2

Coding

Whatever religion might be, it depends on fashioning forms in the medium of meaning. Just the same way that meaning is treated in other contexts. This does not tell us for the present in what sense religion is specific, but to make the transition, we can fall back on the discussion of forms launched in chapter 1. It is no use asking what the “meaning of religion” is, as if religion were something preexisting, because any answer to this question is obliged to use a form, and thus to make a distinction indicating religion and excluding “everything else.” But how could religion accept a production of meaning that excludes “everything else,” using the inside of its form as an excuse for ignoring the unmarked state of the world—and thus the observer as well?

Regardless of how we draw the boundary between marked and unmarked, it is precisely this boundary that any valid assignment of meaning in the form of religion must identify as its problem.

This means that every use of form involves religion, because every use of form generates an unmarked state. (Without marking, of course, there would be nothing that is “unmarked”; the world must always first be transformed into an imaginary space by distinguishing between marked and unmarked.) But nevertheless, with universal competence, religion envisages a specific distinction, just that of marked/unmarked (observable/unobservable). Yet how can this be called a distinction or a form if the other side, the outside of the distinction, eludes marking—and if that is precisely the condition of marking itself?

Let us take a second look at this problem by asking what the code of religion is. Coding presupposes that both sides of a distinction serving as a code can be indicated, if only by distinguishing between a positive value and a negative one. We’ll come back to this. What is of interest here is only an earlier problem, namely, what happens when the code of religion takes the place originally (and universally) occupied by the distinction of marked/unmarked. We can assume that this is how religion makes itself distinguishable. That is, it becomes a system with this (and no other) code. Further, the observer can then be observed as someone who uses this form and who (with the help of this distinction) gives religious meaning to what he is signifying. And that, in fact, is how sin “enters the world.”

Actually, both sides of the code should be distinguished in relation to their unmarked states. There cannot be two unmarked states, because that would presume digitalization,^*1 or marking. Evidently, there is a third possibility (excluded for logical reasons): the chaos that is inadmissible in an orderly world. However, is it not the world itself that is being excluded from the world? How does this world in the world come into being, this inclusion of the excluded third possibility?

If we let this question guide us, we immediately see a range of helpful possibilities. Myths of the world’s origins can then be told, gaining in plausibility by narration, the placing of distinctions coordinated with one another in a sequence. There are exclusions, taboos, and rules of purity and purification presenting an order by excluding something else.¹ Another solution is to see the world itself as distinguishable. We can signify it if we juxtapose it with something else—whether the one God or nothingness. We can then make the non-world side of this distinction symbolic so as to signal its incomprehensibility. That would appear to suffice for presupposing the world itself in the mode of the observable. As in the biblical paradise, prohibitions on knowledge can be introduced, or the idea that the observer is the “devil.” In each of these ways, religion generates a semantics of its coding, which can communicate and absorb uncertainty in particular historical societies. Religion canonizes itself and marginalizes those who question it.

Nevertheless, we cannot completely exclude the possibility that questions will be posed about the unity of the code, the unity of positive (e.g., good) and negative (e.g., bad), the unity of marked and unmarked, and the unity of the distinction itself (which is necessary for form). Philosophers concede we have to tolerate skepticism (leading nowhere) as the “free side of every philosophy.” ² But that is only a different way of formulating our problem. Behind every indication marking something, there is always the unobservable unity of its difference. It’s what is called a paradox.

II

If one thing is certain, it is that a paradox (even in the form of a tautology) can never be transformed into an identity without losing some of its meaning. The same would hold for the identity of a redeeming God, the identity of a redeeming nothingness, and the identity of a principle. For resolving a paradox into understandable identities, a distinction is needed. In place of the black hole of paradox, which does not release any information to the outside, we have to substitute distinguishable identities. These then limit what people can expect of them. Language may hide these distinctions by attributing characteristics or activities to a subject (of an utterance). But if we move away from this habit of attribution, we immediately see differences between God and redemption, nothingness and redemption, and principle and recognition. In such cases, we have to ask what distinctions are substituted for the distinction of observable/unobservable so that this paradox can be resolved [entfalten] into identities—that in turn can be enhanced—such as “God” and “redemption.”

As soon as we come to deal with resolving paradoxes, we are also dealing with history. Transformations in that domain do not follow logically but creatively, and not in some necessary form but contingently.³ Society can thus select appropriate ways to resolve paradoxes, depending on the significations it can most plausibly operate with.⁴ In addition, certain figures have to be distinguishable, and they thus expose themselves to “critique.” Surprise attacks or ambushes by the unmarked state (precisely because nothing is marked there) can never be ruled out entirely. Longterm (evolutionary) stability can only be achieved when modifications are made, when the same is constantly varied. Identity is constituted by repetition, but repetition occurs in different situations and activates different contexts—often even different distinctions—that indicate the same thing using different counterterms. What has proven itself identical in repetition is simultaneously condensed and confirmed, reduced to a kernel of meaning (its essence, or essentia) and confirmed by extending its “meaning” for some other thing. Ontological metaphysics accounted for this phenomenon by distinguishing between substantial and accidental certainties. There are thus identities that outlive themselves, semantics worth preserving that represent communications worth preserving.⁵

But the referential excesses of all meaning always leave open the option of seeing certainties as limitations and asking questions about the other side. As a result, the technique of the medieval quaestiones disputatae practically became a form of learned sport. When scholastic authority was no longer sufficient to answer the questions being disputed, it became a legitimate form of communication to make paradoxes.⁶ We regularly find paths leading back to that beginning, to paradox as a form in which religion is no longer recognizable as religion. Yet that is precisely why religion mobilizes tendencies that preempt paradoxes (or at least leave them to small realms of systemic self-observation). That way, religion does not fall victim to the apathy of “anything goes,” leaving us asking which forms of meaning succeed at resolving paradox, for how long, and in which societies.

Among the myriad distinctions possible in the context of religion, we are looking for one that enables us to recognize religion as religion. Recognizing religion as religion is a process of attribution about which observers can agree or disagree, for the classic question about the “essence” of religion will be answered differently by different observers. If we ask the question this way, from the outside, religion can be distinguished in various ways, often directed toward those elements of meaning we would like to see qualify as religion. For one person, choosing the organic menu at the university cafeteria is a religious choice; for another person, it is not. If we stick with the question of essence (and thus an ontological treatment of the problem), we cannot avoid religious pluralism (under current societal conditions)—pluralism both in the sense of a plurality of religions with their respective followers, and in the sense of disagreeing about which elements of meaning qualify as religion in the first place.

Deferring this line of questioning, we therefore consult only a single observer, religion itself. The question then becomes: how does religious communication recognize it is dealing with religious communication? Or put differently, how does religion distinguish itself? As external observers, we rely on religion’s self-observations. We do not prescribe but rather accept what describes itself as religion. Still, we are presupposing (and here we may be mistaken or contradicted by facts) that there is a guiding distinction for religion, one that reformulates the basic paradox of the reentry of form into form. We are presuming that religion has some grounds to begin with for differentiating itself and for copying this difference onto itself. We are thus presuming that religion can make a distinction between self- and other-reference and, in addition, that the “self” of this reference still cannot answer the question of how religion recognizes itself as religion.

III

To reconsider the issue, let us return to the thesis that the world of meaning (in other words, reality) has to be divided up if something is to be observed. But that would only mean that every observation depends on a distinction that has been operatively completed. In religious communication, we are dealing with a specific case we can call (all too generally) “reality doubling.” Certain types of things or events are assigned a special meaning, taking them out of the regular world (where they are still accessible) and granting them a special “aura,” a special circle of reference. Something similar is at work in the cases of play, art, and statistical analysis. These are perhaps surprising relatives of religion, if not quite on a par with it.7 This kind of distinction appears to exist in all social systems.⁸ The only thing that varies is how we attribute conditions and events to it. Such variation is the starting point for possible differentiations that ultimately distinguish and classify errors, norm violations, religious problems, special artistic achievements, and so on. Even the “transcendental reduction” of Husserlian phenomenology follows this schema: the ontological question and the “natural view” of the world are bracketed out (epochē), and the freedom thus gained for the variation of possibilities is used to discover stable eigenvalues (here still referred to as “essences”).

For the world, as a result, the meaning of the term “reality” has to be restricted. Until it is qualified, reality (and with it, fate) does not come to be or signify and thus distinguish itself from something else. The world contains something that in this narrow sense is not real but nonetheless can serve (and be observed) in the position of an observer. Everything that exists is no longer real simply by existing as it does. Rather, a special (let us call it a real) reality is generated through the existence of something that is different/distinguished from it. Until now, the field of religious studies has been interested primarily (if not exclusively) in understanding the specific phenomenon of the holy or sacred. It assumes that “what is” questions bring us closer to the issue. If, however, we let ourselves be guided by an approach based in difference theory, we can ask what happens with the other side when the world is divided into sacred and other. To an observer, reality only starts to emerge when there is something (in the world) we can distinguish it from. Without that distinction, reality cannot at all be solidified in comparison to the rather fluid world of the imagination. And only then can we speculate on relationships, mirror relations, or intervening activities that connect the two parts of the world, the real reality and the imaginary one. It was therefore likely the primary activity of religion to constitute reality by preparing something for observation that did not fall under the category of “reality.”

Such a revolutionary development, one with massive consequences, must always have been associated with the linguistic use of signs. On the one hand, cognition is thus equipped with a capacity to err, and communication with a capacity to lie. Realities can thereby be observed that are not—if we may formulate it this way—“referentially real.” But there is more, for we can also double reality by artificial and consensual means: by reducing and expanding it. This doubling is precisely at work in the cases cited above of play, art, statistics, and religion. It is not meant to be switched off again, as when errors are made. Rather, it has a positive connotation and is reproduced as worthy of being preserved. At the same time, doubling projects onto the world the first commandment of all observation: “Draw distinctions!” As a result, we always have to indicate to which side of a distinction we are assigning other distinctions, indications, and observations.

This leads to a further question: how can we reproduce such a distinction between reality and imagination, one that is seriously intended (and should not be taken for an error)? There must be signs that keep us from getting confused, quasi-objects⁹ such as prophets or footballs, letting us to recognize that sequences can be assigned to reality’s double. Or there must be statistical or game rules guaranteeing that we stay in the realm of the probable/improbable and do not make the error of assuming that certain events are concrete (which in fact are not). Precisely in the case of religion, however, shouldn’t there also be the possibility of allowing confusion, indeed of producing it intentionally in certain situations, as ecstatic cults do?

