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| Professor Chantal Delsol..."we are now living at a breaking point" over "choices concerning the meaning and place of the human person in the universe" |
If your answer is yes, then you are one of those who are realising that there is a massive transformation going on in society, deeper than technological change, empowering a revolution, a paradigm shift in the public mindset. The transformation afoot is not a sudden eruption, but a factor of emboldened forces deploying their power with greater intensity in order to bring about a new social order.
Those with their hand on the wheel form an elite comprised principally of players from academia, the mainstream media, and the political arena. Their program is not offered by way weak influences here and there but it is part of a campaign that is on the offensive, that is very political, and which is mounted with purpose.
There is a utilitarian foundation to the program; however, though it has a fluidity of manner it is intolerant of any divergence from any of the dogmas its operatives are establishing. It is without any central dogma, but its key players show remarkable intolerance toward those who fail to agree on its rapidly expanding creed.
To comprehend what is happening around the world - not in every nation or society but in most - and most strikingly in the stalwarts of Western civilisation, we can usefully explore the ideas of French political philosopher Chantal Delsol, who last year gave a lecture on the death of Christendom, which is not synonymous with Christianity, but which refers to the radically different social and political order that grew from the principles of the new religion.
Delsol received her PhD in philosophy at the Sorbonne and became a university professor, a member of the French Academy, and winner of many awards, including the Academy of Ethical and Political Sciences Award in 2001.
Her theme in the lecture is that the West is at the end of a 16-century-old civilization, termed Christendom, that Christian culture "formed a world, a world cohesive in all areas of life", and "for two centuries [it has] struggled not to die".
Christianity has built a civilization, which has lived according to its laws and dogmas, as best they can, for 16 centuries.
Christianity as a civilization is the fruit of Catholicism, a holistic religion, defending an organic society, challenging individualism and individual freedom.
The fate of Christianity makes it irremediably inclined to hate modernity, which challenges its first principles: truth, hierarchy, authority and coercion.
Late modernity, which begins after the Second World War, definitely regards the Church as an obsolete institution. During the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, the differences have accumulated. The reigning liberalism/libertarianism represents the exact opposite of ecclesial thinking.
Delsol points out that the fading Christian presence does not mean the death of the spiritual, and certainly not the acceptance of atheism:
Of course, the twenty-first century is religious - but it is no longer Christian. Other religions have taken over the scene. There is no great prophecy in predicting that a century will be religious - for all centuries are.
As long as humanity is imperfect and mortal (until the end of time no doubt, despite the fabrications of post-humanism), it will give itself religions, wisdoms, morals.
Only the extreme and fleeting rationalization of the Enlightenment, detached from realities, could believe in the future of atheism [...] since as soon as Christianity fell, all kinds of other gods took its place.
Societies are not made up of a few intellectuals, but of peoples, to whom common sense prompts that there are mysteries behind the door, and who are at least agnostic if they are not believers.
Ideals are reinvented differently, but disenchantment does not mean the reign of atheism and all-powerful rationalism.
Daily experience confirms to us that morality did not disappear with the fall of Christendom; neither civilization nor morality ends with Christendom. They orient themselves differently and follow other paths.
We are not going through a descent into hell or a total loss of what makes humanity, but a paradigm shift that can be considered radical and questionable, but which nevertheless defends other honorable principles.
Though "New Age" was commandeered decades ago by Shirley MacLaine in her books on metaphysics, spirituality, reincarnation and more, Delsol posits that what we are seeing unfold is just such an experience:
I use this expression again. The new age will be the age of wisdom and paganism, necessarily rediscovered after the challenge of transcendence.
I think we have to understand the moment that we are living as a revolution, in the strict sense of the return of the cycle, in both areas of morality and ontology.
The picture presented in this lecture is that of paganism, once overthrown by the upstart Christian religion, reasserting itself, and in fact, reclaiming its former dominant position as the force that shapes the culture.
Since the second half of the 20th century, and significantly since the 1960s, our moral hierarchies have literally been reversed. It is not uncommon, concerning individual behavior and social acts, that in a few years an evil has become a good and vice versa, that the old hated behavior is now praised, that the old admiration is changed and challenged.
In the world of our fathers, colonization was generous and admirable, torture was part and parcel of war; today, colonization and torture are satanic acts, and very largely, war too.
Homosexuality was banned and despised, and today it is not only justified but praised. Abortion, previously criminalized, is being legitimized and advised.
Divorce, which was almost impossible and then difficult, no longer encounters any obstacle.
