Glossary

False worship. The fourth part of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), the most violent, deals with service and false service under the dominion of the good principle, or with religion and priestcraft. Kant lays down there a principle he declares self-evident: whatever, apart from a good way of life, the human being supposes he can still do to become well-pleasing to God is mere religious delusion and false service of God. Prayers, pilgrimages, fasts, rites and sacraments, taken as means of winning God's favour, belong to fetishism, and the Church that lives off them is priestcraft. The essay measures the reach of this text by a Lutheran raised in pietism, which turns almost all actual religious practice into fetishism, and finds in it the name of religion without spirituality: observance, worship that commits the one who performs it to no transformation. It also notes that Kant, by reducing religion to the recognition of our duties as divine commands, sacralized morality, for which Nietzsche will reproach him in The Antichrist as an underhand theology. See also Spirituality, Fetishism, Religio, relegere, religare. Read in the essay

The reading that seeks beneath the letter of a sacred text another meaning, philosophical or moral. Philo of Alexandria, in the 1st century, reads Genesis with the Timaeus: when the two seem to diverge, it is because the letter of Moses hides a meaning that allegory must uncover, and the Logos is its key. The essay speaks of a regime of allegory, earlier than all the regimes of critique: Philo does not criticize religion, he translates it into philosophy, which protects it from the rationalist objection but installs in it a double meaning, reserved for those who know how to read. The method passes to the Christians through Origen, who systematizes it, and reappears in Averroes and Maimonides, for whom the revealed text has an apparent meaning and an inner meaning. Schopenhauer gives its disillusioned version: religions are the allegorical garment of truth, the metaphysics of the masses, and it would be cruel to take away the people's allegory. The Grand Inquisitor is the political culmination of this reading. See also Logos, Taʾwīl, Double truth, Demythologization. Read in the essay

In Latin, love of fate. In Nietzsche (The Gay Science § 276, Ecce Homo), the consent that wills what is, wanting nothing else, neither forward nor backward nor in all eternity: not to bear necessity, but to love it. The essay distinguishes it from obedience to fate and from the justification of the world: to love necessity without justifying it is exactly what Ivan Karamazov refuses when he returns his ticket, and what Spinoza accomplishes through the intellectual love of God. It is an exercise that transforms the one who consents, not a submission to an absolute, which makes it a component of the spirituality of exercise. It has its limit: Nietzsche, an exception by attitude and not by position, remains unstable between § 344, which admits where his fire comes from, and Zarathustra's prophetic temptations. The essay's conclusion tries to hold together Spinoza's acceptance and Marx's protest, by consenting to the necessity of the world without consenting to the injustice of men. See also nihilism. Read in the essay

In Edward Tylor (Primitive Culture, 1871), belief in spiritual beings, which he takes to be the minimal definition of religion. Animism is a primitive philosophy: the man of the earliest ages, reasoning about dreams, visions and death, concludes that there exists a soul separable from the body, then peoples the world with spirits; survivals of this stage persist in the higher religions, and anthropology presents itself as a reformer's science. Frazer extends the scheme in The Golden Bough through the succession of magic (the bastard sister of science), religion and science. The essay sees in it the regime of error in its evolutionist form: Tylor and Frazer explain the birth of belief, not its duration. Durkheim objects that a universal and everyday error would be an inexplicable delusion; Wittgenstein, in his remarks on Frazer, that the rite expresses and does not reason, and that Frazer is more savage than his savages (attested response); Malinowski, that magic begins where knowledge stops. Girard takes up all of Frazer's material while reversing its interpretation. What remains established: the universality of belief in invisible beings. Read in the essay

Intuition and feeling. In On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799), Schleiermacher defines the essence of religion against the two reductions of his century: it is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling, sense and taste for the infinite, “Sinn und Geschmack fürs Unendliche”. Kant had reduced it to morality, rationalist metaphysics to the proofs of God; Schleiermacher places it in the immediate experience of the universe, prior to all dogma and every Church, to the point that a religion without God can be better than a religion with a badly conceived God. The essay sees in it the birth of the regime of experience and the first attempt to leave instituted religion without leaving lived religion. It also marks its structural weakness, which will hold for James, Otto and Bergson: experience proves that one feels, it does not prove what one feels. Hegel will answer that if religion were a feeling of dependence, the dog would be the best Christian; Feuerbach will answer in 1851 that the dependence felt is dependence on nature, and Barth will say in 1927 that Feuerbach is the truth of Schleiermacher. See also Feeling of absolute dependence, Eight regimes of critique, Numinous. Read in the essay

Literally hidden. The word first designates books reserved for initiates, then books that are not read in the assembly and whose origin is judged doubtful. Its meaning varies between confessions: Protestants call apocrypha the Greek books of the Old Testament, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Maccabees, which Catholics call deuterocanonical and receive; all call apocryphal the gospels, acts and apocalypses excluded from the New Testament, such as the Gospel of Thomas or the Protevangelium of James. A pseudepigraphon is a writing placed under the name of an ancient figure, Enoch or an apostle, a common practice in Antiquity. The apocrypha tell us little about Jesus, but much about the diversity of Christians in the second century and about the origin of popular traditions, from the manger to the parents of Mary. See also Biblical canon. Read in the essay

The two central notions of Jung's psychology after his break with Freud. Archetypes are empty forms of the collective unconscious, filled by the particular representations of each culture, and found with striking constancy in the myths, dreams, visions and delusions of the most distant peoples and ages: the mother, the shadow, the wise old man, and above all the Self, image of psychic totality, which Jung recognizes in Christ, the Buddha, the mandala and the philosopher's stone. Individuation is the process by which the individual enters into relation with this totality; Jung sees in it the psychological equivalent of what religions called salvation, and defines religion, in Psychology and Religion (1938), as the careful observation of the numinosum. The essay follows Buber's objection: psychologism, since God is now only an image of the soul, and gnosis, since the encounter with an external Thou is replaced by knowledge of an inner content. It concludes that Jung makes religion necessary without making it true, and that a religion of the unconscious offers no criterion for refusing the sacrifice an awakened archetype might demand, like Wotan in 1936. See also Numinous, Gnosis, Need and disposition. Read in the essay

Leo Strauss's thesis in Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952): the philosophers who wrote under threat, Maimonides, Averroes, Spinoza and many others, composed their books on two levels, an exoteric teaching in keeping with the opinion of the city and an esoteric teaching reserved for attentive readers, which can be deciphered in contradictions, silences and repetitions. Strauss finds its source in Maimonides, whose seventh cause of contradiction, in the introduction to the Guide for the Perplexed, describes a writing for two publics. The essay judges this theory fragile in its general use, but takes seriously the suspicion it casts on Spinoza: the apparent piety of the Ethics, the piety that made him a God-intoxicated man in the eyes of the Romantics, would in part be an art of writing. It replies that the intellectual love of God is demonstrated there, not suggested, while acknowledging that the Spinozist exception rests on an indemonstrable decision. The theory extends the Averroist division between the elite and the multitude that the essay follows from Averroes to Renan and to Strauss. See also Double truth, Taʾwīl, Intellectual love of God. Read in the essay

The subject of the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morality (1887): what do ascetic ideals mean? In the priest, asceticism is the means by which suffering life turns against itself in order to last; it gives suffering a meaning, guilt, and this meaning, however terrible, is better than meaninglessness, for man would rather will nothingness than not will. § 24 to 28 extend the diagnosis to science and atheism: the unconditional will to truth is the most recent and noblest form of the ascetic ideal, and it is Christian morality itself, truthfulness raised into a duty, that triumphed over the Christian God. The essay reads in it both an anticipation of the theories of secularization, Weber and Gauchet rediscovering this self-abolition of the religious by the religious, and the objection Nietzsche addresses in advance to Simone Weil, whose refusal of consolation resembles an asceticism; the essay judges it partly right, while noting that Weil refuses to give misfortune a meaning. See also Will to truth, Genealogy, Disenchantment of the world. Read in the essay

Asylum ignorantiae. In the appendix to the first part of the Ethics, Spinoza explains the birth of superstition by the finalist prejudice: human beings, who are ignorant of causes and desire what is useful, believe that everything is made for them by gods who govern them, and when an event contradicts this belief, a storm, an earthquake, a disease, they go back from cause to cause until they take refuge in the will of God, that is, the asylum of ignorance. The word thus designates the point where explanation stops to make way for a mystery. The essay makes it the emblem of the regime of error in its most rigorous version: religion as ignorance of causes, a theme d'Holbach will take up in saying that ignorance begets the gods, and that Boyer will rediscover, in another form, by showing how the mind lends intentions where there are only causes. The essay also notes the limit of this explanation: it says why one is mistaken, not why one needs to be mistaken, which Feuerbach, Marx and Freud will seek. See also Deus seu Natura, Eight regimes of critique, Illusion. Read in the essay

Ἀταραξία, the absence of disturbance. In Epicurus and Lucretius, knowledge of nature is not an end in itself: it is an exercise that delivers from the two fears that spoil life, fear of the gods and fear of death, and procures tranquillity of soul. Explaining lightning, earthquakes and disease by atoms dispels terror; knowing that death is nothing to us, since where it is we no longer are, dispels the other. The essay insists on this spiritual dimension of the regime of error, which the moderns will forget: Epicurus is not an atheist, the gods exist and live in a blessedness that any care would disturb, and the impious man is the one who lends them the opinions of the crowd. This is why the essay says of Onfray, who claims Epicurus and Lucretius, that he inherits from them the regime of error and the hatred of priests, not their piety or their exercise. Ataraxia is the ancestor of the wisdoms of immanence that Part Twelve examines. See also Spiritual exercises, Spirituality of exercise, Eight regimes of critique. Read in the essay

The unbelievers who surround the madman of § 125 of The Gay Science (1882), the one who runs into the marketplace with a lantern crying that he is looking for God. They mock him, and it is to them, not to believers, that he announces that we have killed him, you and I. The essay makes them a type: the atheists of the marketplace take the absence of God for a settled matter, one more opinion, whereas the madman knows that it is an event whose consequences have not yet been measured, and which calls for festivals of atonement and sacred games. The essay places among them the new atheists of the early twenty-first century, Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Hitchens, Sartre in his own way, and those who believe they find in meditation a wisdom without history and without presuppositions: all of them carry shadows they do not see. The figure says, in Nietzschean terms, what the law of refoundations says in Stirnerian terms. See also Death of God, Law of refoundations, Nihilism. Read in the essay

Georges Bataille's project, which gathers Inner Experience (1943), Guilty (1944) and On Nietzsche (1945) under the title Somme athéologique: the title parodies the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas and announces an undertaking of the same scope, but of opposite meaning. Atheology is an inner experience of the sacred without God, a journey to the end of the possible of man, a naked experience that leads thought to non-knowledge, through anguish, laughter, ecstasy and expenditure. Sartre sees in him a new mystic of whom only the corpse can still be touched (attested response, 1943). Michel Onfray takes up the word in 2005 in his Traité d'athéologie, in an entirely different sense, that of a militant critique of the three monotheisms, which the essay calls a reversal. It regards Bataille as a key witness, not as an exception: his sacred of transgression refounds a sacred and confirms Durkheim. See also the sacred. Read in the essay

The essay's rule of method, announced in the prologue and recalled at each encounter between two authors. An attested response is a debate that took place: one of the two read the other and answered him, in a text that can be quoted, as Origen against Celsus, Pascal against Montaigne, Feuerbach against Stirner, Freud against Rolland, Blumenberg against Löwith. A constructed confrontation is a face-to-face that the essay itself organizes between authors who did not read each other or did not answer each other: Plato and Rousseau, Maimonides and Feuerbach, Bayle and Ivan Karamazov, Wittgenstein and Leibniz. The essay signals the status of each exchange so as not to pass off a reconstruction as a historical fact. The sections entitled “constructed debate” (morality without God, why do people believe, why something rather than nothing) are constructed confrontations for several voices. The site's Responses page lists the seventy-two exchanges, fifty-eight attested and fourteen constructed, with their section. See also Eight regimes of critique. Read in the essay

The dialectical movement in Hegel, for which French has no word: aufheben means at once to abolish, to preserve and to raise up. Applied to religion, Aufhebung means that philosophy surpasses religious representation by preserving it in the concept: religion is not refuted, it is comprehended. For Hegel, religion and philosophy have the same content, absolute Spirit; religion thinks it in the form of representation (images, narratives, the Father and the Son), philosophy in the form of the concept. The death of God, in Glauben und Wissen (1802), is a speculative Good Friday followed by a resurrection; Nietzsche will keep the death without the resurrection. The essay judges the argument right and the conclusion wrong: philosophy becomes the higher religion of the wise, and the Averroist division between the elite and the people returns. Kierkegaard answers him that subjectivity is truth (attested response); Barth takes up the word to say that revelation abolishes and fulfils religion. See also death of God. Read in the essay

Achsenzeit. In The Origin and Goal of History (1949), Karl Jaspers observes that between roughly 800 and 200 BCE, and above all around 500, comparable spiritual events took place independently of one another in China, India, Iran, Palestine and Greece: Confucius and Lao-tzu, the Upanishads and the Buddha, Zarathustra, the prophets of Israel, the Greek philosophers. Everywhere man becomes conscious of himself and of his limits, raises the question of the Whole and calls received myths into doubt. Jaspers makes it the axis of universal history, in place of the Christian axis of the Incarnation, which holds only for Christians. The essay finds in it what gives Jaspers his place in an inquiry that seeks to move beyond Christianity alone: the critique of religion and the spirituality of exercise have multiple sources, and the history the essay tells, centred by avowal on Christian and post-Christian Europe, is only one of the paths. The notion was taken up by sociologists, from Shmuel Eisenstadt to Robert Bellah, and debated for its chronology. See also Philosophical faith, Encompassing, Relay fable. Read in the essay

The notion by which Danièle Hervieu-Léger defines religion in La Religion pour mémoire (1993): an ideological, practical and symbolic apparatus through which the consciousness, individual and collective, of belonging to a believing lineage is constituted, maintained, developed and controlled. To believe religiously is to believe in the name of a chain, drawing one's authority from a tradition that goes back to founding witnesses and that one takes on the task of passing on. Modernity is amnesiac: it breaks the chains of memory, and what fades away with the practising believer is religion as a shared self-evidence, Berger's canopy. Two figures take its place: the pilgrim, who composes his own itinerary, and the convert, who chooses his lineage. The essay notes that the convert touches on the criterion, that there are replacement lineages, the Nation, the Revolution, Onfray's Civilization, and that a spirituality without a lineage escapes refoundation but is not passed on: the modern pilgrim has no lineage; he has a library. See also Sacred canopy, Invisible religion, Secularization. Read in the essay

The thesis of the Theodicy (1710): God, being perfect, chose among all possible worlds the one that contains the most perfection, and the evil it contains, the metaphysical evil of finitude, the physical evil of suffering, the moral evil of sin, is the condition of a greater good in the whole. Leibniz thus answers Bayle, who held the problem of evil to be insoluble by reason, in an attested response. Voltaire turns the formula round after the Lisbon earthquake (1755): Candide (1759) has Pangloss repeat that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and ends on the garden to be cultivated. The essay judges that theodicy accepts the sacrifice of the individual to harmony and asks each person to sacrifice their complaint; it sees in it the distant origin of the revolt of Ivan Karamazov, who refuses harmony out of love for humanity and returns his ticket, in a constructed confrontation. Leibniz's question about the existence of the world nevertheless survives his answer. See also Theodicy, Principle of sufficient reason, Everything is permitted. Read in the essay

The list of books a community recognizes as Scripture. The Greek word designates the mason's rule, then the norm and the catalogue. The Jewish canon, fixed gradually, counts twenty-four books; the Christian canon of the Old Testament varies between confessions, Catholics and Orthodox receiving Greek books that Protestants set aside. The twenty-seven books of the New Testament imposed themselves through liturgical use over roughly two centuries, before being recorded in lists, among them the festal letter of Athanasius in 367, then defined by the Council of Trent in 1546. The criteria invoked, apostolic origin, conformity to the faith, wide reception, antiquity, serve above all to justify an established usage. For a text, being outside the canon means not being read in the assembly, not being without historical value. See also Apocrypha. Read in the essay

The cultivated philistine. Nietzsche coins the word in the first of his Untimely Meditations, David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer (1873), against the author of The Old Faith and the New (1872). Strauss, whose Life of Jesus of 1835 had ruined the imposture thesis by showing that the gospel narratives were myths formed without intent to deceive, proposes forty years later a new faith, a piety towards the universe nourished by science, by Beethoven and Haydn, and by common morality. Nietzsche reproaches him not with being too critical but with not being critical enough: he has done away with the Christian God and kept Christian morality intact, without seeing that the one does not stand without the other, and he is content with this half-measure with the good conscience of the man of letters. The essay ranks this attested response among the first applications of the law of refoundations, and links the cultivated philistine with the atheists of the marketplace of The Gay Science: in both cases the absence of God is taken as a settled matter whose consequences have not been measured. See also Atheists of the marketplace, Law of refoundations, Death of God. Read in the essay

