Since its inception with the work of Graham Harman, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has had an uneasy relationship with theology.¹ While OOO has been influential in fields as diverse as media studies, literary criticism, ethnography, art criticism, history, biology, and rhetoric, it has been difficult to see how something like an object-oriented theology might be possible. Indeed, until the publication of the book presently before the reader, it has appeared that OOO and theology have been destined to be opposed. Although formulations of OOO differ from one another in how they theorize the being of objects, the dominant strains of object-oriented...

This book models an object-oriented approach to grace. Its approach is object-oriented in that it gives full metaphysical credit to the multitude of individual objects that compose our universe for the collective formation and continuation of their own existence.

Another way to say this is that in offering metaphysical independence to the multitude, this book experimentally frames the meaning of grace in a post-Darwinian world. InThe Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Stephen Jay Gould characterizes the difference between pre-Darwinian and post-Darwinian thought in the following way:

Pre-Darwinian concepts of evolution remained speculative and essentially non-operational, largely because they fell into...

When I say that I want to “port” grace into an object-oriented framework, I’m using the word in a way that is analogous to its use in computer programming. To a programmer, toportmeans to modify a program or application for use on a different platform or with a different operating system. To port an application, you need to rewrite the sections of code that are system-specific and then recompile the program on the new platform.

Analogously, to philosophically port a concept means to modify it for use on a different metaphysical platform. My aim is to experimentally port...

The entry on “grace” in Mircea Eliade’sThe Encyclopedia of Religionis general but instructive. Grace, it reports, “stands primarily not for human virtue but for God’s presence. Grace is a divine activity in human history and human lives.” Foremost among the features identified in this entry is the idea that grace is a name for how God overlaps with (i.e., is immanently present or active in) this world. In particular, it names those aspects of divine manifestation that, while never being primarily the product of human virtue, nonetheless intervene in human lives and history. And because this grace is...

An object-oriented metaphysics distinguishes itself from more traditional approaches in that it is non-conspiratorial. Classically, metaphysicians consistently fall prey to the same temptation: they are conspiracy theorists. They assume a much higher degree of fundamental unity and intentional coordination than is actually needed to account for the patterned complexity of what is given.

As a venerable brand of ivory tower conspiracy theory, the very work of metaphysics has long been understood as the task of unveiling some invisible hand at work behind the scenes, directing and unifying the movements of the disorganized and passive multitude into a coherent whole by...

For Latour’s part, a genuinely contemporary metaphysics ought to be shaped by its refusal to countenance any conspiracy theories. As a result, a contemporary metaphysics ought to be ironically characterized by a deeply anti-metaphysical stance. Of course, Latour’s metaphysical project, like all metaphysical projects, must begin with some axiomatic assumptions, but Latour means to turn the need for such assumptions on its head by banning, axiomatically, any axiomatic decisions about the nature of the real. For Latour, nothing should be decided or assumed in advance—with the exception of this stern decision to decide nothing in advance. In this way,...

Latour’s vital, metaphysical minimum might also be summarized in terms of the following, deeply non-theistic maxim: “replace the singular with the plural everywhere” (PN 29). Where, traditionally, a metaphysician would assume an underlying macro-unity or background compatibility, Latour assumes instead an irreducible and uncountable metaphysical plurality. Rather than axiomatizing the One, he axiomatizes the many. An experimental metaphysics, rather than preformatting the world, encourages the untidy proliferation of as many objects and actors as the universe (or, better, pluriverse) can muster. The result is that the world becomes “an immense, messy, and muddy construction site” (PN 161).

“There are more...

An experimental metaphysics is a metaphysics without aristocracy. No object or concatenation of objects has any innate royal prerogative. All objects are bastards and none have a divine right to the throne. In Latour’s scheme, if God exists, he is no metaphysical king. God, if he exists, is one object among many. An experimental metaphysics is a democratic metaphysics and its suffrage is comprehensive. “The serfs have become free citizens once more” (WM 81).

Here, the patient metaphysician “rediscovers the oldest democratic impulse and puts it back in its place, in the audacious elaboration of an experimental metaphysics whose results,...

