Envisioning the Cosmic Body of Christ: Embodiment, Plurality and Incarnation (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies) [1 ed.] 9780367356088, 9780429340604, 0367356082

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Envisioning the Cosmic Body of Christ

The metaphor of the cosmos as the Body of Christ offers an o ­ pportunity to escape the aporias of standard Body of Christ imagery, which has often proved anthropocentric, exclusivist, triumphalist, and/or sexist in the ­analyses of classical theologies. The body motif in particular contains ­starting points for current body discourses of gender-sensitive and ­ecological theologies, especially in their mutual overlaps. This book offers a critical evaluation of the prospects and boundaries of an updated metaphor of the Body of Christ, especially in its cosmic dimension. The first part of the book addresses the complex tradition in which the universal dimension of cosmological Christologies is located, including the thinking of the Apostles Paul and John, Origen, Cusanus, Teilhard de ­Chardin, McFague, and Panikkar. In the second part of the book, r­ epresentatives of various innovative concepts will contribute to the anthology. This is a wide-ranging study of the implications of a new Cosmic Body of Christ. As such, it will be of interest to academics working in religion and gender, religion and the environment, theology, and Christology. Aurica Jax, Doctor of Divinity, is Directress of the “Arbeitsstelle ­Frauenseelsorge,” German Bishops’ Conference. From 2013 to 2019, she was Research Assistant to the chair for systematic theology, Institute for Catholic Theology, University of Cologne, Germany Saskia Wendel is Professor for systematic theology, Institute of Catholic Theology, University of Cologne, and Vice Director of the a.r.t.e.s.-­Graduate School of the Humanities, Cologne, Germany.

Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies

The Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic and research readers. This open-ended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for contemporary society. Gaming and the Divine A New Systematic Theology of Video Games Frank G. Bosman Theologising Brexit A Liberationist and Postcolonial Critique Anthony G. Reddie Vision, Mental Imagery and the Christian Life Insights from Science and Scripture Zoltán Dörnyei Christianity and the Triumph of Humor From Dante to David Javerbaum Bernard Schweizer Religious Truth and Identity in an Age of Plurality Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz Envisioning the Cosmic Body of Christ Embodiment, Plurality, and Incarnation Aurica Jax and Saskia Wendel For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ religion/series/RCRITREL

Envisioning the Cosmic Body of Christ Embodiment, Plurality, and Incarnation Edited by Aurica Jax and Saskia Wendel

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Aurica Jax and Saskia Wendel; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Aurica Jax and Saskia Wendel to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jax, Aurica, editor. | Wendel, Saskia, editor. Title: Envisioning the cosmic body of Christ : embodiment, plurality and incarnation / edited by Aurica Jax & Saskia Wendel. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019029793 (print) | LCCN 2019029794 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367356088 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429340604 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Jesus Christ—Mystical body. | Jesus Christ—Person and offices. | Cosmology. Classification: LCC BT205 .E58 2020 (print) | LCC BT205 (ebook) | DDC 232—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029793 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029794 ISBN: 978-0-367-35608-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-34060-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of contributorsvii Introduction

1

AURICA JAX AND SASKIA WENDEL

PART I

Reconstructions5   1 “And wisdom became matter”: materialist explorations of the Cosmic Body of Christ

7

AURICA JAX

  2 The son as the paradigm and soul of the world: the cosmic Christ in Origen

21

CHRISTIAN HENGSTERMANN

  3 Christ and the Cosmos in Nicholas of Cusa’s universe

36

INIGO BOCKEN

  4 Teilhard de Chardin, apostle of the cosmic Christ

48

URSULA KING

  5 Following Raimon Panikkar toward an understanding of creation as incarnatio continua

62

BERNHARD NITSCHE

  6 The “world as the body of God” (Sallie McFague): the cosmic Christ as the measure of the body of God MARGIT ECKHOLT

77

vi  Contents PART II

Investigations91   7 Embodied conscious life: the idea of an incarnated God and the precarious metaphor of the Cosmic Body of Christ

93

SASKIA WENDEL

  8 Deep incarnation between Balthasar and Bulgakov: the form of beauty and the wisdom of God

101

CELIA DEANE-DRUMMOND

  9 Incarnational presence: sacramentality of everyday life and the body or: unsystematic skeptical musings on the use of a central metaphor

114

MAAIKE DE HAARDT

10 Divine promiscuity

126

LAUREL C. SCHNEIDER

11 “These are my bodies . . .”: Cosmic Christology between monotheism and polytheism

140

MATTHEW EATON

12 Members of each other: intercarnation, gender, and political theology

154

CATHERINE KELLER

Index164

Contributors

Inigo Bocken is Professor at the Titus Brandsma Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands. Celia Deane-Drummond is Senior Research Fellow in theology and Director of the Laudato Si’ Research Institute, Campion Hall, University of Oxford, and Affiliate Faculty Member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford. She is also Visiting Professor in theology and science, University of Durham, UK. Maaike de Haardt is Professor Emerita of religion and gender, Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands. Matthew Eaton is Assistant Professor, Department of Theology, King’s College, USA. Margit Eckholt is Professor of dogmatics and fundamental theology, Institute of Catholic Theology, University of Osnabrück, Germany. Christian Hengstermann, doctor of divinity, is Fellow of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism, UK, and visiting lecturer at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. Aurica Jax, doctor of divinity, is the director of the “Arbeitsstelle Frauenseelsorge,” German Bishops’ Conference. From 2013 to 2019, she was Research Assistant to the chair for systematic theology, Institute for Catholic Theology, University of Cologne, Germany Catherine Keller is Professor of constructive theology, Drew University, USA. Ursula King is Professor Emerita of theology and religious studies and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of ­Bristol, UK.

viii  Contributors Bernhard Nitsche is Professor of fundamental theology, Faculty of Catholic Theology, University of Münster, Germany. Laurel C. Schneider is Professor of religious studies, Affiliated Faculty Member in women’s and gender studies, and American Studies, Vanderbilt University, USA. Saskia Wendel is Professor of systematic theology, Institute of Catholic Theology, University of Cologne, and Vice Director of the a.r.t.e.s.-Graduate School of the Humanities, Cologne, Germany.

