A video clip accompanied by the alarming claim “Conquered: French Christians Surrender!” has been making the rounds lately. The video is of an Arab Muslim chanting the adhaan, the Islamic call to prayer, inside a Paris church,
Well, not really. The ‘call to prayer’ in this case was part of a performance of “The Armed Man: A Mass For Peace,” a 1999 work of classical music by Welsh composer Karl Jenkins, who composed it in the wake of the Kosovo war. It combines elements of the Catholic Mass with the Islamic call to prayer, a secular poem, and a Hindu text.
One can argue over whether or not it is right to allow the prayers of non-Christian religions in a Christian church, no matter the context; personally, I am a purist about such matters, and would fully support a mosque or synagogue forbidding the performance of Christian prayers within its wall, under any circumstances. But in fairness, one must recognize that in the celebrated Paris case, the adhaan appears not as worship, but as part of an artistic performance.
Here is the English translation of the adhaan:
God is great (4x)
I bear witness that there is none worthy of worship except God (Allah). (2x)
I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah (2x)
Come to prayer (2x)
It’s easy to see why some Christians, especially in France, find this so alarming. You would have to be a fool to ignore of downplay the seething tensions between France’s Islamic population, and its non-Muslims—not to say “Christians,” because France is Europe’s most atheist country. It seems that these unbelieving Frenchmen prefer there to be no religion at all, and allowed themselves to believe the myth of progress inevitably leading to a desacralized public square.
You can’t fight something with nothing. If the French don’t like the Islamification of French public life, then they aren’t going to stop it by doubling down on laïcisme. In Michel Houellebecq’s controversial 2015 novel Submission, the demoralized and de-Christianized French public turns voluntarily to an Islamist government, in what amounts to a vast public confession of the inadequacy of godless materialism to provide solid grounding for a way of life.
Houellebecq may be decadent in his personal life—his antics are at times squalid, and he looks like he dwells under a bridge—but no novelist sees Europe’s religious crisis with clearer eyes.
Louis Betty, an American scholar of French literature who was most recently in these pages for his work on translating and publishing Rénaud Camus’s essays, in 2016 published a penetrating analysis of Houellebecq’s religious vision, titled Without God: Michel Houellebecq and Materialist Horror. Though Houellebecq is not personally religious, Betty claims that he is “a deeply and unavoidably religious writer.”
Why? Because Houellebecq’s novels, says Betty, are “a kind of fictional experiment in the death of God.” The novelist is preoccupied between the clash between materialism—as expressed through science, sex, and shopping—and “the desire for transcendence and survival, which is best expressed in and through religion.”
Houellebecq is influenced by Auguste Comte, the 19th century French philosopher who was an atheist, but was so convinced of the necessity of religion to social life that he invented one without a god—a secular pseudo-religion that is still practiced by holdouts in Brazil. The novelist believes that France is in profound crisis because having thrown off its ancestral Catholicism, the nation finds it cannot live on materialism alone.
Without religion to answer the deep questions of life—especially to offer hope that life survives death—people turn to material distractions. If there is no God, and no transcendent meaning, it becomes difficult for most people to rise above indulging their base desires. Humanity has won freedom from religious creeds, from traditions, from external sources of authority, and from virtually anything that stands in the way of the individual doing and being whatever he desires. In victory, the rebel confronts the devastating truth: that he has destroyed everything that made life meaningful.
This is not an abstract crisis. In 2018, I sat in a café in Paris, talking with one of that country’s most celebrated intellectuals. He is a robust secularist, a man of staunch republican values. But on that day, he was utterly deflated over the rise of Islamism and the loss of a sense of common purpose among his countrymen. This was not what he and his generation fought for in 1968. When I raised the possibility of a return to religion, he politely but absolutely ruled it out. I might as well have suggested that the French leave their Left Bank townhouses for caves in the Pyrenees.
Houellebecq’s novels can be rough going. He writes about sex with a grimy frankness that is superficially pornographic, but for the fact that porn at least aspires to offer titillation. In Houellebecq, sex is a sad simulacrum of human intimacy. He anticipated the miserable loneliness of the ‘incel’ before we had a word for that kind of soul. The novelist’s point is that we are driven to ever kinkier forms of sexual enchantment to distract ourselves from the meaninglessness of our materialist lives. Houellebecq is a writer of the Sexual Revolution’s Late Brezhnev period: a time when nobody really believes in the revolution’s promises anymore, but are pretending to for lack of anything better to do.
Betty calls Houellebecq’s novels “keen examinations of the lives of men and of societies that no longer lie beneath a sacred canopy.” These are the people that Harvard anthropologist Joe Henrich memorably calls “WEIRD”: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. That is to say, us. In his book about the phenomenon, Henrich points out that modern Westerners (even those who still profess religious beliefs) are in most cultural and psychological ways real outliers on universal human experience. Houellebecq’s gift, or perhaps curse, is to follow the logic of Western rationalism to its sociological conclusion.
