BELIEF AS DECOHERENCE OF FAITH
What, then, distinguishes the individual subject determined in-the-last-instance as faithful from the old subject of philosophical belief from which he is extracted, as its clone; what distinguishes the kernel of the faithful lived from its metaphysical placenta?
1. Its deindividualization or generic nonegoism, which it owes to messianity. A subjective lived necessarily human in origin but become an objective procedure is not denied or reduced to an object, it has just lost its egological form, its form as transcendental consciousness. Science here is the science of living beings or of believers, but the science of living beings is not itself living—this would be a vicious circle—rather the science of “spiritual” life is itself lived-without-life. Since the living being is the circle or the fold of the lived and life, the christic science of living beings knows nothing at all of life, it requires it as a lived that is unknotted from life, with the latter remaining sutured to the lived. Life gives rise to philosophy and theology (Michel Henry) but our problem is still elsewhere: it is not to found a new theology, whatever one might think, but to render scientifically intelligible this premature and precipitate “science” that is theology. A non-Christian science has to be not believing or faithful without further specification, but generically faithful.
2. Its nature as christic lived. We already know the two procedures (superposition and noncommutativity) that make it a science on the quantum model, but what is it that specifies it as non-Christian? Its essence of faith. Obviously it is more generally a lived, but this lived is determined according to the sayings (
paroles) of Christ as path or way, as memory of a futural coming, as fidelity. As messianic superposition, faith is the essence of every fidelity, and one of the specific traits of the generic human lived, which has a plurality of them. Each generically human science requires a trait that specifies the subject concerned in the form of a lived of a univocally faithful nature, whether it is the amorous lived, the lived of the artist, the lived of the political subject. Faith in the generic sense has almost nothing to do with belief, which is its transcendent and worldly derailing; it is not faith in … a person, an idea, or an event, but immanent faith. Just as lived and subjective faith does not refer to a subject but to a subject-science, it does not refer to an object, even an interiorized and idealized one, it is of the nature of immanence, which is neither an all nor a singularity but a superposition.
Vectoriell superposition is messianity as fidelity of immanence-(to)-itself. The Christ-event makes a new science emerge because it is the science of the world as object of belief, a world of which Being, the One, the Idea, or
physis are modalities. The world is the gnostic object par excellence, globalization or not. The conflation of faith and belief, of messianity and the world, is the disaster that affects faith as revealed by Christ, the Christian confessions being the agents and the consumers that render “decoherent” faith as belief. Quite obviously this destructive decoherence is the real content of “original sin,” which is its mythical projection.
THE QUANTUM INTERPRETATION OF ORIGINAL SIN
Can “original sin” still have a meaning or receive a generic or quantum interpretation? If there is an “original sin” that is the fault of generic humanity, its fallibility or its temptation, it resides in the extreme ease
in principle with which faith can be destroyed by belief, belief in the world in itself and in its relevance to the things of faith. Faith is messianity, it is lost or destroyed in belief and its temptation, which is its confusion or macroscopic identification with the world, not even its becoming-macroscopic, rather its destruction. The exercise of faith as decision fallen into its own immanence is arrested or obstructed by not only that which should only have been the occasion of its resumption, but that which has become the origin and foundation of its thought and its life, the world can only destroy it in its principles. At best we have life and movement in the milieu of the world whose most general form is spontaneous theology; we do not have the lived of the vectoriell reaction that “moves” mountains. For faith itself, mountains, in their immobility, are unlocalizable. The mechanism of belief is precisely the vainglory of religions, the loss of the generic through an excess of transcendence, which makes them interpret sin as a fall, when it is more an attempt at elevation and overgrowth, a negation of the generic state of humans denying the conditions of their salvation.
