The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère: Believing or Learning as a Theological Virtue

Abstract

Le Royaume [English Translation: The Kingdom] is one of the French author Emmanuel Carrère’s most successful works. The main question posed by this book is this: how can normal, intelligent people believe in something as absurd as the Christian religion? One of the believers with whom the author enters into dialogue is Carrère, who for some years was a devout Catholic himself. He then links this questioning to a form of historical research into the sources of Christianity. If Carrère’s historical research is not always up to date, the part devoted to introspection is a convincing testimony, showing how a renowned author grapples with his own past and that of the church in a postmodern, secular world. The interesting aspect of his research is that he finds that, although he is not a believer, he wants to be a disciple.

1. Introduction

The President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, is known for his extensive knowledge of the literature and for regularly quoting poetry. So, it is no surprise that, at the end of 2017, he invited the French author Emmanuel Carrère to accompany him for a whole week. Carrère (born 1957) is not only one of today’s most important French writers but also a screenwriter and film director. The fact that he was a member of the Cannes Film Festival jury shows that he enjoys a certain status in France. Carrère began his career as a journalist, and his first book was devoted to the film director Werner Herzog. Internationally, he made his breakthrough with “Je suis vivant et vous êtes morts”, a biography of the legendary American novelist Philip K. Dick (Carrère 1993). Dick is a science-fiction writer who suffers from paranoia, partly due to the fact that he is epileptic. His psychological problems were probably exacerbated by his experience of drug abuse. The book was awarded the Prix Femina, one of France’s literary prizes. One of the most important characteristics of Carrère’s work can already be seen in this book. Like many other writers of his generation, Carrère wants to remove or at least relax the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. In his works, the boundaries between fantasy and fact are regularly blurred (for an interview with Carrère about the art of non-fiction, see Hunnewell 2013). Another of his bestsellers was Limonov (Prix Renaudot). This book is a biography of Eduard Venjaminovitsj Limonov, a Russian writer and politician who returned to Russia via Paris, New York and Serbia to found a neo-fascist right-wing party (Carrère 2011). This is another example of a non-fiction novel.

He also plays with the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction in one of his other best-selling books, Le Royaume (Carrère 2014; As English translation I use the first American tradition of 2018). In this voluminous book, Carrère attempts to investigate the origins of the Jesus movement. The title refers to the Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed. Le Royaume became a huge success in France, and it is pointless to list all the French reviews of this book (but see Birnbaum 2014).

Le Royaume received little attention outside France. This seems to confirm what The Guardian wrote about the book. It states that Carrère is the most important French writer we “have never heard of” (Crum 2014). The Kingdom tackles theology and the history of Christianity in a very personal way. It is a very French book, and perhaps that is why it is good for a non-French theologian and exegete such as myself to discuss it critically. I am a professor of New Testament and Early Christian literature from the Netherlands, with a certain fondness for the French language.

In addition to a few remarks on the author’s approach to the history of Jesus and the Church, I will try to characterise and evaluate the book from the point of view of the history of theology/interpretation of the Scriptures. This book deals with theology in a very personal way and touches mainly, but not exclusively, on my own field: the interpretation of the New Testament and Early Christian Literature.

Le Royaume (The Kingdom) is a thick book. The English translation has 384 pages, while the French paperback version has 605.

After a “Prologue” (Paris, 2011; pp. 3–14), there are four parts:

I

A Crisis (Paris, 1990–1993; pp. 17–82);

II

Paul (Greece, 50–58 [A.D.]; pp. 85–176);

III

The Investigation (Judea, 58–60; pp. 179–262);

IV

Luke (Rome, 60–90; pp. 265–363).

The book ends with a section entitled “Epilogue” (Rome, 90—Paris, 2014; pp. 367–84).

In the following, I summarise the main points of the book before offering comments from my area of expertise.

