous than any other...
...The chal- lenge lay in producing God, not in producing concepts...
...Almost all 19th century European thought "was anti-Semitic...
...Then came the microscope, and from the crawling Germs observed, some came to visions, and so Blake Painted a flea's soul...
...Social redemption necessarily fails, and soon enough the tyrants turned to their' own profit the fervor that had been aroused...
...Certainly, Mounier and his companions at Esprit tried to construct, from the point of view of Western tradition, a concept of the human and a standard of existence and institutional life with which it would be possible to imagine and live out a human life guided by values common to believers and unbelievers...
...No society can satisfy the religious need...
...We don't have to pretend to know every- thing before we possess the power within ourselves to rebel...
...AndrdGlucksmann believes he has found in anti-Semitism the common trait among such diverse and contradictory thinkers as Fichte, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, he transfers to the first half of the 19th century a concept as it was forged in the fires of Auschwitz and is not relevant a century earlier insofar as anti-Semitism then served everyone...
...We can now see that both are dead, because what is really dead, of usury and atrocity, is a particular relationship of man to God, a relationship of fraud and exploitation...
...In the quarrel, humardty has lost not only its famous dignity, but it has been methodically deprived of all its qualities and credentials...
...the conscience, liberated by Chris- tian individualism, will be reconciled with other conscience,, and with nature...
...It is clear that the Gulag and Stalinism, insofar as they proceed from certified disciples of Karl Marx, raise grave questions about some of the affirmations and even more of the deficiencies of Marxism...
...de Quelen, began a sermon at Notre Dame: "Brethren, not only was Jesus Christ the son of God, but he was from a very good family on his mother's side, and there are sound reasons to consider him the legitimate heir of the throne of Juda...
...In view of such an aspiration, what importance can the young Marx's denunci- ation of God have...
...I understood perfectly but it wasn't mine to provide them with the means...
...The sacred is not spread indistinctly over the entire earth...
...What I reproach the Marxist authorities for, above all, is this menial status to which they have reduced my co-religionists...
...But ideas are not fer- tilized directly...
...He came not as a conqueror but as a servant, and in the same act by which he brings a universal opportunity for salvation, he renounces universal empire and confers on each individual, each nation, its own rights and destiny...
...We love him, through Jesus Christ, in men...
...The ideologies of nation, race and class fed the flames...
...like certain plants or certain parasites, ideas need intermediaries to transport their seeds or larvae...
...Anyone acquainted with evil and knowing that it is remediable, anyone who does not refuse to look evil in the face, recognizes what he must know about domination: it comes from our cowardice, our incer- titude, our isolation...
...Now, as formerly, the problem is centered in Jesus Christ, in our difficulty of accepting him simply as God and Man...
...it appeared in substantially the same form in the July-August 1978 issue of Esprit...
...A bit more reasoning would have kept today's denigrators of reason from turning to the idolatries of the age...
...The Assyrians did not wait for our master thinkers before they committed'geno, nor did the Incas wait for them before establishing talitarianism...
...Imagine a church made up principally of converts...
...The personality is the special vision that each man has of God," wrote LEon Bloy...
...The quest to save the univr possibility of freedom, of reason acting on behalf of dil ences and free choice, demands, not new ruptures and strictures and certainly not the increasingly unbeliev...
...This is not the exclu- sive election of the Jews...
...What Emmanuel Mounier called engagement is the logic of the Incarnation...
...HEN I take ihe train from the Bourg-la-Reine station (fr, Wwhich Pdguy departed for the last time on August 2, 19 I walk by 7, rue Theuriet, where he lived in a house I s before it was replaced by a luxury apartment building...
...I was the end of History, in the opposite sense to what Mar~ predicted--not its apotheosis, but its turning inside-out in th, holocaust...
...T ODAY the problem is no longer so much what we believe as the very possibility of believing...
...The debate over the origins of totalitarianism must be car- ried all the way...
...Maritain said all that can be said against the "three reformers," Luther, De- ~scartes, and Rousseau...
...Along with the dream of industrialization, Marxism brings the underdeveloped countries the legacy of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution...
...I remind those defrocked Maoists who today would like us to expiate their sins that if they had ever so slightly tested the evidence, they would not have sunk into a delirium for which they now want to lay the responsibility on the 18th-century philosophers (who knew about fanaticism long ago) and ulti- mately on the devil himself, who having paid very dearly during the Middle Ages for the charge of getting maidens pregnant and bewitching the flocks, must be amused at the idea of being taken for the patron of such eminent intellectuals as Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche...
