Science is Heavenly, Religion is Earthy:
Bruno Latour and an Object-Oriented Approach to Theology

Remarks for the Korean translation of Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

Adam S. Miller

To study the Way is to study the self,
to study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is
to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.
—Dōgen Zenji

1. Introduction

Going on forty years now, I’ve spent three hours in church nearly every Sunday. That’s close to 6000 hours. In all that dedicated time I’ve never seen or heard or felt anything supernatural. My experience seems to be more the rule than the exception.

If the aim of a Sunday service is to open a live line to deep space, then religion is an epic failure. Either our songs and rituals don’t work or we’re doing them wrong. Neither scenario is encouraging.

But there may be something else. It may be that our sermons and sacraments do work but that they are successfully doing a different kind of work, front and center, that, because it’s so obvious, is harder to see.

The question is: if my weekly trip to that pew never convokes any special-effects-worthy theophanies, then what does it do? What does happen at church?

This way of posing the question is itself worth thinking about. What’s going on in my assessment of religion if my measure for it is billion dollar budget, Hollywood-grade science fiction? If the heavens are now clearly the province of science (and or fiction), then maybe we should seriously consider whether we’ve confused things from the start.

On this score, Bruno Latour may be right. If I want to know about the sun and the moon and the stars, I turn to science. But if I want to connect with the ordinary world at my feet, I go to church. On this account, it’s science that’s heavenly and religion that’s earthy.

2. Latour’s Approach

To see where Latour is coming from, we’ll have to start with the assumption that truths are not found or reflected but made. That is, truths are built.

Clearly, this way of talking breaks with some common sense assumptions about truth. It runs afoul of two assumptions in particular: first, that there is only one neatly preformatted world shared by all, and second, that truths are then just accurate reflections of what has already been decided.

Forget this picture for a moment. Let’s experiment with a different model.

At Latour’s urging, let’s begin instead by assuming a plurality of co-eternal agents. Further, let’s claim (1) that agency goes all the way down such that “to exist” is “to be an agent,” (2) that agents are not timeless, self-contained atoms but messy, dynamic assemblages of other agents, (3) that a world is an active assemblage of agents, not a preformatted container, and (4) that there are, as a result, worlds without number.

For Latour, metaphysics is not vertical but horizontal, not single but multiple, not global but local, not centralized but distributed, not pure but messy, not strong but weak, not royal but democratic, not atemporal but historical, not original but recycled.

On this model, truths are not reflections of the one true world. Rather, truths are one way of talking about the hard work of making new worlds and assembling new coalitions of agents. Truth-making is the work of creation. It is ontological rather than epistemological. It is the work of building bridges between agents who do not come pre-assembled and of binding those agents together. Truths are coalitions painstakingly assembled and maintained.

Taking the word “object” as a generic term for every kind of existing thing, let’s say: every object is an agent, every agent is a coalition, and every coalition is a truth.

Truths, as coalitions, must be made. They must be built just as surely and just as materially as any freeway overpass or plumbed toilet. Truths are built by the concretion of agents in a common cause. Truths are not slick, top-down, univocal declarations. Rather, truths are hard-won, bottom-up, multilateral settlements.

Some truths are big, some are small. Some truths are dependable, some are fragile. Some truths are strong, some are weak. Some truths are easily portable, some are genre-dependent. The measure of a truth is not the passive vanity of an accurate reflection but the size, diversity, and cohesion of the crowd of agents that can be gathered to compose that truth and dependably endorse it.

Let me repeat these criteria: the relative strength of a truth is gauged by (1) the quantity of the agents gathered into its coalition, (2) the diversity of the agents (human and non-human, living and nonliving, material and formal, cultural and natural) gathered into its coalition, and (3) the durability of the settlement that collects them.

Truth is never all or nothing. There is no original “all” against which a truth can be measured and, so, truth is gauged instead by indexing its strength according to the quantity, diversity, and durability of its amassed support.

All truths are judged according to these same criteria. Science has no inherent advantage over poetry, history has no inherent advantage over mathematics, religion has no inherent advantage over politics, etc. All disciplines, despite variations in their strategies for coalition-building, must fashion the same kind of claim. They compete to fashion compromises capable of claiming as cooperators as many different kinds of agents as possible. Any truth that will fly is a truth that is, to whatever height it manages, true.

