Paper Money and Religion as a System of Symbols:
The Creation of the Spiritual

Robert J. Baird

The National Faculty

This past summer at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta the credit card company Visa rolled out a new form of money known as Visa Cash. The piloting of this new cash card to 5000 merchants in Atlanta was only a warm-up for Visa and Mastercard's plan to introduce "digital cash" to the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the Winter of 1997. As recently noted by James Gleick in the New York Times, Visa cash cards are different from traditional credit cards or ATM cards which persuade automated teller machines to spit out cash. Unlike these older forms of money "smart" cards require no PIN or password, cardholders do not sign the cards, nor do they show any identification to the merchants. Holders of the smart card simply insert it into a small terminal and, as Gleick says, the "card and terminal engage in a quick electronic conversation, validating each other's tiny identities, and if all goes well, a carefully recorded transaction takes place. The tally of cash on the card goes down , and the tally on the terminal goes up. If you lose the card, you have lost the money--no overnight replacements or cash advances from Visa; this is cash."[1]

If this story of digital cash's intangibility provokes at least a touch of anxiety, it is with good reason. Whenever in the past money has shifted or lost its materiality, whether from gold to paper or paper to electron, anxiety has ensued. The question of substance and reality are foregrounded. As cited earlier in The New York Times, Gleick wonders if digital money can ever "be as real as a dollar bill?"[2] seemingly overlooking the fact that it was only in the late nineteenth century in North America and the late eighteenth century in England & Holland that similiar anxieties erupted over the backing and reality of paper money. Marc Shell in Art & Money links nineteenth century discourses on the unreality or ghostliness of paper money to traditional Christian binarizations between substance and sign (res and intellectus) as well as debates specific to eighteenth century Europe and nineteenth century America--debates about representation and aesthetics. In the case of the former, Shell examines 8th and 9th century Byzantium tracing the transformation of material ingot as valuable thing to inscribed coin as valuable both materially and spiritually. Inscriptions of value on coinage, to use Shell's words, "precipitated a quandary over the relation between face value and substantial value--between, as it were, intellectual currency and material currency"[3]

The separation between material and spiritual value in the case of coinage was exacerbated by the introduction of paper money in 18th century Europe. Paper, a substance of seemingly no value, was now being magically transformed into money by the work of graphic artists. As Shell points out paper money was greeted by suspicion, Voltaire writes of "the chimerical value of paper money bills" and "the commerce of the imagination"[4]. Montesquieu and Defoe likewise characterize paper money as a fiction and stress its power to lure innocents into trading their real metal-based wealth for imaginary riches made of mere paper. This argument carries forth most powerfully in 19th century American debates between "paper money men" and "gold bugs." Political cartoons by Thomas Nast such as Milk Tickets for Babies, in Place of Milk not only capture the public's scepticism around paper money but more significantly tap into wider questions around symbolization and the nexus of art and money. I quote Shell at length:

The problem, from the viewpoint of aesthetics, involves representation as exchange. A painting of grapes, a painting of a pipe, or a monetary inscription generally stands for something else--it makes the implicit claim: "I am edible grapes," "I am a pipe," or "I am ten coins." Sometimes observers are trumped into taking the imitation for the real. . . But pipes and grapes, however much they are representable by artworks, are also more or less "original" objects. Money, on the other hand, is not. A piece of paper money is almost always a representation, a symbol that claims to stand for something else or to be something else. It is not that paper depicts and represents coins, but that paper, coins, and money, generally, all stand in the place of something else.[5]

 

Money & Religion

As a thought-experiment I want to extend Shell's analysis of money as symbol--as a standing in for something else, to the late 18th and 19th century project of the science of religion or Religionswissenschaft. As anthropologists Talal Asad and Peter van der Veer along with growing number of theologians and scholars of religions have recently argued the distinction between what we call religion and other aspects of society--politics, art, economics, morality, etc.-- is by no means natural but has been forged over last 300 years of Euro-American and postcolonial cultural and philosophical history. It was impossible in the 17th century to speak, according to Michel de Certeau, of religion or politics, "as two stable, solid columns on which a historical analysis could be based"[6] since this distinction, which has subsequently been deemed central to Western modernity, was still being produced. In short, if 17th century British theology was typified by a ongoing exchange between the discourses of reason and religion, by the time of Hume in the middle of the 18th century the discourse of religion had already broken off as a passive zone or inert dimension of existence separate from reason's active power to organize the political and moral spheres. The creation of a religious zone, which John Milbank rightly identifies as a "policing the sublime,"[7] is recognizable in both the Enlightenment formulations of a generic religion as a system of subjective beliefs and "Christianity" or "the Christian religion" as a particular species of the genus religion.

The discursive recasting of Christendom as a religion, in Asad's words, "anchored in personal experience, expressible in belief-statements, dependent on private institutions and practiced in one's spare time"[8], undergirds the 17th and 18th century Protestant imagination across Europe. Rather than reading this transformation through the well-worn lens of secularization--as the period par excellence in which religion's hold over European polities is weakened, if not crushed--I see it differently. Protestant /Enlightenment thinkers, in a period of colonial misadventure, invented religion as a generic and universal entity and in so doing created the conceptual conditions for a science of religion. Whereas the last two-hundred years of secularization theory has traced the shrinkage of religious reality from cultural plenum to subjective belief, critics of this paradigm, such as W. C. Smith and Milbank, have pointed out that it is during the longue dureé of the Enlightenment that conceptualizations of religion as a category of the imagination and theological discourses of divine agency begin to proliferate. Religion's much heralded decline, privatization and marginalization should not distract us from the Enlightenment's reinvention of religion as a system of transhistorical beliefs, whose essence is stable and thus can be identified across all cultures, in all times. In short, the conceptual formation 'religion' supports both an 18th century discourse of religious deterioration but also gives rise to an equally powerful discourse that asserts religion's solidity, its establishment as fact, not delusion. It is this positive invention of religion that undergirds the disciplinary project of Religionswissenschaft or the science of religion.