Ἐπιμέλεια ἑαυτοῦ, epimeleia heautou. In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, his 1982 Collège de France course, Foucault shows that in Antiquity the Delphic precept know thyself was subordinate to a more fundamental precept, the care of the self: one could know the truth only by taking care of oneself, that is, by transforming oneself. This is the sense of the definition of spirituality the essay borrows from him, the search, the practice, the experience through which the subject carries out on itself the transformations necessary to have access to the truth. The Cartesian moment marks the end of this subordination. Hadot, whom Foucault had read and drawn upon, expressed after Foucault's death both his esteem and his disagreement: the culture of the self, the care of the self in which the subject constitutes itself as a work, seemed to him too aesthetic, a new form of dandyism, whereas the ancient exercises aimed at going beyond oneself towards the Whole. The essay notes that Foucault does not say what the true is nor whether it exceeds the subject, and that is why it takes the definition from him and the description from Hadot. See also Spirituality, Cartesian moment, Spiritual exercises. Read in the essay

Foucault's expression in The Hermeneutics of the Subject (lecture of 6 January 1982), which the essay paraphrases, not having found the wording on a reliable page. From Descartes onwards, access to truth comes through knowledge alone: all that is needed is a subject who reasons well and follows a method, and no transformation of his being is required any longer; truth becomes a matter of propositions, and spirituality separates from philosophy. The essay uses this framework to explain why the modern critique of religion has almost always targeted religion as belief, as a set of true or false propositions: it is because, since the Cartesian moment, truth has been a matter of propositions. Spinoza is an exception, the Ethics being a book of geometrical demonstrations whose end is a transformation of life; so is Nietzsche, who constantly asks what truth does to the one who seeks it. The essay itself qualifies the notion, in the Descartes section: the Cartesian moment is not a clean break but a conversion of spirituality into metaphysics. See also Care of the self, Spirituality, Will to truth. Read in the essay

Stahlhartes Gehäuse, the image that closes The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905, revised in 1920). The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are compelled to. Concern for external goods was to lie on the shoulders of the saint like a light cloak, but fate turned the cloak into a casing as hard as steel, and asceticism, leaving the monks' cells for working life, built the cosmos of the modern economy, which now holds without its religious mainspring. For the last men of this development Weber envisages specialists without spirit and sensualists without heart, who imagine they have reached a level of humanity never before attained. The translation as iron cage comes from Talcott Parsons; the essay says casing. It reads this page as the Weberian version of the self-abolition of the religious by the religious: Protestant asceticism produced a world that no longer needs it, as in Nietzsche Christian truthfulness killed the Christian God. See also Disenchantment of the world, Polytheism of values, Sacrifice of the intellect. Read in the essay

Cause of itself. The name metaphysics gives to God when it thinks of him as the ultimate ground of beings: Descartes uses it to say that God draws his existence from his own essence, Spinoza makes it the first definition of the Ethics, before relating it to substance. Heidegger, in the lecture on the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics (Identity and Difference, 1957), sees in it the proper name of the God of the philosophers and shows that such a god has nothing divine about it: to this god man can neither pray nor offer sacrifice; before the causa sui he can neither fall to his knees in awe nor play music and dance. Godless thinking, which must abandon the God of the philosophers, is perhaps closer to the divine god. Marion takes up the analysis to define the conceptual idol, a site, metaphysics, a function, theology in onto-theo-logy, a definition, the causa sui, then turns Heidegger against himself. Becker uses the expression in another sense: the causa sui project is man's effort to be his own cause and to deny death. See also Onto-theology, God of the philosophers, Idol and icon. Read in the essay

The expression by which Michel Onfray, according to a reported formula the essay has not been able to verify, is said to have described André Comte-Sponville, and which he turns into a category, Christian atheism, in the Traité d'athéologie (2005): the atheist who keeps Christian morality, compassion, humility, love of one's neighbour, abandoning only God, is still a pious atheist in Stirner's sense. The essay notes that Spanish criticism has applied the same expression to Onfray, atheology as the discourse of Christian atheism, and that the irony became complete in 2021, when Onfray defended the Latin Mass as liturgical heritage and declared that his world is the one the God of the Christians made possible. Onfray has in turn become a Christian atheist, but differently: Comte-Sponville keeps from Christianity an inner fidelity, a spirituality without a Church; Onfray keeps from it an outward civilization, a Church without spirituality. According to the criterion, the first refounds nothing and the second refounds a collective absolute, Civilization, a contemporary case of Stirner's law and of the figure of the Grand Inquisitor. See also Faithful atheist, Pious atheists, Atheology. Read in the essay

Chiffern. For Karl Jaspers, transcendence is not a supreme being that could be known or denied; it is the Encompassing of all encompassings, and it gives itself only in ciphers: nature, the work of art, the religious symbol, metaphysics itself are ciphers of transcendence, which designate it while withdrawing. What is proper to the cipher is that it refuses knowledge at the very moment it points: it must remain a cipher, and that is why Jaspers reproaches Bultmann, in an attested response of 1954, with translating myths into existential concepts, since myth cannot be translated without loss, and reproaches revelation with turning the cipher into a possessed object. Philosophical faith is the attitude that stands before the ciphers without fixing them into dogmas. The essay ranks Jaspers among the prudent believing exceptions, formulating a reservation about the inflation of ciphers, which ends by saying everything and therefore nothing, and replying to Camus that Jaspers's leap, if it is a philosophical suicide in logic, ends in no obedience. See also Encompassing, Philosophical faith, Limit situations. Read in the essay

In Rousseau (The Social Contract IV, 8, 1762), a purely civil profession of faith, whose articles the sovereign fixes not as dogmas of religion but as sentiments of sociability: the existence of a powerful and beneficent divinity, the life to come, the happiness of the just and the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws, and a single negative dogma, the exclusion of intolerance. Whoever does not believe it may be banished, not as impious but as unsociable; whoever, having acknowledged it, behaves as if not believing it must be punished with death. Rousseau distinguishes it from the religion of man (the Gospel, too detached from the city) and from the religion of the priest (Catholicism, which divides sovereignty). The essay knows of no text that illustrates its criterion more exactly: Rousseau leaves the Church through the heart, with the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, and re-enters religion through the city. Robespierre and the cult of the Supreme Being (1794) did not betray this chapter. Strict refoundation; Plato (Laws X) is its original, by constructed confrontation. Read in the essay

In Durkheim, the state of exaltation produced by the gathering of a group, in the ceremonies of the Australian Aborigines as in the nights of the French Revolution, from which the sacred is born: the assembled individuals feel a force that surpasses them and refer it to an external being, totem, god, Fatherland or Reason, which is only society itself hypostatized. It is through effervescence that a living cult can be born, and that is why Durkheim reproaches Comte with having wanted to revive a religion artificially: from life itself, and not from a dead past, a living cult can arise; a day will come when our societies will again know hours of creative effervescence, and there are no immortal gospels. The essay sees in it one of the two strongest objections to its thesis, and the most disturbing, since the political religions of the twentieth century are that very effervescence. The essay sets Weber against it: the gods have already returned, but in the plural and without restoring unity; and Malinowski, for whom the effervescence of crowds is often entirely profane. See also The sacred, Collective representations, Secular religions. Read in the essay

The notion on which Durkheim founds the sociology of religion. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) opens with the thesis that religion is an eminently social thing: religious representations are collective representations that express collective realities, and rites are ways of acting that arise within assembled groups. The very categories of thought, time, space, cause, totality, would have a religious, and therefore social, origin. It follows that there are no false religions: all answer, in their own way, to the given conditions of human existence, and the god is only the figurative expression of society. The essay sees in it Feuerbach transposed from the human species to the group, but with the opposite conclusion, since projection, far from being an error to be dispelled, is the condition of all common life. Bergson readily admits the existence of collective representations deposited in institutions, language and customs, but refuses to make society the sole source of the sacred: it is only one source of it, and the lowest. See also The sacred, Collective effervescence, Projection. Read in the essay

In the Bible, the pact by which God binds himself to a people or to humanity and expects fidelity from it. The narratives give several: with Noah and every living creature, sealed by the bow in the cloud; with Abraham, marked by circumcision; at Sinai with Israel, of which the Decalogue and the Law are the terms; with David, to whom a royal line is promised. Jeremiah announces a new covenant, written on hearts; Christians take up the formula at the Last Supper and call their own Scriptures the New Testament, that is, the new covenant, which makes the Jewish Bible an Old Testament. The essay holds with Sanders that the Judaism of Paul's time was already a religion of the covenant received by grace, not a religion of works, and that Paul does not leave it for another. See also Torah, Messiah. Read in the essay

In Nietzsche (The Gay Science, § 108, § 125 and § 343, 1882), not a thesis about the non-existence of God but an event in culture: belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable, and no one has yet measured everything that falls with it, beginning with morality. In § 125, the madman cries it out to the atheists of the marketplace, who laugh: we have killed him, you and I, and what festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? The Buddha's shadow remains for centuries in the cave (§ 108). The formula comes from Hegel, for whom the death of God in Glauben und Wissen (1802) is followed by a speculative resurrection; Nietzsche keeps the death without the resurrection. Heidegger makes it, in The Word of Nietzsche: “God Is Dead” (1943), the completion of metaphysics: Nietzsche completes, he does not leave. The essay retains that what triumphed over the Christian God is, according to On the Genealogy of Morality (III, 27), Christian morality itself, which announces Gauchet, and that the death of God is a task rather than an achievement. See also nihilism, Aufhebung. Read in the essay

The metaphysical heart of Simone Weil's thought, in the fragments Gustave Thibon gathered under the title Gravity and Grace (1947). To decreate is to make something created pass into the uncreated; to destroy is to make it pass into nothingness, a guilty substitute for decreation. Creation is an act of love by which God renounces being everything so that something may exist outside him; the creature must respond with a symmetrical renunciation, renounce being something, consent to be nothing so that God may be through it. This is why Weil can write that of two atheisms one is a purification of the notion of God, and can pray while thinking that God does not exist. The essay compares decreation with Eckhart's detachment and with Murdoch's unselfing, which transposes it into a soberer vocabulary. It sees in Weil the principal believing candidate for the rank of exception: a faith that refuses consolation, one must not have consolation, accepts affliction without justifying it and gives no meaning to suffering, which partly answers the Nietzschean objection of the ascetic ideal. See also Gelassenheit, Unselfing, Ascetic ideal. Read in the essay

Belief in a creator God, architect of the universe and guarantor of morality, established by reason alone, without revelation, dogmas or Churches. The word appears in the sixteenth century and designates in the eighteenth the natural religion of the English and French Enlightenment. It is the position of Voltaire, who fights l'Infâme, superstition, fanaticism and the Church, but keeps a Supreme Being as the foundation of morality and a social restraint: if he did not exist, he would have to be invented, and let the sage proclaim him and kings fear him. D'Holbach holds deism to be a half-measure, and Voltaire answers him (Dieu, dieux, 1771). Hume ruins its proofs in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. The essay classes Voltaire among the transfers of the sacred: he invents a useful God, and Ivan Karamazov quotes his line as the very programme of the Grand Inquisitor. Kant, later, keeps God as a postulate of practical reason, which is another way of keeping what is reasonable. Read in the essay

Rudolf Bultmann's programme (lecture Neues Testament und Mythologie, 1941): to interpret existentially the message of the New Testament, the kerygma, by freeing it from the mythical world picture that envelops it, the three storeys of the universe, miracles, demons, the end of time, which has become unbelievable for modern man. The aim is not to eliminate myth, as in Strauss, but to translate it into the language of existence, borrowed from Heidegger: faith is a decision before God's call, not an opinion about facts. Bultmann thus separates the Christ of the kerygma, object of faith, from the Jesus of history, about whom almost nothing can be known. Jaspers objects to him in 1953, in Die Frage der Entmythologisierung (1954), that myth cannot be translated without loss and is the proper language of transcendence (attested response); Bonhoeffer judges Bultmann a liberal at bottom. The essay meets it in the debate on Jesus' existence and in Part Ten. See also kerygma, mythicist thesis. Read in the essay

God, that is, Nature. The formula appears in the preface to the fourth part of the Ethics: the reason, or cause, for which God, that is, Nature, acts and for which he exists is one and the same. The essay stresses that it does not abolish God, it displaces him: God is no longer a person outside the world who creates it, judges it and loves it, but the single substance of which everything that exists is a mode, and which acts by the sole necessity of its nature. Spinoza keeps the name of God out of conviction, not prudence: Novalis will call him a God-intoxicated man, Hegel will say that Spinozism is not an atheism but an acosmism, in which there is too much God and not enough world. The essay makes this position the major exception of its series, the position of immanence: an exit from religion that refounds nothing because it renounces leaving entirely and keeps, knowingly, the name of what it has transformed. Leo Strauss objects that this exception rests on an indemonstrable decision. See also Intellectual love of God, Pantheism and acosmism, Asylum of ignorance. Read in the essay

In Max Weber, the retreat of mysterious and incalculable powers before rational calculation: one can, in principle, master all things by foresight. The word, borrowed from Schiller, appears in The Protestant Ethic (1920 version) and in the lecture Science as a Vocation (1917, published 1919). The process is religious before it is scientific: Jewish prophecy, then ascetic Protestantism, drove magic out of the world, and religion abolished itself, just as in Nietzsche Christian morality killed the Christian God. Disenchantment does not mean the end of meaning but the impossibility of a guaranteed common meaning: the old gods, disenchanted, rise from their graves in the form of impersonal values at war, the polytheism of values; whoever cannot bear it may return to the arms of the old Churches, at the price of the sacrifice of the intellect. Gauchet takes up the formula in The Disenchantment of the World (1985) in a different sense, the exit from heteronomy. The essay sets Weber's gods returned in the plural against Durkheim's single Society and regards Weber as the last Puritan. See also secularization. Read in the essay

The expression of The Rebel by which Camus describes the outcome of modern revolts: cynicism, the divinization of history and of matter, individual terror or state crime. Revolt begins by contesting God in the name of man; it ends by divinizing man, then history, and by killing in the name of this new divinity, the regicides of 1793 and the deicides of the nineteenth century preparing the totalitarianisms of the twentieth. Marxism has not left religion: it has turned revolt into a religion of history, whose meaning, placed in the future, justifies every present sacrifice. The essay writes that the divinization of history is, in Camus, the name of what it itself calls the refoundation of a religion, and it ranks the History of the revolutionaries among the strict refoundations of its conclusion, alongside Plato's city and Comte's Great Being. The quarrel of 1952 with Jeanson and Sartre bore on this chapter; the essay sides with Camus on substance and with Sartre on method. Löwith and Voegelin say the same thing in terms of the secularization of eschatology. See also Revolt, Secularized eschatology, Secular religions. Read in the essay

A doctrine attributed to the Latin Averroists of the thirteenth century: a proposition could be true in philosophy and false in theology, or the reverse. Averroes never taught it; the Decisive Treatise (Faṣl al-maqāl) holds on the contrary that truth cannot be contrary to truth, that there is only one truth and two modes of access to it, the apparent meaning for the people and interpretation (taʾwīl) for the men of demonstration. The expression comes from the condemnation pronounced in Paris in 1277 by Bishop Étienne Tempier, who in his prologue reproaches masters of the faculty of arts with saying things true according to philosophy and false according to faith, and from its polemical readers. The essay takes the double truth for a legend, but retains from Averroes a real solution, the sharing of truth between an elite and a multitude, which it judges the most stable of all and finds again in Spinoza, Comte, Renan and Leo Strauss: Averroes does not leave religion and founds nothing, he divides. Read in the essay

The essay's interpretive grid, set out in the prologue. Critiques of religion do not form a continuous tradition: they belong to eight distinct regimes, which do not aim at the same thing. Religion appears in turn as an error to be corrected (Epicurus, Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume, d'Holbach, Feuerbach), a symptom of a world that needs it (Marx), a value whose genealogy is traced (Nietzsche), a component of metaphysics, onto-theology (Heidegger), an illusion commanded by desire (Freud), a social function (Durkheim, Weber), an inheritance whose secularization is disputed (Schmitt, Löwith, Blumenberg, Gauchet, Taylor, Habermas), or an experience that survives dogmas (Schleiermacher, James, Otto, Bergson, Bataille). Ricoeur groups the second, third and fifth under the name of the school of suspicion. The eighth regime obliges the essay to widen religion to include spirituality. These regimes do not add up, they accuse one another: each reproaches the previous one with having remained religious, which the essay calls the law of refoundations. Read in the essay

In Jaspers (Vernunft und Existenz, 1935; Von der Wahrheit, 1947), that which envelops every horizon without being able to become an object: being itself, which neither subject nor object exhausts, and within which all knowledge stands. The Encompassing presents itself in several modes, empirical existence, consciousness in general, spirit, existence proper, the world and transcendence; none can be grasped from outside, and every thought that believes it holds it misses it. Ciphers are the language by which transcendence, the Encompassing of all Encompassings, makes itself heard without giving itself up. The notion brings Jaspers close to negative theology, from Plotinus to Eckhart, and to the mystical in Wittgenstein, for whom it is not how the world is that is mystical, but that it is; the essay counts these three attitudes among the refusals to let an answer occupy the place of the question. See also philosophical faith, limit situations, negative theology. Read in the essay