Introduction Aurica Jax and Saskia Wendel

Christologically, as well as ecclesiologically, the metaphor of the Body of Christ seems to be precarious. In the analyses of classical theologies, the metaphor has often shown anthropocentric, exclusivist, triumphalist, or sexist characteristics. 1 At the same time, there is an interesting possible change of perspective in the use of the metaphor in its cosmological broadening: The universe or the entire cosmos can then be understood as the Body of Christ. However, it is by no means self-­ evident that this perspective is more fruitful, because of the problematic history of the term, the remaining aporetic tension of the universal and the particular in it, and systematic problems, such as the panentheistic implications of the concept or the superioristic identification of a Cosmic Body of God with the Body of Christ. At the same time, the body motif in particular contains starting points for current body discourses of gender-sensitive and ecological theologies, especially in their mutual overlaps. One of these overlaps lies in reflections on oneness and plurality  – the need to deconstruct the former and celebrate the latter, also in theology. The first part of the book addresses the complex tradition in which the universal dimension of cosmological Christologies is located: Origen – Cusanus – Teilhard de Chardin – McFague – Panikkar, to name just a few thinkers. Thus, in the interest of a sustainable reconstruction of the metaphor of the Cosmic Body of Christ, it is necessary to trace stages of development and lines of reception of the metaphor, including their tensions, contradictions, and demolitions. In the second part of the book, representatives of various innovative concepts contribute to the anthology: deep incarnation (Deane-Drummond), incarnational presence (de Haardt), promiscuous incarnation (Schneider), queer little gods (Eaton), and intercarnations (Keller). These implicit or explicit Body of Christ metaphors entail concepts that reflect the impact of corporeality and suggest the de-­ dramatization of gender differences for Christology. Most of them also criticize the anthropocentrism of other concepts and broadening of the notion of incarnation beyond humanity. But they offer different evaluations on

2  Aurica Jax and Saskia Wendel whether a reconstruction of the Body of Christ metaphor in a cosmic perspective really escapes the aporias of this metaphor. The first part, “Reconstructions,” is opened by Aurica Jax’s “ ‘And Wisdom Became Matter’: Materialist Explorations of the Cosmic Body of Christ” which departs from the provocative translation of John 1:14 as “wisdom became matter” and examines the metaphor of the Cosmic Body of Christ in different Christological approaches from the perspective of the ecologically concerned theories of New Materialisms. Christian Hengstermann then opens the analytical contributions to individual conceptions of the Cosmic Body of Christ with a discussion of Origen’s understanding of the metaphor: He analyzes Origen in “The Son as the Paradigm and Soul of the World: the Cosmic Christ in Origen,” as Origen is the first Christian metaphysician to work out a comprehensive doctrine of the cosmic Christ. Origen views the world as the visible body of the Son who is identified with the Old Testament Sophia or Wisdom as the sum of God’s ideas, suffused by his creative agency. Inigo Bocken deals with another central tradition of the cosmic Christ. In “Christ and the Cosmos in Nicholas of Cusa’s Universe,” he reads Cusanus together with Michel de Certeau. In Cusanus, Certeau finds an alternative model of the corpus mysticum that is resistant to the crisis of modernity and its dualisms between mind and body: Christ is for Cusanus the concrete connection of the finite and the infinite. Ursula King’s contribution, entitled “Teilhard de Chardin, Apostle of the Cosmic Christ,” shows in detail how Teilhard de Chardin contributed to the renewal of the metaphor of the cosmic Christ. In a synthesis of Christian doctrine and evolutionary theory, Teilhard de Chardin was convinced of the interdependent unity and organicity of all living things animated by the spirit of God and the presence of Christ, the latter being the goal of the universe. Besides Teilhard, Raimon Panikkar is an important representative of a cosmic Christology of the 20th century: In “Following Raimon Panikkar toward an Understanding of Creation as Incarnatio Continua,” Bernhard Nitsche sketches Panikkar’s understanding of “Christophany.” It includes classical Christologies, but at the same time exceeds them in an interreligious understanding of Christ. Margit Eckholt addresses the feminist perspective of Sallie McFague’s understanding of the cosmic Christ body. In “The “World as the Body of God” (Sallie McFague): Cosmic Christ as the Measure of the Body of God,” Eckholt analyzes McFague’s metaphorical “World as the Body of God.” Eckholt traces the Christological and creation-theological references of this metaphor and demonstrates the significance of McFague’s “embodied thinking” for ecological ethics and creation spirituality. The second part of the book, “Investigations,” starts with Saskia ­Wendel’s “Embodied Conscious Life: The Idea of an Incarnated God and the Precarious Metaphor of the Cosmic Body of Christ.” Wendel develops

