To “philosophize in Christ” is one of those injunctions of which philosophy boasts so many—but this time a Lutheran (and Pauline) one against Plato and the Greeks. It means recognizing the grandeur of reason, since one must philosophize but at the same time place reason in conflict with faith. This would also be the thesis (like so many we find in Marxism) of a nonphilosophical practice of philosophy (in this case a Christian one). Understood in this way, this maxim is susceptible to innumerable equivocations so long as the rigorous concept of Christ is not itself established independently of philosophy. We understand this maxim of a nonphilosophical practice of philosophy as the obligation to establish a science, which nonetheless would not at all be neutral, of Christianity—a science that engages with the Christian affair but not like a hermeneutics does, and not only as a positive science of it.
To philosophize in Christ may be nothing but a still-theological slogan, and this indeed is how it has been understood. But in that case it is not fundamentally new, and merely recenters on Christ a new, vagabond, speculative, and theocentric theology. We understand this formula otherwise, as a call to transform from top to bottom in an experimental or current practice (somewhat like the mystics did) what we call “theology,” to make it into a lived and faithful affair. Rather than a theology accompanied by a minimum of faith or a faith accompanied by a minimum of theology, always more or less easy to externally suture, we understand theology as a lived experience in the contemporary sense of experience—precisely as experimental, abandoning the norms of philosophical validity but not all philosophy. Can theology be a life rather than the contemplation of a possible life? A work according-to-faith rather than a faith without work or a work without faith? Can faith be an immanent praxis of theology and thus something like a theology implemented or put to work by faith? Such an inflection (more than simply “lived”: formalized) of theology as a work operative in each of the faithful signifies a taking leave of the Church as apparatus of mediation, and of theology as apparatus of the Church.
For faith to be the condition of the immanence of the most theoretical works, the praxis faithful to theology, it is necessary to dismember, in a manner itself nontheological, the theo-christo-logical doublet that structures it and makes for its authority and sufficiency. If this dismemberment itself is no longer to obey a theological practice impregnated by philosophy, it must be carried out in an entirely other manner. The formula “to philosophize in Christ” resonates like the affect of a distance impossible to bridge but that must be bridged, the call of a blank space that is radical in a certain sense, of a lack into which precisely the Church and theology, who have a horror of the void, have been cast, as mediations designed to resuture the whole formula. But another operation was possible: this blank space testifies, no doubt, to a void, to an implied term, but there is no reason to reform a whole according to the same mode of unification. The term that is lacking, because it is a stranger to philosophy and to the theology of Christ, is that of “science.” Yet another term testifies to it, precisely yet illegibly, in theology and its transcendent ontological presuppositions (that of the “in”: “in-Christ,” which indicates an immanence of Christ and an insertion) to philosophize and thus theologize in this immanence. What we shall call the generic (or christic) matrix is the apparatus, a scientific and experimental apparatus (physical, and more precisely quantum-physical) that succeeds in the dismembering of the theo-christo-logical doublet and the inclusion of theology itself in this immanence that bears the name of Christ. This formula therefore calls for a change of theoretical element for theology. A program which is that of the fusion of Christ and quantum science in a generic thought.
Does “science-in-Christ” thus testify more crucially to the grandeur of Reason, or to an effort to cut down that grandeur? We resolve this aporia, which radicalizes the injunction to “philosophize in Christ” so that it pits Luther, Pascal, Plato, and many others against one another, by introducing between philosophy and Christ this third term which was not expected in such a form, that of science. And by identifying in Christ and in him alone the subject bearing a
generic science—that is to say, a subjective science, a science of religions. Such is our primary thesis. To philosophize in Christ does not affect the grandeur of Reason if it really is a question of a science-in-Christ. This would be to place philosophy, and therefore theology, as complexes of knowledge and belief, under condition of a new theoretical but practical stance, to determine them and transform them by way of a science whose blinding yet invisible, clear yet silent principles would be contributed by Christ. Christ is not just a religious model to be imitated in his existence or in his sufferings, the founder of a new religion that ceaselessly returns to interpret and solicit him, but the author of logia that must be read as the protocols and axioms of a new science of humans—and humans, moreover, insofar as they are committed, as beings of beliefs and rites, to the world. It is to this Christ that we submit religious thought, as one submits an object to the principles of science. An important nuance here: it is not the Christian religion, still less “Christian science,” that is the science of other religions; it is Christ who announces the protocols of a science for all religions, Christianity included. Christianity is here no more than what we could call a “formal” or else “primary” religion, to be placed under condition, a christic condition. Needless to say, this is not a positive science, although it has identifiable principles and procedures taken from a contemporary science that is both experimental and formal.
Why speak of a “science of Christianity” and of other religions? Has faith ever contributed a science, or indeed allowed itself to be the object of a science? Historical reasons, although quite superficial, can nevertheless put us on the right track. The Christ-event is none other than that of the emergence of faith, against the Greco-Pagan and Judaic beliefs that it alone is capable of transforming so as to place them in the generic service of humans. And this struggle against beliefs in the name of faith maintains the closest of links with modern science—that is to say, physics. If philosophy and mathematics since Plato have been conjoined like twins in a mirror, faith and mathematical physics have done so otherwise, and together signal the entry into the Cartesian modernity of subjective certainty (Heidegger) for which “Platonism” is no longer anything but a means in the service of thought, rather than an inspiration. The theoretical (in the broadest sense) conjuncture having changed a great deal, this association now has different means at its disposal, and can propose new objectives for itself. One will not be surprised therefore to see that here we require certain algebraic (neither logical nor philosophical) properties used in quantum physics, which represent the hard kernel of contemporary physics, and which we hope are suitable for producing the rigorous understanding of faith. Conjugated with the Lutheran imperative, this new perspective can only signify a taking leave of philosophy as exclusive or theoreticist contemplation of faith. Should we say, then, that this is Christianity in the science of Christianity? Not exactly, and it is this that distinguishes it from a hermeneutics: there is Christ-in-person in the science of Christianity and of other religions. “In-person” does not mean the individual, but a generic universality various echoes of which still inhabit the Trinity of the “three persons,” despite its Greek mask. If prior-to-priority is granted to Christ and not to Christianity in the science of Christianity, the circle is broken, but only on condition that we can suture science and Christ. Now, this suture, if it is the horizon of modernity, is more profoundly a gnostic affair. We retain from the gnostics, in the hope of escaping from the hell into which the Church and Philosophy discarded them, two fundamental axioms. When formulated in a manner suitable to our conjuncture, these axioms will suffice to sketch out the most general framework of this essay: (1) A certain special suture of science and the subject—a fusion, why not, of theory and the faithful masses, defines man as generic knowledge rather than as the man of “Greco-Christian humanism.” (2) This knowledge is faith itself, in subjects delivered to the world, and is the practical source of their salvation.
