More notes in the margin of Philip Goodchild’s book Religion and Capitalism:
What matters most? This book presents us with four insights which have not, according to Goodchild, been thought in their interrelation. Firstly, there is the truth of suffering: human life is not sustainable, but the ecological catastrophe is preventable; secondly, the awareness that money has become the self-positing measure of all values; thought and values themselves must be understood in terms of their monetary value; thirdly, the awareness of what Goodchild calls the “experience” of God and fourthly, the awareness of the “murder of God” as this reveals the nihilism of the European tradition – the values which devalue themselves.
Traditional accounts of this murder will not suffice. It is not the development of nominalism, or the displacement of religious authority from ecclesiastical institutions to individual conscience in the Reformation, or the rise of the experimental method in the sciences which transformed the concretion of knowledge and prepared the way for secularism and atheism; none of these accounts for their condition, which is, Goodchild argues, a shift in pieties – a shift from God to Mammon, which is to say, the murder of God happens because of the emergence of the self-regulating market as the basis for the organization of the social order.
What is to be done? How might one alter the currency? Might one hold out for a redirection of attention – for a new piety, a new religion, a new conception of God and with it, a new understanding of truth and goodness? For Goodchild, to alter the currency is to redirect attention. It is to understand economics and economism as a kind of piety – as a way of directing attention away from what matters. But it is also to counterpose a religious piety to economic piety as it is founded upon excess and not conservation. One might object that this talk of piety nostalgic. Doesn’t scientific progress already testify to the anachronism of the appeal to piety? But, for Goodchild, the currency of truth must be altered, since the apparent stability purchased through abstraction wagers the real. When truth is understood as immutable, incorporeal and identical over time, it threatens to pass over what is changeable, material and discontinuous. The objects of astronomy or mechanics are indeed regular and ordered in their behavior – but this is not the case with the ostensible object of economics.
Pierre Bourdieu writes of the mason who forewent the ritual meal that was supposed to be eaten in the mason’s honor after he had constructed a house. He asked for 200 francs in exchange for the meal in addition to the 1,000 francs for the construction itself. What is wrong with that? The event of the meal – the taste of the food, the animals killed to supply that food, the friendships which are formed and reaffirmed over that meal, conversation and conviviality – is not substitutable. Trust is everything in the system Bourdieu describes; therefore, the temptation is to cheat by feigning trustworthiness.
One might understand the transition of ritual to historical piety to occur at this point, although Goodchild warns us against any simple understanding of this transition. The God of historical piety is understood as being able to bestow reparations for suffering in the present: He will punish deceit and wickedness; the righteous will prosper and the wicked will perish. Piety, here, is no longer directed towards the ritual repetition of a past event but to the future. Abraham, trusting the promise of God, leaves Ur because of a promise; he ventures his life on this uncertainty. Ritual piety is put to death when he is called to sacrifice his son; meaning and value spring out of this gesture. Hebrew monotheism depends upon a rejection of idolatry: one worships one God; the past, and the ritual piety in which one returns ceaseless to the past, is sacrificed in view of a universalism. Piety is now oriented towards the future – to the coming of the Messiah, or, with Christianity, to the return of Christ which will bring about the Kingdom of God.
But here, already, the divine economy allows God to resemble Mammon. The event of the murder of God has already been prepared; historical piety is perilously close to the economism that will allow commodification and reification. But religion does not collapse into capitalism. Broadly speaking, for Goodchild, religious piety is still able to embrace the singular and exceptional: it can attend to suffering because it is pluralistic in a way capital is not. Doesn’t Marx show this when he allows that money “is the god among commodities” – that it is “the incarnation of exchange value”? The monism of capitalism allows it to as it were worship itself; piety synthesizes time such that the future becomes, for the financier, the object of speculation even as, for the householder, the future harbors catastrophe: the threat that he or she will be unable to subsist.
