Rosenstock-Huessy

 “GOD IS THE SPEAKING VOICE”

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE THOUGHT OF

EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY

A few years ago, in the early days of the COVID kerfuffle, Alison Blunt, an English composer and musician, sent me a composition of hers in which she had incorporated, in my voice, a sentence I had recently spoken in an interview with Kristof Vanhoutte of the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking.  She and I began to correspond, and presently she sent me a PDF of The Christian Future by Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy and urged me to read it.  I had run across Rosenstock-Huessy’s name quite a few times over the years, most notably in legal historian Harold Berman’s magnificent Law and Revolution, in which Berman repeatedly acknowledges Rosenstock-Huessy as a formative influence on his thinking.  Reading Berman was an important epoch in my coming to understand that Ivan Illich’s intuition that “modernity can be studied as an extension of Church history” was not as eccentric as Illich sometimes supposed, and I made a note then to follow up with Rosenstock-Huessy some day.[1]  Alison’s nudge finally got me started, and I found The Christian Future so invigorating and inspiring that within a couple of years, I had read almost everything of Rosenstock-Huessy’s I could find in English.  The following essay is my tribute.  I wrote it, first, to test and consolidate my own understanding of Rosenstock-Huessy’s thought – it was one of his axioms that truth is what survives communication – and, beyond that, to share my findings with friends who might possibly find comparable inspiration.  Since many of these friends are fellows students and inheritors of Ivan Illich, I’ve begun with a brief prologue concerning the ways in which my encounter with Illich created the context in which I read Rosenstock-Huessy: 

In The Rivers North of the Future, Ivan Illich argues that “our present world can finally only be understood as a perversion of the New Testament,” or, alternately, “that modernity can be studied as an extension of Church history.” He paints this idea in bold, vivid strokes, but, at the same time, puts its forward quite tentatively.  He has offered, he says, only “a little pencil sketch of where I think I have been standing.”[2] His idea is not a finished theory, but only a tentatively offered “research hypothesis.”[3]  He is committed to his idea – “it would be wrong,” he thinks, “to allow [himself] to be deflected from this hypothesis” – but he characterizes it, even so, as no more than an inarticulate “stammering.”[4] Both his confidence and his reticence were genuine, I think.   One reason for his hesitation was the explosive, and easily misunderstood, implications of his idea for the reputation and standing of the Church – how easy it would be, as several friends pointed out to him, to assimilate his critique to old Protestant, and proto-Protestant, images of the Roman Church as Anti-Christ.  Another was the novelty of his sociology, a novelty which philosopher Charles Taylor recognizes in his preface to the book.  Theories of modernity, Taylor says, have tended to divide for and against – proponents arguing that modernity has successfully “secularized” Christianity, opponents insisting, on the contrary, that modernity has abandoned its faith.  Illich stands outside this dichotomy.  For him, modernity is neither the realization nor the rejection of Christianity but its perversion – an idea that suggests, not that we ought to choose a team, but rather that we are blind to the  origin of our way of life and so have no clear idea where we are, how we got here, or how we might eventually get to a more habitable place.  Illich is also novel, Taylor points out, in advancing this idea from within Christianity, as a man of faith, and in arguing that, though “the historical consequences of Christian belief” are manifest to all, there are also dimensions of the contemporary situation whose full meaning “only faith can discern.”[5] 

Illich died with the feeling that his ideas had found little echo outside of his immediate circle.  He said, of his thesis that the contemporary discourses of Life are rooted in “a perverse transmutation of…Christian vocation,” that he “had not even found a first conversational partner within any of the established churches.”[6]  In proposing that modern conceptions of technology could only have arisen “in a world conceived in the spirit of [the Christian doctrine] of contingency,” he thought that he was “pretty much alone among the historians of science.”[7]  He was sufficiently unsure about how the interviews that comprise The Rivers North of the Future would be received  by readers that he hesitated for nearly three years after their broadcast in Canada before finally authorizing their publication.  That book appeared in 2005, more than two years after Illich’s death.  By then I had already begun to discover that Illich’s work had a good deal more resonance among his contemporaries than he had imagined.  The first sign was a call from Charles Taylor after he had listened to the radio broadcast of “The Corruption of Christianity.”[8] He told me, as he would later put it in his preface to The Rivers North of the Future that he “had been working for a number of years on a project to account for the rise of secular civilization” – a project that came to fruition in his consummate A Secular Age in 2007 – and that his “basic thesis…was similar to Illich’s.”  I soon discovered many other affinities with Illich’s “research hypothesis” in contemporary theology and philosophy.[9]  John Milbank’s work in theology is one notable example, as is Giorgio Agamben’s in philosophy.   

Illich’s hypothesis that the modern West, and its worldwide sequels, rest on a misapprehension, misappropriation and misapplication of the Christian inspiration invites us to “rethink everything,” as his friend Teodor Shanin (1930-2020) has said.  What should we call those who attempt this rethinking?   Shanin’s successors at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences – an institution that Shanin founded in 1995 and that is usually called, in his memory, Shaninka – have proposed “The International of Hope,” a name coined by Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, aka Subcomandante Marcos, the masked, pipe-smoking theorist and anti-leader of the Zapatista insurgency in the Mexican province of Chiapas.   It’s a lovely name and very much in the spirit of Illich, who wrote in his essay “The Rebirth of Epimethean Man” that nothing less than “the survival of the human race” depends on the “rediscovery [of hope] as a social force.”[10]  What the thinkers that might be grouped under this banner have in common, say Shanin’s colleagues in planning documents for a symposium called “Rethink Everything” that they held in April of 2025, is that these thinkers “were all convinced that [there was a] moment in the history of Modern civilization when everything went wrong.”  They all had been somehow brought to “the thought that perhaps the Western experiment…had been a mistake,” in the blunt formula with which Canadian philosopher George Grant once astounded me.[11]  This is often taken as a despairing or pessimistic thought, and these were labels often enough applied to Grant, despite his objections.  (“Civilization come and go,” he said, but “if you believe in God, you must be an optimist.”[12])  It’s an optimistic thought, above all, because it suggests that there is another way – “[an] unknown future that mankind has missed and must seek to rejoin,” as John Milbank puts it.[13]  

Along the road to the discovery of this fatal disjuncture, and the future north of the future that it will potentially disclose, one of my great recent finds has been the work of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, the thinker for whom I hope to make a few new friends by this essay.  (After his marriage he joined his name to that of his beloved wife Margrit Hüssy according to an old custom in her native Switzerland, but, with respect, I will just use the more manageable Rosenstock here.)  I had come across references to Rosenstock over the years – I knew of his friendship with German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig; I was aware that American legal historian Harold Berman had drawn extensively on Rosenstock in the former’s monumental Law and Revolution, one of the first books to show me that Illich’s claim that “modernity can be studied as an extension of church history” might be a more widely shared insight than Illich sometimes intimated.  But it was not until a friend pressed Rosenstock’s The Christian Future on me a couple of years ago, that I began to read him.  Soon I couldn’t stop and, by now, I think I have read most of what is available in English.[14] 

It quickly became evident that Rosenstock is a thinker who is famous for not being famous.   His friend, poet W.H. Auden, in a foreword he contributed to a collection of Rosenstock’s essays, says that as “a poet by vocation” he approached Rosenstock’s work with no expectation that he could “learn much about Language from a writer of Prose,” but ended up indebted to Rosenstock for about “half of what I now know” about various aspects of poetics.[15]  Nevertheless when Auden included several of Rosenstock’s apperçus in the Viking Book of Aphorisms, which he co-edited, a reviewer objected to the inclusions of sayings by someone the reviewer had never heard of.   Epithets like “neglected” and “ahead of his time” are frequent in the scant secondary literature on Rosenstock.  “While the stars of former friends and associates, such as [Martin] Buber and [Paul] Tillich, waxed in the United States,” writes one of his most discerning interpreters, Australian scholar Wayne Cristaudo, “[Rosenstock] was largely unknown and unlistened to, except for some devoted undergraduates who taped his… lectures for posterity.”[16]  A principal reason for this obscurity is the unclassifiable character of Rosenstock’s thought.  He commented on it himself in the closing pages of his book Out of Revolution: 

I have survived decades of study and teaching in scholastic and academic sciences. Every one of their venerable scholars mistook me for the intellectual type which he most despised. The atheist wanted me to disappear into Divinity, the theologians into sociology, the sociologists into history, the historians into journalism, the journalists into metaphysics, the philosophers into law, and—need I say it?—the lawyers into hell, which as a member of our present world I have never left. For nobody leaves hell all by himself without going mad.[17] 

Rosenstock was a formidable scholar – in 1912, at the age of twenty-four he was already a professor in the history law at the University of Leipzig, the youngest to hold the rank of Privatdozent in Germany at the time – but he disliked academic pretension and refused to be confined, or defined, by disciplinary boundaries.[18]  (Rather like Illich who also tried to “shed… certain…extremely sticky and persistent… academics etiquettes, like the organization of knowledge into specialized and exclusive disciples.”[19])  Rosenstock wrote about language but rejected the granular analysis practiced by scientific linguistics as missing the forest for the trees.  He was sometimes called a philosopher, and at a pinch would own to the name of “social philosopher,” but he refused much of post-Heideggerian philosophy and said that Heidegger’s famous “question of Being” was a red herring.  Being, he said, is an “unfortunate,” totalizing and, ultimately, “silly” abstraction, because “we cannot ascertain what is apart from speaking about it” and “Contrariety remains the only bridge that leads to the whole.”[20]  He upset sociologists – those few who were paying attention – by his astonishing claim that “Grammar is social science” and “language…a system of social relations.”[21]  Theologians blanched at his claim that God is a name on which we call, and in which we act, not a being that we can know in some abstract or metaphysical fashion. Marxism and psychoanalysis were both alien to him, and he belonged to no party or movement – as little a traditionalist as a modernist, as far from the left as he was from the right.  A man entirely of the present – “Timeliness is everything,” was one of his sayings[22] – he belonged ultimately to the future, not the future that comes later, but the future that he says “must be created,” the future that consists in doing the “one thing necessary” right now.[23]

Rosenstock was set on this path early in his life.  He was born in Berlin in 1888 to a comfortably situated family of assimilated Jews.  In 1909 he was baptized a Christian but said later that this represented no dramatic conversion, as he had grown up a Christian in all but name, and felt the truth of Christianity from a young age.   He was, as I’ve said, an academic prodigy, and, while he was teaching the philosophy and history of law at the University of Leipzig, he became acquainted with a young Jewish scholar, two years older than he, named Franz Rosenzweig.  The two became friends, and an intense conversation began about language, religion and the relations between Christianity and Judaism.  When Rosenstock offered their correspondence to the public in a book called Judaism Despite Christianity, many years after Rosenzweig’s untimely death in 1929, he said that the two of them had “exchanged life rhythms,” submerging their “individual purposes” in a “process of recreation.”  Rosenzweig has a standing within academic philosophy that Rosenstock never gained, and successors and scholars of the better-known of the two friends, jealous of their man’s autonomy and originality, have not always been willing to acknowledge the extent of this interpenetration and metamorphic alteration, but that was how Rosenstock saw it.  Out of their conversation grew the idea of speech thinking – the idea that understanding is an event of speech and not the transcription of some event which is prior to speech – an idea that Rosenzweig would develop in his monumental The Star of Redemption, and Rosenstock would continue to elaborate to the end of his life.  At the same time, as one can read in their letters, they redefined the relationship between Christianity and Judaism as one of reciprocity and mutual clarification, and denounced the zero-sum hypothesis that if one is true the other must be false.

All this went on in the midst of war while both men were serving in the Imperial German Army, Rosenstock as a lieutenant, later captain, in artillery.  For 18 months he was stationed at Verdun, the site of the longest and deadliest battle of the war –700,000 casualties and 300,000 deaths over 302 days.  There, in the wreckage of the West – “a naked worm,” as he once described his sense of himself when cowering in a shell crater in no man’s land during an artillery exchange[24] – he realized that his world had changed decisively and irreversibly.  He had witnessed, he would say later, “a Last Judgment…on Wilhelm II’s Germany.”[25]  Before the war, he had been seen himself as an academic – “the idol of scholarship held me firmly in its grip” – as a nationalist – “ the god of law and power held my allegiance” – and as a man of the Church – “on the road to integral ‘Churchism.’”  By war’s end, all these institutions had “lost their scent.”[26]  In 1918, when he was still in uniform, and in keeping with the reputation he had achieved before the war, three eminent position were offered to him: he could return to the University of Leipzig; he was invited to Berlin to help write the constitution of the new German republic as an undersecretary in the Ministry of the Interior; and he was offered an editorship in Munich at Germany’s leading religious magazine, the “Hochland.”  He refused all three offers and took an obscure position at the Daimler Benz automobile factory in Stuttgart, where, among other things, he edited a newspaper for the workers.  

        Rosenstock had been “called,” in his own words, “into a new, dangerous form of existence which did not yet exist.”[27]  It was his task, as he saw it, to help invent this new form of life.  But this was not, he insisted, “an act of the will” but rather “an unwillingness to continue,” a “giving up” on the “dead works” of the exhausted institutions whose blandishments he had refused.  Such “unwillingness,” he says, “is not an act but an experience.  The words make no sense, the atmosphere is stifled.  One chokes.  One has no choice but to leave.  But one does not know what is going to happen, one has no blueprint for action.”[28]   His improvisations thereafter took two forms.  The plunge into worker education at Daimler prefigured one of these forms.  Like a new Benedict of Nursia (480-547), who urged his monks in his Rule to integrate prayer and work (ora et labora), Rosenstock sought new ways in which physical, intellectual and spiritual pursuits could be combined and harmonized.  In 1921 he founded the Akademie der Arbeit (Academy of Labour) in Frankfurt am Main.  When he returned to university teaching in Breslau in 1923, he also devoted himself to adult education in the area around Breslau.   Along with some of his students, “he helped organize voluntary work service camps for students, farmers, and workers to address the appalling living conditions and atrocious labor conditions at coal mines” in the area.[29]  He continued this work after he emigrated to the United States in 1933, and was pleased to discover, when he read William James essay “The Moral Equivalent of War,” that the leading American philosopher of the age shared his ideas.  In this essay, which began as a talk at Stanford in 1906, James recognized that mechanization and mass mobilization had rendered war “absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity,” but insisted that war would never be given up until some other way was found to evoke the virtues of discipline, sacrifice, and self-abnegation that war had immemorially summoned and expressed.[30]  When Rosenstock was asked by President Roosevelt to create  a special training camp for leaders of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in Vermont, Rosenstock called the initiative Camp William James.   The camp successfully mobilized students from Harvard, Radcliffe and Dartmouth, where Rosenstock taught, but it was disbanded when the United States entered the Second World War.   Camp William James has often been seen as a precedent, and perhaps an inspiration, for John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps, and for VISTA, its subsequent domestic incarnation.  It’s worth noting, however, that the Peace Corps, as a creature of American foreign policy, was not entirely what Rosenstock and James had in mind.  Rosenstock’s Breslau students worked in the coal mines of Silesia, James imagined his youthful conscripts deployed in “freight trains and fishing fleets…foundries and stoke holes.”[31]

This was one side of Rosenstock’s search for a way of life “which did not yet exist.”  The other, which I’ll focus on here, was his copious and always lively writings – all of them crackling with energy, wit, and a gift for aphorism.  (His student Clinton Gardener, stuck by his teacher’s knack for the right word in the right place at the right time, assembled a book of sayings called Life Lines which brought together many of Rosenstock’s most brilliant and characteristic formulations.[32])  I’ll begin my discussion of these writings with what Rosenstock describes as the “vision that slowly ascended before my inner eye on a winter morning” at Verdun in 1917.[33]  In the midst of a catastrophic ending, he had a vision of beginnings, and only by writing it down, he said, could he finally “demobilize” and salvage what he could from the ruin of so many.[34]  This took many years.  It was not until 1931, he later wrote, “that the time for a book of scholarship returned for me.”  It was then that he published Die Europäischen Revolutionen, in which he considered in rich historical detail the character of the revolutions that had shaped the West, beginning with what he called “the papal revolution” touched off by Gregory VII’s declaration of papal supremacy in 1077, and proceeding through the Reformation, and the English, American, French and Russian Revolutions. 

His hypothesis, in brief, is that “every revolution starts from faith,” and, specifically, from the characteristically Christian conviction that “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” and that all things can be “made new.”[35]  The history of revolution is therefore the story of “the march of the Holy Spirit through the nations.”[36]  This faith is explicit in the first Western revolutions,  but appears mostly in displaced forms after the time of the American and French revolutions.  In Rosenstock’s typology, revolutions begin in the despair that is occasioned by loss of faith in a once cogent and compelling social order.  “The great Revolutions seem to destroy an existing order,” he writes, ‘but that is not true.  They do not break out until the old state of affairs is already ended…[in the sense that it] is no longer believed.”[37]  This is the moment at which a new word must be spoken.  It is often preceded by what was called in the days before the French Revolution erupted la grande peur (the great fear).  The same apprehension seized Germany in the years before Hitler came to power, and was also marked at the end of the first millennium when Frederick II proclaimed “the end of time.”

Rosenstock qualifies himself in this book as “non-revolutionary” – pacific and conservative by temperament – but he says that he has been forced to the conclusion that “creation goes on as God’s creation has always done…A thunderstorm of destruction clears the air; then follows the low rustle of growth and reconstruction.  We may assign the noise to the devil, and the still small voice to God.  But only wishful thinking can exclude either of these sounds.”  This composite of destruction and creation takes place in a space that Rosenstock calls “the open.”  This domain stands outside all normal distinctions and rules of order.  It is neither public nor private, neither legal nor illegal, neither good nor evil because it is the very crucible in which these terms will assume or resume their meanings, a realm in which men are “driven by the angels and demons of love and fear.”[38]  In this claim Rosenstock stands very close to his fellow German jurist Carl Schmitt, and to Schmitt’s insistence that sovereignty always comes before law.  (Rosenstock knew Schmitt as a fellow legal scholar, and they were on cordial terms until Schmitt threw in his lot with the Nazis and Rosenstock broke with him.)  “Sovereignty comes first,” Rosenstock says, and only when it has been forged in the fires of political creation can a legal order grow out of this primal act.  “No power can derive its sovereignty from laws.”[39]  The storming of the Bastille, the raising of the New Model Army [in the English Civil War], Luther’s 95 theses nailed to the church door in Wittenberg – these must always come first.   

Rosenstock’s contention that revolution occurs in a space “beyond good and evil” is shocking – or was to me, since I share his non-revolutionary temper – but he insists that “the idealist who thinks anything can be good outside of time and space only makes a fool of himself.”  “Timeliness is everything,” he writes, and what is good is good only when it is timely and may be bad “when [it is] too late or early.”[40]  Revolution for him is action at the right time.  The same action might at another time be entirely quixotic.  Necessity is the mark of “true revolution,” arbitrary action the sign of “a political charlatan or a despot.”[41]

The thought that timing determines good and evil, rather than the other way round, might be considered a radical existentialism, and that is certainly a word that sometimes suggests itself in Rosenstock’s case, but I think his view is better described as a philosophy of incarnation.  It is the Incarnation, for Rosenstock, that puts the capacity to recreate and renew the world in human hands.  Christianity, says historian of religions Mircea Eliade, “valoriz[es] Time” and, in valorizing time, invents history.[42]  Wittgenstein calls this valorization “the apocalyptic view of the world” – the view that “things don’t repeat themselves” and that events therefore always tend towards some culmination at which their meaning will be revealed and judged.[43]  All Christians, up to now, have, by definition, shared this view, but Rosenstock asserts it with particular clarity and force.  “The nature of man is his time,” he declares bluntly.[44]   According to Rosenstock, Christianity perfects and universalizes this view, which is already prefigured in the prophets of Israel.  He honours the three great “streams of speech” which feed into Christianity.  He calls them, first, the speech of “the tribes” who “listened to the spirits of their dead” but still lived in anxious and ritualized dependence on their gods; second, the speech of the temple religions that opened themselves to the cosmos but then fell silent before their own cosmograms; and, third, the speech of poetry which listened to nature but remained bound by nature.  “If we accept time as our father, we can free ourselves,” Rosenstock writes.  “If we make nature our mother, we remain enslaved to her.”[45]

Rosenstock expresses respect for the “the great speeches of art and ritual initiation” but believes, even so, that these have been “voided in the great divine ‘No” to all human artifice” that is spoken by and through the prophets of Israel.[46]  Israel, in his view, made a great religious discovery, as valid on its own terms as any scientific discovery, and as little to be rejected, because it arose among a particular people, as one would reject gravity because Newton was English, or the mathematical fecundity of the concept of zero because the idea was given its first systematic exposition by Brahmagupta in ancient India.  This discovery was “the God who beckons us from the end of time as the common destiny of mankind.”[47]  With the Incarnation, this discovery becomes the common possession of mankind.  “The eternal sameness of events ceases” and “the threshold of reality” is crossed.[48]  This is the implication, for Rosenstock, of a God who lives by dying.  “Death precedes birth,” Rosenstock says.  Christ absorbs all the great “speeches” of mankind – the speech of law and prophecy, art and ritual – and he unifies them by “empty[ing] himself of all of them.”  He is “the harvest of all times” and “the seed of a future” in which, as the apostle Paul says, God may be all in all.”[49]

 Rosenstock did not think that the coming of Christ as “the harvest of all times,” constituted a supersession, or replacement, of earlier forms of life and thought, as Christian triumphalists often supposed.  This was a point he discussed with his friend Rosenzweig in their wartime letters.  Rosenzweig had been on the brink of conversion to Christianity, but he had instead redoubled and redefined his commitment to Judaism, reaffirming the existence of the Jews as “the eternal people.”  He argued in his letters to Rosenstock that Israel must continue to send out “rays from the heart of the fire” until the day that “God is one and his name One.”[50]   (This sense of witness and chosen-ness was, for Rosenzweig, incompatible with Zionism, so, despite his sympathetic relations with friends like Martin Buber and Gershom Sholem who did become, with qualifications, Zionists, he remained what some have called a “non-Zionist,” i.e. an abstainer from Zionism rather than an “anti-Zionist.”)  Christianity, Rosenzweig thought, in undertaking to universalize the inspiration it shared with Judaism, had necessarily exposed itself to a series of “grand self-deceptions” which he summarized as an “attempt to take the Kingdom of Heaven by force.”  A universal religion would inevitably become an imperial religion and, as it spread, it would dissipate and volatilize becoming “more and more devoid of sensible perception and substance.”  Judaism as a “point of contraction and limitation” would then be “the guarantee of the reality of that [insensible] Christian world.”[51]  Time, Rosenzweig says in his Star of Redemption, “bounce[s] off …the Jewish people,” because they are called to live only in terms of their relationship to God.  As “the eternal people” they are oriented to the beginning and the end of time rather than to history.  (Zionism by “renationalizing” Judaism obviously departs from this understanding, which is why Rosenzweig stood aside.)  Christianity, in order to spread the word, must attempt “to gain…mastery over time.”[52]  Commanded to “preach to all nations” in the interval between “Christ come” and “Christ coming,” it is in constant danger of losing itself in its imperial and pedagogical mission.[53]  Corruptio optimi pessima.

Rosenzweig and Rosenstock’s dialogue was much more than an exchange of opinions.  Rosenstock, as we’ve heard, called it nothing less than “an exchange of life rhythms.”  In this exchange the two friends redefined the relationship between Judaism and Christianity as one of mutual support, each showing the other a potentially neglected side of its inspiration, each clarifying the other’s calling.  The Judaized Christianity that Rosenstock expounded to Rosenzweig when they first met became in Rosenzweig’s hands a Christianized Judaism.  Both were aspects of God’s revelation – one emphasized the eternal and exigent relationship of the Jewish people to the God who “beckons from the end of time,” one the universal mission and destiny this relationship implies.  Revelation was the keynote for both.  Both men believed that a new age was dawning in which revelation would, in Rosenzweig’s word, “absorb” philosophy.[54]  Rosenzweig shared this vision in his The Star of Redemption – a book he wrote in less than six months between August of 1918 and February 1919, its first sections composed on military postcards and mailed to his mother.  The work was composed under such pressing inspiration that Rosenstock said later that he thought that it had undermined his friend’s health and opened the door to the motor neuron disease that disabled him and led to his early death in 1929 at the age of 43.  Rosenstock would write about their shared vision for the rest of his life.

Central to this vision was the idea of speech thinking.  Rosenzweig expressed the germ of their shared idea quite succinctly in a supplement to The Star of Redemption that he wrote in 1925 called “The New Thinking.”  In this essay, Rosenzweig contrasts “the thinking thinker,” who had so far been the subject of philosophy, with what he calls the “language thinker, or alternately the “grammatical thinker.”[55]  “Thinking thinker[s]” have perfect access to their own thoughts.  They enter “philosophical discussion…knowing [their] thoughts in advance” and knowing them “exactly.”  They need only find the time and the words to express what they know.  This may not be easy – time is often short, words refractory – but it presents no difficulty in principle.  In principle the “thinking thinker’s” mind is transparent.  “Language thinkers,” says Rosenzweig, are in quite a different case.  They are able to know what they think only through the intermediation of some interlocutor.  Their thoughts do not already exist in some pure and essential form in advance of their expression – they take shape in an encounter with some other on whom they depend and for whom they can only wait and hope.  This means that they must also “take time seriously” – not as an inconvenient “noise” intruding on thought’s clear and timeless “signal” but as thought’s very condition.   The thinking thinker, self-sufficient in his truth, thinks “for no one” and speaks “to no one.”   The language thinker, on the other hand, must “speak to someone and think for someone, and this Someone is always a quite definite someone and has not only ears…but also a mouth.”

Franz Rosenzweig, like his friends Gershom Sholem and Walter Benjamin, had a mystical view of language.  He held that “The living language [is] constituted [by] the archetypal words which lie hidden under each and every manifest word…In living speech, these inaudible arch-words become audible as real words…In place of a language prior to language, we see before us real language.”[56]  Just as Galileo thought  that reality has a mathematical structure, so Rosenzweig, by assuming a “language prior to language,” supposed that reality has a linguistic structure.  The Gospel of John says the same with its resounding opening, “In the beginning was the Word.” 

This Word – logos in the New Testament’s original Greek – is obviously not a word on the level of carburetor or dish-soap.  In Rosenzweig’s way of speaking, it is an arch word, not an everyday word.  But an assertion is being made, nonetheless, that the world is spoken into being – the same claim that Genesis makes by its assertion that each thing that appeared was first “said” – “God said let there be light and there was light.”  Language to this way of thinking is primary and irreducible – it is the way in which the world is given to us.  This is what Heidegger means by saying that language is “the house of Being,” or Gadamer by his claim that there is no world without language, nor language without world.[57]    

The proto-scientists of the 17th century, like Francis Bacon, saw language as a defective and approximate medium, full of deceits and flattering illusions, and to be used only with great circumspection.  “Certain it is,” Francis Bacon wrote, that “words, as a Tartar’s bow, do shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest and mightily entangle and pervert the judgment.”[58]  Bacon and his successors believed that this difficulty could be overcome by the cultivation of an exacting and explicit style; and, when the Royal Society was formed in 1666 to pursue Bacon’s vision of a new science, its members were adjured by the society’s charter to write with “mathematical plainness.”[59]  Science would discern what Albert Einstein still dared to call “God’s thoughts” in the language of mathematics, not in words.[60]  Contemporary persons, whether dutifully “following science” or facing ostracization as “anti-science,” remain heirs to this view.  Rosenzweig and Rosenstock, with many others, tried to create a new foundation for thought.  They claimed that thinking “needs the other” and must “take… time seriously” by waiting on the other.  “In actual conversation,” Rosenzweig says, “something happens.  I do not know in advance what the other will say to me because I myself do not even know what I am going to say; perhaps not even whether I’m going to say anything at all.” [61]  They supposed, further, that language is thought’s “medium,” in the strong sense in which this term can be used after McLuhan’s the medium is the message.  Language not only carries thought, it conditions and engenders it.  Language, moreover, is shared.  It is not the solitary possession of the “thinking thinker” but belongs also to that “definite someone” who, as Rosenzweig says, has a mouth as well as ears.  So, not only must I wait for this other, I must also expect that when they show up, I may find, as Illich once said, that my words have been “turned around” in the other’s mouth.[62]  The “new thinking,” says Rosenzweig, is limited, particular, and contingent.  It is the thought of the world, and not, as he says, of the All.[63]

Rosenstock spelled out the implications of “speech thinking,” explicitly in books like Speech and Reality, The Origin of Speech, and The Fruit of Our Lips, and implicitly in more  politically and socially oriented works which still always insist on the primacy of speech – his Out of Revolution conceiving revolution as essentially a speech act; his Soziologie (rendered into English as In the Cross of Reality) claiming that “language does not describe – it creates – a before and after, as much as a here and now.”[64]  Grammar, Rosenstock says, is primary social science – the way in which society is made, the way in which it is lost, and the way in which it is renewed.[65]  “It [may] seem ridiculous,” he writes, “like shooting arrows at a battle ship,” to diagnose the “great calamities” of war and revolution and immiseration as “diseases of the circulation of speech.”  And yet, he argues, war ends in the writing of a peace treaty, revolution in the proclamation of a new order, immiseration in the restoration of credit – all “remedies are of a linguistic or a grammatical nature.”[66]  He does not, of course, intend the word grammar in the sense in which that word is now mainly used, when it is used at all.  Grammar was still part of the curriculum when I was at school, but it has since disappeared almost entirely.  And what I was taught, much as the proto-grammarian in me relished learning about gerunds and participles, vocatives and infinitives, was already, in Rosenstock’s words, “the dissection of a corpse.”  He called this tradition of autopsied language “Alexandrian grammar,” after a school of grammatical and philological study that flourished in Alexandria in the 2nd and 3rd centuries BCE.  Often taken as the origin of the Western study of grammar, these scholars, in Rosenstock’s view, looked at language from the standpoint of the spectator rather than the participant, and arrived at a detached and distanced view of  language’s instrumental functions – the anatomy of a corpse.  Rosenstock saw the elements, and moods, of grammar as integral parts of a living body – the very breath of life.  Language, for him, was only incidentally a tool we use to point at things.  What grammarians call the indicative mood in which we state facts – the mood of reality it’s sometimes called[67] - was for him the least of grammar’s moods.  Language is creative, long before it is indicative.  “Language,” he says, “is maternal…[It is] the womb of time in which man has been created and is constantly being recreated.”[68]

Rosenstock’s sense of language traces back to the 18th century philosophical maverick J.G. Hamann.  “The whole ability to think,” Hamann wrote, “rests upon language…language is the sole instrument and criterion of reason…Without language there can be no reason.”  Using the same words that Rosenstock would later choose, Hamann calls language “the mother of reason and revelation, its Alpha and Omega.” For Hamann, therefore, “The question is not so much: What is reason? but rather: What is language?”[69]  Hamann sometimes wrote under the pen-name Magus des Nordens [the magus of the north], and when Rosenstock was given an honorary degree in theology by the University of Münster in 1959, the citation proclaimed him the new Magus des Nordens.  Many others have also advanced Hamann’s once eccentric view.  Nietzsche’s epigram in  – “I am afraid we are not getting rid of God, because we still believe in grammar” – gives the same idea in a nutshell.  Elsewhere, Nietzsche speaks of “the unconscious domination and guidance of grammatical functions,” which also says that we think as we speak, rather speak as we think.[70]  In the 20th century this sense of language becomes relatively common.  The French linguist and semiotician, Émile Beneviste, for example, says: “We can only grasp thought that has already been fitted into the framework of a language…What it is possible to say delimits and organizes what it is possible to think.  Language provides the fundamental configuration of the properties that the mind recognizes things to possess.”[71]  Rosenstock certainly belong to this “linguistic turn,” as it’s sometimes called, but he occupies a distinctive place within it.  Like Hamann, who says that “creation is a speech,” Rosenstock holds that “God is the speaking voice” and is perceptible to us only as “the pure act of speech.”[72] 

A crucial aspect of speech thinking is its insuperably temporal character.  It “takes time seriously,” as Rosenzweig says, and must take time seriously because time is its very horizon and limit. “The Alpha and Omega from which I grasp everything afresh,” says Rosenstock with reference to this temporal character of his thought, is the idea that things are grasped consecutively and one at a time, not all at once.[73]  Hamann, again of one mind with Rosenstock, says that he “know[s] of no eternal truths save those which are unceasingly temporal.”[74]  Modernity has been relentlessly spatializing.  From René Descartes’ mathesis universalis – “there must be a general science which explains all the points that can be raised concerning order and measure irrespective of the subject-matter, and…this science should be termed mathesis universalis[75] - to Francis Bacon’s intention to discover “the latent schematism in bodies,” the ambition has been to lay out the world before our eyes and bring it under our control.[76]  Today in the era of risk management, decision trees, and global simultaneity, time seems to have been converted almost entirely into space – into something that can be divided and counted, anticipated and overseen.  The experience of time as duration and flow, as thinkers from French philosopher Henri Bergson to Canadian economist Harold Innis have lamented, tends to evaporate for modern persons.[77]  But speech takes time.  A marriage vow, as Rosenstock says, may take a lifetime to understand.  Thousands of years may elapse between a command or a promise and its fulfilment.[78]  Things change in time.  What was once compelling loses its authority.  Even “sacred names,” Rosenstock says, “have a limited span of life” and require renewal.[79]

What time is in itself is a mystery – perhaps the fundamental mystery of our fleeting existence.  “What is time?” Augustine asks in his Confessions. “Provided that no one asks me, I know.  If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.”[80]  We know insofar as we experience time; we don’t know in the sense that time is the very condition of our having experience at all.  Time is our nature, Rosenstock says.  English poet William Blake, in a favourite formulation of mine, calls time “the mercy of eternity” – the way in which the whole is reduced to a tolerable and comprehensible sequence.  Else, Blake goes on, “all were eternal torment.”[81]  Western philosophy, in Rosenstock’s estimation, has been a prolonged revolt against this providential limitation of our knowledge – a revolt he traces all the way back to Parmenides (circa 500 BCE), sometimes called the founder, or father, of ontology after his attempt to grasp the nature of Being.  Being, as totality, says Rosenstock, was an “unfortunate idea” which has “tortured philosophers” ever since.[82]   In Being, the world stands still and becomes an abstract projection in space of what can only be experienced in time.  The dumbfounded subject, in contemplating this remote abstraction, loses its object.  The mind grows attached to what the body can never experience.  And nature and society are “forever split,” with nature becoming a “speechless physis” in which speaking society is anomalous.  A “metaphysical prison” is constructed.[83]  This, in a way, is Nietzsche’s complaint against metaphysics: that a soon as we propose that a “true” world – “unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable” - lies behind and beyond this apparent one, we create a situation where what is given depends for its reality on what is put out of reach, and where nihilism will ensue, should the “true” world be unmasked or put in doubt.[84]  This is the heritage of all post-metaphysical philosophy.  As Hannah Arendt puts it: “What has come to an end [in our time] is the basic distinction between the sensory and the suprasensory together with the notion…that whatever is not given to the senses – God or Being or the First Principles and Causes (archai) or the Ideas – is more real, more truthful, more meaningful than what appears.”[85]  But, Rosenstock reacts to this situation very differently than, say, Heidegger.  Heidegger wants to revive “the question of Being,” and enwrap the earth in the timeless ahistoricity of the Fourfold.[86]  Rosenstock, on the other hand, declares that the question of Being is simply “silly” and quite “unanswerable.” (One of his most charming essays is an imagined letter from Heraclitus to Parmenides – the two were contemporaries, though there’s no evidence they were acquainted – in which Heraclitus tries to talk Parmenides out of the whole idea.)  What Rosenstock emphasizes, first of all, is the loss of time, when the sentiment of existence is extended into an all-at-once apprehension of the whole, and, second, the loss of the creative, engendering quality of speech, when it is swallowed up in “speechless physis.”  Time was excluded from philosophy from the outset.  “From Thales to Hegel all philosophy began its thinking with the world of space, or the knowing mind and a corresponding logic of timeless abstraction.”[87] But, we cannot ascertain what is, Rosenstock says, apart from our speaking of it.  Only by speech can we “order and obey, listen and reply, sing and meditate, narrate and worship, analyze and judge.”[88] 

Time, in Rosenstock’s thought, is the creation of speech.  He does not mean that speech creates the mysterious, given time that Augustine can experience but not explain, but that it creates the time in which a society lives and acts, and without which it can do neither.  Speech establishes the present, he says… 

Only because we speak are we able to establish a present moment between past and future.  [Only] because I am telling you all this here and am waiting for your answer, is it possible for you and me to forget past and future, and to call this hour an hour, this paper a unity, this time one moment, one time span.  By human speech, space and time are created. The scientific notions of time and space are secondary abstractions of the reality of grammatical time and space.[89] 

“The scientific notions of time and space” are the descendants of Parmenides’ attempt to imagine Nature as a static whole, governed by those immutable “laws” that Einstein took for “God thoughts.”  Rosenstock evokes a created world, undergoing continual recreation.  In this dynamic creation speech sets the parameters, creating what Rosenstock, rather wonderfully, calls “time cups” – the eras and epochs in which we act imagined as vessels or containers.  Revolutions create new time cups – they invent new futures, new pasts, and new necessities.  But the idea of the time cup as the named intervals in which cultures live has more everyday implications as well.  Think of the vexed discussions that currently go on with regard to the Enlightenment.  Whether you think we have betrayed it or overcome it, whether you would like it restore or erased, you must first take for granted that the Enlightenment is, as one now says, a thing.  A hundred other examples would do as well.  Speak of “the 60’s” and you are instantly buried in an avalanche of accumulated cultural debris.  Speak of the Middle Ages, and you unthinkingly minimize the aboriginal importance of Christianity in shaping the modern West, substituting in its place a story about how the glorious ideals of pagan antiquity slumbered through a theocratic interruption until they were reawakened at the Renaissance. 

