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The Mark of the Sacred
Jean-Pierre Dupuy, prophet of what he calls "enlightened doomsaying," has long warned that modern society is on a path to self-destruction. In this book, he pleads for a subversion of this crisis from within, arguing that it is our lopsided view of religion and reason that has set us on this course. In denial of our sacred origins and hubristically convinced of the powers of human reason, we cease to know our own our disenchanted world leaves us defenseless against a headlong rush into the abyss of global warming, nuclear holocaust, and the other catastrophes that loom on our horizon. Reviving the religious anthropology of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Marcel Mauss and in dialogue with the work of René Girard, Dupuy shows that we must remember the world's sacredness in order to keep human violence in check. A metaphysical and theological detective, he tracks the sacred in the very fields where human reason considers itself most free from everything it judges science, technology, economics, political and strategic thought. In making such claims, The Mark of the Sacred takes on religion bashers, secularists, and fundamentalists at once. Written by one of the deepest and most versatile thinkers of our time, it militates for a world where reason is no longer an enemy of faith.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 22, 2009
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607 people want to read
About the author
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
69 books47 followersJean-Pierre Dupuy is Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Philosophy at the École Polytechnique, Paris. He is the Director of research at the C.N.R.S. (Philosophy) and the Director of C.R.E.A. (Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée), the philosophical research group of the École Polytechnique, which he founded in 1982. At Stanford University, he is a researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (C.S.L.I.) and Professor of Political Science. Dupuy also has served as chair of the Ethics Committee of the French High Authority on Nuclear Safety and Security, and was inducted as an Academician into the International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences.
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May 1, 2022
Therapy For the Doomed
Self-transcendence has been the key to human success. And it will probably be the cause of its destruction. This, I think is the central conclusion of Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s breathtakingly acute analysis. It is a conclusion without hope but nevertheless of some comfort. By relativising absolutely everything, from climate change to Trump, the Mark of the Sacred provides a kind of Zen perspective that allows anxiety to dissipate. It is a therapy for the doomed.
For Dupuy, self-transcendence is a uniquely human ability which shows up in innumerable hidden as well as obvious forms. Language, perhaps, is one of the most obvious. We use language, we create new language. Yet we live in a world controlled by language. Language transcends us as individuals even though it exists only to the extent that it is used by individuals. That we submit to language in a community is arguably our only competitive advantage in a world inhabited by stronger, faster, more instinctively aware beasts, not to mention the legions of microbes that would devour us if we couldn’t figure out how to fight them off collectively.
Self-transcendence is also demonstrated in political, commercial, and social organisation. Democratic politics is the creation and sustainment by a population of a polity, a set of constitutional laws, that then dominates that same population. In today’s world, we are perhaps even more dominated by an organisational form created in the Middle Ages that combines the transcendence of both the state and the church. This is the modern corporation, established and run by individuals who then are required by law to act in its interests rather than their own. Society as a whole is only marginally controlled by law and explicit restriction, but relies on continuous implicit respect for ‘something bigger,’ such as Order, or Freedom, or Regard for one’s neighbour.
Dupuy argues that the oldest and most universal form of self-transcendence is religion. Certainly no civilisation that we know of, ancient or modern, has been able to exist without the creation of a cause, identity, origin, or purpose external to itself. The essential externality has, of course, been God in some form or other. “By ‘God,’ I mean what all the divinities that human beings have made for themselves throughout history have in common—an exteriority that they have managed to project outside the sphere of human existence.”
For the ancient Israelites, the ultimate exterior transcendence was YHWH for whom and by whom they existed. For The 18th century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, it was the divine Guarantor, who coordinated the activities of his ‘windowless’ Monads to ensure the best of all possible worlds. For us of a more secular, but no less religious, age, our self-transcendence is most often expressed as Reason, a somewhat ill-defined but very much glorified God.