To invoke physical “science” in these domains seems a rather pointless positivist provocation, or a return to the old ruses of metaphysics as “science” as in German idealism, or at best “as rigorous science.” But “the sciences” cannot be reduced to mathematics or to hard (or even soft) sciences, positive sciences in general. We understand the sciences otherwise than taken up in the forking (the Caudine Forks, even) of the paradigm positive/transcendental. Quantum physics displaces this paradigm by imposing a nontranscendental immanence on the one hand, and on the other by implying that the subjectivity of the observer must necessarily be taken into account in the preparation of our faith-experiment. It is the possibility of “subjects-sciences (
sciences-sujets)” that has an antidogmatic and generic pertinence distinct from philosophy (despite the transcendental interpretations of quantum physics)—and distinct also from positive sciences, which do not include the subject in their procedures but only in their objects, and which furnish knowledge, not truth or the conditions for truth. To do this, at the same time as we transform theology, we must transform the positive usage of (for example) quantum physics. We must recognize an affinity between certain scientific principles to be specified and the logia of Christ. Obviously we are not, above all, going to say that Christ is an individual subject in the traditional matter, the subject of a science or of a philosophy—all of that is out of the question for the generic subject-science.
To philosophize “in” Christ? The solution already depends on what we understand by this “in”: through, according to, because of, for? We are evidently involved in a theory of immanence that Christian philosophers controlled through the subjective interiority of faith, others through that of the transcendental ego, and yet others through the interiority of the mystical body of the Church or that of scriptural texts. Whence idealist christologies, which are mere interpretations of Scriptures using the means of philosophy, or the dogmatisms of the Church. For us it will instead be a matter (after a great deal of explanation) of philosophizing “in” that science which is the Christ-event. Since Christ is identified here with a generic science confronting theology, there will be always and only two terms and not numerically three—what we have introduced as a third apparent term will not be a mediation or a philosophical synthesis. We do not define a christological position, but a scientific stance of Christ that takes as its object all religions and in particular their two “substantial” poles, paganism as illustrated by philosophy in its Greek origins or by the Logos, and monotheism as illustrated by Judaism and the Torah—and their more “formal” Christian synthesis, the Christianity that is but the symptom of Christ-effects.
Let us say straightaway (and this will be a second thesis) that if the science-according-to-Christ is a device with only two terms, then Christ is or contributes a type of intelligence that is faith or messianity itself. If faith or messianity constitute the understanding and the critique of religions, it is up to us to find the axioms of faith, the principles of messianity. Our objective is to formulate laws that, without being those of representation, even religious representation, are capable of explaining the latter as that which falls to humans. For on the side of its object, this science is that of humans, of course, but humans qua subjects involved in the world rather than with Being or even
being-in-the-world. If Christ can be credited with a science, it is that of the world and of its last object—this is what distinguishes him from the ontology that occupies itself with the median zone of beings and Being. All the same, for the humans that we are, it is indeed religions, along with their philosophies and their theologies, that are the form of expression of the world which Christ gave us to comprehend. Whence a third, yet more polemical thesis deduced from the principles: Christianity is the set of standardizations of the Church and of the appearances of Dogma—at the limit, the whole set of religious travesties of the message and the “person” of Christ interpreted in the mirror of the world.
It will be said of Christ, to sum up his actions, that he is the faithful or the messiah “in-the-last-instance,”
the last messiah as before-first, an expression that means less than ever a cause or event supposedly hidden behind Christianity, and still less a transcendental foundation. The idea is rather to treat him at once as a constant of the scientific type, and thus as “objective” in the sense of his being an invariant for all possible human science, and also as the fulfilling of subjective functions. The principle of this science is however not some synthesis, a Hegelian synthesis for example, of subject and object; it is a
quantum of faith, constant by definition (which does not necessarily mean quantitative), and of the lived (which is not to say of any lived whatsoever or of worldly belief). An objective constant fabricated within the lived, a lived of faith objectively informed. In this way, faith or messianity qua constant preserves the grandeur of Reason, which is not conflated with that of philosophy (whose sufficiency is, for its part, weakened). The antinomy of the concept of science-in-Christ or, strictly speaking, of “generic theology” is thus resolved as follows: the dephilosophized grandeur of Reason remains to science, with which it canonically conjugates, so that here at least it behaves like a subject or a lived that
is faith, whereas the sufficiency to be abased remains to philosophy and theology. The sufficiency of philosophy and the grandeur of Reason have too often been conflated. We address another conjugation of them, which we call “generic” and no longer “philosophical” in an exclusive sense:
the fusion of science and philosophy under science rather than under philosophy or theology.
THEOLOGICALLY UNINTELLIGIBLE FAITH AND ITS INTELLIGIBILITY
How can we speak of a non-Christian science with “Christianity” as its object, and other religions through it? Because the Christ-event is accessible to us only with the aid of this discursive material that derives from it, and that we must take account of, for better or for worse. In its reality rather than in its possibility, this event is unintelligible for theology; but we have new scientific means to render intelligible, as far as is possible, the reasons for this unintelligibility, and to safeguard it as a secret. It is the Christ-event that must found—in a scientific mode, not that of belief—the science of Christianity as formation of thought and of knowledge, it being understood that this scientific transformation of Christianity is not particularly a transformation of signification or of semantic exegesis, nor especially one of the deconstruction of its texts. This phenomenon is none other than that of the emergence of messianic faith and of its payload of rigor against Greco-Judaic and Pagan beliefs. Christ did not have to give rise to a religion, but the religions that encircled his cradle to welcome him like “bad” fairies did not hesitate to pass the virus of religion on to him, and to give him a seat in the war room of monotheisms.
