by Louis Betty
Religion as religare. The origins of the word “religion” are obscure, but it has been common for scholars to interpret the combination of the Latin prefix re- and the verb ligare as conveying the notion of rebinding, in particular of humans to God through the person of Christ. The notion can also be extrapolated beyond its theological denotation to connote a binding of people to each other under the auspices of a shared faith, or “in” the body of Christ, whose dual human and divine status permits both a vertical and a horizontal integration of the human being into ultimate reality, both divine and social. In a more contemporary context, the rebinding power of religion can be viewed as an alternative to the atomizing forces of modernity that haunt Houellebecq’s fiction, with Elohimism providing a system of belief and practice that fosters human unity amid the destruction that unchecked individualism has wrought.
In the specific case of Possibility, Houellebecq has created a fictionalized twenty-first-century Europe in which Christianity has succumbed to consumerism and the cult of youth; the old are treated as human refuse and left to die alone in hospitals and retirement homes; and mainstream art glamorizes cruelty, egotism, and violence. Even the human ability to love has not survived in the age of materialism. Daniel1’s description of Esther and her friends reveals the extent of the destruction:
What I was feeling, these young people could not feel, nor even exactly understand, and if they had been able to feel something like it, it would have made them uncomfortable [ . . . ]. They had succeeded, after decades of conditioning and effort, they had finally succeeded in tearing from their hearts one of the oldest human feelings, and now it was done, what had been destroyed could no longer be put back together, no more than the pieces of a broken cup can be reassembled, they had reached their goal: at no moment in their lives would they ever know love. They were free. (236)
In this terrifying future, where deep, loving human relationships have become not so much impossible as simply unwanted, traditional forms of human collectivity have been abandoned. Where once, in the Houellebecquian vision, Christianity succeeded in uniting humanity under a shared moral code, in the twenty-first century of Possibility mankind’s sole moral imperative has become to pursue pleasure at all costs and, once the body can no longer support such pursuits, to exit existence altogether.
Elohimism, however, by unifying humanity around a common hope for immortality, does at least produce a semblance of shared moral order, even if it appears flagrantly antihumanistic: the leaders of the Elohimite Church, in promising immortality to their adherents, believe, much as Djerzinski does in The Elementary Particles, that through technology they can restore the conditions that make love possible. Vincent, the prophet of the Elohimite Church, tells Daniel1, “Man has never been able to love, apart from in immortality; it is undoubtedly why women were closer to love when their mission was to give life. We have discovered immortality. [ . . . ] the world no longer has the power to destroy us, it is we, rather, who have the power to create” (286). Elohimism fulfills the social sense of religare: it binds human beings together beneath the banner of a shared system of belief and practice. That binding occurs as the promise of immortality is realized: while Daniel and Isabelle’s marriage dissolves when aging makes its first effects felt on Isabelle’s body, rendering her undesirable and thus unlovable, for the “immortal” Elohimites the body of the other is never a source of disgust and separation, but always a source of desire and union. “Eternity, lovingly”—so goes the slogan of the Elohimite Church’s advertising campaign (283). Love is only eternal, however, so long as the body is eternal: love is bound exclusively to the body, has its source in the body, and it is only by immortalizing the body that love can hope to endure.