Latour’s approach to metaphysics is shaped primarily by methodological concerns.If, he asks, we want to engage in an experimental metaphysics where networks of objects are responsible for explaining themselves,thenwhat will we have to assume about the nature of the real? If we want to avoid smuggling in any a priori reductions, if all metaphysical out-sourcing of the real is banned, then what kind of objects are left to do the work?

Latour’s basic assumptions about the real all flow from his attempt to give this particular kind of account. We’ve already indicated two of these assumptions: multiplicity...

By banning the One, Latour flattens his ontology. As a rough image, we might say that, rather than working on the kind of two-dimensional plane that would allow objects to be encircled, absorbed, and reduced, Latour strips out a dimension so that we end up working instead with only the kind of one-dimensional lines appropriate to a metaphysics whose basic ontological operation is concatenation. In this way, Latour forces a move from shorthand to longhand, from substitution to addition, from reduction to concatenation. Here, the “global” may exist, but not as something that encompasses and then substitutes itself for the...

The second half of our formula—“though the One is not,there are unities”—emphasizes how the multitude of objects, each of which is itself a multitude of objects, is responsible for locally constructing what unity there is. Absent a preformatted world, the multitude of objects must sink or swim. Latour’s bet is that, having removed the cumbersome flotation devices of reductionism, they’ll swim just fine.

It is true, however, that “once we have exited” the prefabricated majesty of a world amenable to reduction, “we are left only with the banality of associations of humans and nonhumans waiting for their...

With a basic framework in place, we’re ready to take a careful look at the heart of Latour’s project: the principle of irreduction. Using what he calls a “pseudoautobiographical style,” Latour describes in self-consciously (and mildly parodic) religious language how he arrived at the principle of irreduction. Bone-tired, he is traveling home on the road from Dijon to Gray when he is stopped dead in his tracks by an abrupt epiphany that both brings him back to his senses and “exorcizes” his demons one by one. Postepiphany, Latour, like Paul, finds himself blind, his ability to see reductively permanently impaired....

Latour’s formal version of the principle of irreduction looks like this: “Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else” (PF 158). Pragmatically—and, as we’ve seen, pragmatic issues are not, for Latour, separable from metaphysical ones; indeed, methodological concerns are driving Latour’s metaphysical bus—the principle of irreduction amounts to the following advice: “After ‘go slow,’ the injunctions are now ‘don’t jump’ and ‘keep everything flat!’” (RS 190).

But what happens when we go slow, don’t jump, and keep everything flat? “What happens when nothing is reduced to anything else? What happens when we suspend our knowledge...

Characterizing the principle of irreduction in terms of resistant availability also allows us to retrofit the notion of transcendence for use in an experimental metaphysics. Transcendence, rather than naming a single, definitive, supernatural difference between this world and another higher, more original, and unconditioned one, names instead the multitude of diffuse, localized, non-supernatural transcendences that constitute the resistance of each object as such. And, for Latour, it is important to note that among these transcendences, no transcendence is different in principle from any other. There are a multitude of others, but no other is Wholly Other.

At this point, it...

It is this dislocation—a dislocation of transcendence from its status as a founding and singular ontological exception to its dispersal as what characterizes the resistant availability of the multitude—that simultaneously marks the dislocation and distribution of grace.

Traditionally, grace is defined as an immanent expression of God’s transcendence and, traditionally, this transcendence is itself dependent on God’s being an exceptional One. Transcendence names that supernatural, theistic gap between an unconditioned, original One and the created, conditioned, and contingent multiplicity of everything else. Grace, then, is understood as stemming from God’s being an excessive, enabling, and absolute exception to...

Operationalized as a “tangible micro-force,” grace shows up as the ordinary business of objects at work. And, on Latour’s model, all objects are engaged in the same kind of work: the work of negotiating the uneven local terrain of a multitude of transcendences. Or, again, all objects are engaged in the work of both resisting availability and making available what is resistant.

Every object is characterized by resistance because “there are no equivalents” (PF 162). And every object is characterized by availability because “everything may be made to be the measure of everything else” (PF 158). Every object unfolds as...

Objects are like houses built from playing cards that, in their weakness, manage to stand only by leaning on each other. Each object is an actor, an agent, but the strength of its agency is always a borrowed grace.