How then, it will be asked, can faith “in” this event count as a scientific cause or foundation? But has faith ever been the belief in an event, however mysterious or objective? Is it not rather an immanent praxis, the messianic practice of the world that finds some affinity with an affect of immanence which is that of scientific knowledge as lived, not as object? We still do not know, after two thousand years of theology, what faith is, even if we all “have” it, even if we all “are” it without having a true idea of it or any cognizance of it. We do not have faith in faith, nor faith “in” Christ but, really, faith “in” (according to) Christ, or “informed” by him. Faith is a scientific-
type principle (neither positive nor transcendental), which renders Christianity intelligible while undoing it as belief; it is a knowledge of whose unintelligibility we no longer have any cognizance. There is unintelligible knowledge, it is the cause in-the-last-instance of its own knowledge as unintelligible, and because of this it is the means of Christianity and its sources. It is not at all a matter of a new interpretation of the Christianity that is given and that we all know well, but of a Christ-science of Christianity.
Let us proceed to a new distribution in a gnostic spirit of the governing terms at play in these sorts of problems. On the one hand we radically (that is, unilaterally) separate faith, as scientific but lived principle, from belief, which inhabits religious and philosophical transcendence. On the other hand, if faith is on the order of a knowledge, it is a non-Platonic knowledge, which cannot be defined as mathematical or transcendental, but only as generic and immanental, proceeding via quantum means, with belief being rejected onto the side of illusory cognizance or of representation that is founded in-the-world. Finally, this knowledge is not self-cognizance, it does not know itself reflexively to be itself, and all the efforts of this science consist in placing religious discourses at the level of their incompetence, or in making them concretely recognize their irrelevance to a cognizance of faith. It is not a matter of recognizing that we do not know anything, just that we do not know anything through philosophy, representation, or historical belief as to the knowledge that we are generically qua faithful in-the-last-instance. It is not Socrates who awaits us at the end of the search, but the gnosis that speaks the “negative” truth of Christianity, with its occasional aid.
The counterproof of the axioms used before for idempotence and superposition is that an organizing transcendence like that of God and his plan converts simple generic duality into a triad, by making it lose its consistency, or converts our discourse into a “new” theology, destroying its superposed axioms. It is enough to introduce transcendence as a principle for humans or the simple to find themselves embarrassed, caught in those nets that are called Jewish paradoxes or Greek aporias, along with their specialists—priests on one side, philosophers on the other, psychoanalysts in between, all the great commentators and exegetes. Every historicoanalytical approach to the logic of messianity purely and simply destroys the real, if not the reality, of Christ, by making his lived being of messianity or of superposition vanish.
Still, the refusal of philosophical or theological representation is not the refusal of all discourse. The Christian science is spoken through axioms (we shall come back to this) that utilize concepts by requalifying them as primary terms, precisely through the suspension or neutralization of their philosophical sense, or even as prior-to-first terms or oraxioms, thus resuming the christic operation on the plane of the word. Non-Christian science is a set of “oraxiomatic” yet immanent statements, deployed infinitely like the phases of a flux. They are neither cataphatic nor apophatic, and they cast off all theology, whether positive or negative. There is obviously nothing scandalous in the faithful assuming the operation of Christ, in speaking of axioms that are generic phrases of messianity, “messianic wave functions,” oraxioms in which the generic subject expresses itself.
The Cross and the Resurrection are a secret open to humans rather than a mystery in the hands of the Church. It is important for the non-Christian science, as it is for every science, to demonstrate the limits of the validity of its proofs (of oraxiomatization), unlike foundationalism and religious fundamentalism. And consequently to be able to speak, not to be obliged to shut up but just to know how to “weaken” one’s discourse—this is the function of the oraxioms in which it expresses itself. The Cross is a sealed secret, fulfilled in the person of Christ, accessible to the Simple Ones who are unlearned knowledge, but refused to the sufficiency of theologians and philosophers, who know that they know nothing rather than not knowing what they know. Their presuppositions automatically imply the destruction of science, for one cannot decently call “science,” except in appearance, something that is founded on philosophical means and procedures.
Christ is a “real” thought-event: he determines, and transforms into his object, received thought; he “fulfills” religious discourse. The fulfillment he claims cannot have any status other than that of immanence or of the Same, and can only be fully understood through idempotence. He no longer engages in the relations between man and Being or Logos, still less those of man and the Torah, but only in those of man and the world insofar as humans have to generically work within it.
THE SYMPTOMS OF GENERIC SCIENCE IN CHRIST
It cannot be a matter of a classical, positive science, a science almost without a subject—nothing here corresponds to such a thing. Jesus can perhaps be said to have conducted a laboratory experiment, but not in this positive sense; it is a kerygmatic experiment, carried out in the cramped territory of Judaism, an experiment of salvation in the vessel of the world. All the same, in Christ’s practice and above all in his sayings, we find many ingredients for a science, but it is a science that includes the subject, in the form of symptoms to be analyzed, on condition of knowing how to read the principles that we “have” a priori in these symptoms. We know the symptoms: the sense of universality as human rather than as cosmic, its fundamental relation to the Law that remains the Law even when fulfilled, the immanence of its fulfillment “in” his person, the theory of his new mediating function, his doubly irreflexive thought—on the one hand his simple, inaugurating, and definitive sayings, like axioms, which, on the other hand, are addressed to “simple souls,” at the limit of the “simplicity of spirit,” who know nothing of philosophy, the necessary passage through the literally crucial experience of sacrifice, and finally the affirmation, accepted by the Apostles but suspect in the eyes of the Church, of the actuality of his messianity and of his accomplishments. All that Christ says under the name of
fulfillment is obviously capable of giving rise to religious scenarios or dialectical constructions, but can also indicate in outline the enterprise of a new comprehension and being, to be taken literally as actual, as axioms in which Christ strips himself of all attributed religious meaning, without necessarily operating a “negative theology.” It is up to us to receive them in a nonreligious and ultimately nonfundamentalist manner.