Elohimism also fulfills the theological sense of religare, albeit in a limited or at the very least unconventional manner. In the place of a supernatural deity, Elohimism proposes the Elohim, a race of technologically superior extraterrestrials who the Elohimites believe created life on earth. Daniel1, who encounters the cult when he meets two practitioners during a dinner party in Spain, offers the following description:
The couple were Elohimites, that is to say they belonged to a sect that worshipped the Elohim, extraterrestrial creatures responsible for the creation of mankind, and they were waiting for their return [ . . . ]. Essentially, according to them, everything boiled down to an error of transcription in the Book of Genesis: the creator, Elohi, was not to be taken in the singular, but in the plural. There was nothing divine or supernatural about our creators; they were simply material beings, more evolved than us, who had learned how to master space travel and the creation of life; they had also defeated aging and death [ . . . ]. (76–77)
The Elohimites of Daniel1’s time do not live to see the return of their creators, and the neohumans of the fifth millennium still await the coming of these Future Ones. Different from their human predecessors, the neohumans practice a cult of emotional and sensual asceticism, attempting to eradicate whatever remnants of desire remain from their ancestors. This asceticism must be maintained until the arrival of the Future Ones, who alone can “succeed in joining the realm of countless potentialities” (334). Daniel24, struggling to suppress bouts of sentiment as he nears death, writes in his commentary on Daniel1’s life story,
The disappearance of social life was the way forward, teaches the Supreme Sister. It is no less the case that the disappearance of all physical contact between neohumans has been able to have [ . . . ] the character of an asceticism; moreover, this is precisely the term that the Supreme Sister uses in her messages [ . . . ]. Considering death, we have reached a state of mind that was, according to the monks of Ceylon, the one sought by the Buddhists of the Lesser Vehicle; our life at the moment of its end “is like blowing out a candle.” We can also say, to use the words of the Supreme Sister, that our generations follow one another “like flicking the pages of a book.” [ . . . ] I know that my asceticism will not have been in vain; I know that I will be part of the essence of the Future Ones. (115–16)
The restoration of human relationships, which the progressive isolation of the neohumans has made impossible, can only take place under the tutelage of the Future Ones. So long as the thoughts of the neohumans stay focused on the return of their creators, hope is sustained, and the ascetic rigor of their solitary existences remains bearable. Though disconnected from their peers, the neohumans of the fifth millennium are bound, in thought and contemplation, to the beings who created them—beings on whom their union, and thus felicity, depends entirely. The Elohim are not only humanity’s creators and caretakers (as is the case for parents) but also its saviors. Faith in the existence of the Elohim and in the salvific benefits of their return to earth places the Elohimites in a binding relationship of hope and anticipation with these outworldly (though not otherworldly) beings. On the notion of religare alone, the religiosity of Elohimism cannot be denied.
The sacred and the profane. Émile Durkheim’s understanding of religion rests on a distinction between the sacred and the profane. All religions, in Durkheim’s view, maintain this dichotomy; consequently, all systems of belief and practice that posit sacred and profane entities are religions. Durkheim writes, “All known religious beliefs [ . . . ] have one characteristic in common: they imply a classification realized by man of things, real or ideal, into two classes—two contrasting genera usually designated by two distinct terms, which are well expressed by the words profane and sacred” (1994, 113). What typifies the relationship between the sacred and the profane is the radical heterogeneity between the two realms—for example, the difference between a wafer of bread and the holy host after a Catholic priest has consecrated it. Sacred things are of such a different order than profane things that the relationship between them may become one of antagonism. Durkheim adds, “The mind shrinks automatically from allowing the corresponding things to intermingle [ . . . ]. Such promiscuity or even close contiguity is strongly inconsistent with the state of dissociation su
rrounding these ideas in people’s consciousness. The sacred thing is pre-eminently that which the profane must not and cannot touch with impunity” (1994, 116–17).
The Elohimite Church boasts no sacred chalices, holy relics, or pantheon of deities, but it does hold one object as being of higher value than all the rest: its adherents’ DNA. The Elohimites take great care to ensure that each member’s genetic code is preserved indefinitely. Replicated in five samples, the DNA is “preserved at low temperature in underground rooms impermeable to most known radiations, which could withstand a thermonuclear attack” (282). Similar to Christ buried in his tomb, the genetic material preserved in this underground laboratory awaits the day of its resurrection, when it will deliver to its owners the youthful, glorified bodies that the church has promised. DNA is the physical site of the sacred in the Elohimite religion. Its isolation in a subterranean laboratory only indicates the degree of that sanctity: hidden away and safe from human tampering, it belongs to a heterogeneous world of forbidden things, accessible only to the high priests of the faith (scientists, in the case of Elohimism), whose expertise permits them to handle this sacred material without risk of profaning it.
