Abstract
Bruno Latour wrote this in the ‘Jubilee of the Year 2000’ (p. 174), the year-long Great Jubilee declared by Pope John II for Roman Catholics to celebrate two thousand years of Christianity. Originally published in French in 2002 as Jubiler (to be jubilant) the book was translated into English and published by Polity in 2013, coinciding with Latour’s 2013 Gifford Lectures on nature and religion. Now, 15 years away from the context of its writing one may only recall barely, if at all, some of the noisy – jubilant! – visible, expressive celebrations that might have alienated someone like Latour, who confesses at the book’s end that he has celebrated ‘from the sidelines, for myself alone without any community, without communion’ (p. 174).
A member of the baby-boomer generation (b. 1947) which turned away from organized religion, Latour thirsts now for a ‘psalter no one has set to verse, that collection of songs no one has compiled, of holy pictures no one has coloured in’ (p. 13).
His mission is to explore the felicity conditions necessary for religious utterance. The problem he wrestles with, like Jacob’s angel, is how to express that most peculiar affect of religion: rejoicing. He wants to ‘disinter a form of expression’ (p. 2) that he claims was once free and inventive. Here he begins a secularization narrative that suggests we once were more enchanted and more religious: ‘in ancient times … the presence of divinities was obvious in the air or the soil’ (p. 5). He would certainly find agreement with many, but not all, sociologists of religion.
This form of expression is not, he says, the language of belief which will ‘make any revival of religious speech impossible’ (p. 30). Beliefs mark separations between people, where ‘the line can be drawn to mark their difference’ (p. 3). He speaks implicitly here of a Christian form of religion that privileges propositional belief, not other belief modes which may be (as he discusses in later work) more relational and emotional.
His quest, expressed in suitably agonized mystical zeal, is to find the language to express religious joy or ecstasy, drawing on much of his earlier work problematizing a science-religion opposition, transcendent/immanent binary, modernity, and purification.
He favours and repeats a metaphor throughout the book: a woman turns to her partner for reassurance, asking him if he still loves her. What if the reply were to be something like, ‘I’ve already said so before. Stop asking me’? That answer would wound the other lover and create distance. What the lover wants is not information, as a scientist would, but renewal and transformation. Lovers renew their love through love-talk, defined more by tone than by words. We should talk about the Holy Spirit, Latour says, the way lovers talk about love (p. 127).
Latour prompts the notion that nowadays we worship the false god of science, twinning his statement with an allusion to scripture: ‘you have first of all to love the sciences with all your might, with all your heart, with all your soul …’ (p. 4) – echoing Jesus telling his disciples that the first and greatest commandment was: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind (Matthew 22:37).
His trumpet call is to remember that we are rooted in the present, and should not seek proof of the historical Jesus but the present Jesus. He suggests that ‘We have no other way, truth and life but the path, anchored in the present’ (p. 30) – echoing, again a biblical verse: ‘Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life’ (John 14:6).
Of sociological interest is how he describes those who ‘reach for their guns whenever they hear talk of “return to religion”’ (p. 152) as mistaking religion for moral codes, economies, and laws ‘in short a total and often totalitarian life-form’ (p. 153). They should understand religion more as a search for a complete, harmonious cosmos. People might turn from religion not because they hate God, but because they hate institutions, he continues. Acknowledging the relational nature of religion, he says there is no such thing as private religion, any more than there is private love. That should shock the majority of sociologists of religion who continue to nurture their fantasy that religion has somehow moved into something conveniently called the private sphere. As Latour suggests, they may be looking in the wrong places. The best place is here and now. Clerics have often found themselves in a contemporary world of materialism, sex, democracy and other ills, which they have ‘hated with all their soul’ (p. 173). Not for Latour: this is this world, the only world, for better or for worse, and it ‘suits him down to the ground’ (p. 174). Rejoice!