The question whether believing is subject to duties. William Clifford (The Ethics of Belief, 1877) maintains, with the example of the shipowner who silences his doubts about his ship, that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”. William James (The Will to Believe, 1896) replies that one has the right to believe, at one's own risk, when the option is living, forced and momentous, and reason cannot decide: dupery for dupery, nothing proves that dupery through hope is worse than dupery through fear, and the duty to shun error is not the only one, there is also that of seeking truth. Russell, Mackie and Plantinga extend the debate. The essay combines the two: one has the right to believe where reason leaves the question open, and this right ceases where belief engages the lives of others without their having chosen it, which is the translation of the sacrifice criterion into the order of knowledge, and holds against the Inquisitor as against crusades waged in Clifford's name. See also sacrifice criterion, Grand Inquisitor. Read in the essay

The formula attributed to Ivan Karamazov: if God does not exist, everything is permitted. The essay shows that it never appears in this proverbial form in The Brothers Karamazov. It is Rakitin who reports Ivan's thesis, without the immortality of the soul there is no virtue and everything is permitted, and Ivan, when questioned, answers only that he will not renounce the formula. Sartre, in Existentialism Is a Humanism, attributes to him the sentence fabricated by the reception, “Si Dieu n'existait pas, tout serait permis”, if God did not exist, everything would be permitted, and turns it into the task of freedom; Camus, in The Rebel, makes the history of contemporary nihilism begin with this everything is permitted. The essay reads in Ivan's thesis Voltaire's answer reversed: if God is necessary to morality and God does not exist, morality collapses. It sets it against Bayle, for whom a society of atheists can hold together: Bayle speaks of society, Ivan of conscience, and Smerdyakov's crime, which takes Ivan at his word, shows that the question is not one of order but of guilt. See also Society of atheists, Grand Inquisitor, Nihilism. Read in the essay

Existential security, the variable that Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart place at the centre of Sacred and Secular (2004): the religiosity of a population depends on the degree to which its members feel protected against illness, poverty, violence and chance. Where existence is secure, in Scandinavia, practice and belief recede over several generations; where it is not, they persist, and the United States is explained by its inequalities rather than by a competitive religious market, against Rodney Stark. Since religious populations have more children, the world nonetheless has more believers than before: this is the demographic paradox. The essay uses these measurements as an empirical arbiter in the debate on the causes of belief: Lucretius, Hume, Freud and Becker, for whom fear is the source, are proved right; the Enlightenment, which expected secularization from critique, is proved wrong, for it is not critique that secularizes, it is health insurance; and Malinowski is confirmed, for whom belief recedes with uncertainty, not with knowledge. Exits from religion therefore presuppose a security that only institutions guarantee. See also Need and disposition, Secularization, Illusion. Read in the essay

In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), the faculty by which the mind produces phantasmal representations, gods, spirits, presences, capable of counterbalancing intelligence. Intelligence, as it developed, endangered the individual and society: it discovers death, it calculates the uncertainty of action, it makes reflective selfishness possible. Nature had at the same time to produce a counterweight, and this counterweight is the religious fables: religion is a defensive reaction of nature against the dissolving power of intelligence, and it is the raison d'être of the fabulating function before that function serves the novel or the theatre. This accounts for static religion, coextensive with our species, which attaches man to life and the individual to society. The essay makes it one of the answers to the question of why people believe, alongside fear, desire and society, and notes that Bergson thereby answers Freud, whom he does not cite: fabulation is indeed a defence, but it does not exhaust the religious, whose highest source is mysticism. See also Static religion and dynamic religion, Illusion, Minimally counterintuitive concepts. Read in the essay

The central notion of Totality and Infinity (1961). The face of the other is neither an object I perceive nor a phenomenon I constitute: it comes from beyond all representation, it always exceeds the idea one forms of it, and speaks to me before any discourse, to say “Tu ne tueras point”, “Thou shalt not kill”. Levinas takes from Descartes the idea of the infinite and carries it over from God to the face: it is in the relation to the other, not in the proof of God, that the infinite is given. Ethics thus becomes first, before ontology, and ethics is an optics: God comes to mind only in the trace left by the face, in responsibility for the other man. The essay sets this asymmetry against the symmetry of I and Thou in Feuerbach, and follows the attested dialogue with Buber. It hesitates over the verdict: Levinas, who rejects the numinous sacred as a violence and holds monotheism to be an atheism with regard to the mythical gods, does not fall under the criterion, though the author is not quite sure of it; he leans towards a believing exception. See also Idol and icon, Numinous, Negative theology. Read in the essay

André Comte-Sponville's position in L'Esprit de l'athéisme (2006). He has lost faith, not fidelity to what the Christian tradition taught him of justice, compassion and love: the best that religion brought, the bond between human beings, attachment to transmitted values, can survive faith. Atheism is for him a belief, not knowledge, and he defends a spirituality without God, founded on the oceanic experience that Rolland set against Freud: the Kingdom is here and now; everything is immanent to the Whole; a God, what for? The universe is enough. The essay situates him between Spinoza, towards whose position of immanence he tends, and Freud, whose atheism he holds to, and reports, according to a formula it has not been able to verify, that Onfray is said to have called him a Christian atheist, that is, a pious atheist in Stirner's sense. Its verdict is twofold: Comte-Sponville refounds nothing, no sacrificial absolute, but his wisdom consoles and does not protest, as Hausemer objects to him regarding the disappearance of evil; he lacks Marx's Protestation, and he does not refound without being an exception. See also Oceanic feeling, Christian atheist, Protestation. Read in the essay

In Schleiermacher (Der christliche Glaube, 1821-1822), the essence of piety: the consciousness of being absolutely dependent, that is, of being in relation with God. The Glaubenslehre systematizes what the Speeches on Religion of 1799 said in other words: religion is neither knowledge nor morality, but intuition and feeling, sense and taste for the infinite. Hegel mocks the formula in his preface to Hinrichs (1822): if religion were the feeling of dependence, the dog would be the best Christian (attested response). Feuerbach takes it up and turns it around in his Heidelberg lectures (1851): man depends first of all on nature, and it is nature that religion deifies (attested response). Otto, in 1917, corrects it with the creature-feeling, which presupposes the inaccessibility of its object. The essay sees in it the structural weakness of every regime of experience: experience proves that one feels, it does not prove what one feels. See also numinous. Read in the essay

The word comes from Charles de Brosses, Du culte des dieux fétiches (1760), who uses it for the worship of material objects held to be powers, and whom Tylor quotes as an epigraph to Primitive Culture. It has two critical uses in the essay. Kant, in 1793, applies the vocabulary of the fetish to Christian worship: every rite performed to win God's favour is fetish worship, a false service. Marx, a reader of de Brosses, takes it up in the first volume of Capital (1867) to speak of the commodity: in exchange, the relations between people take on the fantastic form of relations between things, and the products of labour seem endowed with a life of their own; to understand this fetishism, he says, one must take flight into the misty region of the religious world. The critique of religion thus becomes the model for the critique of economics. The essay notes that Marx describes there the cult of abstract man, the religion proper to commodity society, and that the emancipation he promises, a transparent society delivered from its fetishes, inherits the function of salvation. See also Opium of the people, Afterdienst, Projection. Read in the essay

A position that grounds religion on faith alone by ruining reason's claims to know God. The word is modern; the thing goes back to the Christian scepticism of the Renaissance. In Montaigne, the Apology for Raymond Sebond (Essays II, 12) humbles human reason, unable to make a mite and yet making gods by the dozen, and leaves received faith intact: one is a Christian as one is a man of Périgord or a German, by custom. The essay holds this fideism to be sincere, not the mask of an atheist, but notes its uncontrolled effect: if reason can do nothing, custom remains the only explanation of religion, and Montaigne announces Hume. Pascal answers him in an attested response (Conversation with M. de Sacy, fragments 62-64), and Bayle and, in another key, Kierkegaard inherit it. Montaigne enters into no refoundation; his motto is a question, and he remains within a tradition. Read in the essay

The two determinations of Aristotle's god in Book Λ of the Metaphysics. The eternal movement of the heavens requires a first mover that is not itself moved, otherwise there would be an infinite regress; now what moves without being moved is the object of desire: the first mover moves as what is loved (Λ 7). This god is pure act, and its activity can only be the highest: it thinks itself, and its thinking is thinking of thinking, νόησις νοήσεως (Λ 9, 1074b34). It is therefore ignorant of the world, did not create it and does not care for it, which is Plato's second impiety. The essay shows the paradox of its posterity: this indifferent god became the God of the philosophers of the three monotheisms, through Averroes, Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, and the definition of first philosophy as theological science (E 1) is the source of what Heidegger will call onto-theology. Aristotle himself attaches no cult to it; the contemplative life of the Nicomachean Ethics, to make oneself immortal as far as possible, is an exercise without religion. See also God of the philosophers, Onto-theology, Causa sui. Read in the essay

The genus, the human species conceived as essence. For Feuerbach the individual is finite, but the species is infinite: reason, will and heart, which make up the essence of man, have their limit in no individual and are realized in humanity as a whole. God is nothing but this essence of the species, separated from the individual and worshipped as a being apart: the consciousness of God is the self-consciousness of man, and the secret of theology is anthropology. The essay shows that the operation had already been carried out by David Friedrich Strauss in 1835: the predicates the Church attributes to Christ contradict one another in an individual and agree in the idea of the species; humanity is God made man. Stirner turns the argument round: Man, the species, is one more alienation, a ghost that demands of the individual the same sacrifice as God. Marx reproaches Feuerbach, in the sixth thesis, with making the human essence an abstraction inherent in the isolated individual, whereas it is the ensemble of social relations. See also Projection, Homo homini Deus, Spuk. Read in the essay

Detachment, letting-be, the serenity of one who has renounced willing. The word comes from Meister Eckhart, for whom the poverty in spirit of sermon 52 consists in willing nothing, knowing nothing and having nothing, to the point of praying God to be rid of God, that is, of the idol one makes of him. The essay distinguishes two readings: a negative theology pushed to the limit, which aims at the nameless Godhead, and a modern reading that makes Eckhart the ancestor of the spiritualities without God, detachment becoming an exercise in dispossession that no longer needs any object; Schopenhauer will hail in him a brother of the sages of India, Simone Weil will speak of decreation. Heidegger deliberately takes up the word in the small volume Gelassenheit (1959) to name a thinking that renounces calculation and holds itself in expectation; the essay sees in it Eckhart displaced, and objects that this expectation without content remains a piety without object. See also Negative theology, Decreation, Spiritual exercises. Read in the essay

Nietzsche's method (Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887): to ask where our values come from and what will willed them, rather than whether they are true. Christian morality, the ressentiment of the weak, the priest's ascetic ideal are read in it as ways of evaluating that have a history and an interest. Religion appears as a value, not as an error or a symptom: this is the third regime of critique, distinct from those of Feuerbach and Marx, although Ricoeur groups them under the name of the school of suspicion. The third essay of the Genealogy (§ 24-28) applies the method to atheism itself: the will to truth is the last form of the ascetic ideal, which abolishes itself, and man would rather will nothingness than not will. William James answers all genealogies in advance: one knows the tree by its fruits, not by its roots. The essay calls genealogical lucidity the first common trait of the exceptions: knowing where one's fire comes from, like Nietzsche in § 344 of The Gay Science. Read in the essay

In the historical sense, the currents of the second and third centuries that taught a salvation through knowledge, gnôsis, of a God foreign to an evil world created by an inferior demiurge; the Fathers fought them as the first heresy. In the twentieth century the word becomes a polemical category. Eric Voegelin, in The New Science of Politics (1952), makes gnosis the essence of modernity: from Joachim of Fiore to the totalitarian ideologies, the moderns would seek to realize salvation here below, to immanentize the eschaton, and claim certain knowledge of the meaning of history. Blumenberg, without answering Voegelin himself, turns the formula around: modernity is a second victory over gnosis; Kelsen objects that a theory which recognizes gnosis everywhere proves everything. Buber reproaches Jung with a gnosis of another order: the encounter with an external Thou is replaced by knowledge of an inner content. The essay judges Kelsen and Blumenberg right against Voegelin's genealogy, but wrong against the function Aron describes: secular religion in Aron's sense remains indispensable to it. See also Secular religions, Secularized eschatology, Archetypes and individuation. Read in the essay

Unser Gott Λόγος. At the end of The Future of an Illusion (1927), answering the objection of an imaginary interlocutor, Freud grants that science will not replace everything religion gave, but entrusts himself to reason and experience: our god Logos will fulfil those of our wishes that external nature allows, slowly, in an unforeseeable future, for a new humanity; he is not very almighty, and the voice of the intellect is soft but does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Freud borrows the figure from Multatuli, who made Logos and Ananke, necessity, the two divinities of the scholar. The essay notes the weight of the admission: the man who most resolutely wanted to refute the essay's thesis states it himself, by giving reason the name and the place of a god. It also turns § 344 of The Gay Science against the sentence that follows, our science is not an illusion: for Nietzsche, faith in truth is still a faith. The conclusion ranks the god Logos among the transfers of the sacred, beside Durkheim's Society and Stirner's Ego. See also Illusion, Will to truth, Logos. Read in the essay

The expression comes from Pascal's Memorial, dated 23 November 1654: “Dieu d'Abraham, Dieu d'Isaac, Dieu de Jacob, non des philosophes et des savants”, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. It designates the God that reason demonstrates and needs in order to ground the world: Aristotle's first mover, Plotinus's One, the simple and immutable Being of Augustine and Anselm, cause of itself and guarantor of eternal truths in Descartes, necessary substance in Leibniz. The essay shows that this God was born of a fusion, that of Plato's God and the God of the Bible, accomplished by Philo, Justin and Augustine, and that he is the major fact of the intellectual history of the Christian West. The moderns undo him from two sides: Pascal from above, by setting against him the God of a history and a revelation; Heidegger from below, by showing that the causa sui has nothing divine about it, that one can neither pray to it nor dance before it. Spinoza kept him while withdrawing everything the Bible had given him. See also Onto-theology, Causa sui, First mover and thinking of thinking. Read in the essay

The poem Ivan recites to his brother Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880, Book V, chapter 5). Christ returns to Seville at the time of the Inquisition; an old cardinal has him arrested and reproaches him for having refused, in the three temptations in the desert, miracle, mystery and authority, and for having left men a freedom they cannot bear. The Church has corrected his work: it gives bread and governs consciences, at the price of the lie of a few who no longer believe. Christ answers nothing and kisses him: a gesture, not an argument. The essay makes it the touchstone of its whole question, the figure of the one who leaves God while keeping religion, and the political completion of Feuerbach, a Comte become lucid, and therefore tragic. Plato is its ancestor (Laws X), Voltaire wrote its programme, Demopheles in Schopenhauer is the version without tragedy, Onfray the contemporary case; in Girardian terms, the Inquisitor is the priest who manages the scapegoat mechanism. It also marks the limit of the right to believe: the problem is not belief, it is the Inquisitor. Read in the essay

The object of the positivist religion, named in the Catechism of Positive Religion (1852): Comte condenses the whole of positive conceptions into the single notion of an immense and eternal being, Humanity. The Great Being is the whole of past, future and present beings who freely concur in perfecting the universal order; it is composed first of all of the dead, the living being more and more governed by them, and it directly inspires the sacred formula of positivism: Love as principle, Order as basis, and Progress as end. Around it are organized a dogma, a worship, sacraments, a calendar and a priesthood. The essay notes that Comte founds something sacred and makes no secret of it, and that the catechumen of the dialogue, by confessing her personal nullity before the Great Being, herself formulates Stirner's objection. Durkheim will reproach him with wanting to revive artificially a religion that social life has not produced. The Great Being figures among the strict refoundations of the conclusion; the essay sees in it the proof by fact of what Stirner asserted by argument. See also Law of the three stages, Religion of Humanity, Strict refoundation and soft refoundation. Read in the essay

The theatrical genre born in Athens in the sixth century BCE in the cult of Dionysus, performed at the civic festivals of the Dionysia before the whole city. Its three great authors, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, take up the heroic myths, the Atreids, Oedipus, Antigone, the Bacchae, to stage conflicts without issue between the gods, the city, the family and the individual. Aristotle defines it by the imitation of an action which, through pity and fear, brings about the purification of these emotions. Hegel sees in it the collision of two equally legitimate rights, Nietzsche the union of the Apollonian and the Dionysian that Socrates supposedly killed, Vernant the moment when the city questions its own values. For Girard, tragedy is half lucid: it shows the symmetry of the adversaries that myth hides, and sometimes lets the victim's complaint be heard, but it ends by ratifying the expulsion. The essay encounters it in the Girard section and in the boxes devoted to Weil, to Sartre and to the Bacchae. See also Myth, Scapegoat mechanism. Read in the essay