Elohimism also prescribes several rituals, the most consequential of which is the suicide rite that marks members’ “entry into anticipation of resurrection” (249). Daniel25 writes in his commentary, “After a period of hesitation and uncertainty, the custom was gradually established of carrying it out in public, according to a simple, harmonious ritual, at a moment chosen by the follower, when he felt that his physical body was no longer in a state to give him the joys he could legitimately expect from it” (249). Besides evoking a parallel with early Christianity, in which hope for the resurrection of the body was matched by an equal certitude that Christ’s return was imminent, the Elohimite suicide ritual sanctifies a death that might otherwise be experienced as arbitrary and meaningless. By choosing to end their lives on their own terms, adherents avoid suffering the slow degradation of aging and are able to escape an unpleasant embodiment in the company of their fellow believers, who affirm the soon-to-be departed in his or her hope for rebirth.
When one considers these practices in conjunction with the doctrine of the Elohim, the creators of all life; the existence of a prophet, who announces the return of the Elohim and their gift of immortality; and a host of minor rituals, practices, and beliefs, it is clear that Elohimism maintains the same distinction between the sacred and the profane that Durkheim theorized was characteristic of all religions. From this point of view, Elohimism is as much a religion as any other faith tradition: binding man to man as much as it binds man to a higher power, and prescribing practices and beliefs that sanctify the body in life, death, and resurrection, the church has all the sociological makings of a religion. And yet it is missing something, something too obvious to go unnoticed, even by the most Durkheimian of sociologists:
The supernatural. On first glance, Elohimism appears to distance itself radically from the supernatural: its “gods,” the Elohim, are no more than highly evolved material beings, while the “souls” of its adherents are equated with memories contained in the physical brain. For the Elohimites, no forces exist that may “suspend, alter, or ignore” (Stark 2004, 10) the laws of nature; rather, it is precisely through the exploitation of those laws that immortality can be achieved. Miskiewicz, the church’s leading scientist, describes Elohimite immortality thus:
I suppose you [Daniel] remember what I said [ . . . ] concerning the neuro-circuits. Well, the reproduction of such a mechanism is possible, not in computers as we know them, but in a certain type of Turing machine, which we can call fuzzy automata [ . . . ]. Unlike classical calculators, fuzzy automata are capable of establishing variable, evolving connections between adjacent calculating units; they are therefore capable of memorization and apprenticeship. There is no a priori limit to the number of calculating units that can be linked, and therefore to the complexity of possible circuits. The difficulty at this stage [ . . . ] consists of establishing a bijective relation between the neurons of a human brain, taken in the few minutes following its death, and the memory of a nonprogrammed automaton. The life span of the latter being almost limitless, the next step will be to reinject the information in the opposite direction, toward the brain of the new clone; this is the downloading phase which [ . . . ] will present no particular difficulty once the uploading has been perfected. (92)
Miskiewicz’s optimistic (not to mention rather burlesque) apology for machine-mind transfer might well be an example of scientistic fancy run amok. Such theories interest transhumanists who dream of uploading their brains into supercomputers, but the relationship of such thinking to real science is somewhat dubious.5
On supernatural criteria, Elohimism does not look like a religion at all. It may pass the Durkheimian test for religiosity, but the absence of any belief in the otherworldly distinguishes it not only from the monotheisms, where belief in the one God and the soul is central, but also from Buddhism and Hinduism, where some form of human identity survives bodily death to be reincarnated in the next life. If Elohimism is to be considered a religion according to the argument from the supernatural, some redefinition of the word “supernatural” will be needed. Such a reformulation is not, however, as unworkable as it may seem, for despite Elohimism’s unswerving physicalist assumptions, it may still be possible to ascribe a sort of metaphorical supernaturalness to the movement. What Elohimism shares with the supernatural religions is the doctrine of survival—the continuing of existence, in some form, beyond the death of the body. The means of that survival are radically different: in the case of the supernatural religions, survival is a matter of fact, while for the Elohimites it must be artificially induced. But the object remains the same. Life beyond death is still possible; only the means of securing it have changed. Processes taken to be supernatural have, in effect, been naturalized, without altering the essence of the result. Simply put, in Elohimism it is precisely the supernatural nature of the supernatural that is called into question. By broadening the scope of the definition of “supernatural,” we are thus able to grant Elohimism some provisional status as a religion.