All of this is not merely existential, and is not, moreover, actual in the sense of historical existence deliverable into the hands of theologians, if not sectarians; but it is theoretically relevant if one knows how to decipher it and see its logic. Messiahs are only actual under the virtual condition of messianity, which includes a trait of inexistence or of nonmanifestation, signifying that they do not manifest themselves to the eyes of the world, which is blind by definition. Theology, cosmological in form and in vocation, philosophical in its means, has constructed upon the event of Christ-thought a whole “plan of salvation” attributed to God, a vast story that makes up the ground of our mythology and that is pursued by teleology in the direction of the history that is supposed to encompass humans. But a non-Christian science, founded on algebra, the algebra of idempotence, and no longer on a philosophical logic, will instead grasp in messianity an almost aleatory process, an indiscernible dispersion of messiahs sufficiently intricate to outline the “ecclesial” body, but nonlocalizable by the faithful. To pass from theology to the generic science of Christ one must pay this price, which is not the abandonment of all “hope”—quite the contrary, perhaps.
THE QUANTUM MODEL OF CHRIST
We transform Luther’s still theologically inspired imperative by adjoining to it the concept that it lacks; we reinstate its insurrectionary status as “philosophizing in-the-last-instance according to the science-in-Christ.” The West is sufficiently proud of Christianity’s invention of another conception of man, of another relation to the world, of the introduction of the individual and the subject into history, and even of the birth of modern science. It is time to draw all the consequences of these affirmations and to give them some scientific rigor. If Christ inaugurates a science of humans qua submitted to the world rather than to Being, then we must go as far as possible in the most innovative current science of the relations between man and the world, and, for this new impetus, turn to quantum physics. Hegel, in his speculative way, had probably recognized the characteristics of a possible science in the sayings of Christ, but he practiced it in apparently philosophical ways. We take up this problem again in a non-Hegelian manner, neither positive nor transcendental or speculative. The possibility of this previously impossible treatment owes to the existence of this already secular physics, which furnishes an entirely new way of reading the experience of the world, and thus a new way of thinking to rival philosophy. Quantum physics will serve as our model to transform the style of thinking and even the practice of faith. This is why Christ will be treated as a “christic constant,” faith as a “quantum of faith,” and the theoretical procedures implemented as mathematically stripped-down quantum-theoretical principles, the two principal among them (obviously interrelated) being the superposition characteristic of wave phenomena and the noncommutativity detectable in particulate phenomena.
All we are doing is taking up again, in our own way and a little better armed, Christianity’s ambition to conjugate faith and science, but in a way that owes nothing to the confrontations or syntheses operated by self-declared or nostalgic atheists. This science is not historical Christianity itself, and in general it is not a religion; it is the science of existence, whether narrowly “Christian” or otherwise, in the world as Christ unveiled it or posited its foundations. If Plato is the emblem of philosophy in its twin-ness with mathematics, then to philosophize-in-Christ implies a displacement of philosophy and theology placed under determinant condition that is no longer itself Christian, but christic. Under condition, as would be a Last Instance that would seem to retire or subtract itself from theology and from religions, producing in them an effect of the underdetermination of belief. All the same, it is not a simple subtraction operated
on the sly in the name of a faith that is itself vanishing, and would believe that in this way it could smuggle itself past any theological control. Radical faith is prima facie conceivable as a quantum-type act of superposition, and is opposed point-by-point to the identification of belief that would always seek the absolute. The quantum of faith is a sort of nonacting or nonreaction to the world, but one capable of acting by transforming the world without, therefore, creating it. Correlatively to the irruption of faith, we must abandon the model of creation that is not only “objectivating,” but philosophical or theological, and what remains of it in the opposite, specular model of its idealist or materialist contemplation, in favor of the generic model of its transformation. Radical faith, the fidelity-in-the-last-instance permitted to humans, has an immanent effect that alone is the generic transformation of the world.
The fusion, in the name of “Christ,” of scientific principles with ancient religious beliefs both transformed and put into a quantum state of superposition prohibits any kind of return of philosophy upon the messianity that is foreclosed to it—that is to say, a twofold traditional enterprise. Firstly prohibited is a religious, ultimately circular and philosophical critique of philosophy. To philosophize in Christ, this slogan has been perceived as a way to bring down the grandeur of Reason by way of Plato—the whole Lutheran tradition that runs through Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, Hamann, and Kierkegaard. But this is not at all our project, which is not intrareligious and antirational. Even if we are happy to be neighbors to these thinkers who struggled against the great rationalism of dominant philosophy, we interpret the formula on the basis of principles both philosophical and scientific, and this in quantum thought and in Marxism. These two disciplines serve us as models of a science established upon these principles, models in the axiomatic sense. Subsequently, and symmetrically, the theme of fusion with a subject become quasi-predicate shows that it is not a question of a scientific-positive
foundation that we wish to substitute for Christ, and that would flatten everything onto a positivism without being able to give this science a real dimension that could be said to be “immanental.” Strictly speaking, it is a matter of superposing, not identifying, the grandeur of Reason and the religious philosophy of the Greeks and Jews who tried to capture and produce “rationalism,” or conflated this grandeur with philosophical sufficiency and scientific positivity. In all seriousness, there is no grandeur for this christic and generic science as there is for philosophical Reason, no Christian theology as rigorous science nor, inversely, science as rigorous philosophy—only the indivisible bloc of a
christic subject-science whose object is Christianity and its theology. What must be thought, or rather what makes thinking happen and constrains reason as much as it constrains belief, is the undivided encounter of certain scientific principles with a subject plunged from the very start into a scientifico-religious doxa from which it is extracted, constrained by their radical immanence to become a faithful subject. A faith is necessary to practice this science, but does not condition it; on the one hand it is a negative or underdetermining condition, on the other hand faith is belief transformed by science and desubjectivized, neutralized, or made generic. Our beliefs are philosophically bipolar, individual, and thus gregarious, whereas our faith is generic. We do not have to bear this faith either as individual or as collective. To philosophize
in Christ but to believe
in one’s capacity as scientist—this formula may be too paradoxical for positive spirits to understand, except under a certain number of quantum conditions including that of superposition.