The world does not come preformatted. The world is a welter of competing agents and truth is a marketplace. When a truth emerges, it does so by negotiating cross-platform compatibilities from generally divergent arrays of actors.

Truths invite assent, they gather signatures, and they abridge collections of agents into functional simplifications. As operationalized simplifications, truths are never even entirely compatible with themselves let along with other truths. Every truth leaves a vast remainder.

In this sense, a truth, as a coalition, is an operationalized simplification. It takes what is many and sets it to work as one.

Say you want to make the case that the arctic ice cap is not melting at an alarming rate. There is nothing to stop you from trying. But this claim will only be as true as the quantity and diversity of cooperators it can durably claim. Producing statements that only some humans find persuasive won’t get you very far. If you want to speak truthfully about icebergs, then it is not enough to convince your fellow scientists, some influential politicians, or even a bevy of soccer moms. To have real traction you’ll need enough research grants, measurements, instruments, photos, outposts, statistics, charts, satellites, etc. to convince the icebergs themselves to line up behind what you have to say.

Similarly, if you want to make claims about honey, you’re alignment of agents will have to queue not just bee-keepers, but flowers and hives and bees as well. The more bees that agree, the more substantial your claim becomes. Nonhuman actors get every bit as much a say in the composition of a truth as humans do. In fact, the durability of a truth depends primarily on the quantity of the nonhuman agents that counter-claim our work because nonhumans tend to be significantly less gullible than people are. People tend to be suckers – especially for authority. But when it comes to truth, appeals to authority carry only as much weight as the masses that such authority can muster.

Blanket appeals to truths sponsored by absent gods, angels, Platonic forms, natural laws, or noumenal things-in-themselves have no force. Truth is the product of a mundane democracy, not the province of a magic kingdom. In order to vote, you have to show up at the polling place. No one gets a veto. The work of making truths – the work engaged in by scientists, lawyers, teachers, doctors, politicians, religious leaders, and entrepreneurs alike – is simply to get out the vote. There are no metaphysical shortcuts for skirting this work.

Say you want to make a normative claim about how things should be rather than a descriptive claim about how things are. The work is the same. Morals and values and obligations are truths that cannot be set aside. But, like all truths, they too are messy, historically situated, localized, ad hoc, and emergent agreements. They too are the provisional product of ongoing, bottom-up negotiations between however many agents are involved.

Or say you want to offer a brilliant reading of the book of Genesis that requires the Earth to be just six thousand years old. I have no objection to this. You are welcome to try. But it is not enough to convince a subset of humans to go along with your reading. Nonhumans must be convinced too. The opinion of a fossil matters. Carbon-14 gets a say. DNA has a voice. Geological formations can’t be discounted. If 4.5 billion years worth of rocks and weather and radioactive decay disagree, then your reading is seriously hamstrung.

The irony of “literal” readings that discounts the material agency of actual rocks and actual words is that they flirts with nihilism. A reading of the book of Genesis doesn’t fail to be true if it fails to flawlessly repeat. It fails to be true when it no longer bothers to take both words and rocks seriously as agents with independent histories, trajectories, weaknesses, and frictions of their own. Reading is not qualitatively different from photosynthesis or mitosis or cloud formation. The measure of a biblical interpretation is simply: what agents does it convoke, how many, of what variety, and for how long? There is no original meaning to recover. There are only agents to be persuaded – again and again.

The necessity of this work is not to be regretted. The world is not such that constructing truths takes us farther from the things themselves. And the world is not such that extracting ourselves from the messy work of making truths moves us closer to the things. Rather, because the real is itself characterized by a plurality of competing construction projects, a plurality of competing truths is just part and parcel of that ontological work that builds real bridges between real agents.

Take science as an example. A multiplicity of competing and not entirely compatible scientific truths [QUOTE]

does not mean that scientists don’t know what they are doing and that everything is just fiction, but rather [it means that we have to be able] to pry apart exactly what the ready-made notion of “natural objective matters of fact” had conflated too fast, namely reality, unity, and indisputability. When you look for the first, you don’t automatically get the two others. And this has nothing to do with ‘interpretive flexibility’ allowed by ‘multiple points of view’ taken on the ‘same’ thing. It is the thing itself that has been allowed to be deployed as multiple and thus allowed to be grasped through different viewpoints. (Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, 116) [END QUOTE]

The fact that our truths never do better than an only partially compatible multiplicity does not mean that we’ve failed to grasp the real because we failed to capture the simple “unity” of the world itself. Exactly the opposite is the case: if we do not begin with the metaphysical assumption that the world is a simple unity, then our multiplicity of only partially compatible truths becomes a token of the fact that we are connecting with the multiplicity of the real itself.