To speak of the evental encounter of quantum theory and the subject that produces generic humanity, each religious Law has its intuition and its interpretation. The Greeks, since Heraclitus at least, have the flash, the source of all philosophical forms of light that give and withdraw, shine out and fade, it is the aesthetic intuition and ontological seduction. The Jews have another experience of the real, a “Sinaic” experience through the voice and through an affect of the absolute Other, the ethical intuition of an absolute transcendence. Voice and light are intuitions that hesitate between metaphor and concept, but for us they are only symptoms, for they obviously have not taken on vectoriell form; they are prequantum and lacking in “formalism.” They are limited or inhibited by subjects as spontaneous philosophers, whose transcendence resists the traversal of waves of voice and of light, and whose egological properties transmit messianity poorly. These properties, which religions interpret as egoism of the flesh and sin, refuse the passage of messianity and destroy it. The logic of our interpretations leads us to say that the rigidity of the sinner is his original “macroscopic,” that is, worldly, nature, and that original sin is understood as destruction of idempotence and superposition, as decoherence of fidelity, destruction of the very conditions of messianity. From the point of view of philosophy and religion, every wavelike or vectoriell phenomenon is perceived in terms of the world, under conditions of punctuality, circularity, or globality. But messianity is only an event if it has the continuity of phases and does not disappear punctually in itself or into a subjective interiority—it must under-go like a flash that is not extinguished in itself like a light that withdraws into itself; it under-goes as the secret of a “half-light” that calls for a theoretical explanation rather than the doubling operation of a clarification, an elucidation, or perhaps the simplicity of a clearing. As to the voice, if ultimately it does participate effectively in messianity, in so doing it would cease to affect itself as voice of Being, but also to signify through its infinite reserve and its transcendence. It under-goes as voice “in-phase” and without emphasis, underheard.
MAN MADE MESSIAH AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST BELIEF
The vector of messianity is a virtual and therefore incomplete gnosis, a science that must incarnate itself in human materielity or dress itself in faith, a knowledge called to become a neutralized and generic lived, a subject-without-ego. Of this lived obtained via superposition, it will be said that it is cloned from the lived of the philosophical subject or preempted over it by the vector, rather than the vector being schematized in it; but as idempotent, it no longer owes anything to the form of this occasion. It is enough that the philosophical occasion (that is to say, we, the believing subjects of the Church or of the world), that we should spontaneously place ourselves in the position of sufficiency, for from and “in” this immanence has already emerged a messiah-existing-subject, this time in a stance of struggle against the world and belief. We do not re-act against the world—it is the world that resists the transformation imposed on it. The generic immanent lived under-goes messianically the transcendence of the world, unilateralizes it, or makes it fall into vectoriellity. If transcendence were really and absolutely in itself, to that extent we could believe that the Messiah under-goes as transcendental and as schematizable in the human as anthropological given. But the process in the matrix is immanental and not transcendental, and the transcendental version of messianity inverts the real process (which is not the inversion of the apparent process). Thus the simple vector of messianity must be fulfilled or completed by the faith of the faithful-subject, by the messiah in his struggle against the world. Becoming messiah or faithful in-the-last-instance implies or conditions the struggle against “Catholic,” or more generally religious, paganism, against the belief and fetishism that objectivate faith transcendently. The old Greek and polytheistic paganism was a paganism in the eyes of monotheism, but it is now the hypertranscendent monotheisms that are vainglorious substances in relation to the faith that transits Christ. It is a matter of incarnating subjectively in we who are also the occasions of infidelity, the Christ who is a matrix (not a center) of all incarnation. To be exact, it is less an imitation in rivalry with a Christ supposedly already complete than his unilateral “imitation.” The content of Christ is that superposition with messianity that we, subjects of the world, are forced to accept as a possibility of failure. The imitation of Christ is not that of a Master or a Hero; it is done, it is “made,” through that superposition of messianity with belief thus transformed, and as a cloning of a faithful-subject in struggle that derives from it. It is the happiness and the suffering of being torn from the world qua sufficient, not the eternal return into the self or into the ego of pious interiority. The messianic flux of faith must be completed by our becoming-faithful in a state of struggle against that which we are always too much: believers-in-the-world. If God is “made” man, couldn’t we say that we the humans are “made” messiahs, against the times, against all evidence?