2. Is It Possible for Normal, Intelligent People to Believe?

In the prologue, Carrère explains how, as a screenwriter, he withdrew from the project for a French TV series, Les Revenants (English: The Returned). The series tells the story of a small French mountain town overlooked by a man-made lake, where several people who have been dead for years come back to life at the same time and try to resume their lives in the town. After Carrère’s departure, the series became a worldwide success. He then recounts how, a few months later, at a dinner party, he tried to impress Patrick Blossier, the project’s chief cameraman, by suggesting that he [=Carrère] was also working on something interesting: a book about the early Christians.

He then sketches out a kind of scenario. During the dinner, partly because of his drinking too much, he becomes more and more enthusiastic about his own idea. Patrick contends that “It’s strange, when you think about it, that normal, intelligent people can believe in something as unreasonable as the Christian religion, something exactly like Greek mythology or fairy tales” (Carrère 2014, p. 5). Stranger still that society tolerates and even honours them while Presidents of the Republic pay deferential visits to their leader. How is that possible?

This question becomes the central theme of the entire book. Carrère repeatedly stresses that it is incomprehensible that people should believe. In this context, he recounts a practical joke by one of his colleagues, who went to confession with a hidden camera. He himself thinks such a practical joke is misplaced but then remarks that hardly anyone objects. If something similar had occurred in a synagogue or a mosque, there would have been a storm of indignation in every ideological corner of France. Could the flagrant lack of understanding of religion in today’s France be accompanied by an unpunished mockery of Christians and what is sacred or important to them (Carrère 2014, p. 9)?

At several points in the book, he admits to a feeling of superiority. In the prologue, he fantasises about going on a “Saint Paul” cruise. In the Year of Our Lord dedicated to Saint Paul (2007–2008), he would visit—with a group of Catholics led by a priest—the most important places where Paul would have been. Then, he imagines that at the table, for example, he would ask the group of Catholics if they believed and also how: “I saw myself kindly grilling a table of Catholics over dinner, for example, taking apart the Apostles’ Creed “phrase by phrase” for example (Carrère 2014, p. 8). He would even pay half the price of the trip in advance, but in the end he did not go.

In fact, there’s one Christian that Carrère can ask these questions. It is his former self, the Catholic Emmanuel Carrère. He had (almost) forgotten that he himself was a Christian. At that time, in a large number of notebooks he commented on his daily reading of the Gospel. The notebooks were still tucked away somewhere in an attic. Rereading these, he can enter into a dialogue with the Christian he once was. He can reconnect with an intelligent person (such as himself) who nonetheless believes. So, the book begins with a reflection on how he came to be just like Paul.

3. The Story of a Conversion

The first part of the book deals with his sudden conversion, but also with the subsequent disappearance of this religious practice and rule of life (For the theme of conversion in Carrère’s work, see Nonnenmacher 2016). At a time when his marriage was not going very well, he had a kind of writer’s block and goes on vacation with a friend (they have the same godmother!) to a mountain village in Switzerland. At a Melkite Orthodox mass, he hears the priest pronounce a phrase from John’s Gospel:

John 21:18: “Amen, I say to you, when you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you wherever you do not want to go.”

(Carrère 2014, p. 30)

And so began a period of fierce attempts to lead a very Catholic life.

Following this conversion in the autumn of 1990, he married in a church, had his sons baptised and attended Holy Mass almost daily for nearly three years. During this time, he also wrote a daily commentary on the Gospel of John. At the same time, he began writing Je suis vivant et vous êtes morts, the biography of Philip Dick, in the hope that this work would remove his writer’s block. As this book progressed, his compulsion to write about St. John’s Gospel slowly disappeared and faith gradually faded in favour of agnosticism. The notebooks on John found their way into the attic.

