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Why, you might wonder, have I decided to deal today with “Christianity”? What more have we to do with it? I believe it’s important at present to take the trouble, to stop evading the question, because it is a fertile one: not for cultural identity (is Europe “Christian”?) but for culture, and especially for philosophy, which is the matter at hand. The eras of Christianity’s dominance and subsequent denunciation are behind us, and the era of its banishment upon us. It is high time to review what Christianity has caused to advene¹ in thought. What possibilities of the mind has it contributed, or buried? That is my reason. Because it needs doing. Even if, having spent so much time among the Greeks and the Chinese, I am perhaps not ideally suited to the task. Perhaps the risk is worthwhile for me precisely because I take an external perspective, because I am further removed from the vassal’s position.

I believe the time has come to stop evading the question of Christianity in contemporary thought. The very idea of “Europe,” bound up as it is in that history, stands to gain. We in present-day Europe must determine what Christianity has contributed, transformed, discovered, or covered up in thought. We must determine what lies totalized (labeled) in the -ity of Christianity, which we see couched amid so many other -ities and -isms. I say evading [évitement] because the astonishing, even aberrant, affair known as Christianity is, in an ambient manner, a collective embarrassment to us. There is no denying this. We would like to see it over and done with, filed away. We would like to believe it to be a historical matter. And so we tacitly skirt the issue. But can we be rid of it? From Lacan to Mitterrand, a Mass is, in fine, perhaps not out of the question. . . . Even as we bother with so many false questions – questions that no longer deserve the name, questions that we keep alive in artificial debates – we shut our eyes to the matter of genuine import in this troubling heritage of ours. Officially declaring our society to be secular has hardly unburdened us of Christianity, that “thing” we now find so difficult to grasp. Though a massive majority of us no longer “believes” – or, at any rate, no longer “practices” (there are so many passive Christians) – we have hardly obliterated Christianity’s imprint from our thought. We know this, of course, but how deeply do we wish to know it? Even if all that remained were a relic, we would still have to wonder what part of Christianity we could not get past. I wonder, in fact, if this evasion doesn’t extend into the Church itself, more comfortable now with ecology and humanitarianism than with the question I do not see being asked: What has Christianity done to thought?

Needless to say, I will not enter into the matter of Christianity with the traditional question: to “believe” or not. “He who believed in heaven / He who did not”² seems to me a somewhat outmoded dilemma. I will not first delve into Christianity from the standpoint of “faith.” Even the question whether “God” exists seems to me to have run its course. Though still of interest for the history of thought, it has bogged down completely. Perhaps it will recover some of its relevance later on, in some other configuration of the mind, but for present-day thought it is a dead issue, with no further effect. Christian philosophers themselves, drawing a lesson from Kant, have shown that all imaginable proofs for the existence of God lead nowhere. Christianity has no use for the crutch of demonstration. That said, neither will I seek refuge in the history of thought, a field in which I have no competence. Nor, more generally, will I consider Christianity from the scholarly, remote, disinterested perspective of the social sciences. Such exteriority no longer stands in relation to its cultural tradition. It stems from an adopted “objective” position, and would necessarily quash whatever existential gain I might draw from Christianity’s thought. To explore such potential gain we must enter into Christianity’s thought – but does “entering into” mean adherence? How, then, can we develop a philosophy that is no longer Christian per se – as honorable as such philosophy is, thanks to many great names (Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and, today in France, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Michel Henry) – but is instead a philosophy of Christianity? A philosophy whose perspective is not the traditional one of apologetics and criticism, defense and denunciation? After all, we have before us a question that does not run through the rift and concerns us all equally: do the coherences of Christianity, the mostly paradoxical coherences, still have a use in thought, especially in the thought of existence? In other words, how might they remain pertinent if, in fact, we are no longer required to believe?

