Georges Bataille
Theory of Religion
translated by Christos H. Gemeliaris
ed. ypsilon/books, 2022, p. 136

Already from the title of this short essay “Theory of Religion” we allow ourselves to be drawn for a moment into the field of constitutive questions of religion, soteriology, its social role, its origin or function. However, for Georges Bataille, any hypothetical reference to the general landscape of the past as if it existed in the present is meaningless. The representation of the universe without man, or the attribution of a meaning divorced from the consciousness that gives meaning, is all nothing but arbitrariness and is accomplished by a poetic leap, a movement that replaces the “zero of ignorance with a fuzzy superposition.”

Without the idea of ​​the divine, we would not be able to instrumentalize the world and organize it rationally.

Bataille, a major French writer and thinker of the 20th century, expounds a complex worldview, making a semantic shift from what might automatically be considered a theory of religion. In his worldview, the concept of the divine plays a necessary central role, since without this idea, a person would not be able to operate the world and organize it rationally. He would not have built a set of universal moral principles or a legal system. The divine and sacred does not depend on the length of time, it is not affected by the variability of matter. Thus, by means of comparison, man succeeds in turning himself into an instrument with the ultimate goal of production, a thing among others, a thing in the world of things.

Without explicit references to history, politics or anthropology, but in a deeply philosophical – but ultimately political – text, the author traces the course of human civilization. Speaking in general terms of the anthropology formed in The Theory of Religion, man distinguishes himself from the animal world, from the immanence of animal life and asserts his ability to distance himself from it by sacrifice, sacred celebration, within the community of religion with the primacy of the spirit or spirits. The real world turns into a remnant of the divine, and this last dangerously spreads. And as it spreads, both the resistance to unremarkable malice, animal life, and the need to constantly reinvent transcendence overwhelm the inner violence that now erupts and manifests outward. Man turns to war.

With the war, man, who interpreted existence as a thing, passes to the next stage of his cultural development and turns man himself not just into a tool, but into a commodity. The enslavement of man by man, violence, makes humanity itself a thing in the world of things. “The sacred power appropriated [ο πολεμιστής] it is a pretext for peace, which in the depths of the soul has become a use-value.”

Thus we have passed from an archaic world to an age of military order, and then to a realm of things tending towards a universal character. Here law develops and morality is established to provide stability and increase accumulation. Dualism arises and dominates, which defines good, placing it on the side of the spirit, divine, sacred, and at the same time banishes the principle of evil and matter. It is “an empire of the order of reality, where slavery reigns.” Dualism will eventually lead to the exclusion of the sensible world according to rational criteria in the transitional age of mediation. Then follow the realm of autonomous things, the world of industry, where a complete rupture of relations between the divine and the real leads to the absolute isolation of man from his works and his inseparable connection with the order of reality.

Bataille, with his particular style, manages to build on a few pages a complete interpretation of the world and existence. An original, special interpretation that he wanted to leave open so that his readers could understand through it and project their thoughts, their readings onto it. At every moment of his work, the author opposes the divine to the real, always placing the axis of man, consciousness, which gives meaning to the world. At every moment of his composition, Bataille reminds us of the importance of forgotten tension, free movement, which “breaks into tears, ecstasies and bursts into laughter, revealing the impossible with laughter, ecstasy or tears.”