Introduction 3 an understanding of both individual conscious life and the whole universe as God’s embodiment (in the sense of a self-expression of divine life in its unity of the mental and the physical). At the same time, she marks the shortcomings of the Body of Christ metaphor as designation for the universe as God’s embodiment and finally pleads for a renunciation of this metaphor. Celia Deane-Drummond, however, examines in “Deep Incarnation Between Balthasar and Bulgakov: The Form of Beauty and the Wisdom of God” the potential of recent debates on Christ’s presence in the world understood as deep incarnation. Relying on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s and Sergii Bulgakov’s understanding of creaturely being, she criticizes philosophies of New Materialism as offering a purely naturalistic interpretation of transcendence and insists on the idea of Christ’s reception of divinity as a particular form of beauty and wisdom of God, and on an understanding of the whole cosmos as the Cosmic Body of Christ. In “Incarnational Presence: Sacramentality of Everyday Life and the Body. Or: unsystematic skeptical musings on the use of a central metaphor,” Maaike de Haardt doubts, similar to Wendel, whether the metaphor of the (cosmic) Body of Christ can have a “convocative capability” – in her case, in a Dutch, secular context. Instead, she offers a plea for revitalizing the old and general concept of sacramentality in a critical, embodied, and ethically relevant way within the framework of a political theology of everyday life: incarnational presence. Also facing the problems of traditional Christology, Laurel C. Schneider’s “Divine Promiscuity” suggests a queer and postcolonial turn to the concept of promiscuity in order to undo God’s otherness – as divinity is mixed with humanity  – as well as God’s purity  – as divinity is mixed with the earth. Humorously, as well as seriously, Schneider sketches “promiscuous incarnation” as a Christology of unbridled and indiscriminate relation that fails all ecclesial and imperial demands for its decency and chastity. In “ ‘These Are My Bodies’: Cosmic Christology between Monotheism and Polytheism,” Matthew Eaton wrestles with the possibility that the world is best understood as a thoroughly religious ecology, incarnate with a plurality of “queer little gods” (Eve Sedgwick), each of whom reveals infinities beyond human horizons, creates subjective worlds outside of themselves, and provides various salvific narratives for life. Catherine Keller’s “Members of Each Other: Intercarnation, Gender, and Political Theology” completes this volume. Keller troubles the boundary between the alleged universality of the Body of Christ as a cosmic figure and its universe as a space of ecological precarity. Her “political theology of the earth” shifts from conventions of Christian exceptionalism toward an earth-scaled intersectionalism and its multiple “intercarnations.” We as editors say a big “thank you!” to everyone who contributed to the book in multiple ways, especially to our student assistants Barbara Engelmann and Ruth Glaubitz. We also would like to thank the Deutsche

4  Aurica Jax and Saskia Wendel Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for funding this project and to Routledge for accepting the book as part of its exciting program. Cologne, on the day of Catherine of Siena, April 29, 2019. Aurica Jax and Saskia Wendel

Note 1 See Wendel, S.,  & Nutt, A. (Ed.). (2016). Reading the body of Christ: Eine geschlechtertheologische relecture. Paderborn: Schöningh. See also Remenyi, M., & Wendel, S. (Ed.). (2017). Die Kirche als Leib Christi: Geltung und Grenze einer umstrittenen Metapher. Freiburg: Herder.

Part I

Reconstructions

1 “And wisdom became matter” Materialist explorations of the Cosmic Body of Christ Aurica Jax

“And wisdom became matter and lived among us.”1 This is how the “Bibel in gerechter Sprache,” the project of a Bible translation into German that intends to be sensitive about antijudaism, gender, and social justice issues, translates verse 14 from the prologue to the Gospel of John. “And wisdom became matter and lived among us.” This translation goes along with the line of my argument, which examines the metaphor of a Cosmic Body of Christ from the perspective of New Materialism.2 This means, as I am going to argue, that we should understand the Body of Christ in a cosmic sense, in the sense of the corporeality and materiality as a result of a creatio continua and incarnatio continua. In the following, I will first explain some characteristics of New Materialism and then highlight a few examples of a cosmic – or “Christian materialist”3 – understanding of the Body of Christ in the past and present of theology. For the latter, I  will examine a number of authors with regard to the following aspects: First, how do these theologians reflect on Christ’s nature? “Nature” is meant in a double sense here: concerning the Christological dogma – this also includes how Jesus of Nazareth and the cosmic Christ are related to one another – but also the relationship to nature in the sense of materiality. The second question is about inclusivism and exclusivism: who (and what) participates in this “nature of Christ” and how? Third, what relevance do ecological concerns have for the authors analyzed here?

Perspectives of New Materialism Theories of the so-called New Materialisms determine the relationship of discursive constructions and the underlying materiality of the body – and of everything that is. They appreciate the dynamics of the material without undermining the insight into the social construction of reality, and their theological reception offers interesting starting points. They do not represent a consistent theory or school of thought, but rather a bundle of approaches and disciplines, for example “environmentalism, [. . .] feminism, [. . .] queer theory or postcolonial studies.”4 The observation that motivates the “New Materialists” is that the material still seems to be regarded as

8  Aurica Jax inferior to the nonmaterial, to language, discourse, spirit, and so on. Thus New Materialisms develop “changing conceptions of material causality and the significance of corporeality, both of which we see as crucial for a materialist theory of politics or agency.”5 Not going against the cultural turn, but rather beyond, it is now time to deal radically with matter again. At least since the turn of the millennium – with a forerunner in the “corporeal materialism” of feminist theories – there is a marked reorientation toward the “materialism of Deleuze’s philosophy” as well as Whitehead’s “processontologies.”6 They can be found in authors such as Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Jane Bennett, and Karen Barad.7 The main feature of New Materialisms is their posthumanist reorientation – “posthumanist in the sense that it conceives of matter itself as lively or exhibiting agency”8 – and thus there is a special emphasis on the productivity and resilience of matter. Posthumanism aims at “transgressing the previous divisions between nature-culture, object-subject, man-machine”9 and at describing matter as “active, autonomous and historically changeable.”10 This is clearly reminiscent of what Donna Haraway already wrote years ago. Posthumanism thus questions any privileging of the human over the nonhuman – this is interesting for the notion of incarnation because it can raise the awareness for the anthropocentrism of traditional concepts of incarnation. Reasons for the emergence of New Materialisms are to be found in the advances in scientific knowledge – for example, in the understanding of matter in physics, as well as in ethical and political challenges (climate change, globalization, migration, biotechnologies, ecology). “We unavoidably find ourselves having to think in new ways about the nature of matter and the matter of nature; about the elements of life, the resilience of the planet, and the distinctiveness of the human.”11 The news value of New Materialisms can thus be found in the combination of scientific findings with political themes and in their emphasis of complexity, plurality, and processuality. And very interestingly for (political) theologians, sociologist Andreas Folkers perceives an element of speculation in these theories: What is new about the new materialism is not that it has a new vision of society, but that it is prepared for the new, the incoming. In this speculative attitude lies the politically important moment of the new materialism.12

