Contenu du sommaire : La domination ecclésiale. Modèles et critiques (XIXe-XXe siècle)

‪The essay examines the interpretations that Étienne Gilson and Robert Markus offered for the ‪‪civitas terrena‪‪ (or ‪‪civitas diaboli‪‪) theorized in Augustine's ‪‪De civitate Dei‪‪. First, the essay recalls the most delicate and ambiguous aspects of Augustine's notion of the ‪‪civitas terrena‪‪, namely its flexible semantic field and its paradoxical consistency. Then, it takes the way in which Gilson and Markus approached these questions as a starting point for a broader reflection on their re-readings of Augustine's thought and their application of it to the present. Although these re-readings contrast under many respects, Gilson's being ecclesiological while that of Markus is political, they are alike in dissolving Augustine's couple (‪‪civitas terrena/civitas dei‪‪) within a tripartite scheme. As such, these interpretations are representative of a major tendency in the modern and contemporary reception of the work of the Bishop of Hippo.‪

‪Robert Markus's book, ‪‪Saeculum : History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine, ‪‪published in 1970, offers a remarkable interpretation of the Augustinian concept of social life. How, asks Augustine, do the objectives that men pursue in society relate to the ultimate purposes of their existence ? In a reversal of Constantinian imperial theology, the Bishop of Hippo does not merely desacralize the established political order. Above all, he defines the‪‪ saeculum ‪‪as the region in which the celestial and terrestrial cities “overlap”, though they are exclusive from one another in their eschatological reality, thus laying down a basis for the representation of the political realm as an autonomous, neutral and pluralist space.‪

‪Who invented the Gregorian Reform ? The expression passed into common usage through Augustin Fliche's books in the 1930s but the origin of the concept can be traced back a century earlier, to the 1830s. This paper studies the changing perceptions of Gregory VII in the works of Johannes Voigt, Auguste Comte, François Guizot and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and, more broadly, how this historical period was theorized both by idealist philosophy and by liberal history. It then focuses on the last quarter of the nineteenth century and on two figures, Henri Charles Lea and Rudolf Sohm, and, finally, on the importance of the Gregorian Reform for Max Weber as he framed his concept of clerical bureaucracy.‪

‪“‪‪Domination” in the work of Max Weber only reveals its complete potential in religious configurations which are not churches but charismatic groups. The events that the German sociologist identifies as most striking sociologically and historically, chiefly the rise of modern capitalism, were due to the imposition of moral patterns in these small groups, reaching a level of constraint that Christian ecclesial institutions had never been able to obtain. After preliminary remarks on recent criticisms of the translation of Weberian ‪‪Herrschaft‪‪ as “domination” (perceived in French as a Bourdieusian concept), I will argue that Weber paradoxically explores the ways of domination in his sociology of religion by analysing the most “democratic” religious structures, Puritan sects, as responsible for the deepest forms of social control. This perspective on the Church is in many ways an inheritance from German liberal Protestant theology – except on a few decisive points.‪

‪It is well known that, in his later years, Gramsci was very interested in the Roman Church as the archetype of a hegemonic institution. This interest was not only characteristic of his old age, but can already be identified during his youth in Turin and his beginnings as a journalist. It is also worth looking into the posterity of this aspect of Gramscian thought, as it appears to have been quite marginalized in the main Gramscisms of the 20‪‪th‪‪ and the 21‪‪st‪‪ century. The works in which this continuity can be observed are few in number but of major importance. In Italy, the complex relationship between Pasolini and Catholicism cannot be properly understood if it is not seen under a Gramscian perspective. In France, as strange as it may seem, Louis Althusser was the most faithful to a Marxist analysis of culture that manages to take the Church into account.‪

‪The‪‪ Prison Notebooks ‪‪are for Gramsci the outcome of a long political reflection centered on the question of the Church. His hostility towards the institution, averse to all forms of emancipation, remains but does not prevent him, in the early 1930s, from analyzing the history of Catholicism, from the Counter-Reformation to the new Concordat, seen as an opportunity for the old Jesuit plan of gaining “indirect power” over all aspects of social life. This meticulous study allows Gramsci to consider the Church as a possible pattern for a process of ideological conquest.‪

‪The Catholic Church weakened considerably in the 20‪‪th‪‪ C. However, Gramsci noted that in Italy it could still boast of a solid social base and had an ancestral experience with hegemony that might provide valuable lessons for a modern political party. In the ‪‪Prison Notebooks‪‪, his attentive reading of the latest encyclicals allows him to avoid being taken in by the proclaimed apolitical nature of the Lateran Treaty. The importance of this reading of the Pope's letters and of the Catholic press is clear if we connect it with the theoretical turning point found in Notebook 6, in which the main Gramscian political categories emerge. Here, Gramsci develops his theory of the “integral State” and of “hegemony” after an examination of political theology (that of Pope Pius XI and of the machinery of hegemony that it lays out).‪

‪In addition to Antonio Gramsci's reflections on the Catholic Church and its predominance in Italy, it is also interesting to examine the ideas that he formulated, in particular in the ‪‪Notebooks‪‪, on the Protestant Reformation as a historical phenomenon leading up to the French Revolution and to the rise of Classical German philosophy, among other things, but also as an active element in the contemporary world, foremost in the United States of America. On one hand, there are predominantly reformed societies, the United States first of all, which were the object of Gramsci's constant attention ; and on the other hand, the presence of “neo-Calvinists” in his own contemporary Italy within the debate on necessary social and political modernization, on the basis of Weber's ‪‪Ethics‪‪, which Gramsci had read carefully and absorbed‪‪.‪

‪The place of the Catholic Church in the work of Pierre Bourdieu is, a priori, particularly tenuous. Yet in his lectures at the Collège de France, particularly in his historical sociology of the State, he regularly summons the Catholic ecclesial model to escape the State's discourse about itself. Nourished by the work of historians, and particularly by certain medievalists, Bourdieu's reflection finds in the Church a form of counter-discourse that he hopes will be fruitful for escaping from the self-justification of the State. Bourdieu thus becomes a theologian of the State, fascinated by medieval jurists, an archetypal figure of the social efficiency of a theoretical discourse. In Catholic metaphors, the sociologist finds resources for thinking about his own practice.‪