Bruno Latour’s Hesitant Proclamation

When Bruno Latour died two years ago at the age of seventy-five, his obituaries listed him among the essential intellectuals of the contemporary era. Le Monde described Latour as “one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” The New York Times echoed this assessment: “Dr. Latour was one of the leading philosophers of the postwar era and one of the few known outside the academic world.” The Royal Anthropological Institute concurred, as did The Nation, which described Latour as a founding figure of “Science and Technology Studies” (STS), an approach to the sciences as complex social fields rather than dispassionate, objective pursuits. In Nature, his one-time collaborator Steve Woolgar wrote that Latour “upended received wisdom on the nature of scientific truth.” Like the other remembrances, Woolgar’s noted the “dizzying expanse of topics” that attracted Latour’s attention, including “science, the law, transport systems, religion, the Brazilian rainforest, politics and the limits to growth.”

This list of interests is representative, both of the reach of Latour’s thinking and of a certain blind spot in the eyes of many who admired it: religion. When Latour’s eulogizers mention religion, it is mostly in passing, one item among a host of others. Almost none note the depth of Latour’s religious thought. Time may prove this an astonishing oversight. Far from being a mere side interest, religion was one of Latour’s central concerns in later works such as Rejoicing, or the Torments of Religious Speech (2002/2013[1]), On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (2010), his late magnum opus, An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence (2012/2013), and If We Lose the Earth, We Lose our Souls (2022/2024). Perhaps Latour will never be seen as a church father (as Bishop Robert Barron has described Latour’s near-contemporary René Girard). But in an era in which the Church seems to have lost its ability to speak to the “moderns,” as Latour described them, Latour’s interest in the felicity conditions of religious speech—particularly preaching—should warrant more attention within the Church.

Certainly preaching itself should warrant more attention. “It is no secret,” writes one priest, “that there is a crisis in Catholic preaching today. There is a general sense amongst many of the laity that Catholic priests simply are not able to preach well. People complain that homilies are boring and increasingly out of touch with the experiences of everyday life.” The working document from the Continental Stage of Synod, “Enlarge the Space of Your Tent,” echoes those observations: “The quality of homilies is almost unanimously reported as a problem: there is a call for ‘deeper homilies, centered on the Gospel and the readings of the day, and not on politics, making use of accessible and attractive language that refers to the lives of the faithful’” (§93). As is his wont, Pope Francis sound-bites this problem most memorably: “Please, the homilies: they are a disaster.” That there is something wrong with preaching seems beyond dispute; the question is how to move beyond critique and toward renewal.

Not being a theologian or minister, Latour might not immediately appear to be a resource for better preaching. He himself admitted as much: “I have no authority whatsoever to talk to you about religion and experience, since I am neither a preacher, nor a theologian, nor a philosopher of religion, nor even an especially pious person” (Modern Cult, 99). Despite this lack of qualifications, Latour’s analysis of religious speech offers a path toward the renewal of Gospel proclamation. For Latour, religious speech is never “about” religion. Rather, religious speech is that which accomplishes the aims of religion: renewal, conversion, relationship. Religious speech does not convey information; it changes the audiences who hear it. It should be obvious to say that these aims are fundamentally different from the aims of scientific or political discourse. Yet we moderns, argues Latour, continue to judge religious speech by the wrong standards. Until we see that religious speech is not first and foremost concerned with claims about reality, or the defense of moral conclusions, or even the assertion of beliefs, we will find neither the words to express the Gospel nor the ears to hear it.

Religious Speech and Double-click Communication

Whatever shaky authority Latour may have to speak about preaching, it begins with his own experience of listening to it. Like so many Catholics, Latour finds it difficult to sit through a sermon. “Yes, he goes to mass, and often, on Sunday,” begins his Rejoicing, “but it doesn’t mean anything” (Rejoicing, 1). (The “he” described in these sentences is Latour himself, whose use of the third person positions him as the subject of the sort of ethnographic study he usually pursued in laboratories.) The Scriptures, he writes, “have been properly and faithfully handed down. Anyone can hear them. But then the sermon begins—and the overburdened listener feels like running away as fast as his legs will carry him” (16). He remains faithful in his mass attendance, even as he grinds his teeth at the misunderstandings he hears both inside and outside the church. “It’s a twisted situation: he is ashamed of what he hears on Sunday from the pulpit when he goes to mass; but ashamed, too, of the incredulous hatred or amused indifference of those who laugh at anyone who goes to church” (1). He cannot explain his devotion to anyone: friends, colleagues, students, even his children.

