More Latour:

In religious talk, there is indeed a leap of faith, but this is not an acrobatic salto mortale in order to do even better than reference with more daring and risky means, it is a somersault yes, but one which aims at jumping, dancing toward the present and the close, to redirect attention away from indifference and habituation, to prepare oneself to be seized again by this presence that breaks the usual, habituated passage of time. As to [scientific] knowledge, it is not a direct grasp of the plain and the visible against all beliefs in authority, but an extraordinarily daring, complex, and intricate confidence in chains of nested transformations of documents that, through many different types of proofs, lead toward new types of visions that force us to break away from the intuitions and prejudices of common sense. Belief is simply immaterial for any religious speech-act; knowledge is not an accurate way to characterize scientific activity. We might move forward a bit, if we were calling “faith” the movement that brings us to the close and to the present, and retaining the word “belief” for this necessary mixture of confidence and diffidence with which we need to assess all the things we cannot see directly. Then the difference between science and religion would not be found in the different mental competencies brought to bear on two different realms — “belief” applied to vague spiritual matters, “knowledge” to directly observable things — but in the same broad set of competences applied to two chains of mediators going in two different directions. The first chain leads toward what is invisible because it is simply too far and too counterintuitive to be directly grasped — namely, science; the second chain, the religious one, also leads to the invisible but what it reaches is not invisible because it would be hidden, encrypted, and far, but simply because it is difficult to renew.

What I mean is that in the cases of both science and religion, freeze-framing, isolating a mediator out of its chains, out of its series, instantly forbids the meaning to be carried in truth. Truth is not to be found in correspondence — either between the word and the world in the case of science, or between the original and the copy in the case of religion — but in taking up again the task of continuing the flow, of elongating the cascade of mediations one step further. My argument is that, in our present economy of images, we might have made a slight misunderstanding of Moses’s Second Commandment and thus lacked respect for mediators. God did not ask us not to make images — what else do we have to produce objectivity, to generate piety? — but he told us not to freeze-frame, not to isolate an image out of the flows that only provide them with their real (their constantly re-realized, re-represented) meaning.

I have most probably failed in extending the flows, the cascade of mediators to you. If so, then I have lied, I have not been talking religiously; I have not been able to preach, but I have simply talked about religion, as if there was a domain of specific beliefs one could relate to by some sort of referential grasp. This then would have been a mistake just as great as that of the lover who, when asked “do you love me?” answered, “I have already told you so many years ago, why do you ask again?” Why? Because it is no use having told me so in the past, if you cannot tell me again, now, and make me alive to you again, close and present anew. Why would anyone claim to speak religion, if it is not in order to save me, to convert me, on the spot?

The real intellectual challenge is rarely comprehension of concepts, but accomplishing habitation and perpetual re-habitation of one’s best understandings — and this is accomplished through much more than beliefy faiths. It requires more than spirit. Ethics is about inhabiting and caring for an ethos, which is a collection of many kinds of being, spanning why, how, what — and most of all, who.