‘Nothing? Nothing with come of nothing. Speak again.’
– King Lear, Act I, Scene 1

The Cult of Reason was France’s attempt at an established state-sponsored atheistic religion, intended as a replacement for Catholicism after the French Revolution in 1789.
It was officially banned in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte with his Law on Cults.
Opposition to the Roman Catholic Church was one of the main causes of the French Revolution. Most of the dechristianisation of France was motivated by political concerns. Philosophical alternatives to the Church were slow in coming.
The Cult was a mixture of ideas and activities, and marked by chaos. Its goal was the perfection of mankind through the attainment of Truth and Liberty, and its guiding principle to this goal was the exercise of Reason.
All crosses and statues removed from graveyards, and all cemetery gates had one inscription—”Death is an eternal sleep.”
Churches across France were transformed into modern Temples of Reason. The largest ceremony of all was at the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. The Christian altar was dismantled and an altar to Liberty was installed and the inscription “To Philosophy” was carved in stone over the cathedral’s doors.
Many contemporary accounts reported the Festival of Reason as a “lurid”, “licentious” affair of scandalous “depravities”. These accounts galvanized anti-revolutionary forces and even caused many to publicly separate themselves from the radical faction.
Maximilien Robespierre, one of the architects of the French Revolution, and the Reign of Terror that followed, scorned the Cult and denounced the festivals as “ridiculous farces.”

Ancestor cults

There’s a great scene in the Michael Mann film The Last of the Mohicans, where the British are about to be attacked by a Huron native American tribe. The Huron hesitate, and start pulling back. They realise the area is a burial ground, and the ancestors don’t have to be their own for them to respect this sacred earth. They do not go through with their attack.
In the novel Christ Recrucified, by Nikos Kazantzakis, the displaced refugee villagers look for a new area to re-start their community. They carry all their possessions across rocky terrains and mountain passes: ‘the men took their tools, spades, picks, shovels; the old men lifted the icons in their arms; and then old grandfather took the lead with the sack of bones on his back.’ Carrying the bones of your ancestors was a connection to the land which nourished them, with a hope that a new land will, in time, nourish us too.
Professor of Religion Francesca Stavrakopoulou describes standing stones dating back to the Early Bronze Age (c. 3100 – 2000 BCE). These stones were identified with extraordinary beings. They marked the presence of deities, or deified ancestors who stood at the intersection between humans and ‘otherworldly planes’. These stones were common features of temples and other ritual spaces. ‘Wherever these sacred spaces were sited, their standing stones simultaneously monumentalised, memorialised and manifested the robust, grounded presence of the divine.’
These ancient ideas about divine presence played a crucial role in shaping the Bible. Something that has stood the test of time for over 2,000 years cannot be simply dismantled. Or if it is being dismantled, it is not at all clear what we are heading towards. If the universe is random, incidental and accidental, that’s a hard sell to a population hungry for truth and answers. Reason is not enough. We don’t derive morality from facts. How do we just know right from wrong?
Man cannot move mountains. ‘All we have, is the past’, said novelist Anthony Burgess.

James Neophytou