Suicide was frowned upon (suicides were not offered a religious funeral), it is considered a possible benefit, and the laws in some countries may help to achieve it.
"The table of mores" of a society reveal its reigning philosophy, its "gods". Even if a society does not define its creed, "any signifying act reveals a sleeping belief".
All behavior engages beliefs that are often buried and secret. The normative reversal that we have before us appears to a large part of the youth to be quite natural, because children are always educated by their time more than by their parents.
We must put a name on this inversion. It translates and tells the story of the end of Christendom. And it will be even easier to understand if we go back to the origins.
Christendom was established by a normative inversion, in the other direction. The fourth century was a break in the paradigm, both in the philosophical sense and in the ethical sense.
The universe of the Christians was the reverse of that of the Romans: they introduced a dualism between temporal and spiritual, here below and beyond, men and God, while the ancient religious world was deeply unified.
The Romans must have felt as if they were entering a torn intellectual and spiritual world. In the space of a few decades a reversal of mores took place. The old morality was replaced by another. In the context of what we now call the societal, in other words mores, there was an inversion of values.
Everything had to be reversed, as Tertullian, a 2nd century Christian theologian, wrote: “It is against all these prejudices that we have to fight, against the institutions, the ancestors, the authority of the thing received, the laws of the rulers, the reasonings of the wise; against antiquity, custom, necessity; against the examples, the wonders, the miracles, whose help strengthened all these adulterous divinities".
Christianity opposed the lax Roman strictures against divorce. Moreover, "abortion and infanticide had always been legitimate among ancient peoples, except among Jews and Egyptians". Romans families kept daughters only when the first born. Christians opposed those practices, and homosexual behaviour as well.
Within the Roman sphere of influence, Christians rose to positions of power in the 4th century following the Edict of Milan of 313. Within very few decades, the reversal of Roman mores had been achieved, though the country people - the paganus - ran at a slower pace. "And Christians called themselves 'modern' - the word modernus appeared at this time."
Perhaps in our time we are seeing the term "Christian" and "bigot" serve the function of "pagan" - "Paganism is given as superstitious, obsolete and outdated."
It is already a march towards progress: the winner appropriates the meaning of history. The revolutionary period in the 18th century was what can be called the beginning of the end of Christendom. At this time the Westerners begin to overthrow the common civilization.
This process lasted two centuries. [...] Take divorce in France. A law authorizing divorce was promulgated in 1792 during the Revolution. It was repealed in 1816 under the Restoration. But divorce was reestablished in July 1884. A law of the Vichy regime of April 2, 1941, restricted the possibilities. Finally, after the second war, the laws on divorce made it easier and easier, until mutual consent was reached.
Delsol sees a definite "drive to root out the principles of Christianity". However, "the tide has been sweeping for two centuries always in the same direction, and never stopping".
The recent history of abortion laws reflects the same upheavals, strewn with violent reactions in both directions. The demonstrations are screaming. The laws passed arouse cries of joy and cries of horror, and excesses everywhere. Passion is always involved. Women march by screaming that their bodies belong to them. Extremist groups are trying to block the operation of abortion clinics.
The same goes for marriage between two people of the same sex, for assisted reproduction, for assisted suicide.
Christians try to defend traditional morality with non-Christian arguments: they know very well that their dogma would not be heard at all.
They argue from nature, natural law or peripheral reasons which are not necessarily less important. In doing so, they even find unexpected allies, as when today groups of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists devoid of religious convictions join the ranks of Christians in the fight for the defense of fatherhood.
But all this, without any result, ever. Our societies do not care about natural law, and widely believe that this sort of thing does not exist, and that we are the inventors of nature.
Whatever happens, the old principles are going back step by step, sometimes fast and sometimes slowly, but with regularity and certainty. Their Christian defenders struggle only for ethics of conviction or for panache.
Countries that resist total liberation are singled out by others, treated as backward, as if there was an obligation of good taste, good conduct, reason and intelligence, to erase old mores.
We can see that the currents that defend ancient morals, although elected by many voters, have difficulty finding representatives or rather find only extremist representatives [...] The fate of a current condemned by history is to become more and more extremist, to lose its most competent defenders, and finally, by a sort of disastrous process, to end up resembling the description of its adversaries.
The normative inversion that we see at work here, through this quiet and decisive evolution that crosses the 19th and 20th centuries, represents almost the exact opposite of what happened in the 4th century. Plutarch's cry, "The great Pan is dead" might have anticipated the end of paganism - at least that is how Christians then interpreted it to their advantage. Pan, or Priapus, is the God of sex and violence.