With Latour’s objects, we need to give full weight to the ordinary meaning of agency. To be an agent is to act onsomeone else’sbehalf. All objects, as agents, are endlessly engaged “in the process of exchanging competences” with each other (PH 182). All objects, endlessly engaged in negotiation and compromise, are forever acting on behalf of others—even when...

Latour calls the work of agents in relation to each other “translation.” How is it that, though there are no equivalents, “everything may be made to be the measure of everything else?” (PF 158). The answer is translation. Cast out of the garden of reductionism, the work of aligning objects becomes much more difficult. Relationships between objects become “at once muchmore intimateand muchless directthan that of the traditional picture” (PH 144). For Latour, translation names an ontological operation that works by way of intimate detour.

Translation is necessary because objects resist transparent reduction. Translation is possible...

“Translation,” as an ontological operation, neatly summarizes the principle of irreduction in a single word. Talking about intimate detours is just another way of talking about resistant availability. Similarly, we might also summarize the principle of irreduction with just the term “representation” because all translations are representations. It is true, for Latour, that a human way of being is representational, but this is nothing special because every kind of relationship between every kind of object is also representational. “We shall retain the crucial word ‘representation,’ but we shall make it play again, explicitly, its ancient political role” (PN 41). Here,...

In the same way that Latour’s principle of irreduction blends heaven and earth, transcendence and immanence, resistance and availability, it blends ontology and epistemology. In an experimental metaphysics, one cannot legitimately distinguish between questions about our epistemological access to things and questions about the things themselves. If all existing unity is postestablished, then “access” is the ontological question par excellence. Epistemology is just a local (and specifically human) version of ontology and, if its scope is not widened to include the work of nonhumans, it can be an extremely misleading version.

As a metaphysical term, Latour uses the word “politics”...

On Latour’s account, all epistemological problems are actually engineering problems. Knowing things amounts to knowing which objects must be concatenated in what kinds of ways in order to build durable, usable bridges between the agents in question. In this sense, Latour is a constructivist. Latour, however isnota “social” constructivist—unless you include under the rubric of society every actually existing object, human and nonhuman alike.

It is proper to call Latour a constructivist because, in an experimental metaphysics, nothing is just given. Everything is made. Every exchange involves change and nothing is aligned or concatenated without a cost....

Given, then, the weird topography of Latour’s experimental metaphysics—a topography that simultaneously manages to be methodologically modest, metaphysically ambitious, austerely empirical, and acutely refreshing—what can we speculate about the shape of grace? Ported into Latour’s pluriverse, the shape of grace follows from his recasting of transcendence. If grace is the wax, transcendence is the mold. For Latour, transcendence is not vertical but horizontal, not single but multiple, not global but local, not centralized but distributed, not pure but messy, not strong but weak, not royal but democratic, not atemporal but historical, not original but recycled. So too with...

If the world is stuffed full of grace—pressed down, shaken together, running over—then where does it hide? What accounts for its frequent obscurity? The obscurity of grace is tied, in part, to the nature of objects themselves.

Latour’s experimental metaphysics allows for the reworking of a variety of classic, philosophical concepts. In addition to how he retrofits transcendence, Latour offers novel approaches to concepts like substance, essence, matter, form, subjectivity, and reference. The key to his innovative account of substance (and, by extension, to the obscurity of grace) is his description of objects as “black boxes.” A substance...

Talking about substances in terms of black boxes is helpful but limited. “Black box” ultimately sounds a bit too solid, rigid, permanent, and static for what Latour has in mind. Substances are really more like acts, procedures, or institutions than they are like paperweights.

For instance, though substances may endure, they aren’t permanent. “Permanence costs too much and requires too many allies” (PF 165). And while we might talk about a kind of necessity being associated with the compressed strength of a substance, “the words ‘necessary’ and ‘contingent’ gain meaning only when they are used in the heat of the...

Latour’s notion of “essence” mirrors his treatment of substance. There are essences and there are substances, but an object’s essence, like its substance, is plastic in relation to a given line of sight. Like objects in general, an essence is a local work-in-progress that looks just “a bit more complicated, folded, multiple, complex, and entangled” than we might have expected (RS 144).

