COME ON, HUMANS, ONE MORE EFFORT!entails the obverse certitude, or fortitude; it is a certain readiness for the redeeming event
that will keep death at bay. Hope postulates equality in the face of life and is therefore the
only maxim that acts as a barrier against death.
This was a very brief introduction to the issue at hand. We must now try to get a
tighter grip on it, which I shall attempt to do by spiraling around the issue in a series of
turns of the screw, the emphasis being on signs pointing to the exit from religion already
contained in the Christian maxims, sometimes even more so than in their lay translation.
Faith stands in opposition to belief. Animist religions are belief systems that are upheld
not by any autonomous, subjective adhesion but simply by an absolute compliance with
the authority of tradition. There is no distinction between the physical and metaphysical
worlds: nature is the seat of magical forces that the individual can neither challenge nor
doubt. There is no place for faith in any such system, nor is there in ordinary supersti-
tions. Furthermore, faith has only a very limited place in all phenomena of religious
fundamentalism, including contemporary variants. Belief is an abdication of thought,
whereas faith is a explicit acknowledgment of the limits of thought. Belief is a state; faith
is an act. One might think that it is essentially a religious act. If we go along with Gauchet,
it appears, on the contrary, to be the supreme antireligious act, proclaiming the break
with belief and the solitary destitution of the individual before the unknowable. Every act
of faith declares the disconnection of the subject from the common rule and atavistic
authority. Agreed, when faith in God is at issue, its declaration is an act of allegiance, but
of individual and therefore free allegiance, which stands for the social bond only insofar
as it presupposes the same adhesion, independently, on the part of others. The act of faith
is an ethical act, which remained shielded behind the mask of the religious so long as
there was not sufficient progress in the awareness of the disenchantment of the world—to
quote Max Weber’s expression that gave Gauchet’s book its title.^3 With the advent of the
Enlightenment, history thought it was ready for the religious maxim of faith to be trans-
lated into the political maxim of liberty. As it happens, the translation stopped midway,
because the act of faith had not been sufficiently separated from its cangue of belief. As a
result, the practical bases of ethics had been muddled together with theoretical antiobscu-
rantism. Positivism would be the belated outcome of the fact that the Enlightenment
(with the exception of Kant) did not take the postreligious virtualities of Christianity far
enough.
Without faith, there is no hope. Without liberty, likewise, there is no equality. Chris-
tianity was the first religion to proclaim the equality before God of all his creatures and,
among them, the equality of all human beings before the chance of salvation. This presup-
posed that human beings are beings of liberty and that the equality of all is based on
shared faith. Hence the militant proselytism of the first universal religion. But because
the faith of Christians radically distinguishes itself from belief, its main object is no longer
the existence of God but rather the resurrection of his Son. Clearly, the twofold human
and divine nature of Christ upholds the postulated existence of the Father, but based on
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