Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (a title he preferred to the original Les Mots et les Choses) was the book that made his name. It has never been without its critics; historians could hardly have agreed with his essential contempt for their craft, which Foucault replaced with an “archaeology” or Nietzschean genealogy, and more than one reader has been puzzled by his grand pronouncement that the human subject—male, of course, l’homme—was a recent invention, fated to be washed away “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”[i]

What Foucault meant was not that absurd, though. The human subject which we take for granted today, the self-sufficient and potentially dispassionate observer of the inner and the outer realms, the ego thrown into the maelstroms of biological necessities and social demands, is indeed an ephemeral or at least novel phenomenon. But his argument would have benefited from some real history, one which was not so stereotypically Francocentric and which reached farther into the past. Foucault’s “Western culture” takes in only a few hundred years, from the fifteenth century through the beginning of the nineteenth, and in that context it makes some sense to imagine human life in terms of “epistemes,” “the epistemological field[s] … in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or to its objective forms, grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility.”[ii] But when we take a broader perspective it can appear that the real novelty is not a shift in epistemological presuppositions, but the emergence of a new orientation towards life that, for the first time, made epistemology important.

I don’t mean to be harsh on Foucault. His fundamental periodization is reasonably persuasive, and he is surely right in arguing that something changed in the underlying presuppositions of European theorizing from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. But Foucault took it for granted that discourse is essential and that people orient themselves in the course of their lives through a theoretical grasp of the world’s structure and manner of operation. This is certainly what you and I think we are doing, or at least ought to be doing, and the savants of post-Reformation Europe were certainly trying to develop a comprehensible and comprehensive explanation of things. But it isn’t necessarily a universal practice, and the farther out or the farther back we look it makes less and less sense to suppose that it is.

Nothing will ever keep people from talking about their lives, or of developing theories about themselves and the world, but these activities have not always been given the importance they have today and the expectations of speaker and listeners have not always been the same. Significance can be endowed in other ways. In “Darmok,” a famous episode of Start Trek: The Next Generation, the aliens spoke in phrases which evoked paradigmatic events from their culture’s myths, assimilating novel interactions to familiar ones, and thus resolving conflicts by symbolic re-enactments of the mythic events. Myths perform a similar function in many cultures, offering Nietzsche’s “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms” which shape action and emotion but which, through a practice of constant telling and modified retelling, are never allowed to harden into the “truth” that Nietzsche derided.

We often think of Christianity as opposed to myth, as it appears to rest on factual claims about the history of God’s dealings with His world. That seems to be what St. Paul had in mind: “If Christ be not risen,” he wrote, “then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.” But there are many who have assimilated even some forms of Christianity to a mythic mode of orientation. As the young, improbably virtuous priest Jud Duplenticy tells the detective in Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man, “The question is, do these stories convince us of a lie? Or do they resonate with something deep inside us that’s profoundly true, that we can’t express any other way except storytelling?”

The secondary role that Father Jud gives to language is nothing new. In the Classical world, which is where Christianity developed, philosophies were ways of life, not systems of explanations, and Christianity was little different. By the early Middle Ages, in fact, theological language was rarely intended to lead listeners to the truth. It was the other way around: only experience and practice would allow one to understand that language. As R.A. Markus, a noted historian of the period, wrote, “The allegory is not so much a pulley that lifts the reader to God, as a device that enables the reader who already knows God to return to the text and detect his vestigia in it.”[iii] This can lead to head-scratching interpretations; Hildegard of Bingen, centuries later, can tell her listeners that when Luke writes about the empire-wide census that takes Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem he means that all of creation issues from the Heavenly Father.[iv] But the upside of this is a keen understanding that words are slippery things, useful when we want to evoke truth but dangerous if we think we are actually pinning it down.

St. Thomas Aquinas himself cautioned against confusing doctrinal propositions with the truths that they appear to make explicit: “The things of faith are not proposed in themselves but by certain words or likenesses which fall short of expressing or representing them.”[v] This is an anti-epistemological stance, even a mystical one, and Thomas stayed true to this position. At the end of his life, following an experience of which he would not speak, he refused to write any more. He called his entire oeuvre “so much straw.”