As Dupuy notes, “reason, like all human institutions, has its source in religion.” Whether we view it as a substitute for religion or as an extension of traditional religion matters very little. Dupuy quotes Emile Durkheim approvingly (and frequently) as the first to understand that “the fundamental categories of thought, and therefore of science, have religious origins.” And not just thought but all the social structures created by thought: “… it can be said that nearly all great social institutions are derived from religion.” Marriage, justice, government, science, ethics, and basic social courtesies and virtues have their ultimate origin in the ultimately transcendent entity - God.
The traditional term for designating that which is explicitly transcendent is ‘sacred.’ We create the sacred but it is beyond us. Hegel called the process by which we do this ‘self-exteriorisation’; Marx termed it ‘alienation’; Adam Smith, the Invisible Hand. The French anthropologist, Louis Dumont, referred to the condition these processes established as ‘hierarchy,’ by which he meant the term in its original Greek meaning of ‘sacred order.’ This sacred order has an important characteristic. It “encompasses the contrary.” This can be stated rather precisely in terms that seems to include all of human social organisation:
This statement may seem confusing to non-mathematicians but it is an extremely simple concept. A good example is the kind of corporate organisation common in many large German companies in which members of the workforce are elected to the ‘supervisory board’ which has corporate authority over management who in turn have authority over the board members from the workforce. Dupuy calls this a “tangled hierarchy.” My old teacher Russell Ackoff used the term “circular organisation” and advocated it extensively among American businesses.
Dupuy puts Dumont’s idea through an important ‘stress test’ and finds its weak point. He concludes that “the most stable social order is the one that contains the threat of its own collapse.” Think of democracy which permits maximal disagreement and diversity of political parties. Or, even more apt, a loosely regulated financial market (an old colleague of mine, Richard Pascale, wrote a book for business managers called Managing on the Edge which had the same theme). These institutions work best according to political and economic theory - until they, abruptly and without notice, don’t. At which point they tend to disintegrate completely into crisis: “The crisis that accompanies the collapse of a hierarchical order bears a name that has come down to us from Greek mythology: panic.” When the god Pan is seen in the forest, the locals hotfoot somewhere else, anywhere else. As word gets around, he instantly becomes the new exteriority for the entire population..
Panic undermines all hierarchical order; in fact it inverts it. When there is panic, all of the virtues of the system are inverted. What was good - freedom, self-determination, light-touch regulation, even fundamental concepts like private property and the sanctity of contracts - becomes evil. Commenting on the 2008 financial crisis, Dupuy makes the point clear: “… the virtue of a crisis of such unprecedented scope is that it makes clear, at least to those who have the eyes to see it, that good and evil are profoundly related; indeed they have become identical with each other as a result of the crisis. If there is a way out, it will be found only by allowing evil once again to transcend itself and take on the appearance of the good.”
So democracies do fall into dictatorship (e.g. Weimar Germany) and markets do become horribly chaotic (as in the dot.com bust or the even larger derivatives meltdown). But because we do not like these outcomes doesn’t imply that democracies or markets don’t work. They surely do - by creating the possibility a new hierarchical order, in which, perhaps, democratic freedoms are suspended and regulation becomes a dominant commercial force. Virtues become vices and vice versa. Therefore says Dupuy, “The challenge facing policymakers in a time of panic is to find an external fixed point that can be used to bring it under control.”
In other words the real strength in our institutions, if strength there be, is their ability to find new gods which re-establish orderly society. Finding/inventing/creating the new sacred as panic sweeps across our societies is necessary for survival. But this is where our history and our cultural heritage betray us. We are trapped by a monumental paradox of our religious life first identified by Max Weber:
When the respective religious authorities decided to fix their canons of sacred scripture and stop the process by which these writings had been continuously edited, amended, and re-interpreted, our fate was sealed. Religion became faith, complete confidence in some static expression of exteriority. Not only the gods, but also God became archaic, an impediment to human welfare and the welfare of the rest of the planet.
