On Religion as an Alternative to Thought (Fragment)

 

Religious ritual creates a fixed space, a kind of standing in place, whose repetitions only ever involve partial catharsis (assuming we are speaking of orthodox religion). Thought is itself not unlike the experience of being initiated into it, i.e. the process of reading. The movement from beginning to end, the completion of the dialectical circle, requires that we suspend judgement and in a sense, suspend the organs in Deleuze's sense. In this sense, religion is akin to an obsessional neurosis, or, in the language of modern psychiatry, attention deficit disorder. For one does not "read" the bible, i.e. the religious person repeatedly affirms the supposed truths which it contains, and returns always to a limited number of fixed points, as someone who prays the rosary alternately repeats the lord's prayer and the hail mary. The more repetitive, the better, for the religious individual. But for the thinker properly speaking, this total certainty is replaced with what Hegel calls "absolute knowledge", which is like a roving rather than fixed mode of attention, a free floating but rigorous attention that exalts in the dialectic of the book. If this book is the bible than we are doing hermeneutics (as thinkers). If we are consulting it to pray, we are religious, and thus we are not thinking per se. Imagine being faced with a very difficult philosophy book. To get through it, which means to enjoy it, is a suspension of certainty that leads to absolute knowledge, a knowledge which continuously modifies itself through subtle differentiations and, indeed, repetitions, but the ratio of repetition to difference is lesser, i.e. difference or dialectic is what gets emphasized. The priest or receiver of the eucharist can only affirm with all their strength these fixed truths which provide a euphoric feeling. The philosopher or organic intellectual opens themself to the anxiety of not knowing, but the reward for this labor is, again, absolute knowledge, knowledge that is in a sense scientific, as Hegel said. For knowing and coming-to-know is a process, whereas fingering one's prayer beads is, again, a standing in place or treading in water. The ecstasy of being close to Jesus or the Virgin Mary is the reward for this activity, but the trade-off is a rejection of all so-called heresy, and orthodox religion defines orthodoxy  according to a very narrow set of realities. To know, to think, we must come to the realization, as Hegel said, that "God himself is dead". This means that one whose goal is to THINK roves freely through the hermeneutic labyrinths of religious texts, and beyond, to even stranger memory palaces.