Perhaps the most notable (but certainly very early) form of designating an imaginary reality of the religious can be found in limiting communication through the form of the mysterious [das Geheimnisvolle]. It can thus be communicated but is only revealed in special circumstances or for those expressly initiated. By means of this form of the mysterious, the sacred distinguishes and protects itself against being trivialized. The problematic of the arbitrariness of possible claims about the other side of reality, intrinsic to reality doubling itself, is thus socially controlled: not just anybody can come and maintain just anything. This kind of social control is presupposed in classical sociology by what is termed “institutionalization.”

Representing the sacred as a mystery has important advantages. It distances what we perceive but leaves it in a perceivable state. What is deemed sacred, for instance, may be bones,¹⁰ statues, images, or certain natural objects like mountains, springs, or animals. They are, to use the terms of the previous chapter, visualizations of a reentry. Each of these is “something tangible” and is at the same time more than that. We are not really allowed to take hold of it, even if we could. The problem of doubling is transferred into an ambivalence protected by “modesty” (aidōs) and is thus neutralized by an ambiguity specific to the object.

As long as a mystery can be objectified in a perceivable state, it can be presupposed in communication. It remains a mystery, but one that exists (can be shown). We see it because others see it, too. Here we avoid a problem that arises as soon as the mysterious has to be communicated as a mystery, because mysteries in communication can be guessed at or given away. They cannot be constructed, only deconstructed. They cannot be represented as artifacts of communication without it causing a performative contradiction. In a communicative context, we help ourselves by making taboos. As a result, the breaking of taboos can no longer be ruled out, because even the taboo as a form has another side. It can be impaired, which under the right conditions (pointing also to the possibilities of evolution) enables taboo breaking (“unheard of” behavior) to emerge as the foundation of a new religion.

Another way of dealing with mysteries is to formulate them as functionally equivalent to a contradiction or paradox. A prohibition on observing them is replaced by a contradiction blocking itself or, in the case of paradox, by a claim claiming its opposite. God is thus to be feared and loved. He thus cannot accept his own death on the cross. He thus can only be visualized if we think beyond what cannot be thought of as larger or smaller. And, finally, paradox also leads us to fill morality with religious justifications and self-refutations. Precisely when we rely on our good works, it can be fateful. It is then recommended that we sin and repent.

As long as the mysterious stays in the realm of the perceivable, we can still imagine the distinction collapsing, with divinity itself appearing and being provoked into doing good or bad. Hence, there is not only symbolization and not only representation, but also something beyond the everyday that can still switch over from normal absence into presence. Then it is only an issue of recognizing this process—declared and prepared in the sacredness of objects, events, rituals, and cults—whenever it arrives and adapting it to our own interests through invocations, sacrifices, and the like. Alternatively, as in antiquity, mystery cults can be formed for making the mystery accessible, but only for those who are present and who have been initiated (all of which rules out being able to report on it to outsiders adequately and comprehensibly).

Although the mysterious is another form of reality, it is still a thing among things, a distinguishable event. Hence, it something toward which we behave in a conditioned and trained manner. As a form of societal religiosity, it is not invalidated or eliminated, but rather refashioned when a structural change takes place, for which I employ the concept of “coding.” We can continue making the old distinction of real (or really imagined) things and events, but that too is reconfigured by a (very) much more radical distinction involving the world itself. For everything that exists, a two-part valuation has been made, and in the case of religion, it is the double valuation of everything as immanent and as transcendent. And everything that had previously been religious has to fit into this new context, being modified, regulated, or interpreted. At that point, the doubling of reality can be represented more abstractly as a transcendent meaning correlated to everything immanently observable. But the representation can only be realized if we can answer the question of which contents are capable of filling in such an abstract universal schema of meaning.

Among the most impressive evidence that religion begins in reality doubling is early Sumerian religion. Here all relevant appearances of the world, in nature and culture, are assigned gods, who are behind these appearances and responsible for them.¹¹ At that point, there is no order assumed in the relationship of the gods to one another, no special system to the religious cosmos. Such a point-by-point designation is not replaced by a system-to-system one until the Sumerian-Semitic religion of Mesopotamia develops further. In turn, the world of the gods becomes systematized according to a societal model of family structure and political authority. The analogy makes the order of this world and the other world plausible. The correspondence between those forms confirms that they are necessary, precisely because a this-worldly and an other-worldly reality had already been distinguished.

The basis for that distinction has archaic and primitive features. Revelations will come about in situations, ad hoc, in the form of inspiration and boundary crossings. These come about concretely and case by case. Until the rise of the major religions, no one talks about “holy scriptures” or canonizes revelation as the self-representation of a god. The European tradition is a rich one because Jewish tradition preserved a purely religious reality doubling fixed in textual form, thus partially influencing Christian doctrine, while Greek philosophy took a completely different path of linguistic-conceptual abstraction.¹² The theology of the rabbis preserves a communicatively binding relationship with God. As a result, the text cannot deceive but must be reinterpreted continually, however controversial the resulting interpretation may be. Controversy, as a form of resolving paradox, is thus a structure of tradition that must be maintained.¹³ For Plato, by contrast, signification (naming) is vulnerable to deception,¹⁴ and it has to be constantly reconfirmed with reality in the form of remembering prototypical ideas. In both cases, remembering is central. In one, a plan for creation must be preserved and actualized; in the other, forms are referred to that we can no longer experience purely but that account for the essence of things. Both versions articulate a distance between imaginary and real reality, but each provides a different semantics for the realization of the program. In both cases, the other side of remembering—forgetting—is to be forgotten. The dark side of producing and preserving religious forms remains the excluded other enclosed within them.¹⁵

IV

The notion of code should indicate a form that makes operational this problem of reality doubling and of establishing a real reality. Coding is by no means simply a way of recognizing something, a simple indication of reality doubling. A code projects a different kind of distinction, but one that only becomes possible given reality doubling. Through the distinction, it is led back into the unity of a divided worldview.

A code is a guiding distinction by which a system identifies itself and its own relationship to the world. Such a usage can be distinguished from the one common in linguistics and also (partly) in sociology.16 Here, “code” is to be understood as a strictly binary schematism that knows only two positions or “values,” excluding everything else in the sense of a tertium non datur^.*2 Codes are generated in a process that duplicates what already exists, such as turning spoken language into writing, alleged truth into possible untruth, and so on.¹⁷ We might also say that a reality first conceived (and simultaneously functioning) as “analog” is becoming “digitalized.” It is thus reinterpreted as a binary schema, so that what is given only claims one side of the schema, and the other side is freed up for monitoring and reflection. In that case, one can already interpret the artificiality of all codings, making it possible to distinguish them as distinctions. We can therefore accept (or avoid) codes with the help of “transjunctional operations.”¹⁸ That is the only reason they are suitable for identifying what system the operations belong to.

Binary codes are distinctions of a special type. They are not merely significations that distinguish themselves by isolating something they have defined against the unmarked state. Nonetheless, they are not qualitative pairs—like heaven and earth, man and woman, or city and country—which hold out a prospect of equivalent possibilities of specification (= possibilities of connection) on both sides. They instead fix the system in an asymmetry that is commonly presented as a distinction between a positive and a negative value (such as good/bad, true/false, correct/incorrect, having/not having property).

Gotthard Günther indicates that the positive side of the distinction is a designative value and the negative side is a reflective one.¹⁹ In that way, a (logical) functional distinction is already being expressed. The designation only serves to signify what in ontological terms is called “existence” or “being.” The non-designative value thus remains free for other tasks that can generally be comprehended as reflecting what conditions the appearance of the designative value. If we transfer this distinction from logic into empirical systems research, the positive value acquires the sense of indicating the adaptability of systems operations to systems operations. The system can only operate on this side. The negative value is once again freed up to make observable the meaning of such operations as information, with the proviso that even observation is only taking place in the form of a systems-internal operation.

Binary codes and those built asymmetrically onto themselves have a complicated relationship to other distinctions on which the operative closing of a system is based. It is especially important that they diverge from the distinction between system and environment, or between self- and other-reference. It would be a false application of the code if the system were to distinguish itself with the positive value and give the environment a negative one. In that case, the mobility introduced by the coding would only have been given up. In general, there is no correspondence in the environment of the system for its code. Codes instead serve to balance internally the consequences of operative closing. That is because a system (in and of itself), which cannot contact the environment with its own operations (being unable to operate across boundaries), would have to view each environmental condition as equally probable. The coding, however, put the system in a position to treat surprises as irritations, to digitalize them, to understand them as a problem of assigning the code values, or to develop corresponding programs for their repeated use—in short, to learn. In internally produced horizons of expectation, in assumptions about normality or in places of uncertainty, irritations are made visible as distinctions that can become distinctions and thus information. Everything developed in the practice of coded operations invariably remains a purely internal construction. But since irritations do not occur randomly (since the environment itself contains structures), an internal order can be built up with help of such coding. Although this order does not contain the environment and is not at all consistent with it, it is nonetheless sufficient for making it likely that the system’s autopoiesis will continue as long as the environment does not change in decisive respects (with destructive consequences).

What is noteworthy about the special form of the distinction of the code is how reflexivity is built into it. Codes distinguish themselves from distinctions that only serve to indicate something, that only operate with a single value. They distinguish themselves from simple divisions (“heaven and earth”) that leave what is divided up in nonreflexive being in the manner of types and genres. They also distinguish themselves from simple claims of copies (imago Dei) or mirrorings that have to assume an analogy of being (or analogia entis) in order to associate what has been distinguished. Ultimately, codes distinguish themselves from distinctions in which reflexivity is offered as a characteristic of distinguished objects, in the case of husband and wife or master and slave. Instead, codings use distinctions, the reflexivity of which results from the distinction itself and is built into the distinction, indeed making up its specific form and function. What is preexisting and thus directly observable is duplicated only for the sake of reflexivity. And that does not only mean that an addition is made with a specific capability. Rather, both sides of the distinction are set up for second-order observation and thereby linked. The positive value cannot be held without the negative one.²⁰ Hence, the forcing of a code always has positive as well as negative results.

But that is only the case for second-order observations and thus only for cases in which the system observes its own observations. In the direct operations of systems, a reference to code values appears to be dispensable. Courts do not use the distinction of law and non-law to ground their judgments; they assume it instead. Making reference to truth is not part of the language of research, just as an artist does not feel understood if we say to him that he made something beautiful. And there is also no consolation gained from referring to code values of religion. They should not be part of the sermon and are not an argument for conversion or for faith.