But evocative discourse can only be communicative if it relates to or points toward forms of experience which both speaker and listener share. Without a prior acquaintance with the transcendent all talk about it is as vague and meaningless as descriptions of sexual ecstasy would be to a virgin. And shared experiences must be cultivated within a shared way of life. That makes faith less a matter of propositional assent than a habitus, built through a set of embodied, interpersonal, and material practices which, like works of art, cultivate and encourage certain experiences and sensations.

The religious life of the high Middle Ages was as much as an orthopraxy as an orthodoxy. People were “taught over time to listen, to recite, to move, to be still, to be silent, engaged with the acoustics of words, with their sound, feel, and look.”[vi] The real presence in the host was taken literally; Christ’s body occupied the same space and time as the worshipers’ bodies and if stabbed might even bleed. Daily life took place in the company of sculptures and icons, and surrounding and encompassing it were weekly Masses, occasional Communion, sacred dramas staged in the market place, gatherings of lay sodalities and guilds, processions princely and penitential, pilgrimages, and festivals both local and church-wide. All of these allowed a participation in richer forms of life and experience. Christianity was thus a “pattern of being in the world” with both horizontal and vertical connections, lived as something fundamentally open and collective rather than through the private embrace of some theory of ultimate reality.

To be a Christian in the Middle Ages was to be a member of a Christian community, and the tenets of the Christian faith did not need to be the object of conscious assent when they underwrote and sanctified the life of the community itself. As the doctrine of implicit faith held, “an attitude of trust in God and his earthy representative” was sufficient for salvation.[vii] Through the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though, “faith” came to acquire its contemporary meaning, as an overt assent to a body of propositions. This put language and logic at the heart of both theology and philosophy. It was not enough to evoke the presence of something that could never be stated outright. Reality had to be brought out into the light. Only then would the faithful understand and affirm their belief.

The transition was swift. By 1664, as Peter Harrison notes, a prominent English theologian could define faith as “a rational and discursive act of the mind.”[viii] It was manifest in alterations in collective practice and linguistic shifts, too; in the sixteenth century the term “catechism” lost its meaning as the exorcism before baptism, performed at the door of the church, and came to signify a course of instruction whereby young Christians were expected to commit the articles of faith to heart.[ix]

It was Luther, of course, who is the most visible agent of this change, and his theology of salvation by faith alone undermined the communal and collective character of medieval Christian life. However formalized and ritualized it was, the Catholic insistence on works had given a major role to human relations and to the maintenance of the community, and those horizontal ties were sanctified by the everyday intimacy with the divine and even its physical presence. The Reformation did not just sweep away abuses and images; it broke those ties and attacked the belief that Christians lived in something like the Classical “city of gods and men.” Each believer was alone with God.

This shattering of a communal Christian life was no mere implication; as Bossy noted, in his first reformed mass Luther “the social aspect of the medieval theory was … abandoned, and accordingly no provision was made for a congregational kiss.”[x] But even a personality as forceful as Luther’s could have made little headway if the social order had not already begun to fracture. Life in the high Middle Ages had never been easy, but at least you knew where you stood. From the fourteenth or fifteenth century onward, though, its foundations began to shift, especially on the European continent. The increasing social instability and emotionally extreme character of late medieval society has been noted from Huizinga to the present day, and it has been blamed on everything from the Black Death, the monetization of the European economy, and the end of the medieval warm period to an increase in literacy and private reading and the much-contested rise of the university and rational theology. Whatever the causes, social life no longer seemed to give a reliable and relatable framework for individual life, and its members were more and more left to fend for themselves “the burden for knowing and defending doctrinal details fell increasingly upon the individual rather than being distributed, on the basis of trust relations, across the community of the faithful.”[xi] One had to look within, for “being a true Christian was now thought to involve not only the explicit profession of certain beliefs, but also being cognizant of their content and capable of providing a justification for holding them.”[xii]

This shift was not limited to the new Protestant sects. Within Catholicism, too, introspection grew in importance until it could be taken as the consummate religious process, as it is in St. Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. The confession box, invented by St. Charles Borromeo in the late sixteenth century, is an image of this change. With it confession ceased to be a once-a-year conversation, usually held towards the front of the church with others waiting nearby, and became a ritual that took place regularly, in secrecy and in intimacy. Catholics, too, were to uncover, examine, and define their inmost thoughts and impulses so they could describe them to their confessor.

