SUBSTANTIAL RELIGIONS AND FORMAL OR GENERIC RELIGION
The importance of Christianity and Judaism in the creation of sciences is a theory and a problem for historians, even if in reality their impact was only ever indirect. But we take up this problem in another way, in relation to the creation of a science of monotheisms and their theology. This genesis that we seek is obviously distinct from Plato’s mathematico-philosophical creation, which takes place within it, or is an internal but particular realization of it. In any case, each attempt at a science is a rupture of myth, Plato with mathematics as science of the heavens, Galileo with physics as science of nature, Freud with psychoanalysis as science of the individual imaginary, Christ with the underdetermining placing under condition of those world-thoughts that are religions and what remains of them in their theological structure.
If Judaism is one of the conditions of the birth of modern science, as has been maintained, we hypothesize that this took place necessarily through the Christian mediation. The same goes for Greek paganism, which is a valid religion like any other. One invents philology, exegesis, and commentary, the other the axiomatic and deduction; these are frameworks of means for sciences to come, but do not at all provide the theory-frameworks or the science-continents in which they must be reinserted, possibly in relation to the “world as such” of which Christ (rather than Christianity) is the invention and the theory. We call substantial those religions that can, among other things, develop scientific knowledges founded on the unmediated primacy of the divine (even a polytheist divine), but that cannot directly furnish the model of a science of the world and thus cannot place it under condition. These religious images are globally “transcendental” structures—that is to say, structures with three terms or poles, historically diverse but sufficient for the type of invariant we seek. They are “substantial” or intraworldly religions that are on good terms with metaphysics, which they deform without suspending its transcendental kernel, as a function of their type of divine transcendence. Now, to put this transcendental structure of the world under condition, it is necessary to have invented a “form” or a formal paradigm articulated on a generic duality, man/world. This does not necessarily establish the technique of modern science, but promotes its generic character. “Formal” does not signify a formalism of the logical and mathematical type as usually understood, but a generic universality of the real, a human-oriented generic universality—what we call a materiel formalism. Christianity is the “formal” and “materiel” religion that invented, in the old religious context that served as its placenta, the mediate-without-mediation as unilateral duality and as messianic lived. As generic, it dedicates science to the world and to its theologico-philosophical structures rather than to the heavens or to signs, to human genericity rather than to the positivity of sciences-without-subject. It is only in Christ that we have the supra- or metatheological destination—nontheology is not a metatheology or a plan of salvation. What remains is to attach it to contemporary theoretical means.
THE ABSTRACT, JUDEO-CHRISTIAN AND GRECO-CHRISTIAN PROBLEMATICS
Let us eliminate straightaway the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Christian problematics. We are not interested in these overrestrictive historical problematics, in the broad sense of the relations between Judaism, philosophy, and Christianity. Judeo-Christianity is often a nostalgia for institutional Christians, a construction often judged to be phantasmatic, retroactive, linked no doubt to chance phenomena of theoretical and political exchanges between early communities, denied by many Jewish historians who refuse to be absorbed or sublated by Christianity. The time has not yet come to awaken what is a desire for origins or for a common root, a nostalgia for the Jewish emergence of Christianity that would historically and dogmatically complete it. History ceaselessly bifurcates at points of violence, rejections, and captures, and Judeo-Christianity is above all something that is at stake for the Christianity of the Church and seems destined to remain, on the Jewish side, a wish, certainly a very pious one. No ecumenism other than the political strategy of ulterior motives is possible between Church and Synagogue. Thus our point of view is not historical and continuous; it does not wish to and cannot enter into these so-called ecumenical debates. It is scientific: what can Judaism as material or variable contribute to the building of this science for which even Christianity is ultimately also a material or a variable? Let each remain faithful to the faith of his people and to his upbringing, Christ is another affair and another faith; fidelity is neither vernacular nor historical. The problem is not really any longer that of the Christian interpretation of Judaism, to be accomplished dialectically or otherwise, in a Pauline way or otherwise. One should not forget just how profoundly Levinas, for example, irrevocably closed the hiatus with the Greek and Christian grounds that he
exemplifies through the Hitler-event as philosophical event. A perhaps excessive exemplification, but it is necessary in these matters to think with the excess that alone can instruct and prevent any theoretical reconciliation—
theory is not the life that contents itself with doxa and generality in the guise of genericity. Attempts at synthesis, even very controlled ones (Derrida), if not incoherent, certainly can satisfy neither
philosophers coming from a Greek background nor Jewish
intellectuals, and still less the
faithful. With Christ, a fracture of an entirely other order took place, and was announced by him; it is irreversible despite all efforts to suture it. We have admitted this fracture, though it is covered over with a transcendental appearance and perhaps more still with an immanental appearance.