...Et verbum caro factum est...
...This formula of Bernard-Henri Levy is not only nonsense (what would the Enlightenment be without tolerance...
...we must breah circle it has drawn around us by pronouncing the words it forbidden and by naming the values it has forfeited...
...Why did Patocka die, why was Plyushch sent to a psychiatric hospital, why do hundreds of Chinese swim to Hong Kong every month, except for an idea that was born in Europe in the 18th century, the idea of liberty which today is still not so natural as we pretend to believe...
...It was the most stupendou deformation of religious hope since the Crusades: a giganti, effort to make up for the absence of God, to give som, meaning to life, to console the suffering and assist the dying...
...I have enough to apologize for...
...they had decided to anticipate matters...
...Paul said, is a praxis...
...The 19th century, passing beyond Jesus Christ, gave its hand to Cyclops...
...They gave themselves, or more exactly, they gave the person the maximum existence...
...That it has become, among us, stifling and repetitive does not at all cancel out that to hundreds of millions of people in Asia, Africa and Latin America...
...we do not pretend to create the creator, as Lunacharsky and his companions pretended, but we fulfill the teaching of his Son by encouraging the maximum liberty and the maximum social communication...
...they only continued to drink the dregs of that earthly religion which, in the 19th century, filled the basins left by Christianity's disappearance...
...It was born in a particular language, by a particular will, from a particular people...
...Precisely what the Enlightenment prepared...
...No matter what's observed: how to set down the seen From outside in or inside out Is everything...
...A gigantic industry for the cleaning, repair and reconstitution of the Ego has grown up...
...When we examine the influence of philosophies on history, we must not limit ourselves to one of those family trees drawn for philosophy students on the model of the biblical genealogies: Plato begat Aristotle, who begat St...
...God exi from history...
...hatreds, and comradeships of every sort...
...they need an environment for fertilization...
...The Revolution will take the baton passed on b) Christ in order to liberate humanity...
...We come full circle...
...But if this means a reinstatement of God at the cost of defeating men, if it is a matter once again of exalting God against humanity, then the stupid and fatal cycle will begin again...
...We must back u the point where the road forked...
...In other words, to suppress GOd one must first suppress history, that is, the possibility for any human group to prove its liberty...
...Alienation sends us back to this original filiation...
...this would be a servile kind of thinking...
...The translation is by Leonard Mayhew, who recenqy translated Francois Truffaut's The Films in My Life (Simon and Schuster...
...Apostasy only came much later when the Roman Catholic Church officially dropped the dictators and began its reconciliation with the oppressed...
...God is GOd, and that is precisely why he is not at our beck and call...
...L ET US return to the flaming phrase of Holderlin: "The presentation of the tragic rests principally on the convic- tion that the monstrous [das Ungeheure]--the mating of God-and-Man, the way in which all limits having been abolished, the panicky power of nature and the secret essence of man became One in passionate fury--is conceived as this limitless transformation purified by an unlimited separation...
...The individual has only one choice: either give in to the surrounding indifference or, if he wishes to believe, reconsti- tute for himself alone what used to be called the edifice of the faith--an overwhelming and exhausting task...
...But who has encountered man...
...I always keep with me a photograph that Albert Beguin told me Bernanos kept on his worktable...
...During the same period, in France Barrds attacked Kantian rationalism, German thought (especially Hegel), and the nascent technocracy...
...the worker will humanize the entire earth...
...the libertines disappeared with/h6 ~leonic Empire...
...To hell with society, politics, power, the state...
...The Communist authorities had only to take over the reins of Josephism...
...It is true that unlimited liberty leads to slavery, that universal emancipation leads to terror...
...It has been the epoch of a sacrifice searching among the nations for victims that correspond to its appetite...
...Claudel, Bloy, Huysmans, each in his own way, rejected scientific modernism and appealed to the power of mysticism and art...
...he is not there to console us for having let everything fly apart...
...Now artists have returned To outsides once again: soupcans and string, Meticulously rendered...
...To people locked into their ancestral fatalisms, Marxism brought a shock from the West, a shock that awakened them to demand rights...
...Not on the side...
...All the work presents itself in the alignment of man as he faces the last judgment...
...The history of an idea cannot be traced without reference to the aspirations it satisfies, the adversaries it combats, the situation in which it is conceived...
...though at times it limits or obstructs me: The vision I have of them, however, strengthens me in my integrity because I recognize in them the presence of a being I feel lacking in myself...
