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"Tradition, a spiritual weapon against progressivism"

2021-10-19T09:59:09.915Z


FIGAROVOX / LECTURE - By incessantly seeking progress, modernity devalues ​​the past, estimates sociologist Michel Michel. Against this pitfall, he does not oppose nostalgia, but The recourse to tradition, the title of his latest book, tells the academic Christophe Boutin.


Christophe Boutin, associate in public law, is a professor at the University of Caen-Normandie where he teaches constitutional law and the history of political ideas.

He recently co-edited with Olivier Dard and Frédéric Rouvillois the Dictionary of Conservatism and the Dictionary of Populisms (editions du Cerf).

It is in the Théôria collection directed by Pierre-Marie Sigaud, alongside works by Jean Hani, Jean Borella or Frithjof Schuon, that Michel Michel has just published a work which evokes the necessary place of Tradition - with a capital letter - in our modern world. Sociologist, the author has in fact always been interested in this particular intellectual family, that known as the "thought of Tradition", one of the main authors of which was the Frenchman René Guénon, alongside Schuon, Coomaraswamy or Evola, and according to which, in short, there would exist in the spiritual history of humanity a primordial Tradition from which would flow particular spiritual traditions.

The religious fact is not, as it was believed in the last century and at the beginning of the XXth century, a stage in the history of humanity, but an irreducible dimension which endures even in the apparently desacralized framework of modern societies.

Michel Michel

The author discovers during his studies René Guénon or Joseph de Maistre, intellectual associations which will lead him to choose to be "a sociologist in the field" and not yet another ideologist, at a time when the University is becoming more politicized. still on the left. And if he evokes "

at the end of the 1970s, the prompt debacle of the leftist utopia

", it is undoubtedly appropriate to put the latter in perspective, because if the movement of May 68 was indeed quickly extinguished politically, it does not he nevertheless led to the cultural victory of many of its themes - and to the capture of intellectual power by its members.

In my eyes

,” writes the author, “

the modern world has not created one culture among others, but an anthropological exception

”. Michel Michel indeed poses the question of the religious dimension of man - and, in doing so, of the way in which it would be possible to study him, whether it involves doing it around the referents of ethnology or those of anthropology.

However, he notes this practice that our modern societies, entirely turned towards a deified progress, have of devaluing the past in order to better impose their

doxa

.

Inventing very useful "black legends" then repeated to satiety, systematically presenting the ancient world as that of the most sinister and the most sectarian obscurantism, they impose in particular this idea that the magic and / or religious facts were not in fact as primary forms of pseudo-understanding of the world, before the advent of modern rationalism made us pass from darkness to the Enlightenment.

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Evoking the research, in particular, of Georges Dumézil, Carl Gustav Jung, Mircea Eliade or Roger Caillois, Michel Michel refuses for his part to accept this simplistic evolutionism to affirm, on the contrary, that "

the religious fact is not, as one believed it in the last century and at the beginning of the XXth century, a stage in the history of humanity, but an irreducible dimension which continues even in the apparently desacralized framework of modern societies

”.

The proof of this fundamental expectation of man would also be the appearance of this false religiosity found in what we will call secular religions, in the way in which the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century will play on religious myths, and , even more, in the advent of this "Promethean religion" which seems to our author to be the dominant ideology of our time.

A Promethean religion which would, in fact, be the subversion par excellence, overthrowing the very order of the world: then, he recalls, that "

all human cultures have recognized the superiority and authority of transcendent principles

", the post-revolutionary Western culture which claims to become “world culture” affirms “

the absolute autonomy of human will and denies the legitimacy of any law whose foundations are not contractual

”.

According to Michel Michel, the powerful spiritual energy still present in certain sectors of the Catholic Church should be noted.

Christophe Boutin

Inversions therefore: "

Progressivism takes the Tower of Babel for the heavenly Jerusalem

", writes Michel Michel, attached to rediscovering the meaning of symbols and myths. He thus evokes this modern dream of unity, that, ultimately, of our "happy globalization", which, according to him, is based on three key elements: relocation first, and this in all senses of the word, of factories as well as of men. cut off from their affiliations; then dematerialization, or disembodiment; finally, global unification of the world, by leveling off all identities. But this leveling and destructive unit of the beauty of the world would come under a

hubris

against which, he recalls, a number of myths, whether it be the fall of the Garden of Eden or the failure of the Tower of Babel, had nevertheless warned humanity. “

Totalitarian confusion

- he writes -

tries in vain to find unity by the homogenization of the world, it aims at equality, indistinction by universalist atomization, the 'free market' or everything is equivalent to everything. becomes the paradigm of all human relations

”.

Does this "Progress" have "lead in the wing", as our author writes? Sometimes he seems a little confident. Of course, it evokes the new critique of a Science which, in the 18th and 19th centuries, "

appeared as a sort of great Promethean movement, set out to conquer total knowledge, the proof of the unlimited power of human reason, since then. that she freed herself from metaphysical and religious obscurantism

”. In fact, apart from the return of religion, we can note the current proliferation of sects, various psychologies, occultism, the taste for the fantastic, and even the famous conspiracy theories, all of which prove that the he human mind is little satisfied with dogmatic rationalism alone and seeks other reasons to believe.