The relativity and partial compatibility of our truths does not derive from our cracked perception of the real, it derives from the nature of the real itself. Truth is not an epistemological problem, it is an ontological work.

3. The Principle of Irreduction

That brief run at Latour’s notion of truth puts us in a position to better appreciate the centerpiece of Latour’s approach. This centerpiece is called “the principle of irreduction.”

Latour’s version of the principle of irreduction looks like this: “Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else” (PF 158). Here, while it is true that no object is entirely reducible to any other object, it is also true that no object is free from being reducible, in part, to other objects.

Because we are unable to entirely reduce objects to some single metaphysical generality, objects can’t be accounted for in advance. But because each object is composed of and in relation with a multitude of other objects, every object can be partially reduced to other objects by such simple means as testing, counting, and measuring.

The brilliance of Latour’s formula shows up, I think, in how it balances reduction and irreduction. On my account, as an axiom, it makes two distinguishable but related claims:

Given an original multiplicity, (1) no object can be entirely reduced without remainder to any other object or set of objects, and (2) no object is a priori exempt from being reducible in part to any other object or set of objects.

The first part of the principle bans the One and ensures multiplicity because it prevents a complete unification of objects under any given heading. Every relation will always entail an unsubsumed remainder. The One as a totality is banned. The second part of the principle ensures the possibility of overlap and communicability. No multiple is exempt from being reducible in part to other multiples. In principle, anything can enter into some kind of relation with anything else. Here, the One as a sovereign exception exempt from relation is banned.

Latour doesn’t explicitly describe things this way, but we might succinctly summarize the two halves of the principle of irreduction in terms of (1) resistance, and (2) availability. Every object resists relation even as every object is available for it. No objects are wholly resistant and no objects are entirely available. Objects are constituted as such by this double-bind of resistant availability. Resistant availability both necessitates and makes possible work.

If an object exists, then it exists as the only provisional unity of an only partially compatible set of relationships. Objects can neither substitute themselves for their parts in some global fashion nor can they be substituted for. Objects, though real and available, are irreducibly messy. Every object is, like pi, an irrational number.

4. Science and Religion

Granted the principle of irreduction, what, then, happens to how we think about the difference between science and religion? According to Latour, both science and religion are engaged in the same work of making objects phenomenologically visible.

In terms of the principle of irreduction, the visibility of an object will depend on the varying degrees of resistance and availability that characterize it relative to a given line of sight. Developing an image depends on optimizing the balance between an object’s resistance and its availability. Objects that are either too resistant or too available will fail to appear. Both the unavailable and the acquiescent tend toward invisibility. In one case, the object is too distant, too opaque, too transcendent. In the other, it is too close, too transparent, too immanent.

Science and religion differ in that they address two different kinds of invisibility. Where science aims to illuminate resistant but insufficiently available objects, religion aims to illuminate available but insufficiently resistant phenomena. Science is a third-person exposition of the unavailable. Religion is a first-person phenomenology of the obvious.

Or: science corrects for our nearsightedness, religion for our farsightedness.

Mark this distribution. On Latour’s account the field of religion is immanence, the discipline of science is transcendence.

With this distribution of work, Latour means to untangle religion from the web of vestigial expectations that now only serve to hamper it. In defending religion, he says, “I am not longing for the old power of what was in effect not religion but a mixture of everything,” politics, science, philosophy, mythology, psychology, art, etc. (TS 217). Rather than being royalty, it is enough for religion to be one among many “different types of truth generators” or “regimes of enunciation” that help relate and articulate the multitude of objects at work in the world (TF 28). Ultimately, though, Latour’s originality lies less in his attempt to identify a more modest but still viable role for religion than in his striking redistribution of its responsibilities in relation to science.

Latour finds the commonly assigned division of labor between science and religion to be laughable.