From Cusa to Keller: traces of the Cosmic Body of Christ To come back to the translation by the Bibel in gerechter Sprache, the prologue to the Gospel of John echoes the creation story – and maybe to translate its famous first sentence as “[i]n the beginning, there was wisdom”/“Im Anfang war die Weisheit” not only hints at the “relationship of the prologue to early Jewish wisdom traditions”13 but also distances itself from an exclusive Christological interpretation.14 Moreover, “wisdom” became not only

“And wisdom became matter” 9 flesh but also matter – this wording illustrates the “extreme turnaround, a transition from the celestial to the earthly” that John intended to indicate. This translation fits perfectly with a materialist interpretation of the Body of Christ and more precisely a cosmic understanding as I will explain now, tracing a few stages in the history and present of theology. To begin, we focus on the 15th-century theologian Nicholas of Cusa and his Christology, which owns a cosmological perspective: His speculative concept of God as coincidentia oppositorum corresponds to his Christological considerations, or perhaps was even stimulated by them – concretely by the Council of Chalcedon – along with the neo-Platonic influences. The individual Body of Christ is considered by Cusanus especially in the context of his sermons. As not surprising for a text from the 15th century, he interprets the body completely in the context of salvation history. The biological and cultural gender of Jesus explicitly does not matter to Cusanus – but implicitly, of course, the “Body of Christ” is male because it is undoubtedly identical to the “exquisite body” of Jesus Christ. Without often using the term “the Body of Christ,” Cusanus, nevertheless, makes a determination of the relationship between the individual and universal Body of Christ by connecting the human Body of Christ with the cosmos. Being both God and human, Christ himself represents the coincidentia oppositorum, so that the coincidentia is also evident in salvation history and does not contradict the cosmological dimension – on the contrary, it points to “the cosmic motivation of incarnation in the entirety of Cusa’s reasoning.”15 Cusanus applies to his Christology the “relation of the unified enfolding and manifold unfolding (complicatio – explicatio), which underlies his conception of the God-world relation.”16 The enfolding of nature and the unity of all are connected with the maximity of Christ who is the “perfection of the universe and of human nature” because he “enfolds all of nature.”17 Cusanus connects this vision of coincidence with Paul’s, the egalitarian enfolding of all into the Body of Christ in Galatians 3:28. And so, we see how it is that our nature, which is not other than Christ’s, is, in Christ, most perfect. And here take note of the fact that Christ coincides with the nature of humanity, through which all men are men. [. . .] In the Oneness of Christ – where there is neither Jew nor Gentile nor male nor female but where Christ is all in all  – they are present without difference.18 Almost 500  years after Cusanus, the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin meditated on Christ in cosmic dimensions too. For him, the individual and Cosmic Body of Christ are in continuity with each other as the cosmic Christ is the enlargement of Jesus’s body. And since Christ was born, and ceased to grow, and died, everything has continued in motion because he has not yet attained the fullness of his form. He has not gathered about Him [sic!] the last folds of the garment

10  Aurica Jax of flesh and love woven for him by his faithful. The mystical Christ has not reached the peak of his growth – nor therefore has the cosmic Christ.19 Teilhard dynamizes and universalizes the incarnation, which affects the entire cosmos. “God is incarnate in matter, in flesh, in all of creation, in the cosmos. The incarnation of Christ becomes extended to the dimensions of the cosmos; it is an event and mystery of cosmic extension.”20 In Teilhard’s “rich theology of the body of Christ,”21 the Body of Christ carries different meanings that merge into one another. It can refer to the person of Jesus of Nazareth, but it is also a body that forms a personal center for humanity and the material world. It is a physical, organic center, a christic element in all things, so that all things can be an opening, a disclosure of Christ to us.22 Teilhard revolutionized the Christian theology of creation by bringing it permanently into conversation with the theory of evolution. He imagined the evolution of the world as deeply theo- and Christocentric, and established the idea of “God in transition.”23 Likewise, his worldview is inclusivist to the highest degree: to him, the bodily integration of the faithful into the collective Body of Christ is the only unique goal of the cosmos: “The exclusive task of the world is the physical incorporation of the faithful in the Christ who is of God. This cardinal task is being carried out with the rigour and harmony of a natural evolution.”24 Sallie McFague is famous for her ecologically motivated idea of the world as the body of God, which is influenced by process thought, especially Charles Hartshorne, and by Teilhard de Chardin.25 Like the latter, she reflected on Christology and on incarnation,26 but she denies Teilhard’s claim to absoluteness. Her idea of incarnation means neither primarily nor exclusively Jesus Christ,27 because she wants to avoid the “scandal of uniqueness” of an incarnation that occurred in Jesus Christ once and for all. She has two reasons for this argument: On the one hand, she states that there is a gap between the mystery of the universe and what we know about it. On the other hand, she is convinced that the Christian claim of uniqueness is in conflict with other world religions. Jesus, according to McFague, is “not ontologically different from other paradigmatic figures either in our tradition or in other religious traditions who manifest in word and deed the love of God for the world.”28 Incarnation rather happens in “all matter”29 since everything was created and creation is continuously going on: The world (universe) as God’s body is also, then, a radicalization of divine immanence, for God is not present to us in just one place (Jesus of Nazareth, although also and especially, paradigmatically there), but

