De Certeau and an Enquiry into Believing

In both a special edition I edited for New Blackfriars on De Certeaus work

and a section of my Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory, I attempted to
outline the ways in which de Certeaus work is significant for theology. It is
significant because he was trained theologically by some of the best J esuit minds,
several associated with nouvelle theologie like de Lubac, but also because some of the
objects of his analyses and the methods he developed to examine them, have
theological import. There is his historical and historiographic work, for example, in
volumes like Loudon and La mystique fable that charts the move away from the
sacramentalism of Christendom to the opacities of nominalism and the spiritual shift
towards personal experiences of ecstasy as a measure of theological truth. De Lubac is
very much in the background here. There is also his examination of social practices
and cultural politics that have so influenced my own work on rethinking systematic
theology and his argument that as secularity dawned and ascended so political,
economic and civil society functioned as a substitute for ecclesiology. The work of de
Certeau might be approached as articulating the masked theology of the secular, not in
the liberal tradition of Harvey Cox or Paul Tillich, but more as a theologically-minded
voyager through a secular cultural and political landscape. And so, for de Certeau,
politics is a modality of religion; both being rooted in forms of spatially organised
practices that are sites for the production of discourse. The long march of history or
tradition both links and divides religion and politics, leading to the decline of the
former and the rise of the later.
Both of those writings in New Blackfriars and Theology and Contemporary
Critical Theory are now ten years old. Nevertheless, it is in de Certeaus examination
of the relationship between spatial and discursive practices, the political and the
religious, that we come across what now I see as some of his most interesting
ruminations: on believing, for example. From years of familiarity with de Certeaus
work, I sense now that these scattered analyses of trust, faith, knowledge and
credibility go right to the heart of why de Certeau is so important an intellectual
resource for contemporary enquiries into secularism, religions and theology. Not that
others, confreres like Deleuze, Foucault, Baudrillard and Bourdieu, did not
themselves develop what is finally a Marxist inspired investigation into the
production of knowledges. But none of these thinkers explicitly undertook such an
investigation on the basis of the conviction that the historical shift from religion to
politics profoundly informed the social production of such knowledges and that
questions of believing and believability were fundamental to the shifts themselves. On
what basis does Luthers justification by faith gain unprecedented credibility in the
early sixteenth century? On what basis does empirical evidence, gathered and
presented by some, become persuadable to others; those with no direct relation to the
collection and organisation of the data? What de Certeau seeks to demonstrate is that
the factual is embedded in the mythic; the real framed always by the recited (from
rcit - a story, a narrative); the true netted always in chains of symbolising signs and
extended legends.
De Certeaus work on believing gives, to my mind, suggestive hints for
approaching what desperately needs examining today in the light of a new public
visibility of religion and the employment by sociologists, cultural theorists and
philosophers terms like re-enchantment and postsecularity as cultural descriptors.
In this essay then I wish to return to one of de Certeaus most influential essays
Believing and Making People Believe and interrogate what we find there both in
terms of de Certeaus ideas and the methodology informing them. I will suggest the
specific ideas he elaborates in that essay are outmoded. But their outmodedness is
significant because it points to a shift in what I will go on to detail as the structures of
believing. De Certeaus essay articulates ideas about the organisation of knowledge
and belief that are no longer with us, are no longer convincing; although one of his
central arguments still warrants further thinking. Nevertheless, much in de Certeaus
methodology remains fundamental for my own investigation into contemporary
believing. In the second half of the essay, having critically thought through Believing
and Making People Believe, I will sketch, on the basis of the critique, an alternative
approach to believing focussed upon structures. In a sense this alternative approach
attempts to combine de Certeaus poststructural concerns with time, spatial flows and