Of course, this problematic must be extended in the other direction, beyond Judeo-Christianity, all the way to Greco-Christianity—which is equally imaginary if it is isolated and becomes a religious gnosis. But all of these mélanges are but materials to be transformed in order to understand the Christ-event theoretically. As impossible as this theoretical construction may be from the philosophical and theological point of view, here we undertake to construct, in the name of non-Christian science, a christo-fiction, real but philosophically and theologically unverifiable. There are in the above, and there will be in what follows, “christo-fictional” statements that will be received as theological fictions but that are nevertheless true, even if indemonstrable within the theological framework.
THE AMBIGUITY OF CHRISTIANITY
To understand Christ as “factum” of faith or as mediate-without-mediation, we have had to go back to the Greek and the Jew—in an external, substantial, and synthetic combination not as practiced by the Church, laying claim to its double “heritage,” but as controlled by two quantum principles that are the refusal of all mélanges.
Substantial religions are autonomous and of a saturated consistency, they enjoy the independence of ancient roots. But Christianity is not a stock or a root—from this point of view it is more like a branch or a graft. Only the Jew and the Greek are our origins, not Christianity, which comes too late. The danger is that Christianity tends to establish itself as a root equal to others, to make itself a “religion” or even a “Europe,” something that at the beginning it was not meant to be. Its strength is to be a form that prevails over substance, a mediation, strictly speaking, between Athens and Jerusalem. In relation to the Jew and the Greek, it is almost empty or without content—it is just a miniscule historical and sectarian event that does not change the givens but the very form of the game; it presents itself as a new law or logic introduced between conflictual terms. Apparently the Jew does not have the will to synthesis either, but is a pure form of repulsion, a refusal to be assimilated; but at the same time the Jewish form of proselytism is entirely a defense of its territory and its substance alike. Greek polytheism is substantial and, to that extent, oriental; it defines itself using terms with little form, or that play the role of a borrowed form, like the metaphysics of the One and the Multiple; it subsists with a hybrid or mixed will to proselytism, philosophy. As for Christianity, it diverts the work of Christ and easily becomes militant and missionary, its expansive force coming from this in-between situation and from the possibility of synthesis; it carries a certain power of universality that is not yet saturated, and in it the form of synthesis tends to produce its own religious substance to be imposed. To simplify and make a symptomatic link with our problematic, which is that of the idempotence or algebra of Christ, Christianity, which is historically an a posteriori synthesis, presents itself as an a priori synthesis, and in this way tries to encroach upon the other religions.
This religious takeover is not at all what Christ called for in his most unambiguous sayings, or at least he did not wish it in the authoritarian form that it later received, particularly with Paul. Christ is not the capture, disguised as “heritage,” of the Greek and Jewish principles. If he transforms them, it is through an immanent procedure of the preemption of the lived of Jewish and Greek subjects, which he carries into quantum-oriented genericity. We seem to give priority to Christianity over the other religions, but whatever religion it has become, its essence is to be a force that wishes to be fundamental rather than a religious substance. This is why, if it is seen-in-Christ as we propose, it becomes a nonreligious force empty of all proselytism—messiahs are actual, even if one is tempted to say that they are “rare.” The gnostic Christ is the prior-to-priority over all religion, which implies that he is freed from Christianity itself. We distinguish the christic stance from Christianity, which has only been able to borrow from existing religions so as to constitute this mixture that ceaselessly betrays Christ. It is obvious in its conditions that Christianity can only claim to be a science of other religions on the condition of renouncing, through generic faith or fidelity, its own beliefs.