4. Back to the New Testament: An Investigation into the Beginnings of Christianity

Fifteen years after this period of piety, Carrère returns to the life of Jesus and gives an account of him in the next three parts of his book, no longer as a believer, but, as he says himself, “Let’s say as an investigator” (Carrère 2014, p. 85). The question driving the research is twofold and perhaps even ambiguous. The question of how it is possible for sane people to believe coincides in part with him with the question of how Christianity began. His main sources are Paul’s writings and the story of Paul as found in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles (For the Unity of Luke-Acts, see Verheyden 1999).

He suggests that Luke hides behind the “we”, which is used in Acts of Apostles 16:11. This is a rather traditional viewpoint, but today is disputed by most scholars. Carrère also suggests, or perhaps better, fantasises, that Paul and Luke knew each other and, for example, talked together at the local café (Carrère 2014, pp. 98–99). In the second part, entitled “Paul” (Carrère 2014, pp. 196–97), Carrère employs a strategy that, not so long ago, was also used in Catholic seminaries. He somewhat erroneously claims that all historians of Christianity would do the same. This shows that Carrère has read a few Protestant scholars. These scholars, like many others, are quick to raise a few methodical problems when the Acts of Apostles and Paul’s letters are too easily read together.

Paul was introduced to the seminarians by placing extracts from Paul’s letters in the context of Acts. Through this process, a human, psychological, theological and spiritual biography of Paul is pieced together, but the overall tone is that of a novel (see, for example, Holzner 1937; also, Wilson 1997). The disadvantage of the strategy used in the seminaries and by Carrère is that both Paul’s specific perspective and Luke’s vision, as found in Acts, are quickly lost (for an example of how one can deal with these differences, see Koet 2017).

In the third part, Paul’s letters are abandoned as a source, and Carrère mainly follows the Acts of the Apostles. Here, Carrère shows that he is an experienced scriptwriter. As in the flashbacks and sidelines of a script, Carrère asks all sorts of secondary questions. He also draws on the gospel he takes most seriously: Luke. After all, for him, Luke is the most reliable historian of the evangelists. Even the infancy stories of Jesus and John the Baptist in Luke 1–2 are discussed. He thinks some of these stories are so true that he even suggests Luke may have heard them from Mary herself. Probably, he does not realise that in the past, this argument was often (or even always) used in Catholic apologetics.

He rightly uses the Roman historian Flavius Josephus as an additional source. Interestingly, in this third part, he also reads—with undisguised sympathy—the Epistle of James in the context of Luke’s actions and makes the bold suggestion that this Epistle was written by Luke (Carrère 2014, p. 280).

In the fourth part, the perspective changes again. Now, it is Rome. Here again, Carrère uses the Acts of the Apostles as his main source since, according to Acts, Paul appeals to the emperor and, therefore, he will have to go to Rome. Yet, in this section, Carrère focuses even more on Luke than on the text of Acts. Luke is said to have been in Rome and is compared to Martial, the first-century Roman poet. Because Carrère apparently wants the whole New Testament to speak, he also draws on John and his gospel. Even the Apocalypse is touched on briefly. From his personal point of view, this is appropriate, as Carrère bought a house on Patmos, the place where Revelations is said to have been written. Carrère’s own life is thus always integral to the structure of his book. He sometimes describes his place of residence when studying a certain piece. In telling of his participation in a French Bible translation project, he confides some valuable comments on the difficulties of Bible translation (Carrère 2014, pp. 330–34). In mentioning elsewhere Eusebius’ view that Mark based his gospel on Peter’s Didascalia, Carrère points out with some irony that in French, didascalie is a technical term in filmmakers’ jargon: instructions de mise en scène, thus clearly evidencing links between Carrère’s research and such other aspects of his life. His book repeatedly invites the screenwriter to write the script for the story. As he will say in his Epilogue, all research holds up a mirror that he does not hesitate to look into, a claim we will return to. For now, I would like to make a few comments as a professional Bible reader and scholar of Early Christian Literature.