What a comedy of errors! When the debate between science and religion is staged, adjectives are almost exactly reversed: it is of science that one should say that it reaches the invisible world of the beyond, that she is spiritual, miraculous, soul-lifting, uplifting. And it is religion that should be qualified as local, objective, visible, mundane, unmiraculous, repetitive, obstinate, sturdy. (TF 36)

It is the work of science to build fragile bridges of carefully constructed, painstakingly tested, and incessantly extended chains of reference. It is science that gropes out into the dark beyond and bring us into relation with the distant and the transcendent. It is science that funds the miraculous, defends the counterintuitive, excavates the unbelievable, and negotiates with the resistant and unavailable.

But the invisibility of the resistant and transcendent is only one kind of invisibility. The invisibility of the available, obvious, familiar, local, repetitive, sturdy, matter of fact phenomena remains. This invisibility, while quite different in character, is just as difficult to breach. “The far away is just as foreign, just as difficult to reach, just as unrealistic, and I would add just as unreasonable as the nearby” (WS 465). Confusion results when it is assumed that all invisibility is reducible to a single kind, accessible from a single line of sight. In particular, confusion results when it is assumed that the invisibility proper to religious phenomena is identical to that of scientific phenomena.

On Latour’s telling, though the analogy is mine, the story of our common confusion about science and religion goes like this. To great applause, science works out dependable methods that correct for our near-sightedness and bring into focus distant, transcendent phenomena. However, full of its own success and egged on by religious pretensions, science can’t help but draw some unflattering conclusions about its neighbors. Science borrows some spectacles from religion (spectacles meant to correct for our far-sightedness), puts them on, and then loudly complains that these glasses are useless. Seen through these lenses, all of science’s hard-earned, transcendent objects have suddenly become blurry or disappeared altogether.

The mistaken assumption that commonly follows—for many religious people and scientists alike—is that religious talk, because it does not directly address the transcendent objects articulated by science, must then be referring to “an invisible world of belief” that is even more distant, even more transcendent, even more miraculous, than the one science itself is articulating (HI 433).

As a result, both science and religion get backed into a corner. Scientists think such religious talk about the super-transcendent is ridiculous and many religious folk feel compelled by the strength of their own practice—knowing that religion does in fact bring something crucial into focus—to make a public virtue out of believing in the super-absurd.

“Belief,” claims Latour in response, “is a caricature of religion exactly as knowledge is a caricature of science” (TF 45). Both of these caricatures need to be abandoned. Science doesn’t deal with obvious facts any more than religion deals with magical beliefs and “the fights, reconciliations, ceasefires between these two ‘worldviews’ are as instructive as a boxing match in a pitch black tunnel” (WS 464).

The difference between science and religion would not be found in the different mental competencies brought to bear on two different realms—‘belief’ applied to vague spiritual matters, ‘knowledge’ to directly observable things—but in the same broad set of competencies applied to two chains of mediators going in two different directions. The first chain leads toward what is invisible because it is simply too far and too counterintuitive to be directly grasped—namely, science; the second chain, the religious one, also leads to the invisible but what it reaches is not invisible because it would be hidden, encrypted, and far, but simply because it is difficult to renew. (TF 46)

The same competencies needed to be good at science are those needed to be good at religion. The practitioner needs patience, modesty, persistence, curiosity, concentration, generosity, creativity, rigor, care, and, of course, an objective bent.

As commonly understood, neither knowledge nor belief describes the work of science or religion. Both science and religion require the same competencies and both science and religion produce the same output. Both induce revelation. However, where science reveals transcendent objects by correcting for our myopia, religion reveals immanent objects by correcting for our hyperopia.

5. Evolution

Let’s take evolution as a case study.

In the same way that religion gets into trouble when it tries to out-science science, science gets into trouble when it tries to out-religion religion. This is particularly true when science apes a traditional view of religion as something that is all things to all people, a mixture of everything, and the final word on all of it.

This traditional take on religion models for science all the key features of the bad kind of reductionism that Latour abhors. Science, to the degree that it explains objects by neatly and completely reducing them to other objects, plays at being God and, thus, remains fundamentally “religious” in orientation. Even if self-identified as secular or atheist, this kind of reductionism remains religious because “reductionism and religion always go hand in hand: religious religion, political religion, scientific religion” (PF 190).

The principle of irreduction is a crucial, methodological safeguard against this misstep. Without the modesty axiomatically imposed by this principle, both religion and science remain susceptible to seduction by the ur-fantasy of a smooth, simple, and total reduction of objects to some single, original macro-force.

