Controversies and Viewpoints

by Alain de Benoist

  Religious distress is, at one and the same time, the expression of real distress and a protest against real distress.

  This amounts to saying that despite its lack of originality, this Christianity is, at least, of a very personal nature. It is a religion devoid of original sin, Immaculate Conception (‘A dogma that acts as an insult to all mothers’), and ‘dualist perversion’, one that longs to represent a return to ‘sound biblical totality’ while relying on the theologies of revolution.

  From Christianity itself, what Mr Garaudy has essentially retained is the primacy of charity, the ‘revolutionary’ content of the Beatitudes and the replacement of aesthetics with morality.

  It is this account of a conversion which, in fact, is not quite one that Mr Garaudy has published in Parole d’homme,371 a book which, incidentally, begins with an autobiographical ‘overview’ and includes numerous passages taken from a previous book: Peut-on être communiste aujourd’hui?372 (Grasset, 1968).

  Roger Garaudy was born in Marseille in 1913. In 1936–37, while in Strasbourg, he learnt the basics of theology alongside Karl Barth.373 At that time, he had already made up his mind. On the religious level, he had converted to Protestantism; on the political one, he had chosen to become a member of the French Communist Party in 1933, at the age of twenty, following a formal and necessary detour at the JOC.374 He would later state:

  I was still a Christian militant and intended to remain so.

  Shortly afterwards, having (temporarily) lost his faith, he remained convinced that ‘Communism must integrate the very best of Christian values’. He adds:

  For as long as I have lived, this concern with “holding both ends of the chain” has never left me.

  In 1937, having been appointed as a professor of philosophy at the school of Albi, he joined the Tarn Office of the Communist Federation. There, he met Maurice Thorez,375 whose friendship and support he assuredly states he had always had.

  He has been a ‘permanent’ member of the Party since 1944. Elected as a representative of the Tarn department in 1945, he would retain a parliamentary role until 1962 and would most notably act as the president of the National Educational Commission and the Vice-President of the French National Assembly.

  An ‘Outstretched Hand’

  In 1949, while preparing a book on The Church, Communism and the Christians, he travels to Rome, where he is received by Jacques Maritain, then ambassador to the Vatican, with ‘a great deal of comprehension’. Upon his return, he would declare:

  Marxism would find itself impoverished if Saint Augustine, Saint Theresa of Avila376 and Pascal377 became foreign to it.

  To which Maurice Thorez responded by writing:

  It had to be said, because it is the truth.

  In 1953, in La théorie matérialiste de la connaissance378 (PUF), a book where he defends, in passing, ‘the fundamental theory of the heredity of acquired characteristics’, he asserts that Stalin ‘opens uncharted historical paths and drafts unlimited perspectives of grandeur and happiness with regard to human practice’. He goes on to say:

  Never has philosophy, taken in its noblest possible sense, had such great significance as with Stalin.

  A year later, in the Soviet Union, he obtains a Professor of Sciences degree thanks to a thesis on The Issue of Liberty and Necessity in the Light of Marxism.

  In this book, which would be published in 1955 by éd. Sociales and include a preface written by Thorez, he strives to demonstrate, using a considerable number of Stalin’s statements in support, that liberty only flourishes on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

  ‘In no place could the study of the issue of freedom have been conducted better than in the land where genuine liberty now prospers for the first time in our world’s history’, he assures us.

  Twenty years later, Mr Garaudy explains: ‘Just like all of my comrades, my knowledge of Stalin was restricted to that which, within him, personified Socialism’ (‘We did not know about it’: that is what the accused of Nuremberg also stated. In connection to the latter, however, this is what Mr Garaudy writes: ‘Anyone who executes a criminal order is himself a criminal’).

  At the CERM (Centre of Marxist Studies and Research), which he would run for a period of ten years (alongside Gabriel Mury, who, having subsequently embraced Maoism, has since passed away), and on the occasion of the Weeks of Marxist Thought, he lays the doctrinal foundations of the policy of the ‘outstretched hand’.

