Secular Revival

Tags:: Barack Obama,; Charles Darwin,; Chateaubriand,; secularism,; Sigmund Freud,; Warren Breckman

In the late 1790s, the poet François-René de Chateaubriand languished in his London exile. He had journeyed to America at the beginning of the decade in hopes that the New World sun would burn off the lingering clouds of his morose childhood in the dank and gloomy family castle in Brittany but had returned to Europe, summoned by the call to arms against the French revolutionaries. After suffering a wound, he retreated to England. As he recalled in his Memoirs, in the summer of 1798 he had just dodged an engagement with one Charlotte Ives that would have “buried” him “in an English county,” leading the life of a “hunting gentleman,” when a letter from his sister Julie interrupted his navel-gazing. “My dear,” wrote Julie from Saint-Servan, “we have just lost the best of mothers: I grieve to inform you of this fatal blow. When you cease to be the object of our solicitude, we shall have ceased to live. If you knew how many tears your errors had caused our venerable mother to shed, how deplorable they appear to all who think and profess not only piety but reason—if you knew this, perhaps it would help to open your eyes, to induce you to give up writing.”

Chateaubriand’s “error” was his first published book, a lengthy essay voicing the combative hostility toward organized religion that had become stock-in-trade for French advocates of enlightenment in the twilight years of the eighteenth century. Cast into despair by this account of the torment he had caused his dying mother, written by a sister who herself had died by the time it reached him, Chateaubriand went back to navel-gazing with a vengeance. He underwent a conversion. “I became a Christian. I did not yield, I admit, to any mighty supernatural illumination. My conviction came out of my heart. I wept and I believed.” Instead of yielding to Julie’s plea to cease writing, he resolved to expiate his sin by composing another work, a religious one. The poet’s most famous book, The Genius of Christianity, appeared fortuitously just days after Napoleon mended relations with Pope Pius VII in 1802. Perhaps because he was all too familiar with the withering power of skepticism, Chateaubriand did not deign to meet the critics of religion on their chosen battlefield by arguing rationally for the doctrinal truth of Catholicism. Instead he tried to bring the rationalists to tears. He poured his literary gifts into sumptuous descriptions of the power and beauty of ritual and the sensual and emotional satisfactions of faith. Madame Fortunée Hamelin expressed a common response to Chateaubriand’s book when she exclaimed, “What, this is Christianity? But it is delicious!”

What a contrast to Sigmund Freud’s depiction of religion as the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity. Religion, conceded Freud, has performed vital functions within civilization, offering us an imaginary compensation for our helplessness in the face of nature through fantasies of a controlling intelligence and an illusion of our capacity to summon that power through rituals and prayer. Above all, Freud saw religion as a mechanism of repression, channeling instinctual drives into socially acceptable forms. Chateaubriand’s lush Catholicism does not at all fit this notion of religion as the ultimate form of renunciation, but Freud’s portrayal of the austere and sublime legalism of Mosaic Judaism certainly does. Ultimately, however, Freud and Chateaubriand may not have disagreed entirely on the essence of religion. Freud was, shall we say, too Freudian not to recognize that human instincts will have their due. Renunciation only works if it actually satisfies the instincts it represses, even if the paths to satisfaction may be unexpected and devious.

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In volume III, numberI, Religion, on pg. 211 there are superhero avatars for different 'faiths', however for Muslims there is none. It may be suspected that 'political correctness'/fear has reared its censorious head by the exclusion of an avatar for Allah. Say it isn't so. Was it the publisher? I'm sure this has probably been pointed out by others.

Posted by john lewis beaufait on Wed 3 Feb 2010
Well its time to make the division between the true and pure secularist and the one that is 'tainted' by religion. I think the answer the author searches, yes searches, for is not in what secularism expounds but what it lacks. The weakness lies in the un-conformity of the secularism belief. If the foundation allows hypothesis that verge on any spritisitc satisfaction than the end does not justify the means. I speak of the other realm that does exist and if this belief eludes it and acts as if it is not there then there will forever be a lack of satisfaction of a basic human need.

Posted by Tara on Mon 1 Mar 2010
"Barack Obama’s eloquence is often leavened by biblical resonances, and his message of hope taps the veins of religious yearning and expectation that marble the bedrock of American oratory."

C'mon now. You have to admit that's stretching the definition quite a bit. If leavening one's eloquence with biblical resonances and delivering a message of hope (or reacting to the same) counts as being religious, then I daresay none of us are secular.

Posted by Aaron on Fri 19 Mar 2010
Proud to be a member of the least trusted minority. To 'believers' I say, "I don't trust you either."

Posted by Diomedes on Fri 20 Aug 2010
"...Defenders of religion are all too ready to claim that secularism offers at best a wizened form of experience and sensation. Such a view has us moderns living within a purely immanent world, blocked from any relation to a truly transcendent sphere. In such a world, the colors are a shade paler, the sounds a tone flatter than in a world touched by the divine...."

Yes, they would have us believe that believing in the fantasy of the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus makes life more beautiful. In reality, it only keeps us children wanting someone else to be responsible for our lives, abdicators en masse - abdication from taking charge of our lives, and dumping it all instead on a Santa Claus on a cross or on a dead Easter Bunny revived after three days.

We might as well accept Disney's realities where animals talk in English and walk on their hind paws - and clutch things in thumbless front paws.

Religion, at best, is an open-hearted social club; at worst it is the War of the Roses and 9/11, mixed with beheadings and the Inquisition, right wing religious wackos (and Wacos) and burning innocents at the stake. Left to its own devices, those are precisely what religion becomes. Religion without secular tempering is a terribly dangerous thing, destructive of individuals and intemperate in the extreme. The idea of religion as a benign connector of people or as a conduit to the divine is a cover story, a scam, a hucksterism of the lowest sort. The end goal is always to tell people that a free and pleasurable life is undesirable and contrary to the will of some imaginary deity, in order to empower a select few to control and destroy those whom the few disagree with.

Compare the joys of life on a wide scale during the eras when religion dominated, versus our secular times - which has brought individuals' lives more joy, more prosperity, more capacity to live, more ability to experience the world that was created?

What deity would choose for his most sentient creations the former over the latter?

I rest my case.

Posted by SteveGinIL on Wed 13 Jul 2011