The Sacred Eclipsed?

(Paul
Gottfried)
Aug 9th, 1970
by Dave Anderson.

Review of Leclipse du sacre

Alain de Benoist and Thomas Molnar
Paris: La Talle Ronde, 1986, 247 pp.
This book is a series of discussions between two religious thinkers with shared cultural
concerns. Thomas Molnar and Alain de Benoist have both written extensively on the
problem of secularization in the modern West.
The attempts by modern states to recognize secularism as a public philosophy and to
distance themselves from the symbols of traditional theistic religion represent a
striking departure from earlier human history. Almost all past societies, even those few
that prohibited the establishment of a national religion, encouraged public displays of
religious beliefs. The United States until the 1950s impressed foreign visitors, such as
the French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville, as a land that combined religious freedom
and pervasive public piety.
Against the tendency toward approved manifestations of piety, a militant secularism
has asserted itself in the form of opposition to, for example, nondenominational public
school prayer (even silent meditations are disallowed as a form of public school prayer)
or public funding of activities associated with religious bodies. The attempt to
dissociate religious belief from the polity has behind it influential supporters from
members of the Supreme Court and Congress through the media and universities down
to teachers unions. This militant secularism has a clear precedent in the anticlerical
Third Republic in France, which strove to eradicate French Catholicism in the opening
years of the twentieth century. The culminating point of raising secularism to the level
of public philosophy can be found, of course, in communist countries where atheism
and scientific materialism have become hallowed state teachings.
Molnar and Benoist each stress the unprecedented and problematic aspects of
governments and societies suppressing the public expression of religious sentiment.
They also speculate about the future of our non-religious society. Molnar argues that
because of the constancy of human spiritual needs, even secularism must eventually
resemble a religion or yield to a real faith; Benoist, however, believes that the sense of
the sacred has already departed from our culture.
It may be useful to note that these two thinkers start from dramatically different
premises about religion and culture in the West. Molnar is a traditionalist Catholic who
deplores the modernizing tendencies in the church and who even now speaks of Martin
Luther with a frisson dhorreur.

Christianity and Atheism

Benoist, by contrast, is a critic of what he calls judeochristianisme, the monotheistic
assumptions and ethical prescriptions that have informed Western thought since the

Middle Ages. Identifying himself as a neo-pagan, Benoist has described Christianity

and atheism as two sides of the same coin. The biblical reductionism by which all
natural and historical phenomena were traced back to a single divine principle left the
world without mystery. The view that there is a single divine author of the world, who
stands over against it and demands human obedience to his will, caused nature to
become desacralized. The cosmic point of gravity in the post-pagan West was no longer
the relationship between men and nature or their ancient sacred cities but between the
Creator and mankind. As long as men fulfilled the divine commandments imposed on
them, they would enjoy divine favor and exercise mastery over nature.
Atheism, as Benoist sees it, represents an exaggeration of certain Judeo-Christian
ideas committed at the expense of others. Atheists draw from the Judeo-Christian
cosmology its desacralized view of nature, and even their customary veneration of
scientific laws is derived from a theology that stresses the objectivity of the universe as
the product of a self-revealing Creator. The biblical God and his followers are intended
to rule nature without being parts of it, and the achievement of Western atheism is to
dislodge God from his throne to put us in his place and to attempt to construct
mimetically a relationship to the world analogous to Gods relationship with creation.
Atheism is the flattery of imitation that post-Christian man pays to a transcendent
deity who orders and regulates a world of his own making.

A Cat-and-mouse Game
There is an element of truth in many of Benoists statements, and the presence of that
element makes it hard for Molnar to trap him in what often seems a cat-and-mouse
game. For example, Benoist is justified in insisting on the necessary connection
between, on the one side, atheism, socialism, and millenialist ideology, all elements of
Marxism and, on the other, Judeo-Christian culture. Modernist and postmodernist
trends did not emerge out of a cultural vacuum. Nor would they today be so
widespread among the educational and political elites unless they had a wellestablished, historical foundation. Benoist finds that certain contemporary ideologies
have roots in the Bible: modern nationalism in the Old Testament, modern
egalitarianism/universalism in the New Testament, and political millennialism in both
Testaments. Unfortunately, he exaggerates these connections. The Bible does not
provide a sufficient explanation for modern ideologies that developed thousands of
years after the Bible was written. Since ancient times, devout Christians and Jews have
believed in a biblical God without turning into secularists. Benoist is provocative when
he describes the early church as the Bolshevism of antiquity. Yet, though primitive
Christians held possessions in common and defended the spiritual dignity of slaves,
they did not claim to be either scientific materialists or social revolutionaries. Nor were
they as globalist as the Roman Empire, which persecuted Christians and Jews and
imposed emperor worship on all its subject peoples.