“And wisdom became matter” 11 in and through all bodies, the body of the sun and moon, trees and rivers, animals and people.30 But Jesus still matters, as in him, God became flesh and lived “among us” (John 1:14), embodying “the concrete, physical availability of God’s presence and the likeness to ourselves,”31 likeness in the “christic paradigm” – a notion that McFague takes from Teilhard de Chardin.32 Like him, she emphasizes the continuity between Jesus’s body and the cosmic Christ too. “This resurrected Christ is the cosmic Christ, the Christ freed from the body of Jesus of Nazareth, to be present in and to all bodies.”33 So, according to McFague, the famous metaphor of the world as body of God is intrinsically Christological. Its scope is the cosmic Christ: “We know God  – we have some intimation of the invisible face of God  – through divine incarnation in nature and in the paradigmatic Jesus of Nazareth, in the universe of God’s body and in the cosmic Christ.”34 The cosmic Christ shows the extent of God’s love in the hope that it will be unlimited. “It is for all of creation and especially for the oppressed, needy creatures.”35 McFague doubts the uniqueness of the incarnation in Jesus Christ, while at the same time, his actions form the “christic paradigm” in which the world is to be thought of as the body of God. Not only does McFague expand the Body of Christ beyond the lifespan of the historical Jesus but also even beyond the church. The cosmic Christ metaphor suggests that Jesus’ paradigmatic ministry is not limited to the years 1–30 C.E. nor to the church, as in the model of the church as the mystical body of Christ, but is available to us throughout nature. It is available everywhere, it is unlimited – with one qualification: it is mediated through bodies.36 Raimon Panikkar’s thought is close to Teilhard, too, although Panikkar neither shares Teilhard’s “Christology from above”37 nor exactly his cosmology, which he regards as Eurocentric and “evolutionistic.”38 At the same time, they have a number of assumptions in common: First, humanity is “on the way,” in process of further development to a higher goal; second, we humans are becoming increasingly more conscious of a fundamental change in our relationship to the Earth; and third, this dynamic vision is intensely Christ-centered for both thinkers.39 While Christians recognize Christ in Jesus of Nazareth, this does not need to be the case for those who belong to other religions. “Jesus is Christ, but Christ cannot be identified completely with Jesus of Nazareth.”40 At the

12  Aurica Jax same time, the Body of Christ always remains the same: preexistent, historic, Eucharistic, and risen. The protological Christ, at times improperly called preexistent is one with and the same as the historical Christ, and the historical Christ is inseparable from the eucharistic and resurrected Christ. The eucharist [. . .] is the continuation of the incarnation and so makes it possible for us to speak of an incarnatio continua.41 Panikkar coined the notion of “Christophany”: radically pluralist (beyond exclusivism and inclusivism), trans-Christian, and explicitly cosmic.42 This “Christophany” can only be understood within Panikkar’s “cosmotheandric” worldview: The entanglement of the human, the cosmic, and the divine resonates with the Christological dogma.43 “This is the mystery of Christ: the interpenetration [. . .] between the divine and the human, without forgetting that within the human there also exists the cosmic, as Jesus’s entire speech here attests.”44 Panikkar is convinced that every being is a Christophany45 and that the fear of pantheism has led to the restriction of the incarnation to only one human being.46 His idea of incarnatio continua includes an ecological dimension, and his pluralist “new cosmology”47 assumes an agency of the earth – relying on “deep ecology” and the “Gaia hypothesis” – which resembles the new materialist posthumanism. In his notion of deep incarnation, Niels Henrik Gregersen formulates the framework of an ecological Christology by emphasizing the cosmic dimension of incarnation, where God unites with the whole creation.48 “Deep incarnation” is the view that God’s own Logos (Wisdom and Word) was made flesh in Jesus the Christ in such a comprehensive manner that God, by assuming the particular life story of Jesus the Jew from Nazareth, also conjoined the material conditions of creaturely existence (“all flesh”), shared and ennobled the fate of all biological form (“grass” and “lilies”), and experienced the pains of sensitive creatures (“sparrows” and “foxes”) from within.49 In Jesus Christ, therefore, a qualitative change took place in the God-world relationship: God did not become human but kol-bashar – all flesh, aiming at the reconciliation of humans and God, and a closer connection of God and world. God became flesh for the purpose of reconciling humanity with God, and of conjoining God and the world of creation so intensely together that there can be a future also for a material world characterized by decomposition, frailty and suffering.50

