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The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. By Mark Gauchet. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. 272p. $24.95.
The subtitle of Peter Gay's seminal book on the Enlightenment was, for those who do not recall, "the rise of modern paganism." The full meaning of this, however, was brought home to me only a few years ago when, upon giving birth to our second child, my wife was given the option of taking her placenta home in a plastic bag along with a recipe for soup.
Marcel Gauchet's overriding concern is in describing and explaining the long parabolic movement from the binding of Isaac to such forms of modern if not postmodern paganism. His concern is with that process inherent to religion per se which, in explicating transcendence, sets up its very demise and with it a plethora of subjectivist responses to the overriding questions of meaning, ethics, and normative order.
The different forms of "the religious after religion" are, however, only of passing concern at the end of this intricately argued, dense, difficult yet thoroughly absorbing work. The truly radical thesis presented by the author pertains not to the variety of "postreligion" phenomena but to the origins and dynamics of what have been termed the great world historical religions, or what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age. His thesis is one of Hesoidian decline. Rather than the apogee of religious instauration, Gauchet sees that Axial Age, that period when the consciousness of transcendence registered across the myriad religious traditions of Ancient Israel, Ancient Greece, Early Christianity, Zoroastrian Islam, early Imperial China as well as in the Hindu and Buddhist civilizations (and much later in...