Spirituality in Michel Tournier: Duality aspiring towards a perverse cosmogony

The purpose of this study is to produce a coherent map of Tournier's spiritual cosmogony. Like Hegel, he seeks to construct a cosmogony from which nothing can escape. Although, like Sartre, he infuses his works with binary oppositions, he nevertheless seeks to bring about what Sartre considered the impossible fusion of the pour-soi and the en soi. An avowed rousseauiste and a disciple of Levi-Strauss, Tournier's spirituality is imbued with a neo-primitivism which respects difference and bemoans the movement towards a monoculture. Tournier is an apologist for marginals of all kinds who are victimized by society, and who can thus paradoxically become the center of that society. Their sacrifice reunites the community, and the sacrificial victim takes on the martyr's aura of saving power.; Tournier's protagonists are heroes of mythic proportion in a world pregnant with meaning. Seeking to revitalize myth and meaning, Tournier chooses recognizable legendary figures as protagonists. By investing his protagonist with a destiny he proclaims that despite what many recent authors have said about the arbitrariness of human existence, meaning still awaits those who know how to decipher it.; Tournier manifests an antipathy towards polarization of any kind. Holding Socrates responsible for making philosophy a rational exercise divorced from the physical sciences, Tournier prefers a "pluralisme rationaliste." Unlike Augustine, who encouraged all to deprecate the physical, considered inferior, and glorify only what is spiritual, Tournier seeks to reunite spirit and matter, to re-sacralize Creation and rehabilitate pleasure outlawed by the followers of Augustine. Another result of the Fall bemoaned by Tournier is the polarization of genders. In Tournier's writings androgynous figures are considered ontologically superior to beings of a single gender.; The confusion between good and evil in Tournier's works is appropriate for a monotheistic religion which seeks to discourage the heresy of spiritual dualism. Evil is seen as the "inversion maligne" of good which can become, through an "inversion benigne," benevolent once again. Some critics mistakenly link Tournier to Nestorianism, which denies the "hypostatic union" of God and man in Jesus Christ and emphasizes the distance between divinity and humanity. Tournier's love of fusions is much more consistent with the doctrine upholding the confusion of the divine and the human in the person of Christ.; Taking the traditional Christian doctrine of supersessionism one step further, Tournier presents a theology based on the ideas of Joachim de Fiore which emphasizes the necessity of moving beyond the "Age of Christ" to the "Age of the Spirit." Finding the Orthodox Church attractive because of its celebration of the Resurrection and the Paraclete, Tournier criticizes The Roman Catholic Church for its necrophilia and "dolorisme" evident in its focus on the Crucifixion.; In Tournier's works, the Other is not merely another subject or object as in dialectic thought; the Other, or the structure Autrui, is a lens through which we experience our environment. As Tournier believes that the experience of the Absolute is necessarily individual, the crumbling of the structure Autrui and the advent of a perverse cosmogony would facilitate true communion. Tournier imagines a perverse cosmogony overseen by the Spirit which paradoxically both envelops and maintains difference.