discursive practices with a more structuralist approach in which believing is situated
in a field of synchronic intelligibilities that both oppose and correlate with the term
belief.
The central thesis in Believing and Making People Believe is that just as
religious beliefs no longer organise practices, because membership of religious
organisations is on the decline, so political beliefs also are becoming disassociated
from activism, civic debate and party participation. There is a weakening, exhausting
of belief (something de Certeau examines various aspects of in his La faiblesse du
croit). He defines belief not in terms of a dogma beliefs content or object but as
a modality of the affirmation (p.120), so that while part of the problem with the
disappearance of convictions is that there are far too many objects for belief, the
main point is the decline in that modality of affirmation. One might have thought that
this would give rise to a pervasive if rather enervating scepticism. But Certeau thinks
otherwise. He thinks believing has been displaced, gone on vacation; as beliefs fade
then business has set about manufacturing simulacra of credibility (p.121). De
Certeau makes no reference here to Deleuze (though he does footnote Baudrillard),
nevertheless his account of simulacra owes something to both of them as well as
Guy Debords analysis of the spectacle. Deleuzes account is more philosophical,
Baudrillards historical (in fact Hegelian), and de Certeaus account is thin. It is a
term associated with what de Certeau calls the real without any seeming reference to
Lacan despite the time he spent studying psychoanalysis. The real is related to facts,
data, statistics, events and circumstance. But these items do not speak for themselves,
rather they are employed as part of narratives by organisations, particularly the media,
that institutionalise the real. And the real, as told to us, interminably dictates what
must be believed (p.124). In a sketchy and rather generalised archaeology of belief,
he charts the move away from belief that remains tied to its prime object (p.122) to
the individualization of beliefs (p.123) in which there is a freedom from dogma. It
is this transit of belief that facilities to move toward making people believe.
What is missing in de Certeaus account is a rigorous examination of believing
itself. In order to make his political point, his critical method focuses on examining
cultural practices to understand the relationship between belief and narration, the
rhetorics of persuasion, the production of credibility. We are, he observes a narrated
society in a threefold sense: it is defined by recits (the fables of our advertising and
information), by citations of them, and by their interminable recitation (p.125
translation my own). Adopting a very Lacanian understanding of the relationship
between the symbolic and the real, the observer knows perfectly well that they are
only dealing with simulacra but even so they accept these simulacra have the status of
reality (p.126). But the question here is what is knows in this sentence and why does
the observer accept? What I am trying to get at is de Certeau situates believing with
respect to the cultural/social production of knowledges. That does not allow him then
to use the word knows as if that knowledge was based on truth outside these
productions of knowledge. Furthermore, the observer is little more than a fool
knowing one thing, believing another. De Certeau either has to accept that knowledge
and belief are both produced, and therefore not necessarily related to the real at all
(whatever that might be and however it is acceded to), or knowledge and belief are
very different such that we know certain things but nevertheless allow ourselves to
believe otherwise. The problem here is related to what is set up as an opposition
empirical facts, data, statistics etc. as indices of the real, on the one hand, and their
narration (recit), citation and recitation, on the other. Of course the narration, citation
and recitation socially produces the knowledge, but what is uncertain in de Certeau is
whether the facts still remain facts, the data, data. In other words what is uncertain is
the status of the empirical evidence, or rather the relationship between this evidence
and the real that is subsequently institutionalised. This uncertainty distinguishes de
Certeau from both Deleuze and Baudrillard. For both these thinkers argue there is no
real at all we are only ever dealing with degrees of simulation. De Certeau seems
unsure: on occasion, no doubt with Althusser in mind, he accepts that belief passes
from myth to myth, ideology to ideology. On other occasions Christian belief appears
to be the only true belief, the ecclesia the only true site organising such belief, and