  Following Vatican II, his efforts in favour of ‘dialogue’ garner cardinal Koenig’s support. In 1962, the Archbishop of Recife, Dom Helder Camara, declares to him in Brazil:

  The next step for you to accomplish, Roger, is to demonstrate that revolution is consubstantial with Christianity.

  And that is what he sets out to achieve. In March 1964, he takes a public stand against Ilichev, one of the leaders of ideological work in the USSR, who had stated that religion ‘turns man into a layabout, God’s slave, someone who is only capable of remaining on his knees and begging for divine grace’. This constituted the very first case where a French Communist Party leader openly criticised a ‘theological mistake’ on the part of the Soviet Communist Party. This declaration caused quite an uproar.

  Soon, May 1968 was upon us — a great red sun arose, dazzling everyone. Tormented by a sort of ideological andropause, Roger Garaudy discovers, albeit late, that some analyses presented by his own party had become ‘outdated’. He reproaches the central committee for not venturing far enough in its dialogue with Christian believers. Alongside Aragon,379 he comes down in favour of free artistic expression.

  On 6th February, 1970, during the sixteenth congress of the French Communist Party, he conducts one final intervention, amidst a deathlike silence. All his former friends had cautiously desisted him, along with ‘evangelical Leftism’ and the ‘Third World’.

  A Factor of Disorder

  In 1972, after a two-year reflection period, he affirms: ‘The issue we face today is that of extending the movement inaugurated by Marx by restarting the dialectic blocked by dogmatism’ (Karl Marx, Seghers).

  This project leads to his Parole d’homme, an exalted hymn dedicated to Love, Man and Others. All of which are necessarily capitalised.

  Mr Garaudy explains:

  Love is the opposite of justice, since the latter consists in treating everyone according to what they actually are, meaning in harmony with what they have done in the past. Love breaks this rule of the game, this law of order. It represents a factor of disorder. It is a wager upon man’s future. An entire life can be subverted by this wager, by this act of love that grants it the necessary space for otherness.

  The great word has henceforth been set loose. There is no longer any need for a definition: all is love and vice-versa. ‘Any authentic socialist revolution will be embodied by the triumph of love’; ‘Happiness is, above all, love’; ‘Your person is shaped by your responses to love’s interpellations’; ‘Death is but an even greater love’; etc.

  A love of whom, then? A love of others; of all others. The fact of loving a specific being, a certain individual is already something scandalous in the eyes of Roger Garaudy, who only dreams of universal fusion and of the dissolution of the individual into the ‘Great All’, seizing every single opportunity to manifest his loathing for the differences, distinctions and inequalities that form the very frame of life.

  ‘Hell is the absence of others’,380 he writes, before adding: ‘Happiness begins with the dispossession of the self and one’s communion with the all’.

  Hence a complete inversion of values: universalism represents the ‘good’, self-affirmation the ‘bad’. Oblivious to the time when he celebrated ‘Promethean morality’, Mr Garaudy condemns the ‘reign of Faust’. He claims that the West, the source of all ailments, has ‘impoverished itself miserably’ during two decisive periods: the Greek miracle (with its ‘sad-faced horsemen’) and the Renaissance, which he perceives as the originator of scientism, technicism and colo
nialism. It is a thought that obsesses him and which he reiterates in all the chapters of his book.

  From a general perspective, all that is specifically European, Promethean or simply masculine repels him. He sees a clear link between these three kinds of notion. The core of his thought is epitomised by intellectual matriarchy and gynocracy. He declares himself opposed to any relation with nature that would put man in the position of a ‘conqueror’, preferring to be conquered instead. Quoting the words of Aragon (‘Woman is the future of man’), he praises the ‘feminine dimension denied by our Western and masculine civilisation’.

  The African mask, which renders the invisible visible, is closer and more fraternal to us than the possessive reconstruction of our world in classical art; and the musique concrète which helps us unite or merge with the surrounding universe exerts more appeal on us, at times, than the great harmonies through which the monopolising domination of the human spirit once expressed itself.

