COME ON, HUMANS, ONE MORE EFFORT!very possibly somewhere beyond the religious age.’’^1 Gauchet clashes with a thesis current
among historians of religions, namely, that the religious idea has become more developed,
complex, and systematic as more and more refined religious practices and doctrines have
come into being—all stemming from a primitive religious feeling that might have been
the first existential response to the inescapable horizon of death and the earliest attempt
to explain—in order to make tolerable—the extreme destitution of people cast into the
thick of nature, whose hostility isthegreat mystery. This view of things, Gauchet suggests,
is one-sided and overlooks the element of voluntary choice in the gesture of the earliest
humans as they laid the foundations of religion. This gesture, in which Gauchet sees the
essence of religion, is a kind of pact with nature whereby people consent to a cosmic
order shot through with supernatural forces beyond their control in exchange for a stable
place in this cosmos, guaranteed by respect for ancestral law and the perpetuation of the
social order willed by the ancestors. It is evident that for a very long time we have been
living in compliance not with this pact but rather with a contrasting one, in which nature
is offered to us and is subject to the domination we exercise over it through science and
technology, in exchange for the expulsion of the supernatural from the world and our fall
into the irreversibility of history. According to Gauchet, the human species thus made
two successive and contrary choices regarding what underpins and structures its being-
together, the first of which alone yields religion. Gauchet doesn’t explain why they
succeeded one another in this order, but that is not hard to understand if we adopt a
Darwinian point of view: for our barely hominized forebears, the animism of nature and
the immobility of society must definitely have had a selective advantage. Once this choice
was made, the possibility of the opposite choice could emerge only very slowly. This is
why, Gauchet claims, ‘‘the most systematic and most complex religion occurs at the start,’’
and, far from representing a development of the primitive religious gesture and advances
in the conception of the divine, the stages through which the world’s great religions have
been formed ‘‘actually represent as many stages in the process of challenging the religious.’’^2
The three principal stages are: the emergence of the state, the advent of monotheism, and
the internal development of Christianity, which Gauchet unhesitatingly proclaims to be
the ‘‘religion of the exit from religion.’’
I shall not dwell any further on Gauchet’s thesis, but I would like to emphasize the
extent to which it refreshes and renews the issue of the religious and relieves it of the
weight of historical fatality. By making the relationship to social foundations the center
of gravity for the religious, Gauchet turns inside out the common view that makes the
relationship to the religious the center of gravity for social foundations and, by the same
token, makes it so hard to disentangle the political from the religious. There is no question
of denying that religion constitutes a powerful social link, nor is there any question of
refuting that, in the monotheistic religions, the horizontal link welding the community
together depends upon the vertical link with a transcendent principle that, in return,
organizes the community, either by retreating from it, as in Judaism, or by incarnating it,
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