Rosenstock illustrated how revolutions write their stories by the case of the French Revolution.    In the early years of the 19th century its inheritors invented the Renaissance, transforming the horrifying decadence of the Inquisition, the Hammer of the Witches, and the corrupt Florence of the Medicis into a sunlight rebirth.[90]  An infrastructure of museums and university chairs was created to bring the concept of the Renaissance to life.  This was done, Rosenstock claims, in order to erase the French Revolution’s debt to the Reformation.  The giant papier maché image of Robespierre in a toga that supposedly commanded the first Festival of the Supreme Being – the story is disputed – supports this idea.  Robespierre and his fellows, this image showed, had nothing to do with Christian superstition – they were the heirs rather of noble Romans.  In this way, argues Rosenstock, “The deep shadows of that dying age” – e.g. Quatrocento Italy – were banished.[91]  The point, as is usual with Rosenstock, is polemical and provocative, but also illuminating and unsettling.  His analysis tends to dissolve the seemingly solid forms projected by a reified historical imagination and shows us instead time in its molten state before it has hardened into some authoritative, and eventually obvious account – a certainty, as Illich liked to say.

A time cup is a span of time – an age, an era, an epoch – that is organized and oriented by “the right names” spoken at “the right time” and “in the right place.”[92]  Such a cup is “formed by imperatives.”  Here the old soldier comes into view, watching men die unquestioningly at a word of command, perhaps issuing such orders himself.  He might have reasoned, of course, that no such word should ever again be spoken, and hoped for “perpetual peace,”[93] but his reflection forced him to the opposite conclusion: that human beings will always be under orders. “No authentic life,” he writes, “can step into the world except under command.”[94] His teaching here is easy to mistake, but I don’t think it reflects any willingness whatever to exercise or submit to authoritarian rule.  “Under command” speaks of a call which compels us by its inherent quality – of beauty, of necessity, of timeliness.  We cannot be called, unless we have first been addressed by a name we recognize.  Here we again encounter Rosenstock’s conception of grammar as a system of social relations and his idea of speech as “the lifeblood of society.”[95]  Grammar, as we have known it, if we have known it all, has emphasized indicative moods - a kind of dulled pointing at what is – the anatomy, as he says, “of a corpse.”  His grammar begins with commanding and calling, naming and singing – the functions by which an order of things is brought into existence – and only comes much later to the ways in which it is narrated and systematized. 

A second consideration bearing on his assertion that a time cup, as a lighted and limited field of action, is brought into being by an imperative, is his understanding of the Gospel as a vocation.  When Jesus begins teaching, his auditors are said to be “astonished.”  “For his word was with authority,” Luke’s gospel says. [96]  (The King James translation says with power].  The power and authority of his word consisted not just in its reference but in its speaker actually being what he announced.  He was, and is the Word of God. (This was always Illich’s preferred name for his Lord, as well as Rosenstock’s.)  But to hear this word required a death and rebirth – sometimes an actual death, sometimes what might be called a social death – a dying to what the Gospel calls “the world,” as in “my kingdom is not of this world,” or “be not conformed to this world.”[97]  “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,” Jesus says, “it remains alone.  But, if it dies, it bears much fruit.”[98] This was a crucial teaching for Rosenstock, and he insisted again and again on what might be called the priority of death.  “Death precedes birth,” he says, and our very souls are constituted by “the power of transforming an end into a beginning.”[99]  Such things are hard to say in a time when death has become an obscenity – something to be kept off the scene as long as possible and then, in the last resort, sweetly administered by the agents of a caring state – but such was Rosenstock’s view.  Only a word into which we can die, and for which we will die, has that imperative power that he says founds an era.  “Christianity is essentially war in peace,” he wrote.  “It distributes the sacrifice characteristic of war through “the whole fabric of life.”[100]

Earlier, I quoted historian of religions Mircea Eliade’s claim that Christianity’s most striking innovation was its “valorization of time,” and its “redemption of…history.”[101]  This was an innovation about which Eliade himself was ambivalent.  He was a man who wanted to “kill time,” as a wittily titled recent article about him put it, seeking an escape from “the terrors of history” through a renewed understanding of myth and ritual as our access to the never-changing, but Rosenstock regards the revelation that time is real and unrepeatable as the very essence of the Gospel.[102]  One of the greatest of Christianity’s many scandals is its claim that that the Incarnation of God occurred at a certain time, in a certain place, among a certain people.  Does this partiality and particularity not mock the very idea of a God of all?  Why not among the Chinese or the Maya, the Magyars or the Saxons, the Haida or the Yoruba?  Simone Weil, though a fervent Christian who felt that Christ had “taken possession” of her, could not accept the idea of the Incarnation as a unique historical happening. [103]  “Chronology,” she writes, “cannot play a decisive role in a relationship between God and man, one of whose terms is eternal.  If the redemption [promised in Christ] had not been present on this earth from the very beginning, it would not be possible to pardon God…for the affliction of so many innocent people, so many people uprooted, enslaved, tortured and put to death in the course of centuries preceding the Christian era.  Christ is present on this earth…wherever there is affliction.”[104]  “It is impossible,” she declares axiomatically, “that the whole truth should not be present at every time and every place, available to anyone who desires it.”[105]  Christ, for her, is the epitome of God’s love, and its consummate expression, but his appearance as the son of Mary cannot be a purely or uniquely historical event.  “The content of Christianity existed before Christ,” she concludes, for God’s love must be distributed equally everywhere, as “impartial as sunlight.”[106]  This is not Rosenstock’s view, and neither is it Illich’s, which may help to explain why Illich kept his distance from Weil, despite the keen enthusiasm of some of his closest friends – Lee Hoinacki, notably – for her philosophy.  ‘When Mary brought forth the Word of God in the flesh,” Illich asserts, “something happened cosmically…From that moment on, any prophetic act or word is not only a hope but faith in the carnal presence of God.”[107]  Rosenstock is equally clear that the Incarnation is a unique and decisive event – occurring, one could say, within history, except this is the event which invents history and makes every subsequent moment of time pregnant with a significance it previously lacked.  “The eternal sameness of events ceases,” Rosenstock writes, “the threshold of reality” opens, and nature, spirit and culture become “bearers of reality.”[108]

According to Rosenstock, “Jesus completed the revelation of the living God because he created true future.”[109] (my italics) Religion, in recurrent time, was oriented always to an origin and to a restoration of primeval harmony.  In the Incarnation, Rosenstock  thinks, God speaks from the future, of a condition not yet created.  Now, there can be, as Illich puts it, “a tomorrow” which “no longer turns in a circle with yesterday” but is instead “totally surprising”[110]  This is an idea, says Rosenstock, that is hateful to “all natural minds” – minds that think for themselves, uninformed by what only God can reveal.  Such minds must reject “the idea that a new language should start right here and now” because this idea will necessarily void the authority of some cherished past – the authority, he says, of “their great literatures and codes and manuals of science and Emily Posts.”[111]  This faith that there can be something new – something surprising, in Illich’s way of speaking – is what makes Christianity, for Rosenstock, the matrix of revolution, and the beginning of what he calls “time thinking.” The Cross, he says, will “finally penetrate into the last stronghold of paganism” only when “time-speakers” replace “space-thinkers.”[112]  

The Incarnation, in Rosenstock’s eyes, reveals how things are – it is a clarification of existence, more than a plan of salvation. This is true with regards to language. The premise of universality in Christianity implied translation, and translation implies an underlying unity of all tongues – the revelation of language itself as the unity of all languages.  “Two thousand years ago,” he says… 

…an utterly new phase of speech was entered upon.  Never since has any speaking group of the human race based its existence on the fact of one individual language.  A new principle was proclaimed: all languages may be translated into each other.  Practically speaking, all languages rest on the common basis of translations of the Bible.  Today the fermentation of all natural languages through this central leaven of the universal Bible and the universal science has transformed the languages.  They no longer can be considered separate individualities.  They are becoming varieties and idioms and seceders.[113] 

Language for Rosenstock is revelation.  It is not merely a medium – more or less serviceable – in which revelation is conveyed, but the thing itself when properly understood.  In the beginning was the Word.  The case is the same with Hamann, in the passage I quoted earlier, in which he says, “With me the question is not so much: What is reason? but rather: What is language?”  For Rosenstock, “Language is wiser than the one who speaks it. The living language of people always overpowers the thinking of individual man who assumes he could master it."[114]  He expresses this primacy and priority of the spoken in many ways.  “God is not an object but a person, and He has not a concept but a name.[115]  “God…is the pure act of speech,” and, as such, “has no visible existence.”[116]  God is “the power who makes us speak.”  And “the very name of God means he who speaks.”[117]  These statements will not be easily understood by the “space thinker,” and, insofar as spatialization – the priority of space over time – is a contemporary fate more than a choice, that means pretty well everyone living within the horizons of a technological society.  When Rosenstock says that God is a name in which we do things, rather than a concept, it’s hard for those who believe that truth must finally be visible and demonstrable, if only to “the mind’s eye,” not to hear “just a name,” or “only a name.”   In this sense, Rosenstock presents a new way of thinking, which as speech thinking is separable from time thinking.  This new way of thinking has been intimated many times during the last century – from Harold Innis’s “Plea for Time” to the “linguistic turn” in philosophy – but will remain subject to constant reabsorption and redomestication so long as prediction, surveillance and control remain the default modes of social awareness.[118] 

In the Book of Exodus, when Moses is tending his father-in-law Jethro’s flock of sheep and goats, he comes across an angel of the Lord who appears to him “in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush.”  Moses approaches the bush which is “burning but not consumed” and hears God speaking out of the bush.  God tells Moses to lead the Israelites out of their captivity in Egypt.  Moses asks how he shall answer if the people ask him the name of the one who has sent him.  God replies, “I am who I am” – a translation that began with St. Jerome’s Ego sum qui sum, persisted in Luther, Tyndale and most subsequent modern versions, and resounded through Western philosophy and theology, enabling Augustine and, after him, Aquinas to  identify God as the Being of beings – Esse ipsum subsistens. [119]   But when Franz Rosenzweig undertook to translate the Hebrew Bible into modern German, along with Martin Buber who completed the project after Rosenzweig’s early death, the two men rendered this saying as, “I will be who I will be.”  Ancient Hebrew which didn’t employ tenses, but instead distinguished “actions that have been completed [from] actions that are not yet completed,” allows this interpretation of God’s equivocation.[120]  The same note is sounded later in the Exodus when God “goes before” the Israelites, appearing by day as a “pillar of cloud,” by night at a “pillar of fire.”  In both cases God appears as an action completing itself rather than as a ascertainable being.  This I think is what Rosenstock means in saying that God is a name for what happens over time in that name.  Moses receives a call, and he must answer, yes or no, without knowing the beginning or the end.  The fishermen, Peter and Andrew, hear only, “Follow me.”[121]  Who is speaking is what will be revealed, but only as an event in time, not as a visible and searchable structure in space.

This is the first way in which the Incarnation discloses how things are – it makes plain the centrality and universality of the Word – the word which sounds as the call of the not-yet or the still-to-be-completed – Rosenstock’s “true future” – and requires obedient listening.  The second way is through the image of the Cross – the image by which Rosenstock hoped to create a new sociology.  Just as he conceived grammar as a mirror of social relations, so he considered the Cross a mirror of the fundamental duality of a world in which “primordial forces” are always and inevitably pitted against one another.  “All knowledge,” he says “[bears] the mark of dialectical contradiction.  In thinking man is compelled to oppose one thing to its contrast; black calls for white, male for female, yes for no and so on, ad infinitum.”[122]  “Every spontaneous intellectual activity splits up into opposites and opponents.”[123]  And so “contrariety,” as I quoted earlier, is “the only bridge that leads to the whole.”[124]

Reality, as Rosenstock understands it, is cruciform – cross-shaped.  We are caught between two times, the past and the future, and two spaces, the inner and the outer – each exerting its contradictory demand.  Our decisions are made in the dark – each road shadowed by the one we did not take, each word haunted by the one we did not speak.  In thinking we “double” ourselves – each one becoming their own listener – so we must always be “of two minds.”[125]  In a lecture at Dartmouth, he put it to young men he was teaching this way:

…the purposive man…the passionate man…is [cut in] half.  [Because he] must be able to talk to himself, he is two… In posing the question to yourself, “What shall I do?” you are conversing with yourself.  You are two in one.  All mind, all mental processes…lead to schizophrenia if they go on… unhampered, so to speak, because they invite…us to discuss the problem inside ourselves…The mind is always two because doubt is essential to the mind.  And doubt means to… place a question which can be answered one way or the other.  Therefore, you retain two voices inside yourself: one pleading one course, one pleading the other.  All argument is plaintiff and defendant.  And you must be the judge.  And that is the terrible thing of the mental processes – that they always end in alternatives, you see.  We are torn.  So, the thinking man, gentlemen, is two.  The passionate man is half.[126]  

In the sign of the cross, we suffer division, and experience the wholeness that comes from sustaining that division. 

Our self-division is patent in the case of time.  For him, “the essence of time is transition” – one time is perpetually becoming another, and, consequently, “we always come too late to ourselves.”  It might be said that we are born too late inasmuch as we are born into a world which has always already assumed a determined shape without us, a world with which our very novelty - our natality, as Hannah Arendt says – must make us disagree.[127]  No one ever expressed the thought more wonderfully than William Blake in his poem Infant Sorrow (with his spelling and punctuation)…

My mother groand! my father wept.

Into the dangerous world I leapt:

Helpless, naked, piping loud;

Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my fathers hands:

Striving against my swaddling bands:

Bound and weary I thought best

To sulk upon my mothers breast.

Blake’s squalling fiend is what Rosenstock calls a distemporary, an embodiment of a new time restively encountering an old time, a new form bound within an old form.  The world, for Rosenstock is full of distemporaries, which is why he found it necessary to coin a new word for the clash of times that so preoccupied him.  Teachers are distemporary with their students, parents distemporary with their children, though both are usually bound “under the fiction that they [are] contemporaries and [can] feel and think the same things.”[128]  When he returned from the front in Germany in 1918, he found himself distemporary with those who had not shared his experience.  He watched the same disjunction in the United States after the Second World War, as veterans returned from hellish scenes of battle to peaceful, uncomprehending communities.  The problem he posed was how a present was to be established within which disjoint times and disparate experiences could be held together.  This, he thought, was the task of proper, fitting and timely speech – to unify and integrate, synchronize and coordinate – but this task could only be carried out where the supposed contemporaries had first recognized one another as actual distemporaries.  What prevented this recognition, in his view, was what he called monism, and more specifically “the fighting monism of the army of enlightenment.”  Monism, for him, is the illusion of unity – the pretense that we can comprehend our world in one synoptic look, or one speechless abstraction, whether it be called science or reason or something else.  Reality for him is best represented by the cross whose opposed arms speak of unity in opposition, rebirth in death.  Against monism he asserts what he calls Christian dualism.  He defines it as the ability to recognize and accept, in the image of the cross, the unavoidable duality of love and law, repetition and surprise, custom and revelation.[129]  Only in this sign, and the speech it makes possible, could those who lacked a common history or a common social pattern – thinker and soldier, parent and child, man and woman, amateur and expert – join in “one spirit” and in “one common sense.”[130]

To some this may sound like Christian chauvinism in a new key – a more existentialist apology for what Christians have claimed all along – that their truth is the truth. Perhaps it is, but, before that can be judged, I think it’s first necessary to understand just how new and how different this new key really is.  Rosenstock, to begin, is a completely non-metaphysical thinker.  If we take Nietzsche’s definition of metaphysics, as the belief that this world is only the flickering shadow of some true and unchanging reality that lies behind it, then Rosenstock emphatically believes in one, indivisible world.  Christianity’s primary images, for him, refer not to some other world but to what happens in this world.  In an address to the Dartmouth faculty in 1941, Rosenstock said: 

I know of the Last Judgment as a reality because I have seen Last Judgments passed on Proust’s France, on Rasputin’s Russia, on Wilhelm II’s Germany, President Harding’s America.  Similarly, I believe in resurrection of the body because I see resurrections of bodies all through history, on earth. Any genuine soul will be incarnated time and again.[131] 

William Blake in his notes for his engraving of The Last Judgment presents a similarly incarnational understanding of what this figure means.  “…Whenever any Individual Rejects Error and Embraces Truth,” he writes, “a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual.”[132]  Last judgments occur not after time, but within time, and not once but repeatedly.  Hamann says the same, in a passage I quoted in part earlier: “I know of no eternal truths save those which are unceasingly temporal.”  This means, Hamann  goes on, that he has no need to second guess God – “to mount into the cabinet of the divine understanding” – nor even to “linger over the difference” between what he calls “direct revelation” – the sensible here and now – and the testimony of Scripture, because in the end “the spirit of observation and the spirit or prophecy are expressions of a single positive power.”  The world is one – “Everything is divine…but everything divine is also human.”[133]  Rosenstock says just the same.  What both call for is a revaluation of time and history, not the acceptance of a timeless doctrine. 

In Rosenstock’s thought, all the major figures of Christian faith appear not as singular events – the resurrection of the dead, the second coming – but as recurrences within time and as “silhouettes” – Hamann’s word – of an underlying mystery.  “History is not a process or development – it is what happens to us now,” Hamann says.  “All alike,” he says, ‘’are near history’s beginning and history’s end” – as near now as we will ever be.  This goes further than Rosenstock whose “time cups” do establish a sequence that Hamann’s perpetual now might seem to deny.  But both agree that history only becomes real when we are able to discern through its shadows the outlines of a more enduring order.  And both agree that these signs are presented to us in and through language – the power by which we make history in the first place.  Apocalypse, therefore, is not some cosmic catastrophe that will destroy the creation and make way for “a new heaven and a new earth,” but rather a continuous revelation of what happens when God enters time and the Word becomes flesh.

Religions are often understood as presenting competing and incompatible claims about a supernatural reality in which we must choose to believe or not.  Questions about religious belief, and who has it or who has lost it, are often posed in such horizons.  Is God still up there on his heavenly throne or not?  Yes or no.  But this understanding of religion as an objective cosmology in which one must believe or disbelieve, or indeed as an account of any object whatsoever, will seriously mislead us in Rosenstock’s case.  “Speculations over God and the world are almost always idle,” he says, “the thoughts of…spectators of the theater of life.  ‘Is there a God?’ ‘Has man a soul?’  ‘Why must we die?’  ‘How many hairs has the devil’s grandmother?’ ‘When is the Day of Judgment?’ – all these are idle questions, and one fool can ask more of them than a hundred wise men can answer.”[134]   He is equally scathing about dogma.  “Christianity did not come into the world to teach anything,” he insists. “It is not a doctrine.  It came to reveal something: the connection of death and life.”[135] Rosenstock’s Christianity is entirely acosmic and presents no speculation about some ultimate or transcendent state of things.  Ultimacy, for him, is a word, a call, a command – to which we respond or fail to respond – just that.  This is religion, as far as he is concerned, but, since this is not what the word is usually taken to mean, it would be premature to conclude that he is promoting any religion whatsoever in the usual sense.  For Rosenstock, religion points us to a decision which we will make in time, and in our actual circumstances, not to some private reality.  “God has no dealings with you privately,” he says bluntly.[136] Religion, for him, pertains to a community, and a people.  “Private religion is no religion,” he writes, “it is its stump…Any community must have religion, must have the power which binds it together for better or worse, and therefore it must create holidays [i.e. holy days] or cease to be a community.”[137]

“Every value in human history,” Rosenstock writes, “is first set on high by one single event which lends its name and gives meaning to later events.  Every ‘a’ has to be preceded by a creative ‘the’.”[138]  This saying echoes remarks I quoted earlier on the importance of the founding word – the word, or words, spoken at the right time, which sets a tone and a tenor for an ensuing order.  Jesus is the Christ and “his divinity must be sustained,” because he is not a man, but the man, “the one unique event [that] must precede the many” – the pattern of the era he initiated.[139]  What Jesus initiates is “a process of making Man like God” – a process recognized by many of the Church Fathers and summarized in Athanasius’s formula: “He became what we are that we might become what he is.”  “Christ [as] the center of history,” says Rosenstock, “enables us to participate consciously in this man-making process and to study its laws.”[140]  God and humanity, in this perspective are inseparable – an indissoluble, mutually defining couplet.  They can be distinguished but never divided.  This is not a statement about what God and humanity are in themselves – it is rather a dramatic refusal of the premise that anything can exist or be known in itself.  This is the premise that the natural philosophers who invented what we now call Science surreptitiously borrowed from their conceptualized God:  the premise that they could freeze the world in their objectifying gaze and make it yield up its laws and its secrets. But this God, according to Rosenstock, is not the Living God:

The Living God… revealed by Jesus must be forever distinguished from the merely conceptual God of philosophers.  Most atheists deny God because they look for Him in the wrong way.  He is not an object but a person, and He has not a concept but a name.  To approach him as an object of theoretical discussion is to defeat the quest from the start.  Nothing but the world of space is given in this manner.  Nobody can look at God as an object.  God looks at us and has looked at us before we open our eyes or our mouths.  He is the power that makes us speak.  He puts words of life on our lips.[141]

“Not an object but a person…not a concept but a name” – it passes easily enough, but it challenges what remains the default mode of modern thinking at its very foundation.  By default I mean the mode to which people unconsciously revert, particularly in times of perceived crisis.  Think of all the former critics of science who obediently “followed science” during the recent pandemic, or the skeptics of genetic technologies who proclaimed an untried and barely tested genetic vaccine as “safe and effective” prima facie.  Or consider all the current bloviation in polite circles about misinformation – it presumes, without thinking, that a secure objectivity which can underwrite trusted news is within our reach and that “we” need to get back to this stable foundation.  But where does this confidence come from?  Does it not rest finally on a displaced and unrecognized theology – a God who has entered “society” as the promise of equality and objectivity, science and self-creating nature.  Religion, in Rosenstock’s definition, is whatever someone will stake their life on.  “The religion of a man,” he writes very simply, “rests on the names that induce him to act jointly with others.”[142]   At the moment, what seems to induce joint action in Western societies is the promise of a revived modernity – whether it’s the hyper-equality of the woke, the renewed greatness of the American republic, or the repristinated objectivity of trusted news – all promise to take us back to some reliable foundation, and none recognize a displaced God - what Bruno Latour calls the “crossed out God”[143] – in this foundation.  “Modern man is not so much godless as polytheistic,” Rosenstock suggests.  “His life is split between many gods – or ‘values,’ as it has become fashionable to call them.”[144]  But these “multiplex deities” all stand behind, rather than before us.  We want to get back to them and are, therefore, Rosenstock says, pagan. 

Rosenstock proposes a radically different vision.  A critical element of this vision is the idea that humanity is inseparable from God, and that God, from the human point  of view, is inseparable from the creation and the creature by whom God is made known.  “Man by himself is an abstraction,” Hamann says, “it is only man with God who is truly human.”[145]  God, for Rosenstock, is the inspiration of our speech, and the power that creates, binds and recreates societies.  It is what calls us into existence, and allows us to form the temporal horizons – the time cups – in which we can respond to our calling.  These are the horizons and limits of our understanding.  Time and death are their seal.  As mortal creatures in time, we cannot know more, but can only trust that the words that are “put on our lips,” are “the words of life.”    But, according to Rosenstock, philosophy since the time of Parmenides has misled us into various vain imaginings of the eternity of the extended, or spatialized world.  Philosophy, of course, seems a weak word here, insofar as it now evokes an arcane academic pursuit that most can live perfectly well without.  But for Rosenstock, it stands for the fatal hubris that has brought the world to the edge of the precipice on which it is currently poised: the idea that a stable, total, and unified apprehension of things is available to human beings.  This thought runs from Thales of Miletus (c. 625-545 B.C.E.) who supposed, for the first time, that one ultimate substance must underlie all of Nature, all the way to Einstein, with his assurance that his science could make him privy to “God’s thoughts.”[146]  It underwrites every ism that pretends to encompass the world in one philosophy.  It is built into our assumption that the social and political worlds in which we live are all of one consistency.  It supports our confidence in techno-science as a uniquely privileged access to the nature of things.  But reality is divided and torn, contradiction is a formative and creative power, and people do not speak one language, even though they may be “one crew on one boat.”[147] People cannot live with just “one philosophy,” Rosenstock says, because “all philosophies are partial…” – they show us one thing only to hide another – and “the human soul is challenged today to see the relativity of all philosophical systems” as never before.[148]    Christianity, for him, is neither an idealism, nor a philosophy, it is an “onslaught on philosophy.”[149]

What comes after philosophy, for Rosenstock, can only be called “revelation,” but not in the fundamentalist sense in which this word is sometimes used – as if God’s word were an unchanging formula and unalterable text, always in the past and always in need of recovery or restoration.  Rosenstock saw Incarnation as a continuing and ramifying process.  It had, as we have seen, a unique and authoritative beginning in the Christ – one and only – but it also developed and changed through time.  In his own time, Rosenstock held that Christianity was “bankrupt,” as it had “repeatedly” been in the past.[150]  His view on this point echoed G.K. Chesterton who also held that “Christianity has died many times and risen again, for it had a God who knew his way out of the grave,” and that when it revived it did so “not as an old religion but as a new religion.”[151]  Christianity, in this sense, could not be “saved,” Rosenstock said, because that would be “unchristian” in a religion that teaches that  “whoever wants to save his life will lose it,” and that makes the success through failure of the Crucifixion  its very paradigm of worldly action.  But it could “begin again” and endlessly had begun again.[152]  He did not consider this “progress” exactly, since he rejected a view of history as progress in the usual sense of a steady improvement.  He saw it rather as resurrection.  “The future does not stay open automatically,” he writes; it has to be reopened by your inward death and renewal.”  Consequently, a “man’s life must be neither linear nor spiral [the usual images of progress] but crucial [the image of the cross].”[153]

Rosenstock, as my reader may already have gathered, is something of an evangelist.  He says as much himself when he states that, “A Christian who does not make converts is no Christian”[154]  His book The Christian Future even has a chapter entitled “The Economy of Salvation” – a phrase apt to alarm contemporary readers, along with cognates like “the divine economy” or “the plan of salvation.”  These phrases can seem to despise the misery and suffering of so many during the implementation of the plan, and to imply that the terrors of history, as well as the devastations of fire and flood, landslide and earthquake, extinction and ice age, are just by-effects and incidental costs of a finely tuned celestial scheme – that God knows what he likes, and who he likes, and shrugs off false starts, blind alleys, and other forms of collateral damage.  On top of that, Giorgio Agamben and Nicholas Heron, among others, have also shown that attempts to reason out the nature of divine government are the thought-forms out of which modern ideas of politics and economy will grow.[155]  Nevertheless, Rosenstock persists in the idea that “Christ began a life process which has continually transformed us and the world we live in” and dares to call this “the story” and even “the economy of salvation.” Without this conviction, he claims, “true faith is dead.”[156]  That this is a Western-centric, and Judaeo-Christian-centric view of history hardly needs saying, but, once again, it’s necessary to understand what Rosenstock means, before taking up this apparent ethnocentricism.

His first claim is that “the story of salvation” cannot be, as he says, “a recondite discovery of scholars,” but must be a truth “so simple that any schoolboy can understand it.”  He puts it in one sentence: “The story of salvation on earth is the advance of the singular against the plural.”  “Salvation,” he goes on, “came into a world of many gods, many lands, many peoples.  Over against each of these it sets up a singular: one God, one world, one humankind.”[157]  This is pretty obviously not a doctrinal, or even a cultural claim.  Its one irreducibly “chauvinist” element is the claim that the seed of human unity was first planted in a definite time and place – that the Christ was the flowering and fulfilment of Israel’s religious genius and no other.