From The Denial of Death (1973), which it paraphrases for lack of having consulted the original text, the essay takes from Ernest Becker the following thesis: man knows that he dies, this terror is unbearable, and he covers it over with a causa sui project, the effort to be his own cause, and with heroism, the conviction of having a worth that outlasts death. Every culture is then a hero system, a set of roles, narratives and rites that lets each person believe himself important beyond his disappearance, and religion is the vastest of these systems. Escape from Evil (1975) adds that heroism needs victims. Greenberg, Solomon and Pyszczynski drew from it, from 1986 onwards, terror management theory: being reminded of death should strengthen attachment to one's worldview and hostility to others; the essay notes that the effect was not replicated by Many Labs 4 in 2022. It draws from Becker that the refoundations are replacement hero systems, and objects that he confuses the need for meaning, which is universal, with the need for immortality. See also Need and disposition, Scapegoat mechanism, Illusion. Read in the essay

Literally, receiving one's law from another. In The Disenchantment of the World (1985), Marcel Gauchet uses it to define religion itself: not first of all a belief, but a form of society in which the rules of common life are not made by men but given to them by the gods, the ancestors, the time of origins. The stateless societies studied by ethnologists are its purest form, the one in which dispossession is most complete. The history of the great religions is that of a progressive reduction of this heteronomy: an ever more transcendent God leaves the world ever more to men, until democracy becomes the regime of a society that gives itself its own law and must live without an external guarantor, autonomy after heteronomy. It is in this sense that Christianity is the religion of the exit from religion. The essay sees in Gauchet the historian of the exit, not the thinker of what remains, since the exit from religion does not mean the exit from belief. See also Religion of the exit from religion, Disenchantment of the world, Secularization. Read in the essay

Pascal takes up the verse of Isaiah, “Vere tu es Deus absconditus” (Is 45, 15), and makes it a thesis: Scripture says that God is a hidden God (fr. 242). One must therefore not seek to prove him from nature, as the apologists do; nature everywhere marks a lost God, and God gives enough light for those who want to see him, enough obscurity for those who do not. The essay draws from this that the critique of the God of the philosophers comes here from inside faith: Descartes's demonstrated God is useless for salvation, and the true God is the God of a history. The theme then runs through the series. Hegel quotes Pascal's phrase on the lost God to think the death of God; Weber sees in Calvinist Puritanism, which suppresses the sacraments and leaves the believer alone before a hidden God, a stage of disenchantment; Blumenberg dates modern self-assertion from man's answer to a hidden and unpredictable God, that of nominalism; Simone Weil takes up the idea of a God who withdraws. See also God of the philosophers, Pascal's wager, Self-assertion. Read in the essay

Man is a God to man. The formula, turned round from Hobbes's saying that man is a wolf to man, concludes Feuerbach's critique: if the essence of man is man's supreme being, the first law must be the love of man for man. Feuerbach makes it the supreme practical principle and the turning point of world history; in the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843) he writes that the unity of I and Thou is God, and that human relations, love, friendship, are in themselves truly religious. The essay reads in it the moment when critique turns into consecration: Feuerbach gives up the name of God and keeps the thing, worship, by transferring it to the whole of man. This is the textbook case of soft refoundation and the target of the reproach Engels made in 1886, when he saw in this love a magician god and in this philosophy a religion that Feuerbach wanted to complete rather than abolish. Stirner had said the same as early as 1844: the fear of Man is only a modified form of the fear of God. See also Gattung, Strict refoundation and soft refoundation, Pious atheists. Read in the essay

In Jean-Luc Marion (The Idol and Distance, 1977; God Without Being, 1982), two ways of aiming at the divine. The idol stops the gaze and sends back to it its own measure: an invisible mirror, it is on the scale of the one who looks at it. The icon lets the gaze pass through it towards what exceeds it, and looks back at it in return. There are conceptual idols: the god of onto-theology, with its site, metaphysics, its function, theology within onto-theo-logy, and its definition, the causa sui, is one; Heidegger, who subjects God to the question of being, provides for Marion a second, and God is not said first of all on the basis of Being. Marion thus turns the Zurich seminar against Heidegger (attested response), and in 1995 qualified his judgement on Thomas Aquinas. The essay draws from it its assessment of twentieth-century Christianity: at once a victory and a capitulation, a purified faith that has renounced knowing, consoling, founding and instituting, and of which there remains a spirituality that atheists also claim. See also onto-theology. Read in the essay

In Freud (Die Zukunft einer Illusion, 1927), in the technical sense: a belief commanded by a wish, which is not necessarily false, unlike error and delusion. Religion is an illusion because it repeats the infantile wish for a protecting father in the face of helplessness; it is the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity, and man creates the gods in the image of the father. This is the fifth regime of critique, which explains the need for the error where Feuerbach explained only the error: Freud sees man in miniature where Feuerbach saw man writ large (constructed confrontation). Freud sets against it “our god Logos”, science, which, he admits, is not very almighty; the essay reads in this its own thesis pronounced by the man who most resolutely wanted to refute it, and turns § 344 of The Gay Science against the sentence “our science is no illusion”. Romain Rolland answers him with the oceanic feeling. In the conclusion, Freud appears among the transfers of the sacred, for the god Logos. See also projection, oceanic feeling. Read in the essay

The pair that structures Part Twelve and the quarrel of the two wisdoms. Transcendent is what goes beyond the world or the subject and remains external to it, the creator God, Plato's Good, Plotinus's One; immanent is what remains within the world and has no principle other than it, God or Nature in Spinoza, Comte-Sponville's Whole, Taylor's immanent frame. The essay refuses to make this pair the criterion of the exit from religion: thoughts of transcendence, Murdoch, Weil, Levinas, install no absolute that demands, and thoughts of immanence, the cult of Humanity or of History, do install one. It makes it rather the axis along which the exceptions are classified: the position of immanence, Spinoza and Hadot, towards which Comte-Sponville tends; transcendence without God, Murdoch; the silent version, Wittgenstein. The quarrel between Comte-Sponville and Ferry sets acceptance without transcendence against transcendence without God, the first closer to an exit, the second better able to hear Marx's Protestation, and the conclusion attempts to hold both. See also Deus seu Natura, Man-God and horizontal transcendence, Sacrifice criterion. Read in the essay

The notions by which Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age (2007), describes what modernity has built, and which the essay paraphrases. The immanent frame is the natural, social and moral order that can be understood entirely without transcendence and that holds up by itself. Exclusive humanism is the possibility, widely available for the first time, of a life directed towards human flourishing with nothing beyond it. The nova effect is the multiplication of spiritual positions, believing and unbelieving, that this situation engenders. Against subtraction stories, which present secularization as the unveiling of a human nature rid of religion, Taylor maintains that the world from which God is removed is not a bare nature but a new historical construction, with its ideals and its imaginary, and that belief has become one option among others in it. The essay shares the rejection of subtraction stories, which joins its own rejection of a total exit, but not the conclusion of Taylor, for whom faith remains a living option that the secular age makes more difficult but not less true: Stirner turned around, you have built something else, answer for it. See also Secularization, Post-secular, Living, forced, momentous option. Read in the essay

Eric Voegelin's formula in The New Science of Politics (1952): modern ideologies, on this view, are the attempt to build within history what Christianity expected from its end, the immanentization of the Christian eschaton. The eschaton is, in Christian theology, the final fulfilment that gives meaning to everything that precedes it, the reign of God after the judgement; to immanentize it is to carry it over from the beyond into the earthly future, in the form of the classless society, the thousand-year Reich or indefinite progress. Löwith had shown in Meaning in History (1949) that the philosophy of history is transposed eschatology; Voegelin makes it a pathology, gnosis, and concludes that totalitarianism is the final form of progressive civilization. The essay retains the support these analyses give its thesis, secular religions being the most massive cases of the criterion, but follows Kelsen and Blumenberg against their genealogy: that the History of the revolutionaries demands sacrifice does not prove that it descends from Christian eschatology; it is function, not origin, that counts. See also Secularized eschatology, Gnosis, Secular religions. Read in the essay

In the Greek city, the offence done to the gods of the community: profaning a sanctuary, parodying mysteries, mutilating statues, teaching doctrines that turn people away from worship. Since Greek religion has neither dogma nor Church, impiety is not a heresy, an error of belief, but an attack on the civic order, judged by the ordinary courts. Anaxagoras had to leave Athens, Protagoras is said to have been prosecuted, and Socrates was condemned to death in 399 BCE for not recognizing the gods of the city and for corrupting the young. In Book X of the Laws, Plato makes it a doctrine: three impieties, denying the gods, believing them indifferent, believing that they can be bought with sacrifices, and a graduated punishment, from the house of correction to death for the repeat offender. The essay sees in it the pure case of its criterion, the first law that makes critique a crime in the name of an absolute. Christians will in their turn be accused of atheism for having refused the sacrifices. See also Sacrifice criterion. Read in the essay

Unendlicher qualitativer Unterschied, the expression that Karl Barth takes over, in German, from Kierkegaard and places at the centre of his Epistle to the Romans (1919, recast in 1922). Against the liberal theology of the nineteenth century, which had made religion an expression of human consciousness, of feeling or of culture, Barth proclaims that God is in heaven and man on earth, and that nothing leads from one to the other, neither experience, nor history, nor morality: revelation alone crosses the abyss, from above to below. Barth writes in the preface to the second edition that if he has a system, it consists in keeping in view what Kierkegaard called the infinite qualitative difference between time and eternity. Barth concludes in § 17 of the Church Dogmatics (1938) that religion, the affair of godless man, is unbelief, and he had acknowledged as early as 1927 that Feuerbach is right all along the line about religion as human experience. It is the exact inverse of Stirner: the pious man is godless. Bonhoeffer will reproach this position with a positivism of revelation. See also Fideism, Religionless Christianity, Projection. Read in the essay

The title of the first volume of Georges Bataille's Somme athéologique (1943), followed by Guilty (1944) and On Nietzsche (1945). In it Bataille describes a voyage to the end of the possible of man: a naked experience, detached from every confession, every Church and every salvation, which borrows from the mystics their states, ecstasy, anguish, rapture, while withdrawing their object. Its term is not God but non-knowledge, the night in which the subject loses himself; it is sovereign, that is, without any end other than itself, and it is bound up with expenditure, laughter, eroticism and sacrifice. Sartre replies in 1943, in “Un nouveau mystique” (“A New Mystic”), that Bataille has kept the corpse of God. The essay holds Bataille to be a key witness of the regime of experience, not an exception: the Somme refounds a sacred of transgression and confirms Durkheim, whom Bataille read through Acéphale. It sets Bataille's expenditure against Simone Weil's decreation; Bataille had known Weil and put her into a novel in the figure of Lazare. Onfray will take up the word atheology in an opposite sense. See also Atheology, The sacred, Eight regimes of critique. Read in the essay

Amor Dei intellectualis, the summit of the Ethics, which hasty readers treat as a rhetorical concession. In proposition 36 of the fifth part, Spinoza writes that the intellectual love of the mind towards God is the very love with which God loves himself. This love is born of knowledge of the third kind, which grasps singular things under the aspect of eternity; it expects nothing in return, since God loves no one in particular, and it is blessedness itself: blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself (V, 42). The essay reads in it a spirituality in Foucault's sense, a transformation of the subject that leads to the true, in a book nonetheless written in geometrical demonstrations, and this is what makes Spinoza the exception par excellence, with Hadot. It recalls that Descartes had already joined knowledge of God to joy, and that Spinoza welds the two ends together. Leo Strauss suspects that Spinoza's apparent piety is partly an art of writing; the essay answers that intellectual love is demonstrated there, not suggested. See also Deus seu Natura, Spirituality of exercise, Oceanic feeling. Read in the essay

The Invisible Religion (1967), a revised version of a German book of 1963, in which Thomas Luckmann proposes a reading of modernity different from Berger's. He starts from a very broad definition: religious is everything by which the human organism transcends its biological nature and gives itself a world of meaning. In modern societies this function is no longer performed by the Churches, whose influence is receding, but by private systems of meaning, assembled by each person from available themes, self-realization, the family, sexuality, mobility, and which form an invisible religion, without institution or dogma. Secularization is therefore not the disappearance of religion but its privatization. The essay judges this reading subtler and closer to the spiritualities without God of its Part Twelve, but it marks its limit: a definition that encompasses everything no longer makes it possible to distinguish what the sacrifice criterion seeks to distinguish, and that is why it separates two terms, the shelter of meaning, which does not disappear, and the institution, which can recede. Hervieu-Léger will extend the analysis with the pilgrim and the convert. See also Sacred canopy, Secularization, Believing lineage. Read in the essay

From the Greek kêrugma, the herald's proclamation: the proclamation of the earliest Christian faith, that Christ died for our sins, was buried and was raised on the third day, of which Paul transmits the oldest formula (1 Co 15, 3-5), received from before him. Twentieth-century exegesis, Bultmann above all, uses the word to distinguish the Christ of the kerygma, object of faith and preaching, from the Jesus of history, object of historical inquiry: the Gospels are testimonies of faith, not biographies. In the debate on Jesus' existence, the essay holds that what matters is not knowing whether Jesus lived, which the consensus of historians affirms, but how a crucified prophet became the incarnate Logos; the kerygma is the first moment of this transformation, which Paul completes by spiritualizing sacrifice (Rm 12, 1) instead of abolishing it. See also demythologization, Logos. Read in the essay

The name the essay gives to a regularity observed over two centuries: each critique of religion is accused by the next of having remained religious. Stirner reproaches Feuerbach with it, Marx Stirner, Nietzsche all the atheists of his time, Heidegger Nietzsche, Camus Marx, and Onfray, according to a reported formula, Comte-Sponville. The accusation is always the same: you think you have left religion, but you are still in it. It was Stirner who first formulated it, in 1844, in the sentence the essay takes as its guiding thread, “Unsere Atheisten sind fromme Leute”, our atheists are pious people; for this reason the essay also calls it Stirner's law, and notes that Stirner did not escape it himself, since he puts the Ego in the place of God. The full text speaks of a regularity that ends up resembling a law; the assessment in the conclusion draws up its list and shows why it is no accident: the place left empty by God answers a need for meaning, connection and protection that critique does not abolish. See also Sacrifice criterion, Strict refoundation and soft refoundation, Pious atheists. Read in the essay

The doctrine of the Course of Positive Philosophy (1830-1842): the human mind passes through the theological state, in which it explains phenomena by supernatural wills, fetishes, gods or a single God; through the metaphysical state, in which it explains them by abstract entities, Nature, forces, essences; and finally through the positive state, in which it gives up seeking causes in order to establish laws between phenomena. Each science passes through these states at its own pace, and sociology, the last to be born, completes the cycle. The essay stresses what follows, less often read: after the subjective turn linked to Clotilde de Vaux, Comte founds a complete religion of Humanity, with dogma, worship and priesthood, and this foundation is not a late madness but the logical consequence of the three states, since one must regulate and rally, and one destroys only what one replaces. Löwith recognizes in it a history of salvation in three ages, heir to Joachim of Fiore's division of history into the ages of the Father, the Son and the Spirit. See also Great Being, Religion of Humanity, Secularized eschatology. Read in the essay

In Jaspers (Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, 1919; Philosophie, 1932), the situations one can neither change nor avoid, and against which one can only collide as against a wall: death, suffering, struggle, guilt, and the very fact of always being in a situation. They are not resolved, they are lived; existence experiences itself in them, and it is in them, in failure (Scheitern), that transcendence makes itself felt, without ever becoming an object. They are, with ciphers and communication, one of the paths of philosophical faith. Camus, who reads Jaspers in The Myth of Sisyphus, starts from the same experience of the absurd and refuses the leap; the essay notes that the two attitudes part on the answer, not on the ordeal. Limit situations can be compared with helplessness in Freud and with death as the source of religion in Malinowski, but Jaspers draws from them no explanation of belief: he sees in them an opening, not a need. See also philosophical faith, Encompassing. Read in the essay

The three conditions that William James lays down in “The Will to Believe” (1896) for it to be legitimate to believe without sufficient evidence. An option is living when both hypotheses are really possible for the one who chooses; forced when there is no third way and abstaining amounts to choosing; momentous when the stake is unique and irreversible. When an option is of this kind and reason cannot decide, our passional nature not only may but must decide, at our own risk, and James objects to Clifford, for whom believing without evidence is always a fault, that the fear of error is itself a passion: dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear? The essay stresses the inner tolerance of this position, which defends faith without asking it of the unbeliever, and combines it with Clifford: one has the right to believe where reason leaves the question open, and this right ends where the belief engages the lives of others without their having chosen it. See also Ethics of belief, Pascal's wager, Reformed epistemology. Read in the essay

