“the Kingdom of God is at hand, because it is your hand.” – Timothy Morton
After the deconstruction and decline of religious institutions in the West, a new void of chaotic potential arises. The critique religious dogma is often thought of as a struggle for mental liberation and freedom; to choose how we live and love, to be free to actively create worlds rather than reactively bend beneath God-given laws. This is the legacy of Nietzsche. Yet I often think about this funny but serious remark by a former teacher of mine exclaiming “I detest sincerity!” (“jeg er afskyr inderlighed!”). His hardcore post-structuralist attitude could simply not stand the idea of being a slave to any kind of ‘soulful essentialism’. His deconstructionist mindset was a brilliant one for critical thinking, but also seemed to me a defence against the fateful surrender demanded by beauty. Belief in any ‘truth’ was framed as self-deception, and this teacher seemed to have little regard for the meaning of faith and fidelity – perhaps as an object of study of which he was indeed engaged. However, I would like to approach this entire question from a different angle. While concepts such as ‘truth’ ‘essence’ and ‘soul’ may not be reflections of any eternal meta-physical laws, they can be engaged as temporary constructions. In other words, I think there is an incredibly fertile field in contemplating the meaning of soulful anti-essentialism, and how religion may be reconstructed after it’s deconstruction? (note: while I write about ‘religion’ as a general concept, I am personally most familiar with Christianity and will covertly be placing much of my thought within the context of this tradition, with its particular challenges and possibilities.).
For me it is not a question of regressive nostalgia into the refuge of past narratives, but rather of engaging a whole new view of religion as an assemblage of rituals, elements, symbols, spaces, and practices, that may form a meaningful whole. I should choose my words carefully here, for any idea of a ‘whole’ risks creating the ‘other’, as when an obsession with truth makes everything else a lie. Bateson called this process ‘schismogenesis’ – when something attains a structure or quality by being opposite to something else. Whenever a deep schism arises through schismogenesis in the field of religion, we are at risk of slipping towards the well known fascistoid ‘whole’ of theology, that is obsessed with its own integrity at the expense of ‘heretics’. So, what I mean by a re-constructing a meaningful whole in the field of religion is to contemplate how something may happen in an temporary assemblage of religious elements, that cannot emerge without this interrelated structure. A good example may be a choir. Only when enough individuals collectively agree on a structure, method, and practice, will the choir begin to take shape and give voice to something entirely new. Everybody involved has to be ‘temporarily’ committed to the choir – to have faith and sincerity in it’s purpose – but this should not mean that choir music should suddenly be viewed as the only important kind of music. It is a constructed whole that believes in itself but does not consolidate this belief into a metaphysical dogma.
I love choir music, especially Gregorian chant or Hildegard Von Bingen’s choir compositions, but I thank god that aesthetic experiments in music other than choir music exist! The liberation and multiplicity of creativity itself has a spiritual purpose, and it would kill choir music if there was nothing else. Yet there is something antithetical about the choir as it contrasts contemporary primacy of self-expression, idiosyncrasy, and an obsession with originality often found in contemporary art and music. Byung Chul Han writes that “today, time lacks a solid structure. It is not a house but an erratic stream. It disintegrates into a mere sequence of point-like presences; it rushes off. There is nothing to provide time with any hold [Halt]. Time that rushes off is not habitable.”1. This is the experience of living within a deconstructed reality; we gain artistic freedom and accelerated momentum of invention, but gradually loose the sense of durability and coherence. This is why I think we would become extremely impoverished without religion, for this is exactly the domain of creating durable myths, temples, and practices that synchronise our present with the traditions past and nurtures cohesion in future. I fully acknowledge the pitfalls and dangers of institutional religion, but it is simply to banal to think that we have nothing to loose by leaving it behind.
I think there is a good case to be made I am not alone in this endeavour – that in fact our cultural sphere is already brimming with initiatives that tries to bridge a Christian heritage with ‘post-modern’ aesthetic practices. As the world around us seems to disintegrate just fine without the help of more Nietzschean hammers, many of us are trying to find an alternative to deconstruction and enter a time of reconstruction. It is the task of returning to temples and integrating its own shadows as Jung attempted in Christianity2. It is in the attempts harmonise post-structuralist thought and queer theory with a new theology as attempted by Linn Marie Tonstad3. It is being done in the retrieval of a mystical heritage within the dominating religious narratives as done by Aksel Haaning4. It is being done by applying post-humanist, ecological thinking to biblical text as means of putting its wisdom in service of nature rather than patriarchy as attempted by Timothy Morton5. These all seem like tricky and worthwhile endeavours to me. Luckily it is in full swing, across all forms of media, and the sheer number of heterogenous instances of art and performance that integrate religious symbology and heritage is abounding, yet it cannot be put under one umbrella or movement. This suggests an inherent form of multiplicity and a negation of consolidation. It should probably also be understood in terms of a cultural context where idealising uniqueness as a social ideal has shifted from ‘fitting in’ to ‘fitting out’ if you will6. Rather than going for a common utopia, we are creating many heterotopias –worlds within worlds that may be deviant spaces from the norm – the norm in our case being a disenchanted heteronormative production-paradigm7.
So what do we call this particular pattern or tendency happening in art, culture and academia? I suggest religious paradoxy to be a fine suggestion for naming this ongoing reappropriation of religion into heterotopic practices. ‘Paradox’ derives from ‘para’ (against) ‘doxa’ (opinion/belief), and has its second meaning as the more well know ‘unsolvable’ character of something. Contrary to orthodoxy which derives from ‘orthos’ (true/right) ‘doxa’ (opinion/belief), paradoxy is always differentiating itself as an unsolvable equation. Religious paradoxy is the attitude of embracing religion while criticising it, which makes it an unsolved, unstable, unnerving, paradoxical state. It is alive because it is unstable. Some would simply call themselves ‘spiritual but not religious’ but once we begin to incorporate explicitly religious elements into our work or practice, I think it would be misleading not to acknowledge a religious dimension. Religious paradoxy may be a name for this vague grey zone between a general spiritual attitude towards existence, and a curious impulse to retrieve religion on new terms. Perhaps our lack of a proper name or conceptualisation of the grey zone creates the condition of thinking dualistically about this subject: as either spiritual vs. religious, post-structuralist vs. essentialist. In the beginning of this text i employed my teacher as a straw-man for this kind of dualism where we have to choose between soulful sincerity or critical thinking. I wonder if he had thought differently about these matters with another conceptual map at hand? I wonder what might be possible if we embark on a collective conscious effort to make religion a living, breathing, temple of deep time and higher futurity with the paradox at its heart.
Notes:
1: See Byung Chul Han: ‘The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present’ (2020)
2: See Murray Stein: ‘Jung’s Treatment of Christianity – The psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition’ (2013)
3: See Linn Marie Tonstad: ‘Queer Theology – Beyond Apologetics’ (2018)
4: See Aksel Haaning: ‘Kristen Mystik’ (2024) and ’Naturens Lys’ (2017)
5: See Timothy Morton: ‘Hell – In Search of a Christian Ecology’ (2024)
6: See Andreas Reckwitz ‘Society of Singularities’ (2017)
7: Heterotopia: a concept coined by Foucault to describe spaces that operate outside normal social conventions.
