Rejoicing, or the Torments of Religious Speech by Bruno Latour
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Faith Has Lost the World

I do not believe. I do not disbelieve. Nor am I indifferent to religion. Therefore I don’t fit the categories into which I am permitted to place myself. I am not an atheist. I am not a member of the faithful. And I find agnosticism insipid. ‘Seeker’ is a hippie term that implies cultic experimentation which I find puerile and beside the point. ‘Enthusiast’, in the original meaning of infused with the divine, has a vaguely relevant ring but implies far too much emotion. Admirer-at-a-distance, spiritual supplicant, undogmatic disciple, mystical protégé are all somewhat distasteful conditions I would rather avoid. In the world of religion I do not seem to have a conceptual place to lay my head.

Bruno Latour shares my problem. In a sense he solves it by creating a community of the two of us who know the peculiar pangs of religious isolation. Latour doesn’t provide a name for this community, or a new category of religious experience, or a description of the box into he and I might fit, but he does an excellent job of inventorying the contents of this box as well as outlining a programme that might well invite other people to share it. The regime he suggests is one implied by some modern theologians like Jean-Luc Marion but, I think, with more clarity and … well, more respect for non-academics who don’t really care about professional or confessional disputes. So, for me Latour has provided a first-rate thinking person’s guide to religion in the 21st century.

Latour’s basic insight is brilliantly simple and to the point: In religion God is not the issue. More precisely, whether or not God exists is not a question that is in any way relevant to any religion, at any time, among any group of human beings. This is exactly the same point as that made by Marion in his God Without Being (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Marion’s thesis is grounded on Christian scriptures. If God is love, he says, then He loves before He exists and therefore exists in a manner we cannot conceive. One might say He loves Himself and everything else into existence and then is present as a sort of dark matter, impossible to detect but necessary to recognise. Both Latour and Marion thereby remove the distracting and impossible issue of ontology from religious discourse.

Put this another way: What you and I, our ancestors, and countless others have seen, felt, observed around us for the last 200,000 years or so has been more or less the same. No, not in terms of landscapes, or technologies, or specific threats to life and limb, but rather in terms of our difference as humans compared with the rest of the world, our mysterious separation from the other animals with whom we share so much, our obviously superior facility with memory, expectation, and reflection which don’t appear to be present anywhere else and which constitute our only competitive advantage in a world that seems dominated by brute strength and thoughtless forces.

Many, perhaps all, of those people to some degree or another, had an insight that what they were experiencing was a reality that they could not quite grasp; and that the reality of their mates, friends, and enemies was not quite the reality which they themselves were experiencing. In a typically human way, they brought these experiences under a kind of control by putting them into words. They could then share these words as if they had just discovered a new species to hunt, or a particularly delicious strain of berry that had been unknown to the clan. If the words sparked positive responses, they might become commonplace in communal discourse as ‘the way things are’. It is even possible to imagine a certain amount of primitive intellectual excitement about the discovery of some new aspect of life. In any case these primitive people frequently appeared to have used the word God to express both the mystery and the reality which they could not quite reach.

In the way of things linguistic (as well as religious) the words used to describe these experiences expand, collect connotations, become more sophisticated, morph into many variations, and take on diverse evocative meanings, often widely different for different individuals and groups. Although this process is unstoppable, there is an apparently irresistible impulse in some people, usually leaders in a religious community, to insist that the evolution of the language used to describe religious experience cease. The result is the identification of official sacred texts, creeds, doctrines, and a concern about orthodoxy, that is, the allegiance to particular texts. God is no longer then what Latour calls “the obvious framework for ordinary everyday things” but an abstraction, a symbol to which we pledge our allegiance… or not. As the symbol is attacked or compromised by facts or the horrid actions of one’s fellow believers, we are left with the mere belief in belief, a virtual world of spiritual Knownothingness equivalent to obdurate ignorance.

The consequences for religious individuals of such a ‘linguistic turn’ are, of course, severe. Those for whom orthodoxy does not express their own experiences are likely to be condemned as heretics and apostates. They will be duly victimised. However the implications for the religious community itself are even more devastating. Quite apart from the likelihood of schism, the insistence on linguistic orthodoxy shifts the focus of the entire community from religious experience to religious language. Quite literally what is considered divine in practice are the words that have been fixed. Gradually the community loses the ability to communicate within itself about their individual experiences at all. At this point religion has lost all meaning except that of tribal membership attested by affirmation of texts, creeds, etc.

Perhaps thinking since the Enlightenment has degraded our ability to talk about God. But not because of a denial of the validity of religious discourse by scientists. Rather it is religionists who have adopted the language of science - particularly the positivistic presumption that words can be reliably correlated with things that are not-words - that destroys our religious discourse. Latour puts the matter clearly: “There’s no point trying to get around this rule: the connection between a religious text and the thing it talks about is not the same as the connection between a map and its territory.” The attempts to break this rule are more down to the theologians than the scientists. Any referent in religious language is beyond our comprehension. Poetry respects this but is taken seriously by neither science or theology.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the recognition by Latour and Marion of the dangers of language to religion were anticipated by Karl Barth, arguably the most important theologian of the 20th century (and also a conservative evangelical pastor). Barth’s lifelong crusade was to convey the distinction between the Word of God, and the word of Man (see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). For Barth even the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity are necessarily human constructions which could not be trusted to do more than inspire a response to the divine presence in the world. Scripture for Barth is not definitive but provocative. When it is considered as more than mere language, it hides the reality it is meant to reveal, and it prevents the communication about reality among us. Barth knew that belief could be poison in religion.

And this is Latour’s point as well. Religious revelation is not constituted by angelic messages from some other world, it is the transformation of individuals who have been provoked to appreciate things differently in this one. The language of religion in modern society has ceased to be provocative. It has not only lost its meaning; it is no longer even audible; its poison has deadened our sense of a shared reality. Contemporary religious language pretends to express something that has no meaning among even many of those who affirm the formulae of faith and belief. This goes some way to explain the apparently contradictory behaviour of many Christians, for example, who take the phrase ‘God is love’ as a mantra to legitimise violence, racism, oppressive and discriminatory legislation, and so on, as an expression of ‘Christian values.’ They seem to realise (and to fear), that their religion has become vacuous, that all they have left is meaningless words which they repeat endlessly in the hopeful arrogance that they might become reality. Latour summarises his view of the situation elegantly: “The world has ‘lost faith’, as they say? No, ‘Faith’ has lost the world.”

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