This passage from Latour’s Rejoicing recalls the original title of Borge’s oddest little book, inexplicably called Dreamtigers in English, but in Spanish, El Hacedor.

There is something disheartening, we must admit, about this dependence of the word on the present day, on the current conditions of utterance. All the more so as all the efforts at apologetics, over the course of time, have been directed against that very dependence. Torrents of sermons, thousands of volumes have been poured out to see to it that the ‘existence of God’ does not depend on the word, on the will, on the goodwill of human beings. And, conversely, it is precisely the ‘enemies of religion’ who have, always, had a field day with this obvious fact: human beings make the gods in their own image. And now, I’m hoping to use relativism to reclaim that critical vocabulary to record religious speech piously and faithfully? Mankind, that god-making machine. It’s insane. Or else, what we’re dealing with here is an apologetics even more perverse than the rest, a cleric’s ruse.

And yet, there is indeed something right and accurate in this expression: ‘The existence of G. now depends on us.’ In this whole business, isn’t it a question, literally, piously, ritually, of a ‘God’ that man – that a woman has begotten? Didn’t that woman have to trot out judiciously these few words of acceptance: ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord’? [Luke 1:38]. The lovers know very well that the presence of their love depends on the way they talk to each other anew to make each other present for the other, so why couldn’t we make good use of the same thing? They don’t rely on assurance of their affection, on its force of inertia, either; and yet, when they finally come to love each other, it would never occur to them to attribute their salvation to their own resources – they wouldn’t be so silly. On the contrary, it is only in the estrangement phase, in the middle of the crisis, when they feel suffocated by the deadly weight of time, that they’re reduced to their crafty manoeuvres alone. It’s when they’re incapable of getting themselves out of the hole they’ve fallen into that they solemnly implore assistance: ‘Our love, come to our rescue!’ all the while knowing that no one will come and support them and that they’re as incapable of redeeming themselves as Baron Munchausen. So the lovers clearly take themselves to be the only possible artisans crafting their relationship, all the while knowing that they only become its exclusive makers in the living hell of estrangement: once they’re close again, they recognize with absolute certainty that they have been made by the love that finally came to their aid.

Is it really indispensable to being able to talk about religion for us to go back over the horrible difficulties of that little verb: ‘to make’? Alas, yes. Nothing has blown out the translation arrears like this suicidal battle against the discourse of those who turned religion into a ‘simple man-made thing’. But we should have done the opposite and welcomed them with open arms! Yes, canonize Voltaire, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, declare them Fathers of the Church. St Friedrich would have been more help to us than praying to Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes, and his sanctuary at Sils-Maria would not have given rise to any fewer miracles…