Modernity’s Dissolution of Transcendence and the Sacred

Modernity’s Dissolution of Transcendence and the Sacred names a conflict that the novel locates inside, not merely outside, religious belief. Modern ideas help unsettle inherited authority and sacred forms, but neither skepticism nor institutional change resolves the human need for transcendence. The novel follows that tension through Régis’s damaged yet persistent Christianity, Loïc’s contemplation of divine silence, and the religious encounters in Cuba that lead Rodrigo Lerbier to reconsider his place in Santería.

Modernity Within the Church

Régis’s history complicates any simple opposition between a faithful past and a secular present. Though resolutely anti-modern, he had himself been influenced by the modernizing current that sought to bring the Church in Quebec out of what was regarded as its historical backwardness and medievalism. He had participated in that change through both his actions and his writing. At the same time, he had become absorbed in contemporary art and its iconoclastic, deconstructive tendencies. Modernity is therefore not only an external pressure upon religious life: Régis has helped carry it into the institutions and cultural forms he later fears are losing their sacred dimension.

His disappointment deepens as theologians he once read and admired move toward increasingly subtle denials of Christ’s divinity. He understands this as part of a broader modern impulse to abolish transcendence, an impulse that also works within the Church by fading the sacred. The loss he confronts is consequently doctrinal and institutional at once: belief in Christ is weakened while the Church’s capacity to preserve a sense of holiness is itself diminished.

Faith in the Night of Doubt

Loïc sees Régis in old age as a man moving through an increasingly dark tunnel, yet not abandoning his pilgrimage. His religious fervor has gone out like a spent candle, and theological books no longer console him; still, he insists that faith has not left him. His conviction that Christ remains the only possible salvation persists as a repeated anchor against despair. The novel’s image of faith is thus not easy assurance but endurance in obscurity, sustained even when consolation and certainty have failed.

Régis’s tinnitus gives that obscurity a bodily and paradoxical form. On better days he calls the ringing in his ears his cosmic lyre; when discussing the silence of God, he describes the noise as the interruption that keeps the silence from being complete. He turns from this painful condition to the mystery of a God beyond both what can and cannot be known, beyond the categories of being and non-being. His account does not make divine silence intelligible; it gives that silence a place within the struggle to believe.

Loïc connects Régis’s theology to the idea of God’s creative withdrawal: in making room for the material and human world, God creates a void within himself. For Loïc, the thought helps explain why human beings both fear and feel drawn to emptiness. The brief lives of tropical fish in the aquarium and birds moving between perches sharpen the question of what such lives weigh in divine thought. Yet Loïc also concludes that existence is a gift, and that, in strictly ontological terms, life is neither a success nor a failure. Fame cannot certify fulfillment: celebrated criminals, fraudsters, and mediocrities stand beside geniuses, heroes, and saints, while many of the latter live and die unknown. His reflection turns the modern hunger for public recognition into a measure of cultural unease, not spiritual achievement.

Religious Worlds in Cuba

The Cuban episodes place Catholicism and Santería in a shared social landscape rather than treating religious practice as an abstract contest of doctrines. When an old woman cries that a stone is the devil’s eye, Rodrigo Lerbier recognizes the possibility of black magic and seeks permission to enter the house. The Catholic priest is wary of rites derived from African animist religions, but his Cuban upbringing has also taught him a superstitious respect for ancient beliefs. People in the crowd defer to Rodrigo, and his presence is treated as important as the priest’s. The scene shows competing religious authorities operating side by side, each recognized by members of the community.

Rodrigo interprets the stone through Santería as a concentration of harmful forces, like a lightning rod gathering dangerous discharges, and says it should be quarantined. The image gives the object a role that is at once religious and practical: it is not simply a symbol to be explained away, but something Rodrigo believes can gather and conduct malign influence. Later, Loïc and Laurence attend a ceremony in Havana after Loïc has discussed Santería and Yoruba religion with Manuel. The dancing represents Yemaya, a divinity of the waters; the orishas are described as nature-linked beings sent to help humanity. Loïc feels the pull of his Christian inheritance, but curiosity and amusement outweigh his misgivings as he watches the rhythmic, communal ritual. The encounter complicates a story of sacred decline: religious life remains vivid and socially embodied, even where its claims unsettle Loïc’s inherited framework.

Rodrigo’s Crisis of Allegiance

Rodrigo’s later confession reveals that religious change can mean more than exchanging one set of beliefs for another. After repeated conversations with Aurelio, Rodrigo begins to question both the direction of his life and his adherence to Santería. His crisis is sharpened by his public standing: he has held important roles for many years, and a babalao is a respected, feared institution in Cuba, in some respects more influential than a Catholic priest. Leaving the practice would therefore threaten not only a private identity but also his recognized place in his society.

Rodrigo comes to believe that what he had taken for Yoruba oracles was instead the voice of Satan and that he had unknowingly become a servant of evil. He attributes this recognition not to a direct argument from Aurelio, but to what Aurelio’s suffering, subsequent grace, recovered joy, and love of Christ have made visible to him. The change remains painful and unresolved in the moment of confession: Rodrigo is deeply shaken, and the question of how to leave Santería without becoming an outcast still weighs on him. In this arc, the erosion of sacred certainty does not produce a neutral emptiness. It opens a contested passage in which inherited practice, social belonging, spiritual danger, and renewed Christian belief press against one another.