liturgy the only true praxis. All other believing are displacements of this truth; that is
belief no longer based on an invisible otherness concealed behind signs (p.126).
Still, on other occasions, a residual positivism seems to ground knowledge of what is
real and can be affirmed, and belief is viewed as a modality of such affirmation. The
uncertainty or prevarication is, in part, explained by his method: his examination of
the production of belief following the erosion of Christianity (p.123). But his
governing question, What makes a belief believable ? need not be answered in terms
of a socio-political and psycho-linguistic approach that analyses the history of
practices and productions. He recognises believing is fundamental to the human
condition, and that it is rooted in myths that are both religious and political. But he
never examines this condition as such; and yet surely it is this condition that enables
the transit of belief; the shifts in which what was once believed is now rendered
unbelievable and what was once incredible gains credence. There is then an
alternative, perhaps complimentary approach to the question, What makes a belief
believable ? - an approach that is loosely phenomenological. Rather than examine the
production of belief we can examine its operation.
How do we begin to examine the operation of belief? De Certeaus essay, read
in a structuralist manner, offers us a clue. De Certeaus own interest in and
examination of structuralism in The Practices of Everyday Life, for example
demonstrates how this school of thought impacted upon his own writing. It is no
accident then that his discourse on believing is structured around a number of related
terms which form binary pairs belief/knowledge, simulacra/real, true/false,
fact/fiction, appearance/reality, credibility/lack of credibility, church/business,
visible/invisible, presence/absence, trust/suspicion. To these binaries oppositions,
correlative terms are added: credence and conviction as synonyms for belief,
along with more nuanced terms such as interest and adherents; dogma, referent
object and validation as correlative terms with knowledge. This grid of ideas is
then framed by two spinal categories: authority and power. De Certeau never
examines this structure, as such. In fact, it operates at a deep, semantic level of his
text. But it is this semantic grid that I wish to foreground and develop, for here lies
what I propose to call the structure of believing that facilitates the operation of belief.
An act or an object of believing only becomes intelligible within a grid of variables
the understanding of what counts as knowledge, truth, reality, and credible; levels of
trust or suspicion; and institutional context. The examination of this structure with
respect to a particular object or act of belief should then enable us to answer more
thoroughly the question, what makes a belief believable?
So, taking this basic structure, extrapolated from de Certeau, allow me develop
another set of variables before sketching out how the examination of such a structure
can be important for theology undertaken in a cultural time described in words like
postsecular and re-enchantment. We return to de Certeau and the observation I
made at the beginning of this lecture that the cultural context in which de Certeau
worked has changed, making questionable some of his assumptions. For in many
ways de Certeau is following a Weberian lead: secularisation is a process of
rationalisation that fosters the flight of the gods and the disenchantment of the world.
Hence in his analysis of the outbreak of possessions at Loudon in the seventeenth
century, he will suggest: Power was ceasing to be religious. The power of decision,
with respect to the truths or Churches in confrontation with one another, was slipping
away from them. Henceforth right would be defined in terms of the State (p.26). And
so religious conviction gives way to political conviction; belief in religion to belief in
politics. Only the State will save us now. As we have seen, this is a central axiom of
the essay we have been examining. But besides the fact that that disenchantment
process, and the secularisation process it facilitated, seems currently to be in reverse -
and so such a grand explanatory narrative cannot account for such a reversal the
argument rests upon the structural similarity between religious and political believing.
It is that structural similarity that I wish to question; and question with respect to an
important theological distinction between faith and belief.
I know such a distinction is more difficult in German though not in either
English or French. But if we take one of the earliest Biblical accounts of religious
believing we can see the significant implications for the structure of believing that
such a distinction makes:

