Including a 143-word
sentence.
The best and the worst aspects of John D. Caputo’s On Religion are perfectly encapsulated
by his thesis, “Religion may be found with or without religion” (3). This is a
playful statement, distinctively deconstructive in its dislocative operation,
that announces the concealed objective of this book, which is to rewrite Paul
Tillich’s Dimensions of Faith for the
postmodern truth*-seeker.
Though Caputo does not cite or mention Tillich anywhere in
this book, and though he may have a radically different conception of what he
is doing (see 128), I would like to take a page from his postmodern,
post-authorial authority playbook and let the similarities speak for themselves:
both authors, though separated by a substantial spatiotemporal gap, attempt to
redefine (and recoup) faith—over and against the objections of “pusillanimous
curmudgeon[s]” everywhere (3), as well as, I might add, “the elbow-patched
tweedy membership of the American Academy of Religion” (69) and “secular
intellectuals, [the] poor things” (78), with their stratified epistemological
paradigms and their awfully shortsighted endeavors—in order to resolve the
conflict between the crippling relativism of advanced capitalism on the one
hand and the uncritical intolerance of “fundamentalisms” on the other (which,
in the final analysis, may be two co-dependent processes).
More to the point, both authors redefine faith or religion
as something impossible to detect or study, whether in Tillich’s case as “the
state of being ultimately concerned”—the numerous critiques of which I do not
feel the need to rehearse—or, as in Caputo’s, whose definition of religion
could be glossed as “loving unreservedly the unknowable” (see, e.g., 13, 28,
36, etc.).
Though this definition may well fulfill the needs of a
postmodern philosopher (or the low expectations of a “weak theist”), it goes
without saying that many of those engaged in what is called “religious studies”
may wish for a more practical thesis, since Caputo’s definition of religion, as
it is currently stated, would wreak further havoc on a field that is already
unsure of just what it is studying. I, however, always welcome a further
wrinkle on the whole enterprise, provided it also fulfills the ethical
responsibility of all scholarship to think through the political implications
of its own argument; this is something that, when lacking in any text, one
should not be willing to overlook.
And it is precisely in this political capacity where Caputo
falls short: though his ideas are engagingly expressed in his inimitably witty
prose style, Caputo’s conception of the current state of religion and religious
people in the twentieth/early twenty-first centuries, especially in his
simplifying discussion of fundamentalism (101-108), lacks all historical
credibility and theoretical rigor, while his dreams of a future of religion
(without religion), though nominally anti-capitalist (the word “justice,” after
all, fills the pages of this book, see esp. 136-138), will not be all that
useful in fashioning valid social critique or working toward a collective
solution to the political and ethical crises facing the world today.
John D. Caputo’s numerous contributions to the discourses of
philosophy, a/theology, and religious studies (including, perhaps, the most
accessible discussions and applications of “deconstruction” known to humankind)
constitute a singular, indeed enviable, intellectual achievement.
Unfortunately, On Religion, a far too
celebratory reflection on postmodern “religion without religion” (132ff.), is a
relatively minor work in his otherwise illustrious career, a work that,
ironically, embodies both the greatest strength of his style, namely his bold
attempt to think beyond the generic constraints of writing on religion
(academic or otherwise), and its fundamental weakness, which is that Caputo,
having left behind all trace of scholarly rigor and responsibility, has begun
celebrating the demise of “Truth” (yes, even with the dread capital T) far, far
too soon.