In second-order observation, nonetheless, one can see the complex structure of coding that has always been implicated. This coding changes the meaning of crossing a boundary. A positive value can only retain its positivity if the countervalue is positively excluded. We assume this value can be considered for the entire domain where the code is applicable (again, indicating a unity) but that it can be excluded by determinable operations. Truth, as Karl Popper said, is only possible in the case of statements that could also be untrue. Property, according to Bartolus,^*3 is characterized as available by the possibility that it has been or could be nonproperty. The theories of property protection are suppressed by theories of acquiring property. “Original sin” is transformed by baptism into a status that makes it advantageous to sin and to be forgiven for it. The modal form of contingency is therefore valid for coded domains. That is precisely why there have to be additional arrangements (suppléments in Derrida’s sense) for such provinces of meaning, for making decidable the state of something which is being signified.

Codes are a precise copy of the paradox that they serve to resolve. At first glance, there is no apparent benefit to them. As soon as we ask what comprises the sameness of the positive and negative value or what comprises the unity of the distinction, we again come across the fundamental paradox of the sameness of what is different. Here, too, a question cannot be asked and a return to unity cannot be completed. Yet the advantage in such cases (and this is crucial) is that there are several codings: good/bad, as well as true/untrue, property/non-property, superior power/inferior power. The codes, as a result, can be identified by being distinguished from one another instead of our questioning their internal unity. For instance: it is a matter of morality, not of law, and of property, not of power. The separation frees up the combinatrics, enabling an immoral application of the law, or an illegal acquisition of property, or an unwelcome (“welcome/unwelcome”!) transfer of property into power. Such internal problems in the space for combining the codings will attract attention and communication and will make us forget that this is precisely how the paradox of the sameness of difference becomes invisible. It is particularly true in modern societies that are no longer ordered hierarchically (in strata). By contrast, hierarchical societies (and hence aristocratic ones) at their height had to rely on maintaining a concurrence of all positive values, agreeing on the “good life” or (ultimately) on God. Such was the culminating point of goodness (diligence, virtus), of having goods, power, and the competence to evaluate right and wrong (iurisdictio). Under these presuppositions, the doctrine of transcendentals could declare “the one, the true, and the good” to be all the same thing. Any distinction between them could be outsourced to the idea of nature, where there were successful and failed natures. Yet in a functionally differentiated society, in which systematic differentiation is based on a variety of codings, this form of integration has to be relinquished along with the enormous relevance of morality. Typical system codes are thus distinguished from moral coding, avoiding any congruence of positive/negative values with those of morality. Property and law, truth, and even political power have to be available for immoral applications. These fields are limited solely by their semantic apparatuses, which does not exclude but rather opens up the possibility of uninhibited evaluations, even moral ones. Correspondingly, a logic enabling descriptions that are “polycontextural” (Günther) is needed.²¹

In addition to relying on the distinguishing of different codes from each other, there is already an indication that the paradox is resolved in the functional asymmetry of the codes. If it is already the case that only the positive value is capable of operations (= of use, = of function), that value can be maintained as the dominant one. The argument would then be: one is correct to distinguish between right and wrong (since otherwise the courts would not operate), and it is good to distinguish between good and bad (since otherwise everything could be legitimated, even racism). Even in present-day discussions, this is an argument that cannot be taken apart easily (and I speak here on the basis of experience). Actually, the sole alternative is to return to the paradox of the nondifference of the different. That, however, confronts us with an almost compulsive fear of paradox, then leading to the circumstance that the logic of self-reference—meaning the application of the code to the code itself—is not accepted.

If logic wants to handle positive/negative distinctions operatively (meaning as a unity), it too has to revert to a distinction, and the classic one is conjunction/disjunction. No unity is ever self-evident. As Gotthard Günther has shown, there is still a need for structurally rich logics that are not fixed on the material dimension but might also include the social dimension (for Günther, meaning the majority of subjects, you-subjectivity), as well as the temporal dimension (for Günther, particularly that which is historically new).²² Günther refers to the operation he now wishes to introduce as “transjunction.” Its accomplishment is to select positive/negative distinctions. In other words, it is an operation providing a freedom (which is not implied by classic bivalent logic) to accept or reject distinctions. Quite apart from its consequences for logic, the result is that a transition is made from first-order to second-order observation.²³ It is clear that coded systems have to operate (observe) on the assumption of strict bivalence—and even if only because that is the fastest way to establish order. Hence, they cannot do without the tertium non datur. Yet at the same time, logical and social-theoretical reflection shows that coded systems presuppose indifference toward all other codings. As a result, a completely logical description has to take on a third value, one that is able to signify the acceptance of its own code while rejecting all others.²⁴ This code selection may be designated as a self-indication.²⁵ Yet that too would be an operation dependent on distinction, leading to the question of what is on the other side of the distinction. For observers there is no concluding operation, no resting or fixed point of calculations. Inevitably, we are confronted with a paradox in the search for unity, that is, with a demand to continue. For observers are autopoietic systems that can only produce their operations on the assumption that other operations will follow. Their world is therefore an endless world, a “horizon” always holding out the prospect of other possibilities.

The social-theoretical relevance of this (inevitably) abstract analysis derives from the insight that the distinction between accepting and rejecting a code takes place on the level of second-order observation. The issue is not to reject a system (or person) using a certain code. Nor is it the aim to provoke counterrejections, opposites, or conflicts. The logical structure of transjunctional operations has its societal correlate in a principle of tolerance (or, if you will, of irony). That in turn is a prerequisite of functional differentiation, assuming (on the one hand) the operative closing of partial systems and creating (on the other hand) the possibility of displacing problems onto the system of whichever code is most suited to defining and solving them.

In the end, we have to agree that the societal order of the codings and their rejection values dismantles not only the bivalent logic but also the meta-coding of the tradition, specifically the meta-coding by means of the distinction of being/non-being. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology had already introduced a rejection value to this end, which he called Epoché. There and especially in Heidegger’s Being and Time, this led to an extension of temporal structure as a condition of the world’s appearance.²⁶ In operative constructivism, consequently, the logical proposition of identity must be reformulated. It is no longer “A is A” but instead “if A, then A.” Which is to say that identity can only be constituted in operative sequences, functioning as a structural condition enabling a sequence to be formed in the first place, one that is highly selective and self-demarcating (or self-distinguishing). Even this leads us back to a distinction. Each repetition has to identify what is repeated and in the process condense it into what has been adopted from the earlier context. And it has to confirm this identity, thus assuring that it also fits into a different context.²⁷ In this way, the preconditions are created for a further distinction, specifically for generalization and respecification, the evolutionary-theoretical relevance of which has been established chiefly by Talcott Parsons.²⁸

V

For a theory of religion, claims to great precision in the understanding of binary codings only really pay off when religion is using a binary coding. It is thus not something self-evident but has to be demonstrated. Now, it is clear that religion can only be observed and described when it can be distinguished. We also assume that such a distinction can be made by religion itself and that this self-localization alone (on one and not the other side of the identity-granting distinction) can permit religion to become a system. But that does not in any way mean (in fact, it appears unlikely) that religion identifies itself with a distinction—instead of with holy meaning, with an idea, a founder, with God. We could therefore think that it fundamentally contradicts religion’s self-production of meaning if we ask it to identify with a difference and distinguish itself by specifying its own code vis-à-vis the more mundane concerns of this world.

But such doubts evidently assume an inadequate understanding of the propositional world in operative constructivism, differentialist philosophy, the calculus of forms, and in second-order cybernetics. An adequate notion of code is not available and still has to be provided. The mere observation that sophisticated theological thinking (and even Buddhism could be included here) has always dealt with tautologies and paradoxes could encourage a new awareness in this case. For both forms, tautology and paradox, are built upon distinctions that sabotage themselves. The modern “deconstructive” theory of text, which today extends beyond its home field of literary criticism, arrives at the same result.²⁹ If a code of religion could be successfully identified, we might take up its latent suggestions, perhaps finding more than merely the admission that human comprehension is inadequate (which amounts to resolving the paradox/tautology with the help of an identity-stabilizing distinction of human/divine).

A second problem will cause us greater trouble. The differentiation of religion is also a historical process. For a sociologically informed observer, it is further linked to the evolution of the societal system [Gesellschaftssystem]—to the discovery of writing and the transition to more sophisticated forms of societal differentiation. One should definitely not assume that religion makes itself noticeable from the start in the strict form of binary coding. Whenever we talk about the distinction of religion, we have to account for what historically are very distinctive conditions making religious semantics seem plausible. For one, religious definitions (in Mesopotamia, for example)³⁰ are closely linked with the general societal distinction of familiar habitable land (on which the cults can also be sustained) and the surrounding, threatening wilderness. Only when societies become more complex do specifically religious pairs of oppositions appear and, along with them, specifically religious indications of code values with which these can be distinguished from other value pairs (for instance, rich/poor and powerful/powerless). It only becomes reasonable to apply the idea of binary coding once the guiding religious distinctions can be distinguished from others.

As far as the historical semantics of religion are concerned, we cannot assume that there are identical designations. But that alone may not keep us from forming and applying a temporally abstract notion of coding. Because without such a notion or (put differently) without the historicist hypothesis that an epoch can only be described on its own terms, we could define incommensurabilities of historical “discourses,” without once having asked whether connections could be identified between changes in societal structure and changes in historical semantics. We are applying the temporally abstract notion of code (just like a number of other systems-theoretical notions) on the level of second-order observation, and we thus have to respect the separation of levels. One has to grant historical religions rights to what they can see (and formulate) themselves and what eludes them. But that does not force us to do without more abstract analysis, using notions that prove to be reliable (or not reliable) for constructing theoretical complexity in scientific systems. To that extent, we also hold onto an operative constructivism and a theory of operatively closed systems. The strain of conceptualizing these takes place exclusively on the internal side of the form constituting science. It serves exclusively to improve scientific accomplishments.

The thesis of the considerations that follow is that the semantic elaboration of a code specific to religion is linked with the societal differentiation of a function system for religion. I shall avoid every causal determination according to which one of these is the cause of the other. It is more an issue of a relationship of mutual benefit or evolutionary fit. Yet more abstract versions of the code specific to religion can only make sense to the extent that religion differentiates itself with respect to situations, roles, cults, semantic formulas, social-critical distance, and doctrinal systematization. At the same time, what has to be explained here and now is any increase in autonomy or (even more) any critical distance from everyday “this-worldly” events, providing religion with an occasion for thinking that is directed toward distinctions. Differentiation benefits the code, and the code benefits differentiation. Evolution is consequently an evolution of this connection. Not until modern society do we need both an abstract and analytically complex notion of code to make comprehensible what religion means for such a society.