5. The Kingdom: A First Assessment: To Believe or to Learn

So, how does the professional evaluate Carrère’s book? A first impulse is to point out what is historically and exegetically wrong and how old-fashioned the arguments in this book are at the same time as they are openly indebted to contemporary prejudices. This is a tendency I can easily suppress. I am a great admirer of a statement from the Mishna, Pirkei Avot (in English, often known as the Ethics of the Fathers), one of the most popular rabbinic writings. In a row of sentences attributed to the earliest layers of rabbinic tradition, we find the statement (1.6): “judge each person according to his merit.” Thus, I want, in this case, to examine the merits of the book, not its possible theological and historical shortcomings.

The question may, therefore, arise as to where, as a New Testament scholar and a historian of the Early Church, I might find a starting point for a positive assessment and even for what Christian traditions might be able to learn from this book. First of all, I can say that the book is special. The colleague who lent me a copy told me it was a novel. It soon became clear to me that although the author shows a great deal of imagination, he does consider his work to be a product of research, and we do need to give him credit for having read, studied and reflected on his subject. Nevertheless, before pointing to the book’s particular merits, I will indulge some further remarks of a more general kind.

Carrère’s research is a wonderful blend of different elements. First of all, the book is thoroughly French. Thus, Carrère refers extensively to Ernest Renan (1823–1892). This French historian, with his Vie de Jésus (Renan 1863) and his later works on the origins of Christianity, threw a stone into the pond of French Catholicism of the time. For some, Carrère was providing a liberating revelation in deconstructing the Bible as a historical document; for others, this was an act of blasphemy.

Carrère candidly admits that he makes extensive use of Renan’s books. He claims that these writings are more informative and readable than ninety-nine per cent of the books still being written about Jesus (Carrère 2014, pp. 105–7, here 107). Although the reader clearly sees that Carrère is also aware of later exegetical developments, such as those relevant to the emergence of Gospels and accounting for the existence of documents like the Gospel of Thomas for one, I think that in writing about Luke as a pagan and about the separation arising between Jews and Hellenistic/Roman followers of Jesus, he should have consulted more broadly beyond French scholarship. The result is somewhat ironic: as a Frenchman—even in his agnosticism—he remains predominantly Catholic because he reads little or nothing by Protestant scholars. His great hero, by contrast, Ernest Renan, was much indebted to the German Protestant David Friedrich Strauss. Nowadays, it is generally accepted that an investigation into the sources of Christianity must do justice to the historical data, but it is questionable whether Carrère’s hero Renan still meets historiographical requirements.

Carrère ignores the fact that Renan sometimes gives negative stereotypes of Jewish and Muslim groups (Renan 1862). All too often, the greatness and originality of Jesus rest on the attributed wickedness and narrow-mindedness of others. Now, it is generally accepted that an investigation into the sources of Christianity must do justice to the historical data. Accordingly, today’s historians would take a dim view of Renan’s reconstruction of early Christianity. (For Renan’s relationship with, for example, anti-Semitism, see Moxnes 2018).

One of the few times Carrère mentions the foreign, scholarly literature, he makes an amusing mistake. He identifies the famous German psychoanalyst Eugen Drewermann as a German bishop who has been indicted (Carrère 2014, p. 401), whereas Drewermann was a priest (the mistake in the French edition is corrected in Carrère 2014, p. 250). We also miss Jewish scholars like David Flusser (see only Flusser and Notley 2007) and a giant like Joseph Klausner, the great-uncle of Amos Oz (Klausner [1925] 1989; Engl. 1987). He does not mention a scholar such as the French Jesuit Bonsirven, who, in the middle of the last century, described the Jewish background of the New Testament thoroughly (Bonsirven 1934; Bonsirven 1935). The only Jewish scholar he deals with is Haim Maccoby (Maccoby 1987). Among Jewish scholars, Maccoby is one of the least competent writers of Paul, and Carrère manages to refute Maccoby’s caricature of him (Carrère 2014, pp. 213–21).