In Greek, word and reason: the divine reason or word by which the world is ordered. The Stoics make it the immanent reason of the world. In Philo of Alexandria, who reads Genesis with the Timaeus, the Logos is the intelligible world, intermediary between God and the world, and at times a second God. The prologue of John (1, 1 and 1, 14) makes it the Word with God, then the Word made flesh. In Justin, the Logos is sown in every man (logos spermatikos), which allows Socrates to be called a Christian before Christ, at once an opening towards philosophy and an annexation of it. Augustine finds among the Platonists the Logos with God, but not the Incarnation. In Part Two the essay follows this passage by which the God of the Greek philosophers enters Christianity: the transformation of a crucified prophet into the incarnate Logos matters more to it than the question of Jesus' existence. Freud, in 1927, would call science “our god Logos”. See also onto-theology. Read in the essay

Luc Ferry's notions in L'Homme-Dieu ou le Sens de la vie (1996). Modernity has known a double movement, the humanization of the divine, by which Christianity became ethics and feeling, and the divinization of the human, by which man became the object of sacred values: one no longer dies for God, but for freedom, for human rights, and it does happen. Ferry calls this structure a transcendence within immanence, or horizontal transcendence: the sacred is no longer above, in heaven, but in front, in other human beings and in the horizon of meaning they open. The essay reports the objections of Agnès Antoine and Serge Cantin, who ask whether a transcendence lodged within the immanence of consciousness still deserves the name, and concludes that this is a soft refoundation: Ferry consecrates without demanding, nothing in his work asks anyone to die, but he calls these devotions sacred, and that is the need to consecrate for which Engels reproached Feuerbach. It is the most liberal form of refoundation, opposed to Comte-Sponville's acceptance without transcendence. See also Strict refoundation and soft refoundation, Homo homini Deus, Religion of Humanity. Read in the essay

A formula the tradition has drawn from Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965), where Ricoeur places Marx, Nietzsche and Freud in a single school of suspicion: all three read consciousness as a text to be deciphered, whose apparent meaning conceals a hidden meaning, class interest, will to power, desire, and invent a mediate science of meaning. Ricoeur sets against them a hermeneutics of restoration, that of Eliade and of the phenomenology of religion, and proposes a faith that has passed through criticism, the second naïveté, among men who have not finished putting idols to death and are only beginning to hear symbols. The god of accusation, whom Nietzsche destroys, and the god of consolation, whom Freud destroys, are rightly destroyed. The essay finds him right about method and wrong about the object: the three regimes, symptom, genealogy, illusion, remain distinct and do not form a school. In the conclusion, Ricoeur appears among the believing exceptions, cautious and unstable. See also second naïveté, genealogy. Read in the essay

The anointed one, the one consecrated by anointing: the king of Israel, sometimes the priest. After the end of the monarchy, the word designates the descendant of David awaited to restore the people and justice, a varied figure in the time of Jesus, king, priest or heavenly envoy. The Greek Christos translates it, and Christians make it the title, then almost the name, of Jesus, executed by Rome as king of the Jews. Rabbinic Judaism keeps the expectation of a messiah to come. The essay meets the word in Reimarus, for whom Jesus was a political Jewish messiah who failed, in Strauss, for whom a community awaiting a Messiah gives Jesus the features the Scriptures attributed to him, and in Löwith, who reads the philosophies of history as a transposed messianism. See also eschatology, Covenant. Read in the essay

In Girard (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 1961), desire that imitates the desire of another: one does not desire an object directly, one desires it because a model desires it. Don Quixote wants to be a knight because Amadis was one; Emma Bovary loves through the novels she has read. Desire is not a straight line between a subject and an object, but a triangle whose apex is a mediator. When the model is distant, imitation is harmless; when he is close and desires the same object in the same world, he becomes a rival, the rival an obstacle, and the obstacle an even more fascinating model. Rivalry spreads by imitation up to the mimetic crisis, the war of all against all, which the scapegoat mechanism resolves. Girard reproaches Freud with having tied the founding murder to sexual desire and the father rather than to mimetic rivalry and the arbitrary victim (attested response). The essay retains mimetic desire as the anthropological hypothesis that grounds its criterion, and distinguishes this hypothesis from the Christian apologetics added to it. See also scapegoat mechanism. Read in the essay

The central notion of Religion Explained (2001), by Pascal Boyer. The human mind has intuitive inference systems about persons, animals, objects and artefacts; a religious concept violates one expectation of one of these categories while respecting all the others: a spirit that has no body but sees, hears and remembers, a statue that listens to prayers, a dead ancestor who gets angry. These minimally counterintuitive concepts are better remembered than ordinary concepts, because they surprise, and better than concepts that are too bizarre, because they remain usable: one can reason about a jealous god. Religion is thus a by-product of faculties that have other functions, neither an adaptation nor a need: science is as unnatural as religion is natural. The essay takes from it that Boyer adds no regime to critique but explains why gods are easy to think, and that he refutes the idea of an empty place of exactly the shape of God; it objects that he explains beliefs, not exercises. See also Need and disposition, Animism, Projection. Read in the essay

The mystery that makes one tremble. In The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige, 1917), Rudolf Otto describes the numinous by its effects in the soul and brings them together in a formula that has become classic: the mysterium tremendum, to which is added the fascinans, what attracts and enraptures. The divine is at once terrifying and fascinating, it repels and it attracts; above all it is the wholly other, ganz Andere, what belongs to no category of the world. The tremendum includes dread, the majesty before which the creature feels itself dust, and the energy of a living power; the fascinans, sweetness, grace, promised bliss. The essay uses this analysis to situate the oceanic feeling of Rolland and of Comte-Sponville: a numinous without tremendum, a pure fascinans. Levinas answers Otto directly, in A Religion for Adults, that the sacred that envelops and transports me is a violence, and that the mysterium tremendum, far from being the heart of religion, is what true religion must free itself from. See also Numinous, Oceanic feeling, The sacred. Read in the essay

The secret initiation rites of the Greek and Roman world, open to the individuals who chose them, alongside the public cults of the city: the mysteries of Eleusis, devoted to Demeter and Persephone, Orphism, then in the Hellenistic and Roman period the cults of Cybele and Attis, of Isis and Osiris, of Mithras. The initiate formed in them a personal relationship with a deity and often received the hope of a better fate after death; the secret was so well kept that what was shown there is poorly known. The history of religions school, with Bousset, explained part of Pauline Christianity by these cults, the title of Lord, baptism and the meal as initiations, and the mythicists saw in them the model of a Christ as a dying and rising god; historians have since strongly qualified these parallels. The essay encounters them in Plotinus, who compares union with the One to a mystery that cannot be divulged, and in the section on the existence of Jesus. See also Mythicist thesis. Read in the essay

The traditional narrative that recounts the origin of the world, of the gods, of rites or of cities, handed down without an assignable author and reinvented with each retelling. In Greek, muthos first means speech and story; it is opposed to logos, argued discourse, only from the philosophers and historians onwards, who class under this name what they want to hold at a distance. Xenophanes reproaches the poets for having lent the gods the vices of men; Plato drives Homer out of his city but invents his own myths; Aristotle distinguishes in the tradition a true core and mythical additions meant to persuade the multitude, the first political reading of myth, which the essay follows from Averroes to the Grand Inquisitor. In the twentieth century, Bultmann wants to demythologize the New Testament, Lévi-Strauss reads myths as systems of oppositions, Girard as the story of the lynching seen by the lynchers, and Blumenberg describes the work on myth as a way of holding at a distance the absolutism of reality. See also Allegory, Demythologization, Mythicist thesis. Read in the essay

The thesis that Jesus did not exist and is a mythical construction: sketched by Bruno Bauer, developed by Arthur Drews (Die Christusmythe, 1909) and Paul-Louis Couchoud (1924, answered by Goguel in 1925), taken up by Richard Carrier (2014) and popularized by Onfray (Théorie de Jésus, 2023). It is marginal: the historical existence of Jesus is the consensus of historians, believers, agnostics and atheists alike, based on Paul (Ga 1, 19 ; 4, 4 ; 1 Co 15), the criteria of embarrassment in the Gospels, Josephus and Tacitus; Celsus, Nietzsche and Engels did not doubt it. The essay devotes a section of Part Two to it and places it in the regime of error, in its naive form; it notes that Drews denies Jesus in order to found a monist religion, a textbook case of the law of refoundations, and that the question matters little: what counts is the transformation of a crucified prophet into the incarnate Logos. See also kerygma, demythologization. Read in the essay

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the religion that reason could establish by itself, without revelation: the existence of a God, author of the world, known through the order of nature, and the duties that follow from it. The deists saw it as the common ground of all religions; the apologists, as a preparation for faith. Hume tests it from both sides. The Natural History of Religion (1757) replaces the question of foundation with that of origin: religion is born of fear and hope, polytheism precedes monotheism, and the whole remains a riddle. The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) have three characters discuss the argument from design, and Philo, the sceptic, ruins its force while leaving the twelfth part ambiguous. Rousseau proposes another version in the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar: a natural religion that is not that of the philosophers, founded on inner feeling rather than demonstration, which Kant will take up while acknowledging his debt. The essay notes that Hume alone, among the Enlightenment thinkers, puts no capitalized word in the place of God. See also Deism, Eight regimes of critique, Feeling of absolute dependence. Read in the essay

The distinction that opens Part Nine, devoted to the causes of belief. To speak of a religious need, as Durkheim does, and as Feuerbach's formulas on desire and Freud's on helplessness incline one to do, is to suppose a constant lack that demands to be filled, and that will be filled by a substitute if religion disappears; to speak of a disposition is to designate something in the human mind that makes gods easy to think and belief probable, without making it a necessity. The essay chooses the second word and asks anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists and the cognitive sciences what the religious disposition owes to fear, to desire, to society, to death and to the very structure of the mind. The constructed debate that closes the part concludes that the disposition is universal in its springs and variable in its intensity: there is a need for meaning, connection and protection, not a need for God, and this is why exits from religion are costly exceptions, which presuppose wisdom and security. See also Existential security, Minimally counterintuitive concepts, Illusion. Read in the essay

A way of speaking of God by denying of him everything that can be said, because every positive attribute would lower him to the rank of creatures. It is also called apophatic, from the Greek apophasis, negation. It runs through Plotinus, for whom the One is beyond thought and being, Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, whose Guide for the Perplexed (I, 58-59) holds that we know of God only negative attributes and that for him silence is praise, and Meister Eckhart, who prays God to rid him of God. The essay sees in it the anticipation of the regime of experience, and the site of a constructed confrontation: Feuerbach takes negative theology for a subtle and cunning atheism, which keeps the name of God after emptying it of its content; the essay judges that Feuerbach is right about the ordinary believer and Maimonides about the philosopher. Spinoza, in the Theological-Political Treatise (VII), judges Maimonides' method useless, dangerous and absurd (attested response). Plotinus, Maimonides and Eckhart appear in the conclusion among the precursors of the exceptions. See also onto-theology. Read in the essay

In Nietzsche, the devaluation of the highest values: when the true world collapses, nothing seems worth anything any more, and the question “what for?” remains unanswered. The word comes from Turgenev (Fathers and Sons, 1862) and the Russian debate; Dostoevsky stages it in Demons and in the formula, never proverbial in his work, that without God everything would be permitted. Nietzsche holds nihilism to be a consequence of Christian morality itself, which placed value in a beyond, then killed what guaranteed it; pity is for him the practice of nihilism (The Antichrist § 7), and the atheism of his contemporaries a nihilism unaware of itself. It is an ordeal to be passed through rather than a state in which to settle: amor fati is the way out of it. Camus, in The Rebel (1951), dates the beginning of the history of contemporary nihilism from Ivan's “everything is permitted” and reads in it the deification of history by the revolutionaries. The essay does not treat nihilism as an exit from religion but as what the refoundations claim to ward off. See also death of God, amor fati. Read in the essay

Nirvāṇa, extinction. In Buddhism, the cessation of the craving, hatred and ignorance that feed the cycle of rebirths, and thereby the end of suffering; the schools debate whether it should be seen as a mere cessation or as an ineffable positive state. The essay first encounters it through Schopenhauer, who makes nirvana the mythical expression of the denial of the will to live and quotes, in § 63 of The World as Will and Representation, the Buddhist promise as he read it: a state in which there is neither birth, nor old age, nor sickness, nor death. It then shows, with Roger-Pol Droit, that the Buddhism of the European philosophers of the nineteenth century, a cult of nothingness for some, a positivist religion without God for Nietzsche, is a projection of Europe, and that real Buddhism is a complete tradition, with gods, karma, the saṅgha and the triple refuge: religion is not defined by God. Buddhism is for the essay neither an exception nor an ally, but a test, and the corporate meditation of the contemporary West is a reinvention of it, described as palliative care. See also Will to live, Nihilism, Spiritual exercises. Read in the essay

A word coined by Rudolf Otto from the Latin numen, divine power (Das Heilige, 1917), for the irrational element of the sacred, grasped by a feeling of its own that nothing else can replace: the terrible and fascinating mystery (mysterium tremendum et fascinans), the wholly other. The reader who has no experience of it is asked to read no further. Otto corrects Schleiermacher (attested response): the feeling of dependence is a creature-feeling, which presupposes the inaccessibility of its object, which would close Feuerbach's path; the essay declares itself not entirely convinced. He makes the sacred an a priori category of the mind, made up of rational and irrational moments: one cannot leave it, only leave it fallow or cultivate it, which makes it the paradoxical source of spiritualities without a Church. Jung defines religion by the scrupulous observation of the numinosum. Levinas answers that the numinous sacred is a violence from which Judaism has disenchanted the world. The essay describes the oceanic feeling as a numinous without tremendum, a pure fascinans. See also the sacred, oceanic feeling. Read in the essay

Romain Rolland's expression in his letter to Freud of 5 December 1927: a sensation of eternity, of being one with the world, without limits, which he held to be the true source of religion, independent of any dogma. Freud opens Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) with it: he admits that he cannot discover this feeling in himself, traces it back to the primary narcissism of the infant who does not yet distinguish himself from the world, suggests that it might aim at the restoration of an unlimited narcissism, and refuses to see in it the source of religion, which he finds in infantile helplessness and longing for the father (attested response). The essay judges that both are right: Freud about instituted religions, Rolland perhaps about experience, and describes the oceanic as a numinous without tremendum, a religion without a father but not without a mother. Comte-Sponville takes up the oceanic feeling in L'Esprit de l'athéisme (2006) and holds together Rolland's experience and Freud's atheism (constructed confrontation); the essay objects that the oceanic experience consoles and does not protest. See also illusion, numinous. Read in the essay

Born once and born twice. William James takes this distinction from Francis Newman in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), where it separates two religious types: the healthy-minded, who live in a spontaneous optimism without awareness of evil, and the sick souls, who have passed through melancholy, the sense of sin or of absurdity, and have found peace only at the price of a second birth, conversion. James invites his audience to turn away from the sky-blue optimistic gospel of the former and listen to the latter, whose experience goes further. The essay uses it to classify its own authors: Ivan Karamazov is the sick soul par excellence, Comte and Renan are once-born. The typology also recalls that James defines religion by the experience of individuals in their solitude, in contrast to Durkheim, in an attested dialogue. See also Oceanic feeling, Static religion and dynamic religion, Ethics of belief. Read in the essay

A word of Kant's, which Heidegger takes up to name the constitution of Western metaphysics since Plato and Aristotle. Metaphysics asks a double question, that of beings as beings (ontology) and that of the supreme being which grounds all the rest (theology); the two merge in a God who is cause of himself, causa sui. Heidegger concludes, in Identität und Differenz (1957), that this god of the philosophers has nothing divine about it: before the causa sui, man can neither pray nor sacrifice, neither fall on his knees nor make music and dance, and godless thinking is perhaps closer to the divine god. Its ancient source is Aristotle's theological philosophy (Metaphysics E 1). The essay makes it the fourth regime of critique: the death of God as the common completion of metaphysics and Christianity, foreseen by Pascal, who sets the God of Abraham against that of the philosophers, and turned around by Marion, for whom the god of onto-theology is a conceptual idol. It retains from Heidegger that the critique of the God of the philosophers is not the critique of God. See also idol and icon, negative theology. Read in the essay

Marx's formula in the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1844), usually quoted without the sentence that precedes it: religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of a spiritless situation, and, just before, the protest against real distress. Nineteenth-century opium is a painkiller, not a pleasure drug: religion soothes a pain it did not cause. It is a symptom, and one does not abolish the symptom without changing the world that produces it; to demand that people give up illusions is to demand that they give up a condition that needs illusions. This is the second regime of critique. The essay retains above all the Protest: the wisdoms of immanence, Spinoza before Ivan, Comte-Sponville before Hausemer, console without protesting, and consolation becomes in the conclusion the indicator of a refoundation; Simone Weil, a believer, removes the opium without removing the protest. Marx dismissed the sacred; he did not dismiss salvation. See also theodicy. Read in the essay

