Whatever the religious or atheist beliefs might be, does spirituality come back to the same?
Certainly not! Compare for example prayer and meditation : it’s not at all the same thing. Prayer is made with words (‘to pray is to speak’, writes Thomas Aquinas) : it’s a request, which addresses someone. Meditation is made in silence ; it addresses no-one and asks for nothing. Morally, on the other hand, all traditions converge on what is essential : all place generosity higher than egoism, sincerity higher than lying ; courage higher than cowardice, gentleness and compassion higher than violence and cruelty, love higher than hate…these values, often born in the great religions, are firstly human. We need them to live together without harming ourselves too much. It’s not because they had been decreed by God that they are good. It’s because they are good that it’s possible to believe that they are of divine origin. For my part, I rather see in them a legacy of history which it’s important to preserve. It’s a question of not being unworthy of what humanity has made of itself, and of us!
What about society : can it dispense with religion?
If you take the word ‘religion’ in a limited sense, as belief in a creator God, personal and transcendent, then the answer is clearly yes : immense civilisations have prospered without imagining such a thing. On the other hand, no society can dispense with faithfulness, rules, traditions, rites. None can subsist without a form of communion. Is religious practice even alone in playing this role? Experience proves the contrary. One can also be united in a certain number of common values (liberty, equality, fraternity, justice, love…) including when one considers them exclusively human.
Can this lay spirituality transform itself into a religion of ‘Man’, of ‘The Republic’?
When you don’t believe in God, you can be tempted to replace him by something else which takes his place. It’s a danger, in my eyes, more than an opportunity. Marxism has been depicted as a ‘religion of history’. That’s its messianic component : the proletariat takes the place of the Messiah, communism the place of paradise…I see in this an idolatry of history. Simone Weil has said it well : ‘If you believe you have a Father down here, it’s a false God ; even if monotheist, you are idolatrous’. Idols are legion : the state with Hegel, man with Feuerbach, history with Marx, the Republic, perhaps with some…on the contrary, the greatness of monotheism is to have invented transcendence. The gods have left : there only remains, said Alain, immense absence, present everywhere. It’s a progress which we owe to Judaism. I have no nostalgia for animism or polytheism, quite to the contrary, and hardly any taste for idols!
Does this explain the development of lay ritual?
The strong trend, since the Enlightenment, is a progression of atheism – including, for several years now, in North America. But we need ritual. When we are confronted by the death of someone close, you have to say that purely civil funerals have almost something poor and flat about them, like a copy which wouldn’t be able to make one forget the original. Perhaps it’s a question of time ; you don’t replace 2000 years of the imaginary in a flash..religious ceremony allows horror to be tamed : you don’t bury a man like a beast : you don’t burn him like a log. Atheists are looking for equivalents, with varying degrees of success. Civil marriage, when it’s not botched up, seems today to offer an acceptable substitute. It allows us to officialise what is intimate, the most secret, the most savage, to include family, friends, and society…it’s another way of being united.
Finally, what difference do you make between atheist and religious spirituality
In religion, the absolute is a person, admittedly transcendent, but whom one can meet, pray to, worship. ‘God, more intimate in me than myself’ as Saint Augustine said, and higher than heaven… I distrust this loftiness which crushes everything, as I do this withdrawal into oneself which locks us into internality. I believe more in spiritualities which open us to the world, which know no other absolute than what is real, no other infinity than nature, no other eternity than the present. This is the spirit of Epicurus, of Spinoza, of Camus, as also, so far as I have understood or seen life, the spirit of Tch’an or of Zen. It’s not a question of saving the self, but to save myself from it, to emancipate myself from it, as far as one can. The absolute isn’t the end of the road, but the road itself. Spirituality is this pathway, that you see more often from the perspective of the time, otherwise stated as daily life, with its highs and lows, and which we sometimes get to experience, as Spinoza says sub specie aeternitatis (from the perspective of eternity).
You even defend a certain mysticism ; in what way is this not religious?
Because it doesn’t presume any transcendence, any dogma, any worship, any faith, any hope. It has happened to me – sometimes, rarely – to experience what is called today ‘modified states of consciousness’ : the sudden encounter with mystery and with evidence, an experience of fullness, of simplicity, of unity, of silence, of eternity, of serenity, of acceptance (but joyful, so joyful!), like an infinite peace…it’s what Freud, citing Romain Rolland, calls ‘the oceanic feeling’ which millions of people, believing or not, have felt. I am part of this, and I’ve never experienced anything as strong, nor as happy. Then ‘we feel and we experience that we are eternal’, as Spinoza says, or more that the present and eternity are one and the same thing, like samsara and nirvana in Nagarjuna. One is no longer separated from reality by self : there is no more than everything. Kojève affirms that ‘all authentic mystery is in fact more or less atheist’. I wouldn’t go that far. What I can testify, on the other hand, is that an atheist is not obliged to castrate his soul : his spirit, as much as any other, is capable of opening joyfully, up to the extreme point where it culminates in abolishing itself.