So, in Dupuy’s judgement we have lost our ability for self-transcendence. Our societies no longer act as “God-factories.” Religion has now substituted for the sacred and destroyed it by halting its evolution. The traditional gods have indeed died, even among those fundamentalists who spout an Ole Time Religion that never existed except in their imagination. Theirs is at best a sacralisation of Nostalgia and at worst of White Colonialism. The new gods proposed by the innumerable cults that spring up continuously (QAnon, any number of conspiracy theories, alien enthusiasts, enthusiastic adventists, etc.) appeal mainly to the emotionally needy, the shysters, and the resentful, not to the mass of those affected by the emerging panic on numerous fronts from immigration to the corruption of every major social institution.
We will continue to worship the gods we have established by default in our disenchanted societies - wealth, position, political power, the righteousness of capitalism - because they are, we believe, what Marx called the universal equivalent of every possible desire. They give us whatever else we might want. This is the Prosperity Gospel that proclaims a religion without a hint of the sacred. Even more disastrously, it has annihilated an awareness of the sacred.
It turns out that Hegel was probably correct. Reason has its own agenda of which we are largely unconscious. But whereas he was confident enough to call such an exteriority ‘cunning,’ thus implying a secret plan for human welfare, the better translation might be the Ruse of Reason, the cosmic practical joke that is the species Homo sapiens.
Self-transcendence has been the key to human success. And it will probably be the cause of its destruction. This, I think is the central conclusion of Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s breathtakingly acute analysis. It is a conclusion without hope but nevertheless of some comfort. By relativising absolutely everything, from climate change to Trump, the Mark of the Sacred provides a kind of Zen perspective that allows anxiety to dissipate. It is a therapy for the doomed.
For Dupuy, self-transcendence is a uniquely human ability which shows up in innumerable hidden as well as obvious forms. Language, perhaps, is one of the most obvious. We use language, we create new language. Yet we live in a world controlled by language. Language transcends us as individuals even though it exists only to the extent that it is used by individuals. That we submit to language in a community is arguably our only competitive advantage in a world inhabited by stronger, faster, more instinctively aware beasts, not to mention the legions of microbes that would devour us if we couldn’t figure out how to fight them off collectively.
Self-transcendence is also demonstrated in political, commercial, and social organisation. Democratic politics is the creation and sustainment by a population of a polity, a set of constitutional laws, that then dominates that same population. In today’s world, we are perhaps even more dominated by an organisational form created in the Middle Ages that combines the transcendence of both the state and the church. This is the modern corporation, established and run by individuals who then are required by law to act in its interests rather than their own. Society as a whole is only marginally controlled by law and explicit restriction, but relies on continuous implicit respect for ‘something bigger,’ such as Order, or Freedom, or Regard for one’s neighbour.
Dupuy argues that the oldest and most universal form of self-transcendence is religion. Certainly no civilisation that we know of, ancient or modern, has been able to exist without the creation of a cause, identity, origin, or purpose external to itself. The essential externality has, of course, been God in some form or other. “By ‘God,’ I mean what all the divinities that human beings have made for themselves throughout history have in common—an exteriority that they have managed to project outside the sphere of human existence.”
For the ancient Israelites, the ultimate exterior transcendence was YHWH for whom and by whom they existed. For The 18th century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, it was the divine Guarantor, who coordinated the activities of his ‘windowless’ Monads to ensure the best of all possible worlds. For us of a more secular, but no less religious, age, our self-transcendence is most often expressed as Reason, a somewhat ill-defined but very much glorified God.
As Dupuy notes, “reason, like all human institutions, has its source in religion.” Whether we view it as a substitute for religion or as an extension of traditional religion matters very little. Dupuy quotes Emile Durkheim approvingly (and frequently) as the first to understand that “the fundamental categories of thought, and therefore of science, have religious origins.” And not just thought but all the social structures created by thought: “… it can be said that nearly all great social institutions are derived from religion.” Marriage, justice, government, science, ethics, and basic social courtesies and virtues have their ultimate origin in the ultimately transcendent entity - God.