A quick doubling-back to warn of paths that I will not follow. There are at least three, forming a triangle. First off, to undertake a philosophy of Christianity is not to subject it to philosophical reason, or to bend it to reason’s criteria. Nor is it to reduce Christianity to the most reasonable, or most acceptable, moral content. This would reduce Scripture to the most elementary of teachings, for purely practical use. Christianity’s sole article of faith would then be “obeisance out of love for thy neighbor,” its sole credo that “there exists a supreme being that loves justice and charity” (Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise). It is one thing to take faith and boil it down to its supposed minimal content, like Spinoza, and thereby forsake what might be the most singular and inventive aspects of Christian teaching. It is another to enter into Christian thinking, as I am proposing to do, without first passing through faith, and by the same token without losing – in the manner of a minimalist (rationalist) reduction – what are potentially the most daring, and therefore most fertile, aspects of its conception. It is true that Spinoza, even as he undertook his rationalization, thought it necessary to conduct a rigorous, linguistically and historically buttressed, exegesis, so as to judge the texts’ authority critically, with a focus on “meaning” instead of “truth.” Already with Spinoza, then, we have a promising start. He opened the way to jettisoning the traditional, preliminary criterion of belief.

At the same time, a philosophy of Christianity needn’t run counter to Spinozism, serving as its flipside, and give up the cause of reason. It needn’t illustrate Christianity by invoking the poetry or the bigger soul³ it has brought to the human experience (like Chateaubriand in The Genius of Christianity). The “soul” would never be content with an explanation, which will always come up short. It would cry out for “mystery”: “The most marvelous sentiments are those that stir a certain confusion in us.” This facile binary, in which the “vagueness” of the religious offsets the rigor of science, is suspect by its very convenience. The peal of evening bells in the countryside (or the Latin chants of the Church, or the paintings of Fra Angelico, etc.) might indeed convey emotion, but before drawing an argument from this we must declare what makes it religiously specific. The Christian religion, says Chateaubriand, has tended the “secret,” developed a “sense of the sacred,” but couldn’t we say the same of many other religions? And, in praising Christianity by comparison, we would fall, as Chateaubriand inevitably falls, into the trap of ethnocentrism. As we now know, the way of comparison with other religions leads nowhere. It rests entirely on ignorance of other cultures or, worse, on contempt for the Other, who serves only as the negative of his own affirmation. “The Romans,” says Chateaubriand, “were a horrible people.” This eulogy a contrario holds up only inasmuch as we enter into one coherence rather than the other – the comparison is justified only from within the extolled religion. Chateaubriand, partaking of the nascent Romanticism, did indeed begin to develop the concept of modernity. He also brought out the subjectivity that was effectively being promoted in Christianity. But what religion anywhere in the world lacks its own “genius”?

The inverse path, doubling back to Spinozism, albeit from a different angle, is the path of demystification. Here, rather than extoll Christianity, we must denounce Christianity’s “mystery.” We must reveal its illusion, and to do that we must reduce it to its “essence” (Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity). Spilling over the “national” framework and ethnic limits of the God of Israel, the nature of Christianity, says Feuerbach, has been to raise human aspiration, perceived in its universality, to the heights of the absolute. In other words, Feuerbach established the primacy of the subjective (sentiment: das Gemüt) over objectivity (as determined by science), to the point of reducing the one to the other. In still other words, he took the satisfaction of subjective (affective) needs and objectified them in God. This betokens the triumph of “love” over the “law” – whether nature’s or society’s. God is he who “says yes” to my wishes, impossible as they might be. This is why in Feuerbach’s eyes Christian faith amounts to belief in miracles. God can grant my aspiration, even if it contravenes the necessity of nature (death). In Christianity desire is elevated [exhaussé], as well as fulfilled [exaucé], until it transmutes into the most intimate certainty – becoming unconditional – of awareness [conscience]. Even if the fulfillment contradicts our understanding, or the facts of experience, and brings us up against the “unthinkable” (undenkbar). The fulfillment occurs instantly, meeting with no resistance from the world and requiring no patient effort of knowledge, for a miracle is “as rapid as a wish is impatient,”⁴ but what could it be if not a fiction where we mistake our desires for reality? What could it be if not the production and projection of an imagination that dreams as it likes of happiness, and never works towards it?