Rejoicing, Latour’s most sustained study of religion, is an attempt to understand this struggle. The book is a case study of what Charles Taylor has called “cross pressure,” the very modern feeling of longing for transcendence even while being simultaneously pulled back toward the strictures and demands of immanence (302). But Latour’s aims in Rejoicing are more modest than Taylor’s magisterial history. Latour wants only “to disinter a form of religious expression that used to be so free and inventive, fruitful and saving in days gone by, but that now dries on his tongue whenever he tries to recover its movement, excitement, its structure” (Rejoicing, 2). Critiques of religion, particularly those that dismiss religion as a failed form of science, drive him mad, but so, too, do forms of religious speech that seek to compete with science in conveying information about distant or obscure realities. These twin mistakes thrust Latour into “the middle of the torments of religious speech” (64).

To escape those torments, Latour asks this question: “What place does religious speech take once we no longer compare it with Science, but with the sciences that the author has been studying for the last twenty-five years?” (24). As his obituaries note, Latour spent most of his career observing the distinction between “Science” and “the sciences” through the ethnographic and sociological methods adopted by STS. For STS, science is a messy, complex, and often conflictual pursuit, but Latour insisted that this complexity and conflict are precisely what make scientific knowledge trustworthy.

As his obituaries recount, Latour was often accused of being a relativist and obscurantist. Latour himself wondered whether he had gone too far when a colleague asked him if he believed in reality” (Pandora's Hope, 1). Of course, insisted Latour, the answer was yes. But the question was not whether scientific claims about reality are “made.” (The very etymology of the word “fact” indicates that they are.) The question is whether they are made well or badly. When scientific claims are made with care, then we can be more confident that we are talking about reality. How do we know, for example, that climate change is real? Not because facts about it are plucked from the air, but because of the painstaking effort that characterizes their making. Unfortunately, these recursive efforts are often obscured under the banner “Science,” which simultaneously reduces the complexity of scientific work and inflates its reputation. As a result, we are left with oracular pronouncements that begin, “Science tells us . . .” or “Science says . . . .” If capital-S Science can pronounce anything, it is only because of the meticulous effort of the small-s sciences. Latour’s phrase for this misunderstanding is “double-click communication,” named for the instant access we expect from a computer mouse. “Double-click communication, this immediate and costless access, this conveyance that appears to demand no transformation, has itself become, for our contemporaries, the model of all possible communication, the ideal, the metric standard of all movement, the judge of all faithfulness, the guarantee of all truth” (Rejoicing, 22). The double-click of the computer mouse has conditioned us to expect immediate (and unmediated) information, presented as though it were always just there, with the real work that produced the information erased.

This misunderstanding distorts both scientific discourse and religious discourse. But religious discourse suffers twin indignities: it is not only misunderstood as a form of double-click communication, it is also judged wanting by that standard. If double-click knowledge is a caricature of the sciences, belief is a parallel caricature of religion (Modern Cult, 121). To untangle this confusion, Latour borrows the idea of “felicity conditions,” from J.L. Austin and argues that scientific discourse and religious speech operate under fundamentally different felicity conditions. The sciences operate under the conditions of “reference,” which maintains a constant across the experiments, laboratories, samples, written records, etc., that produce facts. Reference is what gives us access to the remote, whether a distant star or the microbes in the soil under our feet. But religion is a different kind of “truth generator” (Modern Cult, 100). This is why “Do you believe in God” is a different kind of question than “Do you believe in global warming?” (121). The latter is asking a question about reference; the former is asking a question about relationship. Though it seems counter-intuitive, it is science, not religion, that seeks access to the remote. Religious speech, by contrast, does not cover distance; it creates intimacy.