According to Latour, religious people and scientists tend to butt heads on the issue of evolution, not because their positions are so far apart, but because they are so similar. Both tend to reduce the phenomena of evolution to the labor of an external macro-force that robs the multitude of objects of responsibility for their own work.

The problem, according to Latour, is that “neither neo-Darwinists nor creationists have digested the radical news that organisms themselves make up their own meanings” (WS 469). The result is that living, evolving organisms never come into focus as such. Rather, organisms become, on the one hand, simply local puppets of the blind and fatal operation of large-scale forces of efficient causality, or, on the other hand, just local puppets of the caring and intentional deployment of a divinely designed final cause.

“One is a blind cause acting from behind and reaching into the optimum haphazardly; the other an intelligence dragging organisms toward the optimum by some predefined plans: But they are still two engineers who master what they do. Watchmakers they were, watchmakers they remain” (WS 469).

Both miss what makes an organism alive.

To be sure, the differences between a force a tergo and a final cause is important, but this difference pales in comparison with the fact that in the two arguments organisms are erased as individual actors and are transformed into carriers of indisputable necessities. The creativity which seeps in at the gaps and discontinuities faced by each organism as it sustains, perpetuates, and reproduces itself has all but disappeared. What was so radical in Darwin’s discovery, that each individual organism, without a Blind or Intelligent Watchmaker, without an optimum, without a plan, without a cause (final or efficient), without any Providence of any sort (religious or rational), had to face the vertiginous risks of reproduction, has been thoroughly lost in the fight between Science and Religion. (WS 469)

In this sense, the force of Darwin’s discovery ends up getting absorbed and dispersed without effect by both parties. Both science and religion, especially in the confusion of their cross-accusations, risk missing the revelation of what Darwin’s work made visible in the unfolding of life itself: the priority, mobility, diversity, sufficiency, and irreducibility of the multitude.

Here, evolution blooms as a cascading by-product of the way that individual organisms are responsible for continually performing, repeating, and reproducing themselves. The character of objects

was unavoidably obvious to the eyes of evolutionary biologists. Here, billions of entities undergo the risks of repetition across gaps and discontinuities in time and descent that no transportation of indisputable necessities could cover up. They face lots of causes and lots of effects to be sure but at every point there are masses of invention that intervene, so that causes and consequences don’t match one another so well. Creativity, seeping in at every juncture, jumped out at the naturalists. (WS 468)

Darwin revealed, in paradigmatic fashion, the welling creativity that sets worlds of objects in motion. Darwin, in the thick of it with the objects themselves, was doing world class science, rendering the distant and difficult visible and available. In order to be faithful to this same field of labor, science must avoid trying to be religious in a way that even religion is not.

Latour argues that the same should go for religion. What if religion, rather than always opposing, qualifying, or assimilating evolution, simply began again with an acknowledgment that this is the ordinary, commonplace way of talking in the contemporary world?

What would happen, Latour asks, “if religion is now called back on stage, not to encounter nature (it is gone for good) but a world consisting of entities undertaking the risky business of sustaining and perpetuating themselves?” (WS 467). What would happen if religion took this native agency for granted? The result would be an object-oriented theology. But what, then, if biologists, in turn, encountered an object-oriented theology? “What would have happened had biologists encountered a religion that would have helped them protect evolution from being re-packaged into a spurious transcendence, a spurious spirituality of designers (Blind or Intelligent)?” (WS 470)

For Latour, it’s obvious that “religion could have been the best way to protect evolution (or more generally Reproduction) against any kidnapping (and search for overarching meaning or optimum)” (WS 470). Religion and science could have teamed-up to put such conspiracy theories to rest. Given such a scenario, both Darwin and his wife might have slept more soundly.

6. Belief

Let’s turn our full attention, then, to religion.

On the above model, religion is objective. It is made of objects, practiced by objects, and practiced for the revelation of objects. When estranged from its objective character, religion plays as a ridiculous parody. In Latour’s view, no single mistake does more to reinforce this bitter parody than thinking that religion is about “belief.”

Belief is not a religious idea. Belief is a stopgap explanation imposed on religion by those unable to see the too-immanent objects that animate it. “The notion of belief is the projection on religious mediators of the trajectory of information-transfer ones” (HI 433).

Looking through the lens of science for the distant and transcendent phenomena of religion and finding none, the assumption is that religion must be make-believe. Sticking to the premise that there is just one kind of invisibility, what choice is there but to think that religion must be about believing in super-absent stuff?

