Immanence and Religion IV: Vital Forces and the Return of the Religious, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religious Violence

Prior to theological determination religion is an awareness and experience of chaosmos. Chaosmos is another name for nature more generally, in that we find in nature both absolute flux (chaos) and relative harmony (cosmos). It is in nature that human persons suffer. And in our age of burgeoning ecological awareness we have found that it is not just human persons that suffer, half-crushed under the weight of their own progress, but elephants also weep. Human beings share another thing besides tears with the elephants. Teenage elephants who have been orphaned from their parents due to poaching and legal hunting have gone on rampages through Indian villages, waging a guerrilla war against those who cause them suffering.

When one part of the human population oppresses the other, it causes suffering. Are we surprised, then, that these peoples turn both to their religion and violence in response to that suffering? If we define religion as a response to suffering this should not be confused with a quietist approach to this world. Even as those who hope for another world do indeed hope for that world, they act now to affect this one. Though they may fabulate a radical transcendence, this is to give them the possibility of acting now against a far superior force. Henri Bergson has argued that this reactive force in religion, or in his terms, static religion, ‘is a defensive reaction of nature against what might be depressing for the individual, and dissolvent for society, in the exercise of intelligence.’ This is to say, the human person is a natural being and its constitution of a religious act is a defensive measure against the ‘depressing’ chaos of nature, even when that nature is another human society.

We may understand this in part as one aspect of nature, the human community, attempting to redirect or misdirect another aspect of nature, the chaotic flux and endless differentiation of epochal time. Bergson’s example is sexual pleasure. The most seemingly natural (that is efficient) way to procreate would simply to repeat in the human person what is present in most other animals. That is, there would be a drive to procreate with no pleasure involved, we’d mate and then be done with it. But through the attachment of pleasure to the sexual act we’ve found a way to ‘trick’ nature and cut the sexual act and its pleasure from the goal of procreation. For Bergson this is largely ambivalent, or at least not lacking in possibility, and there appears to be no real need to defend Bergson against charges of heternormativity. The fact that we are free to not procreate and enjoy the sexual act opens two possibilites. One is a ‘superficial repetition of the same’, or the notion that pleasure creates literally nothing except more pleasure for its own sake and the other is the love of all beings, literally of everything. That is, beneath this seemingly nihilistic and, if universalized, destructive force (pleasurable sex with no goal) lies a great hope – the love of all things.

This is why I say, with tongue firmly in cheek, that I’ve learned to stop worrying and love religious violence. Beneath violent religious acts is desire and as Deleuze and Guattari tell us “Desire is agape.” This desire is the impetus for the opening of time for the creation of a radical different future. In its pure state this is given the name mysticism by Bergson and the mystic names that person who is strong enough to turn back upon the chaosmos. The mystic does not need to have recourse to transcendence for meaning that preserves life by filling in the gap between reason and society, but is “content to feel itself pervaded, though retaining its own personality, by a being immeasurably mightier than itself.” Politically the mystic is open to a society of all humanity, an open society, and loves beyond humanity to the plants, animals, and the whole of nature. Such a mysticism must be produced through the ontological poverty of the multitude that, much more than dogma or hierarchical institutions, make up religion. Bergson’s notion of mysticism names something that everyday people experience and live through, rather than a certain grouping of ‘higher’ people with religion. Ultimately, it will not be the cloistered mystics that produce belief in this world for the creation of the future, it will be men and women working and labouring in the world with the same creative love that mystics experience in the desert.

Nature is not economical, it does not save time or rest, and only religion can match it in its lavishness. The task of philosophy is simply to redirect out attention, to discipline our attention so that this lavish expenditure of energy fosters a religious consciousness worthy of the suffering it responds to.