For the rest, Rosenstock shared the view of many of his contemporaries that  Christianity is not a religion, like other religions, but something more like the simultaneous fulfilment and abolition of religion – a splitting of the atom of religion which releases its immense pent-up power and puts it, for good and ill, into the hands of humanity.  Rene Girard says something like this with his claim that the Crucifixion breaks the mould of all previous mythologies.  So do the many other Christians who say that Christianity is not a set of beliefs or practices so much as a relationship – an orientation to the living God.  Illich often argued – in his early writings on mission, in Gender, and in his recorded conversations with me – that the Gospel could have been, and should have been, a leaven and a supplement to the world’s many religions not their replacement.  The Romanesque churches of the first millennium, he argued in Gender, remained quite hospitable to the dragons, river gods, green men, and other local spirits of pre-Christian Europe.  The pre-Gothic church he said still “blessed everything” – Ecclesia omnia benedicat – and took the view that the Christian God was deus deorum – a serene God of gods, rather than their competitor.[158]  In The Rivers North of the Future, in answer to my question as to whether “the Good News could have been preached without the loss of proportions,” i.e. the loss of the genius of place in religion, he answers, Yes, and then adds ruefully “ but it was not God’s will.”[159]  The French priest and scholar Henri de Lubac says the same as Illich.  The Church, he says, is, or ought to be, catholic in that word’s etymological sense: universal.  “There was no need for the Church to repudiate the harmony between the earth and the cosmos…The church gather[s] to her vast treasury riches rescued from all sides…She made a halo for the Sun of Justice out of the glory of the Sol Invictus [and] adorn[ed] her cathedrals with the signs of the Zodiac, harmonizing her ceremonies with the rhythm of the seasons.”[160]

None of this is to say, of course, that Christianity did not become a typical religion, and an imperial ideology, but only to suggest that Christianity had, from the outset, another side, and to align Rosenstock with the contemporary movement to recover this original vision, and to free him from any suggestion of sectarian purpose.   In his book The Christian Future, Rosenstock vindicates his view that “the last two thousand years have really been the story of man’s salvation” by first allowing that “faith is intermittent” and second that “Christianity does not abolish sin and death but overcomes them.”[161]  These are both weighty provisos, particularly the second, with its subtle distinction between abolishing and overcoming – what does that mean exactly? – and its hint that Christianity has often presented itself in a corrupt and misunderstood forms.  (Illich’s corruptio optimi pessima is an important supplement to Rosenstock’s courageous but incorrigible tendency to “accentuate the positive” – a point I’ll take up in a minute.)  Rosenstock divides Christian history into three epochs, and, with his gift for bold typologies, defines them as follows: in the first millennium one God replaces many gods; in the second millennium, a single world is created – at first through the medium of “the Papacy as a world power,” and subsequently through “the system of territorial states” that grew up in the image of the Papal state.  Now “we are living through the agonies of transition to the third epoch” whose task will be to realize the unity of mankind – “the great singular of humanity, in one household,” he says.[162]

At the time it was written, this scheme would not have shocked, as it does now.  (The Christian Future was first published in 1946 and republished in a popular paperback series in 1966.[163])  At the time, Rosenstock’s sense of an incipient new age would have borne comparison to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reflections in his letters from prison on “religionless Christianity” and “man come of age” or to the theme of “planetary consciousness,” that found so many expressions in the 1960’s and after – from McLuhan’s global village to Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere” to the Lindisfarne Association’s vision of a “new planetary culture.”[164]  Today, with reaction to “globalization” in full spate, and the angelic noosphere abuzz with the static of the internet, Rosenstock’s prophecy makes a very different impression.  His word “agonies” predicts our present moment well enough, but, even so, it’s hard, in the present atmosphere, to remember or recapture the visionary imagination of a new age which Rosenstock helped to generate.  Rosenstock was an optimist, though the word  seems pallid and I should perhaps better say a man of faith, but he was not naïve, and he did not forget what he had seen at Verdun.  He recognized, as we have seen, the repaganization of the West; he admitted that Christianity was “bankrupt” at the time he wrote; and his whole attempt to reformulate Christianity as a social vision, hinging on embodiment and timely action, rather a private relationship to a fantasized God,     implied clearly enough that he knew his vision of a new age was a long way even from being understood, let alone fulfilled.  Rosenstock died in 1973, at a time when the visionary gleam still lingered – Illich, in those same years, also wrote intoxicated lines about “the invention of the future” and “man’s race to maturity” and, more than once, gave evidence that he thought the deschooling of society was imminent[165] – but Rosenstock was also in many ways a realist and knew that the third epoch would take just as long as the previous two millennia to unfold and that, when it did, it would happen in the same vexed and tortuous way that things had happened in the past. 

In The Creation of Adam, Michaelangelo’s often-reproduced fresco on the roof of the Sistine Chapel, God is shown with a cloud of angels enfolded in his robe, while Adam lies alone and naked on the rugged ground of the new creation.  All powers and potentialities are on the side of God, whom Adam reaches to touch.  But imagine, Rosenstock says, a pendant to this picture painted, so to speak, at the other end of time.  In this supplement, “all the spirits that had accompanied the Creator would have left him and descended to man.”[166]  Rosenstock’s fancy gives a pretty fair image of his estimation of our present moment, as well as a good sense of how he thought the Incarnation had acted in history.  We have taken the place of God, and, by the largely automatic and unconscious operations of credit and techno-science, made many worlds into one, but have not yet learned how to live in this haunted and uncanny space.  This is the challenge of the third Christian epoch, though it’s Christian elements will often appear, in Rosenstock’s nicely chosen word, “incognito.”

Like Illich, who also argues, though in a somewhat different vein, that Christianity has disappeared into the very structure of our present world, Rosenstock sees the  Incarnation as the motive power of Western-becoming-world history.  In his “autobiography of Western man,” Out of Revolution, as we have seen, he speaks of the revolutionary upheavals that have marked Western history as “the march of the Holy Spirit through the nations.”[167]  This effect, as said earlier, is explicit in the Papal revolution, the Reformation, and the English revolution, but implicit, and often carefully disguised, thereafter.  I have, for example, already related his intriguing theory that the invention of Renaissance during the early 19th Century was a ploy to hide the influence of the Reformation on the French Revolution.  By our time this disguise is so complete and mystifying that what Illich calls our “obviously Christian epoch” is not only aggressively convinced that it is post-Christian, it is actively scandalized by the memory of its ever having been Christian.[168]  In Canada, for example, a spate of church burnings that would have brought the house down had the targets been mosques or synagogues, gurdwaras or sacred mountains, has passed without much comment in our political mainstream.  It was “unacceptable,” our prime minister said at one point but also “understandable.”[169]

This occulting, as you might say, of Christianity and its influence is what Rosenstock calls “Christianity incognito.”  Many scholars have tried to make this influence patent since Carl Schmitt asserted in his Political Theology that all our significant political concepts are “secularized theological concepts,” and not just by their descent but in their “systematic structure.”[170]  In recent years, thinkers like Charles Taylor and John Milbank have shown convincingly that secularity is a product of Christianity not a departure from it,  and Ivan Illich has made a persuasive case that “modernity can be studied as an extension of church history.”[171]  But a powerful consensus - our default setting, as I said earlier – continues to hold that we are an enlightened, secular and scientific people for whom Christianity is at most a privately preferred “spirituality.” 

So many of us are both Christian and non-Christian at once: Christian by our institutions and habits of thought; non-Christian by our disavowal of the Christian religion.  “Christian and pagan, believer and unbeliever,” Rosenstock writes, “[are] no longer separate from each other as at first, but side by side within every soul,” and it is against this background that “a further…evolution of Christianity” must be plotted.[172]

French thinker Marcel Gauchet calls Christianity the religion of “the exit from religion,” or “the end of religion.”[173]  Like Charles Taylor, he notes that Christianity, by disenchanting the world and humanizing God, produces secularity, and this means, for Gauchet, that Christianity tends to stage its own disappearance.  The point is tricky because secular society is not just Christianity’s consequence, it is also its realization, however deviant.  In that sense, Illich’s “most obviously Christian epoch” is not a time that has exited from religion so much as one that has become unconscious of its religion.  Christianity has been at the same time consummated and corrupted, achieved and repudiated, and this has created an inherently mystifying situation in which we are what we aren’t and aren’t what we are.  As Illich’s formula, corruptio optimi pessima, makes plain, our troubles are precisely tailored to the good that might have been ours.  But the worst to which we are falling – our being increasingly “out of whack with any prior historical epoch,” as Illich says[174] – remains unintelligible until we take account of the distorting mirror it holds up to the best.  What most needs to be seen is out of sight, out of mind, and, often enough, under active taboo. 

Rosenstock certainly doesn’t see things exactly as Illich does, but they are arguably looking at the same glass with one, Illich, seeing it half empty, and the other, Rosenstock seeing it half-full.  The same illusion of difference can be generated by comparing Illich to Rene Girard and concluding that Girard sees the good Christianity did in exposing the machinery of violence, scapegoating and mimetic desire, while Illich sees only the harm.  Different points of emphasis and accentuation are mistaken for disagreement.  What I reluctantly called Rosenstock’s optimism a moment ago is germane in this context.  Unfortunate, or perhaps just unself-conscious phrases, like “the march of the Holy Spirit through the nations,” can be read as triumphalist when they only actually indicate what Illich believes just as much as Rosenstock – that through the Incarnation the Holy Spirit has been made available to the nations and has had its effect on them.  There is certainly more of realpolitik, if not of theodicy and “the cunning of history,” in Rosenstock’s history of revolution, and his argument that each revolution enacts what is “necessary” at the moment it occurs, than there is in Illich’s view of modernity as the consummation of the mysterium iniquitatis.[175]  But even so, Rosenstock believed that he was facing, in his time, a “bankrupt” Christianity – a religion that, by definition, had exhausted its resources and currently lacked both the names and the  images it would need to inaugurate a new age.  “All sacred names have a limited span of life,” Rosenstock says, without exception.[176]  Death comes before resurrection.

In these circumstances, Rosenstock predicted that Christianity would assume new forms.  “The inspiration of the Holy Spirit,” he says, “will not remain inside the walls of the visible or preaching Church.  A third form, the listening Church, will have to unburden the older modes of worship by assembling the faithful to live out their hopes through living and working together in unlabelled, undenominational groups.”  “Christianity… may rise from the dead,” he concludes “but only “if it now discards its self-centredness.”[177]  These are both adventurous predictions.  An institution without a name – “unlabelled” – and with no particular regard for itself – no “self-centredess” – is not easy to imagine for those with any experience of actually existing institutions.  But Rosenstock’s thought here is very close in its inspiration to Bonhoeffer’s equally illusive idea of a “religionless Christianity.”  Neither Bonhoeffer nor Rosenstock pretended to know what this would actually look like in practice. Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac, who held, like Rosenstock, that “the stages of history . . . are in reality stages of an essentially collective salvation,” took the view that the whole world must finally be seen as a church and that only in this perspective does the Christian doctrine of salvation make any contemporary sense.[178]  Certainly Rosenstock’s insistence that salvation is social, collective and communal – that God does not, as he says, deal with us “privately” – points in this direction.  “The listening church” is unlikely to resemble anything we would currently recognize as a church.

But, before such a church can come into existence, there will first have to be something about which Rosenstock has a good deal to say: the new way of thinking that Rosenstock and Rosenzweig sometimes called “speech thinking.”  The keynote of this kind of thinking is responsiveness.   The age of faith, Rosenstock writes, can be typified by Anselm of Canterbury’s precept: Credo ut intelligam – I believe in order to understand.  The modern age adopted Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am.   The new age, he urges, must take as its motto: Respondeo etsi mutabor – I answer even though I will have to change.[179]   This adage captures the essence of speech thinking.  It overturns modernity’s “arch heresy” – “the illusion that we can think outside of the realm of speech” – and puts in its place the principle that “truth is that of our thought which is still valid when it is communicated to others.”[180] 

At the end of his The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi announced what he called “the discovery of society.”  He meant, roughly, that modernity’s great experiment in trying to reimagine and reconstruct societies as economies had led at last, after two catastrophic world wars, to the discovery that society is irreducible and that people will never finally consent to see themselves and their lands as no more than factors of production.  His contemporary Rosenstock – they were born within two years of one another – made a comparable finding – the discovery of language.  And he gave a comparable explanation of why the originality and irreducibility of language was now coming to light – the Cartesian and Baconian attempt to make thinking primary and to treat language as no more than an instrumental means to “represent the truth after it is perceived” had shown its deficiencies in the same way as the economic project of rendering the living world into a set of “fictitious” commodities.   The two discoveries are related, and Rosenstock, in many ways, complements and completes Polanyi, though they never had anything to do with one another when they lived, so far as I know.  The redefinition of the world as an economy depended on the transformation of the very lineaments of existence into instrumentalities – resources disposable according to their price.  Language was assigned the same instrumental character in Francis Bacon’s plan for a new science.  Language, Bacon said, was a dangerous and deceitful medium that perverted reason and distracted people from the true nature of things, making them mistake their fancies for reality.  It must, accordingly, be retrained as the obedient servant of a rigorous method and deployed only with that “mathematical plainness” urged by the Royal Society’s charter.  We live now in the ruins of Bacon’s utopia – our language tamed to perfect docility, each word instrumentalized by some commercial, professional or ideological purpose, “a ragged and limping vernacular,” as Illich once called it, left at the mercy of Big Language, which raids it from time to time for a jolt of authenticity. 

A new account of language is at the heart of Rosenstock’s project.  Since the age of  Condorcet (1743-1794) and Hamann (1733-1788), the origin of language has been in dispute, with Condorcet and his posterity proposing a mechanistic account in which the long ladder from the first grunt to Finnegan’s Wake is climbed one rung at a time, and Hamman and his successors sensing the impossibility of reasoning about an ability that is itself “the  mother of reason and revelation, its Alpha and Omega.”[181] This second group have tended to notice language’s holistic and recursive character and to conclude that where every step already implies every other step, no step-by-step story can plausibly be constructed.   Not all in this second group have concluded, therefore, that a god, or the God, must have instructed our ancestors, but all have shared some form of the intuition that language must be divine, in at least the minimal sense that we are its creatures and have no place to stand outside of its affordances.  Carl Jung remarked, more than once, that the only replacement for a religion is another religion, and the case is the same with language – beyond language, while we live, there is only more, though perhaps better, language.[182]

Rosenstock and Rosenzweig drew the firm conclusion that there is no world outside of language because it is only by language that we make a world in the first place.  What we call things is what, for the time being, they are; when they stop answering to the names we have given, our only recourse is new names.  The times and places in which we “live, move and have our being,” are effects of the names by which we delineate and describe them. A child is called into existence by its name, and knows itself as a thou – as an addressee – long before it knows itself as an I.  And this is true of our social participation as well: “I am a thou for society long before I am an I to myself,” Rosenstock says.[183]  Language is world-making long before it is discursive and indicative: praising and praying, commanding and declaring come first.

This constructive power is the divine power in us, according to Rosenstock.  We speak only after we have been spoken to; we know only what we have heard.  God is the one who speaks; we speak in his voice and in his name.  But language in our mouths is partial and fallible – words fail us, as we, their careless curators, fail them.  “That is not what I meant, at all,” says Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. “That is not it, at all.”[184]  Language also limits us.  So long as one believed that behind represented reality there stands a pristine real reality, secure and serene, to which science and philosophy grant different forms of access, then everyone could potentially be made to bow to this truth, and unity achieved.  This was the old dream of science as Pentecost that illuminated the early modern centuries – Descartes’ mathesis universalis, say, or the hope of Renaissance grammarians that their studies would reveal the unity of language behind the Babel of tongues.[185]  Rosenstock participates in the discovery of language as a medium – the ur-medium certainly, but a medium just the same.  All media are in some measure opaque, all offer resistance, and all influence, and sometimes distort, what they transmit.   This was the discovery of Harold Innis and Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman in their elaboration of what Postman called “media ecology.”  But it is a discovery that I think was made across the board in the 20th century.  A notable example is the history and philosophy of science in the years after Thomas Kuhn first proposed, in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that knowledge is inevitably conditioned by the paradigms within which it is organized and oriented.  Einstein’s pretension to know “God’s thoughts” gives a pretty fair idea of what was being overcome in Kuhn’s account.  Writing in 1982, philosopher Isabelle Stengers and chemist Ilya Prigogine would say that, “Science is still the prophetic announcement of a description of the world seen from a divine…point of view.”[186]   Stengers and Prigogine, along with Kuhn and his many successors, were arguing for a new science attentive to “the multiple, the temporal, and the complex.”[187]  Language would not be trained into “mathematical plainness”; point-of-view could not be subtracted from science;  Descartes’ “certitude equal to…the demonstrations of Arithmetic and Geometry” was, in the end, an adolescent fantasy.   The consequences of this new view are summed up in Rosenstock’s respondeo.   Faith can orient us, and trust lead us to commitment, but absolute knowledge is not and will not be ours. 

Speech thinking is social in a double sense.  It is social, first, because speech is a shared and inherited possession in which I can only finally say what others can understand and what others have previously taught me to say.  Comprehension, according to Rosenstock, is the ultimate criterion of validity: “truth is that [part] of our thought which is still valid when it is communicated to others.”[188]  Mind is socially distributed, not isolated in individual brain pans – only “mental monadists,” Rosenstock says, “…look for the mind within the individual.”[189]  But speech thinking is also social in the sense that it endlessly requires supplementation, contradiction or completion by the one whom I address and who addresses me – the one who allows me “to turn his words around in my mouth,” as Illich says.[190]  It is my interlocutor, Rosenzweig says, who will show me what I think and what I can no longer, like the Cartesian ‘thinking thinker” discover all by myself.  This response may draw me out, or oppose me, but in either case I will have to wait for it, and, for this, I must “take time seriously.”   Since the scientific revolution, so called, Rosenstock says, time is “not reasoned about – it is reasoned away.”  For Spinoza it's merely a “mistaken impression,” Einstein calls it a “stubbornly persistent illusion.”[191]  In speech thinking, it returns as a feature of reality, rather than as a cognitive artefact which distracts us from the really real i.e. extension in space. 

The understanding of truth as temporal and social, and of language as its horizon,  potentially undercuts a great deal of contemporary anxiety and offers a ground on which culture war might begin to turn into civil interchange.  From the time of “the science wars” in the 1990’s, when scientific “realists” challenged “social constructionists,” to the current panic over “misinformation” and the supposed prevalence of “anti-science,” there has been an assumption that social stability and social amity depend on restoring the lustre of a truth untouched by human hands, a truth that is objective and purely “discovered.”  This is a reactionary project – it wants to get back to an idealized past of “trusted news” and unquestionable science - even if it is rooted, as I think it is, in a very real and well-founded fear of epistemological chaos.  When “a society finds itself in crisis,” the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz once wrote, “it instinctively turns its eyes towards its origin and looks there for a sign.”[192]  This describes pretty precisely what seems to me to be going on today – whether one is trying to return to the neverneverland of American greatness, or to the security of certain knowledge and scientific “law.”  “Speech thinking” offers a way ahead – into a world in which truth beckons from an open future instead of lying squandered in a mythical past.  If we depend on one another to find out what is the case, if our language, however corrupted, is still inexhaustibly renewable, and if religion is expressed, not privately, but in our common commitments, then a perspective opens in which there is something more to do than browbeating each other with dead gods.  Gods die, “sacred names” languish, but the living God acquires new names, which have to be discovered by painful experience.  The chaos that the reactionary votaries of truth fear is real, but understanding as the task of Rosenstock’s “listening church” remains an inspiration and a summons.

Rosenstock’s respondeo etsi mutabor is radical.  It throws us into what he calls “the open” – a region in which we await a vision or a commanding word.  It emphasizes attention and attunement to what has yet to be disclosed, rather than trying to reanimate old loyalties.  It opens a path out of the solipsism of the “thinking thinkers,” which most of us continue to be – by default, long habit, and the reinforcing power of our technological environment.  By a responsiveness in which, as Gadamer says, “our own prejudice is…brought into play by being put at risk,” we discover the future as an unknown that summons us, a way out of the welter of warring truths and the long shadow of ideology.  To really be changed by one’s response to another, just as to really be surprised by something, implies that there is something that one hasn’t known, hasn’t expected, and perhaps can’t know or expect by oneself. In silence and waiting, there are grounds for humility and hope.

In The Rivers North of the Future, Illich makes the staggering claim that “the world,” in the New Testament sense, which confronts us today is a “mystery of evil” – a topsy turvy Gospel that would not be what it is if the Gospel had not been preached in the first place.  This mis-taking of the Gospel is no simple mistake – it is, according to Illich, a lengthy process of historical instantiation and ramification, in which our institutions, our technologies, and our ways of thinking and speaking, sensing and feeling all come to embody the original misunderstanding.  William Blake in his poem Jerusalem says: “I give you the end of a golden string./ Only wind it into a ball./ It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,/Built in Jerusalem’s wall.”[193]  Blake’s import is somewhat different than mine here – he is urging Christians to understand that “Imagination [is] the real and eternal world” – but his image of a thread to be rewound has stayed with me as a hint at how to begin to remedy the condition of gospel-gone-wrong that Illich diagnoses.  Somehow, we have to retrace our steps, back to John Milbank’s “unknown future that [we have] missed,” and undo the misunderstanding.  

Will we then be free to elaborate a new Christianity?  I doubt it.  If Christianity names a religion, and an ideology – an ism as the French Le Christianisme suggests – then a “religionless Christianity,” as Bonhoeffer names this unknown future state, will probably not be called Christianity.  Rosenstock says as much in imagining his “listening church” as comprised of “unlabelled groups.”  Jesus, in his apophatic mode, also recommends anonymity – “Tell no one,” “do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,” “pray…in secret” etc.  Jacques Ellul gets out of the difficulty of calling the gospel by the name of what he considers its subversion – Le Christianisme – by designating the faith he wants to affirm with an algebraic “x.”[194]  One hears of “cultural Christians” and “intellectual Christians” who want to conserve some parts of historical Christianity and not others.   Religion is plainly something we can’t live with and can’t live without, and the problem of naming the nameless, or, to put it another way, of creating an institution that is acquainted with its shadow, is likely to be with us for a long time.  Contradiction may be “the criterion of the real” for Simone Weil, and paradox an emblem of faith for Henri de Lubac, but the cross, in Rosenstock’s sense, is still a long way from being accepted as the sign of truth for most people.[195]

I will not speculate further here, but, as this next Christianity emerges, I think that Rosenstock will have a lot to contribute to it.  As a thinker, he is perfectly, and even, as I’ve said, evangelically Christian, but also perfectly secular in the sense that he stakes no religious or metaphysical claim whatever.  He knows that “faith cannot live unless it remains intermittent”[196]; that “private religion is no religion”[197]; that “bod[ies] of time exist only because we say so”[198]; that “the other world is in this world”[199]; that “all knowledge [bears] the mark of contradiction”[200]and that “timeliness is everything”[201] – to make just a small bouquet of characteristic statements.  None of these statements is “religious” in the accepted sense.  One might call them  “existential,” had this word not been quite so badly enervated by the array of “existential threats” that now crowd every newscast.  Certainly, these statements all refer to properties of existence.  And this is true of Rosenstock’s Christianity in general.  He views the rudiments of Christianity – incarnation and resurrection - as illuminations of the human condition, and not as images of any occult or extra-mundane reality.  God and humanity, for him, are indivisible; and language ultimate, in the sense that it is our matrix, our medium and our limit.  Neither premise is widely accepted, but both have the power to open the future.

[1] David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich, House of Anansi, 2005, 169 (RNF)

[2] RNF, 146

[3] RNF, 68

[4] RNF 68, 61

[5] RNF 48, 170

[6] David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation, House of Anansi, 1992, 279

[7] RNF, 75

[8] The series was broadcast on CBC Radio’s Ideas in early 2000 and is available on my website: https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/category/Ivan+Illich

[9] I devoted a long chapter to the subject of Illich’s affinities with contemporary thinkers in the book that was eventually published as Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (Penn State 2021) but had to cut it in order to reduce the book’s length.  That essay is here: https://www.davidcayley.com/blog/category/Illich%2FAffinities

[10] DS, p.106

[11] David Cayley, George Grant in Conversation, House of Anansi Press, 1995, 74 (GGIC)

[12] GGIC, p. 75

[13] John Milbank, “The Last of the Last: Theology, Authority and Democracy,” Telos 123 (Spring 2002), p. 15

[14] Because Rosenstock left Germany for the United States after Hitler’s accession in 1933, his publication history is quite complicated.  Like Hannah Arendt, Paul Tillich and other permanent emigrés, he soon became a remarkably eloquent English stylist, and, by 1938, with the help of American friends, he had recast and reimagined his nearly 800 page magnum opus, Die Europäischen Revolutionen—Volkscharaktere und Staatenbildung (The European Revolutions and the Character of Nations, 1931) in English as Out of Revolution:  The Autobiography of Western Man.   But his English and German texts are not identical, and there are still works in German that have not appeared in English – an autobiography (Ja und Nein: Autobiograph, L. Schneider, 1968) for example.  One good place to begin an exploration of Rosentstock’s life and work is the website of the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fund: https://www.erhfund.org/

[15] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, I Am An Impure Thinker, Argo Books, 1970, vii-viii (IIT).  Auden paid poetic tribute to Rosenstock’s ideas in a poem written in the year after Rosenstock died and published in the year before Auden died.  Auden presented the poem, wonderfully, not as an elegy but as an aubade – a hymn to dawn. (W.H. Auden, Collected Poems, Vintage, 1976, p. 881 

[16] The lectures were given at Dartmouth College where Rosenstock taught between 1935 and 1957 and can be listened to at the website of the Rosenstock-Huessy fund, mentioned in the previous note.  The quotation is from Cristaudo’s entry on Rosenstock in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.   Cristaudo is professor of political philosophy at Charles Darwin University in Australia’s Northern Territory.  He’s the author of  Religion, Redemption, and Revolution: The New Speech Thinking of Franz Rosenzweig (University of Toronto Press, 2012), and the editor, with Francis Huessy, of The Cross and the Star: The Post-Nietzschean Christian and Jewish Thought of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009)

[17] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man, William Morrow and Company, 1938, 758 (OR)

[18] https://www.erhfund.org/biography/       

[19]  RNF, 148

[20] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, Argo Books, 1970, 177 (SR); Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, In the Cross of Reality, Vol. 1, The Hegemony of Spaces, ed. Wayne Cristaudo and Francis Huessy, trans. Jürgen Lawrenz, Transaction Publishers, 2017, 91 (ICR) 

[21] SR, 115, 118

[22]  OR, 720

[23] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future, or The Modern Mind Outrun, Barakaldo Books, 2020, 40 (CF); Luke 10:41-42 – Jesus says that Mary is doing the “one thing necessary” in listening to him.

[24] https://dartreview.com/dartmouths-philosopher-remembered/

[25] From an unpublished lecture in 1941 quoted in Cristaudo’s article on Rosenstock in The Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy.

[26] All these quotations are from a letter to an unnamed friend in 1946, which was reprinted as “Metanoia: To Think Anew” in “, pp. 184-185.

[27] Ibid, 188

[28] Ibid, 189

[29] https://www.erhfund.org/biography/

[30]  William James, The Moral Equivalent of War,” in The Best American Essays of the Century, ed. Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan, Houghton Miflinm, 2000, p. 52

[31] Ibid, 54

[32] Life Lines: Quotations from the Works of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, ed. Clinton C. Gardner, Argo, 1988 (LL)

[33] OOR 708

[34] Ibid, 5

[35] Matthew 4:17 – “From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’”  Revelation 21:5 – “Behold, I am making all things new.”

[36] OOR, 229 – I have substituted spirit for the word ghost in Rosenstock’s original.  This word must have recommended itself by its common origin with the German Geist, but it has since grown strange, unfamiliar, and nearly archaic.

[37] Ibid 472

[38] Ibid 473

[39] Ibid, 470

[40] Ibid 720

[41] Ibid 719

[42] Myths, Rites and Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader (MRS) ed. Wendell C. Beane and William G. Doty, Harper and Row, 1975, 75

[43] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, Basil Blackwell, 1970, 56

[44] ICR, 160

[45] Ibid, 160

[46] Judaism Despite Christianity: The Letters on Judaism and Christianity Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig (JDC), ed Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, University of Alabama Press, 1969, 180

[47] Ibid, 182

[48] ICR, 180

[49]  Corinthians 15:28

[50] JDR, p. 48

[51] Ibid, 160

[52] Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (SR), trans. William W. Hallo, Notre Dame, 1985, 340

[53] Ibid, 342

[54] JDC, 33

[55] Franz Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. and ed. Frank W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan, Cambridge/Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000, pp. 126-127

[56] SR, 109-110; subsequent quotes from this same passage

[57] “Letter on Humanism,” in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, HarperCollins, p. 193; Han George Gadamer, Truth and Method (TM), Continuum Books, 1975p. 440

[58] Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Book II, p. 211, reproduced here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:The_Works_of_Francis_Bacon_(1884)_Volume_1.djvu/339

[59] Thomas Spratt, The History of the Royal Society, S. Chapman, 1722, p. 113

[60] “I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts; the rest [is] just details.” (E. Salaman, “A Talk with Einstein,” Listener 54 (1955), 370-371)

[61] Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, translated and edited by Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing. 2000, p. 126

[62] RNF, p. 159

[63] “The All as one-and-universal can be held together only by…reasoning…  But if vitality is thereby ascribed to reasoning, it must willy-nilly be denied to life.” (The Star of Redemption, p. 47),  “By asserting that ‘All is One’ philosophy was also asserting that ‘All is nothing.’” (Philosophical and Theological Writings,  p. 33)

[64] ICR. 123

[65] SR, 98

[66] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Origin of Speech (OS), Argo Books, 1981, 16

[67] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_mood

[68] CF, 157

[69] Ronald Gregor Smith, J.G. Hamann, 1730-1788: A Study in Christian Existence (JGH), Collins, 1960, 85, 162

[70] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Future Philosophy, Cambridge, 2002, 20

[71] Quoted in Jacques Gernet, China and the Christian Impact (Cambridge, 1985), p. 240.  Gernet cites “Catégories de pensée et categories de langue,” Études philosophiques, IVd (Oct-Dec. 1958, reprinted in Problèmes de linguistique générale (Gallimard, ’66, pp. 63-74)

[72] OS, 103

[73] JDC, 119

[74] JGH, 225

[75] Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Rule Four, in The Philosophical Writings of René Descartes, Vol. 1, Cambridge, 1984. 19

[76] Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Open Court, 1994, 140

[77] See Bergson’s Creative Evolution and Innis’s Changing Concepts of Time

[78] OS, 37

[79] CF, 8

Saint Augustine Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick, Oxford World’s Classics, 1991, 230

[81] “Milton, Book the First,” in The Complete Poetry and Prose of Wiliam Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, Anchor Books, 1988, 121

[82] SR, 177

[83] IIT, 77

[84] Friedrich Nietzsche, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable,” Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kauffman,  Penguin, 1976, 485-486

[85] Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Vol. One: Thinking, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971, 10

[86] “The fourfold,” in Heidegger’s thought is the “gathering” of earth and sky, mortals and gods, in which things become real.  The idea is developed in the essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” in the collection Language, Poetry, Thought (Harper Colophon, 1971)

[87] CF 211

[88] SR, 177

[89] SR, 21

[90] OOR, 699

[91] OOR 702

[92] SR, 174

[93] Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, Hackett, 1983

[94] Cross, 262

[95] SR, 16

[96] Luke 4:32

[97] John 18:36; Romans 12:2

[98] John 12:24

[99] CF, 9

[100] CF, 31

[101] MSR, 75

[102] Matthew Rose, “Killing Time,” First Things, March 4, ‘25

[103] Simone Weil, Waiting for God, Harper and Row, 1973, 69

[104] Simon Weil, Letter to a Priest, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953, 17

[105] Simon Weil, First and Last Notebooks, Oxford, 1970, 302

[106] Letter to a Priest, 127

[107]RNF, 176

[108] ICR, 180

[109] CF, 117

[110] RNF, 49

[111] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Fruit of our Lips, The Pickwick Press, 1978, 121 (FOL)

[112] CF 212

[113] SR, 161

[114] Harold M. Stahmer, "Speech-Letters" and "Speech-Thinking": Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock Huessy, Modern Judaism , Feb., 1984, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Feb., 1984), p 75; this is Stahmer’s translation from a German source, unpublished in English

[115] CF 114

[116] OS, 95          

[117] OS, xv

[118] “A Plea for Time” was a lecture Innis delivered at the University of New Brunswick in 1950 and then incorporated into his The Bias of Communication (Toronto, 1951, pp. 61-91

[119] Exodus 3:14

[120] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am

[121] Matthew 4:19

[122] FOL, 53

[123] ICR, 11

[124] See note 20

[125] On doubling ourselves – ICR, 171; Of two minds – ICR, 11

[126] The Cross of Reality: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Lectures Vol. 5, Lecture 24, Dartmouth College Philosophy, 1953, 503

[127] Arendt presents the idea in The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958) and many other place in her work.

[128] CF, 279

[129] OOR, 90

[130] CF, 285

[131] Wayne Cristaudo quotes this unpublished speech in his excellent article on Rosenstock in the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy; he cites Microfilm 358, Reel 7 in The Collected Works held at Dartmouth.

