Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

40. Presence

40 Presence This both is and is not your grandmother’s religion. Regardless of age, the work of practicing clichés is the same, even if the clichés differ. On our knees, in the pew, at the mountain top, ‘‘we are not only undergoing a change in experience among others, but a change in the pulse and tempo of experience’’ (TF 29). Different objects circulate in different times and different places, but the tone and tempo of religion stay the same. Religion is always ordinary, attentive, contemporaneous. Off the shelf, practiced, religion feels familiar. Spirit is uncannily natural. Perhaps this is why Latour says ‘‘I always feel more at home with purely naturalistic accounts than with this sort of hypocritical tolerance that ghettoizes religion into a form of nonsense specialized in transcendence and ‘feel good’ inner sentiment’’ (TF 34). Iconoclasts and idolaters alike are welcome to keep their pop psychology and sci-fi musings to themselves. Churches are neither 155 movie theaters nor reliquaries. They do not traffic in entertainment , fantasy, or nostalgia. ‘‘Religion, in the tradition I want to render present again, has nothing to do with subjectivity , nor with transcendence, nor with irrationality, and the last thing it needs is tolerance from open-minded and charitable intellectuals who want to add to the true but dry facts of science, the deep and charming ‘supplement of soul’ provided by quaint religious feelings’’ (TF 34–35). The objects of science are neither obvious nor dry, and Spirit is anything but a pious, hypothetical supplement to an indifferent , object-poor universe. For Latour, ‘‘religion in general is not about long lasting substances’’ and he is amused by the idea that ‘‘religion has anything to do with dreams of an afterworld’’ (TS 231). The point of religion is to wake up. ‘‘The dream of going to another world is just that: a dream, and probably also a deep sin’’ (WS 473). On Latour’s account, the test for religious competence is clear. ‘‘If, when hearing about religion, you direct your attention to the far away, the above, the supernatural, the infinite, the distant, the transcendent, the mysterious, the misty, the sublime, the eternal, chances are that you have not even begun to be sensitive to what religious talk tries to involve you in’’ (TF 32). Religion has no interest in selling you insurance or in telling you something you don’t already know. It does not want to teach you or inform you. Religion wants to change you. It wants to render you sensitive to the passing worlds already hard upon you. ‘‘Information talk is one thing, transformation talk is another’’ and religion is about the latter, not the former (TF 29). When it comes to religious talk, ‘‘one does not attempt to decrypt it as if it transported a message, but as if it transformed the messengers themselves’’ (TF 29). Hearing Spirit whisper is like hearing the voice of your lover. ‘‘What happens to you, would you say, when you are addressed by love-talk? Very 156 Presence simply put: you were far, you are now closer’’ (TF 30). What happens when you are addressed by religious talk? Simply put, you were far and now you are closer. ‘‘In the same way as the word ‘close’ captures the different ways space is now inhabited, it is the word ‘present’ that now seems the best way to capture what happens to you: you are present again and anew to one another’’ (TF 30). Prayer puts you back in your seat—again and again—until you arrive where you are, acknowledge its grace, and, like father Abraham, say ‘‘Here I am.’’ Borne into the present, you are born again. Trailing caul, you stumble into the presence of both the objects that circulate in you and the persons that circulate through you. Formerly indifferent by-standers, now visibly near, get transubstantiated into neighbors. ‘‘It is religion that attempts to access the this-worldly in its most radical presence, that is you, now, here transformed into a person who cares about the transformation of the indifferent other into a close neighbor, into the near by, into le prochain’’ (WS 464–465). This is the heart of it for Latour. By attending to the ordinary, religion ‘‘performs persons in presence ’’ (TS 216). In the presentation of the lover, the enemy, the neighbor, the stranger, the child, you may be moved to borrow...