VI

In designating both values of religion’s specific code, the distinction of immanence and transcendence is the most appropriate one. We can also say that a communication is always religious whenever it observes immanence from the standpoint of transcendence. At the same time, immanence stands for the positive value, for the value that provides the capacity to connect with psychic and communicative operations. Transcendence stands for the negative value from which what occurs can be viewed as contingent. In Günther’s terminology, immanence is the code’s designative value and transcendence is its reflective value. It should be noted that no preference is thereby expressed (even if there can clearly be preferential codes). The positive is not in some sense “better” than the negative. In the unity of the code, both values presuppose one other, reciprocally. Events in this world do not receive a religious meaning until they are seen from the perspective of transcendence. But producing meaning is also the specific function of transcendence, and it does not exist in and of itself. It is the ability of every boundary to be crossed in some direction. Still, a boundary is no place to live, and in a place that is always different, one cannot build a “mighty fortress.”^*4,31 We are not disputing that there are religions, especially god-based ones, that judge this matter differently. But judgments about existence are the judgments of first-order observers. And in this case, a second-order observer might maintain, their function is to carry out and conceal the reentry of a code into the code, specifically allowing the difference of immanence and transcendence to be thought and said.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. For now, it is important to clarify the prehistory of the differentiation of a specifically religious coding.

Many older religions are based on a notion of a space that connects transcendence with immanence. What is distant is unattainable, but at the same time something—if one were present—that could be observed as a familiar everyday world. If we could reach the summit of Mt. Olympus (though reverence might keep us from attempting it), we might be able to see the gods dining. Theologians may dispute that the issue here is one of transcendence (in the Jewish or Christian sense). Yet, from an evolutionary perspective, this image is an antecedent figure. It does not permit us to grant distinction to transcendence by giving it a unique (existence) predicate, but the transitions are fluid, leaving it to the religious imagination to bridge the distances that cannot be reached with entirely different objects. From the standpoints of comparative religion and evolutionary theory, we can hardly exclude this case of (mere) spatial transcendence, no matter how much one might concede to evolutionary innovations.

For the Western tradition, it is important to clarify the relationship of coded religion to ontological metaphysics. It is not enough to reconstruct the extent to which religious cosmology operates with basic assumptions of metaphysics. More significant is that both ontology and its logic are built on the distinction of being and nonbeing, and thus on the assumption of a logical bivalence that leaves the remaining problems untouched.³² In its wake, all thinking and all efforts at knowledge conclude with being; conversely, there is no being that cannot be logically grasped. Put differently, we lack a structurally richer logic here that might regard this as a problem. Ontological metaphysics proceeds from a single guiding distinction. It describes the world “monocontexturally” (to borrow Günther’s terminology).

In retrospect, one can thus ask what can (and cannot) be seen if an observer bases himself on ontology and bivalent logic as a primary distinction. Or one might ask what gets lost and remains invisible if one starts with the distinction of being and nonbeing and a correspondingly bivalent logical set of tools. Clearly, an ontological metaphysics can form ideas such as nothingness, infinity, or time. In the process, it may produce a certain overlapping of them in the direction of religion. The problem, however, lies in the exclusionary effect of logical-ontological bivalency or, put differently, in the invisibility of the observer who has accepted this schema “uncritically” and is unable to indicate himself. Here a world, a reality, remains unobserved. Due to its bivalent logic, metaphysics cannot even see (or formulate) that it does not see what it does not see. To that extent, no matter what theology clerics might formulate, the need for religion is dragged into modernity (as it were) on the back of metaphysics.

If we accept this as a problem of a highly developed semantics, there is still the question of how religion inserts its code (and thus itself) into a reality that is assumed and accepted by societal communication. We have to start with the thesis of a reality distinction separating the actual real from an imaginary one, thus constituting a “durable” reality in the world (as shown above).³³ This does not at first occur (and certainly not quickly) in the perfect form of coding, but as a division of the world (construed as close to perception) into a domain that is familiar, well-known, and operationally accessible—and another domain. Without immediately implying a coding, we can refer to this counterworld of reality as “transcendence,” since if it is to be signified, we have to imagine that a boundary is being crossed.

This notion of transcendence presents itself as a standpoint from which to compare very different religious semantics, particularly those of primitive societies. This way, such religions may be taken more seriously as religions than they sometimes are in the quite folkloristic research of the relevant specialties.³⁴ Transcendence is for now the provision of a direction, and it refers to a crossing of boundaries. But from the outset, territorial boundaries are not what are meant (even when places are being “sacralized”) but rather boundaries to the unattainable, boundaries not only outside but also within the society one is starting from. Transcendence, when it is specified, conceals the unfamiliar [das Unheimliche] but is unfamiliar itself and thus capable of destroying, dissolving, and passing through every meaning. That is why we interpret transcendence as a duplication that cannot be formulated (and that is concealed precisely by religion), duplicating what is present, attainable, and familiar into a different realm of meaning.

An operatively inaccessible realm, a second world, does not set any limits on fantasy. One would be able to maintain anything because nothing can be tested—just as people deal with negations in an unrestrained way. Transcending produces an excess of semantic possibilities and a corresponding need for limitations. It is no coincidence that the etymology of religio is based on the notion of “rebinding,” and it is no coincidence that Durkheim, in his idea of sacré, highlights the sanction of a limitation. But to limit what as transcendence is supposed to be kept sacred invariably produces (as does every signifying operation) a new boundary that is capable of being crossed. Which would reveal that transcendence is still not (at all) the transcendence that flows into the limitless.

The pressures this problem generates make it more understandable why early religions take up countermeasures. They establish communicative constraints that in turn are sacralized, having absorbed all reflexivity. It is a mystery how the sacred gets determined. Otherwise, the ancestral bones stored in the tribal house [Männerhaus] as the reference point of all rituals seem to be merely bones and, moreover, bones that have to be restored if they are lost or deteriorate.³⁵ The problem is solved by the only operative mode available to the social system of society: communication, particularly the twofold process of expanding and inhibiting communicative possibilities. The sacred is depicted as a mystery, a prohibition, or an impossibility that communication can define something. And curious questioning (curiositas) is prohibited or discouraged by saying that only trivial results can be achieved, letting one know one is missing what is essential.

Conventionally, the immanence/transcendence distinction is presented in primitive religions as dividing up a world that unquestionably preexists. (Even that limits the possibility of thinking of the code as reality-doubling.) The code is explained by distinguishing between near and far, or heaven and earth.³⁶ The idea of eternal life after death, and thus a sublation of the fateful difference between immanence and transcendence, is often found associated with the religious locus heaven. In more elaborate versions of this idea (surely influenced by the major religions), we also find the idea that transcendence is a boundary crossing, itself without boundaries, even present in immanence.³⁷ People can then say plausibly that God is at the same time close and faraway, present everywhere. In so doing, they can count on the important, easily accessible semantic form of “existing in something”: God is not a definite appearance but he exists in one.

A semantic and institutional reaction to the distinction between a this-worldly and an other-worldly world—a reaction that is typical and prevalent—is our need for interventions either by objects or actions. At the same time, the extensive (likely universal) dissemination of this type of intercession demonstrates that this rather foundational distinction is very ancient and is likely attributable to the genealogy of religions. The distinction itself can only be grasped by marking a boundary. One can be helped, for instance, by dividing up spaces or times—or by artificially making a part of the event unseen. The marking of the boundary itself has an ambivalent status: it belongs as much to one side as the other, and thus to both sides and none. It therefore symbolizes and realizes the unity of the distinction. Thus the marking itself is a sacrum, sacred and terrorinducing at the same time. From the start, the unity of the difference is a problem, even if it is not as such reflected upon but only allows itself to be approached with fear and trembling, or under the protection of certain blessings, or under technical measures such as those that guarantee shamans a favorable return from other-worldly excursions. To an extent, the sacred is concentrated on the boundary representing the unity of the distinction of transcendent and immanent.³⁸ Religion itself definitely does not take place in the world beyond.

Intercessors are necessary if the issue is not to mark the boundary but rather to pass through it, crossing it back and forth. They themselves are incarnations of paradox if we move away from their respective sensitivities and attempt to identify them. In his worldly life, Jesus of Nazareth is a human being (albeit one without sin). As Christ, he is the son of God. As part of the trinity, he is God, thus his own father, just as God the Father is his own son. Here the mysterium sabotages the distinction on which it is based. The differentiation of transcendence (God the Father) and immanence (the Son’s earthly life) presumes that the problem is being explained—and denied—at same time. The renunciation of logic is not an error but the appropriate form of the problem. One might stop with that insight, but one can also attempt a new description of the problem.

Both markings and intercessions serve to permit the unfamiliar world (of transcendence) to appear in the familiar world. Restrictions can really only be institutionalized as forms, as semantic contents that can be signified and operatively connected. At issue is whether this or that object, this or that place, or this or that gesture or action is distinguished as holy in the immanence of the familiar world. If we take the constitutive distinction of religion in its original, concrete form as a distinction of familiar/unfamiliar, then religion only emerges when this form undergoes reentry into the form, when the distinction of familiar/unfamiliar reenters the familiar. This is the only way the religiously unfamiliar (here transcendence) can be distinguished from what is simply unknown or unusual. Nonetheless, this distinction too is the result of an evolution, which can be seen in just how long the unexpected or unusual, the surprising and monstrous, have been the occasion for religious interpretation.

In comparison to the classical sociology of religion that characterized religion by demarcating domains—making simple distinctions such as sacred/profane (Durkheim) or ordinary/extraordinary (Weber)—the figure of the reentry of a distinction offers us a place both to begin a more complex analysis and to have access to the paradox that is always concealed in religion. With respect to the evolution of religion, it still seems evident that in the imaginary realm of religious fantasy, there are no boundaries drawn for the hypertrophy of forms, and there are many impulses for variation.³⁹ Yet what also seems apparent is that resolving the fundamental paradox of reentry demands timely and convincing forms placing limits on what can ultimately be accepted. Put differently, in the this-worldly realm, one has to communicate with plausibility (if not with unquestionable evidence) when referring to the other-worldly realm. In addition, the difference between this- and other-worldly should be prevented from intruding into communication and deconstructing it as a “performative contradiction” (as in the failure of a magical performance).