THE EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE OF THE CROSS
The Cross and the Resurrection, which are inseparable, are the heart of Christianity, its genetic kernel as religious experience and as faith. But they have been interpreted rather hastily, from within a bastard Greco-Jewish mélange, rendered unintelligible beneath heaps of images and beliefs, transformed into rationally incomprehensible paradoxes that call for the easy solution of substituting belief everywhere for faith. Belief and representation have served to efface the blank spaces of theology or, inversely, theology has plugged the holes of belief. For us it is not a matter of trying to “rationalize” them in the classical manner, as idealism claimed to “rationalize” experience (Kant, for example, with his “religion within the limits of reason alone”). Rather than these mixtures, how can we invent a generic practice of Christ and of messianity with quantum means, means that therefore are still scientific, but better suited to the
contemporary character of Christ? For he is our contemporary, and we are the contemporaries of his messianity insofar as his immanent act ceaselessly demands new theoretical means, and must throw off the old transcendent finalities (classical and modern alike) with which history has loaded down its messianity so as to divert it from its effectiveness—namely, the “salvation” of which humans are capable. It is with this intention that we construct
a scientific model (not a “representation”) of the Cross in the form of a generic matrix that is more manipulable, and with more certainty, than theological images and beliefs. It is capable of bringing to light the generic truth of Christ in the very act of “crucifying” philosophy or the world. For historical Christianity and its theologies are, precisely, a representation of the messianity of Christ, just as belief is a representation of faith.
The theo-christo-logical doublet is organized by theo-centrism, and on the theological plane by ecclesio-centrism. These are the fundamental characteristics that we want to destroy here, but without carrying out a textual deconstruction in the Judaic spirit or a neotheology that is still in the spirit of the Fathers. We force theology to change its theoretical basis: it will no longer be based upon (essentially Greek) philosophy but upon a science, quantum physics. By substituting the principles of contemporary physics for the old classical rationality that was in reality entirely philosophical, we do not eliminate all recourse to philosophy despite its being relegated to a secondary or, as we shall say, “occasional” function. In order to achieve this we shall do as the theologians do, concentrating upon the meaning of Christ at the moment of the Cross, but so as to draw from it entirely other consequences. It is a matter of arriving at an interpretation of the set of phases of the sequence
sending of Christ/message/death/resurrection/evangelization as the unit of a crucial experiment of humanity, with preparation of the experiment, sacrifice, proven result, and objective appearance of the phenomenon. The texts of mystics could also have served us here as a guide for describing the
experimental science of the Cross as lived experience. But we gather them together and treat them as and
in an experimental vessel entirely distinct from the temporal dispersion of the historical story—of evangelization, for example, as the history of the expansion of a belief.
FAITH OR FIDELITY AS GENERIC QUANTUM
To delimit the human phenomena accessible to the new science that Christ discovers, it is fundamental to identify, alongside the experimental vessel of Golgotha, a constant, a generic quantum that assures us that we will be dealing with generic humanity and not, let us say, “rational” or “logocentric” humanity. This will be faith or fidelity qua identical to messianity, despite (as we shall see) their duality with the latter. There is no rigorous discipline of religions that does not seek to be positive, but usually they do so with physico-mathematical constants that swamp humans with anonymous and overgeneral entities. Their place is then taken by philosophies and theologies that are not sciences. It may be that religions have affirmed their sufficiency, and that of their theologies, upon the basis of this absence or this theoretical repression of a generic science of faith. The disciplines that exist use positive means (which can be philosophically elevated) such as history, archaeology, exegesis, even dogmatics, but without a generic means, without the subject that is implicated in them. So that the faithful subject is presumed sooner or later to be a philosopher, and therefore a believer. These objective sciences of religions forget that the true constants, as universal and rigorous as they may be, are also specific to their object, here “the simple ones,” those stripped of the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy, but not of all philosophy. This is why these two determinations of every generic human, or of what he can do, are conjugated in science qua generic. We have also seen a deconstruction of Christianity, psychoanalysis, and structuralist enterprises, but from our point of view all of these rest either upon scientific and “textual” ideologies such as structuralism or (like psychoanalysis) upon a basis of positive sciences (biology or mathematics) absorbed into a Judaic context. For this reason they could not do justice to the subject qua generic—that is to say, qua inextricably faithful and believing—in such a way that one would be able to say that humanity is faithful in prior-to-priority, believing in priority.
If we conceive the human constant of the science of religious phenomena as faith or fidelity, it is a matter neither of just any “humanity” nor of just any belief, but of the generic concept of the subject = X to be determined as the support of the conjugation of faith and belief. A constant necessary for all human, political, aesthetic, or theological sciences, which could, for example, make of “theology” a human science of God rather than a divine science of man. This constant must be discovered as the scientific threshold to be passed through, a threshold that opens onto a region of unlimited possibilities. Prior to the discovery of this constant, a science works above all in the imaginary of its object, does not distinguish itself clearly from this object, and loses itself in mélanges. This constant can no longer be of an institutional nature, as Catholics would have it, or scriptural, as would Jews and Protestant Reformers. We no longer have to choose between the dogmas that structure the Church as thought, the Scriptures whose consistency is reduced more and more to a fundamentalism, and a sectarianism just as closed as the Church—between two deadly dogmatisms.
Obviously only the sciences can introduce a constant that would not be a philosophical or theological subtotality. But the constant, as objective as it might be, must always also imply a quality that belongs to the domain of objects. Even the quantum of action or of the speed of light contains symptoms of a subject that will reveal itself subsequently—for example, in quantum physics, in the form of the “subjectivity” of measurement or observation. As for religions, what is specific to their object is the believing subject. One thing that is original in Christianity is its having revealed the generic essence of sciences that claim to be human and that must engage immanently, in their scientific stance, with a lived that is still more faithful than believing. We draw the consequences of this in the transfer of the science of religions into the quantum terrain.
NAMES AND FUNCTIONS OF THE RADICAL “CHRIST”
The science of Christ is not that of Jesus. The name “Christ” is a volatile hotbed of theoretical functions—unlike Jesus, who is more easily discernable by the historical and theological sciences. It is impossible for us to speak of “Christ,” period, in a unique sense, except obviously (and this will often be the case) in simplifications, generalities, or quick references. We distinguish between a diversity of functions into which the “radical” Christ enters.
