28) Conflitos laicismo-religiao na Europa, da Revolução Francesa à Primeira Guerra Mundial

EARTHLY POWERS
The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe From the French Revolution to the Great War.
By Michael Burleigh.
Illustrated. 530 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $29.95.

Godless Europe
Review by MARK LILLA
The New York Times, Book Review, April 2, 2006

Among the many stories Europeans tell about themselves, none is more tenacious than the legend of Europe's secularization. It goes something like this. After many dark centuries of cultural backwardness and political tyranny sanctified by Roman Catholicism, followed by a period of maniacal confessional conflict set off by the Protestant Reformation, Europe in the 17th century began a slow but steady exit from religion. By the 18th century the leading lights of the Enlightenment had issued a public declaration of independence from God and his priests, which then became a battle plan for the war of attrition against religion that began with the French Revolution.

The outcome of this conflict was settled from the start, and already in the early 19th century the center of gravity in European life had shifted from problems of faith to those of class, industrialization, urbanization, nationalism and colonialism. The "long" 19th century, from the French Revolution to World War I, culminated in a crisis involving all these new factors, and the result was total war in the 20th. After this catastrophe, Europe was divided geographically and ideologically, but still unified in believing that the challenge of religion was over. Since World War II, Europeans have stared in blank amazement across the Atlantic at a new global power whose citizens and even leaders seem to believe myths about the old bearded man in the sky. They call this American "exceptionalism," on the assumption that living without God is the ultimate destiny of the human race.

Things change. Today we can be forgiven for thinking that Europe, not the United States, is the exception. Wherever we now cast our gaze around the globe, we are met with the spectacle of individuals and whole cultures set spiritually ablaze, and eager to spread the flame to others. The Old World is different: though Christian belief remains strong in some European countries, like Poland, and Islam is a potent force among Muslims across the Continent, contemporary Europe is the closest thing to a godless civilization the world has ever known. Does this place it in the vanguard of world history? That is what many Europeans think, which is why they have been caught off guard by the challenge of radical Islam even in their own backyard. They find it hard to believe that people can still take God seriously and want to shape society according to his dictates.

Yet it was not so long ago that the problem of religion was central to European intellectual and political life, too. Contrary to the legend of steady secularization, 19th-century Europe was seriously divided over the problem, though in a new way. While 19th-century Protestant America was searching for God by immersing itself in the Bible, experiencing one Great Awakening after another, Europe entered an age of anxiety over the prospect of living in a disenchanted cosmos. Was modern man progressively recovering the powers he once projected onto gods, building for himself a fully human world? Or was religion going to re-emerge from the challenge of modernity like a phoenix from the fire, purified by rational analysis of its moral doctrines and shorn of its myths by sound historical scholarship? Did the disappearance of old forms of worship mean the destruction of traditional social bonds, foreshadowing a dark, atomized future? Or was it mere prelude to the founding of a new kind of religion animating a new kind of society, a utopia in which human beings would finally be reconciled to themselves and with one another? These were the great questions haunting the European mind throughout the 19th century, questions that have returned to haunt us now.

As Michael Burleigh disarmingly admits in the introduction to "Earthly Powers," he tripped across these questions while hunting other game. Burleigh is an accomplished popular historian specializing in Germany, and is the author of the award-winning book "The Third Reich: A New History" (2000). In this work he casts his net more widely over the whole of Western Europe in the long 19th century. As he states in the introduction, he set out to write a study of totalitarianism as the continuation of modern attempts to reshape human nature through what he calls "political religion," beginning in the civic cults and festivals instituted in postrevolutionary France. What opened up instead was the whole rich landscape of 19th-century religious and political thought, to which he has now devoted an entire volume. An earlier generation of intellectual historians writing after World War II — Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Talmon, Frank Manuel, Paul Bénichou — shared Burleigh's intuition that the seeds of Europe's collapse in the 20th century were planted in this landscape. His book is not in their league, relying more on secondary reading than on firsthand familiarity with the most important figures of the period. It is also a surprisingly messy work with no clear thesis to advance, lazily written in patches and in dire need of editing. Still, it is a useful contribution in the present moment, reminding us about some forgotten thinkers who were grappling with remarkably contemporary problems.