An elaborate coding of religion assumes a reentry of the distinction into what it is distinguishing.⁴⁰ Only then can a code’s distinction be construed as not limiting us to the option of one or the other side. For both sides can always be found on both sides. Here, the logical (or mathematical) consequence is that an incalculable intransparency is at work, one that can only be resolved by imagination. In the process, it becomes possible for us to participate on the side of immanence in the entirety of the code. On the other hand, it becomes possible for us to imagine that what happens immanently also matters transcendently. It is the only way that communication taking place in immanence can refer to the code. In any event, such a reentry results in structural uncertainty and must therefore depend on supplements (parerga) to guide the selections becoming necessary. In other words, communication has to rely on memory and ends up being ambivalent as far as the future is concerned. One might thus, for instance, regard one’s own life as part of a narrative of sin and redemption, hoping one’s sins may be forgiven, but not knowing for certain whether one’s soul is among the saved.

If the reentry of the form into the form succeeds plausibly, something important has been accomplished: the social stabilization of religion. Its production of meaning is relocated to the primary distinction of its code, thus becoming independent of the coincidental appearance of unusual events, from solar eclipses to epileptic attacks. Religion can then be organized like a machine so that it includes the causes of the operations involved and is thus disconnected from the course the world is taking. This results in models of human behavior that are—not coincidentally—understood as circular. The repetition of rituals in Aztec religion is presented as parallel to the cyclical itinerary of the world and as maintaining it. Religious ceremonies can always be set in motion as necessary.⁴¹ What needs to be done is known and can be repeated. Religion thus can function as a cybernetic feedback mechanism, although with the important distinction that it can make itself independent of triggering by environmental events (drought, plagues, and wars). There is the further distinction that it can also lead to overreaction and maladaptation if it trusts too much in the independent logic of its implementing apparatus.⁴²

Religions are distinguished by the performance of reentry and the description of transcendence defined by it. Without assistance (or at least reassurance) by transcendent powers, nothing important can be accomplished. That is perhaps the most significant or at least oldest version of religion. Religion is said to motivate magical procedures—not in the sense (one might think) of needing additional empirical causes but rather inasmuch as possible resistances on the other side of the “Great Boundary” have to be eliminated. Magic relies on the simple distinction between visible and invisible things in the same world. It expresses the richness of nature, which extends beyond the visible. It is neither a meta-theory, then, nor a mode of second-order observation, with all the logical problems that would pose. Only the distinction itself, which divides the world into visible/invisible, remains unexplained. The effectual relation remains unknown—which is precisely why it is plausible. It permits no monitoring of errors, nor any cognitive development through learning. Remaining unknown contributes to respect for the holy and also confers authority on those who can credibly cite experience of it. To the extent that rituals are agreed upon, myths associated with them are gathered and recount why people do things they do. In retrospect, this may be taken for a form of naïveté. But naïveté is not the same as error. And there has never been a radical change, not even when a theology arose that by concealing the paradox lost its innocence, thus making the entire world sinful and in need of redemption.

Max Weber, as is well known, formulated the matter with his customary clarity: “The most elementary forms of behavior motivated by religious or magical factors are oriented to this world.”⁴³ It is sensible to formulate it this way if one only needs to ward off theological prejudices and be able to describe early eras as also religiously motivated. In Weber’s next paragraph, however, there is already a correction that introduces a difference.⁴⁴ For not even the everyday world of practical use, of interests, resistances, and dangers could really be experienced in this manner. Weber’s characterization of “this-worldly” might also remain a modern reconstruction if the earliest religions had not already peered across the boundary. In his attempt better to understand Weber’s understanding of religion, Hartmann Tyrell highlights the same exact distinction: “Social action can thus be called religious if there is also a layer of meaning in the orientations of the acting person(s) that refers to the ‘extra-empirical,’ to a meaningful other world—and can be called that if this action in some sense (symbolically at first) ‘accounts for’ the extra-empirical as it is occurring.”⁴⁵ Only with this distinction is a reality constituted that needs expanding, and that is precisely where its religious form is found. But in the beginning, this naturally does not mean that the purposes of action also have to be directed toward the other-worldly, having to be redemptive purposes. It only means that the world can be experienced as religiously arranged.

In the early versions of religion, other-worldly powers are encountered as arbitrary, moody, vulnerable actors (but in that way also able to be influenced or appeased). They symbolize the way human life is exposed to an environment with uncontrollable effects, and they result from externalizing the problem of an endangered society. One cannot yet speak of a clear, well-formulated distinction of this-worldly and other-worldly. If that distinction is made available in the form of a fundamental exclusion, it is what makes it possible to discipline the world of the gods, mainly by copying onto it socially familiar structures such as family formation, political control, and writing. This development can primarily be seen in the foundations of the archaic-primitive Mesopotamian religion.⁴⁶ Even though the gods have writing and use it to determine fate each and every year, there are not yet “holy scriptures” and therefore no abstracting of the reentry that depends on them. Instead, relations to the divine world are regulated by a complex system of rules for divination. Only the later major religions use writing developed in the context of divination in order to fix sacred meaning in sacred form, thus assigning it to a primarily oral type of transmission.

For the moment, these suggestions may suffice to explain our thesis. Religion is characterized from its beginnings (what came before it would not yet be seen as “religion”) by a distinction that identifies it and becomes tangible in the distinction’s reentry into what is distinguished. The care taken in forming this idea is worth the time spent. Once the reentry takes place, an operation is carried out that (in and of itself) is paradoxical, a paradox that has to be made invisible. The ciphers [Chiffrierungen] used in these operations then appear as religion—and appear in all the major religions with the additional knowledge that they themselves are not the essence of what is intended.

We can additionally see that what is being copied into itself is a distinction and remains one. Simplifications take place time and again—and are combated as idolatry.⁴⁷ But we would misunderstand the specifics of ancient Egyptian piety, according to which the statues were gods, if we did not see that an incarnated difference was being worshipped. In addition, the theology of St. Augustine does not maintain that God is “the order” [Ordnung] and “the good,” but that he has to accept the opposite as some kind of fatality in his creation; it maintains that he is specifically interested in the distinction.⁴⁸ It is never simply a matter of a (possibly conventional) sign of alterity. Even after the notion of the symbolic is available, it means more than just a sign. The issue is always the real presence of the difference—just as the size and ornamentation of a doorway indicate one is crossing the threshold into another room.

We can only make observations in the realm of the familiar, in a realm that (in contrast to transcendence) can be called immanence. Only here can something be signified, highlighted and—in distinction to everything else—be retained for additional operations. That also means that all the distinctions that can ever be made are immanent distinctions—even those of being and nonbeing, of sacred and profane, of divine and human. These achieve reality only by being communicated. That which all indications and distinctions are distinguished from is left behind as unmarked space. And in unmarked space, world and observer (as the blind spot of his observations) remain behind—unobservable because they are indistinguishable, as already explained.⁴⁹

Religion can be seen as the attempt not simply to accept this inevitability. That is why the world that is observable through distinctions is duplicated and ultimately brought into the strict form of a code whose guiding difference is immanence/transcendence. Coding is nothing but a rewriting of the reality distinction into another form that is more strictly linked and more easily distinguished. It is then adapted to a new kind of experience of the world, making it more compatible with higher contingency. On the one hand, identities are also destabilized in this process. It is now no longer possible, at least in a more demanding form of religious observation, to sort things or events out as sacred/profane. Because now everything can be described from the standpoint of transcendence or immanence. And if we want to know how to classify things and events, that depends on the observer we have to observe. Religions are now required to provide criteria, rules, and programs. On the other hand, religion no longer gains a foothold by recognizing things or events, but by making a distinction that is self-contained and that interprets the world. It is thus able to cope with greater “worldly” uncertainties.

What is probably the most distinct caesura in this development is to be found in the religion of the Hebrews, specifically in the form of a resolute refusal to return the other-worldly to the this-worldly. Despite all the inconsistencies of the priestly religion that emerges, the god of the Hebrews has no name.⁵⁰ He eludes being known and dealt with by imagining himself as the future that he “will be.”^*5 He places himself in the world as a text. That text, which serves as a plan for constructing the world, is revealed to be a two-track tradition, a written specification for oral transmissions of interpretation that are open to the future. This text replaces all other forms of immanent reentry, especially following the destruction of the Second Temple [in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE]. And the purpose of Talmudic tradition is to preserve the never-ending possibility of interpretation as controversy. In cases where decisions become necessary (mainly questions of law), there is a majority principle that cannot be sidetracked by interventions from the other world.⁵¹ In a strict sense, the reentry of the distinction into itself can thus be shifted onto the other side, onto transcendence. A transcendent God is presented as an observer of the world, as a unity of observer and observation. All the sacred things of this world are, in comparison, merely a reflection.

A fully developed coding of religion does not emerge until then, a coding in which both sides of the form reappear (on both sides). The question is no longer whether to divide the world up into realms of visible/invisible, familiar/unfamiliar, close/distant, only assuming that one side of the distinction is not the other. Instead, both values of the code perform a reciprocal production of meaning, thus concluding the religious signification against other codings. Sociologically, this process could be associated with the emergence of cultural elites outside (ascriptively given) social units of families or kin.⁵² At the same time, religion becomes instituted both specifically and universally. In its specificity, it is based on the accentuated distinction between transcendent and mundane. In the process, a peculiarity emerges that distinguishes religious coding from other codings. The negative value of transcendence is posited as the basis and source of the coding itself. Transcendence, in producing its code, becomes the opposite of every other distinction. It has to be presumed as devoid of qualities. Even the distinction between distinction and nondistinction is alien to it, as noted by Nicholas of Cusa [1401–1464].⁵³ In comparison to other codings, this changes the way explanations are formed. In the case of religion, explanations are realized by including (not excluding) the opposite value—not as truth is realized by excluding untruth but by revaluing all distinctions in a transcendent production of meaning. But that which is set up as transcendence has to be capable of being discriminated, if only as indicating the right path to redemption. That too requires a reentry operation so that it can at least be observed.

There is no other coding that is concentrated this way. Religion’s peculiarity consists in the radicality of distinguishing being directed against distinctions. It is the only way we can understand what is essential: all observing (all distinguishing, experiencing, acting, communicating) is always operating from the standpoint of unobservability, and that is why every return to that standpoint disavows its own specification. As a result, the appearance of religion in history is unavoidably linked to implementing a reentry, even if we can only see at the end that this was how it began.

VII

In religiously inspired communication, concrete objects, events, and actions that implement a religious reentry are not distinguished by this function or described as formally paradoxical. Such forms of observation freeing up contingency were not yet available in the earliest history of society. Instead, they appear somewhat ambivalently—using the threatening/helpful distinction in particular. It is a matter of fine-tunings, which in turn are able to be conditioned. As rituals or highly distinctive objects, they acquire a form that is unmistakable and invariant. We can know that crossing the internal boundary of the form (“either this or the other side”) ought to be avoided by the strictness with which this invariance has to be observed (and is sensitive to mistakes). Crossing is not an operation that is possible; it congeals (one might say) into the identity of a sacred object. For now, one is saved from having to name the immanent/transcendent difference that is operating as a code. And in one respect, that will never change: a distinction can’t be worshipped.