[132] Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 562

[133] JGH, p. 225, 235, 247

[134] LL, 47; Gardner quotes this saying from Auden’s Viking Book of Aphorism, where no source is given

[135] LL, 36; Gardner cites one of Rosenstock’s Dartmouth lectures

[136] Ibid, 34; from the Dartmouth archive, as above

[137] CF, 251

[138] Ibid, 125

[139] Ibid, 125, 126

[140] Ibid, 132

[141] CF, 114

[142] LL, 28, translated from Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts

[143] Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Harvard, 1993, p. 32ff.

[144] CF 117

[145] JGH, 137

[146] See note 60

[147] SR, 14

[148] LL, 65-66; from the Dartmouth archive

[149] Ibid, 44; from the Dartmouth archive

[150] CF, 109

[151] G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, Hendrickson, 2007, 238

[152] CF, 75, 109

[153] CF, 101

[154] CF, 162

[155] Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, Stanford, 2011; Nicholas Heron, Liturgical Power: Between Economic and Political Theology, Modern Language Initiative, 2017

[156] CF, 137, 138

[157] CF, 139

[158] Ivan Illich, Gender, Pantheon, 1982, 159ff.

[159] RNF, 196

[160] Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, Ignatius Press, 1958, 153

[161] CF, 137, 138

[162] CF, 139

[163] The book was originally published by Charles Scribner’s Sons and reissued in paperback in the Harper Torchbooks series.

[164] Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison first appeared in English in 1953; McLuhan began writing of “the global village” in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962); Teilhard’s concept of the noosphere is developed in his posthumous The Phenomenon of Man (French, 1955; English 1959); The Lindisfarne Association was founded by cultural historian William Irwin Thompson in 1972, following up on ideas he had expressed the year before in his book At the Edge of History.

[165] See Celebration of Awareness (Doubleday, 1970), p. 5, and Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (Penn State, 2021), p. 114

[166] OOR, 7327

[167] See note 36

[168] See note 5

[169] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Canadian_church_burnings

[170] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, MIT, 1985/1922, 36

[171] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Harvard, 2007; John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, Wiley Blackwell, 2006/1990; RNF– see note 1

[172] CF, 152

[173] Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, Princeton, 1999

[174] RNF, 60

[175] OOR, 719; “the cunning of history” is G.W.F. Hegel’s term in his Philosophy of History for the ways in which historical events, often terrible, produce results the historical actors never intended or foresaw

[176] CF, 8

[177] CF, 156

[178] Catholicism, 148; Benjamin M. Durheim, “All the World is Church: The Christian Call in Henri de Lubac,” Obsculta, Volume 2, Issue 1, 5/1/2009

[179] OOR, 751

[180] SR, 172, 72

[181] See note 69

[182] I have come across the observation repeatedly in Jung’s writings.  As far as I know, it is first found in a letter to Freud – C.G. Jung, Letters, Vol. 1, Princeton, 1973, p. 18

[183] OS, 90

[184] T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" from Collected Poems 1909-1962, Faber and Faber, Ltd, 1963, 16

[185] For Descartes reference, see note 75; the idea that Renaissance grammarians thought of their science as a Pentecost that would overcome Babel by a scientific anatomy of language in general, I owe to early modern scholar, Roland Greene, who explains it in the first section of Part Three of the CBC radio series, The Origins of the Modern Public:  https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/category/Origins+of+Modern+Public

[186] Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, New Science Library, Shambhala Books, Boulder, p. 76.  (This book was published by Gallimard in French in 1982, under the title La Nouvelle Alliance: Metamorphose de la Science.)

[187] Ibid, p. xxvii

[188] See note 180

[189] CF, 275

[190] RNF, 159

[191] SR 28; Rosenstock quotes Spinoza; the Einstein example is mine – from memory, but, as I recall, it comes from his correspondence with Michele Besso, where he expresses his conviction as that of a “believing physicist.”

[192] Octavio Paz, “Reflections: Mexico and the United States, The New Yorker, Sept. 17, 1979, p. 153

[193] Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 231

[194] Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, Wipf and Stock, 2011, p. 11ff.

[195] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952. 89; Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, Ignatius Press, 1987

[196] CF, 110

[197] CF 251

[198] CF, 203

[199] CF, 152

[200] See note 122

[201] See note 40

Concerning Life

CONCERNING LIFE: AN OPEN LETTER TO JEAN- PIERRE DUPUY AND WOLFGANG PALAVER

“And the Gileadites took the fords of the Jordan against the Ephraimites.  And when any of the fugitives of Ephraim said, “Let me go over,” the men of Gilead said to him, “Are you an Ephraimite?”  When he said, “No,” they said to him, “Then say Shibboleth,” and he said, “Sibboleth,” for he could not pronounce it right; then then seized him and slew him in the fords of the Jordan.   And there fell at that time forty-two thousand of the Ephraimites.” (Judges 12: 3-6)

A shibboleth is a dividing line, and dividing lines are sharpest when they are razor thin.  For the Ephraimites the price of forty-two thousand lives was nothing more than what linguists call an unvoiced fricative.  Things are not yet quite so bad with us, but the pandemic has certainly brought division between friends.  (And how great, after all, were the differences between Ephraimites and Gileadites, if all that distinguished them was the ability to make this crucial sound?)  One of the shibboleths dividing us seems to be life.  Recently two admired friends have taken issue with me over this word and the interpretation I have given of Ivan Illich’s views on the subject.  Theologian Wolfgang Palaver, in an interview in the German weekly Die Zeit for Dec. 23, 2020, expresses concern that Illich’s claim that life has become “a fetish” is being abused as a justification for “sacrificing the weak.”  And French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy, in an article for the website AOC called “The True Legacy of Ivan Illich,” argues, similarly, that those who follow “the fashion of covidoscepticism” misunderstand and misappropriate Illich’s strictures on “the idolization of life.”  Dupuy’s article is the second of two on the “alleged ‘sacralisation of life.’”  The first denounces what Dupuy calls “the blindness of the intellectuals.”  

In Dupuy’s essay I am named in a way that flatters my achievements as an interlocutor of Illich’s before I “succumbed to the times.”  “Alas, a thousand times alas,” he says, that “David Cayley himself” has “succumbed to the times” and now “multiplies his clichés and manifests his ignorance” while engaging in a “classic minimization of the severity of the pandemic.”  Palaver is milder and doesn’t name me directly, but since I have been prominent amongst those who have tried to argue that “the idolization of life” has played a pernicious part in political responses to the pandemic, I include myself within that company whom he thinks have pushed Illich into dangerous territory, far beyond Illich’s intention.   

The stakes are high here.  “Saving lives” has justified every policy adopted to counteract the pandemic during the last year, and life is likely to continue as the sacred sign in which the revised social order that emerges from the pandemic will root its legitimacy.  Accordingly, it seems important to seek some clarity on what is now meant by this word.  (I hope my frequent resort to italics will be understood as a way of marking the usage I want to question.). I will begin by trying to understand what is worrying Palaver and Dupuy, then present what I take to be Illich’s view, and conclude with some reflection on the role of life in the present, and emerging, social order.  

Palaver and Dupuy are concerned with what they call the protection or preservation of life.  Both argue that those who “minimize” the pandemic, criticize the measures taken against it, or flout the rules for its containment are recklessly endangering their neighbours.  Both focus particularly on Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben as the epitome of this recklessness.   Agamben has argued throughout the pandemic that the official response has amounted to destroying the village in order to save it.  By leaving the old to die alone and unconsoled, by making people afraid of one another, and by banning funerals, church services and other elementary forms of social and cultural life, he has written, we have eviscerated what is left of our way of life, and allowed medicine to establish itself as an all-powerful and virtually incontestable religious cult.  Dupuy is outspoken in his criticisms.  Agamben’s “intellectual posturing,” he writes, is the “soft version” of the same “reactionary violence” as one sees in “American far-right groups…shouting, guns in hand, in front of the steps of their legislatures.”  This is already unfair and entirely ad hominem, but then Dupuy goes further.  With respect to Agamben’s concept of “bare life,” by which Agamben clearly and explicitly means life without the cultural qualifications that give life narrative shape and dignity, Dupuy claims as an implication of this concept that Agamben must “despise… the simple, ‘animal’ life of the poor landless peasants of the Brazilian northeast.”  This seems to me to verge on slander as well as willful misreading.   

Palaver, again, is milder and more temperate, but he too says that he is “upset” with Agamben.   The relevant passage in Palaver’s interview with Die Zeit: where he expresses this consternation is worth quoting in full: 

Agamben really upsets me. He is more papal than the Pope and more ecclesiastical than the Church. He claims that the Church has given up salvation and sacrificed it to health: because it sought salvation in history, it could only end in health. Nonsense!  Why did Jesus heal people and take care of physical ailments? The many healings alone contradict Agamben’s theological escape from the world. I am the LORD, your doctor.  Or think of the miracle of the multiplication of bread. When people are hungry, you have to do something! Agamben practices bad theology when he tears salvation and health apart. 

…Agamben rightly laments an attitude for which health and survival are the most important things in life. But here one would have to ask: is it about my own life? Or is it the concern that applies to other people? 

I can’t overlook the possibility that this is mistranscribed, mistranslated or just spoken hastily off the cuff, but, if this is what Palaver meant to say, I think he goes too far.  Jesus certainly fed people and healed people, but he  didn’t heal everyone or feed everyone.  Indeed he fed and healed people so sparingly that it seems fair to say that such actions, when he performed them, were intended illustratively rather than administratively or programmatically.   This is the great issue in Dostoevsky’s fable of the Grand Inquisitor.  The Inquisitor reproaches his Lord for not turning stones into bread when he was challenged to do so.  Because of this failure to allow for the weakness of suffering humanity, which cries always, “Enslave [us] but feed us!,” the Inquisitor says, it was necessary for the Church to step in to “correct and improve” the Gospel.  I don’t mean to imply that Palaver takes his stand with the Grand Inquisitor, but only to point to a profound ambiguity in the Gospel view of Jesus as physician. Yes, there are feedings and healings, but there are also declarations that the Kingdom is “not of this world” and references to a way or a path so narrow or so arduous that “few find it.”  It seems unwise therefore for Palaver to accuse Agamben of a “theological escape from the world.”  Agamben has never claimed to be a theologian, and his defence of particular “forms of life,” like funerals for the dead or human solace for the dying, seems to me eminently worldly.  What he lays at the Church’s door is to have forgotten the messianic, and therefore to have lost a necessary “dialectical tension” between history and what exceeds or interrupts history.  It is only between “these poles,” Agamben claimed in an address to “the Church of our Lord” in Paris in 2009, that “a community can form and last.” Palaver may disagree, but, in that case, I would expect arguments rather than irritation and dismissal (“Nonsense!”) 

The second point that Palaver makes is that the masked and distanced citizen is not necessarily concerned with his own life, but with the lives of others.  Dupuy says just the same – it is not for myself that I take precautions but for others.  Some of this is quite uncontroversial.  Long before COVID I would have declined to go out into society with an infectious disease, and hoped for the same courtesy from others. But in a world where everyone is a danger to everyone else, and the threat of “asymptomatic transmission” inhibits all social interaction without exception, it seems to me that a limit of “responsibilization” has been reached and surpassed.  Reconceptualizing society as an immune system writ large is a formula for social dissolution.  

Palaver argues further that those who argue against lockdown and similar measures are preparing to “sacrifice the weak..”  Behind this willingness he says stands “scapegoat logic” – the logic of the High Priest when he says, in the Gospel narratives of the Passion, that “it is better that one man should die than that the whole people should perish.”  In the understanding that Palaver shares with his teacher René Girard, this was the archaic principle – timely sacrifice preserves social order  - that first Judaism and then Christianity began to question and overturn.  All “utility thinking,” Palaver says, reasserts “scapegoat logic.”  “Only life can provide orientation,” he concludes.  I agree, but much turns, as we shall see, on what is meant by life. 

Before turning to Illich I can’t avoid saying, though with some trepidation, that in both Palaver and Dupuy, I feel I detect a note of panic.  Once, long ago, after a lecture of Illich’s on Medical Nemesis, a member of his audience turned to a friend of Illich’s and asked in innocent perplexity, “What does he want? Let people die?” Both Dupuy and Palaver are more sophisticated, and more conversant with Illich’s work, than was this bemused young man, and yet both seem, finally, to have reached the same sticking point.  Lives must be saved – more or less at all costs – and anyone who argues otherwise has blindly forsaken “the height of humanism” (Dupuy) and succumbed to “scapegoat logic” and “social Darwinism.” (Palaver) 

Both my interlocutors think that “covidosceptics” are mistaking and abusing Illich’s claim that life has become “an idol” and “a fetish.”  Palaver admits that Illich issued a salutary warning, but feels that Illich is being taken too prescriptively.  Dupuy claims that’s Illich’s strictures on the “idolization of life” were intended only to prevent life’s degradation, not to in any way limit its protection and preservation.  To get to the bottom of this we will first have to establish what Illich, in fact, said. 

Sometime in 1985 a Baptist minister by the name of Will Campbell approached Illich after a lecture to a group of social workers in Macon, Georgia.  In his private papers, Illich left behind a brief account, written ten years later, of this fateful meeting: 

[Following the lecture] I noticed [a] man with…a…knotted walking stick coming towards me.  He introduced himself as a preacher: “Will Campbell…who has to ask you for a great favour.”  I gasped, because that name I knew, “If you are the one who animated Martin Luther King, do not ask me but simply command, I obey.”  He mumbled something which ended in “…you darn papists” and then said, “You refused to speak about ‘life’.  You see, ‘life’ is tearing our churches apart.  There are those who condemn capital punishment, but not the A-bomb, and others who call for the execution of abortionists.  I will gather the representatives of our Churches so that you can talk to them.” 

I was frightened.  I cast about in my mind what to make of such a call.  Many months later, somewhere in Ohio, I faced the room full of ‘church leaders’ that Campbell had assembled.  The mood was tense.  A clergyman in the front row identified himself as the representative of the Catholic Bishop’s Conference and urged me to start with a prayer.  This trap I had to refuse; I told him that I would start with a solemn, formal curse and asked those who did not stand for such a ceremony to leave.  Then, dramatically, I raised my hands and repeated three times, “To Hell With Life.” 

Beyond the curse I do not know what Illich said on this occasion – Ohio is a big place, the meeting left no further trace in Illich’s papers, and I’ve never encountered anyone who can tell me anything more about it – but four years later, in Chicago, Illich addressed a conference convened by the American Lutheran Church on the same subject.  This lecture, called “The Institutional Construction of a New Fetish: Human Life” was published, three years later, in Illich’s book, In the Mirror of the Past.  On that occasion Illich told his auditors, without qualification, that “life is the most powerful idol the Church has had to face in her history.”  “More than the ideology of empire or feudal order, more than nationalism or progress, more than Gnosticism or enlightenment, the acceptance of substantive life as a God-given reality lends itself to a new corruption of the Christian faith.”  The word “substantive” is important here, and I will return to it in a moment, but first I want to examine the claim that contemporary reverence for life corrupts Christian faith. 

In the gospels, Jesus asserts, repeatedly, that He is Life.   “He does not say, ‘I am a life,’” Illich comments.  “He says, ‘I am Life,’ tout court.”  What is meant is more than merely being alive.  The Life which Jesus incarnates and exemplifies can be given and received, Illich says, only as a gift.  As such, it can be encountered, celebrated and shared, but it can never be ours to define or delimit, administer or control.  This way of thinking and speaking about life, in which the word always implies a relationship to the One in whose gift Life lies, saturated the culture of Christendom for many centuries.  “For much more than a millennium,” Illich says, “it was quite clear that people can be among the living and be dead, and other people can be dead and have life. This is not simply a religious statement; this…became an ordinary everyday assumption.” This everyday character is significant because it was Illich’s argument that the “preconditions for modernity” were created by this acculturation of “Gospel truths.”  Modernity bent, folded and mutilated these truths, in his view, but it could never have come to be without them.  This is why Illich dares to say that contemporary usage “abuses the word for the Incarnate God.” He considered this a historical rather than a theological judgment.  Trace the word life back through its many expressions in the Western theological, philosophical and scientific tradition, he said, and it will become evident that its meaning, however altered, continues to be shaped within the field that emanates from Latin Christendom.  

The way we speak of life is rooted in a civilization once suffused with belief in the Incarnation.  And this “Christian ancestry,” is shared with “other key verities defining secular society.” But at the same time the word’s meaning has completely changed.  It has become “substantive,” Illich says.  By this he means both that it has taken on the character of a stuff –  of something palpable – and that it has acquired substance in the more philosophical and theological sense of something that can exist in itself – it has become self-standing and self-sufficient.   That life has become a stuff can be seen, Illich claims, in the discourses of law, medicine, economics and ecology – all of which claim this stuff as both their jurisdiction and their justification.  The law protects it – in several U.S. states one can even sue for “wrongful life” – medicine extends it – corporations administer it – as manpower or human resources – and ecology studies it.  The science of genetics now knows its “language.”  Demography and journalism tirelessly count its units.  Lives lost index disaster; lives saved index social progress.  The pursuit of health prolongs it; technology enhances it.  Life is known, as never before and it is managed, as never before.  

But, at the same time, life transcends all management as what Illich calls a “fetish.”  This was a favourite word, chosen more for its power to shock than for any particular anthropological resonance.  A fetish is a magical object with the power of channelling or fixating certain feelings.    “Technological society,” he says, “is singularly incapable of generating myths to which people can form deep and rich attachments.”  And yet such a society, just for its “rudimentary maintenance,” requires some way of commanding sentimental and not just rational allegiance.  This is the role of the fetish.  It is “a Linus blanket…that we can drag around to feel like decent defenders of sacred values.”  Life is managed as a biopolitical resource, but, as a fetish, it is also something that can be “spoken about in hushed tones as something mysterious, polymorphic, weak, demanding tender protection.” What Illich calls ‘epistemic sentimentality” can thus attach itself to life, at the same time that life is being intensively managed.  To live under the sign of life is to become adept at eliding these seemingly contradictory connotations.  One learns to slide smoothly from one to the other without this operation ever having to come into consciousness as such.  With a single verbal gesture, we revere what we manage, and manage what we revere. 

Life, Illich says, “tends to void” both the moral and the legal “concept of a person.”  For him, it is in “the notion of ‘person’ [that] the humanism of Western humanism is anchored.”  A person possesses a clear boundary, and an inviolable integrity.  A life does not.  One is a person; one can, as the saying goes, “get a life.”  Lives can be a evaluated and improved in ways that persons cannot.  A doctor, facing me as a person, faces a certain story and a certain unknown destiny – there is a lot he or she must learn in order to treat me.  A doctor facing me as a life can discern everything he or she needs to know from my test results.  Lives vary, of course, as the skillful physician will recognize, but not quite in the same way that persons vary. 

Life, for Illich, was also the sign of a profound change in “religiosity” – a term that he used to refer to the feelings, gestures and barely conscious dispositions that might not be captured by the more formal word religion.  “My nose, my intuition, and also my reason tell me,” he said in 1992, “that we might be at a historical threshold, a watershed, a point of transition to a new stage of religiosity.”  This idea had first taken hold of him a couple of years earlier, he told me, while he stood in the kitchen of the apartment of a group of graduate students whom he was visiting: 

On the icebox door two pictures were pasted.  One was the blue planet and one was the fertilized egg.  Two circles of roughly the same size – one bluish, the other one pink.  One of the students said to me, “These are our doorways to the understanding of life.”  The term doorway struck me profoundly. This stuck with me for quite a few months, until, for a totally different reason, I…took down a book of Mircea Eliade[’s].  Eliade has been for many of us a teacher of religious science…And, going through this book, I came to the conclusion that better than anyone else I had studied he brings out the concept of sacrum.  The term sacrum, the Latin noun corresponding to our sacred, has been used by religious scientists to describe a particular place in the topology of any culture.  It refers to an object, a locality, or a sign which, within that culture, is believed to be – this young lady was right – a doorway.  I had always thought of it as a threshold, a threshold at which the ultimate appears, that which, within that society, is considered to be true otherness, that which, within a given society, is considered transcendent.  For Eliade, a society becomes a conscious unity not just in relation to neighboring societies – we are not you – but also by defining itself in relation to what’s beyond. 

The pink disk and the blue disk, Illich concluded, performed, very precisely, the function Eliade described.  Just as much as the megaliths at Stonehenge, the Ka’bah in Mecca, or the omphalos of the earth at ancient Delphi, they were sacrums.  But, as “emblems for scientific facts,” they were sacrums of an entirely new kind.  The “ultimate” which appeared at earlier “doorways” beckoned from a beyond that was transcendent – the opposite and other of this world with which it was understood to be radically discontinuous.  What appears in the doorway of the two disks is more of the same – a realm of the invisibly small or the invisibly large to which we can gain access only with electron microscopes or the vast explosive power required to overcome gravity but which is yet no different than what is at hand.  The doorways at which life is experienced and understood are, in Illich’s words, “a frontier with no beyond.”  Like the endless virtuality that extends beyond the computer screen, they open to an infinity without difference.  The new religiosity he had discovered was a “spirituality” of pure immanence, in which virtual objects, conjured out of the womb of technology, present both a here and a beyond at once.  

Life as pure immanence is uniquely available – it opens itself to our microphones and our cameras, our microscopes and our scanners.  Life is at our command, even as we are at life’s command.  We manage what we praise, administer what we venerate.  Both aspects are at play in the notion of responsibility for life which has played such an important role in the discourses of the pandemic and which seems to be the main concern of both my interlocutors.  Palaver says, “We are responsible for each other’s life. It is our highest responsibility, for which we may even have to sacrifice our lives.”   Dupuy evokes “the risk of infecting one’s loved ones” as the standard one should apply to one’s own behaviour.  To criticize either the ideological construction of the pandemic or the counter-productive measures adopted against it is to flirt with irresponsibility – the reckless disregard for the lives of others which both Dupuy and Palaver deprecate and fear.  But the word responsibility, according to Illich, is something of a trap – a word that’s easier to get into than to get out of.  The key issue for him is whether the thing for which I am said to be responsible is within my reach, within my power, and within my understanding.  “Responsibility catches,” he says, by imputing to the one being made responsible some imaginary power– it might be the power to overcome racism, save life on earth, or end the pandemic by staying home.  But very often Illich says this power “turns out to be phoney.”  And that makes responsibility “the ideal base on which to build the new religiosity of which I speak, in the name of which people become more than ever administrable, manageable.”  

No challenge is offered here to behaviour that is prudent, considerate or courteous.  Illich’s concern was with illusion, moral grandiosity and epistemological confusion.  The last is particularly important in the present case.  Despite immediate domestication in a thousand cartoons as a spikey malevolent little demon, little was known about SARS COV-2 when it first appeared, and much is still in question, including its origins, the mortality it causes, its mode of transmission, and how it is best prevented and treated,  But, at the same time, “consistent messaging” and “following the science” having been emphasized.  This has been seen to require an effective censorship, first to keep perfectly normal scientific dissensus out of the news, and second to lend an air of obviousness and impregnability to what are in fact scientifically doubtful precautions.  (An example of the first is the marginalization of dissenting public health experts like former Ontario chief medical officer of health Richard Schabas and former Manitoba head Joel Kettner in Canada.  The best example of the second is the use of masks, dismissed as useless at the beginning of the pandemic, then, without new evidence, made compulsory and indisputable.)   This creates a strange situation with regard to responsibility.  Real response-ability depends on an intelligible situation in which I can respond and reach a practical judgment about what to do.  But the pandemic, while real for those who are ill, has also been played out in the realm of hypothesis, model, and metaphor.  This means that responsibility is often exercised not in the face of an actual neighbour but in relation to a risk profile.  This hypothetical neighbour, in effect, goes on for ever. And so we are, as Illich says, “caught.” 

How we are caught is best illustrated by the idea of risk.  This was the contemporaty preoccupation that most worried Illich, who called it today’s “most important religiously celebrated ideology.”  “Risk awareness” he said is “an invitation to intensive self-algorithmization,” and, as such, it is “disembodying.”  The crucial point is that risk does not pertain to an individual person – no one knows what will happen to me individually.  It is a calculation of the frequency with which a given event will happen in a population or class that shares some attribute or set of attributes – a prediction of what might happen to someone like me.  The individual is displaced or decentred and replaced by a mathematical construct.  To speak about “my risk” is, therefore, to conflate what should be two entirely distinct ways of speaking, and to introduce a hypothetical dimension into my own flesh.  Illich became aware of this predicament through the German legal regime which requires pregnant women to undergo genetic counselling, so that they can become conversant with the various risks attending their pregnancies and then make an informed choice – a responsible decision – about whether to proceed.  Illich found this horrifying, particularly when he found out, through his friend and colleague Silya Samerski’s study of these counselling sessions, that women regularly mistook statements about risk as statements about their own pregnancies.   

Risk in its colloquial meaning is part of living.  No one could safely walk to the corner store without some estimate of possible hazards based on past experience.  But, when formalized and mathematized risk defines a new type of social order that German sociologist Ulrich Beck called a “risk society” (Risokogesellschaft).  In such a society an unprecedented intrusion of the hypothetical into the actual occurs.  This is enacted in two ways.  The first is that advanced modernity as a whole is a giant uncontrolled risk – an ongoing science experiment.  We will find out what it means to have “weapons of mass destruction” stockpiled all over the world after the fact – the experiment is still in progress.  The same is true for homelier examples like mobile phones or the internet - to take just two everyday technologies that are currently transforming social life in completely unpredictable ways.  This element of uncontrolled and uncontrollable risk is inherent a way of life in which constant technological innovation is regarded as good, necessary and inevitable.  “When you see something that is technically sweet,” said physicist Robert Oppenheimer, with reference to his leading role in the creation of nuclear weapons, “you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.”   

This uncontrolled, universal and barely endurable risk generates, it seems to me, a compensation:  a zealous attention to those risks which apparently can be controlled.  This is the second way in which Beck’s risk society is enacted – in our preoccupation with safety, our “zero tolerance,” our constant scanning for incipient “problems.”  “Risk awareness” – “religiously celebrated,” as Illich says – is the complement to uncontained risk.  This type of awareness requires people to live outside and beyond their embodied experience.  It also requires them to dominate the future in a novel way.  Once the likelihood of some unwanted eventuality has been ascertained, one can take steps to prevent its occurrence – the at-risk pregnancy is terminated, security cameras are installed, safety become the promise of every institution.  Prudence passes over into obsession; “be safe” becomes the new farewell.  

Illich, by his own account, lived for surprises. “Our hope of salvation,” he told the graduating class the University of Puerto Rico in 1969, “lies in our being surprised by the Other.  Let us learn always to receive further surprises.  I decided long ago to hope for surprises until the final act of my life – that is to say, in death itself.”  In the first half of his career, he saw the routinization of charity through service institutions as the main threat to the spirit of surprise.  Service institutions replace the fitful, spontaneous unreliable workings of personal vocation with a guaranteed response.  Later I believe he saw “risk awareness” in the same light.  A risk is a probability distribution in a population, it is not a person.  A person invites discernment – careful attention to an unrepeatable story – a risk is an algorithm, an operational rule that tells you what to do in a case like this.  But there may a world of difference between this case and a case like this.  Surprise is the enemy when following a rule. 

This is not to say that risk has no proper place in the world.  An actuary needs precise knowledge of the frequency of certain adverse events; a surgeon would be remiss in not weighing the harms of intervention versus the benefits.  Like much in Illich’s thought this is a question of degree, or balance.  In medicine for example, one needs to ask whether knowledge of risk supplements personal knowledge of the patient, or replaces it, so that the patient, in effect, becomes the risk.  The same question applies to the genetic counselling sessions for pregnant women that made such a big impression on Illich through Silya Samerski’s research.  Does the woman being counselled know the difference between herself, and the risk that she carries as a member of a class?.  To internalize risk is to become, in effect, somebody else.  The unique is replaced by the general; the possible gives way to the probable; hope yields to calculable expectation.  Risk becomes a problem when it moves from the position of a qualified and partial form of knowledge to a “religiously celebrated ideology.” 

The god that rules the realm of risk is life.  All is done to enhance, to extend and to save life.  “I have got up each morning,” said British Health Minister Matt Hancock the other day, in extenuation of his conduct during the pandemic, “and I have asked, what must I do to protect life?”  The interests of life mandate and superintend risk awareness.  The concepts are akin in their generality.  Both absorb the particular and the personal into the abstract and synoptic.  One attends to risk, finally, in order to conserve life. 

This astonishing and stupefying generality make life, according to Illich a plastic word.  A plastic word is a word which is all connotation and no denotation, a word which can go anywhere and do anything because it is subject to no limit.  It is a bare, unshaded light that is never turned off.  Illich first spoke of such words as “amoeba words,” a term he used in Deschooling Society for a term “so flexible” that it can fit “any interstice of [a] language.”  When Illich found a kindred spirit in Uwe Pörksen, a novelist and a professor of German literature at the University of Freiburg whom Illich met at the newly-established Wissenschaftkolleg in Berlin in 1980, they developed this concept further under the name of plastic words.  Pörksen continued to work on what they began together and in 1988 published his book Plastikwörter: Die Sprache einer Internationalen Diktatur, which was translated into English as Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language in 1995.   

Plastic words, among other things, are words plucked from the vernacular and put through what Illich once called “a scientific laundry.”  They then return to everyday use with a fresh scent of expertise and the appearance of wearing a lab coat.  In the movie Cool Hand Luke, when the chain gang “captain” utters the often-quoted line, “What we’ve got here is…failure to communicate,” the irony depends on communication’s character as a plastic word.  To communicate is no longer just to connect, as a communicating passageway connects, it is to engage a process which can be studied and formalized with scientific precision.  To speak of communication is to refer to a realm in which an expert knows, better than you, when you’re communicating and when you’re not.  The word information goes through a similar history.  An old colloquial term was coopted by “information science” and reconstructed as a matter of signal to noise ratio or of bits and bytes.  This lent the word an aura or halo which it retained in common use, so that when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation introduced “Information Radio,” it invoked a “communication” from this higher plane of science.  The CBC wasn’t just telling you something – it was providing Information.  Plastic words become professional resources.  With communication or development, experts can build and make the world as malleable as the words themselves.  

It was with “a sense of sudden horror,” therefore, that Illich realized that life might have become a plastic word – a word that functions primarily as a professional resource.  He shared his reluctant intuition with Uwe Pörksen and found that his old friend was even more appalled than he at the idea that the word life could ever become a member of this egregious category: 

When I came to Pörksen and said, “Uwe, I think I’ve found the worst of them, life, he became very silent.  For the first time…I had the impression that he became angry with me, disappointed in me.  He was offended.  And it took about six months or nine months before we could speak about that issue again, because it is just unthinkable that something as precious and beautiful as life should act as an amoeba word.  

Pōrksen’s horror was an index of Illich’s own. 

To summarize then, before moving on to our current circumstances: Illich regarded life as an idol – a man-made god in whose form we worship ourselves, while at the same time generating a sacred which mandates and justifies our manipulation of living.   He claimed that life had become the object and anchor of “a new stage of religiosity” – a further perversion of the Biblical understanding of life as an implication of God’s breath. He thought that life had become a “substantive” – a stuff to be counted and conserved, a resource to be enhanced and administered.  He held that the idea of each one as a person – a unrepeatable and inscrutable being pervaded by a “mysterious historicity” – was being replaced by system concepts in which individuality dissolves.  And he believed finally that the word life had become the site of a fateful “conceptual collapse of the borderline” between “model and reality” and between “process and substance.”  This collapse is expressed in our thinking that in becoming the protectors, champions and devotees of life we have touched life itself without remainder, reservation or detour. 

How does all this pertain to the present situation, and to the fears of my interlocutors that Illich is being recklessly misappropriated by Dupuy’s “covidoskeptics”?  Well the thing that impressed me most about the onset of the pandemic was the blind certainty with which everyone acted once the W.H.O. uttered the magic word pandemic on March 11, 2020.  Formerly, the conventional wisdom in public health would have urged prudence, calm, and targeted action to quarantine the sick and protect the vulnerable. But, now, suddenly, it was understood by all, seemingly, that fear was our friend and ally, that as many as possible must be quarantined for as long as possible, and that any policy that hinted at accommodation with this new reality was reckless – “Herd  immunity’s a great strategy, if you don’t mind millions of dead,” as one Canadian headline read.  To my amazement, the ugly term lockdown, previously used mainly in prisons and occasionally in schools, completely changed its valence and became an expression of our regard for one another.  Other surprises, for me, were that the “health care system” had to be “protected” from a health emergency and that we would religiously “follow the science” long before there was any relevant science to follow.  Epidemiologist like John Ionannidis of Stanford were ignored when they warned of a “fiasco” amounting to “jumping off a cliff” if draconian policies were adopted before anyone knew for sure just how infectious and how lethal the new disease actually was.   

