Addressing the topic of religion is necessary if one is to enter into a conversation with the title of the work, namely “As on Earth as It Is in Heaven.” This doesn’t mean, however, that talking about religion is easy, especially given the current state of art and its relationship with religious themes. But it is necessary to think about religion if part of the process adjacent to the work is linked to what is thought and spoken about when it comes to religion.
Addressing the topic through a philosophical discourse reveals itself as the path to unifying reflection on religion, escaping religious discourse. Thinking about religion prompts questions about its inherence in human experience. To this end, the two paths or initial positions for referring to it immediately reveal themselves to be traps. One path, thinking about religion as an objective fact, external to us, with a certain indifference about the subject; Or, on the other hand, or path, speaking from religion, as a subjective experience, in such an intimate way that it constitutes us, which is why separating ourselves from the subject is as impossible as when talking about politics or soccer.
Any path, making religion the subject or object of philosophical discourse, presupposes beforehand that we are certain of what religion means. In any case, it implies being within or outside of it, with us speaking about it or it speaking through us. Therefore, in thought, the topic must be approached from a broader perspective that addresses human experience in the world. Therefore, asking whether religion is inherent to human experience, which is what is called religion, and what its variations are in human history seems to be a starting point.
A starting point that requires defining what is common to human experience, or what constitutes us as humans. We humans are part of a world that surrounds us; we are made of the same material as what surrounds us, and we need what surrounds us to remain human. At first, it’s difficult to imagine what separates us, since by definition we are the same, like a certain ontological identity. To do this, it’s helpful to separate this ontological identity into levels.
First Level: The Physical
The constantly present, a reality of particles in force fields. Stones, water, minerals, and elements of the earth. We have a cause-and-effect relationship with this level. Natural laws.
Inorganic
Second Level: The Vital
The relationship with this level is one of stimulus and response. In between, there is something that interprets. A code that filters the stimulus and transforms it into a response. This is the DNA code.
Organized Organic
Third Level: The Mental
The brain is added to the DNA code of the vital. This is the level of intentionality.
Intention to, to tend toward, the mind is directed toward the world.
Fourth Level: The Linguistic
The brain mediates with the world through a linguistic code.
Fifth Level: The Cultural
In the cultural code, something is present above the merely linguistic. For example, in traffic, traffic lights. These are human social institutions. It would be possible to think of a non-linguistic culture.
Knowledge: the world enters us. (Theory). Theoretical reason is the faculty of knowing.
Action: the mind enters the world. (Practice). Practical reason is the faculty of acting.
The faculty of sensing separates them. The mind is close to the world, sensing it, without knowing or modifying it.
Humans differ linguistically, and to some extent culturally. Therefore, there is one certainty about this condition, implicit in our genetic code: at birth, we gradually enter the world of words and culture. That is, history. Unlike all other living beings with whom we share the earth, what we learned from our ancestors endures and constitutes us as historical beings. All other living beings, in some way, learn from life’s own experiences. Although, on a larger scale, what is learning is the evolution of life in a genetic code that, over long periods of time, adjusts to survive and successfully reproduce. This can never be compared to the change in the proprioception of life since its establishment in the grand history of the universe, human life, and knowledge as human history. In just 200,000 years of existence, it has modified the world and the natural environment to such an extent that certain experts dare to think that our existence has permeated the physical world so much that the planet has entered a new era, known to them as the Anthropocene.
In this way, thinking about the human condition is not an eternal, stable, and universal essence, but rather a historical, changing, and plural existence that has been experiencing spatiotemporal variations. Indeed, the human condition is constitutively historical, understanding this historicity as a relationship of mutual and incessant referral between singular human beings and the equally singular world in which they live, that is, as an endless reversal between the “subjective” and “objective” sides of the human experience of the world. This reciprocal reference between the human and the mundane is governed by the ontological principle of spatiotemporal variation, which postulates the inexhaustible diversification and unpredictable mutation of everything that happens. But equally, the commonality of the human in the face of diversity, not only culturally but historically, refers to the communicable experience of historical experience. Humanity is, therefore, nothing more than the result of the relationship between the different manifestations of the human. Thus, in the history of human societies known to history and those yet to come, it is possible to discern a few common features.
