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The Shattering of Christianity and the Articulation of Belief

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Jeremy Ahearne
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Extract

This article is based on a number of texts written by Michel de Certeau between around 1969 and 1974. These texts all explore the ways in which a lucid Christian belief may endure as a resource in contemporary societies. They also indicate a form of transition. In comparison to the probing but orthodoxly circumscribed analyses of L’Etranger, ou Bunion dans la différence (1969), we see the emergence of a more open (more exposed but also freer) mode of reflection. Although Certeau would rarely return in his writings after the mid-1970’s to the question of contemporary Christian belief as such, the analytic and figurative frameworks generated by this reflection continue to inform his thought. They help us to make sense of the apparently disparate heterogeneity of his subsequent publications, taking us as they do in a series of significant zigzags between, say, The Writing of History, The Mystic Fable and The Practice of Everyday Life.

Christianity was, in Certeau’s view, in the process of ‘shattering’. While this may have seemed a provocative diagnosis in 1974, it appears today as a basic premiss for a scrupulous sociological analysis. Moreover, Certeau suggests that there is nothing intrinsically new about this process. He recalls elsewhere the major scissions already at work in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Christendom broke ‘into pieces’, producing here and there new generations of believers ‘without a church’. What is unprecedented, he argues, is now the sheer extent and scale of this shattering. This development is not necessarily synonymous with an imminent extinction of Christian belief, but does modify radically the conditions in which such belief must find a voice and a horizon for action.

Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 77 , Issue 909 , November 1996 , pp. 493 - 504
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 The texts may found in de Certeau, M., La faiblesse de croire (Paris: Seuil, 1987)Google Scholar. A posthumous collection of essays edited by Luce Giard (hereafter referred to as FC). I have relied principally on chapters 4,7,8,9, 10 and 11 . All translations are my own.

2 de Certeau, M., L’Etranger, ou l’union dans la différence (1969; Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1991)Google Scholar.

3 See de Certeau, M., The Writing of History, tr. T. Conley (1975; New York: University of Columbia Press, 1988)Google Scholar; The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. S. Rendall (1980; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); The Mystic Fable, vol. 1: The Sixteenth und Seventeenth Centuries, tr. M. Smith (1982; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

4 See M. de Certeau and J-M. Domenach, Le christianisme éctlaté (Paris: Seuil, 1974). The title of the book could be translated as ‘Shattered Christianity’, although this unfortunately loses the implicit connotations of brilliant light (éclat) or enduring radiance carried by the adjective éclaté. The book is based upon the transcription of a radio debate between the two authors, supplemented by two separately written postscripts. An unedited and substantially longer version of Certeau’s postscript can be found in La faiblesse de croire. pp. 267–305.

5 See e.g. Jean-Louis, Schlegel, Religions à la carte (Paris: Hachette, 1995), pp. 127–32Google Scholar.

6 Cf. M. de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, p. 25 (where ‘la chrétienté brisée en morceaux’ is translated as ‘tattered Christendom’); and Leszek Kolakowski, Chrétiens sans Eglise. La conscience religieuse el le lien confessionel au XVIIe siècle. tr. From Polish by A. Posner (1965; Paris: Gallimard, 1969), discussed by Certeau in L’absent de l’histoire (n.p.: Mame, 1973). pp. 109-14.

7 Cf. Le christianisme éclaté , pp. 56–7.

8 Cf. e.g. The Practice of Everyduy Life, pp. 165-76 (the chapter entitled ‘Reading as Poaching’).

9 La christianisme éclaté, p. 24.

10 The OED gives among others the following definitions of ‘articulation’: ‘The action or process of joining ...; a mode of jointing’, and ‘The production or formation of speech sounds, words, etc.; articulate utterance or expression...’.

11 La christianisme éclaté, pp. 68–71.

12 See The Writing of History, pp. 17–113.

13 See FC 293-304. Certeau begins this part of his discussion by evoking the importance of dreams as such (as well as other ‘voices’ and ‘visions’) within biblical narratives themselves.

14 Le christianisme éclaté, p. 51.

15 Cf. Le christianisme éclaté, pp. 39–40.

16 See FC 112, 213.

17 Cf. FC 290–1.

18 Le christianisme éclaté, p. 66.

19 For Certeau’s founding analyses of ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’, see The Practice of Everyday Life, pp. 34–9.

20 Ibid., p. 37 (tr. mod.).

21 Cf. Jean-Louis Schlegel, Religions à la carte, pp. 128–9.

22 Cf. The Mystic Fable, p. 289, where Certeau cites Hadewijch of Anvers on ‘the dark path, untraced, unmarked, all inner’.