Although the diversity of themes covered by Carrère can, at times, challenge the reader, I do concede that I learnt from him. Moreover, his narrative style brought home to me other facets of the Gospel. The book itself contains some engaging storytelling. One of his predecessors, Daniel-Rops, a member of the French Academy, bought a fur coat for his wife from the proceeds of his best-selling book on Jesus (Carrère 2014, p. 260).

However, Carrère remains primarily a scriptwriter, and he sees a colleague in Luke. He readily fantasises about this, but the starting points he takes are too often no longer exegetically reliable. For example, he believes that Luke, as a non-Jew, was addressing a Roman audience (for another opinion, see Koet 1989, pp. 156–61). The whole picture he sketches of the disintegration of synagogue and church is dated. He may think Renan is a hero, but since then, so much that new material has surfaced, for example, at Qumran. The relationship between Judaism and Christianity has also been assessed from a totally new perspective. Nevertheless, the merit of this book is not rooted in its historical constructions1.

Sartre seems to have said that in France, atheists are also Catholics. Se non è vero, è ben trovato. Thus, although Carrère—sometimes a little emphatically; he seems to want to convince himself after all—insists a lot on being an agnostic writer, he too is a Catholic agnostic. His entire Christian frame of reference is a Catholic one. He naturally assumes that the Pope is the leader of Christianity. Of course, the Pope is not. He is simply and “only” the head of the Roman Catholic Church, which includes Eastern Churches in communion with Rome.

There’s one point where I find Carrère less Catholic: the extent to which he treats faith and the act of believing as the most important element of religion. Perhaps I am mistaken and do not know enough about the French religious language, but I find his treatment of faith or unbelief almost Lutheran because, since Luther, faith has become the only good work that really counts. Carrère’s dilemma is “to believe or not to believe: that is the question?” but his vision of belief leaves little room for interpretation: he wonders how it is possible to believe in the resurrection or in a miracle worker. Although he is a literary man, Carrère has little room for a more poetic approach to Christian or Jewish traditions, and so his research becomes primarily an investigation into what in the New Testament is true in the historical sense. In assuming such a position, he is not really going beyond the questions of the 19th century, nor does he go beyond Renan.

Thus, the act of believing is reduced to this one aspect: did it really happen? But the Christian tradition is about more than that. When it comes to believing in God, it may be worth examining how, even in a compromised text, sung or spoken confessions of faith are part of religious celebrations or how much space is not given to the image of God that is sung in the Latin creed: Lumen de lumine (Light from Light). As for the miracles, he could have consulted Saint Augustine. The Bishop of Hippo repeatedly says that Jesus’ miracles serve to open people’s eyes to the fact that all life is miraculous. For example, the turning of water into wine at Cana is a great miracle, but even greater is the miracle that, every autumn, the grape harvest produces new wine (see Augustine’s treatise on the miracle of the wine at Cana: In Johannis evangelium tractatus 8). In the New Testament, a different emphasis on believing or not is possible. First of all, the very specific emphasis on the idea that Christianity is about believing should raise the question: believing in what? In God, in Jesus as Messiah, or in Jesus as Son of God? Or, as is also mentioned in Carrère’s book, in the question of whether it is possible to believe in the resurrection. In discussions about Jesus, we often talk about his titles: Son of God, Son of Man, Son of David and also Messiah, an important title that is often forgotten. However, Jesus is often typified in Greek as a didaskalos (in Latin as magister). It clearly means someone from whom something can be learned. In the Gospels, the term “teacher, master” is one of the most commonly used indications of Jesus’ identity2.

The Synoptic Gospels—less than Paul!—emphasise in various ways that Jesus is a teacher and that teaching is one of his most important activities. This emphasis is also demonstrated by what Jesus does: he teaches. Another important aspect here is the way that he teaches. It is well known, for example, that he teaches in parables, and this already characterises him as a teacher who invites people to think about interpretations. The general image of Socrates is that he taught by asking questions. Less emphasised is the fact that Jesus also learns by asking questions. Douglas Estes, one of the first scholars to systematically study New Testament questions, claims that 15% of the New Testament consists of questions (Estes 2017). In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus poses counter-questions at crucial moments, thus not giving answers but making his audience think.