For Latour, the best analogy for religion’s felicity conditions is what he calls the “lover’s dialogue.” The person who asks, “do you love me?” is not asking for the kind of information produced by double-click communication. The person is asking to feel loved. The lover’s speech cannot occasion that feeling merely by offering a citation, as in, “Yes, but you already know that, I told you so last year” (Rejoicing, 25). That approach works within the felicity conditions of science, or what Latour calls “reference,” in which citations of earlier texts and contexts are crucial for maintaining the fidelity of an emerging piece of knowledge. But it does not work within the felicity conditions of religion, in which the purpose is not to prove that you had the feeling once, or to “prove” anything at all, but rather to occasion the feeling now. If the lover succeeds in occasioning that feeling again, it will not be because of a simple resemblance to an earlier statement; rather, it will be because of “a gesture, an act of kindness, a look, a joke, a quivering of the glottis” (25-26). These extra-linguistic means of communication are far more important than the linguistic content. Likewise, there is a fundamental difference between speaking “about” religion and speaking religiously. If someone asks, “do you love me?” and you reply, “well, let’s talk about that,” you have misunderstood the assignment.

Latour admits that the “lover’s dialogue” seems like a flimsy framework for the renewal of religious speech (48). But what the analogy captures is the essential problem of how to use old ways of speaking to renew relationships now. In answer to the question “do you love me?” the lover cannot simply repeat the old formulas. But the lover also cannot not repeat the old formulas. “There’s nothing more repetitive than the music of lovers; they always annotate the same story—theirs.” Sometimes those annotations fail, and they appear to lead lovers toward the end. But sometimes the lovers manage to retell their story in a way that renews their love, by “twisting, hedging, shifting, redressing, reinterpreting the same episodes” (73). When it comes to the conversations of love, Latour argues, we readily understand how retelling the old recreates the new. But when it comes to the conversations of religion, double-click communication conditions us to expect that information should be enough. Within that framework, the twisting and hedging so characteristic of the lover’s dialogue may seem to obscure the message. But twisting and hedging are actually the means of preserving it. As Michael Himes notes in The Mystery of Faith, change is, paradoxically, the only way to preserve the past. “In order to stay where one has always been,” Himes writes, “one must change constantly” (88). It would be hard to find a better explanation of how lovers stay together or how people stay faithful.

Back in church, Latour is also trying to stay where he has always been. The only question is how to manage the tension between tradition and innovation. Reciting the Apostles’ Creed, he tries to manage the cross-pressure by a series of mental reservations. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty” becomes “I am certain of the indisputable framework of ordinary existence, the power is not in question, and I know it’s not about belief.” Eventually, this effort becomes too great, and he is “forced to overlook unfathomable whoppers (“consubstantial,” “Virgin Mary,” “descended into hell,” “life everlasting,”) before we even get to the sermon, which will only add to these misunderstandings” (58). (We will return to the question of sermons in a moment.) But Latour also realizes that it is folly to “purify” religious discourse of these traditional articulations. Without them, we will be left with “something so bland and so versatile, that it could be spread throughout the world without shocking anyone” (62). Whatever the weight of traditional religious language, whatever exhausting mental reservations it seems to demand, it is better to make the effort than to modernize. To speak religiously is to walk between “the path of heresy—of selective choice—and the path of orthodoxy—the straight and narrow” (63). There is no third way that resolves and transcends this tension.

In Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, Kathleen Norris argues that every religious inheritance is a blessing and a curse. The religious vocabularies we inherit can offer compassion and tenderness with the right hand and judgment and wrath with the left. But we are born into languages, and so we can never simply cut ourselves loose. “Converting a painful inheritance into something good,” she writes, “requires all the discernment we can muster” (29). Norris, a poet attentive to language, is right about discernment in two ways. There is the meaning of discernment made familiar by Ignatius Loyola, who saw prayer as a means of sifting our experiences for God’s invitation. But the Latin root of discern, cerněre, carries another meaning: the resolution to accept an inheritance. The torments of religious speech result from the attempt not only to sift, but to accept our inheritance, in all its messiness:

If we have to revive the word once more, that means reviving everything, saving everything, clarifying everything, renewing everything, without abandoning a single sheep along the way; not a single bit of piety will be lost, not one vapid remark, religious trinket, holy souvenir, church knick-knack. I want to salvage all the treasure I was promised as my inheritance, for it to be mine for keeps—and for me to be proud of it (Latour, Rejoicing, 63).