“Above all, human life is an eminently social, plural, intersubjective life, formed by a complex and changing network of more or less institutionalized relationships, simultaneously conflictual and communicative. Furthermore, all known human societies have three types of social relationships (economic, parental, and political) that are strongly institutionalized because they respond to three natural conditions of human life: organic survival, sexual reproduction, and the conflicts inherent to a plurality of individuals and groups coexisting in the same territory.”
These three social relationships are irreducible and inseparable from one another, so that it is not possible to establish a relationship of hierarchy between them, that is, one of unilateral derivation and dependence, but rather a relationship of mutual tension and mutual dependence. These relationships have been articulated in different ways throughout history. In fact, each of them makes possible the transition between nature and culture, between animality and humanity, between the objective and subjective aspects of the human experience in the world.
I believe we are now ready to address the major questions that religion poses to us. All societies have three basic social relationships (economic, parental, and political), with which they attempt to respond to three different “natural” needs or conditions of human life: survival, procreation, and rivalry. Thus, human life, as social or “cultural” life, does not seem possible without these three types of relationships. Now, does religion have this same universal character? That is, does it constitute a fourth condition of human life, such that human life, as social life, would not be possible without it? And, if so, what “natural” need would it respond to? Furthermore, what “cultural” response and what social relationship could be considered specifically religious? Finally, what are its main historical variations? For this purpose, it is pertinent to define the concept of religion.
Religion according to Wikipedia is:
A religion is a cultural system of behaviors and practices, worldviews, ethics, and social organization that relates humanity to an existential category. Many religions have narratives, symbols, and sacred stories that purport to explain the meaning of life or the origin of life or the universe. From their beliefs about the cosmos and human nature, people can derive morals, ethics, or religious laws, or a preferred lifestyle. According to some estimates, there are around 4,200 living religions in the world and countless extinct ones.
The definition of religion, according to the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language
While we saw in the previous paragraphs how, in a certain way, it can be said that human relations are mediated by basic social relations, namely, economic, parental, and political. These intervene within the human condition, challenging its survival, procreation, and rivalry. It would be possible to think of religion as a fourth universal character that defines humanity. We would have to question religious practices since the dawn of culture, ask ourselves if the social life of humanity makes religion necessary, ask ourselves if it responds to a natural need or if it is a cultural response.
Defining religion would have to conceptually accommodate all the practices, from mythological to contemporary, that universally envelop humanity and its relationship with religion. Furthermore, this definition of religion, to be universalizable, should take into account the process of “secularization” followed by the modern West and the alleged historical disappearance or “overcoming” of traditional religious forms. In fact, the exercise of reason (in its triple cognitive, moral, and aesthetic dimensions) did not simply assert itself against religion, as if it were a mere external obstacle, but rather developed within it, in close relationship with it and the history of religions themselves, from the most ancient forms of magical thinking to the salvation religions common in modern times.
Even traditional religious beliefs and practices have not disappeared in modern times, but remain prevalent among broad sectors of the population, alongside secularized or desacralized practices and forms of rationality. Furthermore, new forms of religiosity have emerged that can be considered a “resacralization” of secular practices and ideas. So-called modern “rationality” has not eliminated domination among human beings, nor has it assured them dominion over nature, but rather has engendered new and ruthless forms of submission (as is the case with totalitarian regimes) and has provoked new and terrible dangers (as is the case with ecological dangers). Theocracy has been replaced by technocracy, but that does not mean that human beings are now more oriented or less disoriented than before; it means that their criteria for orientation are different. Must we conclude, then, that modern technocracy is the religion of our time, that the myth of progress is the heir to the Judeo-Christian myth?
Today, it is not so easy to be an atheist, since the scientific belief in an ultimate and unappealable principle of Reality is equivalent to the religious belief in an ultimate and unappealable Divinity. But in that case, it can no longer be interpreted in a merely negative way, as the movement of alienation of human subjectivity; or, in any case, this movement of negation will have to provide the human being with some kind of positivity, it will have to allow him to acquire a new or supplementary form of subjectivity; so that the human being can only be understood as such through this duplication of himself. Religion has to do with thought, with the “natural” need that every human being has to orient himself in the world. We can consider this need for orientation to be “natural” to the extent that human beings are born disoriented, that is, to the extent that they have little genetic determination of their behavior; and “culture” is nothing other than the set of orientation criteria that allow them to relate to other natural beings, to their own bodies, and to others similar to them; so that religion would have this positive and decisive “cultural” function of orienting human beings in their relationship (theoretical and practical) with the world. What distinguishes human beings is not only that they collectively regulate their subsistence, their reproduction and their conflicts, that they subject hunger, sex and violence to rules, but that, to institute and articulate these various rules, they use a language, more exactly, a symbolic thought that they share with others and that allows them to orient themselves in the world, that allows them to compose a common world with them, in short, that allows them to understand and conduct themselves as a singular being in that world.
