Religion and Culture

Michel Foucault, Jeremy Carrette, Jeremy Carrette

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136685927
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

First Published in 1999. Postmodern theorist Michel Foucault is best known for his work on power/ knowledge, and on the regulation of sexuality in modern society. Yet throughout his life, Foucault was continually concerned with Christianity, other spiritual movements and religious traditions, and the death of God, and these themes and materials scattered are throughout his many writings. Religion and Culture collects for the first time this important thinker's work on religion, religious experience, and society. Here are classic essays such as The Battle for Chastity, alongside those that have been less widely read in English or in French. Selections are arranged in three groupings: Madness, Religion and the Avant-Garde; Religions, Politics and the East; and Christianity, Sexuality and the Self: Fragments of an Unpublished Volume. Ranging from Foucault's earliest studies of madness to Confessions of the Flesh, the unpublished fourth volume of his History of Sexuality, his final thoughts on early Christianity, Religion and Culture makes Foucault's work an indispensable part of contemporary religious thought, while also making an important link between religious studies and cultural studies.

PART I

Madness, religion and the avant-garde

CHAPTER ONE

Religious deviations and medical knowledge (1962)

Originally delivered at the Royaumont conference on ‘Heresy and society in pre-industrial Europe’ in May 1962.¹ The paper was first published as ‘Les deviations religieuses et le savoir médical’ in the conference proceedings: Jacques Le Goff, ed., Hérésies et sociétés dans l’Europe pré-industrielle 11–18 siècles, Mouton, Paris, 1968, pp. 19–29. It was subsequently published in Dits et écrits, vol. I, Gallimard, Paris, 1994, pp. 624–35.

Translation by Richard Townsend

There is certainly, in any culture, a coherent series of gestures of separation; among these, prohibition of incest, the marking out of madness and perhaps certain religious exclusions are only particular cases. The function of these gestures is, in the strict sense of the term, ambiguous: just when they mark the limit, they open out a space whose transgression is always possible. This space thus measured and open has its own configuration and its laws: it forms for each period what we might call the ‘system of the transgressive’. It is right to say that it coincides neither with the illegal or the criminal, nor with the revolutionary, nor with the monstrous or the abnormal, nor with the addition of all these deviant forms; but each of these terms marks it out, at least indirectly, and sometimes allows it to be revealed in part. It is the space which, for all these terms taken as a coherent whole, is the condition of possibility and historical appearance.

The modern consciousness tends to order, as distinct from the normal and the pathological, the ability to mark out the irregular, the deviant, the unreasonable, the illicit and also the criminal. To all which consciousness finds foreign it gives the status of exclusion, when it is necessary to judge, and inclusion, when it is a question of explaining. The ensemble of fundamental dichotomies which, in our culture, lays out on both sides of the limit the conforming and the deviant, finds here a justification and gives the appearance of having a sound basis. Such marvels should not create an illusion: they were set up at a recent date; the very possibility of tracing a line between the normal and the pathological was not formulated much earlier than this, since we must acknowledge that this possibility was something entirely new in the texts of Bichat at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Strange as that may seem, the Western world knew, and had known for thousands of years, a form of medicine which rested upon an understanding of illness whose fundamental categories were not organised in terms of the normal and the pathological.

The debate that took place between the medical consciousness and certain forms of religious deviation, at the turn of the sixteenth century, may serve as an example. We will limit ourselves here to the belief in a changing of the physical powers of man due to the effect of a demonic intervention.

Let us first note that between partisans and adversaries of this multiplication [of religious deviation], what is at issue is not really punishment. The often cited indulgence² of Molitor and Wier is relative and very much partial. Molitor acquitted the witches of any real action, but only to condemn them more surely to the death sentence, ‘because by their apostasy and their corruption these women have completely denied God and given themselves up to the devil’ (Des sorciéres et devineresses, 1489, p. 81).³ Doubtless, Wier was indignant that the judge did not show enough trust in the anger of God and that ‘for a storm which has fallen on young corn […] he had arrested a few mad and simple minded women’, but he condemns with even more rigour the magicians who made pacts with the Devil ‘in all awareness, free will and knowledge’ (Des illusions et impostures des diables, 1579, pp. 164, 362).⁴ As to Erastus, who held ‘that witches were absolutely unable to perform the marvels that were commonly believed of them’, he asks for the death penalty against them: ‘I believe that I have shown sufficiently that witches should be punished, not so much for the things that they do or that they wish to do; but for their apostasy and their revolt against obedience to God. Similarly for their alliance contracted with the Devil’ (Dialogues touchant le pouvoir des sorcières, 1579).⁵