...and, in a singular irony, returned to it in person of the historian.., a humanity that is in total chargt its history.., a humanity-God, having acquired and encc passed all knowledge in the entire universe in its compl memory...
...I remember a Mass I attended in a country church in the spring of 1944: the officers of the collaborationist regional militia were there, in the front row, in uniform and carrying sidearms...
...It is this difference that grounds both the uniqueness of the individual and the plurality of humanity...
...But when Lenin wanted to apply Marxism, it was in the midst of a world war and in a Russia that did not match the master's postulates...
...When the "new philosophers" seek the root of contemporary totalitarianism, they set out on a fanciful journey through philosophy, in the course of which they bestow on us thinkers considerable power and satisfaction...
...It stirred up the primeval world of dream and myth, it invoked the spirits and made the gods dance...
...Albert Camus was annoyed by the way many Christians removed themselves from the common struggles...
...When I saw young people in May '68 dusting off the old songs and standards in the Latin Quarter, I said to myself that they were shaking off, as we had thirty years earlier, the insignificance and absurdity of bourgeois society, and that they longed, as we had, for intensity and communion...
...A man becomes an atheist when he feels himself superior to his God...
...The latter, 1 have to admit, have cooperated...
...it is also contrary to everything we have experienced and to everything we know about our recent history...
...it is approached only when love rises up, through poetry, music, art, and in rare moments through its own power, to the point where it becomes evident that no destiny is abolished in death...
...I have never doubted this...
...We are not "constructors of God...
...it can be deduced even better from the reaction against rationalism, from the worship of strength, from the return to the basic--fascism and Nazism based themselves on a contempt for science (or on a corruption of science), on the hatred for thought, on an apologia for instinct...
...Nothing drew me more to Emmanuel Mounier than his horror of Catholic politicians of right, left and center, slaves and the guardians of slaves...
...talitarianism is first of all a religious perversion...
...The sinners were himself...
...Thomas, who begat Descartes, who begat Hegel (and his warring cousins), who begat Marx, who begat Lenin, of whom were born Stalin, the Gulag, and the contemporary abomina- tion...
...Is it really impossible in a Christian land to find our balance around this focal point, around the reconciliator who has been proposed to us--Christ who is the Son, that is, distinct from the Father, thus escaping that monstrous lack of differentiation, that pagan coupling of the human and the divine from which we have been delivered by Greek philosophy and Western reason...
...it refuted simultaneously, as the two faces of a single abstraction, both materialism and idealism...
...In Europe we are living at the end of an epoch during which man believed himself able to mobilize God on behalf of his particular aims: money, power, the abolition of power, war, socialism...
...Whatever was given to God was taken away from Man...
...We take note of the separation, of the second flight of God...
...it is a slight but pivotal part of the entire economic and social edifice...
...Since there are, when you come down to it, a mass of the condemned and only a few elect, why not jettison the social element and retain the redemptive...
...The period from which we are emerging has not been marked by the triumph of the abstract idea but by the triumph of religion, of the need for rites and cults...
...I do not think that at its beginnings, as Maurice Clavel claims, there is a rejection of God...
...No one has seeri-God, says the Scripture...
...And now, with the same impulse by which they believed, they want to make us un-believe...
...Constantly falling back on itself, it introduces at the heart of all adhesion the ironic and consoling savor of something inaccessible...
...About this kind of thinking we know almost nothing because, interrupted by the war of 1914, it was stifled by Leninism...
...Even today, there is only one international, one single revolt, one sole communion that binds the persecuted from Chile to China, and passes through Czechoslovakia, the bond of freedom of the spirit, of the rights of man...
...God has known it since the original sin, and it did not impede him from sending Christ into the world...
...For their vision of me supports me...
...Child's play...
...Socialism was conceived, around 1830, among humanitarian preachers and utopian mystics...
...Today the church is experiencing the reverse of that schism: as if being a partisan of man made one an enemy of GOd...
...Not for a moment did he stand by the side of the road to watch the sinners pass by...
...recreating the world...
...The anathemas hurled at politics and lower arise from turning evil into something occult...
...II I II II Anne Fremantle Sight Unseen First they saw outsides only So artists drew Or painted apples, nudes, birds, trees and flowers Armed warriors, crowned kings or grazing horses...
...So the split was made and the two extremes were freed of each other...
...It is becoming possible to speak of God without too many mis- understandings...
...God has created us, and this is what underlies the Christian's political and social struggle...