It quickly became difficult to question the costs of lockdown.  Scientific dissensus, though widespread, was largely swept under the carpet.  “Canada is at war” declared a major Canadian newspaper, and dissent, in wartime, can be construed as treason.  In Canada a distinguished group of public health veterans, including several former chief medical officers of health, released a statement calling for the restoration of “a balanced approach” in which harms are intelligently weighed against benefits and a single disease is not the sole focus and preoccupation of government policy.  This statement was ignored, and those who signed it were largely excluded from major media.  An effective censorship was established.  When three eminent epidemiologists – Sunetra Gupta, Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorf – produced the Great Barrington Declaration, calling for a policy of what they called “Focused Protection” in place of universal quarantine, their intervention was not even reported in major Canadian media, despite the fact that all they were arguing for was the restoration of the status quo ante in public health.  More recently the College of Physicians of Ontario, the medical governing body in my native province, has threatened “investigation” and “disciplinary action” against physicians questioning vaccination, the utility of masks and social distancing, and the value of lockdowns.  Whether in the media, in medicine or in government only approved opinions are to be expressed.  

Of particular concern to me in this has been the reinforcement of what I have written about elsewhere as the myth of Science, by which I mean essentially the idea that there is an institution called Science which speaks in a single unquestionable voice.  Whenever someone speaks of “the science” this myth is engaged.  Sciences, by their nature, are plural, contestable and subject to endless messy revision.  To speak of them in the singular, and then treat this conflation as an oracle, has two profoundly pernicious consequences.  First it pre-empts policy.  Neither the harms supposedly averted by lockdowns nor the harms supposedly created by them are definite data.  There is no science that can precisely ascertain either because, in both cases, certain questionable founding assumptions will be involved, along with many other models and might-have-beens.  (Not to belabour what should be obvious, but the same society cannot be, at the same time, locked down and not locked down, which is the only way that a definitive “scientific” comparison between the two conditions could be undertaken.)  This is why people, at the moment, are so passionately and, I would claim, quite legitimately divided on the effectiveness of lockdowns – they are starting from different assumptions, comparing dissimilar cases, and making varying allowances and adjustments for these dissimilarities.  To imagine that “Science” could sort all this out is, in my opinion, a destructive and reactionary fantasy.  Politics is the sphere of moral choice – the sphere in which decisions about how we are going to live are properly made.  Science simply cannot tell you whether it’s right to let an old person die alone in order to obviate some necessarily hypothetical risk of spreading infection.  “Following the science” in cases where science either doesn’t apply or doesn’t exist is, therefore, a formula for the complete hollowing out of politics.  I have for a long time agreed with the view of French philosopher of science Bruno Latour who holds that we can only get “down to earth” through a revival of politics and that this revival will depend on a redefinition of the sciences that breaks the stranglehold of mythified Science on politics.  It seems to me, accordingly, that the reinforcement of the myth of Science that the pandemic has made possible is something that must be fought. 

The second pernicious consequence of this myth is the injury to the sciences themselves.  Despite the censorship that has been exercised during the pandemic, anyone with an open mind and a variety of sources will still have noticed the fundamental disagreements that have divided epidemiologists, virologists, infectious disease specialists and public health experts from the outset.  These disagreements are normal, expectable and healthy.  What has been unhealthy is the fiction of unanimity upheld by those claiming to know and to follow the science.  This fiction, in my view, perpetuates a false image of the sciences in which all variability, contingency and bias is suppressed.  Worse, its fundamentalism breeds the very anti-science which it intends to oppose.  The sciences will thrive and serve their proper purposes only when they are no longer mistaken for the voice of Nature or the voice of God. 

The policies of mass quarantine followed by many governments during the last year have sown various ominous and fateful consequences.  Basic rights have been eliminated; livelihoods have been lost; a crippling debt has been incurred; social relations have been virtualized; panic has been encouraged; the arts have been decimated; and a hundred other troubles have festered as a result of an exclusive focus on COVID-19.  Whether the benefits of these policies have offset these costs is, as I’ve tried to show, a political question.  I’m obviously doubtful and inclined to think that the “focused protection” option put forward by the Great Barrington Declaration would have been the wiser course.  But what really preoccupies me is why something so clearly debatable cannot, seemingly, be debated.   And this is where I think Illich comes back into the picture.

Illich, as far back as the 1980’s, detected among his contemporaries a new “conceptual and perceptual topology,” a new “mental space,” he said, which was “non-continuous with the past.”  It seems to me that the concepts behind which most have obediently lined up in the last year belong to this new topology.  Notable are the concepts of risk, safety, management, and, above all, life.  We have been “practicing” and acculturating these ideas for many years, but it took a pandemic to show how completely they have taken hold.  Mass quarantine appeared as an unquestionably necessary step, and not as a debatable novelty, because life must be protected, risk must be averted, safety must be paramount.  The damage to established styles of conviviality and engrained cultural habits was endurable because these new concepts increasingly determine our way of life – they are our culture.  The idea of distancing and avoidance as a practice of solidarity worked because enough people already thought of themselves as components of an immune system – a life writ large – rather than as members of a polity or culture.  The contrast was stark in the case of religious worship.  The rituals of health and safety were approved and encouraged; religious rituals were banned.  The first were treated as consensual, substantive, and mandatory;  the second as empty optional husks practiceable only at the pleasure of the state.  

When Illich wrote on “deschooling,” promoting it as the sine qua non of any “movement for human liberation” he argued not for the elimination of schools but for their “disestablishment” – a word most of his readers would have associated entirely with religion.  The government, says the first amendment to the U.S. constitution, may “make no law with respect to an establishment of religion.”  Illich’s proposal failed because few shared his opinion that schooling should be considered “an establishment of religion” rather than as something more utilitarian.  Religion becomes perceptible as such only when it becomes an optional belief, rather than a self-evident way of life.  It was precisely in order to marginalize and contain it that religion was redefined as belief, rather than as practice, during the modern period.  

My point is that Illich’s “new stage of religiosity,” centred on life, is not easy to perceive as such.  It may stand out for committed members of the Abrahamic faiths which centre life in the One in whom “we live and move and have our being” and so do not see the preservation and prolongation of life as either an exclusive good or as the highest good.  But for those who live within the horizons of this religiosity, it must necessarily take the form of something obvious and unquestionable.  When I spoke recently to a surgeon who wanted to convince me to have a surgery which he believed would extend my “life expectancy,” I had the impression that he simply could not understand how any other object – a seeking after the proper “hour of my death” for example – was even possible.   Life, for him, is an unlimited good, death an unqualified evil.  Whatever is made sacred becomes untouchable and unquestionable.  Before life, as that precious stuff which we must at all hazards save, all must bow and fall silent.  This allows government to go on behind a veil, as it were.  The image is precise inasmuch as it was a veil which sheltered the Holy of Holies from view in the Second Temple in Jerusalem.  It was this veil which the Gospels say was torn in two at the hour of the Crucifixion, profaning the old sacred and opening the door, eventually, to our reverence for life-in-itself, life as its own god. 

To sum up: I believe that during the last year people have been made less competent, less aware, more frightened and more prone to ritualism and sentimentality.  Fatal myths, like the myth of the Science, have been strengthened.  More people have been consigned to the new proletariat whose only remaining job is to collect welfare, consume entertainment and cheer on command.  The World Economic Forum has been emboldened to cook up its Great Reset by which monopoly capitalism will be finally made indistinguishable from socialism.  Disabling professional hegemonies have been reinforced.  Difficult conversations – about Covid vaccination, let’s say – have been more difficult, if not impossible, by reckless polarization.  The sovereign who authorizes these developments is Life, along with the lesser, attendant divinities who carry its train, like risk, safety and management.   I believe that Illich saw this coming, and that I remain in tune with him on this point. 

Earlier I told the story of the young man who wondered, after listening to Illich lecture on Medical Nemesis whether Ilich’s proposal was to “let people die.”  I’m sure the same question could now be asked of me.  It’s a strange question because it implies that it’s up to me, or Illich, or whoever else might be challenged in this way, to allow or not allow death.  Ancient images of the Fates show them spinning and cutting the cloth of destiny, allotting each one an unchangeable portion at birth.  The contemporary image is the opposite.  Nothing determines our fates except the vigilance of the institutions that protect us.  We will live until, at the termination of treatment, we are “let” die.  The hubris of this image mirrors the fatalism of the earlier one.  Illich was a man of “the middle way,” which for him meant not mediocrity but the razor’s edge of constantly renewed  discernment.  He did not advocate wantonly letting people die, and no more did he advocate keeping them alive whatever the cost.  Nothing will tell us in advance where the balance should lie, but we will certainly never find it by outlawing discussion. 

The idea that life and death, or good and evil are inextricably tangled in the world is not a new idea, and should not be a controversial one.  Christians have the parable of the wheat and the tares to teach it to them; Buddhists have the idea that good and evil are of “co-dependent origin.”  Only in a civilization completely seized by what Illich once called “a compulsion to do good” would this idea require defense or explication.  But, having to defend it puts the defender in the peculiar position of seeming to speak for whatever evil the latest war is supposedly rooting out.  I believe it was Illich’s view, expressed in his wonderful essay “Research by People,” that a rough and ready distinction can be drawn between technology that “remedies” certain ills and incommodities of the human condition and technology that aims, in Francis Bacon’s words, at “mastery over nature.”  This idea of technology as remedy which he ascribes to Hugh of St. Victor, is as close as he ever came, and as close as he thought he was ever likely to come, to specifying a principle of enoughness, sufficiency or limit on which a new post-Promethean, post-Baconian philosophy of technology could be founded.  However this principle is construed it will certainly stipulate things not to be done as well as things to be done.  Life, on the other hand, exerts an unlimited demand.  It is the monotonous, unshadowed and endless good that corrupted Christianity bequeaths to modernity.   In the last year we have pursued it as never before and without even noticing the watershed that is being crossed.  To “save lives” we have turned the world upside down, accepting censorship and intrusive social control, abandoning the old, and immolating the economically marginal.  We have allowed a further mythification of what was already badly mythified – Science as an immaculately conceived and infallible oracle.  We have opened the door to intensive virtualization, increased fear, and injured conviviality.  Was it worth it? is my question.  

To conclude then: Both Wolfgang Palaver and Jean-Pierre Dupuy have suggested that Illich is either being misinterpreted or pressed too far.  In response, I have tried to draw out the implications of Illich’s denunciation of life as an idol, and to show that what his “nose, his intuition and his reason” told him forty years ago has been much more fully revealed and realized in the meanwhile.   What I would now like to know is where the difference with my interlocutors lies.  Do they think I am wrong about the damage done in the last year?  Do they think I am misrepresenting Illich?  Or do they think that Illlich himself is wrong?

Gaia and the Path of the Earth

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GAIA AND THE PATH OF THE EARTH: LOVELOCK/ ILLICH/ LATOUR 

I have had a long-standing interest in the claim of British scientist Jim Lovelock that the earth as a whole is self-regulating – his Gaia Hypothesis, so called – and I featured Lovelock several times during my years at Ideas at CBC Radio.[1]  During those years, the preeminent influence on my thinking was the philosopher of technology Ivan Illich.  But, when I tried, on more than one occasion, to discuss the Gaia theory with him, his response was disparaging.  Lovelock’s theory, he said, was a travesty, an empty abstraction untrue to the living earth and “inimical to what earth is.”[2] Now, nearly thirty years after Illich made these remarks, a new interpretation of Lovelock’s theory has appeared. It comes from French philosopher of science Bruno Latour in a book called Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Latour claims that Lovelock’s hypothesis, properly understood, is as significant as Galileo’s reimagination of the heavens in the early 17th century, and that it is much less inimical to an embodied experience of place than Illich had supposed.   This has challenged me to revisit Illich’s objections to Gaia à la Lovelock and to ask whether Latour’s new interpretation can answer them.  I will begin by introducing Lovelock’s theory: 

In 1965 Jim Lovelock was working at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), a joint initiative of NASA and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.  His assignment was to devise instruments that could detect life on Mars, should there be any.  In thinking about this problem, he had the inspired idea of turning his question around and asking, in effect, how a Martian would know that there is life on earth.  This brought to his attention the earth’s unlikely atmosphere, a mix of gases as unstable, Lovelock has joked, as those mingled in the intake manifold of a car.  Why don’t these gases react with one another until they eventually reach that state of chemical equilibrium that had recently been shown to characterize the atmospheres of Mars or Venus?  How is such a “giant disequilibrium” maintained?  The answer came “in a flash,” Lovelock told me in one of the several interviews I did with him for CBC Radio: “The organisms at the surface [of the earth] must be regulating the atmosphere.”  “Not just putting gases in the atmosphere,” he reiterated to emphasize his point, but “regulating the atmosphere.”[3]  Thus was born the Gaia hypothesis.  

 Lovelock, as he has now related in more than ten books on the subject, soon discovered many more ways in which living things produce their own environment.  He has shown, for example, that marine creatures emit aerosols of sulfur and iodine in exactly the quantities required by creatures on the land where these crucial elements are deficient. He has demonstrated that earth’s biota remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the amounts necessary to maintain a comfortable climate. And he has established that forest fires help regulate the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere.   The discovery of these mechanisms, and others like them, confirmed Lovelock’s initial intuition at JPL that the earth as a whole must engage in some form of self-regulation.  The idea of naming this hypothesis after Gaia, the ancient Greek goddess of the earth, came from the novelist William Golding who was Lovelock’s friend, interlocutor and neighbour at the time Lovelock first began to explore the implications of his “flash” at JPL.  So grand a theory, Golding said, deserved an equally grand name, and what better name than Gaia, mother of all, first to arise from primeval Chaos, oldest of the gods.  Lovelock, fatefully, accepted his friend’s suggestion.  “When you get given a name by a wordsmith of quality like Bill Golding,” he later told me, “you don’t turn it down.  But, boy has it given me trouble.”[4] 

The name, as Lovelock says, was a blessing and a curse in one.  It attracted media attention, as the several broadcasts I did about it for Ideas testify, and it resonated with many counter-cultural movements – from that branch of feminism in which interest in goddesses was reviving, to the environmental movement which grew out of the first Earth Day in 1970, to the hippie cultural ecologists who were advocating retooling, degrowth and a return to earth.  Musician Paul Winter composed a mass, the Missa Gaia, that was first presented at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York in 1982; writer William Irwin Thompson made the name a sign of a new way of thinking in a book he edited called Gaia: A Way of Knowing.  But, at the same time, this cultural and philosophical resonance became a source of derision amongst Lovelock’s scientific colleagues – the trouble he referred to above.  Biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that the theory struck him as “a metaphor, not a mechanism,” and many other leading biologists rejected it out of hand as well.[5] Some of this condescension and disregard was rooted in the theory’s cultural associations, but it also arose from the sense that Lovelock’s hypothesis offended and threatened neo-Darwinian orthodoxy.   

Modern sciences rest on the banishment of any idea of end, goal or purpose from their accounts.  Aristotle held that each thing was determined by its end or final cause, as well as by its material character and the forces acting on it.  Objects fall to earth because they seek their “natural place” – it is in their nature to do so.  17th century natural philosophy subtracted this idea.  It held that things move only because some overt and discernible force pushes them – everything can be reduced to matter in motion,  “Occult” causes were ruled out.  Purpose was driven out of science and thereby fated to return endlessly as heresy.  In the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy that ruled evolutionary biology at the time Lovelock first presented his hypothesis, it was an axiom that change could not arise by any purposeful process – e.g. giraffes developed long necks so they could reach high branches – but only by random mutation which might confer an advantage in what Darwin called the struggle for existence – a giraffe with a longer neck, by happy chance, appeared and was then rewarded with more food and more progeny.  In this context Lovelock’s idea of planetary self-regulation looked like the latest version of the perennial heresy that had erupted in Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of evolution, in which new “needs” call forth new habits, or in Hans Driesch’s “vitalist” developmental biology in which “entelechies” governed embryological development, and in many other such attempts to reintroduce teleology to biology.  (Teleology, from telos the Greek word for end of goal, refers to any sequence determined by its end and not by a chain of antecedent mechanical causes.)  What evolutionary advantage could there be for marine creatures in producing dimethyl sulfide or methyl iodide in the exact quantities required on the land, or in producing the nuclei which allow clouds to condense and form in just the amount needed to radiate light away from the earth and preserve its comfortable temperature?   These phenomena might demonstrably occur, but they must be only fortunate accidents or coincidences, not elements of self-regulation. 

Lovelock learned to answer these objections in several registers.  He stopped saying that “living organisms” were producing their own environment and began to say that “the whole system” was involved.[6]  He drew attention to the baffling properties of cybernetic systems in which causation is circular rather than linear.  Once a domestic thermostat is set, the temperature regulates the furnace, and the furnace regulates the temperature in an endless circle of which neither is the cause.  The Gaia hypothesis models such a circular process, Lovelock said, whereas modern sciences had previously used linear mathematics to model linear, cause-and-effect processes.   He recognized, of course, that a thermostat must be set by someone before it falls into its homeostatic pattern of self-regulation.    The system must have a goal or end-state which governs its self-regulation.  In the case of Gaia, he claimed that this goal was set by “the properties of the universe.”  Because carbon-based life forms are “quite fussy about the range of temperatures and conditions at which they can exist,” these tolerances “set the goal of the self-regulating system Gaia.”[7] 

In effect, Lovelock argued that the earth itself is a unit of evolution, still subject to natural selection but on a cosmic or universal scale where the selection pressures are established by the parameters of life itself.  He was not contradicting or replacing Darwinian theory by this hypothesis, he said, he was only supplementing it by enlarging its frame.  Just as Newtonian physics had worked fine until Einstein pushed it to the limit at which it broke down, so Darwinian principles of natural selection had been sufficient until the planet as a whole was considered.  Only when Earth was observed from outside, as it was for the first time in Lovelock’s thought experiment during NASA’s Mars mission, did it become necessary to ask whether Earth itself evolves.  People had known for a long time that it changed – they had, for centuries, hunted fossils, measured the age of rocks, and charted the advance retreat of glaciers – but they had still taken that “Nature” which governs “natural selection” for granted  as the context in which evolution operates.  Lovelock by considering the  earth as a whole had identified properties that belonged to it only as a whole, properties that could not be reduced to more rudimentary terms.  

Lovelock’s theory was initially polarizing and controversial.  The problems, as I mentioned earlier, began with the grandiloquent name that was William Golding’s equivocal gift.   The name expanded the idea’s cultural reach but poisoned its scientific reception, creating the view that Lovelock’s hypothesis was, as an editor at Nature said, “a danger to science.”[8]  Leading biologists denounced the theory as mystical para-science, rather than as the fruitful and fully testable proposal that Lovelock showed, again and again, that it was.  This disdain began to abate during the 1990’s when Lovelock decided it was time he talked directly to opinion leaders in biology.  In England, at the time, this group included Robert May, John Maynard Smith and William Hamilton, all or whom Lovelock sought out.  They told him they thought his theory was nonsense.  He asked if they had read any of his papers.  They admitted that they had not and were relying entirely on the opinions of their graduate students.  Once they became acquainted with what he was actually saying, Lovelock says, “they swung right round,” accepting the evidence for self-regulation while still insisting on the challenge this evidence posed to neo-Darwinian theory.[9]  Parallel scientific developments also assisted Lovelock’s cause and made his theory seem less exotic and less threatening.  These included the emergence of various new sciences employing similar concepts of self-organization and self-regulation as those which Lovelock was developing.  Where things stand today is a question somewhat beyond my competence.  There is no body which grants scientific theories the equivalent of the imprimatur – let it be printed – by which the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church certifies books.  But I do have the impression that Lovelock’s theory is today better understood and more widely accepted than ever before.  In 2001, for example, four scientific organizations, operating “global change research programmes,” met in Amsterdam and released a Declaration on Earth System Science which stated that, “The Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components”[10]

ILLICH’S OBJECTIONS

At this point, I want to introduce Ivan Illich and his critique of the Gaia theory.  Illich, for the first twenty years of his adult life, was a Roman Catholic priest.  He worked during that time to declericalize and transform the Church.  These efforts brought him into conflict with the Roman Curia.  In 1968, he was subjected to formal processes of inquisition, and, the following year, the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) which he directed in Cuernavaca, Mexico was placed under a ban.  He withdrew from church service and during the 1970’s produced a series of ever more wide-ranging critiques of contemporary institutions, techniques, and social practices.  Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, Medical Nemesis, and several other such works all argued that modern institutions had become counter-productive monopolies which defeated their own purposes and stifled popular initiative.  As he went on, he inquired more deeply into the “certainties” underlying. contemporary ways of life and the ways in which our technologies, through what Marshall McLuhan called their “symbolic fallout,” tell us not just what we should do but what we are.  He also explored the ways in which the Roman Catholic Church had served as the incubator of modernity, perfecting not just the institutional forms that would become characteristic of modern societies but also that care of souls that brought the faithful under minute and detailed clerical regulation and created the template for modern service bureaucracies.  

I got to know Illich fairly well during the last fifteen years of his life – he died in 2002 – and I had the privilege of doing several extended interviews with him, two of which became books – 1992’s Ivan Illich in Conversation and the posthumous The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich, published in 2005.  A third book, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, an account of his life and thought many years in the making, has just been published by the Penn State Press.  One of the subjects I several times tried to bring up was Lovelock’s Gaia theory, a theme on which I was enthusiastic.  As I said earlier, I did three lengthy interviews with Lovelock during my career at Ideas.  I featured him alongside David Bohm, Ilya Prigogine, and Rupert Sheldrake in a series called “Religion and the New Science” in 1985; presented a full hour called “The Gaia Hypothesis,” in 1992; and devoted an episode of “How To Think About Science” to Lovelock’s story in 2008.  Illich was not really interested, essentially refusing to discuss a theory which he claimed is “inimical to what earth is.”  I found this somewhat exasperating.  I wanted to discuss the merits of the theory; he insisted that there was nothing to discuss since there was no difference between “that kind of science and religion.”  He said little more, but I return to these sparse remarks now, nonetheless, because I want to try and understand what it was that Illich objected to, and then to consider whether Bruno Latour’s construal of the Gaia theory gives a satisfactory answer to Illich’s objections.  

Illich concluded, during the 1980’s, that the world in which he was living had reached and was passing a watershed.  This change surprised him.  It was, he said, “a passage [which] I had not expected, in my lifetime, to observe.”[11]  A “catastrophic break” had occurred which had made “the mental space,” “the conceptual and perceptual topology,” in which we now live “non-continuous with the past.”  This rupture, he. believed, had invalidated many of the assumptions on which he had based the “call for institutional revolution” that informed many of his books of the 1970’s.[12]  He had thought of institutions like education or medicine as instrumental creations, brought into being to serve the purposes of a citizenry or a public who were able to use them for the purposes for which they had been designed.  “I was still thinking,” he told me in 1998, “of someone who stood in front of large institutions with the idea, at least, that he could use them for the satisfaction of his own dreams, or his own needs.”[13]  It followed that he could address these someones about the dangers these institutions posed when they outgrew their proper size and scale and became what Illich called radical monopolies.  And it followed, further, that he could hope to assemble a political majority capable of stopping and permanently limiting this counterproductive growth.  His “deschooling” proposal provides a simple example.  He wanted to “disestablish” educational systems by removing their legal right to make their services compulsory.  Implied was the idea of a citizenry that stood apart from such systems and was capable of evaluating them on instrumental grounds.  If schools were frustrating their own stated purposes, then they could be changed.  

What Illich began to notice in the 1980’s was that this instrumental logic no longer obtained.  A new age had begun in which people were no longer distinct from the systems in which they took part.  They had been, he supposed, “swallowed by the system.”  He began to speak of the emergence of an “age of systems” or, alternately, of “an ontology of systems” in which being itself was conceived as a system.[14]  The word, of course, is tricky – which isn’t? – because it can refer to anything that possesses some over-all integrity or constitutes an established way of doing things – any coherent plan or approach, from Hegel’s philosophy to someone’s special way of making coffee,  can be called a system.   Illich was not invoking these old meanings but pointing to something radically new – a system so total and comprehensive that there could be no ground or standpoint outside it.  The very idea of a tool or an instrumental means, he argued, depended on a distinction between that tool and its user.   A system in the contemporary sense incorporates its user – he/she becomes part of the system.  One uses a hammer but joins a network.  

Behind this distinction between tool and system lay an original historical analysis.  The use of tools is often taken as a primordial and defining feature of humanity.  The caveman in the museum diorama is already Man the Tool User.  Some ethologists even ascribe tool use to the chimpanzees who sharpen sticks to fight or the birds who impale larvae on twigs.  Illich thought differently.  Until the 12th century, he said, with a few premonitory stirrings earlier, there was no general idea of tools.  Tools remained inseparable from their users.  Aristotle, for example, uses the same word for the tool and the hand that holds it.  Tools remained attached and enculturated, limited to their accustomed uses.  Then, for reasons I won’t go into here, a general science of tools began to appear.  A technological revolution began.  In the 12th century, even the newly defined seven sacraments were conceived as instruments or tools – peculiarly efficacious means of grace selected by theologians from the manifold blessings the Church had formerly pronounced on all the affairs of life and “used by God himself…as instrumental causes towards the desired end.”[15]  The spirit of instrumentality, according to Illich, became the leading feature of the age which stretches from the 12th century to our own time, an age characterized by its “extraordinary intensity of purposefulness” and by its idea that to each end some special instrument must correspond.  Even love, says Illich, becomes “an instrument for satisfaction”[16]  There is nothing that is worth doing for its own sake, nothing good in itself, which will not finally be made to submit to a rational means/ends logic.  Modernity, Illich says, was characterized by “the loss of gratuity.”[17] Even the word itself came to mean a negligible consideration – something beside the point, or, at most, a small addition, a tip.  The good gave way to the valuable. 

But this age is now ending, Illich says, succeeded by an Age of Systems.  He left only a partial, sometimes disgruntled, occasionally caricatured account of this new reality, but, from scattered passages in his late works, the following outline can be assembled.  I have already referred to the crucial feature: the lack of an outside.  “Means of production,” to take Marx’s maximally general characterization of the ensemble of tools, can be put to any purpose – Communism was premised on the idea that changing the ownership of the means of production would be sufficient to turn the means of oppression into the means of liberation.  It was already a great part of Illich’s argument in 1973’s Tools for Conviviality that this fond hope overlooked the inherent qualities of tools.  “The issue at hand,” he wrote then, “is not the juridical ownership of tools, but rather the discovery of the characteristic of some tools which make it impossible for anybody to ‘own’ them.   The concept of ownership cannot be applied to a tool that cannot be controlled.”[18]  His solution then was to identify those tools that foster conviviality and proscribe those that lead to domination and monopoly.  He spoke of “the roof of technological characteristics under which a society wants to live and be happy.”[19]  This was a radical proposal, but it still implied the existence of a citizenry able to stand aside or apart from its technological array and ordain what is fit for use.  Technology was no longer a neutral means in this account , but it remained a means.  Systems, in the contemporary cybernetic sense, have lost this quality.  A system, by definition, includes its user – there is no place to stand outside it.  What disappears is what Illich sometimes called “distality,” although I don’t think the word was particularly helpful in conveying what he wanted to say.  It’s a term that has its main uses in anatomy, dentistry and horticulture, where it refers to how distant something is from a defined centre or point of attachment – the growing tip of a plant is its distal portion.  What Illich wanted, I think, was a term of art describing critical distance or distinction.  It wasn’t a question of distality but of difference.  

Illich was an apostle of otherness.  His Christianity was Incarnational, and he understood the Incarnation as signifying that we encounter Christ in one another.  “Whoever loves another,” he said, “loves [Christ] in the person of that other.”[20]  When he spoke of the obedient listening that characterizes friendship, he described his posture as “bend[ing] over towards the total otherness of someone.”  To “initiate a free relatedness,” he said, required that he “renounce searching for bridges between the other and myself [and] recognize…that a gulf separates us.”  Across this gulf, “the only thing that reaches me is the other in his word, which I accept on faith.”  The same point was made, again and again, in his misunderstood book Gender.  Paraphrasing the argument of that book for me, he said that it described “the transition from one type of duality to another.”[21]  In the first type which characterized “all worlds before our own,”[22] there were substantial differences that could be bridged only by imagination.  “Otherness, even at the height of intimacy, was what gave ultimate consistency to what today we call consciousness.”[23]  Modernity, for him, was defined by “the loss of the idea of otherness.”  The constitutive and proportional pairs that had constituted all premodern worlds – heaven and earth, man and woman, here and there, macrocosm and microcosm – gave way to a world of universals.  “The human being, the self, the individual became the model of our thinking.”  The universal sustained many variations but it was fundamentally consistent.  “The Cartesian inside,” Illich said, is only “a special zone within a more general space.”  Goods circulate internationally without changing their character at borders.  Sex circulates generally in bodies distinguished only by their plumbing.   

Otherness was Illich’s great study because he believed that it is by this pathway that God’s word reaches us.  The Incarnation, for him, is summed up in the saying, “the Word became flesh.”[24] In his early, more explicitly Christian writing, word is the metaphor by which he most frequently tries to express the meaning of the Christ’s appearance.  Speaking of the Annunciation – the Gospel scene in which the angel tells Mary that she is to bear a divine child, a scene of crucial importance for Illich – he characterizes Mary’s stance as “openness to the Word.”[25]  This openness has two aspects: one is the “silence” by which she enacts her awareness of “the distance …between…man…and God,” the other a disposition to be surprised.  Distance here means difference, I think, as well as spatial extent.  The angel’s greeting to Mary is homely and intimate – a domestic scene that has been evoked in countless poems, songs and paintings – and yet it crosses an unimaginable, unfathomable gulf – the ultimate otherness.   This otherness, because it cannot be scrutinized or anticipated, can be disclosed only to those able to be surprised.  The announcement to Mary – that God was to become “a living person, as human as you or I” – “is.” Illich writes, “a surprise, remains a surprise, and could not exist as anything else.”[26]  A surprise, by definition, is what cannot be either anticipated or fully understood.  It is also, for Illich, a permanent and desirable condition and not merely a momentary disorientation before we assimilate what has surprised us and learn henceforward to expect it.  “Our hope of salvation,” he told the graduating class at the University of Puerto Rico in 1969, “lies in our being surprised by the Other.  Let us learn always to receive further surprises.  I decided long ago to hope for surprises until the final act of my life – that is to say, in death itself.”[27] 

Illich claims that surprise is something more than Mary’s discomfiture at the angel’s unexpected and impossible claim.  (“How can this be since I have no husband?”[28]) He says that it is the only mode in which The Incarnation can exist at all – “could not exist as anything else” – its permanent and unalterable condition.  This is an inexhaustibly radical assertion.  Arguably it contradicts the entire claim of Christian civilization – first to be able to discern God’s plan of salvation and, second, to be able to administer it through the Church and then through the Church’s secular descendants, the service institutions that were, as Illich says, “stamped from its mould.”[29]  That’s a theme I have treated elsewhere.[30]  What I want to emphasize here is that Illich’s understanding of the Incarnation hinges on otherness – the otherness of God and the otherness of the human other, as marked by that “gulf [that] separates us.”  And this otherness is precisely what he thought was being lost with the unexpected “passage” into a new way of thinking, feeling and being, that “new perceptual and conceptual topology,” that startled him in the 1980’s.  

Illich’s thinking throughout his life was concerned with borders, boundaries and distinctions.  His entire effort in the 1970’s was aimed a writing a constitution of limits for contemporary societies.  This required him to describe a boundary or a threshold at which liberal institutions turn into counter-productive “radical monopolies” which frustrate their own purposes.  The “roof of technological characteristics under which a society wants to live and be happy” is another such boundary.  He drew careful distinctions by which opposing domains could be divided, circumscribed, and kept to a scale at which they could be understood and controlled.  He disparaged monopolies, in which one form, style, or mode predominates.  The differences by which places, peoples and practices remained separate and defined were always prized.  It was precisely this effort that he saw as threatened by the Age of Systems.  

Modernity had continually eroded boundaries but had not challenged the boundary of the human person.  Personhood, Illich says, is the idea in which Western humanism and individualism is “anchored.”[31]  A person is a unique, bounded, and irreducible entity. The idea, for Illich, rests finally on the imago dei, the image of God in which we have been created, but it continues to inform Western humanism long after this creator God has been rejected and the divine spark extinguished.  But, in the age of systems, Illich believed, the boundary defining the human person has been breached and erased.  Systems recognize no such boundary.  This breach was not made all at once at some arbitrarily chosen point in the early 1980’s.  Ages overlap, and, once the idea of a new age is accepted, antecedents and precursors, auguries and portents can be discerned throughout the middle years of the 20th century.  All Illich claimed was that for him this new age was sufficiently well established by the early 1980’s that its premises had become obvious and largely irresistible. 