For now, nothing prevents us from being loyal to form, from repeating the same thing in endless variations. Contents (objects, buildings, rituals) may change, yet the formal typology of transferring ambivalence into identity remains the same. Or that is at least possible. But what can also happen is that questions are asked about the world, about the unity of the distinction that is determined to be identical in the sacred. Major religions only arise when this human tendency to contrive cosmologies prevails. The code appears as a dividing up of the world or also as a temporal dividing of the world making it possible to narrate a story and thus to have transcendence as an origin or meaning of dividing things up into before and after. The “dividing up” (and I am explicitly and deliberately selecting this term for the idea) takes place ontologically, which means in the form of statements about “what exists.” It thus occurs in distinction to what does not exist. But this other side of the form of existence fades as long as we are unprepared to doubt the way the world appears to us. And if that happens, then this nothingness that negates the dividing up is transcendence that generates the dividing up of the world (into social classes, for example)—or tolerates it in order to differentiate itself from it.

In the context under discussion, we are not concerned with the history of religion or a theory of its morphogenesis or evolution, but only the phenomenology (if we can call it that) of religion’s code. Problems of how to assign things emerge to the extent that the distinction between immanence and transcendence becomes visible as the form of religion. The same goes for every code. For its binary structure does not tell us which value—positive or negative—applies in an individual case. The meaning of coding, in fact, specifically consists in keeping this decision open. For the necessary instructions, each code thus requires a code-specific “supplement.”⁵⁴ In the ancient world, there were already formulations for these, such as kanōn, kritērion, regula. Each term, stressing its own correctness, presumes reference to a binary structure.⁵⁵ In such a framework, I shall be speaking of programs (regulations). A mutually exclusive coding of right and wrong can be introduced only when there are legal norms with corresponding institutions (courts) for deciding in individual cases what is what is right and wrong (and not insisting on what is right, as in the case of Orestes or Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas). A teacher can give out good or bad grades only when there is an educational canon in which the requirements are outlined. The code of truth needs theories and methods. The property code, when it has to be translated into financial terms, needs rules of economic calculation (budgets and balances).⁵⁶ So if this is generally true, one should not expect anything different with the code of religion.

Yet here as well there is a problem of historical relativity, which cannot be ignored, but at this point cannot be elaborated. In older societies that have not yet completely adapted to functional differentiation, the programmatic level is used to integrate the more abstract extravagance of binary coding back into society. One finds plausibilities reintroduced that develop from the limitations imposed by the structure of society and, most of all, by its hierarchical (stratified) order. The codes themselves are interpreted hierarchically, provided with a natural and normative weighting of their good side. In the legal system, for instance, this happens by way of natural law. There the idea of nature not only refers to normative evidence but also to the fact that humans, as the result of their nature (= birth), belong to different strata. Natural law, even though it deals with purposes, could thus be viewed as participating in what medieval theologians called eternal law [lex aeterna].⁵⁷ Science has to come to terms with common sense and knowledge handed down. If science tries to break out of this frame, it appears in unscientific form: as paradox. The economy has to respect what in early modernity was still indicated as “domestic necessity,” that which was necessary for maintaining the corporative distinction of “houses.”⁵⁸ These constraints are only suspended in our functionally differentiated modern society. Function systems take over sole responsibility for their function and for the risks associated with abstract coding. Programs are released from the demands of social integration and specifically tailored to each of their codes. Law becomes positive law (which of course does not rule out making reference to moral criteria, practices, technical standards, etc.). Scientific theories are now exclusively scientific theories (which does not exclude them from dealing with theology, etc.). Programs compensate for the exclusion of third values by reincluding what was excluded, even if only on the level of those supplements, which assumes an accepted (not rejected) code. The only issue is how to assign the system’s operations to the values of this code correctly.

Religion looks for and finds a possible solution for the evolutionary improbability of its coding by involving itself in an alliance with morality, albeit a precarious one. This alliance may have been facilitated by the fact that morality itself—especially in making negative judgments—was anchored in a cosmology, thus making judgments with unrestrained aversion. Evil (or the evil person) is found near what is ruined, impure, and (either intentionally or unintentionally) harmful—on the dark side of the world, against whose inexplicable power we try to protect ourselves.⁵⁹ The good side of morality then ties in with the currently accepted societal conventions. Morality starts to fall back on itself, so to speak, only with the decline of magical ideas in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe.⁶⁰ As a consequence, religion itself is finally subordinated to moral judgment and called on to be tolerant and free of fanaticism.

Yet this is only one line of development, and one that triumphs rather late. For a long time, religion itself had trouble linking its code of transcendence with the code of morality. This may have to do with the emergence of significant major religions in the wake of social renewal movements. But even overlooking that history, every religion that makes arguments using transcendence has to ask what the religious meaning is of the (earthly) distinction between good and bad behavior—especially given that happiness and suffering do not appear to be distributed according to moral criteria.

In addition, morality has a tendency to direct our attention toward sin. For what is bad is easier to specify than what is good. Rhetoric from the pulpit can more readily articulate what is sinful than spell out what is good. A manual of confession will assemble a list of sins to be avoided. A list of good deeds will invariably have gaps, under circumstances leaving out those are the most important. An index of what is good can provide a pretext for not mentioning something that is crucial here and now. Life offers more chances to be good than can be recited in the form of a list, while the registry of what is bad can be closed but expanded if necessary.

The major religions understand transcendence as an option for the good side of human behavior. Those still “wild” religions of tribal societies already had to come to terms with societally accepted norms. They did not, for instance, explain norm violations as having been influenced by magic (which would have meant displacing the attribution of guilt), but accepted as guilty those who were evidently guilty. In the major religions, especially the monotheistic ones, something different is found: a kind of religious self-disciplining in the sense of moral values. The programs used to explain which actions imply transcendence (and which do not) are themselves formulated using the moral coding of “good” and “bad.” The transcendent side of the code then takes on personal features so that we can understand that God (or the dominant god in the divine realm) wants what is good.⁶¹ That does not have to lead to the religious acceptance of dominant moral notions, as evidenced by the prophets and their criticisms. But when moral ideas are being criticized, it is in accordance with a different morality that can be confirmed religiously. It might be the morality of covenantal loyalty to God or that of submission to a divine will, which manifests itself in authentic communication and may violate the prevailing familial and clan-oriented morality (such as Abraham’s binding of Isaac, in clear contrast to Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia). Or it is a morality based on the law dictated by God or even a morality of love that respects the freedom of it being accepted or rejected. In tribal religions that receive stimuli from monotheistic major religions but mix them syncretically, the relationship of the high god to morality is for all these reasons still an ambivalent one. This relationship also gets redirected to the rules of dealing with intermediary religious powers or appearances that themselves can be influenced or dissuaded from negative intentions.⁶² But there are also other instances where the major religions play moral politics as their institutions attempt to root out tribal and therefore particularistic moral patterns so as to replace them with universalistic ones that can be represented as expressing the divine will. The most impressive example can be found in the Middle Ages, when the politics of morality were facilitated not only by the sacrament of penance (or “confession”) and the Church’s well-developed legal standing but also by religious orders (such as the Franciscans) that preached directly to the people. The semantic innovations made by this program constituted an individualistic concept of morality directed at internal attitudes or internal agreement with one’s own actions.⁶³ Such an idea is typical evidence that individualization was being used to undermine outmoded social classifications.

On its own, Christian theology might have recognized that morality, which is to say the distinction between good and evil, was something devilish. After all, human beings were not supposed to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. And blasphemy takes its revenge, inasmuch as each time one applies moral notions, one is brought back to the question of which interests and motives are being masked by morality. There is the well-known discussion of whether people would also behave morally “in the dark,” or if they only act justly to maintain a good reputation. Alternatively, if theologians had to preach in a societal context permeated by morality, they could hardly avoid taking a position or calling for goodness in the name of God. Any attempt to refrain from judgment would be counterproductive. In that way, even theology becomes a victim of the Fall of Man, and it might comfort itself with the idea that the whole thing is ultimately staged by God, that the serpent was only a figure sent ahead to conceal the ambivalence of morality.

Accordingly, there are symptomatic autonomies in the relationship of religion to morality. These can be read as evidence that a code is being maintained whose values do not readily converge with the “good/bad” coding of conventional morality. First, there is the aforementioned possibility of critique. It has a social substratum in the differentiation of roles and systems (after these have been initiated) between royalty and priesthood, palace and temple. In addition, there is the possibility of prophetic or innovative religious critique within religion, a response to convergences within ruling circles. Second, a final moral valuation is explicitly left open—the paradigmatic figure being Judgment Day—as a sort of transcendental caveat to morality. And lastly, there is the putative problem of theodicy as a mysterious motive of both these distantiations. God apparently permits sin and innocent suffering to exist in the world as evidence that he has achieved self-realization beyond all distinctions. He offers the possibility of producing a reference to transcendence for everything that exists. Or, more concretely, he offers the opportunity to experience everything as a form of his closeness and love, witnessing that he is always accompanying and observing us. Yet that is supplemented by the idea (perhaps difficult to understand in such a light) that he himself opts to do good and not bad.

As an alternative—one repeatedly exposed to moralizing, of course—the Christian religion offers the theme of “sin.” The marking of sin as “original sin” indicates that the issue is not guilt but destiny. Above all, however, sin is a temporal status that ends with death and cannot be continued either in heaven or in hell. It is a temporal status (temporal in the sense of tempus) to the extent that it is inflicted on people as long as they live, while also giving them an opportunity to take the path of redemption. By comparison, the norms of morality take on more the form of an error to be corrected, in particular making it possible to observe and judge others with respect to their moral violations. The problem thus lies in the social dimension, not the temporal one. This very distinction allows sinners to be observed from the standpoint of guilt. They are either praised or censured in their lifetimes, without knowing what the heavenly response will be. Yet moral judgment can in turn be a type of sin, perhaps even one of the worst cases of it (and this is something priests and theologians clearly don’t like to admit).