Since the Gospels are so insistent that Jesus is a teacher, it makes sense that his followers are called “disciples”. The frequency of the Greek word for disciple in the Gospels and Acts shows just how important this is. The Greek word for disciple (mathētēs) appears in the Gospels and Acts 261 times, making it one of its most common everyday words.3

The word disciple itself comes from the Latin word discipulus, which designates a student or pupil in general. In English, it can indicate that somebody is not just a student or a learner but a follower. The English word “disciple” has all too often become a simple indication of group membership in the New Testament. It means following the master Jesus. The Greek word that is translated as “disciple” in English is much more neutral and primarily means someone who is active in a learning process. It seems that in English, but also in French, it is difficult to describe a person with such an attitude. The word “pupil” is mainly intended for children who go to school. The word “student” refers to young people going to university. It is hard to describe in one word the fact that you can, and perhaps should, be a “student” outside these institutions: lifelong learning, a case of permanent education (Abram 1986). In Jewish tradition, the Hebrew word Talmudiem is used for such people.

It could even be said that Jesus’ primary aim is to make disciples. With this, he has the same aim as other Jewish rabbis. An old rabbinic tradition we can find in the tract mentioned above says: “Make many disciples” (Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers 1:1). In a sense, then, the New Testament, and especially the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles, places more emphasis on being disciples than on being faithful or believing. Perhaps it is also easier to be a disciple than a believer. In any case, being a disciple is more an invitation to be open than an obligation to believe. Perhaps without realising it, it seems that in the course of his research, Carrère discovered the value of learning as an alternative to believing and possibly also that being a disciple is a condition for being able to believe.

After all, wanting to be a disciple sometimes pays off more than Carrère’s soul-searching about whether or not to believe. In any case, this is a lesson Carrère learns from Hervé Clerc, a friend for over twenty-five years. They go on vacation together. They know each other inside out and talk a lot about their respective projects. By this time, he already feels like a sort of demigod, as he will be a member of the Cannes Film Festival jury (for this: Carrère 2014, pp. 243–45). During their daily meals in the same small restaurant, Carrère’s study of Christianity is often mentioned. Because Carrère too often expresses himself with irony and scepticism about “believers”, Hervé counters him at every turn. It is worthwhile quoting an example:

“You say you don’t believe in resurrection. But, in fact, you don’t have any idea what resurrection means. What’s more, in establishing your lack of faith from the start and making it clear that you know more and are superior to the people you’re talking about, you ban all access to what they were and what they believed. Be careful of such knowledge. Don’t start by saying that you know more than they do. That has nothing to do with trying to believe something you don’t believe. Open yourself up to the mystery instead of ruling it out from the start.”

(Carrère 2014, p. 245)

6. The Kingdom—A Further Assessment: Community of Faith, Community of Learning or Community of Celebrating (and Eating) Together?

Many Christian traditions emphasise that a Christian community must be a community of faith. The one-sided emphasis on faith means that we no longer take into account that such a community must also be a learning community, one in which learning together in the footsteps of Moses, of the prophets, and of Jesus and his disciples plays an important role, perhaps even the most important one. In addition to learning, celebrating, singing and eating together are also part of Christian traditions. Not for nothing does Luke present Jesus as the Man Who Came to Dinner (Collins 2005). Carrère’s book also pays particular attention to celebrating together. This is what happens in the book’s Epilogue.

