Resistance to Christianity (eBook)

Author’s Foreword

The rising tide of the commodity has not left standing a single traditional value of the past on the shore on which the two thousand years of the Christian era have been brought to an end. Did not this tide, by drowning the mass ideologies that had themselves hastily brought the religious edifice crashing down (at the moment in history at which the State was taking over from God in the conduct of terrestrial affairs), also inevitably push towards annihilation the last remnants of a Church whose mysteries had already been domesticated by the Second Vatican Council1?

The indifference into which those beliefs that are governed by rituals performed by the Party or by the ecclesiastical bureaucracy have sunk has awakened a new interest in the history of those beliefs. This interest is not motivated by any sort of obsolete desire—be it to make apologies or to denigrate. It is a curiosity that is quite simply preoccupied with its own pleasure and that takes pride in its ability to play the game of discovering that which the official truths tried so zealously to bury beneath the ultima ratio2 of their dogmatic canon.

Could one even imagine that Christianity, once it had been cleansed of its sacred apparatus by the powerful waters of commercialism, would have been able to escape from the crusher that, in less than a half-century, has smashed the sacrificial rocks—known under the names of nationalism, liberalism, socialism, fascism, and communism—that generations of people have adored with a mixture of fascination and terror?

Now that nothing remains of yesterday’s shipwrecks but a sea that is relatively calm and only weakly agitated by ripples of derision, this curiosity supplies that form of archaeology that is best suited to examining objects that have long been coated with holiness. Inspiring respect or profanation, these objects have until now only called for . . . I wouldn’t say impartiality, but the naïve indiscretion of truth-seekers who are without either prejudices or guile.

In the same way as it is now possible to examine the birth, development, and decline of Bolshevism without exposing oneself to accusations of materialism, spiritualism, Marxism, revisionism, Stalinism, or Trotskyism (which today give rise to smiles and yet once were paid for in blood), attention can now be focused on the Christian religion without reference to the repudiations and praises dispensed by theology and philosophy, or to that archaic trompe-l’oeil confrontation in which the God of some and the non-God of the others meet up at the same vanishing point in the celestial realm of ideas—that is to say, at the same level of abstraction from corporeal and terrestrial reality.

Today, along with a feeling for the preeminence of the living, there is, at least for those who remain naïve, an astonishment that wants to understand why and by which channels the world of ideas has so often required a pound of flesh slashed from the heart in exchange for a glimpse at its own chimerical horizons.

The current crisis of transformation, which is today forcing the economy either to destroy itself or to reconstruct itself (one way or the other, it will take the world along with it), has the merit of opening minds to the origins of inhumanity and to the available means of remedying it. The politics of sterilization, which has rendered the entire planet (as well as whole societies, mindsets, and bodies) gangrenous, has also highlighted, thanks to the extremity of the situation to which it has given rise, the ways in which mankind—subjecting nature and human beings to market exploitation—produces, at the expense of the living, an economy that subjugates it to a power that was initially mythical in nature and that subsequently became ideological.

Driven by a system of exchange that they themselves created and that, even as it tore them from themselves, shaped them without ever completely mechanizing their bodies, their consciousnesses, or their subconscious minds, individuals have, over the course of the millennia, been insignificant compared to the formidable power that has fed upon their blood. How could their miserable condition not have induced them to place the halo of an absolute authority, as perfect as the celestial vault, on the transcendence of a Father whose decrees—administering fortune and misfortune alike—proclaimed his eternal and capricious authority over endless generations?

Invested with an extra-terrestrial sovereignty, the mythical meaning of which only the priests had the ability to decipher, the economy nevertheless revealed its fundamental materiality through the interests that, in a free-for-all that was secularized and could therefore no longer be profaned, brought forth temporal masters and business leaders.

Religion—that is to say, ‘that which binds’ [ce qui relie]—placed in the hands of a fantastic deity the central link of a chain that, interlocking tyranny and slavery from one end to the other, also anchored to the earth the celestial power that people’s own scorn for themselves had consecrated as sovereign, unchanging, and intangible.

Thus God drew from the cyclical and archaic world, which was enclosed within the moats and ramparts of the agrarian economy, a permanence that, during great tumults concerning the ‘end of time’, was ceaselessly contradicted by the innovative politics of commerce and free-exchange—a politics that unclasped the links of mythic time, corroded the sacred with acerbic spittle, and introduced into the citadels of conservatism the Trojan Horse of progress.

Nevertheless, despite the state of conflict that repeatedly opposed the conquest of new markets to the ownership of land, the antagonistic emanations of these competing economic models—these emanations being temporal and spiritual kings, on the one hand, and priests, philosophy, and theology, on the other—continued to constitute the two halves of God (that is, for as long as the agrarian structure and its mentality remained dominant).

By decapitating Louis XVI, the last monarch of the Divine Right, the French Revolution slew the two-headed hydra of temporal and spiritual power, which not long before (in the last of a lengthy series of crimes) had sent the young Knight de la Barre3 to the scaffold for allegedly committing the crime of impiety4.

If the Roman Church, now deprived of the secular arms that had once enforced the truth of its dogma, slowly descended to the rank of a spiritual scarecrow, this was because the era of the lords and priests and its dominant economy had come to an end, thereby depriving Rome of the penal ferocity that had previously underwritten the Church’s arrogance.

The Ancien Régime, having been definitively crushed beneath the inexorable weight of market freedom and of the ‘democracy’ of that which is profitable, was dismantled at the same time as its ramparts, palaces, siege mentalities, and old mythic ways of thinking were being demolished.

At that moment, God succumbed to the hatchet blow dealt by a State that was thenceforth able to rule without the guarantees provided by its former celestial accomplice. Christianity then entered the spectacular history of the commodity. Come the dawn of the twenty-first century5, Christianity will emerge from that history crushed, just as other herd-mentality ideologies have been.

The fact that a kind of religious spirit and the sinister colors of fanaticism continue to subsist at the heart of the systems of ideas that have supplanted Christian mythology—including opinions that are furiously hostile to Christian allegiances—is demonstrated well enough by the exaltation of militants and the hysteria of crowds that we see during the great Masses that are solemnly presided over by the tribunes and tub-thumpers of nationalism, liberalism, socialism, fascism, and communism.

The hysterical uprooting that pulls a man out of his body in order to identify him with a collective and abstract body (a nation, a State, a party, a cause) is indistinguishable from a spiritual adherence—I might even say a spiritual adhesion—to a God whose gaze, imbued with both solicitude and scorn, symbolically expresses the relations between the mechanical abstraction of profit and the living matter that is subjected to ruthless exploitation.

There have been more upheavals in the last three decades than in the previous ten millennia. By selling off ideologies from the shelves of indifference, the self-services6 of consumption-at-any-price have, volens nolens7, stripped the individual of the character armor8 that conceals him from himself, and have thereby condemned him to constrained desires (and this without offering him any other way of letting off steam than engaging in the dead passion for destroying and being destroyed)9. Thus, little by little, one sees the gradual awakening of a will to live that has never ceased to appeal to the conjoined creation and enjoyment of oneself and the world. Isn’t the situation now a matter of each person attaining amorous possession of the universe for him- or herself?

The individual, which only yesterday was an object manipulated by a Spirit and nourished by its very substance, today becomes—by discovering on the earth and in his or her own flesh the place of his or her living reality—the subject of a destiny that will be constructed by means of a renewed alliance with nature. Bored and wearied by artificial desires that ascribed to him a...