Before our eyes, a nonreligious belief in religious belief is born. “Belief in belief is thus a charitable construction using the method of science to understand what it is to access something far away in space-time, except that there is no terminus. Belief is an imitation of knowledge without ground” (TS 231).

Religion, taken as a poor man’s science, is found to be poor science. “We might,” Latour says, “think of ‘belief’ as the imitation of an instrument to access that which is far away—but without the instrument!” (WS 465) Religion is just like science, we’re told, except without the instruments one would need to see actually transcendent objects. Which is to say that religion is not like science at all. “To put it more polemically,” Latour continues, “the only believers are the ones, immersed in scientific networks, who believed that the others believed in something” (HI 433). Thus dispatched, religion falls under the wheels of an unmitigated reductionism.

The one thing that isn’t allowed is for religious objects to speak on their own behalf. The critique forgets to include its own reduction. “The modernists and postmodernists, in all their efforts at critique, have left belief, the untouchable center of their courageous enterprises, untouched. They believe in belief. They believe that people naively believe” (PH 275). The result is that religious issues get painted as fundamentally epistemological in character and belief, as naïve, gets cast as a model of uncritical passivity.

Religion, divided from objects by the traditional claim, anathema to Latour, that the world is one thing and our beliefs another, is left to either hide inside people’s heads or get folded into the emptiness of deep space.

Religion (and I still mean by that term what has been elaborated by Christian theologies and rituals) never had much luck with nature. Where nature enters, religion has to leave. And when it leaves, it leaves for good because it has only two equally fatal exit strategies: one is to limit itself to the inner sanctum of the soul; the other to flee into the supernatural. These two solutions mean that the world of nature is abandoned to itself: in the first one a disembodied human soul will be what is left to the care of ever shrinking spiritual concerns; as for the second exit, it is even more counter-productive since it means that religion will try in vain to imitate scientific instruments, the very efficient vehicles that have been arrayed to access the far away and the invisible. (WS 465)

These exit routes are dead ends, not only for religion but for science. “Why not say,” Latour argues, “that in religion what counts are the beings that make people act, just as every believer has always insisted? That would be more empirical, perhaps more scientific, more respectful, and much more economical” (RS 235).

There is no need to go around insisting that religious objects be pushed “into the minds of the believers or into their fecund imaginations, or to embed them even deeper, in a rather perverse and crooked unconscious. Why not leave them where they were, that is, among the multiplicity of nonhumans?” (PH 284)

It is doubtless true that religious phenomena are susceptible to partial reduction by scientific analysis—all objects are—but even this kind of analysis will have nothing to work with until it enfranchises religious objects. Religious objects must be allowed—both by scientists and by religious folk—to speak on their own behalf. Religious objects must be treated as agents going about their own distinctively religious kind of work. This work, like all work, involves grappling with the double-bind of resistant availability, but with its own trajectory.

If I insisted on forcing a religious object into “the procrustean bed of information transfer,” Latour says, “I would have deformed it, transmogrified it into an absurd belief, the sort of belief that weighs religion down and lets it slide toward the refuse heap of past obscurantism” (TF 33). This kind of disposal demonstrates nothing except the absurdity of the original move to discount the agency of religious objects.

Religion aims at illuminating objects that are too near rather than too far. Religion is the work of making-present what is already available. Religious narratives, rather than conveying us to some distant place, are meant to enact the nearness of what is already given. Enacting this nearness is the key to redeeming the present and unveiling grace. “The truth-value of those stories depends on us tonight, exactly as the whole history of two lovers depends on their ability to re-enact the injunction to love again in the minute they are reaching for one another in the darker moment of their estrangement” (TF 33).

This kind of religious work involves certain minimal instruments and practices, but these instruments and practices are not those of science. Religious instruments, though they require the same broad set of competencies, are of a different sort. Latour refers to this work of re-enacting, of taking-up and making-present again what is already given, the work of “forming a procession.” Religious objects process. They make visible the available. Like angels, they “proceed” from the seat of grace, welcome us into its invisible but available presence, and thereby save both us and them.

