Entre o Púlpito e o Altar: Allan Kardec e os debates entre espiritismo, ciência e religião na França do século XIX (1858-1869)

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, the constant process of secularization of society represented the distance between scientific and religious discourses. In this sense, several writers and intellectuals emerged who responded to this process, seeking to reconcile rational and scientific discourse with religion. The French professor Allan Kardec (1804-1869) was one of the first intellectuals to create a new philosophy with moral consequences, by investigating anomalous phenomena considered metaphysical, which had great repercussion in society, mobilizing scientists and intellectuals. Thus, the present work aims to identify and analyze the scientific and religious discourses employed by Allan Kardec in the elaboration of spiritualism. The research focused on reading and analyzing, in the original language, every work published by Kardec. Unpublished original Kardec documents were obtained and analyzed. Secondary sources were used as interpretation and contextualization tools of his work. The results show that the process of distancing between science and religion was marked by several political conflicts that aimed to “sanitize” the scientific practice of themes considered religious or metaphysical. The secularization of society also promoted new forms of spirituality that sought to adapt Enlightenment values such as progress and social reform, in line with religious theses such as reincarnation and divine justice. Allan Kardec raised and tested various hypotheses to explain mediumistic phenomena and concluded that spirits existed, developing a method for obtaining useful and reliable information about the "spiritual world". His goal was to naturalize the spiritual realm, making it an object of rational and empirical inquiry to identify the natural laws that would govern the supposed relations between disembodied spirits and embodied humanity. Through the study of Allan Kardec's research processes and elaboration of theories for the specific cases of the so-called spiritual manifestations and for the case of the psychic mirror, the search for a broad and diverse empirical basis, as well as the progressive construction, is perceived. and the reformulation of explanatory theories. Spiritism presented itself as a form of secular spirituality that rejected the Enlightenment insistence on dividing science and religion, adapting the ideas of reason and progress to their spiritual proposals. The study concludes that Allan Kardec deserves to be remembered as a French intellectual who developed pioneering research on mediumship and contributed to the construction of integration paths between scientific and religious knowledge in the period.