Übermensch. The figure Zarathustra announces: man is something that must be overcome, and the overman is the meaning of the earth, the one who, after the death of God, creates his own values instead of receiving them. The essay does not make the overman the centre of its reading of Nietzsche, which it seeks rather in The Gay Science and the Genealogy, but it meets him in the objections. The first is the one Dostoevsky might have formulated: are amor fati and the overman not figures of Kirillov, the man who makes himself god because there is no God, and Zarathustra, with his disciples and his parables, one more religion? Nietzsche himself feared it, writing that there was nothing in him of a founder of religion and that he wanted no believers. The second comes from Bergson, who answers that the overman already exists and is called the mystic, in whom open morality and dynamic religion have found their man. The essay holds Nietzsche to be an exception, but one of attitude, unstable: § 344 against the prophetic temptations of Zarathustra. See also Amor fati, Death of God, Static religion and dynamic religion. Read in the essay

Two names given to Spinoza's doctrine by his readers. Pantheism identifies God and the world: everything is in God, and God is nothing outside nature; this is how the pantheism controversy, opened by Jacobi in 1785, and the Romantics read the Ethics, some to denounce it as disguised atheism, others to find in it a religion of the universe, like Schleiermacher hailing Spinoza as holy and outcast. Hegel reverses the reading in his lectures on the history of philosophy: Spinozism is not an atheism but an acosmism; there is not too little God in Spinoza, but too much, since the finite world loses all reality of its own. The essay concludes that these two opposite readings say the same thing: Spinoza did not do away with God, he displaced him. The word pantheism returns in Part Six, where the King of Prussia brings Schelling to Berlin to combat the dragon's seed of Hegelian pantheism, and where the young Feuerbach is still a pantheist of the spirit. See also Deus seu Natura, Intellectual love of God, Deism. Read in the essay

Fragment 233 of the Pensées in the Brunschvicg edition, the most famous and, according to the essay, the most misread. Pascal addresses a libertine who can neither believe nor decide: since reason cannot settle the matter, one must wager, and the stake is such, an eternity of happiness against a finite life, that wagering for God is the only reasonable choice. The essay acknowledges that this is a calculation of interest, but maintains that the essential lies elsewhere: to the man who is convinced and still cannot believe, Pascal replies that he should act as if he believed, take holy water and have masses said, and this will make you believe and will stupefy you. Practice precedes belief and produces it, which Durkheim and Hume will each rediscover in their own way. The wager is thus an exercise more than a proof. William James, in The Will to Believe, judges it severely: the wager is valid only for one who already has a tendency to believe, and James keeps from Pascal the right of the heart while leaving him the calculation. See also Hidden God, Fideism, Ethics of belief. Read in the essay

Περιαγωγή, the turning around. In the allegory of the cave (Republic VII, 518c-d), Plato says that education is not the filling of an empty soul, but the art of turning the whole soul, with the organ by which it sees, from what becomes towards what is, like an eye that cannot be turned towards the light without turning the whole body. The essay sees in it the first philosophical name for what Foucault will call spirituality: a transformation of the subject necessary to gain access to the true, whose end is the Good situated beyond essence (509b). The figure returns under the name of conversion of the gaze: in Zosima, who answers Ivan's evil not with an argument but with a change of vision; in Murdoch, for whom moral life is a conversion of attention that turns away from the self towards the Good. It brings out the two Platos whose tension runs through the essay, the legislator of the Laws and the Plato of conversion, and it is the second that the spiritualities without God claim. See also Spirituality, Spiritual exercises, Unselfing. Read in the essay

In Karl Jaspers (Der philosophische Glaube, 1948; Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung, 1962), a faith without revelation or Church: the relation to transcendence that philosophy experiences without being able to know it, which gives itself in ciphers, the language of transcendence, and in limit situations, and which no orthodoxy can possess. It refuses to let any revelation be exclusive, and reads the Trinity and Christ themselves as ciphers of human possibilities. Barth reproaches it with a transcendence without content; Bultmann, with an untranslated myth, to which Jaspers replies that myth cannot be translated without loss; Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, with philosophical suicide, the leap by which the absurd becomes god (attested responses). The essay judges Camus right in logic but not with regard to its criterion, since Jaspers's leap ends in no obedience, and it compares Jaspers to Heidegger: the same structure of expectation, but communication saves him. Jaspers is a cautious believing exception, with a reservation about the inflation of ciphers. See also limit situations, Encompassing. Read in the essay

The sentence of Stirner's that the essay takes as its guiding thread: “Unsere Atheisten sind fromme Leute”, our atheists are pious people. It targets the Young Hegelians, and Feuerbach first of all: they have dismissed God but kept the sacred, by transferring it to Man, and the fear of Man is only a modified form of the fear of God; in the feudal age everything was held in fief from God, in the liberal age everything is held from Man. Feuerbach turns the phrase back on him in an attested response of 1845: Stirner too is a pious atheist, who worships his Ego. The essay judges the retort right about Stirner and weak about the rest, and retains the formula as the law of the whole series, which its author stated without escaping it. It recurs even among contemporaries: Onfray, according to a reported formula, accuses Comte-Sponville of being a Christian atheist, that is, a pious atheist who keeps Christian morality and abandons only God, before becoming one himself, differently, by defending the Latin Mass. See also Law of refoundations, Spuk, Christian atheist. Read in the essay

Nietzsche's formula in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil (1886): Christianity is Platonism for the people, “Christenthum ist Platonismus für's Volk”. It reverses, while keeping it, the reproach of Tertullian, who asked around 200 what Athens has in common with Jerusalem and denounced a Stoic, Platonic and dialectical Christianity. The essay takes it as the thread of its Part Two: the formula is a polemic, but it designates a fact that historians do not dispute, Christianity thought itself in the categories of Greek philosophy, beginning with that of Logos, from Philo and Justin to Augustine. The elitist reading it presupposes, a philosophical truth translated into images for the multitude, itself has a long history, from Aristotle to Averroes and Schopenhauer. Heidegger will take up the phrase in another sense, to say that Western philosophy, understood as Platonism, has reached its end. See also Logos, Double truth, Allegory. Read in the essay

In Carl Schmitt (Politische Theologie, 1922), the thesis that all the significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts: the sovereign who decides on the exception is the omnipotent God become lawgiver, the state of exception corresponds to the miracle, deism to the constitutional state that excludes the sovereign's intervention. Schmitt does not denounce this filiation, he claims it, with Donoso Cortés against liberalism, and the essay ranks him, with Rousseau and Comte, among those who embrace refoundation; in 1933 he would write that the Führer protects the law. Blumenberg replies that these concepts are theologized rather than secularized (attested response, correspondence from 1971 to 1978). Since Varro and Augustine, the expression has also designated the civil theology of cities, and in Spinoza the Theological-Political Treatise. The essay sees in it a limit case of refoundation, in the sole form of authority, which it classes among the strict refoundations. See also secularization. Read in the essay

The diagnosis of Science as a Vocation (1917-1919): the many old gods, disenchanted and become impersonal powers, rise from their graves and resume their eternal struggle. The disenchanted world is not a world without gods, but a world in which the ultimate standpoints on life, the true, the beautiful, the sacred, the nation, are irreducible to one another and no science can decide between them; each must choose his god, and science says only at what price. The essay marks the difference from Durkheim: Durkheim expected new gods born of an effervescence that would restore the unity of society; Weber observes that the gods have returned in the plural and will restore no unity. The exit from monotheism is not an exit from religion but a return to polytheism, without temples or sacrifices but not without victims, and the essay's thesis takes on a new form: one does not refound a religion, one refounds several, which wage war on one another. Weber offers no consolation and refuses the prophets of the lecture hall. See also Disenchantment of the world, Casing as hard as steel, Sacrifice of the intellect. Read in the essay

In Habermas (Glauben und Wissen, acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, Frankfurt, 14 October 2001), the condition of secularized societies that must reckon lastingly with the presence of religious communities and with their resources of meaning. Reciprocity is required on both sides: believers accept that public authority be neutral, unbelievers do not hold religion to be a mere archaism. Public reason has the task of translating religious contents rather than liquidating them: a secularization that does not annihilate is accomplished in the mode of translation, as the image of man created in the image of God (Gn 1, 27) has become the equal dignity of all, and Kant is the first example of a secularizing and saving deconstruction. The essay sees in it a third way between Löwith and Blumenberg, but remarks that Habermas translates only normative contents and does not say how the individual lives without religion. The essay has not read the debate with Ratzinger (2004). See also secularization. Read in the essay

The great principle, not commonly used, that Leibniz formulates in § 7 of the Principles of Nature and Grace (1714): nothing happens without a sufficient reason, that is, without its being possible for someone who knew things well enough to give a reason why it is so and not otherwise. The Monadology (§ 32) sets it beside the principle of contradiction. Applied to the totality of things, it gives rise to the question the essay places at the centre of its last constructed debate: why is there something rather than nothing, since nothing is simpler and easier than something? Since no contingent thing accounts for the whole series, the ultimate reason of things must lie in a necessary substance, God. The essay follows the fate of this demand: Hume dissolves it, Kant sees in it the abyss of reason, Schelling drives it to despair, Heidegger turns it against Leibniz, Wittgenstein keeps the wonder without the answer. It notes that the demand for reason leads to piety by a back door, and that it is when wonder becomes debt that spirituality becomes religion again. See also Wonder without debt, Best of all possible worlds, Causa sui. Read in the essay

Feuerbach's thesis (Das Wesen des Christentums, 1841): man places outside himself, in a God, the qualities of his own species (Gattung), reason, will, love, and then kneels before them. The secret of theology is anthropology, and the consciousness of God is the self-consciousness of man. The word projection comes from the vocabulary of his readers; Feuerbach speaks of objectification and alienation. D'Holbach and Lucretius had foreseen it, Durkheim will transpose it to the group, Freud will connect it to desire. It is the heart of the first regime of critique, the regime of error, in its most accomplished form. Stirner answers in 1844 that predicates transferred to man do not lose their divinity: Feuerbach's Man is a new God; Marx, in the sixth thesis (1845), that the human essence is the ensemble of social relations; Barth, in 1927, grants that he is right all along the line about religion as human experience. The essay takes Feuerbach as the textbook case of soft refoundation: he abandons the name of God but keeps the thing, adoration. See also illusion. Read in the essay

The word Marx uses, in the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1844), just before the sentence on opium: religious distress is at once the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress, “die Protestation gegen das wirkliche Elend”; religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of a spiritless age. The essay writes the word with a capital letter to make a concept of it: religion is not only an illusory consolation, it is also a complaint, and the critique that wants to abolish religion must demand that one give up a condition that needs illusions. It is through the Protestation that Marx remains right against the sages of immanence: Comte-Sponville's oceanic experience consoles, it does not protest; Spinoza, faced with Ivan Karamazov, does not answer the complaint. The conclusion seeks to hold together Spinoza's acceptance and Marx's Protestation, by consenting to the necessity of the world without consenting to the injustice of men. See also Opium of the people, Sigh without a heaven, Revolt. Read in the essay

The current of analytic philosophy of religion whose principal figure is Alvin Plantinga. Against Clifford's evidentialism, which demands evidence for every belief, Plantinga observes that this principle does not satisfy its own conditions, being neither self-evident nor demonstrated, and maintains that belief in God can be properly basic, like belief in the existence of other minds: rational without being inferred. He finds its source in a theme of Calvin, the sensus divinitatis, a faculty or cognitive mechanism that produces belief in God in us in certain circumstances. The classic objection is that of the Great Pumpkin: if belief in God is basic without evidence, why not any belief whatever? Plantinga replies that certain candidate beliefs can be ruled out without having a general criterion. The essay judges that this debate, Plantinga's as well as the one Mackie opens on evil, saves the coherence and rationality of faith at the price of its universality: the believer can be rational, but can no longer demand that the unbeliever be rational by believing; and Ivan remains. See also Ethics of belief, Living, forced, momentous option, Fideism. Read in the essay

The narrative the prologue sets out to undo: that of a critique of religion handed on like a torch, from Lucretius to Spinoza, from the Enlightenment to Feuerbach, from Marx to Nietzsche and Freud, each runner taking the baton from the one before until atheism is complete. The essay sets three findings against it. The critiques do not aim at the same thing: error, symptom, value, illusion, function are not a single adversary under different names. They accuse one another instead of completing one another, which is the subject of the law of refoundations. Finally, the harshest critique of religion often comes from inside faith, in Pascal, Kierkegaard, Barth or Simone Weil, whom the fable ignores. The prologue adds that Christianity did not forge the weapons of its critique alone, and that to forget this would be to perpetuate the fable, hence the place given to Averroes, Maimonides, Arkoun and Bidar. See also Eight regimes of critique, Law of refoundations. Read in the essay

The two ancient etymologies of the word religion, which the essay turns into two conceptions of the thing. For Cicero (De natura deorum II, 72), religio comes from relegere, to read again, to go over scrupulously: religion is ritual and civic exactness, the correct observance of what concerns the worship of the gods, with neither dogma nor inner faith. For Lactantius (Divine Institutes IV, 28), tutor to Constantine's son, it comes from religare, to bind: the bond of piety that ties man to God, and which presupposes a personal relation. The second, Christian etymology won out in usage; modern linguists consider the first the more probable. The essay reads in them the opposition that runs through the sciences of religion: Durkheim, for whom religion is a collective fact with a Church, stands on Cicero's side; William James, for whom it is the experience of individuals in their solitude, on the side of the solitary mystic. See also spirituality, the sacred. Read in the essay

In the strict sense, the religion founded by Auguste Comte after 1847, of which the Catechism of Positive Religion (1852) gives the summary exposition: a religion without God, whose object is the Great Being, Humanity, with its temples, among them the one in the rue Payenne in Paris and those of Brazil, where the motto Ordem e Progresso passed onto the flag. In the broad sense, the essay uses the phrase for every exit from religion that transfers the divine onto humanity: the one Strauss begins by making humanity God made man, the one Feuerbach theorizes, the one George Eliot, translator of both, puts into novels, the one Luc Ferry renews under the name of the divinization of the human. The Grand Inquisitor is its political completion: a religion of humanity administered by those who know, the essay speaking of a Comte become lucid, and therefore tragic. The question the essay puts to each of these forms is the same: does Humanity thus consecrated demand that one sacrifice to it? In Comte the answer is yes, and the refoundation is strict. See also Great Being, Gattung, Homo homini Deus. Read in the essay

Marcel Gauchet's formula, in The Disenchantment of the World (1985), for defining Christianity. Through the incarnation, which puts God into history, and through the absolute transcendence of a God who withdraws from the world, Christianity made possible a society that organizes itself without reference to the divine: it produced by itself the conditions of its own effacement, and democratic modernity is its fulfilment, not its negation. The essay points out that the thesis is already formulated, in genealogical terms, in § 27 of the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, where Nietzsche describes a Christianity that destroys itself out of fidelity to itself, and it compares Gauchet with Girard, for whom Christianity is at once the exit from sacrificial religion and a religion, the two lines of thought sharing the same weakness, which is to make Christianity the end point of the religious history of humanity. It also draws from it a weapon against Onfray's Décadence: if Gauchet is right, Christianity does not die, it fulfils itself. Gauchet specifies in 1998 that the exit from religion does not mean the exit from religious belief. See also Heteronomy, Disenchantment of the world, Scapegoat mechanism. Read in the essay

The programme Dietrich Bonhoeffer sketches in his prison letters of 1944, though the essay has not been able to verify the exact phrase religionsloses Christentum. On 30 April, he announces a completely religionless time, religion being for him metaphysics and inwardness, the stopgap God, Lückenbüßer, who is called upon at the limits of knowledge and power. On 16 July, he takes up Grotius's formula, etsi deus non daretur, as if God were not given: God as a working hypothesis has been abolished, and it is Feuerbach he names; before God and with God we live without God, and God is powerless and weak in the world. On 18 July, the world come of age, mündig gewordene Welt, is closer to God than the world not yet of age. Bonhoeffer distances himself from Barth, whom he reproaches with a positivism of revelation, a block of dogmas to take or leave, and from Bultmann, liberal at bottom. The essay sees in it the reversal of Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche: a weak God is no longer a projection but a dispossession. Bonhoeffer remains within revelation. See also Infinite qualitative difference, Projection, Demythologization. Read in the essay

Hans Blumenberg's concept (Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, 1966) against the thesis of secularization, which he holds to be a category of historical injustice: modernity does not inherit Christian contents, it occupies with new answers places, questions, that theology had opened and then left empty, such as that of the meaning of history. Identity of function creates the appearance of a historical identity that is mere semblance. Modernity is a self-assertion (Selbstbehauptung) of man against the theological absolutism of the late Middle Ages, the arbitrary God of nominalism. Blumenberg thereby answers Löwith and Schmitt (attested responses). The essay makes it the second great objection to its thesis, symmetrical to Durkheim's: to see a religion wherever a place is occupied would be an optical illusion, and the extensive version of the thesis proves too much. It concedes the point, and makes its criterion the answer: secular religion in Aron's sense distinguishes modest reoccupations from reoccupations by a sacrificial absolute. Blumenberg is an unexpected ally, in the order of history. See also secularization, secularized eschatology. Read in the essay