THE GENERIC QUANTUM AND THE SCIENCE OF RELIGIONS
Generic quantum theory is not positive physics, but is said of the sciences that imply man as subject bound by the world. We must modify our concept of the quanta of action in order to give it a human orientation.
A scientific constant cannot be of the order of a subjectivity or a transcendental consciousness, nor of an “objective transcendental”—this is mere wordplay. The constant must first of all be scientific, like an objective law (Kant would say
quid facti?, an a priori algebraic fact), and
to this extent it is lived through preemption over the subject or philosophizable doxa. It is what we call the subject-science as “objective” nonreflexive lived. The idea of the generic is that every subject begins prior-to-priority through a scientific law. This is certainly an abstract or incomplete moment, and it must be fulfilled qua lived. Religions precede man, but man precedes prior-to-priority the science of religions—this also is the meaning of gnosis. The All is preceded prior-to-priority by science, but the All must follow and cede its aspect of the lived in order to complete the generic. The subject cannot support itself all alone through its own transcendental forces as constant. What maintains it constant and open is either a law of immanence, but a scientific or objective one, or the transcendence of the Other. To maintain this openness, one has the choice between the Judaic transcendence of the Other that affects man in exteriority and the immanence of a law as invariant or constant algebraic Same that “hooks up to” some nonegological lived. For our part we rely on the contingent rigor of science rather than the faultless rigor of God.
Michel Henry has formalized the minimal invariant for all possible philosophies of Greek and non-Christian, non christo-centric origin: “phenomenological distance” or exteriority as transcendence of phenomenal depth, a new triad. But this philosophical invariant is incapable of forming a generic constant of the scientific type; through a too-simple opposition, it makes possible an immanent ego as transcendental, which apparently has certain aspects of a scientific constant, but still a philosophical one. For phenomenological distance is an invariant principle, it is never annulled; the transcendental thus cannot risk being flattened onto the earth or the empirical. So what keeps the transcendental opening of Being open, preventing it from falling back on itself? What is it that maintains the transcendental dimension and makes it a quantum of phenomenal distance? Understood as transcendental, this constant is a pure supposition, for the circuit of being comes back not only on itself but into itself, from the exterior and the interior, or is flattened ecstatically in itself; it is in reality a circle that dissimulates itself. This quantum is really a quantum of autoimplication, a constant itself autoimplicated, and that must therefore remain in itself. It is not yet a scientific constant, which would have to be a stable but noncircular structure.
Christ invents the quantum of faith. He presents himself as generic (and thus unilateral) duality, as the necessary condition under which every life is led and reproduced. Faith, action, love, or power suppose such a conception of the quantum. These are obviously neither physical quantities nor philosophical differences: the generic quantum shows that the acting of man is “quantifiable” without passing by way of a hard physical quantification. Faith is not an “act” of faith but in itself a continual vectoriell flux that brings about the cognizance of messianity. There are quanta of faith, of action, or of love that are unilateral and associate two elements that are unilaterally heterogeneous, more than simply unequal or differential. The generic is duel (binary), but because it is quartial (neither singular nor plural, neither one nor multiple, but complex like the “imaginary number” or, more intuitively, the quarter-turn) in origin and is distinguished from the physical quantum and from philosophical difference alike. The Duality of the Father and Son reduced not to a simple transcendence and overpowering unity but to an immanence that suspends the Father, underdetermines him, or makes him fall into-immanence. The Trinity is obviously the return of the philosophical machine, which does not want to relinquish its property, and prefers to place the Father back into the transcendent(al) circle, with the Holy Spirit to bless this synthesis. This trinitarian triangulation with the holy familialism that follows from it flattens faith onto transcendent belief. The algebra of idempotence, on the contrary, is valid everywhere where the subject is involved alongside science as generic, and above all in philosophy and in religion. The amorous lived, for example, is duel without being analytic or synthetic, but just “neutralized” in its ego, giving rise to a science of lovers as generic subject-science.