Hebraic and Classical Traditions

In trying to deal with Benoists presentation, particularly in the last section, which
contains questions and answers from participants, Molnar stresses the value-relativity
and pantheism in Benoists neo-paganism. But Benoist proves an elusive target. He
manages to counterattack by accusing the biblical God of alienating men from nature,
of generating moral fanaticism, and of driving his followers into ceaseless crusades to
change the world in his image. Molnar asks one particularly sharp question about the
mechanical nature of ritual piety in the Greco-Roman world. What made a sacrifice
suitable (hieroprepes), as opposed to unsuitable (memiasmenon), was largely

unrelated to the attitude or intention of the celebrant. The gods were believed to
respond to the ritual itself, independently of the worshippers virtues or vices. Benoist
might have responded by pointing out the similarity between the Greco-Roman attitude
toward sacrifices and the one suggested in Leviticus. Although in the Greco-Roman
world sacrifices was mainly an external affair, the Hebrews, no less than the Greeks,
thought that performing ritual sacrifices without the prescribed procedure was both
wicked and dangerous. Benoist might also have pointed to the rules that govern
Christian sacraments, particularly in the Roman and Orthodox communions. Here, too,
the efficacy of a particular ritual depends upon the manner in which it is done. The
violation of the proper procedure affects the validity of sacraments, no matter how
well-meaning the participant may be.
Significantly, Benoist makes no such comparison between pagan and Judeo-Christian
religions. He is determined to underscore their absolute difference and therefore
ignores any points of contact between them. Benoist makes much of the presumed
difference between the biblical concept of fearing God (yeras hashamaim) and the
Hellenic sense of feeling awe (hazamenos) before divine mystery. But the Hebrew word
for fear, yerah, can also signify reverence, while the Greek verb hazesthai means to
dread ones parents or the gods as well as to stand in awe. Some obvious ethical and
theological overlaps exist between the Classical and Hebraic traditions.
I believe that Molnar and Benoist both recognize these overlaps. Their contributions
reveal that they are immensely learned in philosophy and the study of comparative
religions. In battling with each other, they marshal staggering amounts of erudition
drawn from entire lifetimes of reading. Unlike most American intellectuals, they believe
that matters of the soul count for more than public policy issues. I tip my hat to both
debaters and commend them for discussing the truly permanent things.
All the same, a debating format is not always the best instrument for examining
scholarly positions. Sometimes, in the heat of battle, the participants blur or
exaggerate what in less bellicose circumstances would be presented with greater care.
This is particularly true of Benoist. Still, Molnar tries too hard to play his assigned role,
assuming a militant Catholic stance a bit too often instead of displaying his sound
knowledge of Classical civilization. He depicts primarily an ancient world that was
mired in animistic superstition. But surely Molnar knows (I have no doubt that he does)
that Greco-Roman religion inculcated reverence for ones city and ones ancestors and,
as the French historian Fustel de Coulanges showed more than a century ago,
contributed significantly to civic virtue and martial valor. The image that I find in
Molnars presentation of pagan society is at best a fragmentary picture of Classical
civilization. In other, less polemical circumstances, Molnar would likely be as skeptical
of it as I am.
Despite these objections, the debat dialogue between Molnar and Benoist makes for
exciting reading. One may hope that sometime in the future university students in
religion and philosophy will be encouraged to examine and think about this book.
Having to read it may be for them an education in itself.

Paul Gottfried is a senior editor of the Modern Thought section of The World & I
and author of The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American
Right.

[The World and I (New York), December, 1986]

http://www.amerika.org/texts/the-sacred-eclipsed-paul-gottfried/