THIERRY DE DUVEa new link, virtually unknown to the Old Testament. This is the link of filiation that
sustains the Father’s fatherhood and that the believer reasserts by imitating Jesus. Already
accomplished by Judaism, the gesture that posits the origin of the world beyond the
world no longer involves renouncing an understanding of the here below—as in primitive
animism. With Christianity, moreover, it is released from submission to the transcen-
dence of the Law. This gesture has to do with the merely symbolic assertion of the separa-
tion between the creator and his creatures, under the novel form of paternity. God the
creator is less the progenitor of the world than the symbolic father of men, who form a
community of sons through the mediation of Christ’s sacrifice. Men are equal in Jesus
Christ because they are equal before the hope of salvation, that is, before the hope of
resurrection. Faith in Christ’s resurrection converts equality before death—the only cer-
tain equality—into equality before life. It is not hope in the eternal life of the soul after
death that is the correlative of faith, rather, it is hope in the resurrection of the body on
the day of the Last Judgment. When modern secularism arrived, history thought it was
time to relegate the fable of the resurrection to those private closets where people keep
their personal convictions and superstitions, and failed to realize that the place left vacant
by the fable would sooner or later be forcefully filled in by death-dealing myths—the
most fearsome of all being the myth that dared to proclaim inequality before death.
By being sons of one and the same Father, all men are brothers. When the French
Revolution translated the Christian maxim of love as ‘‘fraternity,’’ it merely took cogni-
zance of a virtuality contained from the very start in the doctrine of Christ. As a corollary
of equality in the hope for salvation, fraternal love extends to all. The only love that saves
is universal love: this is the point that articulates the political and the religious, and it
applies identically to St. Paul and to Marat. Because this point is one of articulation, and
not one of confusion, it is, at the same time, the point at which the political and the
religious can be disentangled. Not that they have been—at least not sufficiently—but we
shall return to this in the second turn of the screw. What matters for the time being is to
see that, just as faith is the condition of hope and hope is the condition of love, so liberty
is the condition of equality and equality is the condition of fraternity. It is also important
to see that, in both instances, it is the third term that retroactively feeds the first. Fraternity
yields liberty; love gives faith. Or, if we cross the terms: love of another is what establishes
the other in his or her liberty, which is thus never a liberation that is conquered but a gift
that is received. And fraternity is what fuels the act of faith whereby I accept the liberty
of my brothers. It goes without saying that faith can never be acquired once and for all,
for it has to fight belief at all times; that acquiescence in the liberty of the other forever
threatens to spill over into submission; that equality may remain formal and act as an
alibi for injustice; that it is all too easy to muddle expectation with hope of retribution;
that at any given moment fraternity runs the risk of closing in the cohesion of the most
immediate group and taking up arms against the outsider; and that love is suspect so
long as it can swathe itself in self-sacrifice or self-hatred. On many occasions, historical
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