Let me take some examples.  In 1943 German physicist Erwin Schrödinger lectured in Dublin on the theme, What is life?  In his lectures, he supposed, in Illich’s paraphrase “that genetic substance could best be understood as a stable text whose occasional variations had to be interpreted as textual variation.”[32]  This was a novel hypothesis at the time, but it was only ten years later that James Watson and Francis Crick revealed the “letters” in which they supposed that the genetic code is written.   Around the same time that Schrödinger was lecturing in Dublin, Roland Jakobson, a Russian émigré linguist, working in the United States, “cracked the atom of linguistics, the phoneme.”[33]  The phoneme, as the basic sound unit of speech, had been taken as irreducible, but Jakobson argued that it was an effect of an underlying set of binary contrasts and not a thing in itself at all.  “A phonetic system must therefore be analyzed,” anthropologist Adam Kuper writes, “as a…system of relationships rather than as a series of individual sounds.”  Jakobson’s finding was a “revelation” to Claude Lévi Strauss and many other “structuralist” thinkers in his wake.  Not only was language becoming a metaphor for a bio-chemical code, as with Schrödinger, it was itself decomposing, in the hands of structural linguistics, into a set of patterns or relationships.  Language, Illich had argued, was an effect of the alphabet, text a consequence of the clarification of the manuscript page in the 12th century.  Now something new was happening.  Language, in the older sense of something stable, privileged, and unique, was disappearing.  When germ plasm can compose a text with no author, and Levi-Strauss can stretch linguistic analysis into an account of all the “elementary structures” of society, language has dissolved into code.  And this was what Illich claimed had happened: in place of language we have “a communications medium” or an “information process.”  

Speech and writing have become instances of something more general.  The embodied word, capable of expressing a personal intention, has lost its contour, its defining boundary has been blurred.  Text is now written everywhere – in the genome, in the kinship structure of Bororo society, in the computer’s binary code.  Literacies abound, as “print literacy” is joined by “computer literacy,” “media literacy,” “cultural literacy” etc.  “Intertextuality” links text to text in a blur of interpenetrating tropes.   Language is naturalized and deprived of its unique relationship to personality.  This deprivation is summed up in the word “meme.” Coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, it’s a term that imitates the word gene, and implies that processes analogous to natural selection determine how ideas and expressions spread within a culture.  It is no longer clear whether we use language, or language uses us.  

The fate of language, as a modern certainty that had lost its definition, privilege and limit, was an instance of something Illich saw happening across the board.  When he revisited his Medical Nemesis a decade after it was published, he pointed to a similar process of “systemization.”[34]  He had assumed, he said, a certain agency and a certain autonomy on the part of both doctors and patients, which had in the meanwhile disappeared.   Medical Nemesis had begun with the bold statement that, “The medical establishment has become major threat to health.”  A decade later Illich claimed that the concepts which gave that sentence its power and its purchase had dissolved.  There was no meaningful “medical establishment,” since doctors had become mere technicians – “adjuncts,” he said – in the administration of treatments based entirely on system parameters and system protocols.  “Health” had become equally vast and indistinct – its obsessive pursuit now itself a “threat to health” in the older sense of the term.  Patients had ceased to be persons and become a collage of risks and probabilities.  This amounted, Illich claimed, not just to a loss of personhood, but to a loss of embodiment.  A simple example is the role that risk now plays both in medicine and in everyday life.  Risk is “disembodying,” Illich argues, because it invites people to think of themselves in purely mathematical terms as items of population. “When I think of risk,” he says. “[I] place…myself… into a base population for which certain events, future events, can be calculated.”[35]  The subject of risk, in other words, is not the individual person but the general class to which he or she belongs.  The unique irreplaceable one is supplanted by an abstract.  Pursued beyond a certain intensity, this “self-algorithmization” leads to disembodiment.  I abandon “the mysterious historicity” of my particular life in favour of the general life, the life that can be opened, enumerated and managed.[36]  Medical Nemesis had still harboured the obscure hope that medicine could be recalled to its proper vocation as a moral undertaking in which the relationship between physician and patient was the crux.  Now he saw that this personal dimension had been permanently and decisively erased. 

The figure within which the Age of Systems coheres for Illich is life.  Illich’s engagement with this theme began in the mid-80’s when he was approached after a lecture in Macon, Georgia by a man who introduced himself as “Will Campbell, who has to ask you for a great favor.”[37]  Illich recognized the name.  Campbell had been a close associate of Martin Luther King’s – the only white person present at the founding of Southern Christian Leadership Conference – and Illich was so impressed that he agreed to the favour without even asking what it was.  “Command and I will obey,” he recalls himself saying in a memoir of this meeting.  The favour turned out to be an address to an ecumenical meeting Campbell would assemble on the subject of life, a subject Campbell told Illich which is “tearing our churches apart.”  Campbell mentioned abortion, ecology, nuclear disarmament, and capital punishment as life-related issues on which Christians were at each other’s throats.   

The meeting took place within the year.  The atmosphere was tense – so tense that a representative of the Catholic Bishop’s Conference who was present approached Illich before his speech and suggested that he begin with a mollifying prayer.  Illich began instead with a curse – an improvised anathema in which he solemnly repeated the phrase “To Hell with Life” three times.  “Life,” he said, “is the most powerful idol the Church has had to face in the course of her history.”[38]  I found this idea absolutely galvanizing when I encountered it, a few years later, in the text of a lecture Illich had given to a congress of the Lutheran Church in Chicago in 1989, but it was not an idea which Illich ever succeed in conveying to more than a handful of his co-religionists.[39]  Mostly he met blank incomprehension, as I discovered for myself, when I asked him to do an interview with me for Ideas on the themes of his Chicago talk.  The transcript of this interview became the last chapter of my book Ivan Illich in Conversation, but, when it was broadcast on Ideas as “Life As Idol” in 1992, it landed with a very dull thud, occasioning less reaction, I think it’s fair to say, than any other program I ever broadcast on Ideas.  It was as if I had farted, and everyone was politely pretending that  I hadn’t.  What I had thought was a dramatic, and perhaps somewhat scandalous claim, passed without comment.  Illich had the same reaction when he lectured on the subject in Germany and the United States.  “In neither place,” he told me, “did I get the impression that one person understood what I was speaking about.”[40]  Illich had thought he was pointing to an epochal crisis for Christian faith – “the most powerful idol the Church has had to face in her history” – but, in the meanwhile, this new reality had become so obvious, and so utterly taken-for-granted that it could not even break the surface of attention and register as a topic.  I will return to the reasons for this – powerfully on display in the current pandemic when the saving of “lives” utterly dwarfs and dominates every other consideration – but first let me try to spell out what Illich wanted to say. 

It should be said first that Illich regarded contemporary veneration for life as the corruption of a Christian original.  The Gospels assert, in various ways, that Jesus is the Lord of Life, that in him is Life, and that this Life is not known in merely living but is a gift of the Spirit.  This usage in his view shaped the mind and soul of Christendom and created the very matrix from which contemporary attitudes have emerged.  According to Illich contemporary lives could neither be “saved” nor enhanced – Coke adds life is a famous instance – were it not for this deep and largely unconscious cultural preformation.  That argument is beyond my scope here but must be acknowledged, since it is an open question to what extent Illich’s view is determined by his sense that ascribing divinity to mere life is a blasphemy.  His argument was that it is a blasphemy, whatever the blasphemer may believe, because it misattributes and misplaces divinity.  Illich knew that faith was not his to confer or withhold and never presumed its presence in his audiences or among his readers.  “Recourse to faith provides an escape for those who believe,” he wrote in Medical Nemesis, “but it cannot be the foundation for an ethical imperative, because faith is either there or it’s not there; if it’s absent, the faithful cannot blame the infidel.”[41]  He spoke of blasphemy “as a historian and not as a theologian.”[42]  And “as a historian” what he claimed was that the life that is reverently spoken of in various contemporary discourses has a secret and unacknowledged tap root in the “life more abundant” that was offered on the Cross.[43] 

What Illich wanted to point out was that life, in recent times, had ceased to be a quality or attribute and become rather a substance or stuff, able to be possessed, managed and manipulated in a new way.  Life had become, as one now says, a thing – “an essential referent” in the discourses of law, medicine, politics and ethics.  An egregious example, in the field of law, is the so-called “wrongful life” suit: an action, now permitted in four U.S. states, in which a disabled person can sue a parent on the grounds that the plaintiff’s life should have been prevented.[44]  The administration and surveillance that ought to have been carried out in cases where life is “wrongfully” given is also implied in the no-longer-remarkable terms “human resources” and “manpower” – each suggests manageable quanta of life.   The same quantification is now a reflex in news media where lives saved or lost – the death toll – now index newsworthiness.  Medicine counts in years of life expectancy.  Ecology defends life on earth.  In all cases, life is a palpable, measurable and manageable entity – a unit of value. a unit of administration, a unit of political power.  Life had been abstracted from persons, Illich thought.  The word person describes a unique, storied and bounded destiny; a life is an amorphous instance of something unimaginably general and impossibly indistinct – the ultimate resource. 

At the time Illich was writing, life was still a questionable term in the academy  – there were “life sciences” but many still doubted that life could ever itself become a scientific object.  Modern science had pursued mechanism – the how of things, the world through the lens of “matter in motion.”  British Biologists Peter and Jean Medawar summed up this old orthodoxy when they wrote in 1983, “From a strictly scientific point of view, the concept of life makes no sense.”[45]  Life, from this “strictly scientific point of view,” was the kind of “occult” factor that science had banished from its explanations.  Scientists who tried to bring it back in were tarred as “vitalists.”  British biologist Rupert Sheldrake was still given this treatment in 1983, the same year the Medawars wrote, when his book A New Science of Life was denounced in Nature and called, by the journal’s editor Sir John Maddox, ““the best candidate for burning there has been in many years.”[46] But things were changing.  Eight years after l’affaire Sheldrake, in 1991, Canadian bio-physicist Robert Rosen published Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin and Fabrication of Life.[47]  It took up the very question the Medawars had pronounced, by scientific consensus, nonsensical.  Rosen argued that “the machine metaphor” which had dominated biology must be replaced.  Addressing the question, what is life?, will generate, he says,  a “relational biology” which is unafraid of the previously neglected topics of complexity and internal organization.  Rosen’s work was a harbinger of the emergence of what is sometimes called “systems biology” – that is a biology which studies whole systems rather than reducing them to simpler component parts.  Complexity, emergence, and self-organization became the new scientific frontiers. “Our vision of nature,” wrote Nobel laureate physical chemist Ilya Prigogine and philosopher Isabelle Stengers, “is undergoing a radical change towards the multiple, the temporal and the complex.”[48] 

I was an enthusiastic chronicler of this new scientific turn.  Many of the people I have just mentioned, including Ilya Prigogine, Robert Rosen, Rupert Sheldrake, and James Lovelock, were featured in a 1985 Ideas series I did called “Religion and the New Science.”[49] This was another reason why I found Illich’s claim that life was an idol so provoking.  His argument was that in the effort to describe what Rosen called “life itself” a crucial collapse had occurred – the boundary between reality and representation had been erased.  The Gaia hypothesis was, for him, a similar instance.  Speaking, not specifically of Gaia, but more generally of the idea that the world as a whole can be modelled, he says, that this style of ecology involves “thinking in terms of a cybernetic system which, in real time, is both model and reality, a process which observes and defines, regulates and sustains itself.  Within this style of thinking, life comes to be equated with the system: it is the abstract fetish that both overshadows and simultaneously constitutes it.”[50]  When the cosmos – the whole – is understood as a system, he goes on, it is imagined as something that can be “rationally analyzed and managed.”  But, when this abstraction is “romantically identified with life,” it is transformed into “something mysterious” whose weakness evokes pathos and “tender protection.”  The procedure by which we slide between these positions, as life’s master and as its reverent servant, is described by Illich as ‘epistemic sentimentality.”[51]  This ability to slip unnoticed between a commanding managerial stance – we will defeat the virus - and facile feeling – one life lost is too many – has been a hallmark of public discourse throughout the current pandemic. 

Epistemic sentimentality is, I think, a useful and illuminating expression, though it may at first seem pretentious and hard to parse.  Why epistemic?  Why not just sentimentality?  Sentimentality is false or corrupted feeling – feeling whose sympathy for its object is compromised by self-interest.   It may be what Milan Kundera calls “the second tear” – the tear aware of itself as “me being moved.”[52]  It may be an affectation or dramatization of a state that sustains a pleasant image of myself.  Or it may be a way of avoiding action. Always one dwells on the feeling, rather than simply suffering it and passing on.  What makes sentimentality epistemic is that it attaches to an object of knowledge – to some certainty whose “objective” features justify and compel the feeling.  If it is a sufficiently compelling object, as life is, any perception or awareness of self-interest can be easily and unobtrusively erased from one’s attachment to it.  During the pandemic the “saving” of “lives” has been an object so obviously and transcendently good that no question can be entered about it or cost charged against it.  This is epistemic sentimentality.  Behind it, in the case of life, is our attitude to death, as the ultimate and unspeakable obscenity interfering with out enjoyment of life, but that’s outside my purview in this essay. 

What is central to Illich’s analysis of systems is the claim he makes that in many of the discourses of systems the distinction between model and reality has been annulled.  When DNA is called “the language of life,” or Robert Rosen mathematically depicts “life itself” as part of his new “relational biology,” one loses awareness that a metaphor is being deployed.  Gaia, as a schematic or abstract of the planet, collapses into the goddess without residue.  To illustrate, Illich sometimes told the story of a visit he made to the apartment of some graduate students who were studying with him at Penn State, where he taught during the fall term between 1985 and 1995.  On the fridge door he found two pictures pasted: one was of the blue planet, floating in space, the other was a microscopic image of a fertilized human egg – macrocosm and microcosm, “the blue disk and the pink disk,” as Illich came to call them. [53]  When he showed an interest in these images, one of his hosts described them as “our doorways to the understanding of life.”  The term doorway stuck with Illich, and a little reflection made him see in it what historian of religions Mircea Eliade calls a sacrum.  As Illich later explained, 

A Sacrum describes a particular place in the topology of any culture.  It refers to an object, a locality, or a sign which, within that culture, is believed to be… a doorway.  I had always thought of it as a threshold, a threshold at which the ultimate appears, that which, within that society, is considered to be true otherness, that which, within a given society, is considered transcendent.  For Eliade, a society becomes a conscious unity not just in relation to neighboring societies – we are not you – but also by defining itself in relation to what’s beyond.[54]   

What was novel about the sacrums on the fridge door was that they were not conventionally religious signs, objects or places.  Indeed, they were not signs at all but. rather, as Illich put it, “emblems for scientific facts” – visions obtained not by faith but by technology.  That scientific facts should function as religious symbols suggested to Illich that we have entered “a new stage of religiosity.” [55]  (Illich always distinguished religiosity as a broad sensibility from religion as a circumscribed set of formal beliefs.)  What was unique about the “doorways” at which Illich’s young interlocutors experienced reverence for life was that they led into a beyond that was not a beyond, a beyond that was only an infinitely extendable here. Like a bridge erected on only one side of a river, or the computer “icon” which opens only into the endless virtuality of cyberspace, these thresholds stood at the edge of a here with no there, “a frontier with no beyond.”[56] What Illich had discovered was a religiosity of pure immanence.  He thought it quite unprecedented.  The dialectical tension between transcendence and immanence may have been adjusted differently in each religion, but both were always in some way present.  Even ostensibly atheist faiths in which there was no personified “master in heaven” recognized a transcendent dimension, constitutionally out-of-reach, and other to what is present and at hand..[57]  Here, for the first time, was a world with no correspondent, no complement, no other – a “wombless world,” Illich said, self-enclosed and unbegotten. 

Illich asserted, as I quoted earlier, that people around him had begun to conceive of the world as a “a cybernetic system which, in real time is both model and reality, a process which observes and defines regulates and sustains itself.”  He was certainly not alone in this claim.  Some of his contemporaries went even further.  A prominent example is French media theorist Jean Baudrillard with his claim that the world has become a “simulacrum” – an artifice in which reality has been so thoroughly absorbed by its models that now “the map generates the territory.”[58]  Models, Baudrillard says, have now become “more real than the real” and exert such a preponderant influence that the ostensibly real itself is shaped in their “magnetic field.”[59]  This is extreme.  Illich claims only that model and reality have become indistinguishable and exclusive.  When people now speak of their systems, it is of themselves that they speak.  There is no sense that a model or metaphor is being applied.  Nature is an ecosystem; you are an immune system; the CAT-scan of my brain or the angiogram of my heart is me.  The element of deprivation in this, for Illich, is that nothing is ever only itself.  An account British theologian John Milbank once gave me of the principle of analogy in medieval theology captures well what Illich would also have said.  “Nothing that’s created exists in itself,” Milbank said.  “It only exists by sharing in the divine reality.  So, in that sense, it’s always other to itself.  It’s speaking of itself but also of God.  By speaking of itself it speaks of something other to itself which is God.”[60]  And what applies to our relationship to the “divine reality” applies equally to our relationships to one another.  I know myself only in and through others.  I move towards myself by moving away from myself.  I have my beginning and my end in what is other than me.  ‘We are creatures that find our perfection only by establishing a relationship,” Illich says.[61] 

Systems are self-contained.  Nothing escapes their gravity by definition.  Whoever uses them becomes part of them, whoever tries to dissent or depart from them is reincorporated as feedback, whoever claims individual exception or exemption is reminded of the holistic or “systemic” properties that condition them.  The pandemic is their perfect embodiment – each one constantly reminded that they are part of a global immune system, responsible for the health of all.  What systems thinking produces, in Illich’s view is nothing less than the “disappearance” of the world.   A world to be a world must stand apart from us, as other than we are.  It must possess a mysterious agency that we cannot fully anticipate or fully understand.  Only in this way can it surprise us, and surprise, for Illich, represents the most crucial and most indispensable dimension of existence – its messianic dimension.  A system can be known because it is composed of the same ground patterns as I am and is consistent throughout.  A world, in the sense I am using the term, can only be very partially known – I cannot know, by assumption or in advance, from which direction or by which means what I need will appear.  A world embodies, in infinite variety, otherness – abstract and general logics cannot comprehend it.   An understanding of the world as system thus deprives it of its most precious and needful quality.  Life, unsurprised, dwindles.  “Only smoke remains,” Illich wrote to his friend Hellmut Becker in 1992,  “from the world-dwindling we have experienced…Exciting, soul-capturing abstractions have extended themselves over the perception of world and self like plastic pillowcases.”[62]   

Gaia, to now return to my theme, conceives the world as system, and that was all Illich needed to know to condemn Lovelock’s theory as an “a-gaia hypothesis… inimical to what earth is.”  “Earth,” he says, “is something you have to use all your senses to grasp, to feel.  Earth is something that you can smell, that you can taste.”[63]  And then he adds the kicker: “I am not living on a planet.”  This is an extravagantly and provocatively reactionary touch, given that earth is demonstrably a planet, but presumably he means to say that he will continue to live in a created world, whatever geology and astrophysics may discover about the matter.  I have already described how I chafed under Illich’s position, while still seeing something invaluable in it.  The question I now want to raise is whether Bruno Latour’s account of the Gaia theory in his Facing Gaia can in any way reconcile Illich and Lovelock and thus, in a larger sense, bring Illich’s radically humanist and incarnational Christianity into conversation with the political ecology that Latour hopes to foster.

FACING GAIA

Bruno Latour is certainly a “well-known” thinker, but, in our intellectually factionalized time, that only means he stands in the top tier of one club while in the neighbouring club he is barely thought of as anything more than a vague reputation.  I learned this the hard way in 2007-2008 when I presented an ambitious 24-part radio series on the movement to reconceptualize modern sciences of which I take Latour to be a paragon.[64]  Subsequent discussions of the subject, both on Ideas and CBC Radio generally, made me realize that the prevailing image of “Science” as an immaculate and unequivocal oracle, speaking in the mighty voice of Nature, had barely been touched by my work.  So, having learned my lesson, let me begin by making a sketch of what I think Latour, with others, has accomplished.  Latour’s first book, Laboratory Life (1979), with Steve Woolgar, carried on the task that the pioneering microbiologist Ludwik Fleck had begun in the 1930’s with his book The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.  Up to the time when Latour and Woolgar wrote, with a few prescient exceptions like Fleck, the history and philosophy of science had been written in a largely theoretical register.  It was a field concerned with what scientists thought that they were doing and what they said that they were doing, and not with what close observation might have shown that they were actually doing.  “We hadn’t been to look,” was historian Simon Shaffer’s pithy summary of the situation on the ground. [65]  Styling themselves as anthropologists in the presence of something radically foreign, rather than as familiars who already know what science is, Latour and Woolgar “went to look,” reporting on the goings on in the neuroscience laboratory of Nobel laureate Roger Guillemin at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California during the sequencing of a previously undescribed neurohormone.  What they, and many other similarly motivated anthropologists showed, was, first of all, the sheer artisanal skill involved in laboratory work, and second, the elaborate and contingent character of the many and far-flung networks that are involved in discovering, stabilizing and sustaining a scientific fact.  

In later works Latour would spell out what he first began to notice in Guillemin’s laboratory.  Particularly important to me was a set of propositions entitled “Irreduction of ‘the Sciences’” with which he concludes his wittily entitled historical case study The Pasteurization of France. [66] By his word “irreduction,” he refused to abridge the “ramshackle” edifices constituting the various sciences, or to boil them down to an essence called Science. (4.3.1) There are sciences, but “Science,” he said bluntly, “does not exist.”  It is only “a name pasted on to certain sections of certain networks,” networks that are in themselves “tenuous, fragile and sparse.” (Networks here can refer to institutions, but also to practices, pathways of communication and shared understandings.)  They take on the appearance of omnipresence only as an effect of “exaggeration.” (4.2.6).  Exaggerations hide the veritable and mundane modes of operation of the various sciences from us “because when a series of locations has been mastered and joined together in a network, it is possible to move from one place to another without noticing the work that links them together.” (4.4.3) Not noticing the work that keeps a network functioning, we are able to suppose that what is contained, supported and extended by the network is in fact universal.  “When people say that knowledge is universally true,” says Latour, “we must understand that it is like railroads, which are found everywhere in the world but only to a limited extent.  To shift to claiming that locomotives cans move beyond their narrow and expensive rails is another matter.” (4.5.7.1)  Sciences can know, in other words, exactly what they are organized, equipped and financed to know – which is a lot but much less than the everything that is promised by abstract and general words – exaggerations – like law, nature, truth etc. 

Latour is a thorough-going pragmatist; and, as it has become clearer that he is as much a philosopher as a sociologist, it has been easier to appreciate how much he stands in the formally Pragmatist tradition of William James and John Dewey, as well as in the distinct but related lineage of Alfred North Whitehead.  For example, in his Irreduction, he challenges an imaginary interlocutor to prove to him that “this substance which works so well in Paris is equally good in the suburbs of Timbuktu.”  Why bother, replies his interlocutor, since a “universal law” is known to obtain.   Yes, says Latour but I don’t want to believe it.  I want to see it.  Ah, says the other, then “just wait until I have built a laboratory, and I’ll prove it to you,” (4.5.7.1). This illustrates the principle that “nothing escapes from a network.”  Not all would agree.  Perhaps the “substance” works even in places where there are no laboratories to prove it and even where the very concept may be unintelligible.  Isn’t the atomic weight of gold always 79 even where no apparatus exists to prove it?  (This is Charles Taylor and Hubert Dreyfus’s example in their Retrieving Realism, where their target is Richard Rorty’s claim, more or less identical to Latour’s, that there is no reality independent of our knowledge of it. [67])  But, however this old debate is settled, I find Latour’s attention to the actual practice of science[s] invaluable, and widely applicable.  It happened, for instance, that when I was first reading Irreduction, I stepped out for a walk and was passed by a van from a Toronto television station with the word EVERYWHERE emblazoned on its side in bold letters.  Television stations also claim knowledge which far exceeds the reach of their vehicles, cameras, and work routines.  Though the van was manifestly there in the street beside me and nowhere else, it could claim to be everywhere by virtue of its knowledge.  Knowing the universal laws by which news can be identified, the station’s eye was effectively all-seeing, despite the modest appearance and restricted ambit of its rather small van.  

Latour went on to spell out the political implication of the revised and more humble view of the sciences which he proposed – first in We Have Never Been Modern (English 1993).  There he described what he called the modern “constitution.”  The term usually has a political reference, and Latour certainly wanted to retain this reference, while at the same drawing attention to the way in which our knowledge of the world is “constituted” in the first place.  This modern knowledge constitution, he said, involved a series of clarifying separations, or “purifications.”  The primary division segregated nature from society.  In a second move God was set at a safe distance from the world – “crossed-out” as Latour said and denied any active part in the affairs of people or nature.  Nature would be the province of the sciences and would speak through them in a clear, indisputable and unconstrained voice, so that the facts on the ground would virtually, as we say, speak for themselves.  Society alone would be the province of politics.  Latour has many witty pages on the illicit commerce that has always taken place between these two supposedly distinct realms – hence his title, We Have Never Been Modern – but his main point is that this distinction has now been utterly overwhelmed by the hybridization of nature and society.  Climate change is a sufficient example.  It is neither a social phenomenon with natural causes nor a natural phenomenon with social causes, but a predicament in which the two are inextricably and indistinguishably mixed.  Moreover, it is also a result of this pretended separation, since humans could never have taxed nature to the extent we have without the fiction of standing apart from it as subjects facing an object.  (This drawing apart of subjects and objects is another of Latour’s modern separations or purifications.)  

The modern constitution is now defunct, Latour says, belied by the countless hybridizations of Nature and Society that surround us.  But sunk capital and intellectual inertia together sustain its existence.  Even critical thought, Latour says, continues to stop and show its passport at the old, approved boundaries.  Critique “demystifies” and purifies – it puts things back in their proper categories.  Any attempt to make a social phenomenon appear as a natural one is denounced as an illicit “naturalization.”   Any incursion of nature on society will be rejected as a limitation on freedom.  What is not faced, either among the moderns or the post-moderns, is the fact that the realities that make are world are generated in the intermediate zone – the “metamorphic zone,” Latour says – where nature and society meet and exchange properties, as they are continually networked, mediated and translated into one another.  Notable at the moment is the COVID-19 virus, a perfect example of what Latour calls a “hybrid.”  It is an entirely natural object, which is also an entirely social object, its physical existence fostered by contemporary socio-technical conditions, it meaning determined in the stew of anxiety and opportunity comprising politics, media and the “health professions.”   

My sketch necessarily simplifies and omits, but the next book I want to mention is 2004’s The Politics of Nature (first French edition 1999), an essay on “how to bring the sciences into democracy.”  Latour’s argument there was that politics in modernity had been disabled – “render[ed] impotent” – by the creation of an “incontestable nature.”[68]  Nature’s authority was expressed through science which brought forward matters of fact, “risk free objects” scrubbed clean of any trace of their artificial origin.  Politics was left to bob in the wake of the sciences, responsible for managing the world of opinion, but with no jurisdiction over the scientifically produced creations and discoveries which sprang out of Nature like the armed men, in the old Greek story, who jumped up from the furrows when Cadmus sowed the dragon’s teeth.   Science filled the world with hybrids – imbroglios in which humans and non-humans were hopelessly entangled – artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, transformed landscapes and a changing climate – but these new kinds of things were represented in politics only, so to speak, after the fact.  Scientists remained the vestal virgins of Nature even as they filled the world with uncanny objects that could have found no place in the cosmograms of earlier societies.  Politics belonged to society, science to nature. 

Latour’s proposal for “bringing the sciences into democracy” involved recognizing that scientists are the de facto representatives of the various non-humans that they have introduced into society.  The modern constitution portrays these non-humans as objects – the only position it has available for whatever is not a speaking human subject – but they are in fact social actors or actants, as Latour sometimes says. The microbes that Pasteur “made public” have had a profound influence on society – the actions taken against them are a primary reason why the human population has now almost reached 8 billion.  And, as humans have acted on them, they have re-acted, mutating and adapting and forcing society to adapt in turn.  Things that have no voice still speak.  The ravaged wetland that once absorbed spring runoff speaks, often without anyone hearing, as a downstream flood.  Microbial antibiotic resistance transforms agriculture and health care.  But these matters have no political representation, so long as the sciences believe that their standing, authority and integrity rest on their having nothing to do with politics.  The difficulty that this poses ought to have been on glaring display during the current pandemic, when manifestly political decisions with profound social consequences have been regularly dressed up as scientific mandates, but no one notices so long as the modern constitution continues to keep any intercourse between science and politics out of sight and out of mind.  

Representing non-humans in domains long-defended as exclusively social is a task that turns on the two primary meanings we give to the word represent itself.  Representation is first of all a question of knowledge.  It speaks of the shape and form we give to things, the way we picture or conceive the things of the world.  The modern constitution, according to Latour, provides us with a map that is now profoundly at variance with the territory it supposedly pictures.  This discrepancy has been brought into clear relief by science studies.  By actually going to look, these new anthropologists of the sciences have shown that the practice of the sciences is quite different than what is claimed by the prevailing myth.  According to this cover story science is the servant of nature – the immaculate oracle through which nature makes itself known.  This is a misrepresentation and must now change, Latour says, if we are to have any understanding at all of how our world is being made and remade from day to day.  But representation has a second sense which refers to the ways in which political assemblies are constituted.   This is currently understood as an entirely social matter.  The entire biosphere may have been thrown into question, but only humans may deliberate about the matter.   This too must change in order to give voice to the many non-humans that now comprise society as surely as we do.  How are all the objects – that have turned out to be subjects – to speak?  How is their, so far, unaccounted for agency to be recognized?  Who speaks for the forests and oceans, glaciers and wetlands, microbes and cloned sheep?  Latour’s answer is that the sciences which know them will have to speak for them.  But for this to happen the inherently political character of scientific knowledge will first have to be faced.  I don’t mean political here in the narrow, prejudicial sense in which the word is taken to refer to knowledge coloured by interest, but in the larger more generous sense in which politics concerns the way in which we make a world together.  

What Latour calls science studies goes by various names: science, technology and society; social studies of science; history and philosophy of science.  Work done under these various auspices over the last fifty odd years, and in a few cases like Fleck’s earlier, has shown a practice utterly unlike the idealized picture provided by the modern constitution.  But this new style of academic study has faced staunch and continuous resistance.  The frequently used expression “trust in science” sums up this reaction.  The position taken by this resistance movement, baldly stated, is as follows: 1/Democracy, progress, and social concord all rest on science.  2/Without science social existence will degenerate into an always potentially violent war of opinion.  3/Trust in science must therefore be preserved and enhanced at all costs.  4/A view of science as plural, fallible, and political can only undermine this trust and should therefore be rejected.  During the 1990’s, “back-to-basics” partisans of trust in science initiated a sub-set of the culture wars that came to be called the science wars, though it was, in fact,  little more than a skirmish, and few, in my experience, have ever heard of it.  It began when physicist Alan Sokal tricked the journal Social Text into accepting and publishing an article he called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.”  The essay was a satirical pastiche of currently fashionable styles, consisting mostly of artfully contrived but, in the end, only faintly plausible balderdash, but the magazine’s editors fell for it.  This then allowed Sokal to make large claims in which he tarred the entire science studies movement with the same brush.  A few polemical books followed, one by Sokal himself, with Jean Bricmont, called Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science.  Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s The Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrel with Science argued in the same vein.  A few lectures were cancelled; a few science studies scholars were denied academic posts; and then the whole thing died down.  Writing about the affair in 2009, I said optimistically that it looked to me in retrospect like “a last ditch effort to save the credit of an obsolete image of science.” [69]  Today I’m not so sure.  Too often, during the current pandemic, “science” has been used as a shibboleth to divide the sheep from the goats, the enlightened folks from the “hardcore, anti-mask wackosphere,” as one newspaper columnist recently put it, without much regard at all for legitimately scientific findings.[70] (This columnist, for example, seemed either unaware or uninterested in the fact that no randomized trial has ever shown that masks of the kind currently in use reduce viral transmission.[71])  

Facing Gaia - to come at last to the text I want to consider – began with an imagined scene that Latour says had preoccupied him for some time before he wrote his lectures.  In this scene, a figure retreats from a frightening apparition, running backwards with her eyes fixed on the feared object, and then, at last, turns around to find that something even more frightening is facing her.  (His vision eventually became a dance piece created with Stephanie Ganachaud called The Angel of Geohistory,)  Latour understands this haunting image as a parable of the modern condition.  The modern constitution was put in place, he says, in order to hold at bay the troubles threatening Europe as a result of the “wars of religion” that followed the Reformation.  (Some argue that these were actually wars of state-building under religious guise – notably William Cavanaugh, building on the work of Charles Tilly – but that’s beside my purpose in this writing.[72])  The Christianity that had once united Europe now divided it.  War had become endemic and vicious – some of the German lands lost up to half their people during the 30 Years War of the early 16th Century.   The program that resulted – Latour’s modern constitution - did three things.  First it forced God into retirement – He would continue to reign only ceremonially and without effect as what Latour calls “the crossed-out God.”  Second a strong state would be established – a “mortal God, as Hobbes called his Leviathan – able to confine religious passion within private bounds.  And, finally, knowledge would be put on the firm and uncontestable footing that we today call science. Modernity broke decisively with the past, and, at the same, time kept its eyes fixed on this past, from which it now believed itself to be utterly different, in order to prevent any resurgence of the dangers lurking there.  Meanwhile, new dangers accumulated, unnoticed at first, and unaccounted for, concealed by the constitution which safely segregated nature from society and kept the hybrids with which science and technology were remaking society out of view.  Only now have we suddenly turned around and found ourselves, as Latour says, “facing Gaia,” and not only facing her, but also having to deal with her in what is rapidly becoming a seriously bad mood. 

