A New Soteriology

I want to compare three important passages today from three different but related figures that have become important to me in the re-exploration of Catholicism. First, this passage from Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia:

… Christians, having lost the race for the most indisputable type of certitude, have gradually abandoned all concern with the cosmos in order to devote themselves to the salvation of humans alone, and then among the humans to the soul alone, before abandoning the soul itself to the exclusive benefit of morality…. Believing themselves attached to the Spirit, they have lost the earth. (210)

The next passage is from Simone Weil’s reading of the Our Father in Waiting for God:

We have to cast aside all other desires for the sake of our desire for eternal life, but we should desire eternal life itself with renunciation. We must not even become attached to detachment. Attachment to salvation is even more dangerous than the others. We have to think of eternal life as one thinks of water when dying of thirst, and yet at the same time we have to desire that we and our loved ones should be eternally deprived of this water rather than receive it in abundance despite God’s will, if such a thing were conceivable. (159)

Third, a passage from Michel Serres’ The Five Senses:

It is not such a bad thing, pace Descartes, that on that youthful day, piloting a ship, we were to discover that a pilot says I for his whole vessel, from the depths of the keel to the tip of the mast, and from the quarter to the boom, and that the soul of his body descends into the soul of the boat, toward the central turbines, to the heart of the quickworks. (21)

All three of these thinkers, as exemplified in these passages, struggle mightily to rethink salvation and religion. In this meditation, I want to look at how these three passages link together to provide new modes of practice — new modes of existence, to borrow Latour’s phrase — that is more suited to a world that is no longer Modern, again in Latour’s sense. This world that is no longer Modern is faced once again with an Apocalyptic Eschaton that is no longer in our past, but, like it was for Jesus and for Paul, staring us in the face. Once again, we seem to be living in Paul’s “time that remains” before the end times come in the form of a planet that has so significantly changed that human evolution cannot keep up.

We are faced with the need for a new soteriology — a practice of salvation as coming to terms with and relieving suffering — that cannot have use for a soul as a discrete possession of the subject (Serres). Nor can we see salvation as a desire for a permanent state as Weil means when she writes, “we should desire eternal life with renunciation.” And with Latour, we should be cognizant of the hidden Gnosticism that condemns this earth as inherently lost, not worth saving, and concentrate on figuring out our exit (e.g., billionaires seeking Mars). This new soteriology sees the soul, with Serres, as entangled with the world. This is similar to how the original Stoics saw pneuma — as the material life force that breathes through everything, including ourselves. For Seneca, the same pneuma that animates an earthquake causes us to sweat when we are agitated. We are entangled by nature.

Serres’ pilot’s soul extends beyond himself to encompass the whole of the vessel he commands because he has lived with that vessel for so long that it is difficult to draw a hard separation between the soul of the boat and that of the pilot. The same thing happens on a small scale when you tap a pencil on the table in front of you. Your body feels the end of the pencil tapping because your neurological system, when properly functioning, extends to include the pencil as part of the body. We don’t notice this because we are so ingrained to see our souls as ourselves and ourselves as cordoned off from the world as autonomous entities.

A new soteriology is necessary because the end times are yet again in front of us. We are no longer Modern. This soteriology requires a coming to terms with what exactly we are saving now that the Apocalyptic Eschaton is once again ahead of us. We are not saving our souls in the sense of discrete possessions Gnostically disconnected from this world around us. We are saving new kinds of souls — ones that do not reside solely and complete inside the human frame. Serres Five Senses provides a new way of imagining our souls as embodied and our embodiment as deeply interwoven with everything. With Latour, we have to see this soteriology as capable of saving the whole of the entanglement without imposing an essence onto what we think we are saving. With Weil, we have to aspire to eternity while renouncing any permanent entitlement to it. This is a new salvation that must attend to the entanglements around us — our dependent conditioning, or pratityasamutpada to borrow an insight from Nagarjuna. There are no essences, only networks of entanglements that we need to attend to while holding onto the insight and the practice that renounces any sense of being able to permanently and eternally codified our understanding of it.

Is this religion or is this philosophy or is it neither or both? It doesn’t really matter. What I am grappling with is ways of knowing that orient us to the here and now. It requires new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, which is radically reoriented to this world. It is the perspective embodied in Matthew 13:10-17, especially these lines quoted from Isaiah:

“You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive.

For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn — and I would heal them.”

It is the turning that counts. But this turning requires opening the senses that are shut and closed off within existing certainties. This is difficult work, but it is the work of religion and philosophy and science together.

Even the apostles, who have been chosen — “To you it has been given the secrets” — see and they hear these secrets, but Matthew’s Jesus stops short of saying that they understand:

But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. Truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.” (13:16-17)

They see, they hear, they have been given the secrets, but they don’t understand. This is Matthew’s message (and especially Mark’s): Religion is whole-body transformation that starts with opening the senses — at least seeing and hearing if not all of Serres’ Five Senses — but this opening is not immediate understanding. The apostles never understand while Jesus is alive. Twice Matthew’s Jesus delivers his key message, which is not a law but an exhortation to contemplation: “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners” (9:13, also 12:7). It is a call that is a contemplation of a statement that will take time to learn. It will require reorientation of one’s body, which will require effort to open the senses that have been shut. But it will also require grace — Weil’s Waiting for God where the opening of the senses is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for salvation.

In this sense, Matthew’s righteous are those who are certain in their knowledge and thus shut off from further curiosity. The sinners are those who stand the chance of transformation because they are willing to see and hear the call even if the call does not lead to immediate understanding. To be a sinner is the better condition than being righteous, if by these terms we see sinners as those who are still open to transformation — to making the turn prophesied in Isaiah as quoted by Matthew. The righteous, to the contrary, are those who are certain, and thus lack curiosity and are no longer perplexed. They will have a much harder time making the turn.

Such a soteriology that renounces its permanence is the heart of Weil’s reading of the “Our Father.” The prayer itself is the daily bread that must be renewed because to desire a permanent salvation is the most dangerous attachment: “Attachment to salvation is even more dangerous than the others.” An orientation to sacrifice is the orientation that seeks order in this world by appealing to another. The gods will set things right if we undertake the right rituals. It opens the door to Gnosticism when the repetition of sacrifice is revealed as defective in its permanence. Mercy orients us to this world, and it is a step toward holding the temptation of Gnosticism at bay. Mercy brings our attention to suffering and how to alleviate it, if only temporarily. Again, we are not looking for a permanent salvation as an eternal, one-and-done salvation. This way violence lies.

We are faced with a conundrum. A massively heating planet that is outpacing our ability to keep up with its changes requires mercy as an orientation to ourselves and our entanglements with the here and now — with the “apocalypse now.” We cannot sacrifice our way out of this one — no God is coming to get us. Yet, we must somehow attach to this reality as one of the causes of suffering. It is a globally shared “inconvenient truth” that we ignore at our destruction. The solution, however, cannot be permanent. We are not restoring a fallen world to a Garden of Eden. There will be no hard transition across a threshold, though there may be a hard transition in the wrong direction. Today we are learning that a crucial Atlantic current is in danger of collapse much faster than we thought. We must come back down to earth to activate religious and philosophical and scientific attention as a permanent need to daily renewal so that “the time that remains” actually remains for a long time.