”The Disenchantment of the World” is Marcel Gauchet's classic of that delves on politics and social thoughts. This brilliant book talks about "disenchantment" to society brought about by Christianity. Religion or Christianity in this instance has successfully penetrated and influenced all aspects of our lives - social, language, values and institutions. According to Gauchet, religion is "the embodiment of social man's negative relation to himself into social forms. . . . [It is] a way of institutionalizing humans against themselves. . . . The central noteworthy feature of the religious is precisely that this constitutive power of negation has been given the task of disguising itself. . . ."
Gauchet's ideas confront, observe, analyze and object to religion. Gauchet argues that the world reaches the end of its lengthy religious day. He called this as the “the religion as the end of religion” pertaining to Christianity.
Religion may have influenced deeply the modern man but society has transformed without the gods. Christianity has led its way out of existence. The perceived "problem" of the foundation of Christian doctrines is the dualism it proposes - the immortality of individual soul and the complete transcendence of God. This very core of Christian teaching exposes it to weaknesses, disagreements and instability.
The "Otherness" of God or His being removed from the world, resulted in the weakening dependence of human beings on the divine. Christianity encourages independence in faith. According to Gauchet, “"[T]he greater the gods, the freer humans are, the degree of human obligation toward the law given to them from outside is, contrary to appearances, inversely related to the degree of concentration of, and separate from, the divine . . . . Transcendence separates reason and faith. . . . There is no intellectual access to a God radically separated from the world, so humans are now on their own. . . ."
Gauchet's views on Catholicism are more inclined to be protestant. The Church is based on “major ambiguity”. First, it espouses the virtue of mediation “between living beings and the spiritual realm” but the Church's central establishment and its preached dogmas implies “the opposite: the impossibility of mediation, the irreversible fracture between the human city and the kingdom of the absolute." Consequently, the Church is seen as the idol that seems to unwittingly encourage rejection by both believers and unbelievers.
As religion became as less broad as society, society developed values that are secular, separate institutions, rites and others. Gauchet pointed out that any move to stop "the divine's inexorable withdrawal [from society] is futile." Christianity fails to understand the logic behind religion and society.
The state then becomes the first religions revolution. The state was created “to preserve their inviolable legacy, repeating their sacred teaching". The structure of the State though comes between people and their gods. "The gods withdraw and simultaneously the nonquestionable becomes questionable, affirmed by the hold humans have on the organization of their own world." "The imperial ambition to dominate the world comes with the [advent of] the State."
Consequently, the state plays a critical role in society's departure from religion. "The power of a few individuals to act in the name of the gods is the barely perceptible, yet irreversible step toward everyone having an influence on the god's decrees... The State ushers in an age of opposition between social structure and the essence of [religion]. Political domination, which decisively entangles the gods in history, will prove to be the invisible hoist lifting us out of the religious."
The state first came to challenge the very existence of religion. Later, it replaced religious authorities, rites and establishments. Social power became secularized as the sacred became clerical then later, a political form. Gauchet observed, the "Nation came to personify immortality." Society "realizes the collective body's internal self-congruence". Therefore, its independence from religion.
The "autonomous self" encouraged by the state no longer wants a world that is "presented" but rather "constituted." This state of being is aptly put by Gauchet as "From now on we are destined to live openly and in the anguish from which the gods had spared us. . . . Perhaps we will never find a true balance between self-love that wishes to exclude all else and the desire to abolish the self, between absolute being and being-as-nothingness. Such is the daily throbbing pain that no sacral opiate can blot out: the merciless contradictory desire inherent in the very reality of being a subject."
The idea of man's unquestioned and unchanging place in the universe was challenged. "The power of a few individuals to act in the name of the gods is the barely perceptible, yet irreversible step toward everyone having an influence on the god's decrees... The State ushers in an age of opposition between social structure and the essence of [religion]. Political domination, which decisively entangles the gods in history, will prove to be the invisible hoist lifting us out of the religious."
