Rhetorical Darwinism: Religion, Evolution, and the Scientific Identity

5. The New Christianity

139 the new chRistianity 5 Descend, O Liberty, daughter of Nature; The people, recovering thy immortal power, Upon the stately ruins of old imposture, Raise once again thy altar! Come, conqueror of kinds, Europe’s example; Come, over false Gods complete thy success! Thou, Saint Liberty, inhabit this temple, Be of our nation the Goddess! —Marie-Joseph Chénier Commissioned for the November 1793 “Festival of Reason and Liberty” orchestrated by various members of the Convention, this hymn was chanted as a Paris actress, playing the part of the goddess Reason who was serving, for the moment at least, as the new sacred emblem of the French Republic, was carried into the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. As poem and rite all too clearly evince, while these acts were certainly part of a revolutionary effort to undermine the hold of Catholicism, they could not help but also emulate it. The festival was the ceremonial climax of a process that had begun four years earlier with the seizing of church property. The prohibition of monastic vows soon followed in 1790 when the National Assembly’s Civil Constitution of the Clergy gave it administrative control of all religious institutions. Now, on the eve of the festival, the republic was in the process of becoming the church. Only a month before it had replaced the Gregorian calendar with one that substituted the birth of the French Republic for the 140 g RhetoRical DaRwinism nativity of Christ as the event marking history’s beginning. Shortly afterward all of Paris’ churches were closed. Although Condorcet had participated in this process, he was not present for the drama that brought it to this ironic climax. Denounced as an enemy of the National Convention because of his opposition to the Jacobin Constitution, he was in hiding just a short distance away, holed up across the Seine in the house of the Paris landlady, Mme Vernet. Many of his Girondist friends were already among the human cargo being loaded onto death carts as part of the daily blood offering demanded by this goddess .1 As a faithful disciple of Voltaire, Condorcet was certainly in favor of crushing l’infâme, but he would have winced at the obvious impersonation of religion put on display by those who now wished to mingle his blood with their sacrifices. Nevertheless, the historical sketch he was writing as he distracted himself from these horrors celebrated in its own fashion the arrival of this new deity. Condorcet’s pageant may have played out in a less ostentatious medium, one more worthy of a philosophe’s reserve, but it too imitated what it thought to attack. He possessed a genuinely visceral hatred of religion, and in his thinking about how to remedy the world of this nuisance he stood, at least in spirit, with the Jacobins. But in his own way he was no less prone to imitate this enemy even as he actively reproached it. We need only to translate the historical plot of his Esquisse into its thematic corollaries to recognize how much of the substance of Chénier’s poem it contains. This bears witness to the guiding principle I have taken from Durkheim. His theory proposes that religious meaning is the only kind of meaning that can sustain social authority. Social authority is as abstract as it is vital, and because abstractions are always susceptible of appearing to be mere assertions of imagination or will, the greater stake individuals have in them, the more they will strive to link these mental constructions to things eternal and inviolable. As the merely verbal anticlericalism of the Enlightenment gave way to the revolution’s dismantling of the church, the vulnerability of the emerging order became more apparent. The Enlightenment, we might say, had been an effort to audition nature (now closely identified with reason ) for the role formerly played by God, and the revolutionary success of this movement now required even stronger demonstrations of its adequacy for this part. This, of course, accounts for the odd irony of the 1793 festival. The best way to prove reason’s fitness to perform the society-building work formerly done by God was to demonstrate just how much like the church its human representatives were. the new chRistianity f 141 So far as the more specific subject matter of this book is concerned, this would also mean that coinciding efforts to win scientific...