Faith is an environmental force. It suspends phenomena by surrounding them with stories, and also waives the need for narrative explanation, as in the case of miracles. This positive and negative capability is secured through the faculty of attribution. When something happens, we may attribute its occurrence to something else, moving along the grammar of reality into analysis. Moving the opposite way along the grammar of unreality into creation, we may also attribute a thing to an action, even if the action is mere being. Faith secures movement on both sides. It suspends transit between the realms of reality and the unreal, the one we associate with objective, external life, and the other with subjective, interior life. That we have these categories at all, that is, that we experience a distinction between them, is a miracle suspended by the environment, which has so thoroughly waived the need for explanation that we feel its miracle as ambient. Faith is environmental because it is the connective force within this ambience between what we understand and what is understood in us. The environment is therefore not a part of reality.
Reality is rather one part of the environment. This reversal may seem odd because in our secular scientific universe reality is the underlying substance to which all phenomena belong. It fulfills the encompassing quality assigned to god in times of faith, or the analytic half of the faculty of attribution. The generative half, which in the past has been fulfilled by the unreal, is now met by our industrial output, which is disturbing because it takes place within a superabundant reality whose products are external. As this swollen material framework encounters the environment and the unreal it is beset by disasters and chaos, which are opportunities for the reintegration of these forces in the old balance secured by faith. The longer this balance is deferred, the closer we come to a new one in which we are prevented from creating at all within the material framework of reality. This impending prevention is an actual threat because reality is not all-encompassing. It belongs to the environment and is subject to it, as a part is to the whole.
Imagination, or the unreal, is the complementary part within that whole. Things of the imagination are immaterial, a word that currently means irrelevant, as the more time one spends imagining, the less one is able to make objects or money. The regulatory function of this loss is overlooked if imagination is seen as private and contained within the scope of individual life. An example of its collective use comes from the early days of covid, when everyone was shut in online, in the unreal space of the web. The sudden primacy of immaterial, virtual production had a salutary effect on the environment. Perhaps it was understood that we were doing-nothing and that, in a half-joking nihilistic way, we had disappeared, and our premature extinction was just what the earth needed, but that is only because we are so out of the practice of immaterial creation, we failed to see our activity as generative at all. In terms of attribution, it appears we were compensating for our superabundant reality by diving into the virtual. The tangible result was environmental health, which could be said about no other configuration of activity within secular time.
In times of faith, the immaterial is rampant, and its main product is belief. We tend to think of belief now as a question of ability: if god exists, why were they not capable of stopping x? But the foundation of a question like this is the assignment of being to a divine something-or-other at all, which is a demanding collective activity. It skews the entire narrative system of the group that sustains it, for if so much energy is spent holding something unreal, then through the exchange faith allows with the grammar of reality, this suspended divine will participate in the process of rationalization. We call this superstition, its prefix super- indicating it is in excess of the real, but if we conceive of this interaction without excess, we simply expand our narrativity with what we already have. A more effective term could be fanfiction. This larger space of storytelling inevitably draws us closer to the unreal, where intense material production and accumulation are limited, though of course, not totally.
That capitalism emerged from monotheism and not polytheism seems consistent with the demands of their respective narrative systems. There is quite a difference between belief in a single god whose glory is only sometimes mediated by nature and beautiful things, and belief in an animated universe, the materials of which are inseparable from their immaterial souls. The activity required to suspend the latter is incalculable, which is to say it rejects number as an ambient force, though it never exceeded the rituals of a group to which it belonged, and was therefore harmonic with the sum of their energy. The task of faith is the arrangement of this harmony.
Eero Talo is a writer in Ridgewood. Their work has appeared in The Reservoir and EOAGH. A chapter of their novel, Apple Of The Forest, is forthcoming in the Institute of Network Cultures' Critical Meme Reader III.