Salvaging that inheritance produces a discourse marked more by twisting and hedging than any resolute eloquence. “Fortunately,” Latour writes, “religion might not be about authority and strength but exploration, hesitation, and weakness” (Modern Cult, 99). The honest answer to “do you love me?” is likely to sound exploratory and hesitant, weakened by a quivering glottis. Latour teaches us that it is a mistake to expect religious speech to be “effective” or “better,” at least in the ordinary meaning of those words. Tradition has it that Moses, God’s first messenger, had a speech impediment. Perhaps to speak religiously is to speak through—both past and, more importantly, by means of—our own impediments.

Religious Speech as Abasement

Religious speech as hesitant, weak, and impeded speech runs counter to most advice on preaching, which, understandably enough, tends to focus on how to make it more effective. The values of exploration, hesitation, and weakness do not figure into this counsel. Yet these values may be precisely what we need now, as we continue to undergo the “cosmological mutation” of the environmental crisis, a crisis that also portends “a mutation in the relations among materiality, spirituality, and politics” (Latour, If We Lose, 2). These mutations, and the effects they would inevitably have on preaching, are the subject of If We Lose the Earth, We Lose Our Souls, published in France just a month before Latour’s death in 2022. The rapid and destabilizing changes to our environment shift both space and time, the planet where we live and the age in which we live. Formerly, humans could assume a “Grand Narrative of what the catechism called the ‘Holy History,’ which elaborated a magnificent account of the world, leading from Creation to the End Times” (21). But the ecological crisis ruptures this framework. We are slowly—too slowly—realizing that unless we alter our course, we will destroy our place in creation (along with the places of innumerable species). We can now imagine a future in which God comes asking, “Where are you?” (Gen 3:9), only to find no one there to answer.

The old cosmological framework, inaugurated by Galileo, showed us that the earth moves. But now, we must speak of an earth that is moved, “an earth that reacts to the actions of those particular living things called human beings, and that raises the existential question of whether or not these humans will be able to maintain the conditions of its habitability” (If We Lose, 20-21). To say the earth is moved is to acknowledge a new existential situation, which demands new ways of preaching the Word. Under the old cosmological framework, “heaven came to designate an escape from the world” (27). But under the new cosmological framework, we finally realize that there is no escape. Setting aside the fever dreams of billionaires, the new reality reminds us that we are limited—limited to the earth, limited to one earth. But there is good news in facing our limits. The ecological crisis, Latour argues, pushes us toward a new embrace of some very old ideas:

Salvation is movement toward abasement, kenosis. What is at issue are the limits of anthropocentrism, limits that are found both in the classical theme of man’s dependence on his creator and in the current theme of man’s dependence on the living beings that have gradually, over billions of years, constituted the provisionally habitable world into which man has inserted himself (29).

Despite what some of Pope Francis’s critics have tried to say, the environmental crisis is not some alien “add-on” to the traditional concerns of the pulpit. In anything, the environmental crisis returns us to those concerns. (Only by changing do we stay where we have always been.) To recognize our limits and dependence is to practice a kind of kenosis, an emptying of our anthropocentric pretensions.

In Let Us Dream, written with Austen Ivereigh during COVID-19, Pope Francis suggests that facing the finitude of our own small-I incarnation is the only way to renew religious speech. Confronted by so many problems, we are forced to admit that “we don’t have the answers all ready and neatly packaged.” Of course we tremble at our own inadequacy. But it is precisely this feeling of inadequacy—of hesitation and weakness, a quivering in the glottis—that allows God to enter in lead us to discover new possibilities. “I describe these new possibilities as ‘overflow,’ because they often burst the banks of our thinking” (21). The literal banks of our cities and the figurative banks of our cosmology are now being burst. We tremble at these threats to our place(s) in the world. But facing these self-inflicted realities, we might find the words to embrace the graces of our own limits. We might then proclaim the Good News more affectively.