THE THREAD OF FAITH AND TEMPTATION
We know that the structure of unilateral duality is susceptible to a double interpretation of the subject that it contains as noema or clone fallen into messianic immanence: it is interpreted either as subject that knows itself faithful or determinate in-the-last-instance, or as objective appearance of a subject that lives as in-itself and as delivered to the world as a function of its attraction = X, which is the force of evil. As soon as generic messianity “surpasses itself” as subject of individual origin and configures a faithful subject, it is inseparable from this double interpretation. It is in this that Christ cuts out messianity “by the sword” from the human subject that is, nevertheless, indivisible, but solicited by a double interpretation: philosophically believing or generically faithful. It is not the One that is divided or decided, only to be finally reconstituted. It is in fact the One in its idempotence that divides and imperceptibly detaches the saved subject from the subject that has given its belief to the world under the constant or structuring attraction of original sin—that is to say, the dominant force = X opposed to messianity. Faith is obviously a duality with only one face, but one that must, in principle, become incessantly double-faced and fall into ambiguity. To perceive generic messianity and the world-evil = X as a duality, with the messiah “between them”—this is precisely the illusion of theology, which confuses the messiah with a messenger, the mediate-without-mediation with a mediation “between” opposite terms. On the other hand, the state of fidelity under-goes when the faithful subject knows himself to be detached, through messianity, from the unfaithful subject, now seeing in the latter his worldly double or his caricature, without placing his fidelity in it. Unilateral duality is not only that which passes from immanence to transcendence; it is the fact that this duality passes or is concentrated
in the cloned faithful subject, which can also always be the sufficiency of the in-itself. How can the “creatures of God” or “children of the world” that we are not be born a very first time in faith? If one has not forgotten that messianity makes itself unifrontal or unifacial, one will admit that the edge of the sword is that of faith or, better still, of messianity. Strictly speaking, messianity as radical immanence cuts into theological double transcendence, but theological illusion and philosophical error are already in this interpretation, which transfers the duality of that which is decided, the theo-christic doublet, onto that which decides and which would be of the same model, the biface of a sword or a weapon. Messianity does not act: this is why it cuts unilaterally. Messianity depotentializes the strong force, simplifies it; this is the only way in which the weak force of immanence can cut the Gordian knot of double transcendence into which the world is twisted. The sayings of Christ have been taken and understood as the dogmas or sayings of a prophet, as given or as containing, from the start and in themselves, the meaning that they must have definitively. Not only is there a religious and mythological fetishism of these logia, but theology, obsessed by philosophy, has neglected the fact that knowledge of Christ is not at all complete and given, ready-made to enter into a system—it is a process of cognizance in progress. If these sayings do not announce a plan of salvation, but rather describe it, at least ideally, it is indeed because there is a becoming or a process in the kerygma, and because it is up to us to fulfill it, to verify it in our acts and in our lives. These are not commandments or norms, imperatives, but variables for a future life, coordinates to define the lived of the faithful. Christ’s sayings are the givens of the problem, not its solution; as for the solution, it is concentrated in the becoming of the faithful.
There are three ages of Christ: the prophets, the apostles, the faithful. From the religious point of view, Christ cuts orthogonally the course of history and redistributes its phases otherwise: the age of prophets (the preparation), the age of apostles (the announcement), the age of the faithful (the implementation). Each of these ages has its own way of being contemporary with Christ: the Church is founded upon a contemporaneity with his historical past, it is the reified preparation; the present is that of the apostles or of theologians with their different testimonies; and the faithful are the secret apostles of Christ, contemporaries of his promise. The faithful successor to Christ qua promise is not the apostle or the disciple, he is contemporary with the promise and with futurality, but not with the present like the apostles, nor with the past or with transcendence like the prophets. In this gallery of figures, the philosopher and the theologian are hybridized characters, haunting the world and condemned to make a tradition of their wandering.
BEYOND ATHENS AND JERUSALEM—AND ROME
1. Under the name of Christ, it is a matter at once but in-the-last-instance of the real of faith or of faith as real object, and of a cognizance that is itself faithful of this faith, or of the faith-in-person of the new faithful. The generic lived or “Christ,” cognizance of which we seek in the name of faith, is itself a “function” of two variables. For the Jewish and Greek givens are the variables or properties of Christ to be conjugated under Christ as “imaginary number,” or to be treated as lived vectors of faith or fidelity, in awaiting the result or the measure that each faithful realizes in his or her person. The plan of salvation is flexibilized, dismembered, its teleology is unmade, in particular that which solved by way of the probable and the aleatory the question of predestination or of the grace for which the faithful is responsible. There is no reified, fixed, dogmatic plan of salvation, controlled by the Church.
