Events

When studying mediations by which a fragile and untrustworthy personal experience of two children in Litmanová, 1990, gradually turned into a widely recognized and shared, authentic religious miracle or a true religious phenomenon, one quickly gets somewhat more complicated picture of religiousness than the one offered by Latour in his numerous writings on the topic. On one hand, the apparition in Litmanová was enacted in many ways as making the Blessed Mother present, here and now, to all the worshippers – to Latour’s joy, one would say. On the other hand, equally frequently, the apparitions were articulated, examined and recalled as matter-of-fact historical events, i.e., false or true according to quite different sets of criteria than those imagined by Latour for his religious mode of existence. The two modalities not only co-existed (our interviewees often switched quite smoothly between them in their accounts), but they did their work together, they constituted each other. Nonetheless, Latour’s point about the nature of religion does hold – in a way: it can be observed in our data that while matter-of-fact articulations of the apparition were prevailing and decisive in the beginning of the entire story, their importance decreased as the religious authenticity of the apparition was becoming more and more established. Thus, Latour’s characterization of religion makes sense only if we look at it in its ready-made, accomplished form. If we want to understand religion in the making, however, the picture is much less pure.