and by the same token without losing – in the manner of a minimalist (rationalist) reduction – what are potentially the most daring, and therefore most fertile, aspects of its conception. It is true that Spinoza, even as he undertook his rationalization, thought it necessary to conduct a rigorous, linguistically and historically buttressed, exegesis, so as to judge the texts’ authority critically, with a focus on “meaning” instead of “truth.” Already with Spinoza, then, we have a promising start. He opened the way to jettisoning the traditional, preliminary criterion of belief.
At the same time, a philosophy of Christianity needn’t run counter to Spinozism, serving as its flipside, and give up the cause of reason. It needn’t illustrate Christianity by invoking the poetry or the bigger soul3 it has brought to the human experience (like Chateaubriand in The Genius of Christianity). The “soul” would never be content with an explanation, which will always come up short. It would cry out for “mystery”: “The most marvelous sentiments are those that stir a certain confusion in us.” This facile binary, in which the “vagueness” of the religious offsets the rigor of science, is suspect by its very convenience. The peal of evening bells in the countryside (or the Latin chants of the Church, or the paintings of Fra Angelico, etc.) might indeed convey emotion, but before drawing an argument from this we must declare what makes it religiously specific. The Christian religion, says Chateaubriand, has tended the “secret,” developed a “sense of the sacred,” but couldn’t we say the same of many other religions? And, in praising Christianity by comparison, we would fall, as Chateaubriand inevitably falls, into the trap of ethnocentrism. As we now know, the way of comparison with other religions leads nowhere. It rests entirely on ignorance of other cultures or, worse, on contempt for the Other, who serves only as the negative of his own affirmation. “The Romans,” says Chateaubriand, “were a horrible people.” This eulogy a contrario holds up only inasmuch as we enter into one coherence rather than the other – the comparison is justified only from within the extolled religion. Chateaubriand, partaking of the nascent Romanticism, did indeed begin to develop the concept of modernity. He also brought out the subjectivity that was effectively being promoted in Christianity. But what religion anywhere in the world lacks its own “genius”?
The inverse path, doubling back to Spinozism, albeit from a different angle, is the path of demystification. Here, rather than extoll Christianity, we must denounce Christianity’s “mystery.” We must reveal its illusion, and to do that we must reduce it to its “essence” (Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity). Spilling over the “national” framework and ethnic limits of the God of Israel, the nature of Christianity, says Feuerbach, has been to raise human aspiration, perceived in its universality, to the heights of the absolute. In other words, Feuerbach established the primacy of the subjective (sentiment: das Gemüt) over objectivity (as determined by science), to the point of reducing the one to the other. In still other words, he took the satisfaction of subjective (affective) needs and objectified them in God. This betokens the triumph of “love” over the “law” – whether nature’s or society’s. God is he who “says yes” to my wishes, impossible as they might be. This is why in Feuerbach’s eyes Christian faith amounts to belief in miracles. God can grant my aspiration, even if it contravenes the necessity of nature (death). In Christianity desire is elevated [exhaussé], as well as fulfilled [exaucé], until it transmutes into the most intimate certainty – becoming unconditional – of awareness [conscience]. Even if the fulfillment contradicts our understanding, or the facts of experience, and brings us up against the “unthinkable” (undenkbar). The fulfillment occurs instantly, meeting with no resistance from the world and requiring no patient effort of knowledge, for a miracle is “as rapid as a wish is impatient,”4 but what could it be if not a fiction where we mistake our desires for reality? What could it be if not the production and projection of an imagination that dreams as it likes of happiness, and never works towards it?
Freud takes things no further (in The Future of an Illusion). All our “anti-theology” textbooks rehash the same arguments. But can we leave it at that? What has Feuerbach’s analysis, though apt and even elucidating, been compelled to overlook? What has its initial choice forced it unwittingly to leave aside? Christianity might indeed have promoted subjectivity, but it remains to be seen whether we should understand its particular notion of the “subjective” as the correlate of the objective in science’s determination. It remains to be seen whether we have, on principle, come to misapprehend subjectivity inasmuch as Christianity has revealed it not to respond to objectivity, inasmuch as Christianity has, in advance, left their pairing in suspense and, as it were, imperfect. If we set the miracle, the prodigy that contravenes reason (water changed to wine at Cana), at the core of Christian faith, then what are we to make of the fact that such a prodigy is referred to explicitly not as a “miracle” (Wunder) but as a “sign” (sēmeîon, σημεῖον, in Greek)? It is others who demand prodigy-miracles (terata, τέρατα); Christ, for his part, produces signs (cf. John 4:48 ).5 Doesn’t the substitution of sign for miracle produce an immediate shift in thought, directing it towards something else (other than thaumaturgy)? Moreover, in viewing it strictly from the perspective of non-contradiction, like Feuerbach, do we not immediately close reason off from paradox, the very thing to which Christianity has so powerfully contributed, the very thing whose intelligence Christianity has deployed? Indeed, can the positing of God as the objectification of desire obscure what Christianity, following in Judaism’s wake, invites us to discover, under the figure of God, as the encounter with the Other? Though a bit too quick to dispense with the question of the “world” – of its consistency, and thus also of its resistance to desire – Christian thought on the matter of subjectivity has an essential link with alterity, which itself compels an effective spilling-over from the world [fait effectivement déborder du monde].
That Christianity might be an entirely human production does not account for the entirety of its import. That its content might in fact be “anthropological,” as Feuerbach says, should not lead us to overlook what it has promoted and invented in man. For the term essence in The Essence of Christianity rightly has another use. Not only does it speak to the specificity of Christianity, it more importantly, more radically, serves to define the religion as “the relation of man to his own nature [i.e., essence]6.” Therein lies its truth. But Christianity, adds Feuerbach, recognizes man’s essence not as his own but as that of another, extant in itself (“God”), separate from man, and even standing in opposition to him. And therein lies its falsity. In this respect religion is, as Marx would say, “alienating.” But in rendering this judgment – that is, in bringing the “celestial” down to the earth of anthropology – must we necessarily restrict man’s “essence” to a particular fixed content, to a fixable content? Must we thereby forget that “man” is a creature in midbecoming – or, better yet, mid-advent? For man is ceaselessly detaching from himself, precisely to make himself other. Therein lies his capacity to abide outside of himself [se tenir hors de soi] and properly “ex-ist.” Even from a strictly human perspective, hasn’t Christianity opened new possibilities unto man (opened them in man)? We cannot be content, like Feuerbach, with an explanation of Christianity as a phenomenon, as every explanation is reductive, and we will risk failing to see the exploratory and effectively productive aspects within Christianity. Baldly stated, my question here is as follows: is Christianity’s productive capacity – what lays within its power to develop within man – now exhausted?
I will steer clear, then, of these three well-trodden paths, all leading through the sole plain of belief. I will guard against bringing Christianity into the sphere of reason, which will seek to steer it towards a more generally acceptable ethical good sense – though this once had the merit of drawing Europe out of dogmatic and bloody conflicts. I will also not do the reverse and set Christianity against reason, finding justification in its aura of mystery – though this once served to emancipate subjectivity, primarily from the sclerotic rationality to which the Enlightenment had led. Finally, I will not be content to explain Christianity, and fail in my analysis of its “essence” to grasp what it might promote in terms of existence –