In this sense, Latour says, “that which layers and forms processions, I will call angel in contrast to that which aligns and maintains networks, which I call instrument” (TS 225). Angels do not pass through the door of belief. There is, here, in the work of angels, no religious object whose absence would require belief. “Religion should not and never was defined by belief in things absent and distant, invisible and beyond. God is not the object of a belief-action” (TS 231). Rather, religion requires something of an entirely different order. It requires that I be faithful to the grace of what has already been made available. Only this fidelity can redeem the present of presence. Religious work depends, of course, on faith, but “faith and belief have nothing to say to one another” (TS 231).

7. Spirit

Latour’s claim, then, is that, in order to understand the revelatory force of religion, we must allow religious objects to speak for themselves. This means both making room for dismissed objects and stemming the backwash of scientific expectations into religious self-understanding.

Between the iconoclasm of a scientific approach to religious objects that dismisses them and the idolatry of a religious burlesque that freezes them, Latour advocates what he calls “iconophilia.” Iconophilia is an approach to religious objects that allows what is too near, too immanent, too available to be made visible in them. It is an approach to religious objects that allows the objects themselves to be simultaneously the targets and agents of revelation.

In contrast to the iconophile, both the iconoclast and the idolater succumb to the drive for purity and exhaustive reduction. Both dream of a world without mediation and, as a result, obscure the real objects at work. Further, both discount the double-bind of resistant availability.

The idolater dreams of perfectly opaque objects that have no overflowing sets of constitutive but partially incompatible objects packed-away inside. In this way, the idolater denies that the object refers and reduces it to its face-value.

Similarly, the iconoclast dreams of perfectly transparent objects that, with clean efficiency, convey us without deformation to the “real” objects behind them. “The iconoclast dreams of an unmediated access to truth, of a complete absence of images” (HI 421). In this way, the iconoclast reduces the object to its cash-value. The iconoclast empties religious objects first by treating them as if they were frictionless signs and then by declaiming that they can’t find any of the transcendent objects to which they putatively refer.

On this account, religious objects are just signs for something else, not agents in their own right. And, because this something else is missing, religious objects are empty signs. “The iconoclast is able to empty the world of all its inhabitants by turning them into representations, while filling it up with continuous mechanical matter” (PH 285). For the iconoclast, religious objects are just empty husks, hard candy shells without any promise of a sweet chocolate center.

But the iconoclast’s disappointment is a product of their naiveté about objects in general. “If the iconoclast could naively believe that believers exist who are naïve enough to endow a stone with spirit,” Latour argues, “it was because the iconoclast also naively believed that the very facts he employed to shatter the idol could exist without the help of any human agency” (PH 274). Iconoclasts fail to understand the nature of religious objects not because there is something peculiarly religious about them, but because they fail to understand the nature of objects per se.

People who buy the iconoclastic account of religion—an account that casts religion as having defaulted on its promise to deliver some transcendent collateral—may still try to cook up some positive account of religion in terms of symbols. Religion, they say, is fine without objects because at heart it is “symbolic.”

Latour does not find this tack to be an improvement. It still disassociates religion from its actual objects. “The symbolic is the magic of those who have lost the world. It is the only way they have found to maintain ‘in addition’ to ‘objective things’ the ‘spiritual atmosphere’ without which things would ‘only’ be ‘natural’” (PF 187).

A symbol is a watered-down supplement to the bare objects of the natural world. It is a hint of rouge for the sake of color. But this supplement comes too late because once the bare objects of the natural world have arrived, it is the lively character of the objects themselves that has been lost. “There is no difference between those who reduce, on the one hand, and those who want a supplement of the soul, on the other. The two groups are the same. When they reduce everything to nothing, they feel that all the rest escapes them. They therefore seek to hold onto it with ‘symbols’” (PF 187). Denied objects, religion must make do with dressed-up platitudes, colorful symbols, and the curation of quaint values.

Caught between the antiquated language of medieval metaphysics and the misapplication of scientific expectations, religious folk may themselves often do a poor job of describing what is going on in religious practices. But the practices tell a different story.

When they speak, those who are religious put the cart before the horse. However, in practice, they act quite differently. They claim that frescoes, stained glass windows, prayers and genuflections are simply ways of approaching God, his distant reflection. Yet they have never stopped building churches and arranging bodies in order to create a focal point for the potency of the divine. The mystics know well that if all the elements that are said to be pointers are abandoned, then all that is left is the horrible night of Nada. A purely spiritual religion would rid us of religion. To kill the letter is to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. (PF 213)

Religious objects are not symbolic intermediaries that passively reflect a distant, primordially transcendent God. What happens at church revolves around an experience of revelation, an unveiling of presence and grace, but no transcendent objects get delivered to view. Nothing resistant to relation gets made visible by religious practices grounded in the active banality of religious objects.