“And wisdom became matter” 13 Thus, God is present in all things created, reconciling the material world in the truest sense of the word of “radical” self-embodiment.51 In the concept of deep incarnation, Gregersen thus connects a materiality “from below” – the whole biological universe, pain, and suffering of the sensitive creature – with a logos-Christology “from above”: The flesh that is assumed in Jesus Christ is not only the particular man Jesus but the entire realm of humanity, living creatures, and earthly soil. The most high (the eternal thought and power of God) and the very low (the flesh that comes into being and decays) are internally related in the process of incarnation.52 Incarnation is not limited to the individual Jesus of Nazareth but expanded to a new level of unity between creator and creatures. “Incarnation is about God’s coming into the world of flesh, not only about God coming to mind.”53 Thus, Anselm’s question cur deus homo is wrong, since God became not only human but also much more comprehensive, all flesh. Gregersen understands all of creation as the “body of Christ.”54 The idea of multiple incarnations is also found in Laurel C. Schneider’s queer paradigm of incarnation, which she calls provocatively, but programmatically, “promiscuous incarnation.” This designation is made with the intention of looking at the poor and oppressed bodies that liberation theologies have pointed to. But promiscuity – a common attribution to “queer people” and/or to those precarious situations – receives a positive reinterpretation. Promiscuous incarnation suggests excess and indiscrimination in divine love. [. . .] It restores sexual bounty and openness to God, which means that it welcomes the end of racialized hierarchy that depend upon sexualized regimes of control. It dismisses purity as a divine attribute and replaces it with the cacaphonous mixture of differences that constitute divine time-being. Promiscuous incarnation refuses the either/or of rigid gender roles in in exactly the same way that all bodies rebel against those strictures. It is a third gender, which makes divine incarnation a disruption of every social binary, every structure that would divinize one at the expense of all of the others.55 Schneider opposes the one-ness of monotheism with the multiplicity of her panentheistic understanding of divine incarnation.56 The divine incarnates over space and time, in the flesh of different bodies that are porous in relation to each other and to the world. Incarnation is always unique because it occurs in a concrete body, and at the same time, it is never unique as an event – not even in Jesus Christ. With the metaphor of “intercarnations,” Catherine Keller approaches the porous, entangled Body of Christ, too, at first addressing Jesus of Nazareth’s

14  Aurica Jax body. “It is not just that Jesus is inseparable from the most vulnerable members of our own species: it is that he is teaching this inseparability as our own ultimate condition.”57 Against the problematic history of the Christological dogma of a unique incarnation, Keller reminds us of the original biblical model of material interdependence, also Jesus Christ’s. In the sticky justice of the basileia the fleshly interdependence of all creatures forms the context for the particular revelation of the flesh of God in Christ. But rather quickly classical theology had revealed the relational process of the revelation, fixating instead on an abstract, immutable Christ-identity, extracted from all the other bodies. [. . .] But the grandeur of this incarnate logos lies precisely in its illumination of the word enfleshed in every creature of the creation – and above all in those least.58 The exclusivism of an incarnation only in Jesus of Nazareth does not only distort the central content of Christian revelation, it even threatens its boundlessness: The significance of the cosmic Christ extends – from a Christian perspective – infinitely outward, in all directions. [. . .] When the mission that witnesses to its radiation shifts into aggressive exclusivism, the glory itself is blocked. For its glory depends upon embodiment.59 Keller illustrates the entanglements of divine presence in the world with the image of the fold, also with regard to the events of redemption in Christ.60 The Body of Christ, like every body, is constantly unfolding: If we take seriously Paul’s metaphor of‚ ‘the body of Christ,’ we belong to a complex organism that as such must always be unfolding in its metabolic, porous relations. [. . .] The Christ symbol is alive only to the extent that it is embodied in process.61

The Body of Christ – a cosmic perspective The theologies examined here – of Teilhard de Chardin, McFague, Panikkar, Gregersen, Schneider and Keller – echo or even strengthen a tendency that the approaches of New Materialism have taken up and put into theory: a regained consciousness of the material conditionality of being.62 A growing awareness of the roots of the ecological crisis leads to an emphasis on the commonalities between humans, animals, plants, and up to the quantum rather than stressing the differences between them. By this, these approaches criticize the idea of a human exceptionalism and want to overcome speciesism and anthropocentrism.

“And wisdom became matter” 15 This relevance of “nature” clearly has consequences for Christ’s “nature(s),” at least for the authors analyzed here: First, none of them reflects much on the Body of Christ in a Eucharistic or ecclesiological sense;63 rather, they try to connect Jesus of Nazareth’s body to the Cosmic Body of Christ. In general, they do not deny Jesus’s importance, but this is not the main focus. He is rather an example of the human materiality and corporeality – and deeply connected with all creatures and with the whole cosmos – than the manifestation of a unique incarnation of the logos.64 Second, everyone and everything is part of this corporeality and materiality. Understood in this sense, not only do all human beings participate in this “nature” of Christ but also all living beings and even “dead” matter with its own specific agency. A Christ-centered exclusivism is overcome; the concept of inclusivism is being challenged as the metaphor of the Cosmic Body of Christ gives a religious interpretation to a world that many will understand as secular or at least not-Christian.65 Third, facing the ecological crisis, all the analyzed authors see the need to react to it and, therefore, promote a model of incarnatio continua that takes place in every (living) being. Only Teilhard de Chardin is an exception, because in his time, there was no awareness yet of the ecological crisis yet. However, he is an important pioneer of the idea of a “christic paradigm,” a cosmos pervaded by Christ. This idea was taken up by his theological heirs in the hope that sacralizing the cosmos will go hand in hand with the aim of saving it. To sum up: A “Christology of becoming,”66 in the sense of a becoming of Christ as much as of the world, seems much more appropriate to the needs of a “materialist” theological reflection in the 21st century, opposing any static, exclusivist, and anthropocentric concept.

Notes 1 In German: “Und die Weisheit wurde Materie und wohnte unter uns [. . .].” Bail (2011), 1983. Cf. Logos und Weisheit. Judith Hartenstein erläutert die Übersetzung. Retrieved from www.bibel-in-gerechter-sprache.de/wp-content/uploads/ logossarx.pdf 2 This position is the result of a long involvement with the metaphor of the body of Christ, recently with its cosmic dimensions. Here, I will only name and not work out the aporias of the metaphor of the body of Christ (the latter has been done elsewhere): first, its implicit ontology of participation; second, its inherent ex-respectively inclusivism; third, its potential sexism; and fourth, its anthropocentrism. For critical analyses of the body of Christ metaphor, see Wendel and Nutt (2016). See also Remenyi and Wendel (2017). 3 I take the notion of a Christian political materialism from Catherine Keller: “Such theological experiments [. . .] make sure we do not abandon ‘Christian materialism’ to any religiopolitical right. In this we do not merely disenchant supernaturalism but offer enticement to ecosmopolitical solidarities” Keller (2017, p. 129). 4 Coole and Frost (2010, p. 2).