Also read Jean de Saint-Chéron: "The spirit of Christianity par excellence is de-gentrification!"

But these disguises of a real relationship to the spiritual have been rightly denounced by Guénon, and it is clear that the System in place still intends to pose itself as the only possible future and to impose its destructive pseudo-order - the current situation. , where the political power bases on Science its claim to rule to the most intimate of the human, destroying freedoms one after another, by being a proof.

The first way to fight against this modern world would be the transmission of a history and a culture which make us know “

the men of before, the men from elsewhere and the man of always

[...],

which allows to put into perspective the naive beliefs of today's men

, ”writes our author.

In this context, it is also necessary to give back all their place to myths, rediscovering, as Eliade did, their universal meaning.

And Michel Michel also evokes the place that art, and in particular sacred art, must hold in this necessary reconstruction of the link between man and transcendence.

But faced with this modern world full of "

Christian ideas gone mad

», According to the famous word of Chesterton, the author also asks himself the question of what could bring to the Catholic Church the thought of Tradition. Because Michel Michel rejects the approach taken by certain “Guénonian” traditionalists for whom Christianity would never be but one form among others of expression of the primordial Tradition. No relativism here for an author claiming to be deeply Christian and wishing to see the Church rediscover its traditional framework. Now it does not seem to him that there is any opposition between the thought of Tradition and Christianity, according to him, for example, because Tradition supposes "the transmission of a supernatural influence, of a spiritual influence, that Christians call Grace ”,or because Christianity rediscovers and maintains "religious forms flowing from the ancient tradition of the priesthood." "

“Christendom has succeeded in transforming soldiers into knights”, writes one who wishes to see the birth of a new knighthood, because for him Tradition is not only an intellectual concept, but must be lived.

Christophe Boutin

The problem would be that the current Church no longer places itself in this logic of transmission.

For Michel Michel, “

in the first half of the 20th century, the Church of France was institutionally defeated in the war of secularism and confined to the“ private ”domain

”.

Is this defeat final? Without doubt not, because, whereas, according to our author, many official structures “

controlled by the ecclesiastical apparatus appear as more worm-eaten

”, it would be appropriate to note the powerful spiritual energy always present in certain sectors of the Catholic Church. Youth movements, charismatic or traditionalist communities, the return in force of the pilgrimage to Compostela, so many elements which would prove the vitality of Catholicism, but lead our author to this conclusion: “

Everything happens as if the vitality of religious institutions were in relation proportional with their capacity to challenge the dominant models of the world and the “values” of modernity

". Is this new? Michel Michel recalls, taking the case of the Catholic Church, that “regeneration” movements have regularly appeared which, either shook a certain slumber, or returned to the source to avoid heretical drifts. And it will be noted that the same type of phenomenon existed in most of the major religions.

However, in this plan of restoring the link with the spiritual, the form is never neutral, and Michel Michel does not hide his “

concern to see the Church abandon the catastrophic pastoral care she has adopted for more than two generations.

".

It indeed seems essential to him that it does so because “

on this side of the“ disputatio ”of theologians, it is the pastoral care adopted - liturgies, sermons, retreats, practice of the sacraments, hymns, etc.

- which models the faith of the people of God

”.

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It is therefore no coincidence for our author, who quotes here the work of Guillaume Cuchet, if the great dropping out of the Catholic Church in terms of attendance of the faithful took place after the Vatican Council II and its consequences in terms of of pastoral care. And one thinks here of course of

The end of a world

, the last work published by Patrick Buisson, in which the latter studies precisely this distance, or the image of this distraught Canadian priest that Denys Arcand stages in

The barbarian invasions

.

We understand then that seems necessary for our author, in the hypothesis where the Church would choose to define a new pastoral to detach itself from modernism to which it would have decidedly given too much place, that it leans, in part at least, "

On the schools of thought which have been able to resist the hegemony of modern ideology

", including the thought of Tradition. A Church which would then rule out the risk of angelism, because for Michel Michel its current drift "

does not consist first of all in the negation of the spiritual, but in a kind of angelism

" which leads to forgetting the struggle necessary to proclaim and defend its values. "

Christendom has succeeded in transforming soldiers into knights

», Writes again the one who wishes to see the birth of a new knighthood, because for him Tradition is not only an intellectual concept, but must be lived.

For Michel Michel, Tradition, which he lives in Christianity, is in fact "

the eternal present of man

", or, as the rule of Saint Vincent de Lérins, whom he quotes, reminds us, "

which has always been believed, everywhere and by all

”.

It is against this Tradition that progressivism, today through its generalized deconstructionism, is waging a relentless struggle, a struggle which has not spared the Church.

This book proposes a way of reconstruction by a return to a lived Tradition.

Michel Michel,

Recourse to tradition - Modernity: Christian ideas gone crazy

, Paris, 2021 L'Harmattan

Source: lefigaro

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