Published in March 2020, We no longer know how to believe had been one of the first victims of Covid-19. Fortunately, the PUF saved this excellent essay by the philosopher Camille Riquier from purgatory, republishing it in the Quadrige collection with a previously unpublished afterword. Far from a Christian lament, the dean of the philosophy faculty of the Catholic Institute of Paris examines the developments of faith and critical thinking over the centuries, and tries to understand why, while man postmodern thought he had gotten rid of beliefs, on the contrary he began to “believe anything”. Interview.
L’Express: According to you, we live in “an era of weak faith and weak doubt”. That’s to say ?
Camille Riquier: At the end of the 20th century, we really thought that faith, like religion, was behind us. One of the great surprises that the 21st century has in store for us is that beliefs once again serve as a criterion to distinguish us from each other in society. I don’t know to what extent faith has returned. But it is certain that we were not prepared for it. We believe in many things, and not only in God, but weakly. With this idea that we could very well change the content of beliefs, like we change our jacket. We try out several beliefs, sometimes more eccentric than the others. But all this is only possible because critical spirit, an innovation of the Enlightenment, is itself in crisis today. As if we were no longer armed against the fantasies of our imagination.
Against the so-called evidence that faith is devoid of doubt, and that the more we believe, the less we doubt, I wanted, in my book, to show that not only can faith and doubt agree, but that they do not really pit each other against each other only when they are both weak. Only the lukewarm believer thinks that doubt can represent a threat to his own faith!
Conversely, the 17th century was, according to you, marked by strong faith and strong doubt. How ?
The archetype is Descartes who practiced radical doubt to reform his mind, without in any way compromising his Catholic faith. On the contrary, he believed that the free use of reason should be the best guarantee. Another example: Pascal, a great scholar, exercised a devastating skepticism on the temporal level, not to shake religion but to bring back the libertine who had strayed from it. As for atheists, still considered weak-minded in the 16th century, they were now feared by the Church. But see, if they so skillfully handled the arguments capable of destabilizing it, none went so far as to deny the existence of God. This is because in a sense, no more than true Christians themselves, they could not be satisfied with the blind and superstitious faith that they had received from the previous century.
The 19th century was that of substitute religions, from science to socialism…
After the decline of Christianity that began in the 18th century, people, disinherited from God, diverted their faith towards other ends, which belong to the profane sphere. They looked for substitute religions in politics or science. Socialism was almost a religion. It was a movement of ideas that stirred up a similar fervor. For others, the cult of science fulfilled the same function. The positivism of Auguste Comte was in his eyes the religion of humanity. Just as we were able to develop a religion of art (Mallarmé, Hölderlin) or philosophy (Schelling, Hegel). This phenomenon continued into the 20th century where, for example, the Communist Party embodied for many a substitute for the Catholic Church. In other words, the error was to consider that humans stopped believing, simply because they no longer went to mass.
“In the absence of a higher authority to which one subordinates oneself, beliefs connect directly to the instinctual”
But how did we get to the weak faith of today?
Substitute religions also ended up running out of steam, because they led to tragic dead ends. Communism and Nazism, these godless religions, showed what disasters they could lead to. The faith has withered, but at the same time diversified. Never have we offered individuals so many objects of belief. Today, it is possible to believe in anything and everything. In many ways our situation resembles that of the 16th century.
For what ?
The 16th century was the last before the rise of great Western rationalism. In a way, we are today at the end of this modern parenthesis. And there are numerous parallels between Montaigne’s century and ours. In the 16th century, the wars of religion caused a shattering of belief, from the inside between Catholics against Protestants, and from the outside with the discovery of new worlds which did not know Christ and whose habits and customs were considered curious. , as evidenced by Montaigne’s chapter “The Cannibals”. These two shocks strongly put the belief into perspective while revealing it as such. We discovered that we were Christian in the same way as “Périgords or Germans”.
Furthermore, in the 16th century, the instruments forged by reason were still insufficient and not very effective. Thought lacked method and did not have reliable criteria to distinguish truth from falsehood. Today, in the same way, we also have difficulty demonstrating evidence, and contradicting someone who adheres, for example, to a conspiracy theory. We find ourselves, once again, strangely helpless in the face of a multitude of new beliefs.
