The Pull of the Sacred: All or Nothing

Abstract

The Pull of the Sacred: All or Nothing Yelena Mazour‐Matusevich Throughout the world, the eternal imitation of the great [French] nation. (Dostoyevsky, Notes on Summer Impressions) In this essay, based on Albert Camus’ insights in his 1950 book The Rebel, I would like to suggest that contemporary Islamist violence, although a new movement in itself, might be the latest expression of a larger historical and anthropological phenomenon going back to the previous century and possibly even before. In The Rebel Camus described this phenomenon as the absolute existential irreconcilability and mutual exclusion between the world of the sacred and the modern secular mindset, which he called the world of rebellion: “Only two possible worlds can exist for the human mind: the sacred and the world of rebellion. The disappearance of one is equivalent to the appearance of the other. There again we rediscover the All or Nothing.” By the world of the sacred Camus understood what Mircea Eliade once identified as the “sacred mode of being,” and medievalists such as Jacques Le Goff and Aron Gurevich, respectively, as “archaic mentality” and “collective consciousness”: a belief‐based mindset shared by a community of people who unconditionally accept certain fundamental values as a matter of faith. More recently, Marcel Gauchet defined it as a “socially imbedded understanding of the universe as sacred order.” The mutually dependent combination of faith‐based and communal aspects is a quintessential and inalienable characteristic of the sacred worldview. Therefore, the fact that ISIS is characterized by the combination of these two aspects proves its belonging to the world of the sacred. Although Camus was neither original nor unique to point at the opposition of the sacred and secular worldviews, a distinction well known to cultural anthropologists, his extreme take on this opposition is his own: he perceived it not only as a conflict, but as The Conflict, the ultimate antagonism of contemporary humanity. As he stated it himself, this was his working hypothesis, “not the only one possible; moreover, it is far from explaining everything. But it partly explains the direction in which our times are leading and almost entirely the excesses of the age.” Camus’ discernments on this topic have not, to my best knowledge, been subject to a public discussion. Even his latest biographer, French philosopher Michel Onfray, who seeks the reestablishment of The Rebel as Camus’ both most significant and most neglected work, leaves this part of Camus’ arguments aside. The reluctance of French intellectuals to include this perspective into the discussion following the 2015 massacres might be due to deeper and more complex reasons than simply political correctness and the traditional post‐colonial discourse, which has become so customary it has evolved into a Pavlov‐like reflex. It might actually be due to what Camus referred to as All or Nothing: the opacity of the sacred mind for those who are deprived of it. For these two mindsets—sacred and secular—are like Janus whose one face is turned to the past, and the other to the future, and whose gazes can never meet. The reason for this tragic lack of communication lies in the fact that while, as André Gide put it, “what we French require most of all is logic,” in the world of the sacred characterized by “a deeper level of social psychology where spontaneous and unconscious mental structures dominate, logic […] has no power.” Therefore, the French refusal to take the sacred cause seriously as the main reason of modern day conflicts might derive from a natural human tendency to reduce the unfamiliar to the familiar. In this case, the familiar is represented by the components of a conflict that are material, quantifiable, accessible to logic and empirical investigation—such as social inequalities, economic development, corruption, poverty, or bad government. However, it is religion and belief systems that are the primary categories of individual and collective identities, and as such they deserve to be investigated without constantly reversing to the Marxist idea of “matter first,” which is concealed behind the tendency of reducing them to economic and social determinants. This is precisely what Camus’ argument in The Rebel aims to achieve: to analyze the very mental attitudes involved and...