The essence of an object, rather than being independent, is interdependent. Essences overflow. “Unlike their predecessors,” Latour’s objects “have no clear boundaries, no well-defined essences, no sharp separation between their own hard kernel and their environment” (PN 24)....

Latour is generally impatient with talk about forms and structures because such language often just provides metaphysical cover for some brand of conspiratorial reductionism. But forms and structures, like substances and essences, are amenable to rehabilitation if the reductive impulse is checked.

The form or structure of an object is simply the through-line that gets foregrounded in relation to a given angle of approach. The form of an object is that object’s profile, its habitual face, as it emerges in light of a partial reduction. Or, the form of an object is that relevant subset of relations that a black...

In the context of an object-oriented metaphysics, the use of the word “object” is polemical. The indiscriminate use of the term object to describeeveryexisting thing—formal or material, living or nonliving, sentient or nonsentient, conscious or nonconscious, human or nonhuman—is meant to undermine its common application as just one element in that binary subject/object pair. Rhetorically, championing the object half of the equation is meant to complicate and problematize the opposition itself. This choice is tactical, both philosophically and theologically, but in principle we might just as fruitfully construct a “subject-oriented” metaphysics that would not differ one...

If objects are nothing but their relations, then existence itself is a weave of references. In this sense, ontologyissemiology and to ask about the constitution of objects is to ask about the nature of reference. For Latour, translation and representation are existential operators. Human languages aren’t a special case, different in kind from other modes of representation. They are just a ramified variation on a universal theme. Soul and body, subject and object, form and matter, and so on, these are each just so many ways of asking “how is the word made flesh?” Or, conversely, “how do...

In an object-oriented metaphysics the truthfulness of a statement depends solely on the number of relevant agents persuaded to line-up behind it. With respect to truth, Latour is an unrepentant populist. The result is a kind of relativism, but Latour’s forceful critique of other populist conceptions of truth is that they’re not nearly populist enough. A conspiratorial populism (i.e., a disguised elitism) that, de jure, disenfranchises the vast majority of voters will rarely elect anyone worth the trouble. The viability of a referential populism depends on radically expanding the base of voters to includeallavailable objects—living and nonliving,...

The implications of Latour’s approach to language for traditional hermeneutic work are straightforward. When we engage in the business of interpreting texts, we’re not doing something special. “Hermeneutics is not a privilege of humans but, so to speak, a property of the world itself” (RS 245). To make any progress, “we have to abandon the division between a speaking human and a mute world” (PH 140). When carpenters build houses, when trees make sap, when bacteria reproduce, they must each engage in thesamedifficult work of compromise and negotiation as do signs. On Latour’s account, hermeneutics is not qualitatively...

A reading is an experiment. Exegetes do the same kind of work scientists do in their labs. In both instances, it is not the interpreter’s job “to decide in the actor’s stead what groups are making up the world and which agencies are making them act” (RS 184). Instead, like the scientist, it is the interpreter’s job “to build the artificial experiment—a report, a story, a narrative, an account—where this diversity might be deployed to the full” (RS 184). Rather than deciding, good science experiments. Good interpretations do the same.

A reading is an essay, a try, an...

The world is a democracy and the principle of irreduction guarantees that, when objects get up in the morning, they all go to work. Similarly, the principle guarantees that, fundamentally, all objects are engaged in the same kind of work. Every object must wrestle with the grace of resistant availability. When a historian sorts through the archives, when rain falls from the sky, when an exegete interprets a text, when a scientist looks in a microscope, when a bird flies, when a mason lays bricks, when a plant bends toward the sun, when a preacher prepares a sermon, they are...

Religion is objective. It is made of objects, practiced by objects, and practiced for the revelation of objects. When estranged from its objective character, religion plays as a ridiculous parody. On Latour’s view, no single mistake does more to reinforce this bitter parody than thinking that religion is about “belief.”

Belief is not a religious idea. Belief is a stopgap explanation imposed on religion by those unable to see the tooimmanent objects that animate it. “The notion of belief is the projection on religious mediators of the trajectory of information-transfer ones” (HI 433). Looking through the lens of science for...