16  Aurica Jax 5 Coole and Frost (2010, p. 2). 6 Braidotti (2016, p.  16). Like Braidotti, Andreas Folkers points out the longstanding feminist reflections in this area (Folkers, 2013, p. 18). At the same time, feminist debates on body issues can be viewed critically by New Materialists with increased attention to “the materiality of the human body and the natural world”: “Ironically, although there has been a tremendous outpouring of scholarship on‚ the body’ in the last 20 years, nearly all of the work in this area has been confined to the analysis of discourses about the body” Alaimo and Hekman (2008, p. 3). 7 Karen Barad, regarded to be one of the leading thinkers of “New Materialism,” interprets the quantum physicist Niels Bohr with the help of Foucault, Butler, Haraway, and Levinás. She emphasizes the agency of matter itself and its posthumanist consequences. Her “agential realism” points to and thinks through the completely relational “intra-activity” of the quanta  – they only exist through particular intra-actions. 8 Coole and Frost (2010, p. 7). Further characteristics are discussions of biopolitical and bioethical issues and a critique of capitalism “in the face of climate change, water, energy and food crises and the loss of biodiversity.” Löw, Volk, Leicht, and Meisterhans (2017, p.  12). Braidotti names posthumanism, queer theory, and critique of capitalism as central issues of new materialist interest. Braidotti (2016, pp. 17–21). 9 Coole and Frost (2010, p. 12f). 10 Coole and Frost (2010, p. 13). 11 Coole and Frost (2010, p. 6). The merits of radical constructivism, for example, in the analysis of power are undisputed, but these approaches also brought with them a neglect of the empirical. 12 Folkers (2013, p. 31) [my translation]. Feminist and queer perspectives are also part of New Materialisms: Alaimo and Hekman (2008), Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson (2010), Löw et al. (2017, p. 83f). They are most inspiring for a reflection on the gendered body as material without assuming “natural” gender characteristics. See Hoppe (2017, p. 36). 13 Logos und Weisheit [my translation]. I will not unfold the rich tradition of wisdom Christology in this chapter even though it would be more than fruitful for a Christian materialist Christology. 14 “A well-known line of interpretation of the prologue identifies logos with Jesus and reads it as a summarizing introduction of ​​the protagonist of the gospel in the beginning. But the meaning of the prologue is not limited to this identification with Jesus, but can also be read much more comprehensively as a description of the work of God towards the world/man, for which the following Jesus story is then an example. Due to the long Christian reception history, we probably read the text more christologically than it originally sounded.” Logos und Weisheit [my translation]. 15 My translation of “die kosmische Motivierung der Menschwerdung im Gesamt des cusanischen Denkens.” Schneider (1979, p. 246). 16 Das “Verhältnis der einheitlichen Zusammenfassung und vielheitlichen Entfaltung (complicatio  – explicatio), das seiner Konzeption des Gott-Welt-Verhältnisses zugrunde liegt” (Haubst, 1956, p. 147; my translation). 17 “We must now consider the fact that in Christ Jesus the human nature, qua exalted unto the Divinity, is the perfection of the universe and, especially, is the perfection of our human nature. For in that [Christ’s human nature] reaches the highest gradation of human nature, than which there is no higher gradation, it enfolds every other [human] nature. And it unifies all the things that are subject to the nature, transforming them into Christ” Nicholas of Cusa (2003, n. 36).

“And wisdom became matter” 17 8 Nicholas of Cusa (2003, n. 37). 1 19 Teilhard de Chardin (1960, p. 59). 20 King (1997, p. 65). 21 King (1997, p. 70). 22 King (1997, p. 70f). 23 See the book on Teilhard entitled Ein Gott im Wandel (Schiwy, 2001). 24 “The exclusive task of the world is the physical incorporation of the faithful in the Christ who is of God. This cardinal task is being carried out with the rigour and harmony of a natural evolution” (Teilhard de Chardin, 1960, p. 50; italics in the original text). 25 “My essay is a continuation and development of these projects at the metaphorical level” (McFague, 1993, p. 141). 26 “Christianity is the religion of the incarnation par excellence” (McFague, 1993, p. 14). 27 “The world is flesh of God’s‚ flesh‘; the God who took our flesh in one person, Jesus of Nazareth, has always done so. God is incarnate, not secondarily but primarily” (McFague, 2013, p. 25). 28 McFague (1987, p. 136). 29 McFague (1993, p. xi). 30 McFague (1993, p. 133). See also McFague (2004, p. 537): “Für Christen unterscheidet sich somit die Schöpfungslehre im Wesentlichen nicht von der Inkarnationslehre. In beiden ist Gott die Quelle allen Seins, die Eine, in der wir geboren und neu geboren sind.” 31 McFague (1993, p. 160). 32 “While McFague repudiates the claim that God is uniquely embodied only in Jesus of Nazareth, she highlights the significance of embodiment in the metaphor of the world as God’s body. God’s presence is made physically available to us and that embodiment in the christic paradigm is a likeness to ourselves” (Schrein, 1998, p. 89). 33 McFague (1993, p. 179). 34 McFague (1993, p. 194). 35 McFague (1993, p. 160). 36 McFague (1993, p. 182f. 37 “If the who of Christ is ‘his divine person,’ Christian spirituality will tend to be in tune with Neoplatonism and will rise to [. . .] the ideas of a Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [. . .]” (Panikkar, 2004, p. 155). 38 “The ‘evolutionistic’ mentality of modern cosmology makes plausible the belief that the whole of humanity is journeying toward one single point of history, which has been called the ‘omega’ point. [. . .] This is the soteriology that we do not accept” (Panikkar, 2004, p. 171). 39 King (2016, p. 14). 40 Panikkar (2004, p. 150). “I insist on this fact of continuity. Despite the novelty of the name, christophany traces itself to those profound intuitions of traditional Christology which it does not replace, but on the contrary, prolongs and deepens in fields hitherto unexplored and proposes new perspectives” (Panikkar, 2004, p. 10). 41 Panikkar (2004, p. 169). 42 “Christ’s manifestation also generates a cosmic repercussion” (Panikkar, 2004, p. 12). 43 See Panikkar (1995, p. 186f). 44 Panikkar (2004, p. 22). 45 “A non-reductive Christian vision should be able to assert that every being is a christophany, a manifestation of the christic adventure of the whole of reality

