Atheist Spirituality: Reflections on André Comte-Sponville’s L'Esprit de l'athéisme: Introduction à une spiritualité sans Dieu

Long before accounting for contemporary Islam, Europe’s intellectual and cultural traditions were diverse and, to a certain degree, contradictory. From Greek paganism to Israelite monotheism, from the Talmudic Law to Epicurean hedonism, and from Inquisitions to Enlightenment, European heritage encompasses competing elements. Within this mixed heritage, nonetheless, some commentators have traced lines of continuity—as the hyphenated Greco-Judeo-Christian signifies. Today, however, many thinkers have suggested that this civilizational lineage is in a state of decline, if not decadence. Statistics point to the decline of church attendance, but also the emergence of new forms of religiosity, many of which exhibit tendencies towards obscurantism and fanaticism. To “save” the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual heritage of Europe, André Comte-Sponville embraces Christianity as a repository of ethical values worth preserving. Unlike the paranoid and xenophobic outcries of far-right voices in France demanding for a return to the “Judeo-Christian roots,” Sponville’s book is a recipe for his compatriots who are troubled by the unravelling of their cultural identities, precisely because his atheist spirituality maintains certain relationship with Europe’s civilizational heritage.

 

Setting aside confessional religions and belief in a transcendental divinity, Sponville’s Godless spirituality presents a vision of reenchanted collectivity that is more open, tolerant, and resourceful. His version of atheist spirituality doesn’t throw out the baby of culture with the bathwater of organized religion. He regards Christianity as the repository of diverse moral values and civilizational resources of the West, especially Europe. Yet one does not need to believe in Christian God to engage with cultural and spiritual resources associated with Christianity.

 

Proponents of the “secularization thesis” professed that with Europe’s progress towards rationalization and modernization, religious authority, and religions more broadly, would decline from the public, political life. It is naïve, however, to declare their prophecy readily bankrupt. While certain types of religious commitments are in decline, other forms are on the rise—especially when one relies on records of church attendance and accounts of religious violence. With the rise of anxieties over cultural identities, religious sentiments lend themselves to communitarianism with hyphenated associations. On the one extreme, there are metonymies of white, conservative, ultra-nationalist, neoliberal, anti-immigrant politics; on the other, Salafist, Islamist, and separationist outcries. Sponville bemoans that new religious phenomena lean toward obscurantism, dogmatism, and fundamentalism. To save Europe and its Enlightenment heritage from both of these tendencies, one does not need to fight religion as such. To the contrary, the Judeo-Christian tradition, according to him, can serve as a repository of cultural and civilizational resources to invigorate more open forms of collective values and identities.

 

Contrary to self-serving oppositional framings of the Orient and the Occident, the Islam and the West, Atheist fidelity and Christian ethics, Sponville’s philosophy promotes trans-civilizational affinities. To highlight shared horizons, he elaborates how Spinoza’s notion of immanence resonates with key elements of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. In formulating a “wisdom for our times,” Sponville selectively connects these dots in surprising but delightful fashion.

 

The book is structured into three chapters, but the last one, “Quelle spiritualité pour les athées?” talks directly to the question of spirituality without a transcendental supreme being. Inspired by Spinoza and akin to traditions of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, the chapter repositions spirituality and mysticism within the immanence of Nature.

 

Sponville highlights values such as detachment from consumerist materialism, compassion, humility, and fraternity beyond identity politics. On a more practical level, he advocates for teaching religion in public schools solely as a historical and social phenomenon. Enshrined in the principle of laïcité and freedom of conscience, this secular education will help to restore a sense of collective heritage beyond race, ethnicity, or any other exclusionary categories.

 

Sponville draws on different etymologies of the term religion to make a case for his atheist spirituality. In the first formulation, he traces religio to religare and the French relier. Religion, in this sense, operates as a social bond and offers common values required for social cohesion. Next, he examines religio in connection to the Latin relegere, connoting the act of reverent and contemplative reading. In this latter sense, religion is akin to the love of a Logos. Using these definitions, then, Sponville’s privileges the joy of life over religion of fear and persecution, communion over Churches with proclivities towards sectarianism, loyalty to certain values over blind faith, and love over otherworldly hopes (or worldly despair, for that matter).