The Judeo-Christian Episteme
Most people say they are atheist these days, but they are fooling themselves. Most atheisms are overtly nihilistic. What makes them so? European nihilism—so well described by Nietzsche—presupposes the end of the universe and the difficulty of finding another one. In the meantime, atheistic nihilism struggles between two visions of the world: the Judeo-Christian and something not yet defined, which we’ll call post-Christian, for lack of a better term—we do not fool ourselves with that, it is for lack of a better term. Only time and progress through the century will permit us to discover it. For now we have nihilism.
We either subscribe to no values or too many values. There are either none or too many. We don’t appreciate the nuances of ethics and metaphysics: we call everything good and well, even the bad. We call everything beautiful, even the ugly. The real seems less real than the virtual; fiction replaces reality; history and memory seem irrelevant to the present moment, disconnected from the past, and unrelated to the future. Nihilism characterizes an age that has no cartography: compasses spin and it is impossible to imagine an escape from the forest in which we are lost.
Nihilism spills out into the gap between two civilizations. The Lower Roman Empire saw the end of one episteme (the pagan and Greco-Roman) and the first stages of a new one (the Christian), which was not yet well defined. Epicureanism runs alongside Gnosticism; Imperial Stoicism cohabitates with millenarianism and apocalyptic ideas that came from the East; and the old philosophic rationalism lives its last hours sharing the century with ubiquitous irrationality: hermeticism, mysticism, astrology, and alchemy. Nobody knew which saint to follow.
Our own time is similar to those times described as decadent—a term that should be used with caution. It can be applied to every age of humanity, and it accompanies every epoch from Hesiod to Oswald Spengler.1 Today, we have to deal with new representations of the world, uncertain blueprints, and perplexing perspectives. We have cosmopolitan ontologies and metaphysics, an ecological crisis, the brutal globalization of economic liberalism, and a market domination that negates the dignity of the majority of humanity. Once we took the first steps on the moon in 1969 and saw the earth as a frigid star, we understood that we only see the cosmos from local perspectives.
What is left of the Judeo-Christian in our daily lives? We must do an inventory. Disaffection with dominical or daily religious practices, skepticism of the reformist gimmicks of Vatican II, and disdain for the pope’s teachings on sexual morality are all only superficial feelings. That kind of de-Christianization is only specious and formal. Most people (the agnostic, the vaguely atheistic, the nonbelievers from time to time, and the faithful by habit) submit to religious baptisms, as their parents did. They marry in churches to please their families and insist on being buried near their family members in religious cemeteries and blessed by ad hoc clergy.
It’s an illusion that Christianity is waning. Superficial disaffections give the impression of deep change when, however, under the thin surface, the same logic persists that has pervaded European society for nearly twenty centuries. The death of God? That’s a Judeo-Christian ruse. Where is the corpse? It is a fiction. What serves as God is far from dead; he’s alive and well. He is the irrational in response to the tragedy of the real. In other words, he has to die one day, but the road is still open before him.
Take the example of the laity: Of course, the law signed in 1905 was a considerable step in consolidating clerical power over all of society, but it did not create any new battles or claim any new victories, and it ended up producing a stasis, and then a moribundity, before ever generating a taste for moving beyond the rancid, the insular, and the stale—qualities so often associated with the laity.2 Its date of expiration has passed, because it never produced a laity that is dynamic, evolutionary, dialectical, and, frankly, postmodern.
When we really look, we see that the traditional laity was formulated with a neo-Kantian vocabulary, the Judeo-Christian Decalogue, and an evangelical morality. It doesn’t necessarily brandish the New Testament in matters of morality (or politics, but that’s really the same thing); rather, it prefers severe educators who teach, without necessarily realizing it, Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone and The Metaphysics of Morals. They reduce both of these books to a series of moralizing aphorisms.
We use different vocabularies and have different formulas, and different actors believe they are adversaries, but they really have the same values. Everyone holds to honor your father and mother, devote yourself to your motherland, prioritize others, love thy neighbor, have fraternity, establish a heterosexual family, respect your elders, love your work, cultivate the virtues of goodness—charity, solidarity, graciousness, leniency, alms, aid, beneficence, justice—over malice, and so forth. We have done a lot of work to come up with these lists of signifiers, but it is time that we now figure out how to accomplish what they signify.
It is also important to show just how much the foundations of French juridical thought—said to be secular—remains Judeo-Christian. In this system, guilt is seen as something willfully chosen through free will, untouched by any determinism. Hence, the belief in personal responsibility and justified punishment; hence, the belief in redemption. It’s a perverse and infernal cycle. Bioethics has the same problem, still hemmed in by Judeo-Christian fantasies. We still praise the salvific power (a Vatican neologism) of suffering and death in relation to original sin. We believe that sickness reveals Providence. And so forth. Our educational system, our aesthetics, and everything else of ours suffer from the same illness. All of these epistemes are built on biblical principles.
The Vatican is not really our metaphysical adversary—it is more like a State operetta, a kind of comic strip. It reflects the consciousness of the people, or its subconscious. It is a problem for individuals, but it’s also a collective and communal problem. I am not interested in anything like Jungian archetypes; rather, I’m concerned with the irrational transmissions that inject, without necessarily realizing it, the Judeo-Christian substance into the identity of people and groups. This episteme needs to be understood, analyzed, dissected, and overcome.
The Need to De-Christianize
I want to continue the logic of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Those ideas are not just archeologically valuable; they can serve as transhistorical models. I want to produce a real post-Christian secularism that revolutionizes not only our terminology, language, and writing, but the very heart of things. A new civilization cannot create values without availing itself of the right to invent its own ethics, metaphysics, ontology, politics, and so forth. What should we preserve? And why? What can we and what should we destroy, surpass, conserve, improve, and adjust? What criteria do we follow and to what end?
