2023-09-24 10:30:06
YANN LEGENDRE
Alain Rauwel is a historian of the Middle Ages at the University of Burgundy, in Dijon, specialist in the Latin Church. With the philosopher Frédéric Gabriel and the historian Dominique Iogna-Prat, he directed the collective work Critical Dictionary of the Church. Social science concepts and debates (PUF, 1,434 pages, 39 euros), of which he signs the introduction.
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Your work focuses on the Church as a “social form”. How does this shed light on our own ways of forming community, as you assert?
The ecclesial community is not simply a community of faith characterized by shared beliefs: it is a way of creating community involving individuals and groups in all their dimensions, and this has strongly permeated our Western societies.
Take for example the question of kinship. Compared to many ancient societies, whose kinship was exclusively based on blood, the great novelty of the ecclesial system is to have introduced a vocabulary and rules of kinship on numerous scales, to the point of introducing a form of universal kinship. . According to the Bible, are we not all “brothers” before a “Father”? Our modern vision of fraternity, which goes beyond blood ties to the point of appearing in the republican motto, is thus part of the history of the Church.
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In the introduction, I refer to Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), who states that the “name Church” can be given to any “moral community based on a system of beliefs and practices”. This open definition seemed to us to be a good working basis.
In particular, you co-signed the article “Christendom”. What does this term mean and how is it experiencing a “resurrection” in contemporary times, as you write?
Initially, the notion of Christianity is linked to polemical contexts. One of the key moments of its structuring is found during the Crusades: the use of this term by different authors then did not respond so much to the need to define oneself as to define oneself against “others”. But gradually the idea of a society will emerge for which Christianity becomes a total norm, where all forms of life – not only religious, but also political, family, economic, etc. – will emerge. – are governed by principles considered Christian, under the control of an established Church.
However, in the years 1930-1940-1950, some expressed the wish for a “return to Christianity”, even though the word had gradually fallen into disuse after the Renaissance. Let us think of the philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), who wrote in 1958: “Not only is a new Christianity possible but it constitutes the meeting point of all the energies at work in history since the disintegration of the Middle Ages. »
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