Therefore, human beings cannot cease to deny themselves, cannot cease to transcend their own limits, and cannot do so without relating differently—a sacred way—to their own bodies and to all other beings, that is, without engendering new cultural creations, new forms of social relations that dislocate the rules of their own rationality and call into question the limits of their own humanity. The sacred is not only that which opposes the profane but also that which serves as its ultimate “ideological” foundation. If religion fulfills a positive and decisive “cultural” function of guiding human life, it is because it allows human beings to simultaneously consider the two sides of their own humanity. Therefore, it is not surprising that religion is understood simultaneously as the movement that founds every idea of reality and as the movement that radically challenges it. “The rejection of the reality principle as a pertinent criterion for deciding the good and evil of the world,” that is, the rejection of every absolute principle of orientation in the world. From this point of view, religion is essentially subversive and at the same time essentially affirmative: it is the most extreme affirmation of the human desire for happiness, it is the incorruptible will to transcend all limits, it is the refusal to accept any justification for the evil in the world, it is the commitment by which human beings seek to transform their own condition and the state of affairs in the world, without resigning themselves to accepting a given identity and reality.
Religion can be considered a universal dimension of human life, as long as we consider it not as a fourth form of social relationship (along with work, kinship, and politics), but as that which articulates these three profane dimensions of human life, inverts them, and invests them with a sacred meaning. Religion, therefore, would have a triple and inseparable function in every culture: the function of inverting the profane, the function of conjoining the profane and the sacred, and, as a consequence of the above, the function of composing the world and orienting human beings within it. Now, since economics, kinship, and politics have been articulated in very different ways across time and place, and since these different articulations have given rise to four different historical types of society (tribal, estate, capitalist, and global), it is not surprising that each of these types of society has also had a particular type of religion or symbolic universe.
Indeed, I believe it is possible to speak of four major types of religion: mythological religions, characteristic of tribal societies; theological religions, which emerge with estate societies; technological religion, which has served as legitimation for modern capitalist society; and, finally, ecological religion, which may become the new symbolic universe of the emerging global society. But these four types of religion do not replace one another, but rather overlap and interweave with one another. Thus, the emergence of theological religions, usually called “religions of salvation,” “universal religions,” or simply “religions,” did not simply cause the disappearance of mythological religions; rather, the latter were reorganized by the former, producing all kinds of syncretisms between the two. Similarly, the emergence of modern technological religion in Judeo-Christian Europe, and its subsequent expansion to the rest of the world, did not mean the disappearance of the great theological religions; rather, they were forced to reorganize and combine in one way or another with the former. In fact, technological religion emerged from within the Judeo-Christian religion itself, and both expanded together as Europe expanded its colonies throughout the rest of the world. Finally, ecological religion has emerged from within technological religion itself, as a kind of renewing and self-critical heresy, and at the same time, it has revisited and reworked some aspects of preceding mythological and theological religions.
Now, when considering this symbolic universe, the true religious conflict of today is that of the prevailing technological religion and an imminent conflict with an ecological postmodern religion. Well, considering this framework, the work developed in the field of knowledge of the Master’s in Fine and Visual Arts at the National University of Colombia is framed by representing this conflict and giving visibility to a technique capable of reproducing and domesticating a nature, once wild and sacred, at a time when the destruction of a natural environment necessary for the subsistence of humanity, as a natural ethnic group, is evident. Without a doubt, this leads us to understand that, in some way, the body, the support of humanity, is inexorably transforming into a sign, an ontological level framed for the reproducibility of the sign within an artificial and technological framework, which will leave behind a natural past of humankind as part of the world, co-dependent in its survival and religious meaning, as a divine entity in nature, giving life and its liberation in its technocratic future.
Thinking about the Anthropocene implies, in itself, considering the possibility of the end of the world as the natural environment of man, of humanity and its sign potential; in which to think about the visions of Terence McKenna, where the planet Earth would be a kind of egg that would hatch at some point, giving life to a divinity or form of existence autonomous from natural dependence, made of signs or data that live forever, reproducing artificially, without human support as a decisive element.
