A Religious Secularism

My last day in Paris is one I’ll think back on with a particular fondness. In the morning, as I mentioned in my last blog post, the whole group went to the Musée des Arts et Métiers, which was awesome! But with my free afternoon away from the class, I went to check out Le Pantheon.

The outside of the Panthéon; clearly, impressive
but I've seen lots of impressive things this summer

The outside of the Panthéon is impressive, but it’s the kind of impressive I’ve gotten used to going to a school like Yale and having spent the last few months in Cambridge (which sounds bad, but it’s a little inevitable). Anyway, while the outside was pretty cool, I was absolutely gobsmacked (yes, gobsmacked; the only word I can think of with the appropriate connotation) by the inside.

Before walking inside, all I had known of the Panthéon was that it is meant to be France’s secular testament to those great minds that contributed to the worlds of literature and science and statecraft and knowledge in general. And, I had heard that Voltaire and Rousseau were buried there, but I didn’t give it a second thought. You have to put dead people somewhere, right?

Anyway, the inside was gobsmackingly incredible. The inside is laid out in the shape of a Greek cross (which seems like a trend; the Salpêtrière was laid out in the same way too). At the head of the cross is a statue of Marianne, the traditional symbol of French liberty and reason, at La Convention Nationale. You can see that the principles she stands for are being celebrated. In the middle of the cross, there are four statues dedicated to the French Revolution and its intellectuals. Of special mention is the statue commemorating Diderot’s Encyclopedia, and maybe the ancient beginnings of Wikipedia. My favorite is this one where lots of brilliant men are frozen in mid-boogey—or maybe that’s just my take on it.

French Revolutionaries sure
do know how to get down

A statue to honor Diderot and his Encyclopédie 

Marianne at the head of the Panthéon

Voltaire's final resting place in
the Panthéon's Crypt

What’s most interesting to me about The Pantheon isn’t the crypt with Voltaire’s and Emile Zola’s remains, but the implications of the immense mural painted about the entire interior. It depicts St. Genevieve, the patron saint of France. But what exactly is a Catholic saint doing in a shrine to secularism and intellectual achievement?

To be fair, the Pantheon was originally built as the Abbey of St. Genevieve, so perhaps the artwork is leftover from the less secular days of France. But even since its commissioning in 1790 as Le Panthéon proper the building has reverted twice to a church, yet always to return to a meeting place of great intellectuals complete with the saintly artwork. Why does secularism seem to triumph over religious stricture?

A little bit of The Apotheosis of Saint Genevieve

Maybe the Panthéon proves that there really is no such thing as secularism, that nothing can ever really be free from any religious bearing. Since much of history (and even current events) is based on religion and religious conflict, maybe it’s wholly appropriate that there is at least a shade of religious belief in most secular institutions—especially governments. England still has a state religion and the American Constitution (my favorite document!) is firmly rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, just to throw out a couple examples.

But even beyond a history rooted in religious beliefs, there is something to be said for a world not rooted in the shackling of man’s intellect. That type of world order doesn’t exactly lend itself to Newtonian physics, or Hume’s skepticism, or really any new secular knowledge. I really do believe that religion, inadvertently or otherwise, and despite persecuting its forefathers for their scholarship, laid the foundation for intellectual exploration. When God makes man the stewards of His creation, there is a certain amount of freedom that that imbued upon mankind, not the least of which is the freedom to explore the natural world. Perhaps it's this idea, the superiority of man and his intellect (which isn't necessarily religious, but I'll argue has its roots in Scripture) that gave rise to all the compendia of knowledge.