French Secularism is Dead
Europe, the God of Wine, and the Olympics opening ceremony.
A few years ago on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, I spent a few days walking alongside a Frenchman who made his living as a restorer of old buildings. One evening we ate dinner together outside, near a small church. We both stared up at the old structure; it was the most interesting thing in that little Spanish town. I couldn’t tell from which era or style the church was. It was many centuries old. Its roof and rear walls were crumbling and a new brick wall, half covered with a layer of concrete and white plaster, had been erected to keep the building intact. A necessary but ugly architectural bandaid.
“Do you see that?” the Frenchman pointed at the new wall. “In France, that would never be allowed.”
Church restorations, the Frenchman explained, were strictly regulated by the French government. You can’t build a wall like that, willy-nilly. Restoration must be faithful to the details of the era, the doctrine of design: Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, and all the mediocre syntheses in between found among hundreds of little parishes across the Republic.
The French government, in fact, owns more than 90 percent of the Catholic church buildings in France, as proscribed by the “Separation” law of 1905. That law, passed by a Socialist government, allowed the French state to seize the Church’s assets while allowing the Church to manage its day-to-day use. This might sound jarring to Americans, accustomed as we are to an idea of church-state separation that grants the church more autonomy, and tax-free status. But I recommend visiting Mont Saint-Michel or Chartres: the French state has proven to be a faithful steward of Catholic monuments, even though it sees them as just that — monuments, museums, artifacts, rather than vessels of living faith.
The Separation Law was mild compared to other things the French state has done to the Catholic Church. During the Revolution, mobs vandalized and defiled the Notre Dame cathedral. In 1793, revolutionaries converted it, and many other churches, into a “Temple of Reason,” where busts of Greek philosophers replaced statues of Christian saints. Reason, represented by an opera singer, was crowned upon a desecrated altar. Later, Robbespierre opposed the official atheism of the Cult of Reason, and retrofitted Notre Dame for his new, generic Cult of the Supreme Being. To me, though, what happened in the Basilica of Saint-Denis is even more disturbing. That church was the burial place where generations of French kings had been buried — including the remains of the first French king, Clovis. Revolutionaries trashed the place, dug up the tombs of French monarchs, and tossed their bones into a pit.
It is remarkable that a mere two hundred years later, the current president of avowedly secular France proudly pledges to restore Notre Dame “stone by stone” after the 2019 fire that toppled its spire. This is the same country which also has strict rules about wearing the hijab, the abaya, and the burkini in certain public spaces. Though some modernizing tendencies in the Notre Dame restoration efforts have caused controversy, the secular French state remains committed to faithfully restoring the cathedral to its former glory. I am not sure if my French companion thought about it in so many words, but his commitment to aesthetic correctness was not rooted in religion. It was just the right thing to do, the thing he had been trained to do by the State.
French revolutionaries sacking churches, French socialists seizing church property, French secularists committed to a highly regulated preservation of their Catholic inheritance — this is the violent and ironic backstory to the now-infamous opening ceremony of the Olympics, which offended Christians around the world. The pageant was emblematic of a twisted identity, which won’t resolve its contradictions anytime soon.
The controversial portion of the opening ceremony in the Olympics was titled La Cène Sur Un Scène Sur La Seine, a clear reference to the Last Supper. Whatever the organizers of the Olympics intended, what they achieved was a ceremony that took images from the Last Supper and combined them with those of a 19th century painting depicting the feasting pantheon of Greek gods, with Dionysus, the god of wine, at the center of the feast. In the Olympic pageant, Dionysus was the blue man who entered the banquet on a platter.
Dionysus is the god of dance and partying and artistic rebellion, Nietzsche’s model of a free spirit. He is also the god of orgies and adultery and the dismembering of animals in acts of ritual sacrifice. In Plato’s Symposium, otherwise known as The Banquet, an essential European book about love, the spirit of Dionysus enters the story late and ends it in a furious diatribe against Socrates. The book contains beautiful speeches about the glory of love, and its power to elevate our souls to the contemplation of truth and goodness — until Alcibiades (who represents the Dionysian spirit) enters the scene and blasts these high minded ideals in the name of passion. How should we interpret Dionysus crashing the Last Supper? How should we interpret the Last Supper being recast as a Dionysian party? I don’t know. I am not sure anyone knows. But it does speak, if nothing else, of a society with dried-out Christian roots with an anti-clerical past, groping for something new to say.