The traditional term for designating that which is explicitly transcendent is ‘sacred.’ We create the sacred but it is beyond us. Hegel called the process by which we do this ‘self-exteriorisation’; Marx termed it ‘alienation’; Adam Smith, the Invisible Hand. The French anthropologist, Louis Dumont, referred to the condition these processes established as ‘hierarchy,’ by which he meant the term in its original Greek meaning of ‘sacred order.’ This sacred order has an important characteristic. It “encompasses the contrary.” This can be stated rather precisely in terms that seems to include all of human social organisation:
“The coincidence of the whole and one of its proper subsets (which, for a mathematician, implies the idea of infinity) is what permits the whole to stand in opposition to the complementary subset. The whole, in other words, encompasses its contrary—the part that does not coincide with the whole.”
This statement may seem confusing to non-mathematicians but it is an extremely simple concept. A good example is the kind of corporate organisation common in many large German companies in which members of the workforce are elected to the ‘supervisory board’ which has corporate authority over management who in turn have authority over the board members from the workforce. Dupuy calls this a “tangled hierarchy.” My old teacher Russell Ackoff used the term “circular organisation” and advocated it extensively among American businesses.
Dupuy puts Dumont’s idea through an important ‘stress test’ and finds its weak point. He concludes that “the most stable social order is the one that contains the threat of its own collapse.” Think of democracy which permits maximal disagreement and diversity of political parties. Or, even more apt, a loosely regulated financial market (an old colleague of mine, Richard Pascale, wrote a book for business managers called Managing on the Edge which had the same theme). These institutions work best according to political and economic theory - until they, abruptly and without notice, don’t. At which point they tend to disintegrate completely into crisis: “The crisis that accompanies the collapse of a hierarchical order bears a name that has come down to us from Greek mythology: panic.” When the god Pan is seen in the forest, the locals hotfoot somewhere else, anywhere else. As word gets around, he instantly becomes the new exteriority for the entire population..
Panic undermines all hierarchical order; in fact it inverts it. When there is panic, all of the virtues of the system are inverted. What was good - freedom, self-determination, light-touch regulation, even fundamental concepts like private property and the sanctity of contracts - becomes evil. Commenting on the 2008 financial crisis, Dupuy makes the point clear: “… the virtue of a crisis of such unprecedented scope is that it makes clear, at least to those who have the eyes to see it, that good and evil are profoundly related; indeed they have become identical with each other as a result of the crisis. If there is a way out, it will be found only by allowing evil once again to transcend itself and take on the appearance of the good.”
So democracies do fall into dictatorship (e.g. Weimar Germany) and markets do become horribly chaotic (as in the dot.com bust or the even larger derivatives meltdown). But because we do not like these outcomes doesn’t imply that democracies or markets don’t work. They surely do - by creating the possibility a new hierarchical order, in which, perhaps, democratic freedoms are suspended and regulation becomes a dominant commercial force. Virtues become vices and vice versa. Therefore says Dupuy, “The challenge facing policymakers in a time of panic is to find an external fixed point that can be used to bring it under control.”
In other words the real strength in our institutions, if strength there be, is their ability to find new gods which re-establish orderly society. Finding/inventing/creating the new sacred as panic sweeps across our societies is necessary for survival. But this is where our history and our cultural heritage betray us. We are trapped by a monumental paradox of our religious life first identified by Max Weber:
“… the Judeo-Christian tradition cannot be identified with the sacred, since it is responsible for the ongoing desacralization (or disenchantment) of the world that epitomizes modernity; second, that desacralization threatens to leave us defenseless against our own violence by unchaining technology, so that unlimitedness begins little by little to replace limitedness; third, the greatest paradox of all, that in order to preserve the power of self-limitation, without which no human society can sustain itself and survive, we are obliged to rely on our own freedom.”