The French word that Nietzsche keeps as it is in the German text of the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) to name the mainspring of slave morality: the imaginary revenge of those who cannot act, who overturn the values of the masters and call good what is weak, humble and suffering. Christianity is for him its major work, and Paul, in The Antichrist, its inventor; Jesus, by contrast, is in The Antichrist a being incapable of resistance, of ressentiment and of dogma, who lives in an inner kingdom, and the essay links this portrait with the silent Christ of the Grand Inquisitor. The essay places ressentiment among the genealogies to which William James replies in advance: Feuerbach explained religion by projection, Marx by misery, Nietzsche by ressentiment, Freud by infantile desire, and to all of them James objects that a tree is judged by its fruits, not by its roots. See also Genealogy, Nihilism, Overman. Read in the essay

The concept of The Rebel (1951). Revolt is the movement by which a man says no to a condition he judges unjust and, by this no, affirms a value he holds to be common to all men; its central formula is a cogito, “Je me révolte, donc nous sommes”, I rebel, therefore we are. Camus distinguishes metaphysical revolt, which contests the whole of creation and God himself, from historical revolt, which contests the social order. His book tells how each of them turned into its opposite: revolt, which began by contesting God in the name of man, ends by divinizing man and then history, and by killing in the name of this new divinity. Against this drift, Camus sets measure, the thought of noon, and refuses to let the we of revolt become an absolute. The essay finds in it the unbeliever's answer to the sigh without a heaven: the lament of the oppressed creature changes its address and turns towards other men, on condition that this we remains horizontal, never becomes a god and never designates a victim. See also The absurd, Thought of noon, Divinization of history, Sigh without a heaven. Read in the essay

The Sacred Canopy (1967), the book in which Peter Berger applies the theory of the social construction of reality to religion. Every society is an enterprise of world-building, and this world, which he calls by a Greek word, nomos, is an order of meanings that shields human beings from chaos; the individual torn from it, by bereavement, exile or catastrophe, becomes anomic, worldless. Religion is the sacred canopy stretched over this nomos, which grounds it by relating it to a cosmic order, and its first function is not happiness but meaning, as is shown by theodicy, which makes suffering bearable by explaining it. The canopy holds through plausibility structures: a religion is believed only if one's surroundings take it as self-evident, and modern pluralism, which brings everyone face to face with other beliefs, undermines this self-evidence; a chosen belief does not have the same authority as a world. Berger had drawn from this a prediction of secularization that he retracted in 1999, the world having remained as furiously religious as ever. The essay distinguishes the shelter of meaning, which does not disappear, from the institution, which can recede. See also Invisible religion, Secularization, Theodicy. Read in the essay

The criterion the essay proposes for deciding whether an exit from religion has refounded another. In its final formulation (conclusion), one refounds a religion, in the sense that matters, not when one occupies a place that theology has left empty, but when one installs in that place an absolute in whose name the sacrifice of the individual can be demanded, and criticism of which becomes sacrilege; freely consented self-offering does not fall under it. The criterion does not depend on the presence or absence of God: believers have left religion in the sense in which Barth, Bonhoeffer and Weil denounce it, and atheists have remained in it. It distinguishes two degrees: strict refoundation, where the absolute demands (Plato, Rousseau, Comte, the secular religions, Schmitt), and soft refoundation, where one consecrates without demanding (Feuerbach, Ferry). The essay owes it more to Stirner, for whom the fear of Man is a modified form of the fear of God, than to Löwith; Girard gives it an anthropological foundation, since to refound is to designate a victim. See also secular religions, the sacred. Read in the essay

Opfer des Intellekts, the formula of Science as a Vocation. Whoever cannot bear the fate of the age, a world without mysterious and incalculable powers, where the prophets fall silent, may return to the arms of the old Churches, wide open and full of mercy; Weber says he must do so simply, without fuss, and that this return demands of him the sacrifice of the intellect, the acceptance of believing what reason cannot establish. He does not despise it: the sacrifice of the intellect for the sake of a positive faith is morally better than the false reconciliation of those who dare not choose; Weber does, however, refuse the prophets of the lecture hall. The expression comes from the Catholic tradition, where the sacrificium intellectus designates the submission of reason to dogma. The essay acknowledges the probity of this position, which refuses both to found a cult and to pass off a value as knowledge, and judges it hard to hold; it wonders whether Weber, who ends on the watchman of Edom and the night that lasts, might not be the last Puritan. See also Polytheism of values, Disenchantment of the world, Fideism. Read in the essay

The shortest name the essay gives to what the sacrifice criterion detects: an absolute, whatever its name, God, the city, Humanity, History, Race, Civilization, in whose name the sacrifice of the individual can be demanded and whose critique becomes a sacrilege. The expression serves above all to decide between modern reoccupations. Blumenberg is right to say that not every occupied place is a religion; but among the answers given to the questions theology left behind, some are modest hypotheses and others install a sacrificial absolute, and it is to these alone that secular religion in Aron's sense applies. Justin's martyrdom is not the sacrificial absolute that the criterion denounces, since it is Rome that makes the demand; Comte-Sponville's wisdom refounds none, but risks accepting injustice. The criterion does not condemn every absolute: it condemns the one that demands the sacrifice of others and has priests to speak in its name. See also Sacrifice criterion, Secular religions, Reoccupation. Read in the essay

In René Girard (Violence and the Sacred, 1972), the origin of the sacred. A community ravaged by mimetic crisis, in which each imitates the other's violence and differences are effaced, suddenly recovers its unity by discharging its violence onto a single victim, designated by some arbitrary trait; the returning peace is attributed to the victim itself, which becomes sacred, at once guilty and beneficent, accursed and divine. Myth is the account of the lynching from the point of view of the lynchers; rite is its controlled repetition on a substitute victim, sacrifice; prohibitions prevent the return of the crisis. The mechanism requires misrecognition: lynchers who knew their victim to be innocent would not obtain peace. For Girard, the Bible and the Gospels, which tell the Passion from the point of view of the innocent victim, unveil the mechanism and render it inoperative. The essay keeps the anthropological level, which gives the sacrifice criterion its foundation (to refound is to designate a victim, and the Grand Inquisitor is the priest of the mechanism), and leaves aside the apologetic level: the exit from sacrifice belongs to anyone who refuses the crowd, believer or not. See also mimetic desire, the sacred. Read in the essay

In Ricoeur (The Symbolism of Evil, 1960; the formula circulates in French retranslated from English), the way of believing that returns to symbols after passing through criticism: no longer the immediate adherence of the first believer, lost beyond recovery, but a listening schooled by suspicion, in which the symbol gives rise to thought. It presupposes that interpretation has no end and that faith never becomes knowledge again. The essay addresses to it the objection of Hegel and of Leo Strauss: a second naïveté might be only a first one that gives itself a good conscience; it retains the answer of Ricoeur, for whom it is not a knowledge but a listening, and reconstructs from him a belief without a father that would escape Freud's suspicion. Ricoeur also hears, in religion, Marx's Protest. With Jaspers and Weil, he is a believing exception: he refounds nothing, but his position remains unstable. See also masters of suspicion. Read in the essay

Raymond Aron's expression (L'avenir des religions séculières, 1944, paraphrased by the essay), close to Eric Voegelin's political religions (Die politischen Religionen, 1938), for the doctrines that take the place of vanished faith in people's souls and situate salvation here below, in the future of humanity: communism and Nazism first and foremost, the deified Volk, History as judge. Voegelin gives them a genealogy, gnosis, the immanentization of the eschaton since Joachim of Fiore; Aron keeps to the function. Kelsen objects to Voegelin that his is a theory that proves everything (attested response), and Blumenberg sees in it a second victory over gnosis. The essay sides with Kelsen and Blumenberg against the genealogy, and against them on the function: secular religion in Aron's sense is indispensable to it, because it neutralizes the crossed objections of Durkheim and Blumenberg. The secular religions of the twentieth century are the most massive cases of the sacrifice criterion, and appear in the conclusion among the strict refoundations. See also sacrifice criterion, reoccupation. Read in the essay

The passage of institutions, property or concepts from the religious to the profane domain. The word comes from canon law (the religious who returns to the world) and from the treaties of Westphalia (Church property transferred to princes), before coming to designate, in the nineteenth century, the retreat of religion in modern societies. The debate that Part Eleven puts on trial concerns its nature: a transposition of Christian contents, for Schmitt (the concepts of the State) and Löwith (eschatology become philosophy of history); a category of historical injustice, for Blumenberg, who sets against it the reoccupation of empty places by new answers; an exit from religion produced by Christianity itself, for Gauchet; the passage of belief to one option among others, for Taylor; a translation of religious contents, for Habermas. Weber had described its mainspring under the name of disenchantment. What the essay retains from the quarrel is that all of them speak of the institution and none of what the individual lives, and that Norris and Inglehart provide the empirical arbitration: it is not critique that secularizes, it is existential security. See also reoccupation, secularized eschatology, disenchantment of the world. Read in the essay

Eschatology is the doctrine of the last things, from the Greek eschata: the end of time, judgement, salvation. Karl Löwith's thesis (Meaning in History, 1949) is that the modern philosophies of history, from Voltaire and Condorcet to Hegel, Marx and Comte, are Christian eschatology transposed: history oriented towards a goal, progress, revolution, the positive state, inherits the Jewish and Christian expectation of salvation, and historical materialism is a messianism in the language of political economy; Comte takes up the three ages of Joachim of Fiore. The Greeks, who thought of time as a cycle, had no philosophy of history. Löwith concludes in favour of a Stoic withdrawal, for which Habermas reproaches him in 1963. Blumenberg answers him that identity of function does not prove identity of content (attested response). The essay holds Löwith to be an ambiguous ally: the best historical support for its thesis, who refounds nothing but proposes no way of living; it judges that its criterion owes more to Stirner than to Löwith. See also secularization, reoccupation. Read in the essay

Selbstbehauptung. In The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966), Hans Blumenberg maintains that modernity owes its legitimacy to no inheritance, Christian or other, but to a self-assertion, and he dates it precisely: it is man's response to the theological absolutism of the late Middle Ages, that of nominalism, which had made God an arbitrary and omnipotent will before which the world no longer offered any guarantee of order. Faced with a hidden and unpredictable God, man had to take charge of himself, to know and master nature in order to find his way in it. Modernity is therefore not a Christianity that has lost its faith, but a response to an internal crisis of Christian theology, and the secularization theorem, which makes progress a transposed eschatology, is a category of historical injustice. The essay holds Blumenberg to be an unexpected ally, whose intellectual hygiene obliges it to restrict its thesis to the sacrifice criterion. Leo Strauss, with no attested dialogue, is wholly opposed to this reading: modernity is for him a break with ancient wisdom, not a legitimate self-assertion. See also Reoccupation, Secularization, Hidden God. Read in the essay

The clause that, in the final formulation of the sacrifice criterion, settles the borderline cases. What refounds a religion is not that a man agrees to die for what he loves, but that an authority demands this devotion of others and treats its critique as sacrilege. Justin dying for having refused a cult, Clifford's scientist who renounces a consolation, Ferry's man ready to die for freedom found nothing: freely consented self-offering does not fall under the criterion. Rome demanding Justin's sacrifice, the Grand Inquisitor, Rousseau's civil religion punishing with death whoever lies before the laws, do fall under it. The distinction allows the essay not to condemn every absolute, but only the absolute that has priests to speak in its name and victims to designate, and to leave Ferry the rank of soft rather than strict refounder. See also Sacrifice criterion, Strict refoundation and soft refoundation, Victimary mechanism. Read in the essay

Λόγος σπερματικός, reason sown. Justin, in the middle of the 2nd century, maintains in his Apologies that the Logos that became incarnate in Christ was always present, in the state of seed, in all human beings: each philosopher spoke well to the extent that he had a share in the seminal Logos, and whatever has been well said among all men belongs to the Christians (2 Apology, 13). Socrates and Heraclitus, who lived according to the Logos, are thus Christians before Christ. The essay notes the double face of the formula: an opening, which recognizes truth outside the Church, and an annexation, which makes Greek wisdom a Christian property and philosophy a preparation. Augustine will repeat the gesture when he debates with the Platonists without excluding that other sages thought the same of God, which the essay calls the politeness of a victor. The word comes from the Stoics, for whom seminal reasons are the rational germs of all things. See also Logos, Platonism for the people, Allegory. Read in the essay

The title of the last section of the conclusion and the question it leaves open. Marx, in the Introduction of 1844, does not say only that religion is the opium of the people: it is also the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the Protestation against real misery. If religion were only an error, its disappearance would be pure gain; if it is also a lament, what becomes of this lament when heaven empties? The essay judges that the wisdoms of immanence answer it badly: Spinoza before Ivan Karamazov, Comte-Sponville before Hausemer, console for injustice by making it understood. Bonhoeffer and Simone Weil, believers, withdraw the opium without withdrawing the protest. For the unbeliever, the most just answer is Camus's, “Je me révolte, donc nous sommes”, I rebel, therefore we are: the lament changes its address and turns towards other human beings, on condition that this we remain horizontal, never become a god and never designate a victim. See also Opium of the people, Protestation, Revolt. Read in the essay

Pierre Bayle's hypothesis in the Pensées diverses sur la comète (1682-1683): a society of atheists could subsist and govern itself as well as a society of pagans, provided crimes were severely punished. Bayle starts from an observation: people do not live according to their principles; convinced Christians commit every sin, and it is human justice that makes the greater part of the world virtuous. Religion is therefore not the cement of morality, and atheism is no worse than idolatry, for which Jurieu will reproach him in an attested response. The essay sees in it the first exit from religion as a political bond, from a sceptical Calvinist, and the first of the five answers in the constructed debate on morality without God: morality holds through society. It sets it against Ivan Karamazov: Bayle speaks of society, Ivan of conscience; a society of atheists can hold together with laws and prisons, but Smerdyakov's crime raises another question, that of guilt. Young Kolya, in the novel, states Bayle's thesis as a schoolboy would. See also Everything is permitted, Civil religion, Theodicy. Read in the essay

Σωφρονιστήριον, the house where one is made wise. In Book X of the Laws (908a-909a), having proved the gods exist through the self-moving soul, Plato provides three prisons in his city; this one, next to the seat of the nocturnal council, is intended for the impious man of good faith, who denies the gods from want of judgement, not from vice. He will spend at least five years there, visited only by members of the council, who come to instruct him; if he relapses on release, he will be put to death. The essay stresses that this is a forced school, not a place of torture, that the impious man is treated as sick in soul, and that the religion imposed on him is a rational theology, not that of the poets. This is precisely what makes the Laws the pure case of the sacrifice criterion: once truth has been demonstrated, it can be demanded, and its critique becomes a crime. Popper made it the first enemy of the open society; the essay sees in it the original of which almost all later refoundations are copies, and the ancestor of the Grand Inquisitor. See also Sacrifice criterion, Grand Inquisitor, Civil religion. Read in the essay

The formula that closes Faith and Knowledge (1802). There Hegel cites the feeling on which the religion of modern times rests, that God himself is dead, “Gott selbst ist tot”, drawing on Pascal's words about a nature that everywhere marks a lost God. Philosophy must restore this historical Good Friday as a speculative Good Friday, in the whole truth and harshness of its godlessness, so that the highest totality may rise again in the most serene freedom of its shape. The death of God is thus thought as a moment of the concept: the finite is traversed and negated, the absolute passes through negation. The essay specifies that the hymn by Johann Rist, from which the sentence comes, is brought in only later, in the Lectures, and that Nietzsche will keep this death of God while taking away the resurrection. It holds Hegel's argument to be right and his conclusion wrong: philosophy, which sublates religion into the concept, becomes the higher religion of the wise, one more Averroist division. See also Death of God, Aufhebung, Onto-theology. Read in the essay

In Pierre Hadot (Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 1981), the practices by which the ancient schools, Stoics, Epicureans, Platonists, transformed the way of seeing and being of their members: attention to oneself, examination of conscience, meditation on death, premeditation of evils, the view from above, concentration on the present. Philosophy there is a way of life before being a discourse. The word comes from Ignatius of Loyola, the thing from the philosophers: it is a debt reversed, and the Christian exercises inherited the ancient ones. Hadot reproaches Foucault, who takes up these themes in the care of the self, with an aesthetics of existence too close to dandyism, because it forgets that the sage places himself in the perspective of the Whole (attested response). The essay finds in Hadot the most exact historical description of the spirituality of exercise that it proposes in answer to its question, with Spinoza for the ontology and Wittgenstein for the limit: the Whole there is a horizon of lucidity, not an object of adoration. Hadot figures among the exceptions, in the position of immanence. See also spirituality. Read in the essay

In the sense the essay adopts, that of Foucault and Hadot: the search, the practice and the experience through which the subject carries out on itself the transformations necessary to gain access to the truth (The Hermeneutics of the Subject, lecture of 6 January 1982). Hadot speaks of spiritual exercises. The notion presupposes neither God, nor worship, nor belief, which makes it possible to speak of spiritualities without God. The essay draws from it the distinction that runs through it: religion in the strong sense involves an external absolute to which the individual is subjected, dogmas and a community; spirituality involves only an exercise through which the subject transforms itself. There is religion without spirituality, the observance Kant calls Afterdienst, and spirituality without God, among the Epicureans, in Spinoza or in Comte-Sponville. It is the eighth regime of critique, the regime of experience, that obliges the essay to widen religion in this way. The essay's answer to its question takes the form of a spirituality of exercise, of which Spinoza gives the ontology, Hadot the historical description and Wittgenstein the strictest limit. See also spiritual exercises. Read in the essay

