The history of religions is not a straight line traced by the divine, but a competition of rhizomes fueled by the human spirit. It is a process of spiritual selection where beliefs survive, mutate, or disappear according to their ability to simultaneously meet multiple criteria, often in tension within our individual and collective psyche.

Of spiritual selection…

The law of spiritual selection is not deduced. It delivers itself ceaselessly in the very movement of history, in struggles and alliances between prophets and kings.

In the 6th century BCE, after a period of climatic and political instability, two radical responses emerge simultaneously, unbeknownst to each other, revealing the singular traits of spiritual selection: the triumphant monotheism of Jerusalem which unifies the divine by submitting the sky through dogma, and Athenian philosophy which unifies its citizens by submitting the city to the examination of reason. Their simultaneity reveals an adaptive convergence: facing the same period of upheaval qualified as the Axial Age, two radical solutions emerge independently on the Mediterranean rim, finding in the fertile chaos and diversity of cultures a favorable terrain to express themselves. A sky too clear, a unique truth, sterilize the process. Without proliferation of ideas, no selection; without selection, no renewal. Thought dies of uniformity, as an ecosystem perishes from monoculture.

In the ecosystem of the psyche, beliefs and truths coexist in competition or cooperation: belief in the afterlife engenders the engineering of the pyramids; the religious feudalism of the Middle Ages extinguishes the knowledge of ancient sciences. They do not survive because they are true in the absolute, but because they are functional: efficient vectors for man mastering his environment, for life touching the limits of the cosmos through him.

A durable belief offers certainty and enigma, present utility and future potential, rational justification and hidden function, group identity and universal proposition. Dialectical tensions. Unstable equilibrium.

In this sense, the "true" has neither theological foundation (God's existence matters little), nor teleological (final design matters little), nor even logical (method matters little). It matters little whether it is a truth or an illusion, as long as it is topological and functional, namely that it possesses sufficient elasticity to resist in the human breach, on this frontier where life stretches by groping toward the cosmos. If this deployment takes at its paroxysm the face of God, it is only a dizzying consequence, almost incidental. The important thing is not the face of the divine, but the forces that sculpt it, that stretch, mutate, and deform without breaking.

Man is not a passive spectator. His mind is not just a soil where truths and beliefs germinate with the seasons — he is the one who precipitates them. From the Latin praecipitare, a gesture that unfolds a triple vertigo: physical, by throwing headfirst into the abyss; temporal, by hastening an uncertain outcome; and chemical, by dropping solid into liquid to crystallize the new.

Precipitating meaning is accepting absolute risk. It is engaging one's reason — one's head — toward the unknown, exactly like the unborn child engages its skull in the void to force passage. It is always a cephalic fall, a plunge of the mind which, as it gains speed, hopes, at the bottom of the chasm, that the void crystallizes an exit for its life.

Like Iapetus, the Titan father of Atlas and Prometheus, grandfather of humanity (whose name in Greek means "he who precipitates"); like Japheth (whose name in Hebrew means "he who opens to the world"), son of Noah and father of nations; these two false twins illustrate spiritual selection in action: man opens to the world by precipitating meaning, and precipitates meaning to open the world.

Josiah does not discover Deuteronomy: he precipitates its revelation in his kingdom through worship, transforming a text into destiny. His liturgy is the art of saturating the collective 'substance'. Socrates does not receive the truth from the oracle designating him the wisest man in the world: he precipitates its meaning in the city through questioning, transforming an enigma into method. His maieutics is the art of obtaining the 'precipitate' of the individual.

Non-predestined children of the same era of crisis and brilliance, philosophy and monotheism embody the living paradox of spiritual selection, revealing the two facets of our relationship with the sacred: the dexterity of a truth lies in the enigma it carries, and the dogma of an enigma lies in the truth that carries it.

We carry within us truths and beliefs greater than ourselves, which sometimes crush us with all they do not say.

The law of spiritual selection then allows us to discern the evolution of monotheism: a unique belief carrying the entire cosmos cracks under its own weight. Confronted with other vectors, it splits to maintain balance. Because it has no adversary of its size left, monotheism enters into conflictual dialogue with itself and regulates itself through schisms. Judaism, Christianity, Islam: these three branches born of historical contingencies were selected for their capacity to become successive and stabilizing pillars of a single edifice. Members of the same family, the apparent conflict (often violent) among believers of each cult nevertheless translates an unconscious collaborative dynamic: giving man the comfort of dogma while maintaining in him the feverishness of childbirth. The true prophecy is not the one proclaimed by the three religions of the Book, but the one they accomplish in their unspoken words: precipitating the birth of the unique God.

Judaism: the concept of alliance between God and Men

Judaism marks the first step of monotheism in the cosmic dynamic of life. By unifying men under the alliance of a unique God, Judaism concentrated spiritual and cultural forces on a common objective: a relationship of union with a supreme being. This union is not a fusion but an alliance, a pact where men commit to a God who guides them and places them under his law.