When the respective religious authorities decided to fix their canons of sacred scripture and stop the process by which these writings had been continuously edited, amended, and re-interpreted, our fate was sealed. Religion became faith, complete confidence in some static expression of exteriority. Not only the gods, but also God became archaic, an impediment to human welfare and the welfare of the rest of the planet.
So, in Dupuy’s judgement we have lost our ability for self-transcendence. Our societies no longer act as “God-factories.” Religion has now substituted for the sacred and destroyed it by halting its evolution. The traditional gods have indeed died, even among those fundamentalists who spout an Ole Time Religion that never existed except in their imagination. Theirs is at best a sacralisation of Nostalgia and at worst of White Colonialism. The new gods proposed by the innumerable cults that spring up continuously (QAnon, any number of conspiracy theories, alien enthusiasts, enthusiastic adventists, etc.) appeal mainly to the emotionally needy, the shysters, and the resentful, not to the mass of those affected by the emerging panic on numerous fronts from immigration to the corruption of every major social institution.
We will continue to worship the gods we have established by default in our disenchanted societies - wealth, position, political power, the righteousness of capitalism - because they are, we believe, what Marx called the universal equivalent of every possible desire. They give us whatever else we might want. This is the Prosperity Gospel that proclaims a religion without a hint of the sacred. Even more disastrously, it has annihilated an awareness of the sacred.
It turns out that Hegel was probably correct. Reason has its own agenda of which we are largely unconscious. But whereas he was confident enough to call such an exteriority ‘cunning,’ thus implying a secret plan for human welfare, the better translation might be the Ruse of Reason, the cosmic practical joke that is the species Homo sapiens.
November 21, 2013
I am tongue-tied, or keyboard-tied for describing or reviewing this book. Dupuy warns us of doom in such a gentle, reasoned voice that the reader has to pay attention to realize how important the warnings are. The very fact that Dupuy is amazingly well-versed in many subjects allows him to bring together in one book material that is usually split up into tiny pieces by various specialists. The amalgam here adds up to a fundamental warning that if we humans think we can regulate ourselves, we will be relegated to disaster. As a long-term colleague of René Girard, Dupuy points to ways that the preconscious human trait of mimetic desire takes over what we think are rational decisions, making them highly irrational and destructive. No review of this book can possibly be even a tiny substitute for reading it and thinking about it. You don't have to like everything he says to be challenged to deep and urgent reflections.
October 13, 2015
Few scholars are as equally at home in discourses of positivist science, mathematics, continental theory (especially sociology and anthropology), and Anglo-American liberalism, amongst others. Dupuy is not another Frenchie decrying the deleterious effects of “reason” from the outside - he actually shows thoughtful care in understanding and undermining the arguments of people like Rawls (Rawls bashing is a bit of an industry, not without good reason; Dupuy’s interpretation is fresh and convincing), Dawkins, the cast of neoclassical economists, and so on from within.
The chapter on voting is particularly interesting, and the most convincing application of his insistence on the ritualistic, sacred underpinnings of society. At other times, it can be a bit much, particularly in the first autobiographical chapter (one wonders if this was added to the American edition, as a sort of introduction to the Anglophone world?). His epistemic Christianity and his insistence on Christianity’s unique standing in global history is a bit unclear and, frankly, comes across as to some degree a prestigious incarnation of Eurocentrism to (to call a thought Eurocentric is not in itself a refutation; after all, the world is dominated by European forms, and we ought to look to what is unique about Europe to understand why. However, given the plasticity of the interpretative enterprise as we know it in today’s theory, one only thinks that if a Girard or a Dupuy applied similar ingenuity to Quranic studies, similar conclusions about Islam’s particular bequeathment to history and particular possibilities for the future could be constructed. That we do not know of any is perhaps more a function of what is translated and what is not, what passes as scholarship and what doesn’t, than any particular merit or singularity of Christianity).
