How do we decide if a particular philosophy is covertly theological? One all-too-common response to this question boils down to little more than a theological bird-watching expedition in which we don our binoculars, pick up our guide books and descend upon an unsuspecting article or book in the hope of catching sight of a Lesser Spotted Miracle or a Great Crested Messiah in the long grass. If we are lucky—or inventive—enough to clap eyes on a theological ornithoid, we tick it off our list, conclude that the terrain definitely smells of incense, and return home contended but, ultimately, none the wiser.
Let’s call this curious practice ‘ornitheology’. Like the quarry they stalk, ornitheologians have their own distinctive calls that can be heard echoing through the philosophical canopy: such and such a concept ‘bears a striking resemblance to’, ‘has all the markings of’, is an atheistic ‘version’ of, ‘is quintessentially’, ‘repeats’, ‘imitates’ or ‘follows’ a theological ‘pattern’ or ‘paradigm’.
One of the problems with ornitheology (there are many, I fear) is that it smuggles a hidden premise under its moss-green waxed jacket, a premise that concerns the nature of imitation: If something looks like a miracle then it must be a miracle, and if it is a miracle then it must be theological. This hides a further assumption: that theology owns the intellectual copyright on everything it touches. Any motif or way of thinking deployed by theology will remain always and forever theological. But we need to be wary of this jump; perhaps it will remain forever theological, and perhaps it won’t, but it’s at least worth asking the question.
We need more sophisticated ways of thinking about God and theology in relation to philosophical writing, ways that can account a little more satisfactorily for what some contemporary philosophers are trying to achieve. Part of the problem is the tired ideology of conflict between philosophy and theology. In a piece I have coming out on Kevin Hart soon I call this the topographical model. In topographical thinking, philosophy and theology are each exhaustive in their own domain, able to say everything that is to be said, but impotent outside the confines of what are assumed to be their respective frontiers. When one discipline seeks to exert what it sees as its own sovereign right over all or part of a foreign territory, all sorts of hackles are raised by the critical border police. It is a land-grabbing paradigm that serves neither philosophy nor theology well.
One way to ask the question of the relation between philosophy and theology in a way that moves us beyond the tram-line logic of the ornitheologian (the more it looks like a miracle, the more theological it must be) is to focus not on which theological trope is imitated in a particular philosophy (here a god, there a god, everywhere a faith in god) but to think also about the complex nature of imitation itself. Might there not be ways of understanding what it means to imitate theology other than saying that imitating theology is always theological? Doesn’t that depend as much on what imitation is as on what theology is? If, for example, Western universalism or the idea of revolution or equality or deconstruction or whatever else owe much to Christianity (and there are of course arguments on both sides) it doesn’t necessarily mean that all revolutions are Christian revolutions or that all universalism is Christian universalism. Or at the very least it doesn’t mean that we should assume to know from the outset what ‘Christian’ means if we do say that all revolutions are Christian.
For one sketch of what rethinking imitation and challenging ornitheology might look like, see my post on Meillassoux as Oedipus. I hope that the line I take in that piece can begin to make sense of why Meillassoux would say, in ‘The Divine Inexistence’, that the only way to banish the religious is for the universal to be incarnated, or why in The Number and the Siren he insists that the only way that Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés… can be unique is by being Christic and imitating Christ’s glorious body and the Catholic mass. If imitation always equals complicity, as it does for the ornitheologian, then these images and moves in Meillassoux just can’t make much sense, or else they need to be done away with in an ungainly critical pirouette which sees reader trying to explain away in an puff of Orwellian pseudo-logic what nevertheless stands clear on the page: it may look like a miracle, quack like a miracle and swim like a miracle, but don’t let that fool you…
In the meantime, listen out for the distinctive calls of the ornitheologians; they are a common species in our parts.