"Earthly Powers" begins with a potted history of the French Enlightenment attack on religion and the bloody suppression of the church by the Jacobins after the revolution. There is little new here and it is curious that Burleigh, who resides in England and is an expert on Germany, does not complicate the picture by reminding readers how very different was the approach to religion in the British and German Enlightenments. But he is right to see radical French atheism setting the stage for the drama that unfolded just after the revolution, when the Jacobins went to war against Catholicism, destroying churches, imprisoning priests and nuns or sending them into exile, and brutally suppressing spontaneous Catholic uprisings that took place across France. Yet it turned out the Jacobins were not opposed to religion as such, just to the Catholicism that had sanctified centuries of tyranny. Having studied Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Social Contract," they were convinced that a strong republic would need some sort of civil religion to establish a spirit of self-sacrifice and belonging, and so they tried to create one, organizing public festivals modeled on pagan cults and remaking the calendar. Burleigh, like so many historians today, sees in these Promethean efforts a premonition of the theatrical mass meetings of the 20th-century Bolsheviks, Fascists and Nazis.

The French Revolution, then, raised two specters simultaneously across the whole of Europe: of a world without religion, and a world with new, improved religions. Both outcomes are consistent with the ambiguous term "secularization." Sometimes the word is used to describe a process of laicization: when a court system, for example, moves from enforcing biblical injunctions to enforcing laws passed by a parliament after public debate, we say it has been secularized. But sometimes we use the word to describe a supposed transfer of religious essence from a divine object to a human one, as when a nation's founder is worshiped as a "secular" god. (Think of Mao in the Yangtze River, or Lenin's tomb.) Burleigh never makes clear whether he thinks Europe was secularized in the first sense, the second or both — though, to be fair, neither did the authors he discusses. Instead, like trauma victims, they kept returning to the French Revolution as the source of all their hopes and fears. It became an enormous screen upon which all sorts of fantasies about religion and politics could be projected.

Three classes of fantasies appear in the rich material collected in "Earthly Powers." One, perhaps the most familiar to us and most current in Europe today, was that religious sentiments would progressively atrophy in a democratic world of equal citizens, free scientific inquiry and public education. When this proved not to be the case, secular forces in France's Third Republic and Bismarck's Germany took matters into their own hands by trying to drive every last vestige of the Catholic heritage out of the educational establishments, leaving scars that can still be seen in the body politic. As the German proverb has it, was soll nicht sein, kann nicht sein: what should not be, cannot be.

A second fantasy, also consistent with the proverb, was of a return to Catholic orthodoxy, to the secure realm of church doctrine that the Reformation had weakened and the revolutionaries had tried to destroy. This essentially was the Vatican's policy throughout much of the 19th century, particularly under the reign of Pope Pius IX, who defiantly issued a syllabus of heretical modern errors, declared the novel dogma of papal infallibility and even recognized the once heterodox doctrine of the Virgin Mary's Immaculate Conception. To the extent that there was a "clash of religion and politics in Europe," as Burleigh's subtitle has it, it was conducted by men and women in the grip of these two fantasies.

But a third, and far more consequential, fantasy was being nurtured throughout the 19th century. It portrayed the French Revolution as a kind of fortunate fall or lucky break, a destructive act that swept away all that was irrational, unjust, backward-looking and alienating in Christianity, in order to prepare a renewal of religion in a world aborning. This dream was attractive because it combined realism and idealism in equal measure, accepting the revolution as a fait accompli but seeing in it the promise of redemption through some kind of spiritual rebirth. In Germany this hope was expressed in genteel form by the liberal Protestant theologians, beginning with Friedrich Schleiermacher, who was both a fan of the revolution and something of a German nationalist. Schleiermacher tried to put theology on a new footing by beginning not with divine revelation but with the human religious instinct, from which he derived all the central dogmas of Protestant Christianity. This humanistic reform of theology was seen by his disciples as the intellectual correlate of the political reforms of the postrevolutionary period, raising the prospect of a concordat between Protestantism and modernity. (A similar dream was hatched in Reform Judaism, which Burleigh does not mention.) In other words, a rationally purified biblical faith would jettison old beliefs in miracles and the Bible's literal truth, allowing it to become the civil faith of the bourgeois German state. This proved to be a powerful myth that turned many a Protestant minister into a blinkered German nationalist, contributing in no small measure to the catastrophe of World War I.

But it was in France that the most radical alternatives were explored, in thought and deed. And the most radical thinkers of all were . . . the reactionaries. Revolutions are thrilling events and revolutionaries are exciting to write about (which is why so many books are written about them). Reaction, on the other hand, is an amorphous phenomenon, and those who promote it are, by present-day standards, unsavory. Yet the truth is that some of the deepest minds of the 19th century were those who reacted most forcefully against the revolutionary tide. In intellectual life as in political affairs, defeat concentrates the mind and brings out a boldness that victory rarely elicits; the defeated have nothing to lose. And so it was with the French counterrevolutionaries, who thought they had witnessed an apocalypse.

The most profound of these was undoubtedly the Savoyard writer and diplomat Joseph de Maistre, who welcomed the revolution and the terror as works of divine providence. Europe, he believed, was being prepared for a new religious epoch in which it would be ruled with an iron hand by sovereign popes standing above restored national monarchies. In his last work, the eerie "Saint Petersburg Dialogues," he developed a dark vision of political life as having its foundation in bloody religious rituals, war and cruelty, all used by God to forge strong nations and achieve his providential aims.

As Isaiah Berlin often pointed out, Maistre's 19th-century books read like a syllabus of 20th-century fascist ideas. But his fundamental insights — that political life rests on a religious foundation, that human relations are shaped by ritual, that individualism is a disease — first found their echo among leftist French utopians like Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and then Auguste Comte. The utopians did not believe in God but they very much believed in religion. That is the truly novel development in the 19th century, and one that Burleigh never manages to bring into focus: the less people talked and worried about God, the more they talked and worried about religion. For the utopians, the revolution's defeat of the Catholic Church represented an enormous step forward for the human race, but also posed an unprecedented challenge. Once men thought themselves free from God they might think themselves free from one another, like elementary particles floating in the void. What modern, postrevolutionary society needed was a new religion, or a surrogate one, a system of symbols and ceremonies bringing individuals together without reference to a revealing, transcendent God.

And so the utopians took out their rulers and compasses and set to work. Saint-Simon imagined the creation of an autocratic technocracy run by industrialists and bureaucrats, and maintained as an organic whole by a new religion of reason. Some of his followers formed a commune outside Paris, where they wore special uniforms and performed secret rites. Comte wrote pamphlet after pamphlet laying out a new "positive" system for society, which would include a "religion of humanity," complete with ceremonies, saints and high holy days. As for the unstable Fourier, he scribbled and drew up an extraordinarily detailed vision of a future world where we would live in small, communal "phalanstaries," sharing work, art, property and sexual partners, brought into harmony by the precise redirection of our passions and the worship of our collective selves. (In the late 1960's, his writings were rediscovered and experienced quite a vogue among students worldwide.)

Burleigh does a marvelous job profiling these colorful characters while still managing to convey the historical importance of their ideas. He also sees how their daydreams about using religion instrumentally to foster social identification took a nightmarish turn at the end of the century when they fell into the hands of rabid nationalists like the French writer Charles Maurras and the German scholar Paul de Lagarde. Here we really are in the presence of the proto-totalitarian political religions Burleigh originally set off to find. But from the material he has collected, they seem less "secularized" versions of genuine faith than products of an obsession with the implications of religion's decline.

At several points in his narrative Burleigh reminds us of Matthew Arnold's lines from "Dover Beach":

The Sea of Faith,
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

It is a powerful image, powerfully expressed. But after reading "Earthly Powers," one can't help wondering what it really means. Was the Sea of Faith ever that full? And is it really destined to retreat from the earth? Or is the melancholy simply that of Arnold and like-minded thinkers as they projected onto the religious history of Europe anxieties about the modern age they found themselves in? Nostalgia, like hope, is a subtle but explosive force in human history, and in modern Europe it has been largely destructive. A "world we have lost" is usually one we never had but which its discoverers would like to create. That is where religion can come in: not as a path to God, but as a dike against the present and a bridge to the future.

The West as a whole, and not just Europe, faces a double political challenge from religion today. One is to realize that the world is full of peoples whose genuine faith in the divine gives them a precise, revealed blueprint for political life, which means that for the foreseeable future they will not enter into the family of liberal democratic nations. Only if we give up the fantasy of a universal historical process driving all nations toward a secular modernity can we face this fact squarely and humanely.

The other challenge is to learn how to distinguish between those whose political programs are inspired by genuine faith, and those whose defense of religion is inspired by a reactionary utopianism having less to do with God than with redirecting the faulty course of history. In radical Islam we find both phenomena today, authentic faith and antimodern fanaticism, shaken together into an explosive cocktail.

And even in the United States we are witnessing the instrumentalization of religion by those who evidently care less about our souls, or even their own, than about reversing the flow of American history since the "apocalypse" of the 60's. Michael Burleigh's book shows how difficult it was for Europe to cope with both these challenges as recently as the 19th century. It is no easier for us today.

Mark Lilla is professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His study "The Stillborn God: Religion and the Modern Experiment" will be published early next year.