16 November 2023

10:25 – 11:10

Amphithéâtre Say

Renaud Rochette

Renaud Rochette has a degree in history and a doctorate in history. He has taught in secondary and higher education. Since 2014, he has been head of training and research at IREL (Institut d’étude des religions et de laïcité, formerly IESR), where he organizes and participates in training courses on religions and secularism. He is also in charge of IREL’s European network and the European projects in which the institute is involved. He is interested in the Byzantine world, Orthodox Christianity and the use of religion in speculative fiction.

Conference: Is God energy?

Energy, in the sense of a force capable of effecting transformations, is a rather recent notion, linked to the development of science and the rise of industrial societies, where the use of machines presupposes the existence of something to set these inert mechanical devices in motion. Humanity did not wait for these late changes to speak of energy. In ancient times, the Greek enérgeia, translated by the Latin actus, referred to action. Heir to ancient philosophy, medieval Christian theology made use of the notion of energy, whether in the little-known (and heretical) interpretation of monoenergism, or in the possibility of contemplating God through his energies, which is a feature of Orthodox spirituality. If, for Christian theologians, God is not a kind of power plant, the recent shift in meaning has led to the idea that there are spiritual energies, at the crossroads of the two definitions, the best-known of which is perhaps Force.