Blasphemy, like all forms of transgression, can be thrilling. It’s fun to do something you’re not supposed to do. It’s fun to challenge authority. Plus, in an act of blasphemy it’s not only the believers who get offended — it is also God Himself. An infinite thrill. The Olympic opening ceremony was not the first time that a European artist has performed blasphemy before a mass audience. In 1961, the great Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel mocked the Last Supper in his masterpiece, Viridiana. Just a few years ago, in an act that was much worse than what happened in the Olympics, a Spanish artist pilfered consecrated hosts from various parishes and used them to write PEDERASTIA on the floor of a gallery. But why doesn’t the fact that, at least in Europe, the institutional Catholic Church is irrelevant compel these artists to look for new targets?
The Catholic Church still haunts the European imagination — even the imagination of secular Europeans who have never attended Mass — because the Church ran the show for over a thousand years. Europe as a political project was only ever possible because Europe was united in religion. The coordinated European effort to resist Islamic advances were possible in large part because the rival monarchies of Europe shared a common faith. Many people ask — as they often do whenever the Church is mocked — “Would they have dared to make fun of Muslims instead?” Part of the answer to that question lies in the fact that Islam remains, for most Europeans, an external, foreign reality, while the Church, however decadent, bankrupt, and forgotten, is still the old boss. (Of course, much of Spain and the Balkans have deep Islamic roots as well.) Sometimes adults relive their youth by rebelling against their aging parents. It’s not enough to have been released from their paternal care, to have escaped the nest. You want to destroy the evidence, or the memory, of having depended on them in the first place. Instead, to mock Islam is to mock a stranger, or even, a guest. It’s another level of rudeness that hasn’t yet gone mainstream.
Europe can’t shake the memory the old boss. I think the Olympic ceremony shows that secular Europe does not really exist, at least not in a robust sense. If your way of offending Christ is by summoning Dionysus, then all you’re doing is replacing the new God with an older one. What would a truly secular Olympic pageant look like? Nietzsche, who dismissed nationalism as “sickliness” and called for a united Europe, signed his last book, “Dionysus against the Crucified.” But Nietzsche was not a man of the Enlightenment. He did not care about human rights or refugees or a rules-based international order. He believed in a complete overhaul of Christian and liberal values, a return to the tragic spirit of the Greeks. “Does anyone except me,” Nietzsche asks, “know of an aspiration which would be great enough to bind the people of Europe once more together?” The question is still relevant.
In 2006, the neoconservative political commentator George Weigel published a short book titled The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics without God, in which he pondered the twin sources of European identity. In it, he marvels at La Grande Arche de la Défense, a great monument to human rights built to commemorate the bicentennial of the French Revolution and the Universal Declaration of Human rights. While both are majestic though, for Weigel, the Cathedral of Notre Dame and La Grande Arch represent different worldviews. Which of the two could be better trusted to support a free society?
Which culture … would better protect human rights? Which culture would more firmly secure the moral foundations of democracy? The culture that built this stunning, rational, angular, geometrically precise but essentially featureless cube? Or the culture that produced the vaulting and bosses, the gargoyles and flying buttresses, the nooks and crannies, the asymmetries and holy “unsameness” of Notre-Dame and the other great Gothic cathedrals of Europe?
Unfortunately, Weigel’s argument is undermined by the fact that, in his view, the sign of Europe’s weakness, and French decline, was its lack of cooperation with George Bush’s War on Terror. The civilization that built Notre Dame celebrates “unsameness,” but Weigel did not abide European unsameness on American foreign policy and war. Still, his framework is compelling. What really is the “Cube”? Are its ideals still alive? Or have they disappeared like the Cult of the Supreme Being? Was its spirit on that stage during the Olympic ceremony?
I don’t think it was. Whatever was represented on that stage was something mysterious, contradictory, and — in a strange way — religious.
This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.
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Doesn’t “The Feast of the Gods” already reinterpret The Last Supper as a Dionysian party? Not as blasphemy, but as artistic reference. If so, then mere art is already a reason to do such a thing, even within the deeply Christian culture of the 17th century. The celebration of a work of art that has long been held in a French museum is then quite plausible as a reason to reference that art in a nationalistic opening ceremony.
You ask whether anyone in France would have minded about the reference. It’s a fair question — one that undercuts your point. If nobody within the milieu of the organisers would have been shocked in the first place, then it becomes much harder to believe that the thrill of blasphemy was a strong motivating factor.
Cultural referencing of a religion you don’t hold to is an odd thing, but not a new thing. After all, Europe kept doing this with Greek and Roman gods long after Christian dominance was an established fact. France still loves its culture and its past, even when it doesn’t relate to it in the same way as before. This doesn’t have to be seen as futile or insulting.
Wonderful piece santiago. I think secularism's issue has always been and always will be finding purchase beyond mere values. Establishing a cultural and emotional purchase is difficult but necessary for any set of values and stories to retain some sort of power. For all of secularism's good deeds and missteps, I struggle to see how that alone can ground a polity.