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While rumors of God's death have been greatly exaggerated in modern times, few deny that Western history has witnessed epochal changes in the social locus and function of religion. Today these changes are reflexively understood as a passage from "Christendom" to "modernity." The latter generally distresses Christians and other religious folk, even as they recognize that "Christendom," with its capacity for crusades and witch trials, fell deplorably short of the kingdom of God.
Since no shortage of commentary has accompanied this momentous passage, I was skeptical that Gauchet's volume would state something not already found in the voluminous literature on "secularization" or in the writings of classic secularization theorists like Comte, Durkheim, or Weber. As the title indicates, the book is certainly indebted to such predecessors, but it transcends them in significant ways; for while Gauchet, an avowed atheist, is convinced that "the religious" has reached the end of its line, he also wants to persuade his readers that religion is the heart and soul of Western culture, even in our religiously deracinated (post) modern age. In particular, he argues that one must recognize the "unusual dynamic potentialities" of Western monotheism, and especially the Christian idea of Incarnation, in order to comprehend the genesis and character of modern secular political culture.
A welcome peculiarity in an age of specialization, the book can only be described as intellectual history of the most speculative, Hegelian sort. Generalizations, profunditites, and obfuscations lie together, embedded in prose as formidable as that of The Phenomenology of Spirit.
Gauchet's book is divided into two parts. In part 1, "The Metamorphoses of the Divine: The Origin, Meaning, and Development of the Religious," he attempts a general definition of religion and proceeds to trace the emergence of the distinctive features of Western monotheism from a primordial religious past. Throughout, he argues against "the idea of religious development," the notion—dear to nineteenth-century liberal Protestants—that the Western religious spirit had progressively advanced from time immemorial to the present, purifying itself from superstition and ignorance along the way. In stead, Gauchet asserts that "religion's most complete and systematic form is its initial one; later transformations … progressively call the religious into question." The essence of the religious in its "pure" form, Gauchet contends, is an "antihistorical frame of mind" and "an absolute dependence on the mythical past." In this state, no distinction exists between human social sphere and the divine. There is one inviolable sacred cosmos, hierarchically arranged, with no sense of divinity's otherness.
A distinction between the social sphere and divinity appears because of the emergence of the State, the "City of Man" in Augustine's terminology. While Gauchet unfortunately does not propose exactly how or why ancient states emerged, he is convinced of their absolute importance for reshaping humankind's relations to the divine: "The State ushers in the age of opposition between social structure and the essence of the religious. Political dominion, which decisively entangles the gods in history, will prove to be the invisible hoist lifting us out of the religious."
The development of Hebrew monotheism (and later Christianity) represents for Gauchet the most pronounced case of the split between heaven and earth wrought by the State. A radical dualism replaces the primeval unity of the cosmos: God is now "above," human beings "below." Gauchet labels this "ontological duality" and sees its emergence as constituting a "revolution in transcendence," which contains, in embryo, the modern secular understanding of the world, an understanding based not on unity and hierarchy but on human self-reliance and equality: "the end result of ontological duality [will be] the restoration of the social bond to human control, an achievement unique to western history. This history is religious to the core." In short, "ontological duality," precipitated by the establishment of state power and developed best in Judaism, is the most momentous cultural legacy handed down to Christianity.
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