Another parallel: the 16th century saw the rise of printing, which bypassed vertical authorities, such as the Church, until then the repositories of the word and the truth. In the same way, the Internet has bypassed institutions that hold knowledge, such as universities or the traditional press. As the Raoult affair showed during the Covid-19 pandemic, science has lost its credibility.
In his time, Montaigne explained that imagination reigned everywhere, between miracles and witchcraft. Today, we also navigate a world of images where it is increasingly difficult to know which ones are true or false. For his part, Machiavelli explained that a weak regime can be recognized by the divorce that takes place between words and actions. However, today, our Republic talks a lot and acts little, a sign of weakness. Words are detached from actions as if they had their own autonomy. Even the current conspiracy is in reality very little followed by effects. Those who are susceptible to it talk a lot, but in real life, they go about their daily routine. If they multiply their arguments and try so hard to convince, it may be that the approval of others is the support they lack to truly believe their own fables.
But how can we explain this deregulation of beliefs? Today we believe in what we like…
The sociologist Gérald Bronner rightly evokes the deregulation of the market of beliefs at the same time as he underlines the hidden rationality to which it is subject. Freed from their tutelage, the imagination is unleashed again; in the absence of a higher authority to which to subordinate ourselves, beliefs connect directly to the instinctual: what pleases us or scares us, etc. By drastically lowering the cost of disseminating and acquiring information, digital media, which today shape public opinion, offer an immense cognitive market where the wildest superstitions can only be used. . Enlightened democracy has been replaced by “democracy of the gullible”.
Until now, religion also served to discipline beliefs. But today we must learn to believe again, because belief is increasingly confused with a simple opinion. We must stop believing willy-nilly.
But believing that a crucified man born of a virgin would have resurrected after three days may seem just as ridiculous…
If we isolate the story of Jesus, perhaps. But the faith that it kindled, as absurd as it may have been, was corseted into a symbolic and rational apparatus of crazy demand. The fathers of the Church, Saint Augustine, delved into the human soul to a depth that has no equivalent today. The richness of Christianity also comes from its longevity and the diversity of its currents, giving rise to a faith in practice, with its rules and its discipline.
“Before, we believed in doing like everyone else. Now, we believe in being like no one else.”
You don’t seem to believe in a “return of religion”…
The decline of religion is an irreversible process. And when religion returns, much less than we think, it does so in a different way from the past. Today, religion has become a marker of identity. Before, it had a socializing role; it brought together, unified. From now on, it serves to distinguish and stand out. It is a cultural garment. As if we choose ourselves by the beliefs we choose to adhere to. It’s very modern. Before, we believed in doing like everyone else. Now, we believe in being like no one else.
The figure of the militant atheist itself becomes much rarer, from the moment the Catholic Church is on the ground. It is that of the agnostic which dominates today, to the point of blurring the boundary between atheists and believers. A writer like Jean d’Ormesson was thus able to claim to be agnostic and Catholic. Or declare, like Michel Houellebecq, that he was no longer an atheist. Even Christians are full of doubts. Atheists sometimes confess that they would like to believe, but cannot, as the book clearly reflects. The kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère, in which he recounts his failure to believe. Atheism was very strong in the 20th century. Today, I know few self-proclaimed atheists. As Nietzsche says, being an atheist is hard work. The example of André Gide bears witness to this, he who spent his entire life trying to get rid of the traces of his Protestant childhood and his religious training.
Figures like Patrick Buisson, who has just disappeared, or Michel Onfray consider Catholicism as an essential civilizational and identity ferment in the face of Islam…
Out of fear of Islam and in reaction, we question what we are. But this is precisely to neglect faith, or to consider it only under the aspect of fear, of which I am not sure that it is a good advisor. Furthermore, the worst thing in the history of religions is often that of its institutions, that is to say the Church. For me, the most interesting thing is faith. The writers you mention mark in a sense the return of Charles Maurras, who was an atheist Catholic. In their eyes, religion is simply a guarantor of collective morality. Today, what we must hope for is not the return of religion without faith, but the opposite: faith without religion.
Isn’t ecology a new, booming religion?
A certain form runs the risk and makes others run the risk. And ecology tends there when the Earth, or Gaia, represents in his eyes a new divinity that must be feared and respected. But for it to become one, it still needs an institution, a canon and rules. Which is not desirable. For the moment, there is only a poorly structured and ineffective current. We are still in a weak faith. The proof is that the environmentalist party is not making any headway electorally. We display our ecological convictions, but without them being very effective in reality, to say the least.
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