Nicolas HUMPHRIS

Original title: La fonction d’incarnation dans la République : entre séduction politique et vision théophanique

Published in

Keywords: De Gaulle, Imitation of Christ, Incarnation of power, Judge of children, Membership and civility, Middle Ages, Political charisma, Sacred royalty.

There is, in the state power of the contemporary French Republic, an archaic institution which continues incognito, the “function of incarnation”. This charismatic function is an institutional device developed at the dawn of our civilization (4th-10th centuries) to arouse, as part of an enterprise of seduction, the free adherence of subjects to public authority by borrowing the model of Christ mediator whose human presence and the flesh irresistibly and subliminally attract men to the invisible God. Today, those who exercise the function of incarnation in the Republic also secretly arouse the adhesion of men to the invisible and transcendent entity that is the State, in the manner of the “seducer” Christ. Whether we are believers or atheists, we all depend, for our attachment to the Republic, on this Christ-like power of seduction of the leader, and therefore, indirectly, of a certain Christ, mysteriously present in his earthly imitator. Are we the prisoners of the subliminal grip of this hidden God? To prevent the said political seduction from being a place of non-freedom, it is necessary to become aware of it, and, even more, to disocccult this Christ who appears here against all expectations, while he is both ignored by the State. and by the Church. It is important to rediscover the capacity for theophanic perception which was from the outset intimately associated with the function of incarnation, to lift the gaze in order to come to perceive the God hidden in the secularized nation state.