  Step by step, he denounces all the structures that act as an obstacle to his dream: traditional education, which renders pupils ‘as foolish and talkative as Cicero’; the family, since ‘the love of our children becomes specifically human when evading the guardianship of the family’; and ownership: ‘The major characteristic of our era lies in the objective reality of the necessary disintegration of private company ownership, on society’s pain of death’.

  Already in 1963, he alleged that the establishment of socialism could allow us to ‘extend the lives of men, on average, to the age of 150 or 200’. By observing the ‘grandiose construction plan of communism in the USSR’, he had gained the conviction that ‘only such a regime could ever manage to create a democracy devoid of lies’.

  Today still, he has yet to renounce utopianism:

  The ultimate goal of our historical struggle is to conquer this unity of man, allowing each man to simultaneously be a technician and a philosopher, the master of his own destiny and the inventor of his own future.

  These topics lack any kind of originality. One might even wonder whether the sterile repetition of the words ‘man’ and ‘human’, which contemporary discourse has turned into a sort of rite, does not actually denote the exhaustion of the classic ‘human perspective’, in a manner that would leave us with merely two means of escape: either from above or from below; either through the progressive or through the regressive; either through the superhuman or through the infra-human.

  In unison with contemporary trends, Mr Garaudy bets on the option of regression.

  In the end, what strikes readers most when reading Parole d’homme is the surprising decrease in standards that seems to have accompanied Mr Garaudy on his career path. La liberté381 (éd. Sociales, 1955), La théorie matérialiste de la connaissance (PUF, 1953), and Qu’est-ce que la morale marxiste?382 (éd. Sociales, 1963) were among the books in which some things could indeed have been retold. Yet they were all books that had been well-thought out and structured, books that testified to a certain mental prowess, one that was supported by an occasionally remarkable ability to present arguments.

  No such thing can be found in Parole d’homme, which is but a confused collection of egalitarian ideas and falsely selfless banalities in which the author, having plummeted to the level of a Christian-Teilhardian communist invertebrate, sets out to repeat, page after page, his invocations to ‘humanity’, using the sniffling tones of a suburban vicar.

  *

  Parole d’homme, an essay by Roger Garaudy. Laffont, 256 pages.

  ***

  Mr Garaudy is currently in charge of an Institute for the interaction and interpenetration of cultures. In his last book, Le projet espérance383 (Laffont, 1976), he once again manifests his contempt for European culture. He has, likewise, returned to his diatribes against the Renaissance, through which he incidentally draws closer to ‘classical’ Leftism and continues drifting away from the Communist Party. In the 15th issue of Cahiers d’histoire de l’Institut Maurice Thorez384 (first trimester, 1976), a series of notebooks whose main editor is Mr Georges Gogniot, what was actually stated about Thorez is that he ‘particularly dignified the Renaissance […], a period which he, just like Engels, believed to have required and ultimately produced giants’.

  On the topic of the excessive use of the word ‘love’ at the hands of Mr Garaudy and his emulators, see Mr Louis Pauwels’ chronicle entitled ‘L’amour, ce mot à désinfecter’385 (in Le Journal du dimanche,386 24th October, 1976).

  *

  Ivan Illich

  Greek antiquity has passed down to us the myth of Prometheus and his brother, Epimetheus. The former chose to take up the gods’ challenge and brought fire to mankind. He would thus become the symbol of a civilisation dedicated to ever overcoming itself. The latter, whose name means ‘he who looks back’, is entirely different. He married Pandora, who burdened humanity with all conceivable evils and only granted man hope in consolation.

  ‘We are pinning our hope on nature’s generosity’, specifies Ivan Illich, a supporter of Epimetheus, who the Greeks considered to be both an oaf and a fool.

  Illich is very vocal in his criticism of the Greeks, who ‘constructed a society founded upon reason and authority’. The man of today is their heir and ‘lives immoderately, as part of a Promethean ideal that has been taken to the extreme’, he writes.

  Here is an example of ‘immoderation’: the efforts of medicine to combat disease.