...The history of totalitarianism is not a history of philosophy...
...search for plebeian candidates to serve as revolutionary o I sition, but a total reversal to the universal, the matchin~ action and word, of the political and the spiritual...
...he saw them as false brothers, ready to desert the battle and take refuge in oratories...
...I write this at a time when the Maoists are confessing that they have believed in paper gods, and when Simone de Beauvoir declares that "socialism is a dream...
...it was about that time that the Archbishop of Paris, Msgr...
...Personalism did not become established, because it was caught short by the demands of the commitment it taught and was perhaps too reasonable for its historic period...
...Time especially, we stuffed with battles...
...Despite what the campaign posters proclaim, for some time yet it is forbidden to hope for another life here below...
...then, "Man is dead...
...Anti-Semitism was nourished by everything, just as today nationalism is nourished by everything, including Judaism...
...It is enough to spend a single hour in any area of action, political, social or military, to understand that ideas are not applicable directly...
...We r attack the scientistic pretensions of our age, its shriv, positivism, without any half-way measures...
...It is impossible to save oneself alone and to establish history anew after a general confession...
...To experience one's own contradictions is no excuse for anyone...
...I did not leave...
...See, and be seen...
...Perhaps the Incarnation, impossible as it is to conceive, must inevitably be split into two divergent currents: divine authoritarianism on the one hand, human liberation on the other...
...I cannot imagine a language of proclamation and adoration which despises or even ignores the effort of the people to stand on their own feet, the effort of people to exist, the wave of conscience that, launched from Christian Europe in the age of the Enlightenment, brought the continents closer and closer We are not only heirs of the massacres and the .Wrannies...
...In the tragic cosmogony of Holderlin, I have discerned, I believe, the face of the evil from which we are emerging...
...GOd has been so misused in order to judge, kill, enslave, and torture men that I only approach the adorable face softly and slowly...
...Ideology, in my opinion, is this soup in which bits of ideas ferment in a juice of tradition and discourse...
...The horrid 19th century, when Christianity turned pagan while socialism aspired to divinity, to God under the one aspect that left the possibility of loving humanity and seeking its salva- tion...
...The soldiers were himself...
...I did not denounce them...
...We handle the same objects, we hear the same words, but we do not see the same persons, and each of us glimpses the Divine Person differently...
...This it is that, for me, gives life and direction to a person...
...The sacred is placed on each human face...
...The excess of this apocalypse doomed it to perversion...
...The only way one was allowed to worship was bowed down, humbled before the image of God and his abusive clerical representatives The consequence: rejection and blasphemy...
...They alone truly identify me who love me and, even more, whom I love...
...It was a turning point when romantics and revolutionaries, seeing that the Gospel had been betrayed by its own disciples, imagined they could preach a new Gospel, which instead of addressing the individual conscience would address whole peoples, the eternal Gospel which derives its promises from the earth, the Gospel of humanity which will celebrate the second coming of Christ reconciled with the poor beyond the bounds and ruins of churches and tyrannies...
...having lost its attachment to transcende~ it sets itself up as knowledge and power that would recapitt and control the past, present and future...
...But, in a way, it spurred us on, aroused us to the struggle...
...There were very few authentic atheists in the 19th century...
...Yes, totalitarianism can be~c!uced from Cartesian rationalism...
...I was in the resistance, a member of the maquis, but I didn't leave...
...He is of this immense troop...
...They must be adapted to circumstances to be effective--and in short order are transformed...
...In this house where Pdguy donned his uniform again a laced his boots to take command of his little platoon, he s~ further of himself: "Never for a moment did he stand at the side of the road to watch the soldiers pass by...
...His incarnation itself signifies the impoverishment of God, his "dethronement" to use the word of Paul Thibaud...
...It pas- sionately sought new incarnations: the People, the Proletariat, the Race...
...Would that they might interrupt their brilliant denunciation of ideas to inquire into what need they have to believe and what twisting of faith it was that victimized them...
...So we have experienced the vestiges of God...
...Until now 1 have always been restrained from writing anything about God because of my personal lack of worthiness, but also because of the thick cloud that the abuses committed in his name had placed between him and us, and between others and us...
...It is true that at this juncture, we have to renounce 19th-century aspiration to fuse God and history...
...Next, insides were observed, and men portrayed Flayed carcasses, split open beasts, or game, Skeletons, and man's own anatomy...
...GOd is not a refuge against the wickedness and stupidity of men...
...Jesus who was born among the poor is an unarmed liberator...