Latour’s claim is that, in order to understand the revelatory force of religion, we must allow religious objects to speak for themselves. This means both making room for dismissed objects and stemming the backwash of scientific expectations into religious self-understanding. Between the iconoclasm of a scientific approach to religious objects that dismisses them and the idolatry of a religious burlesque that freezes them, Latour advocates “iconophilia.” Iconophilia is an object-oriented approach to religious objects that allows what is too near, too immanent, too available to be made visible in them. It is an approach to religious objects that allows the...

By redistributing grace to the multitude, Latour has redistributed religion as well. As a practical matter, this move may do little more than clarify and emphasize the work religious objects have been doing all along. Spirit and grace and charity abide robustly in the object-oriented pews. But in principle, many may balk at Latour’s failure to treat religion as, in the end, animated solely by the Alpha and Omega himself.

Latour, though, is willing to stand with the pluriverse and cut his losses. He cannot turn back now. The very premise of an object-oriented metaphysics excludes the possibility of a...

In the same way that religion gets into trouble when it tries to out-science science, science gets into trouble when it tries to out-religion religion. This is particularly true when science apes the confused, traditional view of religion as something that is all things to all people, a mixture of everything, and the final word on all of it.

This muddled, traditional take on religion models for science all the key features of the bad reductionism that Latour abhors. Science, to the degree that it explains objects by neatly and completely reducing them to other objects, plays at being God...

Dismissing religious objects as empty or flat leaves religion weak. Without objects, religious practices and instruments lose their power to save. In an object-oriented theology, however, this loss has consequences not only for humans but nonhumans. Humans are not alone in their need for grace. “Everything happens as if, the farther forward you move in time, the more the Churches have resigned themselves to save only humans, and in humans, only their disembodied souls” (WS 463). But grace lies in the opposite direction. When it comes to objects, our salvation is intertwined. Neither can we be saved without them, nor...

Religion corrects for our farsightedness. It addresses the invisibility of objects that are commonly too familiar, too available, too immanent to be seen. To this end, it intentionally cultivates nearsightedness. Religionpracticesmyopia in order to bring both work and suffering into focus as grace. Redemption turns on this revelation.

The principle of irreduction guarantees resistant availability and bans any slick metaphysics. Absent the singular transcendence of a traditional God, grace isn’t dissolved but distributed. An object-oriented grace is fomented by a restless multitude of cross-fertilizing transcendences, resistances, and availabilities. Here, grace is the double-bind of resistant availability that both...

Even ported onto an object-oriented platform, it remains apt to say that religion reveals what is, at once, both in us and more than us. Religion presses us to open the black box that we are. It presses us to render commonplace objects less transparently available and, thus, sheds light on those constitutive operations, alignments, and concatenations so ordinary as to typically avoid visibility. This sea of welling, intimate, translucent objects is what the tradition calls Spirit. You must be born again to see it.

We possess “hundreds of myths,” Latour says, about how subjects construct objects, “yet we have...

Objects circulate through us. A subject is a site, a passage point, a relay station, a halfway house that hosts the objects passing through. Some objects are solids and some are liquids. Some objects are words, some are ideas or images or sensations or desires. Some objects are just passing through, some stay for a time. Some leave a mark and some don’t. Prayer minds this circulation. Rather than running, it says amen to the double-bind of their coming and going. In prayer, your will to go away gets broken and you are brought to rest, instead, in the compassionate,...

This both is and is not your grandmother’s religion. Regardless of age, the work of practicing clichés is the same, even if the clichés differ. On our knees, in the pew, at the mountain top, “we are not only undergoing a change in experience among others, but a change in the pulse and tempo of experience” (TF 29). Different objects circulate in different times and different places, but the tone and tempo of religion stay the same. Religion is always ordinary, attentive, contemporaneous.

Off the shelf, practiced, religion feels familiar. Spirit is uncannily natural. Perhaps this is why Latour says...

Work and suffering are the two faces of grace. This may not be what we’d like to hear, but this is what the world has to give. And it is, for those with eyes to see and patience to sit, sufficient. We are composed of objects that grace us with both their resistance and their availability, and we, in turn, offer up the same. On this account, God himself is given over to grace, resisting and receiving, availing and making available, an object among others, working and praying to stay present with our ordinary weaknesses through one more round. Such...