Pressure shapes diamonds

What if Europe lay in the antagonism born of the Renaissance between the Christian and scientific worldviews? This opposition has always been present in different forms at different times. Here it is today on a new level: some argue that a materialistic reading of the world is now impossible in the light of current physical theories.

What is Europe? Faced with this question, some are quick to point to its Christian roots, while many are uncomfortable with this reference, preferring humanism or the Enlightenment. Add to this the fact that some atheistic thinkers of the nineteenth century^th and XX^th centuries seem inseparable from the European heritage. On the face of it, then, there is no such thing as the European spirit.

This difficulty is also reflected in the impossibility of agreeing on a Constitution for the European Union (EU). The Lisbon Treaty, which remedies the impossibility of reaching agreement on an EU Constitution, is vague on the question of Europe's roots. In its preamble, it acknowledges «drawing inspiration from Europe's cultural, religious and humanist heritage». Despite pressure from the Vatican and certain lobbies, the word «Christian» does not appear anywhere in the document.

Yet it's clear that Europe's religious heritage is largely «Christian». Why deny this obvious fact? Because many people want to reject this heritage.

European culture has been marked by opposition to Christianity from the Renaissance to the present day. An opposition that has lasted too long to make Christianity a thought that has had its day. The European resembles a gardener condemned to fight against the same weed, a weed he wants to eliminate, but seems to need, because he builds himself in opposition to it. We'll confine ourselves here to a few points to illustrate our point, as we can't go any further in just a few lines.

The Renaissance opens up the possibility of understanding the world without God

During the Renaissance, Galileo, Descartes and later Newton demonstrated that nature could be described in mathematical language. It was thus possible to understand the universe solely in the light of reason, without recourse to the Bible. Previously, as the law of conservation of motion had not yet been discovered, people believed in the existence of God as the prime mover of the world's mechanical progress. At the end of this scientific revolution came the hope of being able to account for reality in a materialistic way, without reference to invisible metaphysical entities such as the soul or God.

In astronomy, Laplace's famous reply to Napoleon was the culmination of the scientific revolution initiated by Galileo: «Newton mentioned God in his book. I've already gone through yours, and I haven't found that name once.» To which Laplace is said to have replied: «Citoyen premier Consul, I had no need of that hypothesis.»

Enlightenment thinkers allow themselves, apparently, to no longer be Christians

The fact remains that Descartes and Galileo were both convinced Christians. Only, by establishing the autonomy of the world, they allowed their successors to cease being so. Diderot, Hume and La Mettrie were atheists, while others, such as Voltaire and d'Alembert, were deists. They believe that God exists, but that He has little concern for man.

In fact, Enlightenment thinkers were much closer to Christianity than they thought or recognized themselves. By opposing religious abuses, they reformulated profoundly Christian principles in a secular way, and inscribed them at the heart of the European spirit. Secularism, which guarantees the legitimate autonomy of temporal power from spiritual power, finds its foundation in the words of Christ himself: «Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's». The abolition of privileges in 1789 and the struggle for equality between men are also in line with the biblical message. In the epistle to the Galatians, for example, Paul cries out, «There is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.»

Perhaps that's why the scientific and political successes of the Enlightenment - the fall of the old regime linked to Christianity in France and England - don't seem to have got the better of religion. It remained an ever-present notion in the centuries that followed, if only as a starting point to be denied as a matter of priority.

To be free in the 19th century^th and in the XX^th, you must first deny God

For Marx, the question of God must be eliminated in order to affirm Man, so that the critique of religion is a constituent part of his system. Maurice Clavel writes: «Put a total hatred of God into a young Hegelian and you get Marx, all of Marx.» The same dynamic applies to Nietzsche, where the rejection of tradition liberates man to evolve into the superman. Freud, while considering art, philosophy and political commitment as legitimate sublimations of the sexual drive, is highly critical of religion. For him, it's an infantilizing illusion that humanity must rid itself of.

In the XXth century^th The same need to get rid of the Christian God can be found in Sartre's work of the twentieth century. «If God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being that exists before it can be defined by any concept, and this being is man,» he writes in Existentialism is a humanism. Many other authors of the last century are part of this humanist vision, in the sense of a conception of the world that places man at its center, and not God.

Read also | Existentialism is a humanisma vision of freedom

However, it could be argued that these thinkers needed to turn against God, not for philosophical but for personal reasons: the influence of Jewish culture was too strong for Marx and Freud to ignore. This is even clearer for Nietzsche, the son and grandson of pastors. They all came from the wealthy bourgeoisie, a society rigid by today's standards, and all felt the need to free themselves from this straitjacket before allowing original thought to emerge. Proof of this is that today's thinkers, who have grown up outside this reference to Judeo-Christianity, no longer feel the need - which has become superfluous in our time - to declare that God is dead, as Nietzsche did, or that they have done away with God the Father, as Sartre did.

Deconstruction is a new way of experiencing this antagonism.

However, even if the vocabulary has changed - we no longer speak of God - the antagonism remains, and it is now the notion of deconstruction, central to contemporary debates, that is used to express this opposition. The meaning of the word may vary from one author to another, and so may its field of application - language, texts, society... - but the fundamental idea is to question the cultural context in order to free ourselves from it. Gender studies, for example, aim to show that nature has little influence on the differences between men and women. Apart from anatomy, everything is constructed. For some feminists, like Wittig, even «heterosexuality is a cultural construct that justifies the entire system of social domination of women by men».

Yet sexuality is one of the last bastions of morality and religion. By virtue of its ability to give life, it poses the very question of meaning, and therefore a fortiori of God. Presenting sexual differences as an arbitrary, often abusive and discriminatory cultural construct empties sexuality of its transcendence. It's the same battle as in the previous century, but taken to the extreme. It's a radical way of saying that man has nothing to do with God, that there is no order beyond individual projects.

A new scientific revolution... to the rescue of Christianity

The first scientific revolution of the Renaissance led to Auguste Comte's positivism: science allowed us to know reality without having to turn to God. Comte proposed a new religion that would worship humanity. But recently, there's been a shock. In their recent bestseller Dieu, la science, les preuves, Bolloré and Bonnassies claim that the worldview provided by current physics requires an immaterial cause outside time. What's more, the physical parameters that make the appearance of life possible are so precisely regulated that it is unlikely that this cause is not intelligent.

This is not yet proof of the existence of the Christian God, but it is a vision compatible with the Bible's main message concerning the origin of the world. The authors take a further step towards Christianity with their scientific analysis of Our Lady's miracle at Fatima. This is not the place to discuss the validity of their arguments. We merely note that the comings and goings of the great European antagonism, the hypothesis of this article, are still very much with us. This is all the more surprising given that Christianity now counts its allies in the camp of its former detractors: experimental science.

Europe thus seems to find its identity in a constant and fruitful questioning of its Christian tradition. Without this questioning, we might never have known Newton's physics, or the discovery of the unconscious, or the theory of evolution, or the digital revolution... But despite these upheavals, Christianity has not completely disappeared. Will it ever do so, or is it a necessary substratum for the blossoming of European genius?

Write to the author: arthur.billerey@leregardlibre.com

Header image: Galileo before the Roman Inquisition, by Cristiano Banti © Wikimedia

You have just read an analysis from our thematic dossier «Did you say Europe?», published in Le Regard Libre N°87.