This Gaia which now confronts us is nothing like Illich’s imagination of a disembodied and highly cerebral system “inimical to what earth is.”  In fact, Latour interprets Lovelock’s Gaia theory in a way almost opposite to Illich’s version.  Whether Latour’s interpretation agrees with Lovelock’s own is something I’ll leave moot here. I’ve seen no response from the now 101-year old scientist to Latour’s lectures.  But, in any case, it is Latour’s opinion that Lovelock is trying to describe something so new and so different that he often “struggles for language” when expounding his own theory.[73]  Lovelock, for example, quite commonly uses the word system with reference to Gaia, but Latour claims that “[Lovelock’s] version of the earth system is anti-systemic.”[74] (What could be closer to the edge of language than an anti-systemic system?)  The difficulty, according to Latour, is the temptation to think of Gaia as a superorganism or a superordinate whole, or, in cybernetic language, a commanding steersman. (When Nobert Weiner named the infant science of cybernetics in 1948, he derived the name from the ancient Greek word kybernētēs for the pilot or steersman of a ship.)  But Gaia, he says, is an assemblage in which “there are neither parts nor whole.”  It is “not an organism. And we cannot apply to it any technological or religious model.  It may have an order but it has no hierarchy.”  It has “no frame, no goal, no direction.”  It is “chaotic” – indeed “more chaotic than either economists or evolutionary biologists are able to imagine.”  “There is only one Gaia,” he quotes from Philip Conway’s Back Down to Earth, “but Gaia is not one.”  

Gaia, to this way of thinking, is an ensemble without being a whole in the usual sense of a unity which precedes its parts as their organizing principle or transcends them as their coordinator.  Perhaps this is what some people mean by a self-organizing system – perhaps it’s what Lovelock is stumbling towards even when he speaks of “the system” in seemingly conventional holistic terms – but Latour prefers to stress all the ways in which Gaia cannot be represented by machine metaphors – even cybernetic ones – or with reference to anthropomorphic divinities – even Gaia, William Golding’s beguiling name, is, in his view something of a Trojan Horse with its belly full of unwanted associations.  Lovelock, according to Latour, is trying “to follow the connections without being holistic.”  What this amounts to is that Gaia is a network or an assemblage in the sense that Latour has been developing throughout his work, and, with others, in the development of what he and these colleagues have called Actor/Network Theory.[75] 

The essential idea is that society is made or composed by patient and persistent acts of assembly.  The networks that result last only so long as they are maintained and are comprised always of diverse beings, some human, some not, some animate, some not.  Behind a robust and durable scientific fact, for example, stands an astonishing array of actors – from the physical infrastructure of the lab where it was made to the energy grid that powered the lab; from the financial institutions that supplied the money to the administrative  machinery that kept the lab afloat; from the knowledge networks that disseminated the finding to the habits of mind that make “matters of fact” intelligible in the first place.  But once such a fact enters the world as a “scientific discovery” that has descended on some genius from the “Heaven of Ideas,”[76] this messy background begins to be erased and forgotten.  Abstractions displace and disguise the networks.  Science explains scientific discovery; Society explains social creation.  Latour develops the point at length in his Reassembling the Social where he shows how sociology, instead of explaining how society is made, instead treats “the social” as, in effect, its own cause.  “[Sociology] begins where is should end,” he says, “and assumes what it should explain.”[77] 

Nature is another such abstraction – an assumed unity which then becomes an explanation for that unity, according to the principle of what A.N. Whitehead called “the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness” – “mistaking the abstract for the concrete…the occasion of great confusion in philosophy.”[78]  By this means, nature is endowed with an independent existence – a crucial plank of the modern constitution.  Although we live within Nature without distinction from it, and although we constantly mobilize nature in our construction of Society, Nature is given the character, when convenient, of a “disinterested third party,” able to settle disputes and protect the scientists who shelter from the dirty work of politics in Nature’s bosom.[79]  Politics is made “subservient to science.”  The creative and constructive side of science is disguised as the discovery and disclosure of preexistent laws.  Many of the functions of the “crossed-out God” are reinvested in this Nature which stands above and beyond us.  A civilization that has already begun to extract and exploit “natural resources” as never before becomes able to hide this rapacity by always reverting to transcendent nature at the crucial moment.  “This concept of ‘nature’,” Latour writes, “now appears as a truncated, simplified exaggeratedly moralistic, excessively polemical and prematurely political version of the world.”[80]  

Gaia must now replace Nature, according to Latour.  For him, Lovelock’s discovery is as momentous as the new image of the heavens disclosed by Galileo’s telescope.  Galileo confirmed what Copernicus had demonstrated – the earth moves.  Lovelock has shown that the earth is moved – it is not the unchanging object that Galileo “launched…into movement in the infinite universe”[81] but an ever shifting and only partially stabilized collaboration between the elements that compose it.  The human impacts constituting the Anthropocene now make this undeniable.  What was true all along according to Lovelock – that living things produce their own environment – now stares us in the face when, like Latour’s dancer, we turn around.  A living world which we partly comprise and partly make is not an independent nature in which we can find solace, shelter or authority.  It is time, Latour argues, for an account of nature that is, at last, “secular.”  We must abandon, he says, the “under-animated” law-like clockwork bequeathed us by classical science, but also avoid the compensation of an “over-animated” nature that might result from taking the Gaia metaphor too seriously and succumbing to the post-modern avidity for a new sacred.  For him the best word to comprehend “the multiplicity of existents” and “the multiplicity of ways they have of existing” is world – a word we have always used to summarize the whole without subdivision – nature and culture are equally world.   

Latour argues that Lovelock’s hypothesis represents a crucial modulation of the theory of evolution.  According to the common understanding of Darwin’s theory, Nature “selects” the creatures who will prosper and leave descendants according to their “fitness,” or the degree to which they are adapted to a pre-existing “environment.”  This understanding produces what Latour calls the “primal scene” of evolutionary theory - a “bounded organism” living in an “environment” that acts as arbiter of its fitness.  But, according to Lovelock, there is no such limit to the organism because it is always and at the same time producing the environment to which it is also subject.  The atmosphere, to take the example with which Lovelock began, is not a stable environment but a continuing creation – exhaled by some even as it is being inhaled by others.  “We are the atmosphere,” Latour says.   The reason why Gaia produces such a critical supplement to the theory of evolution, for him, is that it shows the earth to be a more chaotic, less easily modelled “system” than many had supposed.  As a dance in which organism and environment are “tightly coupled,” and one cannot easily “know the dancer from the dance”[82] the invitation to participate speaks louder than the commonly heard desideratum to control, manage or save.   

What has brought us face to face with Gaia, according to Latour, is “the new climatic regime” – the accumulating evidence that human activities are appreciably altering earth’s atmosphere.  But Latour’s version of what climate science has achieved remains in keeping with both his vision of a world in flux and his view of scientific knowledge as precarious and provisional.  It is important to him, first of all, that the picture we now have of a changing climate has not been produced by a “prestigious” science, like, let’s say, particle physics with its multi-billion dollar accelerators, but by a “coalition” of more workaday “earth sciences.”  These sciences have made no “earth shaking discovery” but rather have proceeded by “the weaving together of thousands of tiny facts, reworked through modeling into a tissue of proofs that draw their robustness from the multiplicity of data each piece of which remains obviously fragile.”[83] This obvious fragility is important to Latour because he thinks that the challenge that the “climate skeptics” have posed to these individually vulnerable data is salutary and amounts to a “gift” – a “blessing in disguise” as my old aunt used to say.   He has argued throughout his career, as we have seen, that a prime reason for the invention of Nature was to depoliticize science.  It was under this cover that science was able, again and again, to change the world, without ever having to acknowledge the utterly political character of this intervention.  Microbes, artificial fertilizers and atomic bombs could be brought, with immense, unforeseeable political consequences, on to the world stage as if Nature Herself had disclosed and imposed these things through her transparent scientific intermediaries.  Many scientists believe, Latour says, that their only integrity, succour and safety lie in Nature.  Science, they think, can only retain and deserve its authority so long as this authority is seen to be entirely disinterested and to rest on Nature alone.  The result, Latour claims, is that climate scientists, for the most part, engage in political controversy with “their hands tied behind their backs.”[84]  “The science,” as one often hears, will speak for itself. 

The climate skeptics have no such scruple.  Not only have they seized the high ground by claiming the virtue of skepticism – a hallmark of Enlightenment – but they have also fought with the unrestrained polemical vigour that the scientists have denied themselves.  This is what Latour calls their gift – they have shown the sciences how to fight.  Latour has long argued that the sciences must stop hiding behind Nature and  enter the political fray – they must come “into democracy,” as he said in The Politics of Nature.  Now with the end of God-haunted Nature, or at least with its pluralization, “politics can begin again,”[85] and the sciences must take part.  Under the modern constitution, science was covertly authorized to change the world while at the same time constituting itself as the authority before which the political, the controversial, the merely human must bow and give way.  Science was the great exception by which modernity distinguished itself definitively and forever from all other times, place and peoples.  The field of Science Studies, according to Latour, has now shown that science is continuous with other human constructions.  Its networks may be unusually long, its effects unusually powerful, but it extends no farther than these networks can carry it.  It is not universal, and it is not the voice of a displaced God called Nature.  The sciences are therefore obliged to argue their case rather than to claim that it is beneath their dignity as sciences to enter into vulgar contests of opinion.  They must stake their claim in the political arena and reveal the grounds on which their claim rests.  These grounds, according to Latour, are persuasive and compelling but they are not beyond argument. 

Latour has always imagined a new politics, constructed beyond the fictions of Nature and Society, and including all those beings who are now at stake as a result of the “ecological mutation” which modernity has brought about.  He calls the parties who will participate in this politics “collectives” in recognition that they are not just societies but worlds in which places, histories, techniques and the many non-human beings a given group mobilizes also play a defining part.  These collectives, he insists, each rest on a distinct and different foundation.  This is a corollary of never having been modern.  Once we abandon universality, and the coordinating role universals like Nature, Society and Science have played in constructing modernity’s uniqueness, we can see that we are not all living in one time or one space or one set of scientific laws.   Politics must therefore begin again on the basis of difference.  The different “peoples” who will become perceptible once we stop arranging everything along the  arrow of time implied by terms like development or modernization will have to introduce themselves to one another and practice the arts of diplomacy at the boundaries that join and divide them.  Each people will have to disclose “what supreme authorities convoke them, on what lands they believe they are localized, in what time period they situate themselves and according to what cosmograms – or cosmologies – they have distributed their agencies.”[86]   

In trying to define this new politics Latour calls on Carl Schmitt, a German jurist who served the Nazi party during the 1930’s but who has been found indispensable by later political theorists nonetheless.  In his book The Concept of the Political (1932), Schmitt supposed that politics is defined by what he called the friend/enemy distinction.  For Schmitt if something was true, as for him Christianity was true, a decision was demanded in favour of that truth – a decision which would inevitably reveal enemies as well as friends.  According to Schmitt, liberalism had not faced this hard truth, preferring postponement, equivocation and endless indecisive talk.  Arguably, it was his preoccupation with these failings that blinded him to the evil of National Socialism, but Latour still feels there is something in Schmitt’s idea, and, using the long spoon enjoined on those who sup with the devil, he tries to extract it.   There are real indissoluble differences in the world, Latour says.  This is an unavoidable consequences of withdrawing science’s epistemological privilege and dismantling the framework of universality this privilege underwrites.  Latour’s  “peoples,” each convoked by different gods, appealing to different histories, and living in different times, have no common denominator.  What he takes from Schmitt is the idea that there can be no peace without prior recognition of a possible state of war, no friend without an enemy.  A decision is demanded of contemporary people – that is the nub of the “new climatic regime” for Latour – but there is no agreement on how to make it or the grounds on which it should be made.  At the moment all parties hope to prevail by calling their opponents insulting names.  What this epidemic incivility indicates is that they have not in fact recognized genuine enemies – people standing on different moral foundations – but just assumed that the others have somehow stupidly failed to adopt the correct view. Latour’s proposal, if I understand him well, is that the opponent can only become a friend if he/she is first respected as an enemy.  (And perhaps the injunction in the Sermon on the Mount to “love” the enemy says the same.[87]).  Relinquishing the modern framework allows one to see that differences are real and not just the result of incomplete modernization.  And only this acknowledgement can produce the delicate diplomacy that will be required to harmonize these differences.  

Latour has long recognized that the modern constitution is a displaced theology.  Only with Lovelock’s chaotic and indifferent Gaia, he says, do we reach an account of nature which is “finally secular.”[88]  But, in Facing Gaia, he goes much further into theological analysis than he has in the past, summoning to his aid another surprising ally, political philosopher Eric Voegelin.  Voegelin argued in his influential book The New Science of Politics (1952) that modernity is a betrayed and transposed Christianity.  The book’s argument is that Christianity, in its original form, was too spiritual, too arid, and too other-worldly – in short, too difficult – to ever become a popular religion because most people simply lacked “the spiritual stamina for the heroic adventure of the soul that is Christianity.”[89]  And yet it did become a popular religion.  It did so, according to Voegelin, by rendering spiritual and ascetic ends into practical techniques and achievable worldly goals.  He called this reduced and operationalized Christianity Gnosticism, in recognition of the evil twin that had been there all along, ready to turn spiritual wisdom into practicable knowledge (gnosis).   He finds a culmination of this movement in the work of Joachim of Flores (1135-1202), a visionary Italian monk whose writings applied the Trinity to history and declared that, at the beginning of the second Christian millennium, the Age of the Son was about to give way to the Age of the Spirit. (The Age of the Father, corresponding roughly with what Christians call the Old Testament, had preceded the Age of the Son in Joachim’s scheme.)  In Voegelin’s terms, “a symbol of faith” had been made into an object of historical experience – a fateful philosophical fallacy in Voegelin’s view because history, being incomplete, can never be an object of experience.[90]  The eschaton, the final, or ultimate things, had been mapped onto history.  Voegelin calls this “immanentizing the eschaton” – what can properly be grasped only in symbols, because it is inherently transcendent, has been rendered palpable and present.   Many revolutions and New Ages will follow, but Joachim’s visions set the pattern by which the end of history was brought within history. 

What this means to Latour is that, once the eschaton has been historicized or immanentized, the end is, in a sense, already behind us.  As part of history, it has already happened – and therefore we can’t recognize it or react to it intelligently when it suddenly looms ahead of us as vexed Gaia.  His Angel of Geohistory dance/parable reenacts this predicament.  For the moderns, Latour says, history began to come to an end a long time ago.  Modernity is already an “immanentized heaven” and, as such, lacks an “accessible earth.”  We may be on the brink of creating an unliveable environment for much of earth’s existing population, but we can’t conceptualize this end because it doesn’t fit the scheme in which the end has already been installed in history as infinite progress.  How could we go back?  

Latour’s answer, already given thirty years ago, is: abandon the belief that we are or ever have been modern – the belief that we have magically instituted an unending progress – the belief that time can be told in a sequence of which we are the culmination.  We must return to the condition which we, in fact, have never left (except in the undeniably powerful and consequential fantasy by which we appeared to bring heaven to earth in the first place.). Once, says Latour, paraphrasing Voegelin, “immanence and transcendence, the passage of time and the time of the end, the terrestrial city and the celestial city, were in a relation of mutual revelation.”  Then came what Voegelin calls the fall into Gnosticism.  Heaven came to earth; eternity nested in time.  Religion, “so fragile, so unsure of itself,”[91] was given more solid footings.  We became modern.  The perfected society we were making blocked access to the earth.  Now we must once again become, in Latour’s word, earth-bound.   And this can only be done by first releasing heaven from our grasp and letting it return to its proper place – out of our reach. 

“The new climatic regime,” in Latour’s estimate, confronts us with a potential end, but we have brought this situation about by being a civilization whose religion has always preached that time tends inexorably towards its end.  We must, therefore, he says, recognize that, “The end times have come but that time is lasting.”[92] A series of similar paradoxes follows.  “The end has been reached,” he says, “and it is unreachable.”  “We are saved and we are not.”  And, finally, “‘The end time has come,’ yes, but it goes on.  And this prolongation gives decision the same lacunary, incomplete, fragile, mortal character it had before the end time came. This contradiction must not be overcome.”[93] (my italics). This last sentence, I believe, is a key to the whole work.  Heaven and earth, time and eternity stand in opposition – neither can be dissolved in the other without a catastrophic loss of consistency.  (This is what Latour means when he says that an “immanentized” heaven destroys access to the earth.). This opposition can be conceived as harmony, complementarity or contradiction.  But Western philosophy, since the time of Aristotle, has upheld the principle (or law) of non-contradiction.[94]  The reachable cannot be unreachable, whatever ends cannot continue etc.  Contradiction must be resolved – absorbed dialectically into a higher unity, circumvented by the scholastic principle, “When you meet a contradiction, make a distinction,” or otherwise ironed out.  Latour makes the scandalous suggestion that a contradiction should be recognized as unsurpassable and allowed to stand. 

Latour has written in many of his books against what he sometimes has called “totalization.”[95]  A limited, compassable, local thing when totalized becomes an infinite, abstract, universal thing with holistic or transcendent properties that saturate its parts.  To take a homely example, the little news van that so impressed me by its claim to be “everywhere,” at the same moment that it was passing me in the street, was attempting a totalization.  To mistake a network, which can be painstakingly traced out and followed, for a global or universal system that exceeds any grasp is a totalization.  In the case I’ve been discussing, Latour is trying to insure that the idea of the end or the time of the end is not deprived of its provisional and unfinished character – its fragility and mortality, he says.  The point of Voegelin’s analysis of the Gnostic heresy which infiltrated medieval Christianity is that religious symbols were introduced into history as if they were perceptible and achievable goals – that Age of the Spirit which has ended by ruining earthly existence for so many.  The end must haunt us without our ever thinking of a definitive end.  William Blake in his descriptive notes on his etching “A Vision of the Last Judgment” says that, “Whenever any Individual Reject Error and Embraces Truth, a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual.” “Vision,” he says, “…is a Representation of what Eternally Exists.”[96]  In this way, a last judgment can occur repeatedly.  Latour is talking of a recurring end, an end that can guide us, haunt us, instruct us, but which we can never specify or pin down without it turning against us as one more intimidating and discouraging totalization. 

Latour has always been hospitable to religion as a mode of experience.  Earlier I quoted his counsel against the illusion that religion can ever be “left behind.”  Established religions, he says, have long since produced their own “antidote.”  Those who think that they have left religion behind instead become prey to its more debased forms and drink its poison without antidote.[97]  I first began to suspect that Latour was, and is a Christian writer, though of an extremely subtle and tactful kind, while I was reading The Politics of Nature.  I began to hear Gospel accents in statements like, “Weakness, it seems to me, may lead further than strength.”[98] and a little further on, “The smallest can become the largest,” which he  backs up by quoting Jesus’ saying, “It was the stone rejected by the builders which became the keystone.”[99]  His An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013) makes his openness to religious experience more explicit:   

It would not be of much use to say that religious beings are ‘only words,’ since the words in question transport beings that convert, resuscitate and even save persons.  Thus they are truly beings; there’s really no reason to doubt this.  They come from outside, they grip us, dwell in us; we address them, pray to them, beseech them.   

By granting them their own ontological status, we can already advance quite far in our respect for experience.  We shall no longer have to deny thousands of years of testimony, we shall no longer need to assert sanctimoniously that all the prophets, all the martyrs, all the exegetes, all the faithful have ‘deceived themselves’ in ‘mistaking’ for real beings what were ‘in fact nothing but’ words or brain waves – representations in any case.  Fortunately, investigators no longer have to commit such reductions (not to say such sins!), since we finally benefit from a sufficiently emptied-out universe to make room not only for the invisible bearers of psyches but also for the pathways of alteration – we can even call them networks – that allow the procession of angels to proceed on their way.[100] 

Religion here is treated just as the sciences have been treated in earlier writings – as a mode of experience with its own distinct character and its own very specific requirements.  There is nothing, he says, “behind religion.”  There is no higher court in which religious beings can or should prove themselves to us, no test by which we can ascertain what or who they “really” are.  Indeed the heart of religion – as “all testimony agrees” and Scripture again and again attests – is the unending effort to discern what can never be finally or definitively discerned: 

All testimony agrees on this point: the appearance of [the] beings [of religion] depends on an interpretation so delicate that one lives constantly at risk and in fear of lying about them; and, in lying, mistaking them for another – for a demon, a sensory illusion, an emotion, a foundation.  Fear of committing a category mistake is what keeps the faithful in suspense.  Not once in the Scriptures, do we find traces of someone who was called who could say he was sure, really sure, that the beings of the Word were there and that he had really understood what they wanted of him.  Except for the sinners.  This is even the criterion of truth, the most decisive shibboleth: the faithful tremble at the idea of being mistaken, while infidels do not. Exactly the chiasmus that the transmigration of religion into fundamentalism has lost, replacing it by a differentiation – as impossible as it is absolute – between those who believe and those who do not.[101] 

The emphasis on discernment, vigilance and humility here may help to clarify the paradoxes I cited earlier concerning the end which has arrived but which continues, which has been reached but is unreachable etc.  The peculiar property of the beings of religion is that they are “ways of speaking.”  In religion, he says, language “flows.” It does not “refer.”  And this flowing speech must be constantly “renewed,” Latour says, because this “Logos cannot rely on any substance to ensure continuity in being.”[102] Religious beings are, by nature, “intermittent.” and “neither their appearance or their disappearance can be controlled.”  

One can neither deceive them nor deflect them nor enter into any sort of transaction with them.  What matters to them apparently is that no one ever be exactly assured of their presence: one must go through the process again and again to be confident that one has seen them, sensed them, prayed to them…the initiative comes from them…They are never mistaken about us, even if we constantly risk being mistaken about them; they never take us “for another”, but they invite us to live in another – totally different – way.  This is what is called, accurately enough, a “conversion.”[103] 

Religion for Latour is a “mode of existence” as are science and politics (though the last is often unjustly scorned by those in the grip of the modern delusion that the truth of science outshines and belittles politics’ grubby transactions.)  These three modes must be kept distinct, in Latour’s view, because their virtues become poisons when these modes are confused.  To try to extricate them from one another is one of the main purposes of Latour’s lectures.  With a proper understanding of religion he hopes to do four things.  The first is to expose the illusion that religion can be overcome or “left behind,” which, as we have seen already, only exposes people to more debased religions while depriving them of the interpretive resources already accumulated within established religious traditions.  The second is to undo what Jan Assman in his influential book Moses the Egyptian called “the Mosaic distinction,” or the unprecedented idea that appeared first within Judaism that there is one true religion which renders all others false, one true God who invalidates all others.  This monotheism, in Latour’s view still haunts modernity as the “crossed-out God” whose properties have been transposed onto Nature and prevents “the peoples” in their religious variety from ever meeting on an equal footing.  The third is to allow us to see the sciences for the precious but precarious practices that they are by scrubbing the vestiges of theology from their self-portrait.  And finally – the biggest surprise in Facing Gaia for me – he hopes to restore Christianity to its proper vocation. 

It was Christianity’s fate, he argues, to misunderstand and misapprehend the Incarnation – the idea that God has taken flesh and become present and available to us in and through one another.  What should have been taken as pertaining to this world, as a radically new way of understanding it, instead was taken as indicating  another “supernatural” dimension, in which and for which we are “saved.”   “The Incarnation,” he writes, “has been changed into a vanishing point far from all flesh, pointing to the disembedded realm of remote spiritual domains.”[104]  Christianity, he says was “led astray” as “generations of priests, pastors and preachers…have mistreat[ed] the Holy Gospels in order to add above nature a domain of the supernatural.”  The eventual result of this estrangement from what should have been the most earthly of doctrines – the Word made flesh – has been that “the faithful [were made] to disdain the path of the sciences at the very moment when the sciences were showing the path of the earth more clearly than the column of smoke that led the Hebrews into the desert.” (my italics)  That the sciences ultimately “show the path of the earth” is an absolutely crucial point here, and one that might easily be overlooked by those who have misread Latour’s radical re-description of science as an expression of enmity rather than of, as I think it is, profound respect.  

Latour’s view that Christianity ought to have remained earthbound does not lead him to reject the idea of Creation.  Creation might have functioned, he says, as “an “alternative to Nature,” if it had retained the character of an imaginative vision of a living earth.  If this had happened, it might have allowed “the power of conversion of the Incarnation [to] extend little by little, I ought to say neighbour by neighbour, to the entire cosmos.”   Instead Creation became the prototype of Nature – the inert, obedient, law-like petrification of a mighty will. 

As I’ve been stressing, Nature, in Latour’s view, is displaced theology.  Gaia, as he understands it, is the overcoming of this outmoded and mistaken theology.  Gaia, at last, “offers a secular, worldly, terrestrial figure” – an image of a world instinct with immanent powers, not bound by the dictate of a designer or the predictions of a plan.  With Gaia as the image of nature – an image neither over-animated as in paganism nor under-animated as in Christian natural theology – the Incarnation can return to earth.  “The dynamic of the Incarnation,” he says, referring to that movement “from neighbor to neighbour” of which he just spoke, “can recapture its momentum in a space freed from the limits of nature.”  And this way of thinking, he argues, has been a potential of Christianity all along.  In support of this view he quotes the apostle Paul’s statement in his letter to the Romans that the whole creation has been groaning in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.[105]  “This shows,” he writes, “that the creation has not been completed, and that it therefore must be completed, step by step, soul by soul, agent by agent.”[106]  Gaia rescues Christianity from an abstract God and an abstract nature – that God whom William Blake called Urizen (a pun more perceptible when the name is read aloud as “your reason”): 

LO, a Shadow of horror is risen

In Eternity! unknown, unprolific,

Self-clos’d, all-repelling. What Demon

Hath form’d this abominable Void,

This soul-shudd’ring Vacuum? Some said        5

It is Urizen. But unknown, abstracted,

 Brooding secret, the dark power hid.[107]

ILLICH AND LATOUR

Having now introduced Latour and Illich, let me now take my final step and try to understand what their views say to each other.  It is Illich’s contention that systems are inherently totalizing.  First, they integrate all their elements in a whole which conditions every part.  Second, because of this internal consistency, they eliminate otherness – there are no breaks, discontinuities or inherently unknowable features within the system that can be bridged only by hope, prayer or imagination – the system is all of a piece.   And, finally, systems have no outside – all thought or action in relation to a system becomes part of that system – the system continuously transforms transcendence into immanence, outside into inside, absence into presence.  So, system, for him, is the ultimate monism – the terminus of what Charles Taylor calls the “direct access society” in which each part is immediate to the whole.[108] People who may not even know their neighbours’ names worry about the planet.  The scale on which a human life is even possible is destroyed.  “As long as you think of the world as a whole,” Illich says, “the time for human beings is over.”[109]  Gaia, in Lovelock’s rendition, signifies this predicament for Illich.  It is the system of systems, the summit of the vast architecture of abstractions by which the world – local, individual, incomplete – has been replaced.   Latour challenges this view in various ways. First of all, he interprets Lovelock’s Gaia as the emblem of a living world – diverse, inventive, every changing – not as the dictation of a Master Steersman who has slipped without much friction into the place of Nature (which had been the place of God.)   Gaia, Latour says, is anti-systemic – a muddle constantly sorting itself out without “frame…goal…[or] direction.”  Second, Latour’s sees Gaia as a source of otherness and not its denial.  Nature as Gaia is “finally secular.”  Being without frame, we can gain no synoptic view of it; being without goal, we cannot confidently predict its future; and being without direction, we can impose no plot or historical narrative on it.  It is an “order [without] hierarchy” on which we can impose no “technological or religious model.”  This more or less defines otherness, if we take the other, in Illich’s sense, as what we depend on but can’t control, predict or fully understand. 

Gaia also generates otherness in a second sense.   Gaia as a living, responsive world, deprived finally of the theological echoes that resounded in Nature, generates disagreement.  The world that God has given us – first as his creatures and then, in the scientific era, as his surrogates – comes with a set of implicit and sometimes explicit instructions.  An emergent, finally secular world which makes itself up as it goes along does not explain itself in the same way.  The sciences “show the path of the earth,” Latour says, but they never show it unambiguously or incontestably.  That is the very significance of the debates over climate science for Latour. The “coalition of earth sciences” who have made the case for climate change have done so in a way that Latour finds ingenious, admirable and persuasive.  But they have been able to do so only by supplementing empirical observations with models built on more questionable assumptions, and this has left weak points in their argument – “obvious fragility,” as Latour says – which opponents have been able to attack and exploit.  Latour has called these controversies a gift insofar as they require the sciences to stop posing as the virginal priests of Nature and enter political discussion with all their strengths and weaknesses showing.  This idea of Latour’s that, after Nature is secularized and Science defrocked and disaggregated, “politics can begin again” implies fundamental disagreement: the reemergence of peoples whose ways of life rest on different foundations and can no longer be plotted on a single axis measuring their degree of modernization or development.  All the gifts and all the liabilities that Illich imputes to the other are in play.  There is no system which dissolves differences but rather an anti -system which amplifies them.  

The third, final and, for me, most surprising way in which Latour challenges Illich’s account of Gaia as the very paradigm of disembodied systems thinking is by making Gaia, as post-Nature, the key to the very revival of Christianity that Illich himself sought.  Latour, as we have seen, sees in the totalized concept of Nature a deprivation of freedom and spontaneity – continuous and continuing creation immobilized within a rigid and reified framework of law and petrified theology.  The Incarnation, in this preoccupied and predetermined order, is banished to a supernatural realm – Latour’s “vanishing point far from all flesh” where it exerts a purely “spiritual” leverage on human affairs.  Shatter monolithic Nature and return the sciences to their full, fallible humanity, Latour says, and the Incarnation might “recapture its momentum” and resume its proper vocation: to move hand to hand or “neighbor to neighbor” without plan or preordination in an unfinished creation.  

It became clear to me reading Facing Gaia and thinking back on earlier works that Latour’s political proposals resemble Illich’s much more closely than I had previously thought.  In his Tools for Conviviality (1973) Illich spelled out what he called the “three formidable obstacles” standing in the way of “recovery” – by which he meant a way of life in balance with its surroundings.[110]  The first was “the delusion about science” which has removed science from the realm of personal knowledge and turned it into a “spectral production agency” turning out certified knowledge which ultimately overwhelms and paralyzes “the social and political imagination.”  People come to think that they are governed by knowledge which is of a different kind than their own – a finished knowledge from which all traces of its fabrication have been erased, like Marx’s “commodity fetish” which takes on “a life of [its] own” as an “autonomous figure” stripped of all vestige of the labour that went into it.[111]   Illich wanted to demystify scientific knowledge.  This has also been Latour’s purpose.  He has offered an account of scientific knowledge production in which everything that goes into producing and sustaining this knowledge remains visible and accountable.  He has shown that most scientific facts are not the unmediated disclosures of genius by the product of complex and ingenious craftsmanship.  And he has tried to deprive science of its epistemological privilege in order to return it to the common and entirely political world in which we must decide together what to do.  

This similarity goes further, I think.  Illich wrote Tools for Conviviality in order to restore the balance between what people can do for themselves and what is done for them by their institutions and advanced technologies.  He proposed a set of criteria by which tools that people can use for what he called convivial purposes can be distinguished from those tools which, in effect, use people – tools that are too big, too complex, too destructive or too expensive to be controlled.  And he insisted that the control of tools was a political decision – not a scientific or a religious one.  Latour’s attempt to “bring the sciences into democracy” has had no other purpose.  He has believed that the sciences “show the path of the earth” – a point I’ll come to in a minute – but he has also argued that the “modern constitution” has deprived people of exactly the same principle or criterion which Illich was seeking in Tools for Conviviality.  By segregating Nature from Society, and science from politics, modernity allowed the unregulated production of what Latour calls hybrids – those uncanny creations of techno-science that fuse nature and society and appear as nobody’s doing.  Science discovers nature; politics governs society; but nuclear missiles, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and melting glaciers come out of nowhere, admitted by a secret, unwatched door which the constitution doesn’t recognize.   The point of recognizing the florid creativity of science, for Latour, is to be able to regulate it – “to replace,” he says, “the clandestine proliferation of hybrids but their regulated and commonly agreed upon production” in the interests of “moderation” and “slowing down.”[112]  This does not seem very different from Illich’s ambition “to find the roof of technological characteristics under which a society wants to live and be happy.”[113]  So I think, in summary, that there is broad agreement between Latour and Illich – both on the need to dispel the mists and quieten the choruses of angels around the throne of Science, and on the need to bring techno-science within the purview of politics. 