From one perspective these changes can look like the long-delayed discovery of the autonomous self, a key moment in the progress of liberty. From some other standpoints it appears instead to be a construction or even an improvisation, a response to a social catastrophe in which each survivor was tasked with reestablishing an explicit orientation towards life and the world to replace a shared and implicit orientation which was no longer tenable. That one’s eternal salvation depended on getting this right raised the stakes considerably. Catholics and Protestants were both impelled to self-examination and, less often noted because we take it for granted, to self-identification with their interpretations of an inner life which was now the chief focus of religion.

This was an extraordinary shift. Medieval society, like many non-western ones, favored the cultivation of a direct and immediate bodily orientation to an ineffable, unknowable, and inexpressible reality which was manifest in and as all things and beings. Language and doctrine were evocative, not denotative, and they took second place to experience. What replaced this was structured around a complex of consciously-held ideas which were taken to communicate the realities which they represented. This is the world we inhabit today. Not only are self and world split apart, both are known only through mediation, most of all through language. We put ourselves at one remove from what we think we know; the self we have “discovered” is, in fact, a rendition of a self which the self represents to itself as itself. The world, too, has become an object of knowledge—modern science becomes possible—but that knowledge is limited to a depiction of something from which we are now irrevocably estranged. We have entered the realms of theory and of Derrida’s metaphysics of presence.

In early modern Europe the expectations of the past remained powerful, however. Thinking still took place in the presumed context of a divinely guided cosmos; it aimed at a grand unified theory which could encompass the lives of individuals, the order of society, and the activities of nature—reassembling everything that post-Reformation philosophy and theology had split apart. In what turned out to be the worst-placed bet in European intellectual history, the thought leaders of Protestantism, and even some Catholics, laid their money on the discoveries of science, known then as “natural philosophy:” “at the precise historical moment when the newly conceived ‘religion’ found itself in need of rational evidences, the new natural philosophy was able to provide them.”[xiii] The sublime order of the natural world would provide proofs of God’s existence and wisdom, and it would also offer a template for the proper order of the human community.

At that point, of course, Foucault’s epistemes became relevant. Once the orientation of human life relies on theory, epistemology becomes a central concern. We need to know that our theories correspond to reality, and that means coming up with standards for resolving that issue. But this only opens up more disputes, since there is more than one way of improvising a self and more than one way of imagining what truly exists. The new natural philosophy had its own crises and conflicts, and it took some time for something akin to the contemporary human subject to emerge. It did so in parallel with Newtonian physics. The triumph of Newton was not one of science over religion, however, or (more stereotypical yet) of reason over superstition. Neither was it a mysterious epistemic mutation. It was the outcome of a politically-charged dispute which pitted one philosophical and theological metaphor against another. That struggle is the subject of the next part of this essay.

Notes:

[i]Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 19730, p. 387). The modesty implied by the subtitle is disingenuous; as pages xx and xxi of the preface and the long discussion of Velasquez suggest, Foucault has bigger fish to fry than mere disciplinary history.

[ii]Ibid., xxii.

[iii]R.A. Markus, Signs and Meanings: Word and Text in Ancient Christianity (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996), p. 61.

[iv]Hildegard of Bingen, “Two Christmas Homilies,” in Selected Writings, ed. & tr. Mark Atherton.(London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 123. This goes on for a number of pages.

[v]Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1997), pp. 24, 1, ii, quoted in Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 107. Compare this footnote in Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966): “‘We do not believe’, as an Osage explained ‘that our ancestors were really animals, birds, etc., as told in traditions. These things are only wa-wi-ku-ska’-ye (symbols) of something higher’” (fn., p. 149, quoting J.O. Dorsey, “Osage Traditions”, 6th Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology [1884-5], Washington, D.C., 1888, p. 396).

[vi]Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 37.

[vii]Some New Worlds, p. 54.

[viii]Edward Stillingfleet, quoted in The Territories of Science and Religion, p. 107.

[ix]John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 118-120.

[x]John Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution,” Past and Present, No. 100 (August, 1983), p. 57.

[xi]Harrison, Some New Worlds, p. 75.

[xii]Ibid., pp. 81-82.

[xiii]The Territories of Science and Religion, p. 113.