The form taken, according to the conclusion, by an exit from religion that does not refound another: not a doctrine but a practice by which the subject transforms himself in order to gain access to the true, in the sense Foucault gives to spirituality and that Hadot describes among the Ancients. The essay finds its most coherent ontology in Spinoza, its most exact historical description in Hadot, its strictest limit in Wittgenstein, and neighbouring forms in Nietzsche, Camus or Murdoch. Three traits distinguish it from a religion in the strong sense: it knows where it comes from, it installs no absolute that demands the sacrifice of others, it is a way of living rather than a system. Yet it keeps, knowingly, an orientation towards a Whole or a Good that it does not possess. The essay recalls that it also has a Christian genealogy, through Augustine's inwardness, and that it presupposes an existential security that only institutions guarantee. See also Spirituality, Spiritual exercises, Wonder without debt. Read in the essay

The ghost, the haunting. In The Ego and Its Own (1844), Stirner gives this name to every authority one places above oneself and to which one must sacrifice oneself: God, but also Man, Humanity, the State, Truth, Morality, Freedom. Feuerbach had shown that God was the alienated human essence; Stirner shows that the human essence is itself an alienation, and that whoever believes in it has a screw loose. Political liberalism, socialism and the humanism of Feuerbach and Bauer are for him stages of this haunting, theological insurrections that change masters without changing the relation: our atheists are pious people. The essay makes this analysis the very formulation of the law of refoundations, and observes that Stirner does not escape it, since the Unique One, who has set his cause on nothing, settles into the place left empty just as God did, as Nietzsche will object to him. Marx, in The German Ideology, answers Saint Max that his isolated individual is only an abstraction. See also Pious atheists, Law of refoundations, Gattung. Read in the essay

In Bergson (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 1932), the two religions humanity has produced. Static religion is born of the fabulating function, a defensive reaction of nature against what is depressing in intelligence, the representation of death and of the unforeseen; it is coextensive with our species, and Bergson describes it as a tissue of aberrations that protects society. Society is indeed a source, but the lowest one (attested response to Durkheim). Dynamic religion is that of the mystics, who cross in a leap the distance between the closed soul and the open soul, and whose impetus joins the creative impetus: God is love and the object of love, and he creates creators. Instituted religion is its cooled crystallization. Bergson thus answers, by constructed confrontation, Freud and Nietzsche: the overman exists, he is the mystic. The book ends on mysticism calling for mechanics and on the universe as a machine for making gods. The essay judges that Bergson escapes the deification of man by a narrow margin. See also the sacred, numinous. Read in the essay

The two degrees of the sacrifice criterion. Refoundation in the strict sense installs an absolute in whose name the sacrifice of the individual can be demanded and whose critique becomes a sacrilege: Plato's law, Rousseau's civil religion, Comte's Great Being, the secular religions of the twentieth century, the History of the revolutionaries that Camus denounces, Schmitt's political theology. Soft refoundation contents itself with the need to consecrate: it declares human realities sacred, love, the relation of I and Thou, freedom, without demanding of anyone that he die for them. The essay finds its textbook case in Feuerbach, whom Engels reproached in 1886 with wanting to complete religion rather than abolish it, and its most liberal form in Luc Ferry. The distinction matters because the soft prepares the strict: it is through the need to consecrate that consecration becomes a demand among the successors, and the essay sees in Onfray the case of an author who has taken the step, his Civilization demanding that one defend a liturgy in which one does not believe. See also Sacrifice criterion, Self-offering, Law of refoundations. Read in the essay

Survivals. In Primitive Culture (1871), Edward Tylor uses the term for the customs, beliefs and practices that persist in a society after the conditions that gave rise to them have disappeared, and that bear witness to an earlier state of culture: superstitions, games, proverbs, rites whose meaning has been forgotten. Animism, a primitive philosophy that explains the world by souls and spirits, is for him a reasonable error, and its remains live on in modern societies as harmful superstition, which ethnography has the office of exposing and marking out for destruction: the science of culture is essentially a reformer's science. The essay ranks Tylor and Frazer in the regime of error in its evolutionist form, which explains the birth of beliefs and not their persistence, and recalls the refutations by Durkheim, for whom a universal and daily illusion would not be one, by Wittgenstein, for whom Frazer is more savage than his savages, and by Malinowski. The essay uses the word, about Nietzsche, in another sense: Schopenhauer's pity as the subtlest survival of Christianity. See also Animism, Eight regimes of critique, Disenchantment of the world. Read in the essay

The interpretation that leads a word back to what it truly signifies. In The Decisive Treatise (Faṣl al-maqāl), Averroes lays down that truth cannot be contrary to truth: if a demonstration arrives at a knowledge that the apparent meaning (ẓāhir) of the revealed text contradicts, the text must be interpreted and brought back to its inner meaning (bāṭin) by taʾwīl. Demonstration never bends; the text does. Then arises the question of the addressee: to whom should the true meaning be told? Averroes answers with an anthropology of assent, the people of demonstration, the people of dialectic and the people of rhetoric, and forbids divulging interpretations to the common people. The essay concludes that Averroes does not leave religion and founds nothing: he divides, and demands of the people the sacrifice of access to the true, a solution taken up, under other names, by Spinoza, Comte, Renan and Leo Strauss. The legend of a double truth, born of the condemnations of 1277, distorts this position, which knows only one truth with two levels of access. See also Double truth, Allegory, Art of writing. Read in the essay

In Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), the confrontation between the human call for meaning and the unreasonable silence of the world. The absurd lies in their encounter, and the question it raises is that of suicide. Camus rejects two ways out: suicide, which abolishes one of the terms, and the leap, which abolishes the other by giving the world a meaning it does not have; this is the reproach he addresses to Kierkegaard and Jaspers, guilty of philosophical suicide, the absurd becoming god. What remains is revolt, which maintains the tension and draws from it a rule of life: one must imagine Sisyphus happy. The essay reads in this formula a spirituality without consolation, and in The Rebel (1951) the passage from solitary absurdity to a revolt that discovers a we. The word has an older history in the series: James counts the feeling of the absurd among the trials of sick souls, and where Camus spoke of the absurd, Wittgenstein refuses even the name. The essay judges Camus's objection to Jaspers sound in logic, but not in the light of the criterion, for Jaspers's leap ends in no obedience. See also Revolt, Thought of noon, Philosophical faith. Read in the essay

In Durkheim (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912), what is set apart and forbidden, as opposed to the profane; religion is a system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, which unites into one Church all those who adhere to them. The sacred is the form in which a society represents its own force to itself: the god is only the figurative expression of society, and the totem the hypostasized clan. It is born in collective effervescence, and the French Revolution, which made the Fatherland, Liberty and Reason sacred, is for Durkheim the proof of it. No society does without it: one does not leave the sacred, one exchanges one sacred for another, and the old gods grow old or die without others having been born. This is one of the two strongest objections to the essay's thesis, which answers it with Blumenberg and the sacrifice criterion. Otto gives its phenomenological version (the numinous), Girard the darkest version (the sacred is born of the murder of a victim), Bataille that of transgression, and Levinas rejects it as violence. See also numinous, scapegoat mechanism. Read in the essay

A word coined by Leibniz (Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, Amsterdam, 1710) for the justification of God in the face of the existence of evil. God, who chose among all possible worlds, created the best; the metaphysical, physical and moral evil of the part serves the perfection of the whole. The book answers Pierre Bayle, who had died four years earlier (attested response). Voltaire mocks it in Candide (1759), and Ivan Karamazov gives, for the essay, the moral answer to it: he refuses the final harmony if it costs a child's tear, and returns his ticket. The essay judges that theodicy accepts the sacrifice of the individual to harmony and asks each person to sacrifice their complaint. In the broad sense, the word designates any attempt to give meaning to suffering; Berger notes that what theodicy provides is not first of all happiness, but meaning. See also opium of the people. Read in the essay

The last part of The Rebel (1951), and the name Camus gives to a thought of limits. Against the revolts that turned into religions of history, he appeals to the Mediterranean, to Greek light, to the measure that knows that every value affirmed against injustice destroys itself if it becomes absolute. The sentence that condenses it is the one the essay quotes twice: at the noon of thought, the rebel refuses divinity in order to share the common struggles and destiny. The essay makes of it the measure expressly directed against the divinization of history, and notes that Camus's noon answers Nietzsche's noon, the hour when there is no longer any world behind the world; Nietzschean spirituality, which is not a replacement religion, becomes in Camus the thought of noon. It formulates a reservation: Camus's Mediterranean is an aesthetic myth, the most discreet form of refoundation, which is nonetheless not enough to place him among the refounders, and it is as an exception of attitude, unstable like Nietzsche, that Camus figures in the conclusion. See also Revolt, Divinization of history, Amor fati. Read in the essay

The teaching or the Law: in the narrow sense, the first five books of the Bible, from Genesis to Deuteronomy, which the Greeks called the Pentateuch and which tradition attributes to Moses; in the broad sense, the whole of revealed teaching, written and oral. Rabbinic Judaism holds that the oral Torah, set down in writing in the Mishnah and then the Talmud, was given at Sinai together with the written Torah. It contains narratives and commandments, six hundred and thirteen by the rabbinic count, among them the rules of the Sabbath, of purity and of sacrifices. The Greek translation by nomos, law, steered the Christian reading, above all in Paul, towards an opposition between the Law and grace that recent scholarship qualifies. The essay follows in Maimonides, author of the Mishneh Torah, the effort to give a reason for the commandments, and in Levinas the formula to love the Torah more than God. See also Covenant. Read in the essay

The role the essay assigns to Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor. Dostoevsky does not argue, he embodies; the figure he invents shows what becomes of a religion from which God has been removed and which keeps miracle, mystery and authority, for the happiness of a humanity judged incapable of freedom. The essay uses it as a touchstone, that is, as the test to which it submits the other authors: Voltaire wrote its programme a century earlier, in the Epistle to the Author of the Three Impostors; Comte is its believing version, founding a Church without God; Demopheles, in Schopenhauer's dialogue, the version without tragedy; Onfray, who defends the Latin Mass without believing in it, the contemporary case. The touchstone also holds in the order of knowledge: for Russell as reread by the essay, the problem is not belief, it is the Inquisitor. See also Grand Inquisitor, Sacrifice criterion. Read in the essay

The central concept of the speech “Glauben und Wissen” (“Faith and Knowledge”), delivered by Jürgen Habermas on 14 October 2001: a secularization that does not annihilate is accomplished in the mode of translation, “Eine Säkularisierung, die nicht vernichtet, vollzieht sich im Modus der Übersetzung”. In a post-secular society, where religions persist and where secular reason knows its limits, religious contents should be neither imposed nor rejected, but translated into a language accessible to all; Habermas gives as an example man created in the image of God (Gn 1, 27), whose idea of createdness says, in the face of genetic engineering, something that secular ethics struggles to say, and he holds Kant to be the first example of a secularizing and saving deconstruction. The essay sees in it a third way between Löwith, for whom modernity inherits religious contents, and Blumenberg, for whom it merely reoccupies places. It marks its limit: Habermas translates only normative contents, and does not say how the individual lives without religion, which is the question of Part Twelve. See also Post-secular, Secularization, Reoccupation. Read in the essay

Die allgemein menschliche Zwangsneurose. In The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud compares religious rites to the ceremonials of obsessional neurotics, as he had done as early as 1907, and makes religion the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity, arising like the child's from the Oedipus complex, from the relation to the father. Humanity would pass through a neurotic phase analogous to that of individual childhood, and could leave it through education to reality, as the neurotic does through analysis. The essay stresses the difference from Feuerbach: where Feuerbach saw in God the projected essence of man, to be reappropriated, Freud sees the father of childhood, enlarged, from whom human helplessness asks protection; man writ large against man writ small. It also notes the limit Freud sets himself: religion is an illusion, defined by the wish that commands it and not by its falsity, and the science that is to replace it, our god Logos, is admitted to be not very almighty. Jung will answer that the religious disposition is not merely infantile. See also Illusion, God Logos, Projection. Read in the essay

Disengagement from the self. In The Sovereignty of Good (1970), Iris Murdoch describes the moral life not as a series of choices of the will, against Sartre and the analytic philosophy of her time, but as a work of attention, a word taken from Simone Weil. The enemy is the fat, relentless ego, which covers reality with its fantasies; moral progress consists in silencing it in order to see what is. Murdoch calls this silence unselfing, and gives as its example the kestrel: she glimpses through the window a hovering kestrel, and there is nothing now but kestrel. Her sharpest formula, which the essay quotes, says that we cease to be in order to attend to the existence of something else. The object of this attention is no longer God, a single, perfect, transcendent, non-representable and necessarily real object, but the Good, taken from Plato and the sun of the Republic, which judges the world without blessing it, against Comte-Sponville. The essay sees in it the sober transposition of Weil's decreation and ranks Murdoch among the exceptions, the position of transcendence without God: an absolute that demands nothing but attention. See also Decreation, Periagôgê, Spirituality of exercise. Read in the essay

The notions of Mohammed Arkoun, whom the essay knows at second hand, through Tauil and Demorgon, with the reservation it states itself. Arkoun describes, in Pour une critique de la raison islamique (1984), the process by which an orthodoxy constituted itself in Islam after the debates of the first centuries, those of the Mu'tazilites and the philosophers: the dogmatic closure, of which the profession of faith of al-Qadir in the eleventh century is a milestone, sets limits not to be crossed, and a whole unthinkable takes shape. The unthought is what has not yet been thought; the unthinkable, what an orthodoxy has made impossible to think, and the discontinuities of Islamic history, the lost debates, the abandoned possibilities, vanish into this sphere. The essay notes that this vocabulary comes from the French thought of Arkoun's time, and situates the project: Arkoun leaves the closure, not religion, on the side of Spinoza and Ricoeur, by reopening Islam to its history. It ranks al-Qadir's dogmatic closure among the strict refoundations and concludes that the exit from religion is first of all Christian, but not only Christian. See also Double truth, Taʾwīl, Second naïveté. Read in the essay

Wille zum Leben. In The World as Will and Representation (1819), Schopenhauer gives this name to the thing in itself: beneath representations, a blind willing, without aim and without rest, which objectifies itself in all beings and whose law is suffering, since every desire arises from a lack and every satisfaction opens another. Deliverance can come only from the denial of this willing, through aesthetic contemplation, provisionally, then through asceticism and compassion, which recognize the suffering of all that lives. Schopenhauer calls this denial holiness and redemption, recognizes himself in Eckhart and in the sages of India, and concludes that this world, so real, with all its suns, is nothing. The essay draws from this that Schopenhauer left God without leaving the religion of salvation, and that he is the first to read the mystics and Buddhism outside any theology. Nietzsche breaks with him on this point: pity is the practice of nihilism, and the denial of the will to live the subtlest survival of Christianity. See also Nihilism, Nirvana, Gelassenheit. Read in the essay

Wille zur Wahrheit. § 344 of The Gay Science, entitled in what sense we too are still pious, holds that the demand on which science rests is not itself scientific: it is a faith, and Nietzsche admits that today's godless still take their fire from the blaze that a thousand-year-old faith kindled, the faith that God is truth. The third essay of On the Genealogy of Morality (§ 24-27) goes further: the ascetic ideal has dominated all philosophy because truth was posited there as being, as God, as supreme authority; honest atheism is the last form of this ideal, which ends by forbidding itself the lie of belief in God and abolishes itself. The essay makes this paragraph the key to the Nietzschean exception: Nietzsche escapes Stirner's law because he knows where his fire comes from. It also turns § 344 against Freud, who held that our science is not an illusion, and recalls that Nietzsche, asking what truth does to the one who seeks it, recovers against the Cartesian moment the question of spirituality. See also Ascetic ideal, Genealogy, Death of God. Read in the essay

The affect that the essay retains, at the end of the constructed debate on Leibniz's question, as the only religious affect that demands nothing. To wonder that there is something rather than nothing is the beginning of philosophy in Plato and Aristotle and, in Wittgenstein, the mystical itself: not how the world is, but that it is. The essay distinguishes four treatments of the question: the demand that leads to God (Leibniz, Schelling), dissolution (Hume, Kant in his way, Bergson, Carnap, the Wittgenstein of 6.5), wonder without an answer (Plato, Aristotle, the Wittgenstein of 6.44, Jaspers) and debt (Heidegger, for whom wonder becomes sacrifice). The danger is to transform the fact into a gift: a gift calls for gratitude, gratitude for a creditor, and the creditor, sooner or later, for a sacrifice. Wonder without debt founds no obligation, promises nothing, has neither addressee to thank nor altar on which to sacrifice; to think being is not to owe it something. It is the barest affect of the spirituality of exercise. See also Spirituality of exercise, Principle of sufficient reason, Onto-theology. Read in the essay