The present cultural environment reflects the completion of the circle of life, Delsol suggests. There is a coherence in the "normative inversion" taking place. It is not a metter of any march of "progress", toward "freedom", for example.
What is inevitable is "the result of a radical transformation of beliefs". Hearts and minds have absorbed, or been captured by, newly attractive principles.
A normative inversion, especially of this magnitude, rests on the basis of a philosophical inversion. This is quite natural: we do not upset the whole of morality in this way on a simple whim - we do it because the foundations on which the old morality rested have been replaced by others.
Each culture or civilization poses, at an original and decisive moment in its history, primordial ontological choices on which everything else is built and supported - morals and mores, laws and customs. For Christendom, this decisive moment was the time of the first councils, which established the outlines of the first truths on which sixteen centuries of Christianity would live: God, the person, the moral.
There comes a day when faith in first principles breaks down. As far as we are concerned, we are now living at a breaking point where the primordial ontological choices - concerning the meaning and place of man in the universe, the nature of the world or of the gods, are overturned.
If beliefs collapse, laws and mores will continue for some time without further justification and by force of habit alone - but that will not last, and they will eventually collapse under the accusation of illegitimacy.
What founds a civilization is not the truth - as all claim it - it is the belief in a truth. And only this belief guarantees the persistence of the original choices.
Examples of radical transformations include Moses leading the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt into a realm ruled by one god, not a bevy of gods - from polytheism into monotheism. The Hebrews were constantly tempted to revert to the polytheism - "cosmotheism" - of their neighbours.
Historians of religions have differentiated between two types of religions: cosmotheisms or polytheisms which are natural and obvious, and monotheisms or "secondary religions", [which] appeal to the concepts of revelation, faith, interior wisdom. They are constructions and always require to be reaffirmed, maintained by constant efforts.
[In contrast,] primary religion arises, so to speak, on its own, proliferates without fertilizer, and instantly occupies or re-occupies its place as soon as it is free.
This is what is happening to us today. Cosmotheism has never disappeared from the scene in Western societies shaped by monotheism. Many figures or authors have been inspired by it to varying degrees: alchemy, the cabbalah, Spinoza, freemasonry, Lessing, German romanticism, Goethe, Freud, Nazism, the new age ...
We can be sure that cosmotheism remains there, asleep and always reborn as soon as the secondary religion which replaced it shows signs of weakness.
In his famous 1917 lecture, The Profession and the Vocation of Scientist, Max Weber described how monotheism had dethroned polytheism in the name of universal reason. And how polytheism remains, ousted but lurking, awaiting its revenge.
Christian rule is already being replaced - neither by nothingness nor by the storm, but by well-known, more primitive and rustic forms of history.
Behind collapsed Christianity come Stoic morals, paganism, Asian-type spiritualities. Nietzsche had foreseen this evolution when he wrote: "European China, with a soft Buddhist-Christian belief, and in practice, an Epicurean savoir-vivre".
At the start of the 21st century, the most established and most promising philosophical current is a form of cosmotheism linked to the defense of nature.
We can also speak of pantheism or polytheism. Our Western contemporaries no longer believe in a beyond or in a transcendence. The meaning of life must therefore be found in this life itself, and not above it, where there is nothing. The sacred is found here: in the landscapes, in the life of the earth and in humans themselves.
At the turn of the twentieth and twenty- first centuries, we have changed the paradigm by making a new choice of understanding the world.
Under cosmotheism, man feels at home in the world, which represents the only reality and which contains both the sacred and the profane.
Under monotheism, man feels a stranger in this immanent world and longs for the other world. For the monotheist, this world is only a stopover. For the cosmotheist, he is at home. The post-modern mind is tired of living in a stopover! He needs a home of his own, complete in its meanings.
He becomes a cosmotheist again because he wants to reintegrate this world as a full citizen, and no longer as this "domiciled foreigner".
The post-modern man wants to do away with distinctions - his favorite adjective is "inclusive". And cosmotheism suits him because it erases the old dualism characteristic of Judeo-Christianity.
It requires escaping the contradictions between the false and the true, between God and the world, between faith and reason ...
Ecology today is a religion, a belief. "Belief": not that the current ecological problem should not be considered scientifically proven; but because these scientific certainties about climate and ecology produce irrational convictions and certainties, in reality religious beliefs, endowed with all manifestations of religion.