Dupuy’s breadth of learning and the wide provenance of his examples means this is never a dull read, and you learn a lot of ancillary interest beside the thrust of his arguments. In this regard he’s like Zizek, whose hyperbolic blurb graces the book jacket, minus any sense of humor whatsoever (rather than funny, Dupuy’s feigned incredulity and occasional snark comes across as merely informal). One does wonder how Zizek reconciles himself with Dupuy’s seeming dismissal of class politics, seeing in all anger at inequality merely a resentment that needs to be contained by the sacred lest it become the general state of affairs. One can easily follow Dupuy’s project of tracing the areas in which modernity exaggerates its liberation from enchantment without adopting his anthropological nostalgia for a presumed state of holism and governance by an externalized human projection that is believed in.
Even if you won’t follow Dupuy the whole way, this is an admirable attempt to grapple with the apocalyptic times we live in and to read in cultural signs the substantive caesurae of thought that got us here. A powerful, if sometimes overstated, case is made that we must be attentive to the continuities between modern and premodern if we are to adequately account for the practices that govern our institutions and our interpersonal lives.
The chapter on voting is particularly interesting, and the most convincing application of his insistence on the ritualistic, sacred underpinnings of society. At other times, it can be a bit much, particularly in the first autobiographical chapter (one wonders if this was added to the American edition, as a sort of introduction to the Anglophone world?). His epistemic Christianity and his insistence on Christianity’s unique standing in global history is a bit unclear and, frankly, comes across as to some degree a prestigious incarnation of Eurocentrism to (to call a thought Eurocentric is not in itself a refutation; after all, the world is dominated by European forms, and we ought to look to what is unique about Europe to understand why. However, given the plasticity of the interpretative enterprise as we know it in today’s theory, one only thinks that if a Girard or a Dupuy applied similar ingenuity to Quranic studies, similar conclusions about Islam’s particular bequeathment to history and particular possibilities for the future could be constructed. That we do not know of any is perhaps more a function of what is translated and what is not, what passes as scholarship and what doesn’t, than any particular merit or singularity of Christianity).
Dupuy’s breadth of learning and the wide provenance of his examples means this is never a dull read, and you learn a lot of ancillary interest beside the thrust of his arguments. In this regard he’s like Zizek, whose hyperbolic blurb graces the book jacket, minus any sense of humor whatsoever (rather than funny, Dupuy’s feigned incredulity and occasional snark comes across as merely informal). One does wonder how Zizek reconciles himself with Dupuy’s seeming dismissal of class politics, seeing in all anger at inequality merely a resentment that needs to be contained by the sacred lest it become the general state of affairs. One can easily follow Dupuy’s project of tracing the areas in which modernity exaggerates its liberation from enchantment without adopting his anthropological nostalgia for a presumed state of holism and governance by an externalized human projection that is believed in.
Even if you won’t follow Dupuy the whole way, this is an admirable attempt to grapple with the apocalyptic times we live in and to read in cultural signs the substantive caesurae of thought that got us here. A powerful, if sometimes overstated, case is made that we must be attentive to the continuities between modern and premodern if we are to adequately account for the practices that govern our institutions and our interpersonal lives.
September 26, 2016
Dupuy makes an excellent job in warming us about doomsday. If you are tired of the same old tragic end of the world and a fatalistic point of view, you have to definitely read this book. Dupuy enters in dialogue with economics, theology, mimetic theory, and other ideas to remind us that our fate as humans is not yet written, or is it?
April 13, 2015
Interesting analysis of the sacred in modern - do I dare say the end?- times. The book loses its focus at times, especially near the end, but it is a worthwile read that manages to connect religion,economy, science, philosophy and the nuclear threat.
September 2, 2016
For those who have been tired of the modern dichotomies either in politics and economics, the sciences and humanities, this work by Dupuy will fascinate and excite. The debate between the Austrian school and Keynesian school, the debates surrounding John Rawls concerning matters of justice, the furor surrounding transhumanism and nuclear holocaust - this small sampling of modern issues are some of the topics incorporated into Dupuy's work.
