This documentation appears in the Summer 2011 issue of Modern Age, and was translated by Gladden J. Pappin. To subscribe now, go here.
To the question “What is Europe?” I propose the following response: it is the region of the world, the human association where conversion is considered to be the act which is the highest, the most decisive, and the most human that a human being can accomplish. Conversion is to, or toward, the truth. Conversion is the founding act of philosophy, the act by which man becomes a philosopher, capable of a theoretical view, of “the view of that which is.” Conversion is the first movement of the Christian religion, and of her alone, by which the soul discovers at the same time its illness and its cure, its loss and its salvation. The other religions consist of obedience to the Law, or of the quest for Illumination.
The serious atheist understands the sense of conversion just as well as the sincere believer does: he too was converted when, at the end of the inquiry which no man can escape, he concluded that there is no God.
Conversion reveals at the same time the objectivity of the truth, and also the fact that one seeks it freely, that one turns freely toward it, that one can find it, but also miss it or lose it, and thus lose oneself—for what remains of us when we are far from the truth?
The notion of conversion binds together truth and liberty. It is the proper connection to our old Europe, but one that is always in danger of being undermined, even in Europe.
The balance between liberty and truth is always on the verge of collapsing. Formerly it was upset in favor of truth, which was understood to be so “objective” that it became a part of the political law: “what wholly Catholic France is like in the reign of Louis the Great.”1 Today the balance is upset in favor of liberty. But while our fathers, at the height of their tyrannical oppressions,2 maintained at least in principle that the act of faith must be free in order to be meritorious, we have abandoned truth entirely: our liberty has no more choices to make, there is no more truth to find or to lose. I choose what I want because I really want it, because I’m worth it!
At Notre Dame Cathedral the dull tread of wandering tourists slowly wears down the bronze plaque commemorating the conversion of Paul Claudel. Around the Roman Forum, legions of schoolgirls picnic under the Arch of Titus. Everywhere, digital eyes capture everything without seeing anything. The human world is just an open city that one visits. Is it still a place where one prays? A place where one commemorates victories? “What is God, what is war?” the tourists say, and then blink. At the other end of the world, the terrorists butcher the apostate. Half the faces are shielded from view. Life hides itself. It suffocates under the shadow of God.
The terrorists kill the tourists. The circle closes. The two conceits meet. The eyeless view of one who lazily records the shimmer of human appearances and the viewless eye of one blinded by indignation before transgressions of the Law cross for a moment without meeting. How did those who equally ceased to search find each other?
Let us leave the terrorists. Let us trust the police of our country. But we are the tourists, even without leaving home. We have learned and we have mastered the art of transforming the life of the soul into a spectacle in which we are the spectators. We have in our power “the science of man”: we are, in our own view, scientific man looking down on judging man. What does all our science wish to say? That he who knows has no connection with him who is, that he who sees cannot be transformed by what he sees. We even know the cause of man: the great gallery of evolution is open to each of us. After the tour, we are a little bit happier with ourselves. Oh glorious science!
It remains, however, to govern ourselves. Even if we hold judgments of value to be sinful, we still do wish to govern ourselves well: we desire a good government. We thus conclude that we should form a community where we can implement this firm purpose. For us to govern well we must know ourselves, and we know ourselves well in governing well. There is no escaping truth and liberty, though with the mitigations and the accommodations that common life imposes: we are bound to each other without sharing the same truth.
We question ourselves about what we can and what we must do together. We question ourselves about the future of our nations. Who made the nations? It is Europe that made the nations, the Europe which was made by conversions—the conversions to philosophy and to the Christian religion. Consider the Bible and the Encyclopédie, Luther and Goethe, Pascal and Voltaire. This is the case in each nation that has ripened the tone of conversation among those who seek, that has worked out the chemistry of conversions. This is the case in each of our nations where there is any truth for him who seeks it, and any liberty to seek.
But the great tourist Agency has published its new catalogue. The old nations, distillates of a thousand real choices, are abandoned, rejected, mocked. We have instead a new destination: the desert, where the pure liberties began, without anything that struggles or that lives. Here only one commandment reigns: to forget the real Europe, where for centuries liberty has sought the truth. The new “Europe” wants to enlarge the frontiers of the real Europe, spiritually no less than geographically. Liberty which has abandoned the quest for the truth wishes to embrace the religion which has no room for liberty. So that one may finally rid oneself of philosophy, one must finally rid oneself of Christianity!
Among the tourists, however, there is a young man “standing in the crowd by the second pillar at the entrance to the choir on the right, near the sacristy.”3 ♦
Pierre Manent teaches political philosophy in the Centre d’études sociologiques et politiques Raymond Aron (CESPRA) in Paris. His many books include Democracy Without Nations? (ISI Books, 2007) and, most recently, Les métamorphoses de la cité: Essai sur la dynamique de l’Occident. “Conversion” originally appeared in Commentaire 31, no. 121 (2008).
Gladden J. Pappin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University. His work has appeared in the Intercollegiate Review, Perspectives on Political Science, the Journal of Markets and Morality, and elsewhere.
1 The reference is to the title of an essay by Pierre Bayle (1647–1706).
2 The reference is to the French wars of religion.
3 Paul Claudel’s description of the moment of his conversion, “Ma conversion,” Contacts et circonstances (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 1010.