It is perhaps because only the philosopher of religion can understand the stakes of what Goodchild calls apocalyptic piety – an experience which directs itself towards the singularity of suffering in a way outside the consensus. Apocalyptic piety opens what Goodchild calls the “chaotic interval” which other forms of piety conceal (indeed, other forms of piety, whether economic or religious, are precisely an attempt to shield themselves from chaos). One cannot bring oneself into such piety through an act of will. Rather, it reveals itself only in an experience of excess which overwhelms the consensual determination of what is real. Philosophy of religion, understanding apocalyptic piety in its philosophical and political stakes, which is to say, as a way of revealing a future no longer bound by chains of necessity to the present, rises to its vocation to alter the currency. Such a philosophy must be a critical theory of religion because otherwise the experience of God which gives itself in apocalyptic piety will be misunderstood. Only thus might the thinker plunge into the reality of change and discontinuity – to the becoming and affect of the world as it exceeds economic determination and is bound, in that opening, to what Goodchild calls absolute faith.
Reading these pages, I am reminded of Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia. We first meet Domenico as he is prevented from his attempt to cross the hot pool dedicated to Saint Catherine of Siena in the Tuscan village Bagno Vignoni, where the protagonist of the film, the Russian poet Gorchakov is staying. Domenico, we learn, locked himself in the house for seven years with his family, waiting for the end of the world. Gorchakov is taken by this stranger. When he is told Domenico is mad, he replies: “We don’t know what so-called insanity, or madness, is. First, they are inconvenient, they get in everyone’s way. Their behavior, their wishes lie outside the generally accepted rules. And then, we simply don’t wish to understand them. They are terribly lonely, but I’m sure they are closer to the truth than we are.” Later, Domenico immolates himself after preaching to the army of solitaries he has gathered about him for three days and nights. Before he sets himself on fire, he cries: “What is this world worth, what is the value of its truth if some unhappy mental patient, as you call us, tells you: ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves!’ While there’s still time!” Tarkovsky shows us Domenico’s death is not beautiful. He falls and crawls along the ground, crying out. In the interval between the immolation and his death, he is just a man who has set himself alight. His is the mad attempt draw the whole world into the fire of sacrifice and bring it shuddering back into birth. But it is, perhaps, the act of madness which reveals the madness of the world and thus the chaotic interval between one future and another. Meanwhile, far away, Gorchakov has heard of Domenico’s death. He takes the stub of a candle and begins to walk across the drained pool. This is not an act of ritual piety (the repetition of an eternal past) nor even an act of historical piety (it is not performed in the service of righteousness). Dazzled by the chaotic interval, it honors an apocalyptic piety.
I wonder whether Goodchild’s philosopher of religion must embody both Domenico and Gorchakov, answering to the opening of the chaotic interval and then, afterwards, patiently transmitting that experience, along with the singularity of suffering to which it is linked. The first apocalyptic experience, the experience of the interval, leads to death, or at least a kind of dying (Domenico’s self-sacrifice; the shattering of self-consciousness which Goodchild himself describes). It gives way to a second – the affirmation of difference as a potency of which nothing can be known. Such difference is wondrous – to think, henceforward, is to answer what is unthinkable; it is to direct attention to an experience whose source one cannot render explicit. But Goodchild maintains a third apocalyptic experience is necessary through which one comes to understand the experience in question, the affirmation of difference, as an experience of God. I will close with a quotation from the last chapter of Religion and Capitalism, which, if I do not yet understand, is a sign, for me of the necessity of rereading this book:
Apocalyptic piety has no name for the God it experiences, no identity on which to cling. It is merely an experience after the death of God, the subject and the world. It follows the dissolution of reality and the dissolution of the will. If it awakens to God as Truth, Goodness and Awareness, this is not a God it can condition, possess or will. It is merely an experience. Apocalyptic piety stands outside itself: it is a capacity to laugh at, relinquish and forgive oneself; it is a capacity to attend to suffering; it is a capacity to bear within oneself little fragments of heaven and hell. It is compassion.
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