By far, this work is one of the most important books of 2013 to be translated into English. For those interested in humanity in general, and those interested in philosophy, international politics, economics, social theory, and anthropology in specific, this work will be enlightening and moving. Stop what you are reading and check out this work! The prophetic voice of the polymath, Dupuy, will awaken the late modern imagination through analyzing the sciences, economics, politics, and film. The immanent doom of humanity in a world without the sacred should act to curb modern man's hubris and man's nihilistic tendencies, but to do so it will require something only true transcendence can offer.
While Dupuy's analysis is breathtaking and comprehensive, I must disagree with his analysis of Christianity and would refer readers to the work of Paul Ricoeur concerning the imagination and consciousness and Christianity's relation to the sacred (also see Henri de Lubac's Nature and Grace). His description of Christianity is thoroughly modern as well. Theologians such as Kevin J. Vanhoozer and Michael S. Horton provide a more robust view of historic Christianity in late modern times as not merely epistemic but in fact ontological and metaphysical.
Nevertheless, this concise book will be useful for referencing again and again, and I must repeat that it is singly the most important work of 2013. Dupuy's grasp of pivotal thinkers like John Rawls, Rousseau, de Tocqueville, and others will recapture their place in the late modern discussion concerning humanity and the sacred. A must read...
By far, this work is one of the most important books of 2013 to be translated into English. For those interested in humanity in general, and those interested in philosophy, international politics, economics, social theory, and anthropology in specific, this work will be enlightening and moving. Stop what you are reading and check out this work! The prophetic voice of the polymath, Dupuy, will awaken the late modern imagination through analyzing the sciences, economics, politics, and film. The immanent doom of humanity in a world without the sacred should act to curb modern man's hubris and man's nihilistic tendencies, but to do so it will require something only true transcendence can offer.
While Dupuy's analysis is breathtaking and comprehensive, I must disagree with his analysis of Christianity and would refer readers to the work of Paul Ricoeur concerning the imagination and consciousness and Christianity's relation to the sacred (also see Henri de Lubac's Nature and Grace). His description of Christianity is thoroughly modern as well. Theologians such as Kevin J. Vanhoozer and Michael S. Horton provide a more robust view of historic Christianity in late modern times as not merely epistemic but in fact ontological and metaphysical.
Nevertheless, this concise book will be useful for referencing again and again, and I must repeat that it is singly the most important work of 2013. Dupuy's grasp of pivotal thinkers like John Rawls, Rousseau, de Tocqueville, and others will recapture their place in the late modern discussion concerning humanity and the sacred. A must read...
January 28, 2015
Just when you thought that the so-called "Problem of Evil" extends and is stratified even to political economy.
September 6, 2025
This is Peter Thiel's political theology and strategy of 'Enlightened Doomsaying' for guiding America from stagnation! Thiel is an influential, if not the most influential, contemporary metaphysician, making this book practically useful for catching praxis waves. I do worry his alarm bells will not result in the ark being built (likely his goal being decentralization). He and the author don't recognize the centrality of grace from which all human dependent systems must be reconstructed. Fear alone will not drive it. Further, professed creed by all visible players that includes: "He will come again, in glory, to judge the living and the dead", will be needed to attain the broad buy-in necessary for the charted course. Maybe, behind the scenes, there is a reinstituted Knights of Malta coalition marching us towards the light, but in today's world, it must be done in the light. Light from light...
Hopefully, Peter Thiel eventually recognizes that the "projected future" spoken of in this book must be from the backpropagation of grace through the Blessed Eucharist. It will, at once, open the future, redeem and heal the past, and enliven the present. America must first be galvanized with an encounter and recognition of the Holy Spirit for renewal; generative movement will not happen in a gassed-out Economy even if substitution through simul is attempted. A Eucharistic Revival is not a moonshot given mimetic contagion, especially with Christian eschaton broadly known as a motivating force. If he himself, says amen to the Body of Christ, and he convinces those in his network with high visibility, to do the same, there will be a new Pentecost to redeem and save the world. It's the only path, truly...