Today, ecology has become a liturgy: it is impossible to omit the question, one way or another, in any speech or fragment of speech.
It is a catechism: it is taught to children from kindergarten and repeatedly, to help them acquire good habits of thinking and acting.
It is a consensual dogma - whoever asks questions about it, who dispels the slightest doubt, is considered mad or evil.
But above all, and this is the clear sign of a vigorous belief and certainly not of a rational science: the passion for nature makes us accept all that was challenged by almighty individualism - personal responsibility, debt imposed on descendants, duties towards the community.
It is therefore in the name of this immanent and pagan religion that we are reintegrating the indispensable dimensions of existence, which previously were taken into account and cultivated by Christianity.
The new ecological religion is a form of post-modern pantheism. Nature becomes the object of a cult, more or less proven. Mother earth becomes a kind of pagan goddess, and not only among indigenous Bolivians, among Europeans as well. So much so that Pope Francis speaks today of "our mother the earth", in a Christian sense of course, but leaving open the ambiguity that allows the link with contemporary beliefs.
We are at a stage where, in the vast field opened up by the erasure of Christianity, new beliefs waver and tremble. Disaffection with dogmas, or with a decreed and certain truth, brings about the triumph of morality.
She is now alone in the world. We see a philanthropy unfold, a love for humanity directly inherited from that of the Gospel, but without the foundations.
Late modernity takes up the Gospel, but stripping it of all transcendence. For contemporary American political scientist Joseph Bottum, today a disfigured Protestant morality without transcendence dominates morality across the Atlantic. Membership of [US Mainline] Protestantism has decreased from 50% to 4% in half a century, and the deadly sins are: intolerance, power, militarism, oppression.
In other words, a degraded Gospel produced the decolonial current - we must add: after having produced communism in its time.
We remember that in pagan societies, religion and morality are separate: religion demands sacrifices and rites, while the rulers impose morality.
This is the situation we are in the process of rediscovering: our governing elite decrees morality, promotes laws to enforce it, and possibly enforces it through insults and ostracism.
Our morality is post-evangelical, but it is no longer tied to a religion. She dominates the television sets. She inhabits all the cinematography of this time. She rules in schools and in yards, in families.
When it needs to be straightened out or given a good direction, it is the governing elite that does it.
The European rulers represent in this respect the tabernacle of the clericature.
In short, we have returned to a typical situation of paganism: we have a state morality.
Given the powerful winds of change blowing against it, Delsol bravely faces the key question: "What becomes, what will become of the Church without Christendom?"
"A humble testimony" is in order - anything else is "propaganda", which is totally in "bad taste".
[Therefore,] "reduced to the situation of silent witnesses, Christians today are doomed to become soldiers in a lost war. Their fights, especially - and these are the main ones since they concern principles and virtues - fights on societal issues, lead nowhere and moreover have no chance of succeeding.
Christians who protest tirelessly to try to prevent rogue laws on abortion or assisted reproduction can only be successful by first implementing a spiritual revolution.
Convert people to Christianity, to the intrinsic dignity of each embryo, and then you can abolish abortion.
Wanting to do it in the opposite direction would be like trying to impose confession on non-Catholic peoples: terrorist nonsense. Belief and adherence to principles precedes acceptance of laws.
Far from wanting to conquer the world, from now on, like the Jews, we are going to worryabout living and surviving - and that will be enough.
When one cannot be a power, one can be an example, said Camus.
Modernity, in fact, is probably both a rejection of Christian power (challenge to societal laws),
and a revival and adaptation of Christian principles (especially social ones).
In all its dimensions, modernity is established against Christianity as a civilization, and not against Christianity. It only challenges the power of religion and not religion itself, as Tocqueville wrote [of the French Revolution]:
"It was much less as a religious doctrine than as a political institution that Christianity had kindled this furious hatred".
For most of us, the past has become a foreign land - and I will add, unwanted. After the adventures of the last two centuries, [...] it is no longer Christendom leaving us - it is we who are leaving it. Why?
Delsol's reasons include that we don't want Chrisitianity to be taken as an ideology. Also, "because we have given up the reign of force", our mission must be as witnesses rather than as conquistadors.
Probably it would be better if we were only silent witnesses, and ultimately secret agents of God, since despite the normative and philosophical inversions, Christianity is still, in its way, the spirit of the place.
Renouncing Christendom is not a painful sacrifice. The experience of our fathers brings us a certainty: our business is not to produce societies where "the Gospel governs the States", but rather, to use the words of Saint-Exupéry, to "walk very slowly towards a fountain”.