The surprise of Facing Gaia, as I’ve said, was to find Latour so seemingly close to Illich on “the dynamic of the Incarnation.”  In the interviews I published after his death as The Rivers North of the Future, Illich sketched a vision of “modernity as an extension of Church history.”[114]  He argued that the reformed Church of the second millennium, and then a whole array of modern inheritors, had taken salvation into human hands in order to better manage it.  Modernity, he said, could only be fully understood as a corruption or perversion of Christian vocation, whereby a supremely free and unpredictable calling was brought under administration.  The alternative which he preached, until formal proceedings against him by the Holy Office made him withdraw from Church service, was de-clericalization of priesthood and de-bureaucratization of mission.  Latour’s account of the “beings of religion,” as intermittent and unbiddable, assorts well with Illich’s vision of a reformed church.  So does his sense of the Incarnation as a personal encounter and not a theological “vanishing point” far from earthly existence.  There are many other congruences.  Latour points to the common etymological roots of humility and humus and urges living awareness of this link, so that humility becomes a relation to the earth and not just the placation of an always potentially jealous god.   Illich is the author of a “Declaration on Soil” that laments the absence of soil from Western philosophy and praises the bonds which tie us to the earth.[115]  Latour praises the critical work of his friend, German philosopher Peter Sloterdyck on what the latter calls spherology – the prevalence in Western iconography of transparent, traversable spheres, tending always to the imagination of a total visibility and total spatialization.[116]  Illich speaks of “the long drawn out martyrdom of the image,” as more and more of what cannot be seen was brought to virtual visibility.  Both want to disable the myth of progress, deprive time’s arrow of its confident direction, and reestablish the dignity, authority, and fecundity of the past.  Both imagine a revived role for religion, once it renounces its claim to worldly authority. 

There is also common ground in Illich and Latour’s interpretation of the figure of Gaia.  In the concluding chapter of Deschooling Society, in an essay called “The Rise of Epimethean Man,” Illich wrote about Gaia, as follows:

From immemorial time, the Earth Goddess had been worshipped on the slope of Mount Parnassus which was the center and navel of the Earth.  There, at Delphi (from delphys, the womb), slept Gaia, the sister of Chaos and Eros.  Her son, Python the dragon, guarded her moonlit and dewy dreams, until Apollo, the Sun God, the architect of Troy, rose from the east, slew the dragon, and became the owner of Gaia’s cave.  His priests took over her temple.  They employed a local maiden, sat her on a tripod over Earth’s smoking navel, and made her drowsy with fumes.  Then they rhymed her ecstatic utterances into hexameters of self-fulfilling prophecies. From all over the Peloponnesus men brought their problems to Apollo’s sanctuary.  The oracle was consulted on social options, such as measures to be taken to stop a plague or a famine, to choose the right constitution for Sparta or the propitious sites for cities which later became Byzantium and Chalcedon.  The never-erring arrow became Apollo’s symbol.  Everything about him became purposeful and useful.[117] 

According to Illich, when people worshipped Gaia, they “trusted in the delphos of the earth” and in “the interpretation of dreams and images.”   When the priests of Apollo took over, instrumental rationality put Gaia’s dreams into service.  There was “a transition from a world in which dreams were interpreted to a world in which oracles were made.” Illich supplemented this passage in an interview he recorded with his friend Jean Marie Domenach for French public television in 1972 – an interview that took place in a garden in front of a statue of Pandora, a figure whom Illich took to be derived from Gaia, though in a much reduced status, the Greeks having become by the time Pandora was imagined “moral and misogynous patriarchs. [118] Illich tells Domenach that the myth of Gaia in its original form is “the best story about the corruption of man.”  “In today’s world,” he continues, “if we don’t turn back to Pandora/Ge, who lived, and I believe still lives, in her cave at Delphos, if we don’t regain our ability to recognize the dream language she can interpret, we are condemned.  The world cannot survive.”  This is a very strong statement, but not an isolated one.  In Gender Illich wrote about the attenuation that took place in image of Mary during Church history.  Mary “shed the aura of myth that had been borrowed from the goddess and the strong theological epithets with which the Church fathers had adorned her [e.g. theotokos, the God-bearer].”  She became “a model for ‘woman’…the conscience of genderless man.”[119]  These hints at goddess worship and Mariolatry were not developed but they remain evocative. 

Illich’s statement to Domenach that human survival depends on our ability to interpret “the dream language” in which the earth speaks to us seems to come particularly close to Latour’s version of Gaia.  Dreams are chaotic and unconscious products of the mind.  Order and meaning may emerge from this chaos, but dreams in their raw state frequently flout the principles of temporal sequence, hierarchy of significance, identity, and narrative consistency that prevail in the conscious mind.  Latour’s Gaia, in a similar way, is beyond the reach of rational understanding.  It lacks hierarchy and has neither “frame... goal…[nor] direction.”  It possesses “neither parts nor whole” and so cannot be imagined as any sort of super-organism.  Unlike Nature which manifested order even when it overawed and overpowered humanity, Gaia is not a fixed or predictable order but more of an on-going improvisation in which one order dissolves kaleidoscopically into another.   In both accounts – Illich’s dreaming goddess, Latour’s alarming “intruder” on modernity’s fantasies – human pretensions are punctured.  Both preach a return to earth and a rejection of images of humanity as “Atlas, Earth Gardener, Steward [or] Master Engineer” – the expressions are Latour’s who repudiates them because they imply, wrongly, that we are “alone in the command post” but they could as easily be Illich’s.[120]  In both cases humility is the key note.  Latour wants to revive religion as the spirit that makes us alert and aware that there are things which we “must not neglect.”[121]  Illich too feared negligence, telling me once that his motto was “I fear the Lord is passing me by.”[122]  

Do all these agreements suggest that Illich would have recanted his critique of the scientific version of Gaia, had he only known of Latour’s interpretation?  I doubt it because major differences remain.  The first concerns nature.  “My roots are in natural law,” Illich once told an interviewer.  “I have grown up in that tradition.  I just cannot shed the certainty that the norms with which we ought to live correspond to our insight into what we are.”[123]  He repeated variations on this statement many times.  Once he told me that he understood himself best when he supposed the world to be resting in God’s hand “as you can see on any Romanic or Gothic apse.”[124]  He said he was proud to belong to a church that “could still say, “It’s against nature,” even if the Church sometimes trivialized this denunciation by applying it to the wrong objects.[125]  He staked much of his argument in Tools for Conviviality on the restoration of “natural” balances and scales.  This seems to say clearly enough that the world is a created order from which we can derive norms.  Latour, on the other hand, hinges his whole program on the abolition of nature and its replacement by a de-moralized, de-divinized, “finally secular” alternative.  The opposition here seems stark, except that each man means something entirely different by Nature.  Nature for Latour is an almost entirely malign concept – a concept that replaces an active, inventive world by an inert and passive creature of Law, and that hides both the profuse creativity of science and its political responsibility for its creations behind the myth that politics belongs entirely to a separate domain called Society.  Nature, for Illich, is the spontaneous,, living, speaking world bought to its ultimate refinement in the doctrine of contingency in which the world appears as “pure gift,” and every time, place and creature speaks of the overflowing creative spirit that sustains it in existence from moment to moment.[126]   These two accounts are not easily compared.  But it appears, at first glance, that Illich, rather than opposing Latour, is part of that reanimation of tradition that Latour hopes will occur once the dead hand of the “modern constitution” is lifted.  Illich characterizes the transition from the medieval to the modern world as follows: “Things no longer are what they are because they correspond to God’s will but because God has laid into what we now call nature the laws by which they evolve.”[127]  The second half of this description, in which God, in effect, disappears into law-like nature, is pretty much identical with Latour’s account of the crossed-out God and Nature-as-automaton.  If all we know or need of God is to be found in Nature, then God has become, as Illich’s says, “redundant.”  Illich spoke always of the living God – the  God with whose will we “correspond” – and, like Pascal contrasting “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” with “the God of the philosophers,” [128]  he was always scornful of any merely supposed or deduced God – “To hell with God as a hypothesis,” as he once roundly declared.[129] Latour is interested in what comes after Nature, in its modern sense, Illich is concerned with what is before it.  

As I’ve said, Illich more than once declined to discuss Lovelock’s Gaia with me. “Stop it with [the] appeal to science,” he said impatiently on one such occasion.  “What the difference between that kind of science and religion is I don’t know.”  This summary dismissal of a large swath of contemporary reality is of a piece with many other statements that he made in the last twenty years of his life.  When the Dallas Institute for the Humanities invited him, in 1984, to reflect on the artificial lake that the city was then considering creating, he told his auditors that the “recycled toilet flush” with which this sparkling new urban amenity was to be filled could never become “the water of dreams.”[130]  His hypothesis was that planning and processing beyond a certain intensity deprives water of its imaginative resonance and leaves behind only H2O.  When I asked him later if that ruled out baptism, since the water which Christ “sanctified…to the mystical washing away of sin” was clearly something more than mere H2O, he at first denied it, but later said he was not so sure.[131] “I wonder,” he said, “if God might have to redeem us by fire because we have done away with water.”[132]  On another occasion, speaking about the contemporary body as an internalized “ideological construct” rather than a lived experience, he told me that he had come to the conclusion that “when the angel Gabriel told that girl in the town of Nazareth that God wanted to be in her belly, he pointed to a body which has gone from the world in which I live.”[133]  Illich had warned in Tools for Conviviality that, if limits were not set to institutional hubris, humanity would find itself “totally enclosed within [its own] artificial creation, with no exit.”[134]  He gave many evidences in later life that he thought this total enclosure had occurred and the world had indeed been swallowed up by this new human creation and “disappeared.”  This thought has no more poignant index than the claim that the Incarnation has become inaccessible because it pertains to a different body than the iatrogenic “construct” in which most now walk around.  

This apocalyptic strain in the later Illich can sometimes obscure the equally significant and equally emphatic non-apocalyptic strain.[135]  These elements in his thought are in my opinion complementary, which doesn’t mean that they are not contradictory.  The world is made of contradiction.  Complementarity is the disposition to acknowledge this character and dance with it, as I believe Illich did.  But the unwary reader might easily form the idea that Illich in the first half of his career made a constructive critique of modern institutions with a view to reining them in and reinstituting the human comedy within its proper limits, and then, in the second half, despaired of all reform in an Age of Systems so suffocating that it seemed to point only to the end of the world.   It was as a student of Illich trying to come to terms with this complementary contradiction that I rejoiced in Latour’s claim that the time of the end has been reached and is, at the same time, unreachable, and that this contradiction must be endured and sustained, not resolved or overcome.  A lot depends here on how religious language is used and understood – the point that Voegelin made long ago when he began to try to disentangle time and eternity, earth and heaven, historical experience and symbols of faith.  Illich and Latour are also aligned within this project, but it can be hard to see because of their radically different emphases. 

Let me take a single issue in order to try and make this clearer: the status of science.  Illich made the overcoming of the “delusion about science” one of the keystones of his early work.  When he saw that this delusion was only intensifying in a cybernetic science that could no longer distinguish the world from its models of the world, he seemed to say, more or less, that science is over.  (In 1992, we get, for example, “…science in America has become fundable research, and in Germany it’s tasks for which civil service positions can be created.  I mean stop it with that appeal to science.”[136]). Latour on the other hand has been admiring of climate science and its painstaking effort to show “the path of the earth.”  He has staked everything on a re-vision of the sciences.  Only when the sciences are seen in their true light, he says, will politics “begin again.”  You might say that he has tried to imagine the sciences as they would be if Illich’s “delusion” did not obtain.   These are, I think, complementary positions that can learn from each other.  

Illich says: “As long as you think about the world as a whole, the time for human beings is over.”  This has been my watchword in the discussion of climate change that is now well into its third decade. The worldwide civilization whose seed was Western modernity is unsustainable.  Men like John Ruskin and William Morris knew that in the 19th century.  M.K. Gandhi knew it in the 1920’s when he wrote in Young India that that if a society as populous as India ever took to industrialization in the style of Britain “it would strip the world bare like locusts” [137]  Fritz Schumacher knew it when he published Small Is Beautiful in 1973.  All cultures and civilization that have emphasized reciprocity with some donating source have known it.  And all have known that human encroachment isn’t just bad for the biosphere, it also bad for human beings for whom the path to wisdom has always gone through humility (humus) and the observance of due measure and due respect for what we have not made and cannot replace.  The climate change discussion, on the other hand, has mostly been about how far the biosphere can safely be pushed.  It has been about management, often on a scale that is inherently corrupting to human beings.  “Managing planet earth” and “saving the planet” are examples of expressions that evince this corruption – these phrases are uttered frequently and without blush, but they can only imply either tyranny or hubris or both.  So there’s a terrible paradox involved: addressing climate change as a question of mitigation and not of repentance reinforces the habits of thought that produce climate change in the first place.  We don’t ask: what is good?  We ask only: what can we get away with without changing?   Illich helped me to recognize this predicament.  And since, if we lived as we should, climate change would take care of itself, I didn’t see the need for a specific politics of climate change apart from the more general aim of re-inhabitation, limits to growth etc. 

A second point, related to the first, is that knowledge of something as vast and imponderable as “the climate” can never be certain.  Given the number of guesstimated assumptions that must go into a model of the climate, it should not be a surprise that these models sometimes misfire.  This then leads to conflict and misunderstanding.   Claiming too much for science generates a reactionary anti-science faction that admits far too little.  What gets lost is any recognition that there are limits to knowledge.  What Wendell Berry calls “the way of ignorance” – the habit of acting in the light of all that we do not and cannot know – becomes unthinkable.[138]  The failures of scientific management – from Thalidomide to the collapse of the Canadian cod fishery – tend to be forgotten.   Perceived ‘anti-science” evokes a credulous “trust in science.”   Instead of seeking solid moral grounds on which to stand and on which to act, we pursue the divisive will of the wisp of “scientific” assurance. 

Enter Bruno Latour. Instead of claiming that climate science is bullet-proof – rejected only by yahoos, “deplorables,” and deniers – he admits that the science has its frailties and vulnerabilities and he praises “the gift” of the climate skeptics.  Instead of asking all to bow unquestioningly to “the science,” he suggests that the sciences must enter the political arena prepared to argue their case on the same terms as everyone else argues, and not as a privileged disclosure from a higher sphere.  Instead of portraying Gaia as a unified and intelligible system that might conceivably be subject to management, he portrays it as an improvised and incomprehensibly complex assemblage, with none of the coherence, neat categories and clear lines of authority formerly evident in Nature – the dancer and the dance now indistinguishable. 

Latour sees Gaia as grounds for humility, not glorification.  It is first of all not one, as Nature is, but an aggregate of diverse agencies engaged in continuous accommodation and adjustment to one another.  This provides a basis for a dramatic reduction in human self-importance – we are no longer “alone in the command post” – and the foundation for a new pluralism.  This pluralism is of two kinds. First, it enlarges politics to include all the non-humans who are both part of and subject to what was formerly Society.  (Oceans and forests belong at the table alongside France and Kazakhstan, as Latour and his friends tried to demonstrate at a “Theater of Negotiations” they staged in 2015, just before the Paris Climate Summit.  At this gathering, the usual suspects were joined at the table by “Indigenous Peoples.”  “endangered species” and various other natural forms and non-national groups.  Territory was defined “not as a two-dimensional segment of a map but as something on which an entity depends for its subsistence, something that can be made explicit or visualized, something that an entity is prepared to defend.”)  Second, it accepts humanity itself as incommensurably and irreducibly diverse and no longer to be ranked on a single scale or confined in a single story. This leads to his sense that newly defined peoples, or collectives, must make their allegiances explicit and seek a new modus vivendi through peace-oriented diplomacy.  

And this is where Latour again comes so unexpectedly close to Illich.  The campaigns Illich conducted between the 1960’s and the early 1980’s – against development, radical monopoly, and the myth of scarcity – all turned ultimately on his view that these things were consequences of the perverse institutionalization of the Gospel in the Latin Christian Church.  Freedom was the essence of this Gospel – it is “for freedom,” Paul writes to the Galatians, that “Christ has set us free”[139] – but the very universality of this grant of freedom soon urged an unprecedented sense of mission and a universal institution into which all should be enrolled.  Previous societies had stood aloof from “the others” around them.  “Only during late antiquity, with the Western European Church,” Illich wrote, “did the alien become someone in need, someone to be brought in.  This view of the alien as a burden has become constitutive for Western society; without this universal mission to the world outside, what we call the West could not have come to be.”[140]  Behind this sense of universal mission lay the idea that the truth which had been shown in Christ could be possessed, contained, administered and ultimately realized in history so long as all kept their feet on the one path.   Illich wanted to break this spell and put an end to the disastrous conflation of the earthly with the heavenly city that lies at the root of Western modernity and the world-wide predicament it has now generated.  He wanted those who had been “brought in” to be let out again.  This was in the interest of bringing human societies back within human bounds – “the roof under which all can live” – but also in the interest of renewing Christianity.  Latour’s aim seems to be just the same.  His vision of politics “begun again,” freed from the inhibiting supervision of that “disinterested third party”[141] – God, Science, Nature, Progress, etc. – that stood always above it seems very close to Illich’s attempt to end “the war on subsistence” and create a renaissance of diverse vernacular styles.[142]  So does Latour’s vision of “the power of conversion of the Incarnation” pulled back into the human world from its theological ‘vanishing point” and allowed once again to move hand to hand and “neighbour to neighbour.” 

Illich relished the role of the man of the past.  “I’ve increasingly been certain, as I’ve grown older,” he said, “that it’s good to be very consciously a remainder of the past, one who still survives from another time one through whom roots still go far back, and not necessarily examined roots.”[143] This stance, in a man as superbly attuned to his times as Illich, had its uses.  He made the past vividly present for many people. (This is another point in common with Latour whose We Have Never Been Modern argues that we should stop patronizing our ancestors, reorient time’s arrow and supplement progress with regress.)  But Illich could also carry this stance to a fault, as I believe he did, when he told me “stop it with that appeal to science” because Jim Lovelock had discovered nothing that religion didn’t already know.  Lovelock, I continue to be believe, did discover something – about how our unstable atmosphere is stabilized, about how clouds are made, about how land creatures get the iodine they need, and, ultimately, about the kind of world that we live in – a world that makes itself and will in time re-make itself without us, should we render it uninhabitable for creatures like us.  

I cannot, finally, answer the question of whether Illich rejected Lovelock’s findings on theological grounds.  Nor have I space in this already overlong essay to examine the  theological implications of Lovelock’s hypothesis.  I can say that Illich’s claim that a theory of planetary self-regulation is disembodying and “inimical to what earth is” doesn’t say anything about whether the theory can be judged true on the basis of the evidence presented for it.  I will leave moot the question of whether a God who holds the world in his hands could conceivably hold a world as indifferent to humanity as the one Lovelock pictures.  But what I do want to point out is that Latour has answered many of Illich’s practical objections to the Gaia theory, such as that it is abstract, other-denying, and earth-denying.  He has also challenged Illich’s claim that science is over, with a vision of science disaggregated and brought to earth.  One of Latour’s reviewers, John Tresch, puts it very succinctly: “Rather than a view from nowhere of a pre-assembled Nature, objectivity can be recognized in the quantity and rich variety of mediations that establish and maintain robust chains of reference. Scientists must foreground the instruments, institutions, and relationships that form the sciences’ lifeblood; they strengthen their power by realistically presenting their limitations.”[144]  This is science on the other side of “the delusion about science” that Illich deplored in Tools for Conviviality, but it is still science and still grappling with a predicament concerning that synoptically-perceived “world as a whole” that signalled to Illich that “the time for human beings is over.”  All of Illich’s reservations retain their force with me.  The question I would like to leave hanging at the end is whether Latour’s revision of Gaia has opened a way forward which respects Illich’s reservations.  

A final point:  Illich is an anti-idolator, and the idol he singled out for particular attention in his last years was life.  Life, in its contemporary meaning, is the work of human hands, something we are constantly constructing – in law – wrongful life – medicine – saving life – commerce – adding life, etc.  The idol obscures the true God, and it’s having persuasively borrowed one of the names of God – “I am Life” – makes it, for Illich, “the most dangerous idol the Church had had to face in her history.”  His denunciation of Gaia rests on the idea that Gaia is one of the emblems of this idol.   Latour, on the other hand, has come to the conclusion that anti-idolatry is an infinite regress and leads to a situation in which endless sterile denunciation gets in the way of constructive work.  “When one begins with iconoclasm,” he says in Facing Gaia, “one never ends.”[145] In his Inquiry into Modes of Existence, he expands this thought, “The Golden Calf has no sooner been cast down, than the Tabernacle with its sculpted Cherubim is put up.  Polyeucte has just destroyed Zeus’s temple and someone is already erecting an altar on the same spot with the relics of St. Polyeucte.”  Each anti-idol becomes a new idol in turn.  Latour thinks that iconoclasm, or anti-idolatry, is one of the main tributaries of modern critique and produces in the end a somewhat fanatical spirit.  Critique does the work of purification and separation mandated by the modern constitution, but its horror of mixtures hides the “metamorphic zone” in which our world is actually made.  His proposal is to substitute what he calls composition for critique, as the engine of intellectual culture.  “Critique is past,” Latour says.  “We are in such a situation of intellectual ruins, that the question has now become one of composition… Composition means you have to take up all the tasks of assembling disjointed parts, so to speak, from the ground up.”[146]  

Their positions seem to be opposite.  And yet I think they are, once again, quite close to one another.  Illich’s defence of the varieties of subsistence, against prescribed forms of development and modernization, was in many ways a defence of composition – of people’s right and competence to assemble the elements of their lives and livelihoods as they see fit.  Latour, for his part, is a formidable critic and anti-idolator – remember his resounding, “There is no such thing as science,” from his Irreduction of the Sciences – but he has taken the plurality of truth and the plurality of religions seriously, and that has made him aware of the tasks of diplomacy, peace-making and negotiation in a way that rules out the endless denunciations by which the true God eternally trounces his rivals.  Different emphases obscure complementary positions.  In the 1980’s widespread misunderstanding of Illich’s book Gender largely lost him the ear of the social movements of the time.  Latour’s Facing Gaia seems to me to re-open a possibility of dialogue.  If I am right and there is such an opening then Latour’s “This contradiction must not be overcome” seems to be a promising saying to emblazon over its entrance.  

In the following notes, I have abbreviated frequently cited titles of Illich’s as follows: 

David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation, House of Anansi, 1992 (IIC)

David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich, Anansi, 2005 (RNF)

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, Harper and Row, 1973  (TC)

Ivan Illich, In the Mirror of the Past, Marion Boyars, 1992 (IMP)

 
References

[1] “Religion and the New Science,” Part Two, Nov. 4, 1985; “The Gaia Hypothesis,” April 30, 1992; and “How to Think About Science,” Part Six, Jan. 2, 2008.  Transcripts here: http://www.davidcayley.com/transcripts

[2] IIC, p. 287

[3] “The Gaia Hypothesis,” op. cit., p. 4

[4] “How To Think About Science,” op. cit., p. 48

[5] Stephen Jay Gould, “Kropotkin Was No Crackpot,” Natural History, Vol. 97, No. 7, 1988, p. 21

[6] “The Gaia Hypothesis,” op. cit., p. 4

[7] “How To Think About Science,” p. 51; Ideas on the Nature of Science, p. 120

[8] “The Gaia Hypothesis”, p. 7; Lovelock relates that he had submitted a paper with several other scientists that showed a connection between marine algae and cloud condensation nuclei.  The paper was accepted as valid, but the editor insisted that all reference to the Gaia hypothesis be stricken from it on the grounds that the theory was “a danger to science”

[9] “How To Think About Science,” p. 50; Ideas on the Nature of Science, p. 118

[10] 2001 Amsterdam Declaration on Earth System Science http://www.igbp.net/about/history/2001amsterdamdeclarationonearthsystemscience.4.1b8ae20512db692f2a680001312.html

[11] Quotations about this watershed come from IIC. p. 124 and pp.169-1707

[12] “A Call for Institutional Revolution” was the subtitle of Illich’s first book – 1970’s Celebration of Awareness.

[13] RNF, p. 162

[14] Ivan Illich,  “Brave New Biocracy: Health Care From Womb to Tomb,” NPQ: New Perspectives Quarterly, Winter 1994, Vol. 11, Issue 1, p. 9

[15] RNF, p. 79

[16] RNF, p. 266

[17] Ibid., p 227

[18] TC, p. 27

[19] Ivan Illich, The Powerless Church, Penn State Press, 2018, p.165

[20] RNF, p. 47

[21] IIC, p. 184

[22] RNF, p. 132

[23] IIC, p. 185; following quotations in this paragraph on the same page

[24] John 1:14

[25] Ivan Illich, Celebration of Awareness, Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1970, p. 33 – subsequent quotes, until noted, same page

[26] RNF, p. 48

[27] “Commencement [Address] at the University of Puerto Rico,” New York Review of Books, Oct. 9, 1969, p. 15

[28] Luke 1:34

[29] RNF, pp. 47-48

[30] David Cayley, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, Penn State Press, 2021

[31] IMP, p. 220

[32] IMP., p. 200

[33] Adam Kuper, review of Emmanuelle Loyer, Lévi-Strauss, TLS, Oct. 14, 2016, p. 4; following quotes, same place7

[34] Illich dealt with this subject of what had changed since he wrote Medical Nemesis sin two places.  The first was “Twelve Years After Medical Nemesis: A Plea for Body History,” in IMP; the second was “Death Undefeated” in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Dec. 23, 1995, Vol 311, pp. 1652-1653.

[35] RNF, p. 210

[36] RNF, p. 184

[37] My account here is based on an unpublished memoir Illich wrote of this event.

[38] IMP, p. 220 (This quotation comes from a presentation to a Lutheran congress in Chicago in 1989.  No text survives of Illich’s speech at the event Campbell organized, but I’m quite confident that this quote represents what he said on the earlier occasion.)

[39] “The Institutional Construction of a New Fetish: Human Life,” IMP, pp. 218-232

[40] IIC, p. 279

[41] Ivan Illich, Limits to Medicine, Penguin, 1976, p. 269

[42] Ivan Illich, “Blasphemy: A Radical Critique or Technological Culture,” Science Technology and Society Working Paper No. 2, Penn State University, 1994  (This program has been discontinued, and this paper is no longer available.)

[43] John 10:10

[44] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_life

[45] Peter and Jean Medawar, Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 66-67

[46] John Maddox, “A Book for Burning?”, Nature 293, Sept. 24, 1981, pp. 245-246; Sheldrake discusses the affair in my radio series “How To Think About Science,” transcript p. 81.  The transcript is here: http://www.davidcayley.com/transcripts

[47] Robert Rosen, Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin and Fabrication of Life, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, p. xiii

[48] Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, New Science Library, Boulder: Shambala, 1984, p. xxvii

[49] Religion and the New Science http://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/category/Religion+and+Science

[50] IMP, pp.229-230

[51] Ibid., p. 222 ff.

[52] The Unbearable Lightness of Being

[53]  IIC, pp. 263-264

[54]  Ibid., p. 264

[55] IIC, p, 276

[56] RNF, p.137; the image of a bridge that stays on the same side of a river I owe to one Illich’s former German students, Andreas Calic of Bremen.

[57] When Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci appeared at the Chinese court at the end of the 16th century, one of the complaints brought against him was that his belief in “a master in heaven” could potentially disturb the perfect balance between heaven and earth. French scholar Jacques. Gernet has told the story in his China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures (Cambridge University Press, 1981).  Illich repeats it in RNF, p. 133 ff.

[58] Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, 2nd edition, Polity Press, 2002, p. 169

[59] Ibid., p. 178

[60] Myth of the Secular, Part 6 http://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/category/Myth+of+the+Secular- Part Six

[61] RNF, p. 52

[62] The letter is unpublished.  A translation of it by Barbara Duden and Muska Nagel, entitled “The Loss of World and Flesh” was read out at Illich’s funeral by Wolfgang Sachs, and I am quoting from that text.

[63] IIC, p. 287

[64] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-to-think-about-science-part-1-24-1.2953274; transcript: http://www.davidcayley.com/transcripts; a reduced transcript of the series was published in book from as Ideas on the Nature of Science (Goose Lane, 2009)

[65] “How To Think About Science,” op. cit., p. 1

[66] Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, Harvard, 1988, p. 212 ff.  Latour’s “Irreduction” is presented in numbered propositions.  I will avoid further footnotes by supplying the number I am quoting in my text.

[67] Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Taylor, Retrieving Realism, Harvard, 2015, Chapter 7

[68] Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Harvard, 2004, p. 10

[69] Ideas on the Nature of Science, op. cit., p. 15

[70] Chris Selley, “If tests are unwanted then provinces should return,” National Post, Feb. 12, ‘21

[71] See, for example, https://ocla.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Rancourt-Masks-dont-work-review-science-re-COVID19-policy.pdf

[72] William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Religious Violence, Oxford, 2004’ and Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States 990-1990, Basil Blackwell, 1990

[73] Facing. Gaia, p. 95

[74] Ibid., p. 97

[75] Latour presents Actor/Network and argues its potential to transform sociology for the better in Reassembling the Social (Oxford, 2005)

[76] We Have Never Been Modern, p. 79

[77] Reassembling the Social, p. 8

[78] A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Mentor, 1948/1925,  p. 52

[79] Facing Gaia, p. 46

[80] Ibid., p. 63

[81] Ibid., p. 86

[82] “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” is the concluding line of William Butler Yeats’ poem “Among School Children.”

[83] Facing Gaia, p. 31

[84] Ibid., p. 28

[85] Ibid., p. 143

[86] Ibid., p. 223

[87] Matthew 5:44

[88] Facing Gaia, p. 86; Latour’s terminology is problematic at this point because secular is one of those terms that takes its meaning from the modern constitution.  Secular implies a space cleansed of religion, but to pretend to “leave religion behind,” Latour says elsewhere, is only to bring along the worst of religion and “leave aside the antidote that they have also been able to develop.” (p. 286) If there is no prudent exit from religion, there is no “finally secular.”  Despite this incoherence, it is clear enough that what he means by “finally secular” is the end of a specific theology.

[89] Eric Voegelin,  The New Science of Politics, Chicago, 1952, p. 121

[90] Ibid., p. 120

[91] Facing Gaia, p. 198

[92] Ibid., p, 175

[93] Ibid., p. 178

[94] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-noncontradiction/

[95] See, for example, We Have Never Been Modern, op. cit., pp. 125-127

[96] The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Anchor Books, 1988, p. 560. 554

[97] Facing Gaia, p. 285

[98] The Politics of Nature, op. cit., p. 6

[99] Ibid., p. 22; Matthew 21:42

[100] Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, Harvard, 2013, p. 308

[101] Ibid., p. 310

[102] Ibid., p. 306

[103] Ibid., p.309

[104] Facing Gaia, p. 286; subsequent quotes, until noted, same page7

[105] Romans 8:22

[106] Ibid., p. 287

[107] Collected Poetry and Prose of William Blake, op. cit., p. 70

[108] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Harvard, 2007, p. 207 ff.

[109] IIC, p. 281

[110] TC, p 91 ff.

[111] Karl Marx, Capital, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1990, p. 165

[112] We Have Never Been Modern, op. cit., p. 142

[113] The Powerless Church, op. cit., p.165

[114] RNF, p. 169

[115] https://www.pudel.samerski.de/pdf/Illich_ua90DECLARPU.pdf

[116] Peter Sloterdjck, Bubbles: Sphere Volume I: Microspherology, Semiotext(e), 2011; Globes: Spheres Volume II, Semiotext(e), 2014; Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology, Semiotext(e), 2016

[117] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, Penguin Education, 1973 (first edition 1971), p. 107.

[118] https://vimeo.com/66948476

[119] Ivan Illich, Gender, Pantheon, 1982, p. 158

[120] Facing Gaia, p. 283

[121] John Tresch quotes this in his review of Facing Gaia on the Public Books site - https://www.publicbooks.org/we-have-never-known-mother-earth/. I can’t find it in the text, but I’m sure it’s there, as Latour has said this before.

[122] RNF, op. cit., p. 97

[123] This interview, which I have in typescript, was recorded by his friend Douglas Lummis in the early 1980’s, but, so far as I know, never published.

[124] IIC, p. 114

[125] Ibid., p. 101

[126] RNF, p.65

[127] Ibid., p. 68

[128] The text of Blaise Pascal’s so-called “Memorial” is quoted in full here, along with a reflection by Romano Guardini, who was one of Illich’s teachers: http://inters.org/faith-reason-pascal-memorial

[129] IIC, p. 277

[130] Ivan Illich, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, Heyday, 1985

[131] Quote from the order for “The Ministration od Holy Baptism to Children,” The Book Common Prayer, Anglican Church of Canada, 1962, p, 522

[132] IIC, p. 298, n. 201

[133] RNF, p. 210

[134] TC, p. 54

[135] This point is argued at length in the chapter called Apocalypse in my new book Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (Penn State Press, 2021).

[136] IIIC, p. 288

[137] Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 38, Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1953, p. 243

[138] Wendell Berry, The Way of Ignorance, Shoemaker and Hoard, 2005

[139] Galatians 5:1

[140] Ivan Illich, Shadow Work, Marion Boyars, 1980, p. 18

[141] Facing Gaia, p. 247

[142] See the essay called “The War Against Subsistence” in Shadow Work, op. cit.

[143] IIC, p. 101

[144] https://www.publicbooks.org/we-have-never-known-mother-earth/

[145] Facing Gaia, op, cit., p. 176

[146] “How to Think About Science,” op. cit., p. 447