...We haven't been bored for a minute...
...From Saint-Simon to Pierre Leroux, from Hugo to Pdguy, from Comte to Jaurds, it con- tinually tried to found a new religion...
...It attempted again to fuse Man and God...
...Yet this is what is going on before our eyes...
...The Inquisition, I grant, does not bear the same condemnation against Christianity as the Stalinist atrocities level against Marxism, because the Christian does not place his truth -inpraxis...
...This is Proudhon speaking for socialism when it was still pure enough to ask metaphysical questions...
...Then together we could liquidate the clerical exploitation that victimized our youths...
...It is my children who have left...
...T HE NEW Christianity was the axis of revolution in the 19ti century, and not Hegel, as philosophy professors wh< have taken a holiday from history would have us believe...
...We should be no more disgusted than he...
...Stalinism has collapsed in Europe, and Stalinism was not a bureaucratic deviation, as Trotsky thought, nor was it an inheritance from the Enlightenment, a the "new philosophers" claim...
...it brings a sense of their dignity, before it becomes their oppres- sor...
...In France the movement ran out of wind in the early 20th century, but in Russia it experienced a remarkable expansion: "seekers for God," "constructors of God," .a powerful mystical- revolutionary movement prepared the way for the Russian Revolution and enveloped it...
...it is a versal in reverse...
...it is offered to all...
...it excludes the primacy of the observer...
...However, when I went to the lyc~es in upheaval to speak to the students and ask them "What do you want...
...We Catholics should be the first to know this, we who hear the history of a community that had recourse to deportation, persecution and torture...
...But for the first time in my life I stayed on the sidelines to watch, because I had a feeling it was a historic reenactment: OK, finale with the whole cast on stage...
...Of all the human types I have associated with, the most repulsive is the patriotic priest, democraticChristian or progressive Orthodox pope in charge of propaganda for Western visitors to people's democracies...
...counter to the tyrannies of money and the S(ate i|~held up the concrete face of man, the subject of rights.' Bttl tt did not pay for this maximum existence conferred on rrrati:b~, reducing God to the minimum...
...Quite the opposite, we find an immense need for God, an active God, a God of the masses, a God with whom to identify, a God who sustains and blesses the creations of men, who really helps them to love themselves and to regain heaven...
...One of those Chinese refugees told me, "It was Marxism that led us to demand human rights...
...The impor- tant thing is to search out whatever subterranean need these nationalisms respond to...
...We m act as did Pdguy when he indicted the intellectuals in 1900 "the unheard of ambition of the modern world...
...As for the "materialism" that was establl~ed, it was the rebuke of Christian and liberal idealism, a way to hold on to God and man at the same time by diminishing God's pretensions either at the outset or at the end...
...it is the indirect contact with the face of GOd...
...It~ program was: the people, through work and insurrection, wil III I llll II reunite humanity with God...
...The Incarnation is the foundation of history...
...I have nothing against these archbishops who had arrived where they were by the mechanism that eventually led them to the top of the Vatican administration, the same mechanism that governs promotion in every bureaucracy...
...To contemplate a real atheist we have to wait for the mid-20th century, when Le'viStrauss integrated the brain into the structures of the universe...
...they an- swered "To live...
...In fact the work had already been done, and by the hands of masters, the French traditionalists of the 19th century, the Russian spiritualists, the entire nationalist and mystical lhought of the first third of the 20th century...
...These thinkers took mar in his overall dimensions, not in order to reduce him and peel off his humanity, as is done nowadays, but to save him, tc install him in the fulness of liberty and well-being...
...The struggle for liberty and justice is not wiped out by Stalinist terror any more than it was ~by the terror of the Jacobins...
...That panic-stricken reaction to the desertion of the divine brought on the "return to the fatherland," the convulsions of the basic and the primitive, the frenzy of history, the expropriation of sacrifice...
...The people who carried to the Americas fifty million African slaves were good Christians horn too soon to be able to read Hegel and Rousseau...
...Viewed only in the eyes of others, who am I? A character in their private cinema, a symbol in their mythology, an instrument in their plans, an example in their conversation.., and most of the time an item decorating their scenery, a shadow in the street...
...And the intellectual exegesis of totalitarianism enjoying such success today is undoubtedly but the final effort of those who once believed to hide from themselves the desire to which their belief and the mechanisms of their worship responded...
...The 19th century felt thai the Revolution is a religious affair...
...But it is the opposite which is, and should be, true...