De-Christianization is not accomplished through violence. The guillotines of the Terror, massacring reactionary priests, burning churches, pillaging monasteries, violating the devout, and vandalizing sacred objects are indefensible in all cases. A reverse Inquisition is no more legitimate or justified than that of the Catholic Church in its heyday. There is another solution: theoretical dismantling and the Gramscian reconquest of ideas.3
Every time one civilization gives way to the next, there are always dangers. Irrationalism abounds, superstitious thinking excels, and cheap metaphysical solutions proliferate. Moreover, when a culture collapses after a long misadventure, it is always to the profit of impulsive, instinctual, and animalistic hordes. It is as if the apex of an epoch must always succumb to the magma of primitive energy. In the wake of reason comes senselessness.
The goal of a postmodern secularism would be to accelerate the course of history in order to overcome European nihilism. A long cycle may be coming to an end, but there does not need to be a long, tiresome agony and death. It can go well, quickly and cleanly. When a moribund person has nothing more to do in life, it is useless to carry out a senseless, energetic therapy at their bedside. Europe has been Christian, and it remains so because of habits that are the reflexes of a body disconnected from its cortex.
Post-Christians can learn lessons from pre-Christians. They can show us ethical alternatives to old Platonism: moralities of honor and not of blame; aristocratic rather than universal ethics; a conduct of immanent play and not of transcendental processes; virtues that enhance vitality versus those that shrink it; a taste for life that turns its back on self-mortification; a hedonistic plan instead of an ascetic ideal; a contract with the real instead of a submission to heaven; and so forth.
Nihilism will not be overcome by restoring anything: Some, noting the decline of Christianity, feel the need to strive for its rebirth, bringing back the habitual arrangements they have with heaven, either in a traditional form or mixing them with some reforms. They turn to fundamentalism or some reform movement. Global American imperialism opts for a fundamentalist Christianity that fights against—puts in its crosshairs, really—Islam, which has become the strongest opiate for oppressed cultures and minorities.
All kinds of alternative terms swing between the Judeo-Christian and Muslim monotheistic poles. We can avoid this sinister impasse by opting for a third option. We can choose not one or the other, but go beyond them, to a true atheism that denies the Torah, New Testament, and Koran in favor of the Enlightenment of Reason and the clarity of Western philosophy. We can apply the spirit of Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopedia against the religion of the single Book, which dislikes other books and despises reason, intelligence, women, bodies, passion, desires, life, wide reading, and so forth.
I believe we should turn our back on fictions and fables and drive ourselves truly toward philosophy. That philosophy, however, should not carry an attitude like that of the Fathers of the Church. For example, it should not legitimize violence, which intellectuals who are in every way devoted to American liberalism and capitalism often do.
We often forget the breed of philosophy that collaborated with religion and state power in the nineteenth century. It went under the name of antiphilosophy, practiced by a number of people forgotten by history: Lelarge de Lignac, Abbott Bergier, Jacob Nicolas Moreau, the Marquis of Caraccioli, and so forth. They faced off against those who resisted—the philosophers of the Enlightenment.
Dominant historiography holds the Enlightenment figures in high esteem, of course, but it also counts theists, deists, or pantheists as concessions to the Christian religion. I look to more forceful Enlightenment philosophers who are often forgotten and who start with a frank and direct atheism that is clear and precise: Abbott Meslier, Holbach, La Mettrie, and several others. There, in the opening years of the eighteenth century, the new, post-Christian world began. We owe them for an atheism that should now be affirmed against the monotheistic empire. Such a post-Christian atheism would be accompanied by a different morality.
A Post-Christian Atheism
The expression “post-Christian atheism” might strike you as redundant. The substantive alone leads you to believe that one has already gone beyond Christianity and that one is now down off the hill of religion. But by virtue of the Judeo-Christian impregnation of our episteme, atheism itself is forged in the Catholic fire, so much so that there is a Christian atheism and the very term, oxymoronically, characterizes a real conceptual object: a philosophy that clearly denies the existence of God, but also adopts the evangelical values of the religion of Christ.
Thus, the death of God sometimes goes hand in hand with the morality of the Bible. Those who adopt this option deny transcendence and in the next breath defend Christian values in isolation from their theological legitimizations—values that are preserved and honored by virtue of sociological legitimacy. Heaven may be empty, but the world would be better off with the love-thy-neighbor mentality, forgiveness, charity, and other virtues like generosity, compassion, mercy, gratitude, prudence, temperance, and so forth.
A post-Christian atheism emphasizes the principle of the dangerousness of God. It does not deny his existence, but reduces him to his essence: fabricated alienation; a hypostatization of humans’ own impotence; the imagination of an essence outside of oneself; and a projection of essence into an inhuman force. Like Madame Bovary, people do not want to see themselves the way they really are: limited in terms of life span, power, wisdom, and ability. Therefore, they conjure a conceptual personage that possesses the attributes they lack. Thus, God is eternal, immortal, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and so forth.
As soon as God’s mystery is dispelled, post-Christian atheism makes a second pass, and with the same fervor, it dismantles the values inherited from the New Testament, which impede any real individual sovereignty and limit the vital expansion of subjectivity. Our morality has filled the cemeteries of World War I and has given us the monstrosity of Nazi death camps, Stalinist Gulags, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki; State terrorism of Western fascism and Eastern communism; Pol Pot, Mao, and the Rwandan genocide; and everything else that stains the twentieth century with blood. We cannot keep calling on a beautiful but inactive and impotent Soul, since its incarnation is impossible and it offers no truly attainable effects. We should elaborate a morality that is more modest but that can have real effects. Let’s abandon the ethics of heroes and saints and follow the ethics of the sage.