It is clear Delsol would not give any weight to the attempts in the United States to develop a Catholic "integralist" platform as a way of involving Christian principles into civic life.
At the end of her lecture Delsol, considered questions from the audience. The discussion touched upon the need to examine pagan life in Athens and Rome to grasp the spiritual culture appearing most prominently in Western societies.
However, she believed that the concept of human dignity will remain important, without its assessment of human value being the prerogative solely of the world of politics.
I think that about human dignity, there is a paradox, because it is a Christian concept, but the world of modernity wants to keep this concept:
The reception of the Holocaust in Europe proves clearly, I think, that the concept of human dignity is very strong. You don’t have any sign of that, though, in China or Vietnam with the Holocaust.
People are indifferent, you see. There is a will to keep it but in another place it is abandoned - abortion for example. There is a paradox - we would like to keep it but also abandon it. But it is a little hope [for Christians] to see that it is important to keep something.
Discussion leader Dr. Dariusz Karłowicz said that what surprised him about much of the controversy in Italy about immigration is that supporters did not based their arguments on human dignity but on utilitarian arguments.
That was absolutely surprising, because the concept of the relative dignity of the pagan world was based on the utilitarian category. If you were good for the polis - you were okay, if not - you disappear.
As to the possibility of stopping the secularisation process in the world, Delsol was adamant that there is no way to reverse what has happened.
I don’t see any chance to stop it [because] everything is based on beliefs. There are no beliefs for this. The young generation doesn’t understand at all our explanations, they don’t have the same beliefs.
Everything is going to be paganism in lots of aspects. You will have a sort of cosmotheism, ecology with religion, some gods will appear, wisdom, epicurean wisdom, stoicism... But everything will be secularised, I think.
A further question was on the role that believers will have in this new world. Delsol replied:
They have to be witnesses. I think that believers can’t argue to speak. I think the speech is finished. We have to live and to live well. We have to be witnesses only. There is no other possibility now, I think.
Clarification was asked for in this way - Has the communicative element in society been destroyed? Are there no arguments that may be shared? Delsol gave her reply firmly:
No, because we have been speaking for centuries and centuries. Now people are tired of hearing us. They don’t believe us, it’s not the time to speak. It’s the time to exist. To act.
This question was asked again from another angle:
One of the features of cosmotheism is the idea of complete unity with the world, which closes us to transcendence. Can we find contemporary philosophy attempts to reopen to transcendence and rediscover monotheism?
The reply was as before:
I think we have to evangelize as in the beginning… to take people one by one and convince them. We can’t do anything now. I don’t know what else we can do. We have to convince, evangelize individually.
Karłowicz agreed with her but he added that from his study of the ancient world it occurs to him that "paganism raises many questions, which it can’t answer itself. So Christianity is a proper answer. It’s not a question of rhetoric that you mentioned, it’s a question of existential experience, the problem which cannot be fulfilled in any other way."
In turn, Delsol agreed with Karłowicz that what is occurring at this point of history is an attempt to transform the whole Western civilisation founded on Christianity. Karłowicz's view was this:
Today's version of the cosmic religion [...] offers the construction of a new fate and civilisation and it [demands] strong dogmatic proof of faith, its moral codex. This new religion considers it's truth as universal and good. And that’s not intended to deal only with gentle testimony, but has a strong ambition to win in the struggle of political and civilisation victory.
And it’s not only about political power, it’s about human souls to be converted to the truth.
However, it remains to be seen whether this post-Christian and post-Enlightenment program will embed itself thoroughly in the culturally dominant societies on the world stage, or whether it will collapse as the Soviet hegemony did in Eastern Europe as the tide of public disillusionment rose.
Secondly, Christians have faced reversals and persecutions over the centuries, weathering the storms by the power of God - "And remember! I will be with you always, yes, even until the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).
To conclude, in so many ways we see that traditional Christian culture is at an end. To make a new beginning we need to take Chantal Delsol's words to heart when she urges her listeners to "live and live well" - "We have to be witnesses only. There is no other possibility now, I think."
💢 See Rod Dreher's response to Professor Delsol's lecture here.
💢 Useful resources for preparing a Christian response to the new totalitarianism are the books by the prescient Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Society (2017), and Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents (2020).
💢 Go here to read the thoughts of the future Pope Benedict on the prospects for the Church given the adverse cultural environment of secular Europe.
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