Christ-System
Open set of utterances of every kind in the Gospels, whether canonical or not, the logia of Jesus, the tales of the disciples, the interpretations of the Apostles, all of which relate themselves exoterically, in Christianity, to the pole of Jesus Christ, but which function here “esoterically” as properties or variables in the science of Christ, in view of determining the knowledge that we can obtain of the messianity of Christ through faith—that is to say, of the knowledge of Christ-in-person. The kerygmatic content of these utterances or “sayings” is thus suspended in its theological sense along with the Principle of Sufficient Theology, but not destroyed: reduced, rather, to the status of properties of Christ that can be treated as variables in a device called the christic matrix.
States of the Christ-System and Messiah-Function
Designating the different possible combinations of these variables to which the system gives rise; with each state of the system containing the traditional or theological Christian variables of Christ, or his Jewish or Greek coordinates plus the messiah-function, which is added to the variables and permits a quantum-theoretical treatment through its algebraic character as imaginary or complex number. The states of the system are formed of various (theological and scientific) cognizances, but are not yet faithful cognizances; they are the variables of Christ as real object of cognizance, but only faith as faithful cognizance of Christ is the object of cognizance properly so called. We prohibit ourselves from confusing the data that make up the real object with the matrixial process of the production of faithful knowledge.
Christ-in-Person
We distinguish the messiah-factor from Christ-in-person as such (
tel quel), qua incarnating the messiah function, and Christ-in-person itself (
comme tel), qua object of cognizance. This is the unity of messianity and the clone as the two wave and particulate aspects in their unilateral complementarity. Whence the ambiguity of the In-person, which is the indivisible Christ and his unifaciality or his Stranger-subject-being. It is Christ complete or as duality grasped according to messianity but also existing in the state of a clone and consequently open to the ambiguity of the clone-Christ and of Christ in-itself, on whose basis one may go in both directions. Whence the difficulty of defining who Christ is, his probable ontology: outside Christianity or within it? The In-person is characteristic of the final result of the matrix, or the faithful cognizance of messianity that it produces.
Messianity and Faith
Very general common designations or notions that relate to Christ and hence to the faithful-subject insofar as both of them are real objects and objects of cognizance, Christ and cognizance of Christ. Hence the extended range of uses we make of them. The essential distinction is that messianity is the generic lived phenomenon (qua real or qua knowledge), and faith or fidelity the form of the clone of the faithful subject always on the edges of belief.
THE MESSIAH-FUNCTION 1: INTRODUCING CHRIST AS IMAGINARY QUANTITY OR INDEX OF SCIENTIFIC FICTION
To locate a contemporary scientific level in the domain of theology, we must accept the introduction among its givens of a factor characteristic of physical and quantum scientificity. Alongside the real but historical Jesus Christ, Christ the religious object of theology, there is another Christ that we could call “imaginary” or, paradoxically, “scientific” because of its proximity to the algebraic or complex imaginary number—a messiah-factor, more precisely, charged with making the cognizance of Christ pass from the state of a body of theological knowledge to its generic (that is to say, scientific and more particularly quantum) state—truth. This is the famous “spark” of the gnostics and mystics, the “pearl,” as a last radiance, the last-instance radiance of the flash of the Logos. There is a function of the messiah that must be compared to a purely algebraic datum of Christ. This radical Christ should be imagined on the algebraic model, imported from outside so as to secure a possible science, a rigor of thought, not drawn as a given from the Christ-system of the Gospels, but preferably from the power of human understanding as original factor that shakes up the sufficiency of relations or of the theo-christo-logical doublet. A real Christ in a new, nonrealist, thoroughly messianic sense will come forth in it.
On the one hand, like all theologians themselves, and above all in view of the principles of a science of monotheistic religions, we are obliged to suppose that in general they are of a rational nature, at least in-the-last-instance, that they contain a fundamental spark of rationality accessible to a science, which we aim to find. Science in the original Western sense—as distinct from those mythological thoughts or religious wisdoms that escape our power and our knowledge, however accessible they may be to other rigorous forms of knowledge apparently more suitable for these practices (the human sciences, structuralisms, psychoanalyses, cognitivisms)—a sense that does not exclude our attempt to include religions in physical nature.
This factor that we shall call the “messiah-function” or the “index of christic fiction” is apparently present in the theo-christo-logical doublet, and must be drawn out of this structure. No doubt it must provide an explanation for the latter, but it must first descend from the theo-christic doublet toward the messiah-function, subsequently to return from the latter back up toward the doublet. This return is the role of the matrix that produces faith in Christ, the final object of our experiment; but a prior movement is necessary, which is not yet a matter of science, but of its preparation and the inventory of its conditions. Given the doublet, it seems impossible to obtain the messiah-function in its exact figure because one cannot then exit from the doublet, and from the double transcendence that coincides with the PST. This is the vicious argument that Kant thought he had been able to break through. But despite its modifications, extensions, flexibilizing, a science supposes in its object that which it itself has essentially put there a priori—a form of rationality that is adequate to it. A quantum-oriented science places in its object at least the great rational principles that belong to it, places them in it in their totality, without being necessarily positive for all that. For
the quantum a priori comprises the three principles of superposition, noncommutability, and entanglement or nonlocality, but also what we shall call, provisionally and “in Kantian,” the
transcendental a priori of these principles—namely, that spark that is the complex or imaginary number (√ − 1) that is necessary to enter into the sphere of quantum pertinence and to render these principles applicable to religious experience.
As a counterproof, it is possible to deduce from the theological One or from monotheism (that is to say, from a theo-christo-logical doublet structure) the messiah-function as its radical origin, or even the imaginary number as kernel of Judaism. We must first distinguish cognizance as datum in science or outside philosophy, and that same cognizance as taken up in philosophy—this is the level of Derrida’s deconstruction, which presupposes the brute or linguistic signifier and then goes on to grasp it again, philosophically.