  In June 1974, Illich published an article in Esprit magazine entitled The Expropriation of Health, which began with the following words: ‘Medical acts are one of the principal sources of morbidity’. It was followed by a campaign that saw an increase in the number of works sponsored by the ‘humanistic’ extreme Left and whose culmination came with the publication of a book written by Ivan Illich and entitled Medical Nemesis.

  An American citizen, Ivan Illich was born in 1926 in Vienna, into a Jewish family of Russian emigrants. He studied at the Gregorian University of Rome. Having obtained a bachelor’s degree in theology, he is ordained to the priesthood. In 1951, he heads off to New York, where he would exercise his ministry in the Puerto Rican neighbourhood of Manhattan and attract Cardinal Spellmann’s attention.

  From then on, his promotion follows a swift pace. In 1956, he is appointed vice-rector at the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. Committed to progressive ideas, it is Latin America that fascinates him: in 2000, 65% of all Christians are expected to inhabit the Third World.

  In 1960, he departs for Mexico. In Cuernavaca, sixty kilometres from the capital city, Illich founds what Chrétiens d’aujourd’hui387 magazine calls a ‘faith-action laboratory’: the Centro Intercultural de Documentación388 (CIDOC). Placed under the chairmanship of a strong Monsignor named Arceo Mendez, the centre would soon attain global recognition. Benedictine Grégoire Lemercier would then launch an experiment of ‘convent psychoanalysis’ there. Illich himself turns the Centre into a war machine against both ‘ecclesiastic bureaucracy’ (‘The largest in the world: 180,000 lifetime officials’) and developed countries.

  With his dangling hair, high cheekbones, and a smile that reveals his rodent-like teeth, Illich is a man that longs to blow up the structures of the ‘bourgeois’ world. And from within the Church at that.

  Targeting School with Destruction

  His strategy is a simple one: we are to break with capitalism, support the ‘just struggle’ of terrorists and combine the socialist idea with the evangelical Beatitudes. His position statements, founded upon psychoanalysis (Freud), sociology (Durkheim) and political economics (Marx), are remarkably radical. Illich openly declares himself ‘subversive’. Besides, the theories that he develops often coincide with the hierarchy’s revolutionary orientations.

  In 1968, Latin American bishops gathered in Medellin (Colombia) proclaimed themselves in favour of a revolutionary theology. In October 1974, Dom Helder Camara, the archbishop of Recife, stated the following: ‘We have, in a certain way, proved Marx right’.

  On th
e religious level, Illich is a supporter of sacerdotal secularisation, as he himself leads the life of ‘secular priest’. Yet he does celebrate Mass, and Rome has never disavowed him.

  In 1971, two of his books were translated into French: Deschooling Society and Celebration of Awareness. The first is an anti-teaching pamphlet that will find a supporter in the person of Mr Pierre Emmanuel of the Académie française. In it, Illich denounces the mystifying and even ‘harmful’ character of school institutions. Far from being democratic, he says, schools perpetuate inequalities. It is thanks to them that the self-worshiping bourgeoisie endows itself with youths that remain in line with the ‘official model’. Schools are therefore of a ‘demobilising’ nature and are not to be reformed but destroyed.

  To replace schools, Illich proposes the implementation of ‘exchanges among equals’. Here is an example:

  ‘To create a team whose members are willing to help each other in order to understand an article written by Mao, Marcuse, Freud or Goodman.’389

  In Celebration of Awareness, it is not only schools that Illich targets, but all institutions: the army (whose absurdity is ‘obvious’), the police, transport, medicine, the industry and the state.

  His doctrine is, once again, a simple transposition of the story of original sin. Before his fall, man was naturally good and knew nothing of the injustices and wars that are consubstantial with history. However, he acquired a belief in the power of ‘professionals’: from the specialisation of roles emerged the division of labour. Society thus underwent a differentiation process and gave birth to hierarchies. Following the example set by Prometheus, its members sought to take up the challenges of existence. That is precisely how we arrived at the ‘Industrial Mode of Production’ (IMP): the reign of the ‘mega-machine’ has gone hand in hand with the advent of the Malign.