Betty quotes a character from Houllebecq’s 2005 novel The Possibility of an Island:
In countries like Spain, Poland, and Ireland, social life and all behavior had been structured by a deeply rooted, unanimous, and immense Catholic faith for centuries, it determined morality as well as familial relations, conditioned all cultural and artistic productions, social hierarchies, conventions, and rules for living. In the space of a few years, in less than a generation, in an incredibly brief period of time, all this had disappeared, had evaporated into thin air. In these countries today no one believed in God anymore, or took account of him, or even remembered that they had once believed; and this had been achieved without difficulty, without conflict, without any kind of violence or protest, without even a real discussion, as easily as a heavy object, held back for some time by an external obstacle, returns as soon as you release it, to its position of equilibrium.
If God is dead, then the body is all that matters. But what happens when the body breaks down, and ceases to be able to give one pleasure – or worse, becomes a source of little but pain? There’s only one answer: suicide. That, or submission to a strong god. There is no middle ground – and this, one suspects, is why Houellebecq is so hated by the literary bien-pensants, who see the dissolute Baby Boomer as a counterrevolutionary traitor to their generation.
Louis Betty:
Transgressiveness as a literary trope is usually attributed to writers and texts that bend and distort the limits of freedom in the direction of even greater liberation. In Houellebecq’s case, transgressiveness moves in the opposite direction, scandalously daring us to wonder if the discourse of human dignity and rights that the West has fashioned in the wake of God’s death can remain the guarantor of human happiness, or whether, as the Comtean understanding of history holds, it is no more than a wobbly metaphysical placeholder awaiting the shattering day of God’s return.
But whose God? The Islam on offer in Submission is not the savage head-chopping version, but a tamer iteration – think Turkey, not Iran, and certainly not ISIL. As Betty puts it,
It is as if the novel asks, “Read and tell me if you do not, somewhere in your heart, feel tempted by this vision of a Europe in which family life has been restored, men and women have their assigned roles, the economy has been stabilized, and eternal life is reaffirmed.”
Indeed, more than a few conservative American Christians cheered last summer when the Muslim-majority city council of Hamtramck, Michigan, voted to ban Pride flags from city property. These Christians asked among themselves why they lacked the cultural self-confidence to accomplish things like this. As well they ought to have done: in most places across the West—including, at times, in the Vatican—Christians have become eager to surrender to the forces that are tearing civilization to bits.
Houellebecq’s novels compel readers to ask how long this decadence can sustain itself—and what are the alternatives? The despairing intellectual in the Paris café had no hope for the future. He is godless, and so, he told me, is France—as if that were an unchallengeable fact. But is it?
I don’t think so. The future is not determined. Houellebecq’s novels offer hope through the back door: by forcing us to confront the metaphysical horror of life without God, they also direct us to think about the kind of god we will have when the deity inevitably returns. The Twitterati alarmed by the adhaan sounded in French churches may have the context wrong, but they are right to worry about a Catholic institution that would permit such an artistic performance in a time when French Christianity is flat on its back, and followers of the Prophet not only mass in the streets to cheer for the slaughter of Jewish civilians in Israel, but a few even an elderly priest at Mass in Normandy.
The answer is to return to the faith—not the feeble felt-banner piety of postconciliar liberalism, but the full-blooded faith that raised the Gothic cathedrals nearly a thousand years ago. As long as those old stone piles still stand, so does the memory of what France once was. If Balzac was right to define hope as “a memory that desires,” then a Christian future for France—and for Europe—depends on kindling passion for the strong God of traditional Christianity.
If you are scandalized by a Muslim chanting the Islamic call to prayer in a Christian church—if that is your idea of a kind of metaphysical horror—then the best thing you can do is show up as often as you can when the church doors open for Mass, and sing, and pray, with all your heart, soul, and mind. And bring your friends and family. Nothing else will do.
The post-Enlightenment de-Christianization and de-spiritualization of Europe has reached a dead end—and Houellebecq is its prophet. The novelist has said in interviews that he has tried personally to reclaim Christianity, but has not been able to manage it. That’s a pity for him, but then I think about the young Spanish friend who texted me on Christmas Eve from his family’s ancestral village in rural Spain. Since we last talked, one of his parents died, and he was plunged into crisis, resulting in losing his faith. Because we had spoken once of God, he turned to me.
“Go to Christmas Mass tonight,” I urged him. But there is no priest, and the church is locked, he responded. But he said he would get the key from the family who guards it, and go in to pray alone. He did, and returned on the night of Christmas to pray a second time, in the deep darkness.
When the young man opened his eyes after his prayer, there was a single candle burning in the church. No one else in this hamlet of fifty people had come into the church. The young man was there alone … but he was not alone. He is now back on his way to God.
This really happened. It is not necessarily bad to sound the alarm on social media about what holds to be the desecration of holy spaces. But how much better is it to pray in the darkness of a church in the metaphorical desert, seeking the lost God with an open heart, and to receive a gift of a solitary candle, lighting the path back home.
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/houellebecq-prophet-of-post-christian-europe/