Theology has had its troubles with this moral paradox. It has turned the reasons for it into divine intentions, in particular allowing freedom to be the culminating point of creation.⁶⁴ But it is not difficult to return to the other paradox: that the distinction between good and bad should itself be good and not bad.⁶⁵ Seen by an external second-order observer, this paradox can be alternatively resolved by substituting other distinctions in its place. Distinguishing between coding and programming is helpful here. The only reason there is a problem is because religion makes use of morality to assign to society those programs that are essential for interpreting the distinction between immanence and transcendence. Seen this way, religion’s deployment of the code of morality (for its part, just a binary code fraught with paradox) is only an intermediate stage by which religion looks for a connection to societally acceptable distinctions. In a society where the code of morality is still uniformly practiced—but where programs of morality, their principles, rules, or solutions to value conflicts, can no longer achieve consensus—morality or religious ethics could therefore be seen as indispensable, even when their anchoring in society comes at the price of religious pluralism. But it might also be the case that the opposite, a move away from moral commitments, would be found more appropriate.

However, as a type of religiously grounded program, morality can fail or at least not be shielded from the (always possible) question of what justifies it and what its (often disastrous) consequences are. If so, what other possible programming of religious coding could there possibly be? Or is this failure only an example of how religion’s form of meaning defeats any determination of principles and criteria, thus allowing the distinction between coding and programming to fail? Another argument for this could be that other function systems are oriented toward continuous change in their programs (their theories, methods, educational criteria, legal regulations, budgets, etc.). Yet religion demands a type of faith that may be diversified as a pluralistic offering of different religions but that nonetheless cannot be put in the form of “today we’ll do one thing, tomorrow another.”

Such reservations do not mean one has to give up the idea of coding along with the idea of programming. Instead, we ought to ask about other possibilities for enriching the initially empty binary coding with content, thereby providing it with informational value in concrete situations. Here we might consider the possibility that schemas are selected for religious memory that then make it possible to distinguish themes and symbolic contents of communication—for instance, in understanding destiny as mercy.

VIII

It would surely be wrong to consider binary code simply as an effective cause or an independent variable for explaining the development of religion. As I have repeatedly stressed, evolutionary changes in the societal system (a topic needing separate study) are what determine which semantic provision of the code will enable religious communication to be recognized as such.⁶⁶ The dissolving of the coding relation between religion and ethics, for example, presupposes a functioning legal system. (Just as one might assume the opposite: that a renewed merger of religion and morality would mean trouble for a state founded on the rule of law.) In Europe, this medieval-era presupposition was fulfilled both in the domain of civil law and that of common law. It was extended by the “administrative law” originating in seventeenth-century territorial entities and could be used for assuring religious tolerance. By reflecting on societal structure this way, however, we still have not agreed how the code of religion itself might survive if detached from morality.

Giving up the productive difference of a specific code seems to be out of the question. In their closedness (“distinction is perfect continence”) as well as their openness toward further determinations (supplements, programs), binary codes are an incentive for morphogenetic processes, which can then be connected. Using a metaphor introduced by Michel Serres, one might speak of “parasitically connected developments.”⁶⁷ The generating of code-dependent programs dealt with in the previous section is but one example of these. In addition, we ought to consider what kind of decision burdens can be triggered by coding. There are questions searching for an answer (but also answers searching for their question) whenever binary coding becomes visible in the background of dogmatics. There are not only guidelines and texts for clarifying what can be said but also roles and addresses for competently interpreting or simply announcing religious inspiration.

Seen formally, the same problem is found in the code’s bivalency, which provides for the exclusion of third values. But the issue here is an artificial (albeit functional) abstraction that does not suffice for societal communication. The code performs an extreme reduction of complexity with the sole function of enabling a more highly complex order to be constructed. Precisely on that account, it serves as an evolutionary “attractor,” attracting parasites that are ready to submit to the code’s demands and that do not attach themselves as third, fourth, and fifth values, but make use of a need for conditionings—regardless of opportunity or interest. In other words, these make use of the openness of the code’s closedness, the need for additional determinations of meaning.

Doing so calls for decisions that can in turn attract parasites. The situation of decisions results from the distinction prestabilized by the code. But the decision itself is not a part of the alternative that has to be decided. If one is deciding whether a certain action corresponds to God’s will, leads to salvation, or angers the ancestors, then the decision cannot apply itself as an additional variant to choose from. It remains a parasite—and now in the precise sense of an embedded, excluded third possibility. The question itself is structured for a decision, but the answer cannot simply consist in the self-signifying of the decision, in the decision saying: “I am deciding here for myself.” The decision is not allowed to concede its paradox.⁶⁸ It must mystify itself, denying having been generated—and this is best done by attributing it to the person deciding. And that puts in motion a process of reinforcing divergences: the person individualizes her decisions, and the decisions individualize the person.

In establishing a binary code (however it is formulated for the present), this inclusion of the excluded third possibility, the assumption that what is absent is present, becomes a permanent problem. Repetitive situations come about, as well as rules that one can fall back on recursively. I referred to them previously as programs. Whenever decisions are being combined, uncertainty is absorbed, so that an earlier decision can be repeated only in the result communicatively transmitted but not in the decision’s concrete situation or the considerations leading up to it.⁶⁹ The classic form of absorbing uncertainty bears the name of “authority.” It allows something to grow—that is to say, complexity. It assumes that we assume it could provide solid reasons for its decisions. But at the same time, it assumes that this assumption does not have to be drawn on (or only in individual cases, and then only demonstratively or symbolically). It operates, in Hegel’s appropriate formulation, “without excluding its opposite.”⁷⁰ In this sense, the medieval technique of quaestiones disputatae is based on the assumption that authority is available for the respondeo. In the history of this form, one can see how the pretense of authority becomes uncertain (starting with William of Ockham), and how the paradox of opinion and counteropinion remains. The Middle Ages were also a time when organizational questions became important, because the absorption of uncertainty now had to be assumed by roles expressly organized for it—whether by Church councils or by the Roman curia in the name of the pope. However, that is when a problem typical of modernity arose: authority takes a risk every time it is utilized (something to which the French monarchy fell victim, for example).

Pierre Bourdieu is evidently thinking of similar derivations when he discusses symbolic violence, semantic detachment (décollage sémantique), and habitus.⁷¹ His starting point, however, is not the form of the coding but the relationship of society to its economy, a relationship that cannot be disclosed. For that reason, Bourdieu does not reflect on the notion of symbolic violence, on how it is actually an autological concept. It applies to itself, only performed in the act of symbolic violence. Yet we shall have to accept this—which is why a more abstract version of the starting problem is recommended.

In any case, it has to be accepted on faith that a staging of symptoms is created by the parasitism of the code or in semantic detachment. The trace back to the paradox has to be erased (allowing us to open up the trace of that trace’s erasure).⁷² One can play that game and make do with the distinctions it permits, without seeing that these distinctions make a difference only because the game itself can be distinguished. The distinctions in the game represent the distinction of the game, which in turn can be expanded if reports are allowed to be made about paradox, mystery, the inscrutable will of God, or (directly) of the metaphor of the game.⁷³ One only has to know when such reports are appropriate, as in explaining death or even its circumstances—but not when the rope breaks with which the coffin is lowered into the grave.

In such cases, however, professional assistance is indispensable for each practitioner of religion. At least the layperson has to be informed by an expert when searching for the right path. Otherwise, he might make a mistake, “as if a man should think to find a way to Heaven as to London, by the greater track.”⁷⁴

IX

If we assume that the immanent/transcendent distinction functions as a binary code in religion, and that it lets us perceive what can (and cannot) be adapted as religious communication, we are struck by a significant discrepancy—perhaps corrupt, misguided, in any case secularized—namely, Kant’s transcendental philosophy. In asking what the conditions are of the possibility of experience and in intending to avoid a logical circle in his answer (by not explaining experience in experiential terms), Kant then distinguishes between empirical and transcendental in relation to the operations of consciousness. In semi-ontological terms, a domain of causality can be distinguished from one of freedom. In that domain of freedom, there are sui generis facticities that are self-reflexively accessible to consciousness. In appealing to such facts, Kant attempts to explain conditions of the possibility of perception, of practical action, and of aesthetic judgment without having to resort to empirical contingencies.

Whether or to what extent his attempt succeeded is not the issue here. But it is striking that his undertaking is formulated in the same discourse of ontological metaphysics that he aims to break open. At least on the surface of things, it is not clear that we are talking about a secularization of the code of religion (and that is because for Kant, religion is about matters of faith and not about a primary distinction). However, the parallelism is striking if one defines religion not by the specifics of faith but by its code, the distinction by which it makes the world observable to itself. The terminological proximity of transcendent/transcendental may not be a coincidence but rather evidence that the problem has been intentionally displaced—intentionally, perhaps, so that observers (like us) could understand it as secularization.

If one adopts this point of view, then some of what manifests itself subsequently is unsurprising. Most of all, there is the embarrassing tendency toward deifying the subject in the era around 1800. Or, looking past Kant and Fichte, one can see the Romantics searching for a new mythology that operates at a distance from reality, represented in part as irony and in part as reflection. The important thing now is written communication, specifically in the medium of print. It allows the problem to be concealed in inadequate formulations, letting us know that the Romantics cannot mean what they say and yet do not have to answer questions about it. That is why they put such a high value on “fragments.” Their movement finds its provisional conclusion, its self-determined end, in Hegel’s philosophy of the spirit. Or, more precisely, it formulates paradox as an “absolute spirit” that sublates all distinctions in itself—excluding only exclusion.

What this philosophy shares with religion and art is the plan of dismantling the world into reality and something besides it (just as later in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus there is a language for describing the world and a language in which people can only be silent). This is a structure that might interest philosophers and logicians, or even mathematicians such as George Spencer-Brown.⁷⁵ A worldly discipline such as sociology is purportedly interested only in realities. But another displacement takes place if one has regrets about the lack of human beings (as bearers of transcendence) in sociological theories.⁷⁶ At the end of the secularization chain, there are supposedly deficits in theory, and the history of semantic deteriorations rules out seeing religion as utterly deficient in this point. Religion is clearly a different system, one that is not supposed intervene in academic debates. But if that is assumed, then we need to monitor its form within the system of science and thus be able to reject the distinction by which religion can be recognized as religion when necessary.

Man [der Mensch], having been transformed magically into a subject, is a particularly important object for social theorists. But why is that? Merely because we ourselves are the subjects? Or it is because man occupies the position of transcendence from which everything real can be described and explained? And if that is so, how can people in turn be perceived as real? Efforts to resolve this transcendental riddle have taken various paths—from a simple deconstruction of man (in the singular) to a language-analytical philosophy conditioned on linguistics, to a discourse theory that renders man anonymous (reducing him to a process-regulated use of reason), all the way to a theory of the observer as an unseen parasite of his observations. Yet one could, in parallel fashion, make sociology do something quite different. Instead of (or in addition to) deconstructing man by allowing religion—and only religion—to make original observations by means of immanent/transcendent coding, sociology could attempt to reconstruct a religion. One could thus avoid following a simply constructed asymmetry (such as Kant’s): the thesis that the conditions of experience might lie in experience itself. One could make sense of the original paradox concealed by this distinction and see the miracles of imagination and creativity that religious communication can perform when attempting to resolve its paradox.