We posit the messiah as the non-“real” factor, in the sense that it is nonarithmetical but algebraic, as what is algebraic in relation to theology or to religion, an unknown recognized as such by the Jews (and the Christians). Rosenzweig appeals to a scientific “parable,” a comparison with mathematics, so as to demonstrate the irreducibility of the Jewish people qua exception that does not “number” among the nations, a “nonnumber.” The irrational number concretely manifests the infinite, its alterity and its transcendence, become visible and physically present while remaining foreign in reality, incommensurable but physically present, revealing an absolute infinity that surpasses the measure of sense, whereas for the rational number, the infinite is a certain but unattainable and abstract limit. This opposition comes down to establishing a Principle of Sufficient Judaism (PSJ) against the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy (PSP)—two different types of sufficiency and an opposition of the presence of the Absolute and the infinite of the imagination. We must deepen not this opposition of the Greek and the Judaic, but the more complex opposition of the latter with the imaginary number. The imaginary number is also no longer a “number” in the arithmetical sense, and is measured less against the absolute than against the radical that it bears with it and introduces into thought as a prior-to-priority stripped of foundation and contingent in a henceforth nonphilosophical sense.
In other words, our parable or our fiction is precisely that the name of Christ both designates the equivalent of the imaginary number operating as the “puzzling” Stranger or messiah-function in the Greco-Jewish or Christian milieu and introduces the power of fiction into it. The variables of the Greek and the Jew are multiplied and affected by the idempotent reprise of the Jew or of the Messiah, who apparently returns, but who in reality comes for the very-first time, who undercomes or sub-venes (
sous-vient).
The Christ-factor exposes or “has faith” in the Resurrection rather than in the Crucifixion. The Resurrection is a meta-physical act—that is to say, a meta-quantum-theoretical or generic act that establishes a messianity more complex than Judaic messianity or than a Greek-style intellectually biased act. It gives us the measure of an indiscernible Christ, and in doing so distinguishes him from Jesus, who falters on the Cross. Can we not say that the death of Jesus on the Cross is itself resurrection-oriented, oriented toward Christ as generic figure of Jesus? It is vital to suspend the Logos and its transcendent anthropology and its mathematico-Platonic philosophy, so as to bring back into play the spark of rationality that it contains as physics. We interpret the notion of a messiah-factor upon which to index the christic science as mathematical and algebraic, but relieved of the PSM—this is the minimum requirement for the quantum orientation of the knowledge of Christ.
The Christ-system thus comprises two closely conjugated aspects, and only two. On the most external level it designates the christic message, the basically Greco-Judaic kerygma, along with the set of utterances, formulae, and logia of a character named “Jesus,” and, with this, the whole of Christian theology that envelops him as theo-christo-logy. But more profoundly “Christ” is the symbol that designates a structuring but immanent function of those messages, an essentially quantum-type fundamental variable, a factor that is added to all of the variables extracted from the messages, and that has the power to transform them into vectors. It is a factor of the vectoriellization of faith, torn away from belief and even from the imaginary fictionality that gives the sense of its message. Christ plays the role of a symbol for a quasi-mathematical or algebraic operation; as that factor, he expresses and determines the essence of non-Christianity or nonstandard Christianity. Unlike the Will to Power factor that is added to forces in Nietzsche-thought, that is to say, in the essence of philosophy, to further potentialize it, Christ is the factor that weakens or underpotentializes all messages that are conducted by the PST.
Thus, the content of the matrix is not solely Christian in the narrow historical sense; the Christian is an after-the-fact construction of messianity or of faith on the basis of Greek philosophy and the messiah-function. The latter is not entirely the same as Judaism or the Law, the Torah. It is added to the Torah just as it is added to the Logos. It is more universal than in its Judaic understanding, and refers to the theo-messianic or theo-christic doublet that corresponds to Christianity.
THE MESSIAH-FUNCTION 2: THE INTUITION OF THE CROSS
These preparations having been made, a problem remains in suspense. All of these principles are scientific, and specifically algebraic-style, cognizances. Have we fallen back into a philosophy of science, a quantum ontology—and, worse, a transcendental one? Not at all, or at least not entirely. This interpretation, which one might call transcendental, is only a phase of the preparation or of the internal workings of the matrix. But if the latter must be quantum-oriented, we must find the conceptual equivalent of the imaginary number that is closest to its mathematicity and its quantum usage—the equivalent that, as conceptual, demands that its schematization in mathematical intuition be the shortest and most inevitable for these two idioms—the concept and the imaginary number—to be able to communicate or coexist adequately. They have a common element that will be represented by the circle and its division into quarter-turns, as we see in the Cross wherein it is visible. The Cross is more than a historico-spiritual symbol, it is the christic intuition, of a quantum nature, in which the theologeme of Christ and his human figure communicate.
This intuition of the Cross is more than a transcendental a priori for the science of Christ: it is first of all a mathematical datum, a brute and primary algebraic given, but one that is not reprised or interiorized in a simple Kantian transcendental gesture, or perhaps in a geometrical schema (itself an object of mimesis, at once the gesture of a believer and a painting that the painter shows to us). All the same, we have not yet left the transcendental sphere, we are wandering on its borders. Another step must be made beyond the image and the symbol of Christ on the cross, beyond this schematization that thinks the (hypertranscendental) messiah-factor negatively, abasing it by way of the pictorial or imaged means of the concept of Christ, a concept still attached to the cross of philosophy from which it hangs. What is missing here?
In order to make our way to a positive reason of the Cross, one capable of exposing its genesis or explaining it, what we are lacking is the entirely other interiorization of the transcendental itself and of its double transcendence within a more real element—that is, the imaginary or complex root of the schema, which left to itself repeats and redoubles, potentializes itself philosophically and thus enters into contradiction with signification. The Cross has not itself been thought crucially by theology, it has not been reduced and engendered by the quarter-turn that is the root of the circle. What is lacking is the leap from a philosophy-of-quantum-physics to a quantum-physics-of-philosophy—that is to say, the possibility of the cognizance we seek of Christ and of the Cross, but of which, for the moment, we have only the preliminary conditions, since we still conflate the real object with the sought-after object of cognizance. We remain in the exteriority of a transcendental operation of schematization—that is to say, in the transcendental imagination. No doubt we could announce, oversimplifying somewhat, that if the algebraic version of Christ is the imaginary or complex number, then Christ is the religious version of algebra. Christ would be the algebraic reduction of religions, the formal supplement added to every possible religion in order to orient it generically. It is this that would endow Christianity (however overrun it is by pagan, substantial, and even monotheist dross) with the character of a formal, rather than substantial, religion. The reduction of monotheisms is demanded by the christic factor, the ultimate reduction of all substantial and theological content.
