Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

34. God

34 God By redistributing grace to the multitude, Latour has redistributed religion as well. As a practical matter, this move may do little more than clarify and emphasize the work religious objects have been doing all along. Spirit and grace and charity abide robustly in the object-oriented pews. But in principle, many may balk at Latour’s failure to treat religion as, in the end, animated solely by the Alpha and Omega himself. Latour, though, is willing to stand with the pluriverse and cut his losses. He cannot turn back now. The very premise of an object-oriented metaphysics excludes the possibility of a traditional, omnipotent, impassible, wholly transcendent God who created the world out of nothing. On Latour’s view, such a God is the template for every brand of conspiratorial reductionism, be it religious or secular . God, if he does or will exist, is an object, one among 132 many, who suffers the grace of resistant availability like the objects that compose him. What, then, do we do with God? ‘‘Whitehead’s conclusion is inescapable: if an all powerful God is no longer understandable , it should be replaced by a powerless God; indeed, if God itself is an obvious obstacle to religious understanding , God should be declared dead’’ (TS 228). For Latour, there is neither malice nor nihilism in this declaration . There is only a matter-of-fact and deeply religious pragmatism. It may be, Latour suggests, that ‘‘exactly in the same way that Paul declared circumcision to be no longer the sign of a pious soul, belief in God should be discarded’’ (TS 228). Paul doesn’t abandoned circumcision as a way of avoiding the religious gesture, but as a way of repeating it. Religious practices and instruments are just as resonant in relation to a secular world as they were to a medieval one. One takes belief in God for granted, the other doesn’t, but both grapple with the enabling grace that multitudes of competing objects continually press upon them. Why think that an ordinary belief in God makes religion any easier? Why think that ordinary disbelief makes religion any more difficult? ‘‘The message of religion was never more at ease in the ordinary belief in God of the former centuries than it is in the secular atheism of the present age’’ (TS 228). Either way, Latour’s argument is that religion never was about belief , naı̈ve or absurd. Belief is a lure, a shiny, spinning distraction . Faith, in contrast, is the work to which religion calls us. If the aim of religious practices is to enact, again, the nearness of what is too close to be visible, then we must always begin again from the ordinary ground upon which we stand. If this ground is secular, that is neither your fault nor mine, but we must not claim it as an excuse for our God 133 own laziness. ‘‘Christians take as proof of the tediousness and decadence of this age what is in fact the result of their own laziness in pursuing the translation task of their fathers’’ (TS 228). There are nothing but translations all the way down. If contemporary religion reminds us a bit too strongly of a dry well or gaily painted sepulcher, this is not the fault of the age in which we live. It is the result of our unwillingness to do the only kind of work that has ever been done: the work of repeating, copying, translating, concatenating , aligning, porting, processing, and negotiating the whole settlement, from the top, again. Religion works crosswise to theism or atheism. When, Latour asks, ‘‘will we be able to entertain a coherent form of atheism, that is to accept that the ordinary way of talking about religion today is through common sense atheism, which performs the same role as the common sense powerful Gods of a bygone past?’’ (TS 232). Atheism is not an objection against but an invitation to religious work. Theologians should not shun but on the contrary embrace the formidable chance provided by a thoroughly secularized spirit to say that there is no powerful, omniscient , omnipresent Creator God, no providence, that God does not exist (or maybe does not exist yet, as Whitehead could argue), and to see in those common sense features of ordinary talk the expression, the power of religion which may start exactly as freshly as it once did, when it...