Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [65]
April 26, 2008
Your letter ends so abruptly, dear Bernard-Henri, that at first I wondered if there was not a paragraph—or indeed several paragraphs—missing, but maybe not; we are on such difficult terrain that I feel as though I’m boring a tunnel, in total darkness, and I can hear you drilling on the other side, a few feet away; but we can hope for a stray pickax to burst through the seam of flint, for a sudden dazzling light. And if we are not yet equal to the task as intellectuals, we have at least broached the one subject on which I believe we can shed some faint light for our contemporaries. Because, as both you and I are aware, the return of the religious that looms today looks about as friendly as the Incredible Hulk; but we are no less aware that it is nonetheless inevitable. Obviously, it is impossible for me to establish that for a society to cut itself off from the religious is tantamount to suicide; it is simply an intuition, but a persistent intuition.
We approach the subject from very different standpoints, at least as far as I understand from what you wrote about those Jews who broke with the religion of their forefathers and refused to become members of the Catholic Church in their host countries. What did they have left? Very little, apart from the communist faith. And when that too crumbled beneath the weight of evidence? Well, it must have been difficult. Go back to their beginnings?
What was the point of all the effort preparing for the École Normale? I can understand why your father took it badly.
There are, of course, the Jewish texts; but if you’ll permit me, there is something else. I very much like the way you talk about your maternal uncles, Moïse, Hyamine … I can picture them, these Jews dressed in black, when the Sabbath was over, drinking their weekly anisette; in a few lines you manage to make them sound infinitely touching. “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob; not of the philosophers and of the learned.” It was Pascal’s “Mémorial,” too, that brought me to him; a devastating poetic thunderbolt, unlike anything in the French literature of the time.
It’s like in Dostoyevsky—“a single beautiful childhood memory, and you are saved.”* But what you have to understand now is that, when it comes to childhood memories like this, I do not have a single one. You are right, France is much less secular than people claim; in certain regions (Brittany being the most obvious), you need only scratch the surface and you find yourself in profoundly Catholic territory. Other regions, like Burgundy and the Southwest, on the other hand, have long since been dechristianized; and the most important fact (it is its historic failing) is that the Church never managed to regain the confidence of the working classes. The last time I was in Paris, I was passing that little church in the Sixth Arrondissement where Ozanam* and Lacordaire† once preached. They at least understood that if the Church did not break the unnatural covenant it had made with the bourgeoisie and the employers, if it could not forge ties with the working classes, it was signing its own death warrant. They tried, they preached in the wilderness, they failed, and by the time the Church finally woke up from its long sleep, it was too late.
So, in my family, no matter which way I turn, no matter how far back I look, I can see nothing akin to a religious tradition. I can, on the other hand, see a certain communist faith. I have occasionally read in a newspaper that I was “brought up by communist grandparents.” This is both absolutely true and absolutely untrue. My grandparents hadn’t read Marx or Lenin or anything like that. He hadn’t even read Maurice Thorez‡ and I’m not sure that they ever flicked through the Party’s election program. But they voted communist at every election, that much is true, and I don’t think they ever thought of voting anything else. It