This Epilogue is about a meeting in 2014. Only in the second part of the Epilogue does Carrère comment briefly on the Gospel of Matthew. He is not wrong in claiming that this gospel is the church’s favourite. Indeed, Saint Augustine, for example, considered Mark’s Gospel to be less important, as it would have been a “summary” of Matthew’s Gospel. For Carrère, Matthew is also the evangelist who was a member of a band of tramps recruited by Jesus who turned to organisation, discipline and hierarchy. In short, according to Carrère, Matthew is responsible for the transformation of the church. And with the church comes a clergy (Carrère 2014, p. 369)4. After briefly evoking three centuries of persecution of Christians, Carrère talks equally briefly about John and his Gospel, and then he returns to the phenomenon of the “church”. Then, he sketches the church’s antiquity and its fraught past, but at the end, his book takes an unexpected turn that shows that he’s open to learning.

This happens during foot washing in a special community, the L’Arche community (English translation of the French name: the community of the Arc). Let me first say something about the character of this community arising from the experiences of my youngest daughter. After working hard in high school, she wanted to do something different for a year after her exams. Her older brother had done a semester of voluntary work in Wales during his studies as part of a European program. She had written, phoned or e-mailed people in charge of numerous projects, but the outcome was very disappointing. Many people did not even reply, and the few that did had no room for her. My Irish PhD student suggested a community of L’Arche as an alternative. As the French communities had an efficient central registration system and she was running out of time, she reluctantly contacted their headquarters and, within a few days, received a reply inviting her to visit for a week.

After the week, she was very enthusiastic and went to a L’Arche community for a year,5 staying in a house in Bruz, Brittany, and enjoying a fantastic year there. She was living with mentally handicapped people, young and old, as well as with other volunteers and permanent staff.

When she returned home, she resumed her studies, first living with us, her parents. One evening, on a walk early in this phase, she told me what she thought was one of the most beautiful things about her time in that L’Arche community. “You know, Dad,” she said, “they wash their feet there”. In a special ritual, all members of the community wash one another’s feet. This reminded me of John the Evangelist, who presents no Last Supper but instead the washing of feet: the washing of feet seems to be the Johannine explanation of what the Last Supper means.

He is at the bottom of a “basin in which your feet have been washed, and in which you have washed the feet of someone else” (Carrère 2014, p. 377. Shortly afterwards, on the advice of a colleague, I read Carrère’s book and then, almost at its end, and unexpectedly but prepared by my daughter’s story, I encountered the ritual of foot washing. What is this ritual? Carrère wrote in his novel Limonov that a human being who feels superior, inferior or even equal to another human being does not understand reality. A young lady, who realises that his problem may be the opposite of hers, assures him in an e-mail that she can offer him a solution to this gap in understanding: “It is at the bottom of a basin in which your feet have been washed, and in which you have washed the feet of someone else” (Carrère 2014, p. 377).

When, two years later, Carrère completed The Kingdom, he felt satisfied. He had learned a lot by writing and assumed that his readers would learn a lot from him, too. Yet: “At the same time, I was nagged by an afterthought: that I had missed the essential point” (Carrère 2014, pp. 377–78).

And then Carrère decides to accept the “basin invitation” and goes to a community of L’Arche at which, according to my daughter, “they wash each other’s feet”. He wants to keep open the possibility that he may have something to say about faith that he has not said or has not yet said well enough, and thus, he joins a meeting in a community of L’Arche where “disabled” people live together.

Here, he tells how he sits in a restored farmhouse with a crucifix but also a large reproduction of Rembrandt’s The Prodigal Son. He follows the retreat, the daily mass, the religious songs, which he finds boring, and the retreats of the very old Jean Vanier. He recounts Jesus’ Easter days and how he washes feet, as well as Peter’s struggle. As Jean Vanier speaks, Élodie, a young girl with Down’s syndrome, crosses the room. She dances gracefully and asks the audience to give her a hug. When Jean finishes, he returns to his seat, and she to hers: next to him. She looks happy. Carrère is impressed by the ritual and wonders at how much more vulnerable feet are than a human face.

The next day, the retreat comes to an end. Before saying goodbye, there’s another song: too religiously kitsch for Carrère’s taste. And then, suddenly, there’s Élodie. She encourages him to sing and dance, and he sings and dances with tears in his eyes.