The project of the science of religion is launched with Hume. I offer this remark not as a gloss on the history of ideas, but in the tradition of Begriffsgeschichte as articulated by Reinhart Koselleck[9]. I am more concerned with Hume as the stage-setting for the conceptual formation of the science of religion than any explicit project he undertook or has been credited with undertaking. The Natural History of Religion (NHR) creates this stage-setting by demonstrating how humans' inability to be rational, their confusion of the natural world with the symbolic and their love of the concrete over the abstract are all productive of "religion" as we have described it[10]. By examining briefly two of the Natural History's central tropes--anthropomorphism and fetishism, we will see how the "religion" that emerges out of the NHR becomes the conditio sine qua non for establishing what Max Müller called "the secret to the proper study of religion,"[11] that is comparison.

Religion as a Set of Symbols

Hume's ability to see analogies between the religions of ancient Egypt, 17th century Chinese, Laplanders, 5th century Athenians, etc. is predicated on the levelling effect of anthropomorphism on his interpretations of all religions. Anthropomorphism is part of Hume's overall response to the dilemma posed by different religions' multiple claims for authority. It is the criticizing recognition that differences, which do exist between the stories and images of Lacedemonian, Tyrian and Roman deities for example, do not constitute differences in "fact;" they are merely metaphorical or symbolical. Therefore, these differences represent "realities" which, in the words of Hume's Treatise, are "less firm and solid" (Treatise, 631). Personification and superstition become the common tokens of religions incapable of recognizing a "first principle of mind" and which, in the case of the NHR, means all the religions Hume mentions. The possibility of identifying beliefs and practices from any time period or culture as a species of the same genus, "Religion", becomes possible with the homologizing effects of anthropomorphism.

The Chinese, when their prayers are not answered, beat their idols. The deities of the Laplanders are any large stone which they meet with of an extraordinary shape. The Egyptian mythologists, in order to account for animal worship, said, that the gods, pursued by the violence of earth-born men, who were their enemies, had formerly been obliged to disguise themselves under the semblance of beasts. The Caunii, a nation in the lesser Asia, resolving to admit no strange gods amongst them, regularly, at certain seasons, assembled themselves compleatly armed, beat the air with their lances, and proceeded in that manner to their frontiers; in order, as they said, to expel the foreign deities.[12]

William Pietz, also crediting the NHR as the definitive theoretical articulation, points out that fetishistic religion is characterized as nothing more than superstition, false reasoning, and personification that stems from man's inability to reflect on first principles or understand scientific causality.[13] If this is the case, then the mistaking of the natural world with the realm of metaphor and symbol is essential to religion in its fetishistic and anthropomorphic forms and not restrictively to religion in the space of colonial encounter. The Enlightenment project of the comparability of faiths becomes possible with this inscription of fetishism and anthropomorphism into the meaning of religion. For the founding father of the science of religion, F. Max Müller, this forgetting of the metaphorical process and hasty personifcation of natural phenomena is due to the opacity of Aryan words. As Maurice Olender argues in The Languages of Paradise Müller's history of religions is a history of languages which traces the way natural objects are metaphorized as Zeus, Jupiter and Sanskrit Dyaus, all names for the Supreme God, were once common terms for the daylit sky and Eos was the word for dawn before becoming the goddess of the rising sun.[14]

"If I were asked," said Max Müller, "what I considered the most important discovery of the nineteenth century with respect to the ancient history of mankind, I should answer by the following short line: Sanskrit Dyaus Pitar=Greek Zeus=Latin Jupiter=Old Norse Tyr."[15] As Norman Girardot notes, for Müller the plurality of names of the deity "as preserved in the ancient languages of the world"[16] are but imperfect expressions of one infinite God-idea. Hume and Muller share the same structural assumption that different beliefs or different names of deities do not amount to a real difference when it comes to religion; religions can only take symbolic shape because they are based on the move from natural to metaphorical meaning. Religion in this post-Enlightenment form, to quote Marc Shell earlier, can only stand in place for something else.

Muller's location of the true meaning of all religions "in the sacred soil of the human heart, quickened by the same divine spirit,"[17] as he states to the Aryan Section of the International Congress of Orientalists is conceptually of a piece with the fetishistic move to bestow reality on paper money. The tropes necessary to establish the true meaning of spiritualized religion as hidden in the human heart function in a parallel process--spiritualizing the meaning of paper money and leading us where we began with smart cards in conversation with electronic terminals.

Jean Joseph-Goux calls the new system of fictive money atheistic by which he means that the shaken confidence in the gold standard is conceptually and historically on a par with a shaken faith in God.[18] Although atheistic is perhaps the last way I would describe the social landscape of the 19th century United States, I would agree with Goux that there is a homology between the rise of paper money and the discourse of religion. Perhaps it is not coincidental that in the 1950s--several decades after US currency had become a simple token, without metallic backing--President Eisenhower ordered the phrase "In God We Trust" to be inscribed on all coins and banknotes circulating in the United States.