...but we have no fight to unload them on others...
...He took his utmost fill of man and, sc speak, of God too...
...Yet even to this God of recourse and consolation found beneath the ashes of the car- nivorous idols, I do not wish to sacrifice anything of what I have loved and what I have done...
...The opportunity to reconnect with God without any intermediary...
...I I BEHIND THE ATROCITIES IS AN IMMENSE NEED FOR GOD God, man, history & the totalitarian temptation IIII lEAN-MARIE DOMENACH T HE CHURCH has fallen into the very trap it set for cen- turies, the trap whose two jaws are Man and God...
...That the world is violent and soiled is not a recent discovery...
...Simone Weil reproached personalism for erecting each person into an entity that could, so to speak, compete with God...
...The Gulag is the Enlightenment minus tolerance...
...I III I Illlllll III IIIIII II IIII IIIII II I IIIII...
...The common vision that would reveal the unity of God is not now given us...
...nevertheless, charity, as St...
...But now in a certain way God reappears along the lines of the disappointed beliefs, once the mirages of hope have been dissipated...
...Alone, or almost alone, Berdyae+ came to witness to it among us...
...We do not place ourselves on a peak, as do the Olympian intellectuals, but on the axis, or rather at the crossing of the axes, where the new crosses the old, and the world of grace crosses the world of history...
...Faith in God is conscious of its inability to be total...
...We have not left the fold of religion...
...these trace a path toward universal recon- ciliation...
...Catholics have a long habit of voluntary servitude...
...A quiet apocalypse...
...But according to the beautiful formula of Cardinal de Berulle that Jean Lacroix loved to repeat to his students: "GOd has entrusted us to ourselves," which assigns to our freedom the duty of making the Kingdom come...
...we love him with what we ourselves do for justice, dignity and liberty...
...For they do have a very profound common root, just as the various species of anti-Semitism had...
...But it inaugurates a pluralist history in which certain individuals, certain peoples, and certain moments witness by a particular adventure that we only perceive after we have escaped it...
...At the limits of what has been called madness, Holderlin came by flashes to conceive the destiny of the JEAN-MARIE DOMENACH, the editor of Esprit from 1957 to 1976, is the author of numerous books on literature, politics and religion, This essay is excerpted with permission from Ce que je crois, published this fall by Grasset...
...Catholics of my generation have had to live with this shame...
...Lastly man flew, and from above looked down On moving clouds in endless variation And so made abstract art...
...It sets us in an alignment with man, with men...
...The poets, utopians and socialists of the 19th century sought to make up for this failure to fuse the divine and the human in the practice of believers...
...Thirteen years later, the representatives of the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops of France summoned me to say that the Vatican was preparing to condemn the review Esprit...
...The traditionalist, the socialist, the populist and the nationalist all denounced the Jews for contradictory motives...
...We filled them...
...others chose A single snowflake or a grain of sand...
...One can no more assimilate Nietzsche to Hegel as "anti-Semites" than one could, in the 20th century, lump under the label of nationalism Maurras and Frantz Fanon, de Gaulle and Pinochet, Hitler and Boumedienne...
...S O THE time of history is ending...
...also claim the grandeur of that Europe that never ceased to question life, as Stanley Hoffman has said, to rework its myths and to question its own dogmas, and which sent to the four corners of the earth a ferment of revolt that no culture could resist...
...At the beginning of the 19th century religion developed a powerful appeal for numerous reasons, of which I will mention only two: the uprooting of the rural population and the acceleration of technological progress...
...This is why any derision of liberty, far from serving the cause of God, downgrades faith into a habit, conformity, or into an exalted fideism that soon has nothing to do with the burdens and hopes of men...
...It shows about ten Spanish archbishops, in 1937 or '38 standing on the steps of a cathedral with their arms outstretched in the fascist salute, welcoming Franco's generals come to celebrate their victory...
...Marx's atheism is a lover's disappoint- ment...
...Bitterness comes over me and I have the urge to spit on those who spit on the idols they formerly brought us to worship...
...it is a history of religion...
...It is not true that they were de- ceived...
...But I note that it started from the same place that some pretend to have discovered today...
...We have to think of limits, all the while striving to make this thought of limits not simply the thought born of our own fatigue, our own resentment, our hatred for what we have loved too much...
...True, it wasn't hard in those days to feel superior to the official God...
...Today we are witnessing, in a more intellectual, less poetic and less imaginative mode, an analogous phenomenon...
Vol. 105 • December 1978 • No. 25