[T]he word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, saying, Fear
not, Abram: I am your shield, and your exceeding great reward.
And Abram said, Lord God, what will you give me, seeing I go
childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of
Damascus? And Abram said, Behold to me thou has given no
seed: and lo one born in my house is my heir. And, behold, the
word of the Lord came to him, saying, This shall not be your
heir; but he that shall come forth from out of your own bowels
shall be your heir. And he brought him forth and said, Look
now toward heaven, and tell the stars if you are able to number
them: and he said to him: So shall your seed be. And Abram
believed in the Lord and he counted it to him for righteousness.

In Hebrew there is no linguistic possibility to distinguish belief from faith. The verb
(hamin) means both and it closely relate to the verb to trust and to be trustworthy.
But several points follow from this passage. First, and fundamentally, religious
believing is a modality of affirmation insofar as it is a relational activity: it is
people who believe and the religious objects they believe in are guaranteed by the
authority of other people. Of course, this authority is a form of de Certeaus power.
Secularisation does concern the reduction of the power to guarantee the truth of an
object of belief. But ultimately, as this narrative informs us, the power to guarantee
is Gods. This greatly complicates the structure of believing in ways which relate to
the analogy with political convictions and in ways that radically depart from such an
analogy. Into the structure, as I have extrapolated it from de Certeaus writing, has to
be added promising, authority and relation, as aspects of trust and credibility.
With authority and relation we are treating degrees of: the points at which an
authority gains and loses acceptance and levels of proximity and intimate knowledge
with respect to relations. But we are also treating, with religious belief, categories
such as revelation and its mediation. In the story of Abram the revelation is direct,
and given the role such direct revelation plays in the history of Christianity from
Pauls experience on the road to Damascus to prophecy in Charismatic churches
today it must remain an integral aspect of any structure of religious believing. With
mediation we are treating texts, traditions of dissemination, traditions of compilation
and editing, hermeneutics, that cannot be divorced from institutions and the practices
(of reading, of hearing, of preaching, of enjoining, of interpreting, of confessing)
developed by them. Both revelation and mediation disrupt any easy analogy, such
as de Certeau advocates, between religious believing and political conviction.
The second point I would wish to make concerns reciprocality. There is an
exchange between Abram and God: Abram believes and God counts it as
righteousness. We know Paul, and later the Reformed tradition, will make much of
this reciprocal relation. To believe in the context of the Genesis narrative has nothing
to do either with Pascals wager or Kierkegaards leap both of which are responses
to a line of instrumental and calculative thinking that developed in modernity; both of
which anticipate a lack of response and responsibility; in fact, a lack of relation. The
wager and the leap are acts made by lonely and alienated individuals. This is not
Abrams position, nor the structure of his believing. To the structure of believing now
have to be added the categories of assurance, hope, expectation, mutual
commitment (even contract) and reward. As with the category of relation, these
categories as they issue from reciprocity are analogous in religious believing and
political conviction. But we are also treating in religious belief notions such as
salvation, protection, covenant as distinct from contract and the eschatology of
hope and expectation. Again, these notions disrupt the analogical relations.
The consequences of disrupting any analogy between religion and political
convictions, are at least twofold for this present argument. First, historically and
culturally, the disruption enables us to question the secularisation narrative that de
Certeau, after Weber, buys into. It is not to divest the narrative of all explanatory
power; the evident decline of institutionalised religion has been the very grounds upon
which the secularisation thesis can be maintained. But shifts from myth to knowledge,
from religion to philosophy or religion to politics are not as seamless as they once
appeared. And because they are not seamless then there has always remained a
religious believing quite distinct from, and resistant to, the march of instrumental
reasoning. From out of this distinctiveness and these resistances a return of the sacred
and the reversal of a secularisation process can emerge. And that may be what we are
looking at today.
Secondly, and of theological importance, I suggest we need to characterise
that distinctiveness of religious believing by distinguishing faith (as a theological
category) from belief (a human disposition that impacts upon all social and cultural
operations). This certainly does not mean there are no close relations between faith
and believing. One might even say an act of faith only becomes possible on the basis
of the more primordial human disposition to believe.
With de Certeau we can go some way, then, towards a much needed
examination into believing and making believe. I have tried to develop his
methodology further by a) critiquing the secularisation thesis upon which de Certeau
predicates his ideas; b) critiquing the lack of analysis between different forms of
believing that is, the univocity of religious belief and political conviction; and,
finally c), reinstalling what might be called a theological difference between faith and
belief. Let me now return to the context in which I have undertaken this examination
the current new visibility of religion in the public domain that has invoked such
descriptors as postsecularity and re-enchantment, and the need to move beyond de
Certeaus semiotics of believing that is, believing as a sign in discourse that
receives its meaning only in relation to other signs such as trust and truth. My aim
is to provide a phenomenology of believing, but in order to do so we need to
appreciate the grid of intelligibility or deep structure of believing itself.
What I would argue is that whatever we are currently witnessing in the
upsurge of religion has as much, if not more, to do with the changing structures of
belief. I will give two expressions of such changes. The first comes from the work of
Robert Wuthnow, reporting on the publication of books on angels: Overall the
number of books on angels (according to the Library of Congress) rose from 20
published between 1971 and 1975, to 31 between 1976 and 1980, 34 between 1981
and 1985, 57 between 1986 and 1990, and 110 between 1991 and 1995. During these
last periods, total sales of angel books were estimated to exceed five million copies.
1