Judaism can be seen as the first evolutionary attempt to lead humanity to overcome polytheistic divisions, to gather collective energy and devotion under a unique spiritual power. This stage imposes itself because it initiates the awareness of a common goal: a unique God representing an unfailing link between life, men, and the cosmos. This conceptual revolution was logically selected by the human mind, giving Judaism not only the power to resist the greatest empires (Egypt, Babylon, Rome) but also to overthrow them from within. For the power of Judaism goes far beyond the simple passage to monotheism. It conveys other visionary and dizzying concepts like the figure of the messiah, hope, the sacredness of life, the holocaust, and the end times. These powerful vectors of creation explain the survival of Judaism in a diaspora scattered within other dominant and hostile cultures that Jews will never cease to question and shake up. The Jewish genius is not so much an identity as a relationship to the world, a method of questioning unifying the transcendental and immanence, exacerbated by a human experience between wandering, hope, and risk of disappearance.

By glorifying the Alliance in expectation of the Messiah, Jews prevent the future divorce with God. Judaism is the pillar of Law and Promise.

Christianity: the concept of a humanity pregnant with God

The Alliance becomes fertile and begets Christianity. It comes to complete the edifice of Judaism by introducing divine conception incarnated in a human being. Offspring between men and gods have always occupied a choice place in mythologies and ancient literature. The figure of Christ is however more singular because it encompasses in a single individual all the hope of humanity. He is the one who descends from God to lead men to God. With the birth of Jesus, the unique God humanizes, comes even closer to men, this link takes a physical form and undergoes human experience. He offers men a perspective to reach him not only spiritually but also physically. Christ, man of flesh and holy spirit, brings with him a unifying message of all nations beyond the alliance. It is also no coincidence if the figure of Mary, in that she symbolizes the maternity of the divine in the earthly womb, occupies an equally important, sometimes even superior place, in Christian cultures and traditions. The Annunciation could be interpreted as a prefiguration of the process that will one day allow humanity itself to give birth to God. This passage, crucial in the narration of the cosmos, explains why the human mind selected Christianity to make it a spiritual model capable of extending and seducing all continents.

By celebrating the Nativity, Christians maintain the coming birth of the divine. Christianity is the pillar of Love and Birth.

Islam: the concept of God's emancipation from Humanity

To understand the Hejira and the dazzling expansion of Islam in its beginnings, one must probe the internecine struggles between different Christian churches and Jewish tribes of the time. For the question of nativity was as revolutionary as it was a source of doctrinal divisions and confusion for the peoples of the Middle East.

Islam thus intervenes as the final stage of the monotheistic dialectic with a univocal message carried by the prophet: the absolute distinction between God and men. Islam insists on the fact that God is uncreated, unique, and inaccessible, unable to be associated with men in any form. This vision of pure transcendence expresses an emancipation of God in relation to humanity. Islam comes in a way to cut God's umbilical cord. This separation announces the future. God, fruit of life, while being attached to a human history, does not belong to them. It establishes a guarantee against self-idolatry.

By protecting Revelation, Muslims prevent the divinization of man. Islam is the pillar of Submission and Purification.

…to the domain of faith

What fascinates in the epic of the three religions of the Book is their way of reflecting, like a distorting mirror, the relationship between Man and the divine. Holy texts describe an order of the world where God, artisan of the miracle of life, shapes Man and chains him to the laws of nature. But History flips the mirror: Man tears off his chains to birth God in turn, offering him as heritage the very breath of life.

This reversal of perspective appears in mystical intuitions: when Kabbalists speak of Tzimtzum (divine contraction), Christians of Kenosis (Christic self-emptying), and Sufis of Fana (annihilation in God), they describe a same quasi-carnal experience seen from three different angles. They intuitively understood that faith is not belief in the presence of God, but experience of the place of a withdrawal, of a creative absence.

Sacred texts and their interpretations are not content with narrating creation, revelation, or the end times: these three pillars of transcendence. They are an inverted palimpsest where the eternal dialogue between God and Man is inscribed. In the cycle of generations, one and the other pursue, answer, call, prolong each other, as if creation were only a game of mirrors between the creator and his creature become creator. The more we shape God, the more he shapes us. And in this face-off of titans, blind life plays its all. Faith is not what links man to God, it is what prevents man from collapsing under the weight of the god he brought into the world.

Faith is neither dogmatic submission nor mystical ecstasy. It is a biological imperative: the requirement for Man to perpetuate the cycle of life, to carry it beyond the limits of the possible. Faith is the reactor that ignites when life touches the void.

I do not write for those who seek God, but for those in whom God still seeks himself.

Faith is an inner battlefield, where the anguish of the ephemeral transforms into creative force, where the soul draws from the abysses of the imaginary to forge the ultimate ambition: to give birth to God. In it rustle all the tensions of humanity: the fear of erasure, the desire for eternity, and this dizzying intuition that life will only be accomplished when it has birthed its own principle.