This problem of indulgence is secondary. The essential point is that neither Molitor, at the end of the fifteenth century, nor Weir or Erastus, in the sixteenth century, dismisses the demonic. The debate with Sprenger, Scribonius or Bodin does not contest either the existence of the demon or his presence amongst men; rather it ponders upon the ways in which he shows himself and the manner in which his action is transmitted and hidden by appearances. This is not a conflict between nature and the supernatural but rather a difficult debate on the type of truth of the illusion. Here are a few points of reference:

First, Satan, an evil angel, but above all an angel, remained spirit even when he acquired a body. It is with spirits that he can communicate most easily; for these are free, whereas things of the earth submit to the laws which God prescribed for them. If then Satan acts upon bodies this can only be with God’s special permission and a sort of miracle. If he acts upon souls, it is following this general permission which God gave him after the Fall; it is the universal consequence of sin. It was in this way that Erastus defined the possibilities of the action of the Devil: he has little power over things and bodies, less even than man to whom God confided the care of the world; but a great influence over spirits that he wishes to trick and seduce, and which are now the very domain of his ill doings, unless God, by special grace, consents to distancing him from hearts and minds.

Second, among those hearts and minds, Satan will choose by preference and ease the most fragile, those in whom will and piety are the weakest. Women first of all: ‘The Devil, sharp, crafty and sly enemy, invades easily the feminine sex, which is inconstant by its make up; the fickle faith, mischievous, impatient, melancholic because it does not have command of its affections, and principally those old, simple minded and stupid women of wavering spirit’ (Wier p. 300).⁶ Melancholics also, who ‘are saddened by little loss or other things, as said Chrysostom in these words: “All those whose the Devil tricks he tricks by irritation and sadness’” (p. 298).⁷ Finally, the mad: ‘And just as by humours and vapours the use of reason is interested in drunkards and fanatics, so also the Devil who is a spirit can easily and through God’s permission move them, adapt them to his illusions and corrupt reason’ (p. 313).⁸ Thus, the Devil, without overturning any of this natural order, over which he has so little power, knows how to take advantage of the weaknesses and the failings this order may provoke in souls, in order to take them over. He has passed from an order of the world to which he is subject to the disorders of the soul which in turn he subjects. Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) said as much when it explained that the demon took advantage of the fact that ‘the brain is the most humid of all the parts of the body’ and of the influence of the ‘moon, which [itself has power to] incite humours’ (p. 40).⁹

Third, the demon – power disarmed against nature but all-powerful against souls – will act above all by trickery: nothing will be changed in the order of external things; but all will be overturned in their appearance, in the images which are transmitted to the soul. Because man has power, as Sprenger explained, to recover by his own will the images of things which no longer exist, the demon, even more so, holds a similar power: is it not he who when man’s will is asleep commands dreams? (p. 50).¹⁰ The demon is the master of dreams, the great tricking power; and, as he does not have the power to suspend the laws of nature, he only gives to men, by dreams and images, the full certainty that he holds this power: ‘It is false that witches run thousands of leagues in the silence of the night to reach the sabbath;¹¹ they are the toy of dreams or some powerful illusion … that the devil has imprinted in their brain’ (Molitor).¹² Demonic action will not take place in the world itself but between the world and man, all along the surface which is that of the ‘phantasy’ and senses, there where nature is transformed into image. It is precisely this operation which he overturns, in no way changing the truth of nature, but clouding all appearances:

He knows … how to show diverse figures, artificially shape useless idols, cloud vision, dazzle the eyes, put forward the false for true, and by a singular dexterity stop us from noticing his deceptions; hiding the things that are true, in order that they should not appear to be foregrounding things which are not true, and yet making them appear … He is accustomed also to spoiling the phantasy of men by the mockery of many phantoms, troubling those who keep watch at night, astonishing by dreams those who sleep, making stray from the straight road those who travel, and to laughing at those who fail and others also! scaring them, confusing them and mixing up many things by the inexplicable labyrinths of opinion (Wier, pp. 55–6)¹³

Fourth, the intervention of the Devil then is clearly localised. This does not reduce at all its complexity nor its marvellous power, because it can be only in a whole system of complicity and correspondences. Of all the faculties of the soul, the imagination is the most material, or rather, it is in the imagination that the transition from body to soul and from soul to body is effected. And if it’s no doubt true that, under the impetus of a whole religious evolution, the thinkers of the sixteenth century increasingly spiritualised the power of the Devil, they only gave him more complete powers over the body’s interior machinery. All that is at the limits of the soul, just this side of the image, of fantasy and of dream, that is to say the senses, nerves, humours, become by association the privileged domain of the Devil: ‘This evil spirit is more use to moving the humours [of the body], to trouble the source of the nerves which is the brain’ (Wier, p. 58).¹⁴ Satan knows how to mobilise all the solids of the body: when he shakes the nerves next to the brain, he needs at the same time to excite the organs of the senses, so that the fantasy can be taken for reality itself and that the body can be taken in by this great trickery, which makes the Devil appear to the enfeebled spirit of witches. But this mechanism, in itself complicated, is still not sufficient. That which the witch sees, others must see in their turn. In the mind of spectators the same fantasies must be born. And so the demonic operation, which spreads out from the imagination to the nerves and from there to the organs of the senses, extends itself, gains the body of others, their senses, their brain and their imagination, forming a dense vegetation which, excluding the outside world, is none the less real. (It is by this collection of co-ordinated artifices that ‘the evil spirit knows how to bring out, craftily from the body of one possessed and into the sight of all’, hair entangled, sand, nails of iron, bones, waste, ‘which he does after having dazzled our vision’.)¹⁵