The author is a Catholic (once Catholic, always Catholic); I fear he failed to grasp the power of Initiatic Rites on ground of being which formed his ability to have the view from somewhere necessary to devise the brilliant new metaphysical framework identified. For better or worse, Dugin does, and a Rene Guenon approach to reform through traditional (apostolic succession) initiation rites will be the continued approach of Russia. The bridge between the Thiel approach in the west and the Dugin approach in the east is in fact the Eucharist. I pray Peter Thiel will come and see, taste and find. Put some of those famous Thiel bucks and cybernetic know-how towards a Eucharistic Revival. If not, it will be another failed reformation because the real desire of all being is the completeness of unity in the One and many. Not a whitewashing or erasure of history, nor the end of history, but a completion of history. Completion is the only path towards all being well. Completion can only happen in the universal, that is Catholic.
Pax et gratia.
Hopefully, Peter Thiel eventually recognizes that the "projected future" spoken of in this book must be from the backpropagation of grace through the Blessed Eucharist. It will, at once, open the future, redeem and heal the past, and enliven the present. America must first be galvanized with an encounter and recognition of the Holy Spirit for renewal; generative movement will not happen in a gassed-out Economy even if substitution through simul is attempted. A Eucharistic Revival is not a moonshot given mimetic contagion, especially with Christian eschaton broadly known as a motivating force. If he himself, says amen to the Body of Christ, and he convinces those in his network with high visibility, to do the same, there will be a new Pentecost to redeem and save the world. It's the only path, truly...
The author is a Catholic (once Catholic, always Catholic); I fear he failed to grasp the power of Initiatic Rites on ground of being which formed his ability to have the view from somewhere necessary to devise the brilliant new metaphysical framework identified. For better or worse, Dugin does, and a Rene Guenon approach to reform through traditional (apostolic succession) initiation rites will be the continued approach of Russia. The bridge between the Thiel approach in the west and the Dugin approach in the east is in fact the Eucharist. I pray Peter Thiel will come and see, taste and find. Put some of those famous Thiel bucks and cybernetic know-how towards a Eucharistic Revival. If not, it will be another failed reformation because the real desire of all being is the completeness of unity in the One and many. Not a whitewashing or erasure of history, nor the end of history, but a completion of history. Completion is the only path towards all being well. Completion can only happen in the universal, that is Catholic.
Pax et gratia.
March 25, 2021
This book is a mess of barely connected rants presented as something radically new. Sooo secular institutions still have notions of sacredness and ritual in them?? MY GOD WHAT A DISCOVERY.
The main schtick of Dupuy, the elightened doomsaying, isn't bad, but overridden with endless prophesising and unsolicited advice on saving humanity. I mean, I actually agree with some of Dupuy's points, but that's all he has - points. And a lot of arrogance.
So if you want to read an authot that is just as self-assured and has lots of loose ideas about religion, you're better off going back to good old René Girard. At least this man could write.
The main schtick of Dupuy, the elightened doomsaying, isn't bad, but overridden with endless prophesising and unsolicited advice on saving humanity. I mean, I actually agree with some of Dupuy's points, but that's all he has - points. And a lot of arrogance.
So if you want to read an authot that is just as self-assured and has lots of loose ideas about religion, you're better off going back to good old René Girard. At least this man could write.
May 16, 2015
If you're religious, watch out. The Mark of the Sacred tears apart the holy elements to support ritual. If your faith has been subjected to a Richard Dawkins-esque apologetic, keep your head up. The author expands the concept of religion to social practice, divinity to transcendence, etc., until you can't profess without becoming relevant.
May 2, 2016
The chapter on the sacralization of the victim alone makes this book well worth the reading. This should be on a must read list for those are concerned about the place of religion in our world. The nuclear armament conclusion rambles a bit as the book comes to a slightly trudging ending, but otherwise this is quite readable for something so philosophical.
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