Freud takes things no further (in The Future of an Illusion). All our “anti-theology” textbooks rehash the same arguments. But can we leave it at that? What has Feuerbach’s analysis, though apt and even elucidating, been compelled to overlook? What has its initial choice forced it unwittingly to leave aside? Christianity might indeed have promoted subjectivity, but it remains to be seen whether we should understand its particular notion of the “subjective” as the correlate of the objective in science’s determination. It remains to be seen whether we have, on principle, come to misapprehend subjectivity inasmuch as Christianity has revealed it not to respond to objectivity, inasmuch as Christianity has, in advance, left their pairing in suspense and, as it were, imperfect. If we set the miracle, the prodigy that contravenes reason (water changed to wine at Cana), at the core of Christian faith, then what are we to make of the fact that such a prodigy is referred to explicitly not as a “miracle” (Wunder) but as a “sign” (sēmeîon, σημεῖον, in Greek)? It is others who demand prodigy-miracles (terata, τέρατα); Christ, for his part, produces signs (cf. John 4:48 ).⁵ Doesn’t the substitution of sign for miracle produce an immediate shift in thought, directing it towards something else (other than thaumaturgy)? Moreover, in viewing it strictly from the perspective of non-contradiction, like Feuerbach, do we not immediately close reason off from paradox, the very thing to which Christianity has so powerfully contributed, the very thing whose intelligence Christianity has deployed? Indeed, can the positing of God as the objectification of desire obscure what Christianity, following in Judaism’s wake, invites us to discover, under the figure of God, as the encounter with the Other? Though a bit too quick to dispense with the question of the “world” – of its consistency, and thus also of its resistance to desire – Christian thought on the matter of subjectivity has an essential link with alterity, which itself compels an effective spilling-over from the world [fait effectivement déborder du monde].

That Christianity might be an entirely human production does not account for the entirety of its import. That its content might in fact be “anthropological,” as Feuerbach says, should not lead us to overlook what it has promoted and invented in man. For the term essence in The Essence of Christianity rightly has another use. Not only does it speak to the specificity of Christianity, it more importantly, more radically, serves to define the religion as “the relation of man to his own nature [i.e., essence]⁶.” Therein lies its truth. But Christianity, adds Feuerbach, recognizes man’s essence not as his own but as that of another, extant in itself (“God”), separate from man, and even standing in opposition to him. And therein lies its falsity. In this respect religion is, as Marx would say, “alienating.” But in rendering this judgment – that is, in bringing the “celestial” down to the earth of anthropology – must we necessarily restrict man’s “essence” to a particular fixed content, to a fixable content? Must we thereby forget that “man” is a creature in midbecoming – or, better yet, mid-advent? For man is ceaselessly detaching from himself, precisely to make himself other. Therein lies his capacity to abide outside of himself [se tenir hors de soi] and properly “ex-ist.” Even from a strictly human perspective, hasn’t Christianity opened new possibilities unto man (opened them in man)? We cannot be content, like Feuerbach, with an explanation of Christianity as a phenomenon, as every explanation is reductive, and we will risk failing to see the exploratory and effectively productive aspects within Christianity. Baldly stated, my question here is as follows: is Christianity’s productive capacity – what lays within its power to develop within man – now exhausted?

I will steer clear, then, of these three well-trodden paths, all leading through the sole plain of belief. I will guard against bringing Christianity into the sphere of reason, which will seek to steer it towards a more generally acceptable ethical good sense – though this once had the merit of drawing Europe out of dogmatic and bloody conflicts. I will also not do the reverse and set Christianity against reason, finding justification in its aura of mystery – though this once served to emancipate subjectivity, primarily from the sclerotic rationality to which the Enlightenment had led. Finally, I will not be content to explain Christianity, and fail in my analysis of its “essence” to grasp what it might promote in terms of existence – though this too, historically, was once necessary, so that, within its exigency, the possibility of science could assert itself separately from religion. The genealogy I would point to here, if we need one, goes back through Nietzsche, paradoxically enough. Nietzsche wondered what Christianity had both perverted and refined in “man” as he had become in Europe. What had this cost in terms of Greek heroism and happiness? Moreover, what manner of abyssal interiority, what possible subjectivity, had it subsequently carved out, even in its culture of resentment towards life? Nietzsche, however, dealt in terms of “values,” counseled and even foretold against Christianity a “transvaluation of values,” Umwertung aller Werte, because values are indeed exclusive. But must we end things there, at exclusion? For this reason I will deal in terms not of “values” but of resources.