2. In view of a science of religions, we have generically formalized certain Christian notions such as “Christ,” “Life,” and “Resurrection.” This is a radical and theoretical secularization, not a historical continuity. For example, it is impossible to constitute the ultimate generic lived, that which makes Man-in-person, using philosophical concepts or even philosophical operations. It is necessary to change style of thought and to posit it as a before-first term (but determined in-the-last-instance by its “object”). This is why what is needed here is a theory-fiction and models, a modelization. Messianity is the nothing-of-the-world, which is not a worldly nothing, not a “nihil” on whose basis something will be created in continuous and sufficient manner (ex nihilo), something that must be already given and prefigured, creation as vicious repetition. And as for “something,” no radically immanent lived can derive from it. Philosophers seek a “something” only in the most remote and most anonymous regions of being, not truly beyond Being. This is to say that the messianic lived is a given, but since it is neither nothing nor something, its mode of being-given is special, it comes-without-coming, it is born-without-birth immanently, from the futural ground of itself. Is that to say that it is an object of waiting, a promise awaiting its realization? An unexpected among unexpecteds, this side of waiting itself, messianity is the futural Real rather than a realization, even if the Real under-goes immanently without returning to itself, remaining that nothing of being that it has always been.
So is it a matter of a leap in the Real, or of the last possible lived? But where would we leap from if we are already in-lived or in-coming? Perhaps we need to leap, in fact, if we are philosophers—but then we fall back into philosophy and not into the lived, from which we have never fallen. On the other hand, we never stop “refalling” in the grip of philosophy, according to an immanence that we nevertheless can never leave. How to escape from these aporias? They are only aporias for philosophical sufficiency. They surreptitiously suppose that the lived is not a simple radical idempotence, but that the Real in itself was gathered into an All at once divisible and indivisible, divided and undividable. The lived is radically a stranger to the All, indifferent rather than an absolute stranger, but a Stranger-advent for the All. Are we admitting nothing more than the Real or positing it as axiom? But if it makes possible or underdetermines the axioms, then it is itself not the object of simple axioms—it is radically anaxiomatic and anhypothetical without being that absolute of the transcendence of the Good. It would rather be a falling short of essence, more secret and futural than any falling short. To say it again and otherwise than in a Platonic manner, the Real is not anaxiomatic or anhypothetical; it is, instead, the axiom that is underdetermined unilaterally or in-the-last-instance.
3. We distinguish philo-fiction, including its religious elements, which belong to the real and not the transcendental order, from its religious modelization, which allows us to understand our usage of religion. It is religion that supplies paradigms to philosophy since the latter, considered as distinct from religions or strictly defined as transcendental mechanism, in a sense has none. Meaning that the great philosophical mutations are in fact mutations between religious paradigms.
We must fix a new primacy, a Real of a nonreligious type, a non- that is not absolute but radical. The terms used, such as Christ, Lived, and so on, are primary nonreligious terms—not immediate or absolute negations of the religious, but religious terms reduced to the state of a priori materiel and oraxiomatic fiction. On the basis of Christianity as religious paradigm, but a paradigm that is philosophized and then “transformed,” here as always, into an occasion, we draw three consequences of christo-fiction.
4. The end or sacrificial consummation of transcendent religion through the affirmation of generic immanence. The two other paradigms, Greek and Judaic, conserve the transcendent real, and the Christianity of the Church and even the christo-centrism that it sometimes admits exploit it without measure, despite its end being programmed and announced by Christ, by mixing it with the Greek and Judaic. These three paradigms are linked, and they continue to be linked still in philosophy, which concatenates them with its duplicity.
5. The constitution by cloning of a Stranger-subject for whom the announced end is already realized, or immanent, is a real subject as transfinite organon or as partially dependent on the world. This subject is modelizable (and no more than modelizable) by the innumerable christologies produced by philosophy. We must thus distinguish real futurality or the specific under-going of generic Man from the messianity of the Stranger-subject, which conserves something of the transcendental.
6. This subject is the site or the ratio cognoscendi (to speak for a moment in an inadequate manner) that retroactively pronounces the ratio essendi, the consummation of the transcendent religious, or of the Jewish God, in a transfinite messianity, a futurality, or an under-going. The messianic Stranger announces retroactively that he is generic Man in-the-last-instance or that he is in-immanent-under-going.