Fifth, this power, limited to the space of the imagination, finds itself by that very fact redoubled in depth. It can in this way trick not only victims or accomplices, but those very individuals whose piety should be most resistant to temptations: those who hound out sorcerers because they have really been to the sabbath, or because they have turned themselves into wolves; but this is only trickery, and, therefore, the Devil tricks both the feeble spirits and the believers whose solid faith cannot be circumvented directly. Believing in the reality of all these physical powers is also a way of submitting to Satan: those who affirm in order to condemn, the real transport to the sabbath, are ‘the principal slaves of their master Belzabuth who glorifies himself for having been well served, above all under the mantle of the Church’ (Wier, pp. 255–6).¹⁶ But, conversely, to deny the physical modifications because the operations which make them up are imaginary is to be in turn victim of the marvels of Satan: in only addressing oneself to already agitated imaginations and proceeding through fantasies and dreams, Satan knew well that we would fear him less and we would finish by no longer believing in his power; thus, disarmed, one becomes its victim, the peak of the illusion being to believe that his physical powers are only an illusion. According to Scribonus, it is the case with Wier himself, when he

proclaims that witches imagine only that they have committed crimes where in reality they have done nothing … I speak frankly with Bodin: I believe that Wier who defended in all circumstances the witches and poisoners is himself a witch and a mixer of poisons. Ah, if only a man like him had never been born or at least had never written a single word! Whereas he and his books offer to people so many opportunities for sin and to sink into the kingdom of Satan.¹⁷

In any case, this empire triumphs and we do not come out of the realm of the demonic; we confirm its existence if we harry it in order to condemn it; we bring him succour if we deny his physical powers. Satan is always there precisely at the point from which we have just chased him; the place which he leaves empty is still the mark of his victory.

In this order of physical powers, which is henceforth only a universe of fantasies, Satan has become he who is perpetually absent. But it is in this very absence that his presence becomes assured and is shown; the less he can be assigned in his transcendental presence to a particular place in the world and in nature, the more his operations become universal, the more they gain in invisible subtlety, slipping into all truth and each appearance. A sort of ‘ontological’ argument is established: a discourse which does not go in a straight line from idea to existence, but from image (fantasy present to the dazzled mind) right up to the absence (because it only consists of a fantasy), then to he who has dug out or excavated the void, and is the solid figure of his own absence. When we take the image of Satan not for Satan but for an illusion, then Satan shows by this abusive lack of belief that he does exist; and when we take the image of Satan not for an illusion, but for Satan, then Satan shows by this belief that, once again, he exists.

The demonic has not been dismissed; quite the opposite, it is brought closer, and infinitely so: embedded in the joining of spirit and body where the imagination is born. Paradoxically doctors of the sixteenth century freed up from the demonic only those things which were inanimate; they place the demonic in the immediate environs of the soul, at the contact surface of the body. Wier, as with Molitor and Erastus, neither more nor less than their adversaries, by assigning physical powers to the imagination, rooted the demonic in the body. Much later, this did indeed allow a naturalistic reduction of the demonic, but it by no means determined that reduction in an absolute sense in the sixteenth century, a period where the imaginary is not nonexistent, and where the body is not nature.

Third consequence: when located at this point, the demonic commands all access to truth; its power is identified with the very possibility of error; it covers in any case the same surface, and it is there that it takes on its own dimensions. We are subject to the Devil only to the extent that we can be subject to error. But when we escape error we are still not escaping Satan because although we have uncovered and denounced this fantasy, we do not know at all if we are triumphing over Satan by revealing the derisory truth of the error he imposed, or if we are still mystified by he who wants to have us believe that he is not a fantasy. At the centre of the physical powers that are being challenged, there is an experience of the demonic, it is the great uncertainty of experience and truth, of being and non-being, and what Wier, with his contemporaries, named as the ‘dazzling’ of the spirit.

We can therefore say that there was a ‘medicalisa...