Faith & Spirit Quote by Louis Aragon

Aragon’s line lands like a slap because it treats “religion” less as metaphysics than as a libido with paperwork. The provocation isn’t just the insult; it’s the cold, bureaucratic precision of “scientifically systematized.” He’s accusing religion of doing what modernity claims to do best: catalog, normalize, and enforce. Desire can be chaotic, private, improvisational. Religion, in this framing, is desire made legible to institutions - turned into doctrine, ritual, schedules, hierarchies, penalties. A “perversion” that doesn’t hide in the shadows because it has a filing cabinet and a curriculum.

As a Surrealist-adjacent poet who moved through the avant-garde’s anti-bourgeois fury and later the gravitational field of French communism, Aragon knew exactly which buttons to press: sex, science, and sanctity. The subtext is not merely that religion represses sexuality; it’s that religion eroticizes repression. It converts guilt into a renewable energy source, manufactures transgression so it can sell redemption, and trains bodies to experience obedience as a kind of intimate drama. The word “only” is intentionally unfair - a hammer, not a statistic - but the unfairness is the point. He’s parodying the era’s faith in “scientific” authority by assigning religion the same modern legitimacy it often resists, then weaponizing that legitimacy against it.

The result is a compact piece of cultural sabotage: blasphemy dressed as diagnosis, a poet borrowing the clinician’s tone to expose how power survives by managing the most volatile human material - longing.