Christiane Singer on the Anti-Cult 'Witch-Hunt': The Short CICNS Interview

Christiane Singer gave this interview to the CICNS; it is presented here in its short version, a condensed literary defence of spiritual minorities that reads the French anti-cult climate as a witch-hunt and a passing “flare-up of morbid fever”. A full-length version of this interview is also published on this site.

CICNS interview — short version. (English translation of the short version of the interview published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 12 November 2006. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation; passages the machine could not reliably hear are marked [inaudible].)

[Interviewer]: Christiane Singer was born in 1943. A lecturer at the University of Basel, then teaching at the University of Fribourg, she subsequently devoted herself to her literary work. She followed the teaching of Graf Dürckheim, a disciple of Jung. A prolific writer, of Christian sensibility steeped in Eastern wisdom, she refrained from giving moral lessons and excluded all dogmatism. Her work and her personal reflection are centred on the necessary reckoning with the spiritual that smoulders in the heart of each of us.

She wrote numerous novels and essays of great literary quality, including Histoire d’âme, which received the prix Albert Camus in 1989, La Mort viennoise, prix des Libraires in 1979, as well as Éloge du mariage, de l’engagement et autres folies, and her latest book, N’oublie pas les chevaux écumants du passé. Sensitive to the situation of spiritual minorities in France, she wished to contribute to the CICNS’s work by offering us this lively interview, whose words can only awaken the necessity of a radical change in our perceptions regarding the religious aspiration in our societies.

[Singer]: Everything I bring to life, everything I manage to make blossom, I do it for all my own, for all the others, and with all the others. To reopen our vision of the world would be something so primordial.

It is heartrending that there really is a kind of conspiracy against the spirit. It was already Bernanos who said that our society is the most enormous conspiracy against the spirit that has ever taken place. Spirituality — many deplore it, many are afraid of it — is leaving, is quitting the institutions, is overflowing the religious institutions, and is going to irrigate channels that had been left dry, that had been left empty. And that frightens many. Me, it does not frighten me, because I have so… it is exactly the contrary. It puts man in his… each of us in his total responsibility.

Each person embodies another quality, another way of being in his… in this search, in this work. There are even some who are a bit eccentric, a bit very primary, very infantile, very juvenile, very awash with illusions. One passes through that. Those are the phenomena of childhood. There is also a maturation in our inner path, in this inner questioning.

I was recently rereading the Heptameron of Boccaccio — the Decameron of Boccaccio. And afterwards also the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre, for other reasons. And I find it so extraordinary, especially in the Decameron. You have characters who are going to leave Florence, which is invaded by the plague, and who go to withdraw to shelter, and they are going to tell each other, for days on end, bawdy stories — because that is difficult to do in the midst of a society still under surveillance. In our day, what we call workshops, or little spirituality groups — it takes a bit the same thing: they leave the city, but not to tell each other bawdy stories — because that is authorized in the city — but to speak of God. So me, I find that it is such a droll reversal that I would almost like to write a Decameron of today: a group of beings who leave the surveillance, the police experience of the city, to go and shut themselves away somewhere in the countryside, in a well-secluded place, and speak to one another of their experiences, of their touching of being, of their experiences of depth. It would be beautiful, no?

Me, I think the French have made themselves the cantors of rationalism, etc., and perhaps it has gone to their head in a morbid way — you know, there is always a morbid flare-up of any quality whatsoever. For me, reason is splendid — do not make me reject reason, I who so adored the philosophers of the Enlightenment —, but it seems to me that it has such a madness in it, or else a way of diverting attention from the real problems — you know very well, it is always a phenomenon that is well known and very often practised.

I have known atheist persons of such moral height, of such ethical height, that I bow. So it is not even of that order. It is simply: there is a ferocity in a certain part of the population, which refuses to tolerate that there could be another form of existence. That is to say, fundamentalism is at least as much in the anti-religious as in the religious.

I will tell you: I see an indirect homage paid to the religious, to this religious dimension of man. That is to say: if so many forces must be mobilized to discredit it, it must have power inside the human being. It is obvious that man is irremediably religious, in the depths of his being — for how could he not be? It is inside him, this core of immortality which is there, which is indestructible, and which can be covered — covered with rubble — and which can be made unconscious, but 100 %. But it is there. And it is obvious that it is a colossal power of freedom. But man does not want freedom. Me, I always come back to that hallucinating chapter in The Brothers Karamazov — you know, the passage of the Inquisitor — where, finally, it turns out that the one thing men do not want, in that dialogue with the Inquisitor and Christ: “But what have you come to bring us? — Freedom. — But can you not see that they do not want it! And you have come back now, putting everything in disorder. We — we have created a fine, well-structured Church, where we hold them well. And you, here you come again — you come creating disorder again.” And it is in the freedom of love, in the freedom of the phenomenon of reliance — of re-connection with what is higher than us —, there is a boundless freedom.

What is not in my temperament — less and less than it was in my youth, of course — is to brandish banners. Because I noticed, you know, that the more you are in an attack, the more you are in an aggression, the more you reflect the grimace of the adversary, and you end up becoming him. For one Che Guevara who has the luck to die before holding power, how many faithful Castros who will wade in their swamp. You understand? That is to say: if I really enter into this brutal confrontation, I am going to resemble my adversary. How to find forms that will let me keep this quality I defend before the world? That is all. That is, all the same, an incredible question. And without cowardice — I am not saying: let us act as if we had not seen; far from it. But let us find ways to carry high this memory of who we are, of this core of immortality that inhabits us and constitutes the dignity of man, and not to allow, in the places where I move on this earth, that this be forgotten. And each of us in the place where we are — so that there is created that famous, incredible network where, from one consciousness to another, the contagion passes, the contamination of light.

It is so important not to act as if one did not see that there is a witch-hunt going on, of laughable clumsiness. Me, I find it so derisory that I say to myself: it is not possible that everyone does not burst out laughing when commandos of gendarmes arrive in a place where people are questioning themselves about life, or allow themselves to speak of questions of depth. It is so burlesque. There are certainly stories — of which you have spoken — that are of the order of the criminal; but those are the business of the courts, that is quite obvious. But that is 1 % — and at 99 %, you have people who gather to touch together, to make echo in themselves of this depth. And that, I find, is so important.

You know, there is a pastor, at the time of fascism, who said a sentence that has remained famous. He said: “Yes, when the Nazis came to arrest the Jews, we said to ourselves: well, my goodness, well… — I looked away a little. Then the communists: they exaggerate, they are a bit extreme in their convictions; and we are not going to do them so much harm, we will put them somewhere for a while. And then it was the Catholics, then it was the Protestants — all those who raised their voice. They were not many, but there were some. And now, who is going to be there to say halt?” Hence the importance, if I evoke something like that, of beginning, obviously, as early as possible, of saying: but careful, careful, there are [inaudible ?].

I can only say thank you that there are people who commit themselves to this vigilance and who support the people who are suddenly in a situation of being prosecuted over nothing. And that these should keep, deep within themselves, this conviction that they are carried by all the others, that they are not alone — that is something incredibly capital. So truly, me, I salute this activity greatly, and I hope with all my heart that this flare-up of morbid fever will come down again. It is a kind of acme, but one that subsides. It seems to me so senseless that I cannot believe it; I cannot believe in a continuity.