The adage "A healthy soul in a healthy body" is well known to all. It is very revealing that the complete quotation from Juvenal (Tenth satire) is less revealing: "Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano". "It is necessary to pray for a healthy soul in a healthy body.

Pray! It is precisely this metaphysical dimension that seems to be sorely lacking in today's Western fighter. We do not understand it in a strict religious sense - praying to a particular god - but in a reference to that which transcends, that which gives meaning. This is largely the purpose of the research that we have been trying to carry out for more than ten years, the military doctor (er) Gérard Chaput, my brother, colonel of the Army (currently DFE of the Schools of Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan) and myself. Research and experiences that have led to the publication of a book 1.

This work has, first and foremost, an operational base. It was in OPEX (RCI 2006) that they began with a day's training for the PCMs of the 11th PO, led by the doctor and the chaplain. The results were so convincing that they immediately led to an intense collaboration with the PAG. Then, in 2008, they were presented to a War School working group at my brother's request. It was at that time that the concept of "densification" became clearer. Since then, we have intervened, according to the requests, with military or civil authorities, and for various audiences ranging from simple soldiers in the operational preparation phase to prefects. They have attracted the full attention of the National Gendarmerie, which is currently studying their implementation in its various training schools.

The concept of densification is at the same time intellectual, practical and pedagogical. It is a global process that aims to regain the unity of the being, to help it to face all the struggles of life, in a society undergoing profound change. In contrast to ambient dualism, densification integrates the physical, psychological and metaphysical dimensions, in a synergy proper to action. It calls for an approach that convinces the military auditor of the validity of the metaphysical question by bringing together the three components: command, health service and chaplaincy.

This approach begins with the observation that modern society weakens its members. One thinks in particular of the influences of the NICTs, the societal and ideological diktats in which we are constantly immersed. Among these are the undivided reign of the ideology of absolute relativism, the ambient atheistic materialism, the refusal of death, that of constraints for ever greater enjoyment, a totalitarian vision of individual freedom, etc. These "values" of society are very often in contradiction with the "virtues" demanded of those who are its guardians, its sentinels, at the forefront of which are the military (cf. art. L4111-1 of the Code of Defence).

The concept of densification thus attempts to respond to these weaknesses, by encouraging individual and collective restructuring around a classical anthropology: physical densification (sarx), psychic densification (soma), metaphysical densification (psyche). These three approaches are to be carried out simultaneously in a spirit of unification of the being. Metaphysical densification attempts to answer, in fine, the question of the sense of commitment, from which also derives the capacity to face, in an ethical way, the most degraded situations.

"One understands absolutely nothing about modern civilization if one does not first admit that it is a universal conspiracy against all kinds of inner life," wrote Georges Bernanos (La France contre les robots) in 1946 at
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Metaphysical questioning requires that we rediscover the power of silence, in order to let the intimate and inner dialogue emerge in us.The metaphysical questioning requires that we rediscover the power of silence, in order to let intimate and inner dialogue emerge in us, not in a search for oneself, for oneself (which is proposed by a certain number of current meditation methods), but in an openness to others and first of all to those who are "completely different". Only this courageous undertaking of working on oneself allows the establishment of a true ethical foundation, and the necessary resilience in the most deleterious crises, because only it allows us to discern the contours of an answer to the haunting question of meaning.

"Man is an anguished tension towards transcendence," wrote Kierkegaard. Metaphysical questioning, in a process of global densification, then becomes an act of combat.

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1 Gérard CHAPUT, Christian VENARD, Guillaume VENARD, La densification de l'être - Se préparer aux situations difficiles, 2nd ed, Pippa, 2017.