To expect a modest arrangement of people and frescoes and bread and hard wooden pews to do what the Hubble telescope does and lay down a through-line to deep space is to court pretty certain disappointment. But to think that a modest arrangement of these objects has no disclosive power is to miss religious phenomena altogether. Religious practices do not, like scientific practices, send us far away. Religious practices work in the opposite direction: they ratchet us down and in. They display the invisible grace of what was already available. Saying a prayer isn’t like flying off to an exotic locale, it’s like squishing your toes down through layers of mud.

Every object is a kind of icon that bears rather than reflects the mobile presence of the other objects that constitute it. Iconophilia skirts both iconoclasm and idolatry in its patient solicitation of the icon. “Iconophilia is respect not for the image itself but for the movement of the image,” for “the movement, the passage, the transition from one form of image to another” (HI 421). Iconophilia is a willingness to stay with objects. It doesn’t simply avail itself of an available object, it enacts a nearness to it.

8. Practicing Myopia

As Latour tells it, then, religion is what corrects for our farsightedness. It addresses the invisibility of objects that are commonly too familiar, too available, too immanent to be seen. To this end, it intentionally cultivates nearsightedness. Religion practices myopia and redemption turns on this revelation.

The fundamental work of religion is to bring grace into focus. Double-bound, grace has two faces. On the one hand, grace presents as the ceaseless work required by the multitude’s resistance. On the other hand, grace presents as the unavoidable suffering imposed by our passibility. Work is grace seen from the perspective of resistance. Suffering is grace seen from the perspective of availability. Hell is when the grace of either slips from view. Work and suffering are the two faces of grace.

On this account, sin is a refusal of grace. It is a refusal of this double-bind. It is a refusal to be present. It is a desire to go away, to be done once and for all with the necessity of negotiation, to be finally free from the imposing demands of others. Sin denies both the graciousness of the world’s resistance and the graciousness of it’s own availability. It can see neither work nor suffering as the gifts that jointly constitute the object that it is. Sin does not want to be dependent on a grace it cannot control and it does not want to be impinged on by a grace it did not request. Sin wants the given to be something other than given.

The business of religion is “to disappoint, first, to disappoint” (TF 32). Religion aims to intentionally, relentlessly, and systematically disappoint this desire to go away by bringing our attention back to the most obvious features of the most ordinary objects. Its work is to bring us up short by revealing our desire to be done with the double-bind of grace. To disappoint this drive, “to divert it, break it, subvert it, to render it impossible, is just what religious talk is after” (TF 32).

Habitually, we smooth over the rough edges, downplay the incompatible lines, and fantasize that the relative availability of an object depends on something other than the unruly mobs packed-away inside. But in religious practices, “incredible pain has been taken to break the habitual gaze of the viewer” (TF 39). Great effort is expended to show work and suffering as something other than regrettable.

“Religion, in this tradition, does everything to constantly redirect attention by systematically breaking the will to go away, to ignore, to be indifferent, blasé, bored” (TF 36).

Mark this definition: religion is what breaks our will to go away.

This revelation of the ordinary as a grace already given, as a life already being lived, is nothing exceptional, but it is something that must be enacted. It is a revelation that must be practiced. Attention is difficult to exercise, it resists focus and is available for distraction. It is a little bit subtle and requires great care. Religion, rather than fleeing, practices attending. It bends the flight of our attention back toward the ground that’s already bracing us.

By practicing attention, religion repopulates the world. In the mundane work of everyday life, it brings back into view how even the simplest gestures require the cooperation of a multitude of objects.

Redistributing responsibility is crucial to revealing grace at work in the world. The wealth of grace seen is proportional to the amount of agency redistributed. In religion, our poverty “is not overcome by moving away from material experience . . . but closer to the much variegated lives materials have to offer” (RS 111-112).

As Latour puts it:

Religious talk, as we begin to see, cannot be about anything other than what is present. It is about the present, not about the past nor about the future. It speaks when we no longer strive for goals, far away places, novel information, strong interests, as though all had been replaced by a much stronger sort of urgency: it speaks of now, of us, of final achievements that are for now, not for later. (TS 232)

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