It is almost the end of the book. He finds a “professor (teacher, master?)” in Élodie. A few pages remain in Carrère’s book. He returns to the notebooks he wrote years ago when he was still a “believer”. In the end, he asks if he has remained faithful. He has only handicaps that will prevent him from entering the kingdom, for he is an intelligent and wealthy man of the upper class. The final question of the book is: “Did he betray the young man he was then, or did he ultimately remain faithful? He doesn’t know” (Carrère 2014, p. 384).

7. In Conclusion: Confessions for the 21st Century

I have tried to show that in its own way, Carrère’s book brings to light neglected and sometimes even forgotten elements of Christian traditions. Above all, as a teacher, Jesus calls people to learn together. The aim of a Christian community, then, is not only to be a community of faith but even more a community of teaching and living. In addition to the fact that Carrère’s book speaks to different facets of the Christian tradition, the concept of becoming a disciple (or “learner”) highlights an element of the early Christian tradition that is perhaps more appropriate for our times than the term “believers”. An implication of Carrère’s book is that the concept of discipleship is more important in the New Testament than is generally thought, and it is precisely this concept that opens doors for “believers” and “non-believers” alike to draw inspiration from the New Testament in order to develop the attitude of openness to new wisdom.

There’s another aspect of this book I would like to mention. In this final paragraph, I have to dwell for a moment on the kind of book it is. The colleague who referred me to it called it a novel, but despite the fact that this book is part of a new literary tradition of dealing with fact and fiction, in the opinion of many readers, it does not feel like a novel. Carrère himself calls his book an inquiry, an assessment into/of the sources of Christianity and the possibility of belief in the 21st century. Although the book resembles a genuine investigation into the sources of Christianity and certainly brings out many interesting elements, it ultimately fails to meet the requirements of a scientific inquiry. It is too fragmented, too unreflective, too ambiguous and, perhaps, too personal.

Nevertheless, I think it is right and important that, because of the subject matter, theologians should also try to appreciate and characterise this book. I want to try that here, but I have to say that I do not really find it easy because it is such a dense book. Carrère uses very different literary styles. He recounts his own life, his relationships, and his favourite porn sites and talks again and again about his faith and his unbelief. We know from him how he wants to cross the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, so it is not always possible to appreciate exactly what he’s saying. He says he feels superior to believers, but is that not another literary trick? In a rather subjective review with some gross errors and a typical “anglophone” arrogancy, Tim Whitmarsh (2017) mentions in The Guardian the most shocking aspect (“The real scandal”) of this book as being “its relentless narcissism”. As I wrote above, the book is indeed too personal for scientific research. It is indeed a document on the ego, but I am less inclined to play psychiatrist and stick these kinds of overly medical labels on someone.

From my own specialism, the literature of the Early Church, I think—although I hesitate to say it—that the book is ultimately a form of Augustine’s Confessions in the 21st century. Of course, I know the comparison is imperfect. Who can compare with the great Augustine? But more than a novel or a so-called historical novel, The Kingdom is a self-examination. As such, the author’s endeavours are also comparable to the art of introspection, of which one of the first public practitioners was his compatriot Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Two questions are at stake. One is explicitly posed at the outset: why do believers believe? The other question is much more personal: what about my own self, the “me” who once believed?

The latter question can also be put differently: have I remained faithful to this man, my former self? I do not think Carrère clearly separates these two questions. In the last paragraph, he asks himself whether or not he has remained faithful to Carrère, who was a believer: a devout Catholic who paraphrases in his last notebook the last words of Saint John’s Gospel, writing that, like him, he wants to bear witness to his vocation. The last words of The Kingdom are: “I don’t know”! In the end, it is his last word, and it clearly shows that—at least on a literary level—the whole inquiry into the genesis of Christianity was a detour through an inquiry into his own soul.6