X

Let us now return to the question of just how the positions of the code of religion, the positions of transcendence and immanence, can be occupied. The obvious, most common answer is that the position of transcendence is reserved for God. It is the answer of the major religions to the extent that they allow at all for one God. The other side is occupied by man with all his inadequacies. It is characterized by sin, by the freedom to do evil, by a lack of insight. The difference can be bridged by relations of observation, which will be analyzed more carefully in a later chapter. No matter how inadequate or susceptible to sin he is, man is able to observe how God is observing him.

This schema of occupying positions comes with considerable subsequent costs that cannot be ignored when looking back on the tradition (if one takes the concept of code as a basis). This assignment of positions is burdened with the paradox of the moral code and the problem that God’s observational criteria, which man is supposed to follow, cannot be perceived. The (now) classic theme of theodicy strains itself to reflect on this problem but does not go beyond posing it. In addition, God cannot be thought of as transcending every distinction if he is assigned to one and not the other side within the distinction (even if it is the code of religion). But otherwise transcendence would become the value that includes immanence (as always had to be accepted if transcendence was understood as crossing every boundary, including its own). However, transcendence as the single value of the code cancels out the code in itself, and that is a form of mastering paradoxes also found when one hears that it is good to distinguish between bad and good. The code is operationalized through a reentry of form into form, of the distinction into itself.

The old notion still sustained by transcendental philosophy had been that what was immanently experienced could be explained from the standpoint of transcendence. God is said to have created the world, which would thereby correspond to his will. Putting it differently, the transcendental subject is said to accomplish the syntheses necessary for ordering the world he experiences. The reference to transcendence was able to explain things—and reassure us. By contrast, a systems-theoretical analysis makes us see how the world overwhelms consciousness and is (in that sense) transcendent. Thus understood, the reference to transcendence is not reassuring but disturbing. The recourse to elements of tradition, such as a need for redemption or for doubts in faith, can confirm precisely the inverse of this characterization. It clearly does not make much sense to resolve this interpretive conflict by wanting to restrict religion to one of the two viewpoints. Instead, the theory of binary coding encourages a new description of all the elements of tradition. If such a central system-defining, binary-coded distinction exists, the religious system is confronted by a question that cannot be answered: the question of the unity of the distinction. By committing to this (and no other) distinction, the system produces a corresponding unmarked space. And an external observer may still be able to see how a reentry of the distinction into what it distinguishes is clearly capable of producing a diversity of historical semantics of unstable plausibility and “believability.” Yet being able to observe this would only be possible in the form of yet another resolution of a paradox. If we see transcendence as a justification, we wind up in an infinite regress when asking what justifies the justification. If we see transcendence as a notion contrary to the operative closedness of systems operating with meaning, it remains equally open what might correspond as a reality to this projection.

Sociology will not be able and will not want to answer these questions. Precisely as an empirical science and precisely in difficult questions of this sort, it relies on society to create the corresponding facts. In this instance, it relies on religion to decide on forms in which to communicate belief propositions. Nonetheless, sociology can present theoretically prepared questions to the reflective authority of the religious system, that is, to theology. It first produces an analysis of codings (which might be pursued with logic and mathematics more extensively than has been done here). Meaningful theological options are thus either restricted or otherwise burdened by having to relinquish their intelligibility. Moreover, studies of semantics and the social structure would be able to validate that an individual finds himself in a radically different situation in modern society than in the societies in which the major religions were developed.⁷⁷ The functional differentiation of modern society has left the regulation of societal inclusion to the function systems, thereby relinquishing inclusion that was closely based on stratification and morality. Religion responds here by intensifying our expectations of being convinced, while exempting us from participation. The individual finds himself needing an identity based on a self that has become obscure to itself. He might apply social resonance, love, or career in establishing his identity, but (each time) it will remain a construct grounded in uncertainty. Is it not closer to the truth to say that the individual is transcendent for himself? And don’t we say this in the more Romantic sense of an ironic (because it is reflective) relationship to ourselves, instead of ultimately aiming to assure ourselves of some transcendental a prioris?

It is regarded as wisdom to claim that an individual cannot answer the question “Who am I?” Traditionally, this was a sign of weakness in his immanent existence—his orientation toward self-interest, his lack of insight, his sinfulness. This qualification was dictated by its counterpart of a self-completed transcendence. A different understanding would dictate that the individual himself is transcendence,⁷⁸ and he must then rely on committing himself to a continually unstable self-determination. We could understand that the individual experiences in himself the paradox of the unity of a distinction between immanence and transcendence. He may then tend to resolve it by means of externalization or reality-doubling, or by accepting nirvana or the unmediated existence of God. In the process, one loses the possibility of accepting faith based on authority. And one might even say that guilt and sorrow, exclusion and failures of all kinds, make this possibility more plausible than all the confirmations society can offer. Yet then, with or without God, religion would provide the possibility of communicating the unity of immanence and transcendence, a communication confirming for the individual that he might find himself in everything that happens.

In a society that discovers and accepts “subjective” individualism, a fundamental revolutionizing of religion’s code appears to be necessary; it is registered on a semantic level as an insurrection (as nihilism, etc.). It is not that the code values of immanence/transcendence have been abandoned and that religion can then no longer be recognized. Rather, the occupying of these values, their connections to the world, becomes inverted. Transcendence is now no longer something far off (to which we can ultimately be indifferent), no longer “up in heaven.”⁷⁹ It is now to be found in the inscrutability of one’s own self, of the “I.” This is a problem for Christian dogmatics, with its notion of a personal God. It may thus explain why Buddhism is so attractive at present, for it teaches that everything depends on our casting off daily habits of making distinctions and our returning in meditation to that void on which everything in existence, including one’s own self, is ultimately based. (Buddhism thereby refuses the notion of the individual as “subject.”) Despite all the problems involved in the persistence of various dogmatic religious positions, what is far away is a less convincing place for transcendence in our modern world. Instead, uncertainty is increasing among those who attempt to experience what they are or what constitutes their “identity.”⁸⁰

XI

Our analyses up to this point have stuck to the system reference “society” and disregarded processes of consciousness—in crass distinction to all attempts at explaining religion anthropologically or deriving it from the “needs” of individuals. Even the special coding of specifically religious communication is a social structure for which one cannot readily assume that there are psychic equivalencies. There is no doubting this if we stay within the theoretical framework of autopoietic, operatively closed systems. Yet this analysis can be extended if one asks what the conditions are of the possibility of religious experience, thus switching the system reference and proceeding from systems of consciousness and their neurophysiological substructure.

Consciousness undeniably retains its readiness for conditions of stimulus and surprise. It can also be assumed that the brain generates intensities by repeating bio-electrical stimuli in rapid fashion. Yet these are recorded by consciousness not as a sequence but as intensities, and they somehow have to be interpreted—albeit without falling back on neuronal operations.⁸¹ It can then be asked: where do interpretation, naming, and the ability to distinguish affect come from?

The fact that consciousness replaces a sequence through a unity requiring special qualification assures it autopoietic autonomy in relationship to the brain. At the same time, the fact that this can only happen belatedly (it often, of course, lasts just fractions of a second, such as the famous moment of shock in traffic) tells us that consciousness can only operate belatedly, exposed as it is to “eigenstates” [cf. eigenvalues in chapter 1] that have already occurred and now have to be observed. The same is true when consciousness has learned to count on unexpected irritations, such as being frightened in the dark or approaching strangers with caution. In all such instances, there is a basis or receptivity for assistance in producing meaning, something able to take on very different forms depending on what one might call a “life-world.” Typically (especially in the history of society), this requires actualizations in cultic forms that constrain the perceptions of their participants.

In any case, the basis of perception for religious experience is rather amorphous and unspecified, even with respect to religion. To be able to observe its own experiences as religious, consciousness is dependent on externalizations. It has to activate its own perceptions or be able to remember how to define eigenstates by means of other-reference. Here myths can be of service, those listened to when they are narrated (assuming the stories are well known). As narrators and as listeners, our bodies and consciousnesses are part of a complete orchestral staging, so to speak, where our consciousness finds itself involved “rhapsodically.”⁸² Similar functions are fulfilled by specially prepared objects, places, times, and stagings. These can be marked as holy and, when myths are being narrated, they can enter into a relationship of mutual reinforcement—while also bridging over the distinctions between various media of perception.⁸³ When such stagings are ritualized, semantic contents are condensed, thereby helping consciousness through perception—but not thinking (!)—to give form to an internal indeterminacy.

These very general remarks still leave open what it is that leads the corresponding experiences to be associated with religion. My thesis is that this association cannot be achieved through a certain regulation of language but only through the binary coding of religion in the schema of immanence and transcendence. On the one hand, this schema has room for the everyday, in which perception recognizes something familiar. On the other, it has meaning for what is unfamiliar within the familiar. It can mark a boundary, thereby indicating that something else is important. Consciousness may find itself fascinated by what is sacred, by what is terror- and awe-inspiring—and stop thinking about anything else. But that is only possible when social communication is reproducing the distinction as a distinction.

We are therefore able to observe that the religious system’s coding at the same time serves to couple religion and consciousness structurally. Since each domain carries out very different operations, it does not matter whether consciousness is really experiencing such things in a state of shock or whether it does so in prayer and devotion, or whether it is just pretending. This applies precisely to persons such as preachers, who direct and motivate such involvement. Communication protects itself—if necessary by having a strict form—against the all too many irritations of consciousness. Yet it is exactly the condition for consciousness being able to support itself in externalizations and not having to constantly worry (or suspect) that it is a self-constructed reality, something that only exists if we believe in it. It may thus be fatal if theology teaches us that religion is a question of faith and attempts from that position to convince us.

Notes

*1 For Luhmann, “digitalization” designates a binary system, in contrast to an analog system.—Trans.

*2 I.e., “excluding the third possibility.”—Trans.

*3 Refers to a renowned medieval Italian jurist.—Trans.

*4 Luhmann is referring directly to Martin Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress” (“Ein feste Burg”).—Trans.

*5 Luhmann is evidently referring here to God’s initial self-designation in Exodus 3:14.—Trans.