Still, the problem was how to reconcile the brutality of algebra, this datum of the complex number, and the meaning, the flesh, that the schema implies. It is here that quantum physics is no longer negotiable but imposes itself all at once: superposition alone responds to their superposition. There is (and this is more than a datum, more and less than a factum) a superposed-without-superposition of the concept of Christ and of the geometrical (or in any case intuitive) flesh that still served as its schema; with their fusion, the schematism is negated in its hierarchical and philosophical form. The Cross is not, and obviously cannot be, self-caused, on pain of an ultimate nihilism. Certainly one might imagine that death is proof of death, but the lived explains it still better—that is to say, by quantum procedures. Its positive cause lies in the superposed state of Christ and the resurrected Christ. Obviously the secret of the Cross can only be the resurrected Christ, since it alone manifests their intuitive common-being that is elevation or ascension, the vectoriell ascending that is its reprise. It is the Resurrection that explains the cognizance of the Cross, not the other way around; the death of Christ proves almost nothing, it is his resurrection as insurrection that is the true ascending that, as a repercussion, abases the theological concept of Christ, and theology itself. The death of Christ on the Cross is the death of theology, which has been crucified and which is resurrected in faith. The messiah-function is Christ resurrected, that which transforms Jesus and his sayings into an object of cognizance, but which cannot be
deduced from them on pain of returning to a mortifying theology, and which is commutable neither with them nor, more generally, with Christianity. Not to mention that what is to be discovered here is also the inversion of Schrödinger’s paradox.
CHRIST AND THE ALGEBRA OF RELIGIONS
Christ was swiftly rejected onto the margins of theology as a simple means or mediator, or even as a religious persona—sometimes as a false messiah, or a fabled character like Buddha or Socrates, a master of wisdom. Or a Jewish sectarian. Or a historically dubious character, and affirmed all the more dogmatically for it. Faith requires a more solid (even if strictly speaking indeterminate) reference. An algebraic interpretation of the Christ-function is necessary. Unlike Jesus, who gives rise to a transcendent and theological imaginary, uncontrollable and therefore demanding to be dogmatically standardized and forced, under these new conditions Christ gives rise to a controlled and limited, generically oriented fiction. The nonecstatic orientation of vectors is what remains of simple (not reaffirmed or redoubled) transcendence; immanence, albeit radical, like a simple ascending, no longer takes place in the absolute (the dis-oriented milieu par excellence).
The Christ-factor must be understood as a negative and irrational concept, like the flight of the Angel: an ascending or unifacial vector, a principial vectoriellity. Christ’s sayings are not behaviors or acts, but vectors or throwings, ejaculations. The Russian mystics knew how to decipher the meaning of these ex-pressions. Certainly faith is not a cry, but neither is it a dogmatism. Christ is himself a resultant of vectors that traverse theological transcendence. Faith is an ascending or a vector with a minimum of the particulate, or a kernel of belief that is the phase, whereas faith corresponds to the flux. So, no faith as pure interiority of consciousness, but a unilateral complementarity of faith as modulus and amplitude and belief as phase or particulate direction. This is another way to think faith as an ascending stripped of all macroscopic ecstasy but not of any “object.” Apophatic and cataphatic are to be interpreted vectorielly: the vector is at once cata-phatic (because it departs from a radical and generic origin and declines), and apo-phatic (because it ascends toward a particle of faith).
QUANTUM THEORY OF THE BODY OF CHRIST
The human incarnation of the name of Christ must be chased out from its last idealist and theological retrenchments, and completed in the form of a physics of the christic body. What would incarnation be, relieved of its mythology and its beliefs, delivered to the faith of the faithful, if not a quantum-oriented physics which permits the deduction that we must call (despite the apparent absurdity of such a formula) a microchristics or a microscopic christology—that is to say, one whose intelligibility can only be vectoriell rather than existentiell? The archaic character of theology, positioned on the frontiers of religious mythology, can only aggravate philosophy’s position at the frontiers of science; but this is no reason to be disinterested in it, in the name of an atheism that has little to recommend it.
Let us remain for a while on the borders of meta-physics—that is, for we the contemporaries of “our” sciences, the borders of meta-quantum-physics. We seek a physics of the body of Christ, and abandon the psychology of belief. That Christianity introduced a dominant notion of the “person,” that it is a matter of this Christ here who was crucified for us, one time for all, and who came forth as Christ-in-majesty, these are all just images or consequences, and not yet the generic concept. Let us use philosophemes at least as a provisional aid, subject to a complex or more rigorous (more precisely, inseparably theo-quantum-theoretical) understanding of them. With Christ it is a matter of what we have called the “One-in-person,” certainly not of Being, or even of God, or of that One of which the mystics were the consummation but which still lingers on the desirable margins of the Logos, both distant and too close. There is no longer any place here for the weighty dramaturgy of the Trinity, except insofar as it presents itself to us as a symptom. It is enough to understand that “in-person” is the result of the “superposition” of the One and of the person, of the “in” as in-One or immanence, and of the face of the One or the mask of this immanence. Now, this superposition—which is no longer a philosophical operation like the Parmenidean “Same,” but physical, or at least quantum-oriented—can only be said of two vectors, and certainly no longer of objects or concepts and metaphysical categories. With this term “superposition” we have already transformed all of christology into christo-fiction. “In-person” is the unique face of the One according to a relation-without-relation of unilateral complementarity. The face of the One does not add anything to the One except itself, but
the One adds immanently to itself the face or the person that is added to it. Obviously, under the macroscope of philosophy (which is “decoherent,” as certain physicists say), the formula loses its superposition, and is decomposed into an amphiboly or a specular doubling; it bilateralizes or becomes reversible, as in the famous axiom of the convertibility of the One and of Being.