Given the recent media attention to angels since then today the volume of publications
is probably even higher. This attests then to a cultural shift in terms of a sensibility to
a tradition, a specific J udaeo-Christian tradition. My second example is more of a
comment on the remark made by the French sociologist, Marcel Gauchet, that the post
1970s world is a demythologised one; a world without witches and magicians, angels
and demons. But if we examine the popular cultural scene today it is overpopulated
with superheros, magicians, demons, vampires, dark forces, dark matter, messiahs and
spells from the ubiquitous Harry Potter to the recent best-selling novel The

1
After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998), p.121.
Historian by Elizabeth Rostova on Drakula and the undead. There has been a
significant remythologising of the real. In fact, this remythologising is one of the
fundamental characteristics of the current re-enchantment; a re-enchantment
furthermore, that is deepened and extended through advances in technological
understanding that product of secular instrumental reasoning that was supposed to
dis-enchant our world. But the internet and shops retailing CD-Rom games are
predominately stocked with expressions of the supernatural.
There has been a shift then in the structures of believing, perhaps related to the
shift the political scientist Ronald Inglehart discerns, towards a new
postmaterialism.
2
Certain beliefs have become more credible and others less
credible. Terms like real and truth, which for de Certeau were closely related to
data and facts are now presented in new contexts (the virtually real, for example)
and a new questioning, Whose data?, Whose truth?, authenticated by whom and
for what purpose? In a climate of fear, in a time of increasing racism, religious
discrimination and ghettoising terms like trust, authority, and suspicion also shift
because they help to announce a public confidence, or a lack of it. We find the same
with terms such as responsibility and reciprocity. In fact, the effect of a shift in any
one of these terms impacts upon all the others, reordering their semantic
constellations. To be fair de Certeau recognises changes are on their way in the shift
he sketches from belief to making believe, from concrete to simulated objects of
belief, but I think we can go much further.
Let me be clear. I do not think there is any simple correlation between
postsecularity and the new visibility of religion, on the one hand, and the rise of
distrust, scepticism, and suspicion, on the other. It is more complex than that faith

2

and new forms of belief in what is not visible are not a simple reaction to a number of
negative cultural variables. One might say, new forms of religious affiliation are also
being born at the end of a dogmatic empiricism, the rise of a malleability of the real
with soft ontologies and liquid identities, the return of metaphysics and the end of
doctrinaire atheism. The birth of new religious associations, new orthodoxies, is not
simply then the attraction of what Manuel Castells called resistant communities,
because there is nothing defensive about them. They are responses to and producers of
a re-enchantment.
We need to re-examine all the categories that compose the structure of
contemporary believing. But this cannot be just a semantic exercise and this is to
return to de Certeau, albeit in a modified manner. De Certeaus work has been highly
significant for thinking through the relationship between, history, discourse and
spatial practices. His overviews of the changing and conflicting structures of
believing in the seventeenth century France, for example are important. But to
answer todays questions about what makes a belief believable we need to examine
not only current discourses and spatial practices, but also levels of intentionality. I
take the term from phenomenology which does not reduce the word to subjectivity
and the mental acts of individual subjects. Intentionality concerns meaning how it is
invested, how that investment might be analysed. What is involved,
phenomenologically, is an act of faith and an act of believing? We have seen that they
are not identical nor necessarily analogous acts. How does each act become meanful?
How is it understood as meaningful? This phenomenological analysis, to my mind,
will have to consider the structures of believing and the changes affecting them; that
is, the structures and their operations. But such an analysis might, I suggest, provide
us with a detailed account of what contemporary postsecularity and re-
enchantment mean as lived concepts.

Graham Ward
University of Manchester.