A new synthesis. At least until recently, a common assumption in modern Western definitions of religion has been that religiosity is located within a discrete, identifiable sphere of cultural activity that the practitioner enters into knowingly in certain contexts (marriage, baptism, funeral, etc.), while at other times he or she exits that sphere and engages in other domains of cultural practice (the economic, political, familial, etc.). Clifford Geertz famously promulgates this understanding of religion in his 1973 book, The Interpretation of Cultures, in which he writes,
To speak of the “religious perspective” is [ . . . ] to speak of one perspective among others. A perspective is a mode of seeing, in that extended sense of “see” in which it means “discern,” “apprehend,” “understand,” or “grasp.” It is a particular way of looking at life, a particular manner of construing the world, as when we speak of an historical perspective, a scientific perspective, an aesthetic perspective, a common-sense perspective [ . . . ]. The question then comes down to, first, what is the “religious perspective” generally considered, as differentiated from other perspectives; and second, how do men come to adopt it. (110)
Since the 1980s, however, this compartmentalized notion of religiosity has come under fire from critics who see in Geertz’s rendering evidence of Christian and specifically Protestant bias. In particular, Talal Asad has argued that the very conditions out of which the need for a definition of religion arose were contingent on specific historical developments in the West, emerging in a post-Reformation environment in which “the religious” came to be visibly separated from “the secular.” Asad explains,
Several times before the Reformation, the boundary between the religious and the secular was redrawn, but always the formal authority of the Church remained preeminent. In later centuries, with the trium
phant rise of modern science, modern production, and the modern state, the churches would also be clear about the need to distinguish the religious from the secular, shifting, as they did so, the weight of religion more and more onto the moods and motivations of the individual believer. Discipline (intellectual and social) would, in this period, gradually abandon religious space, letting “belief,” “conscience,” and “sensibility” take its place. (1993, 39)
Accordingly, any definition of religion that places at its center a “believer,” who enters into a “religious perspective” under the influence of certain symbols, is in fact only a Christian and specifically Protestant formulation, which became necessary as secular culture increasingly undermined the political and “disciplinary” power of the church. Such a definition of religion would make little sense in a culture without a clear separation of the religious and the secular, and of the church and the state (as one finds, for example, in much of the Muslim world); indeed, there would be nothing to define, insofar as religion would remain embedded in a larger body of cultural practices.
Particularly revealing in relation to Houellebecq’s treatment of religion is Asad’s claim that “even a committed Christian cannot be unconcerned at the existence of truthful symbols that appear to be largely powerless in modern society. He will rightly want to ask: What are the conditions in which religious symbols can actually produce religious dispositions? Or, as a non-believer would put it: How does (religious) power create (religious) truth[?]” (1993, 33). In Houellebecq’s novels, the power of religious and specifically Christian symbols (cathedrals, statues and other religious art, etc.) to generate enduring religious dispositions in the modern person is almost entirely absent. A character’s confrontation with a religious symbol produces at best only fleeting nostalgia for a (largely romanticized) era of medieval piety, which dissipates as soon as he or she descends the steps of the church and emerges into the secular bustle of a busy Parisian street. Houellebecq describes this experience to Lévy: “How I loved, deeply loved the magnificent ritual, perfected over the centuries, of the mass! ‘Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.’ Oh yes, certain words entered me, I received them into my heart. And for five or ten minutes every Sunday, I believed in God; and then I walked out of the church and it all disappeared, quickly, in a few minutes of walking through the streets in Paris” (2011, 138). Similarly, when, in Submission, François visits Notre Dame de Rocamadour, a famous pilgrimage site in southwestern France, the “religious mood” the visit engenders is of the most ephemeral, even tragic sort: