Does the death of God lead to the disappearance of holiness?
Listen and subscribe on your favorite audio platform
I’m Azilise Le Coret, I’m a journalist at Le Figaro and in this new episode of Le Moment Philo, produced by Sylvain Chatelain, we’re going to discuss Sacred Savage anthropologist and philosopher Roger Bastide.
In this work, published in 1997, Roger Bastide attempts to respond to Nietzsche’s famous formula which affirms: “God is dead.”
What is Nietzsche telling us in this formula, which may sound somewhat rhetorical? God represents the sacred, that which is revered and respected, but also that which constitutes the undisputed norm of existence.
By God, Nietzsche therefore also means the beliefs that regulate life as it is organized in the West. Nietzsche tells us that sacred “values” are in crisis and even losing their referential status.
For Bastide, social anomie and the crisis of religious institutions are indeed the cause of the death of God;
“Industrialization, developing rationalist thought – urbanization, breaking community solidarity, secular schooling, stopping religion, finally consumer society, relying on insidious mass media propaganda, directing people’s aspirations to material goods, takes; larger sections of believers from these torn Churches. »
country house
The conclusion is clear. Yet the death of God or the Gods is not the death of the Holy, for the Holy, Bastide tells us, constitutes the essential dimension of Man.
Witness, according to him, the passion of women’s magazines for astrology, the belief in healers or the abundance of esotericism in our society…
As well as ! And yes, the use of drugs especially among young people, which would be a kind of initiatory ritual, as it is in traditional societies.
Unlike the “holy householders” of the churches, man will find ways to respond to his thirst for otherness through compromises between the rationalism of our planning society and the natural desire for religion in man.
“In hippie communities with others, even when collective trance is sought, even when lying bodies are mixed together, with the unconsciousness of gestures, everyone remains alone. There is no exchange of experiences, no gifts, no counter-gifts, but a coexistence and parallelism of experiences that remain a strictly personal domain for each. »
country house
What can we conclude from this? That only household holiness is collective holiness. Collectiveness is not possible except through regulation. So only the law allows you out of savagery… I leave you to meditate.
Source: Le Figaro