18  Aurica Jax on ist way to the infinite mystery” (Panikkar, 2004, p. 146). Here, Panikkar uses Teilhard’s term of the “christic.” Bernhard Nitsche points to Panikkar’s use of the notion “cosmo-vision,” also coined by Teilhard. Nitsche (2008, p. 391). 46 “Monotheism fears that the incarnation might lead to pantheism. If a human body is capable of being divine, it must be treated in a particularly exceptional way” (Panikkar, 2004, pp. 163–164). 47 Panikkar (1995, p. 184). 48 “I thus speak of deep incarnation in a programmatic contrast to more anthropocentric concepts of incarnation” (Gregersen, 2010, p. 174). See also Gregersen (2013b, pp. 319–342). 49 Gregersen (2015, p. 225f). Cf. Gregersen (2014, pp. 33–50). 50 Gregersen (2013a, p. 375). 51 Cf. Gregersen (2013a, p. 375). 52 Gregersen (2015, p. 234). Cf. Gregersen (2010, p. 181f). 53 Gregersen (2015, p. 226). 54 “The‚ body of Christ’ is extensive in scope; it must be so in order to be able to include the full scope of creation. In Christian parlance, the body of Christ thus refers to his life-historical body of the church, and finally [. . .] the larger world of creation assumed by the Incarnate One” (Gregersen, 2015, p. 227f). 55 Schneider (2010, p. 245). 56 Cf. Schneider (2013, p. 109–121). 57 Keller (2007, p. 144). 58 Keller (2007, p. 152). 59 Keller (2007, p. 152). 60 “This cosmic Christ enfolds and iterates the entire history of our species. So the new Adam repeats with a difference the primal earthling in whose earth (adamah) we are all still entangled” Keller, 2014, p. 301). 61 Keller (2007, p. 154). 62 In this evaluation, Nicholas of Cusa will not be included, as he is a person of the 15th century, living in a self-evidently Christian world without any ecological crises, even though he is a forerunner (an “ancestor” as Keller writes) of both cosmic speculation and interreligious dialogue; see for the latter “Cribratio Alkorani” und “De pace fidei.” 63 In general, it can be said that the understanding of the body of Christ in the sense of “church” or “churches” is not in the focus of interest of the here analyzed authors: Cusanus reflects on the church but does not use the metaphor of the body for it; for the authors of the 20th and 21st century, the idea of the cosmos as the body of Christ – if this metaphor is used explicitly at all – seems to supersede the idea of the church as body of Christ. 64 Unlike Teilhard, McFague and Panikkar question the uniqueness of the divine incarnation in Jesus Christ. Teilhard is the only of “our” authors who would not speak of an incarnatio continua but rather of the character of the whole cosmos as christic. To him, Christ is not one “incarnation” among many, but Christ is the cosmos. 65 For Teilhard, the entire cosmos is on the way to Christogenesis; the cosmic Christ is an all-encompassing reality. For McFague, the entire cosmos forms the “body of God” to which there is no outside. For Panikkar, Christ is also “all-encompassing” as a symbol the cosmotheandric reality. However, neither McFague nor Panikkar completely identify “Christ” with Jesus of Nazareth. And although Schneider and Keller adhere to the concept of incarnation, they expressly underline its plurality, too. 66 Catherine Keller (2007, p. 152).

“And wisdom became matter” 19

Bibliography Alaimo, S., & Hekman, S. (2008). Introduction: Emerging models of materiality in feminist theory. In S. Alaimo & S. Hekman (Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 1–9). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Bail, U., et  al. (Eds.). (2011). Bibel in gerechter Sprache. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Braidotti, R. (2016, January). Die Materie des Posthumanen: Kontexte und Ausblicke des neuen Materialismus. New materialism. Springerin, XXII(1), 16–21. Coole, D.,  & Frost, S. (Eds.). (2010). New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Folkers, A. (2013). Was ist neu am neuen Materialismus? – Von der Praxis zum Ereignis. In T. Goll, D. Keil, & T. Telios (Eds.), Critical matter: Diskussionen eines neuen Materialismus (pp. 17–34). Münster: Edition Assemblage. Gregersen, N. H. (2010). Deep incarnation: Why evolutionary continuity matters in Christology. Toronto Journal of Theology, 26(2), 173–188. Gregersen, N. H. (2013a). Cur Deus Caro: Jesus and the cosmos story. Theology and Science, 11(4), 370–393. Gregersen, N. H. (2013b). The idea of deep incarnation: Biblical and patristic resources. In F. Depoortere & J. Haers (Eds.), To discern creation in a scattering world: Questions and possibilities (pp. 319–342). Leuven: Peeters Publisher. Gregersen, N. H. (2014). Christology. In P. Scott & M. Northcott (Eds.), A systematic theology for changing climate: Ecumenical perspectives (pp.  33–50). London & New York, NY: Routledge. Gregersen, N. H. (2015). The extended body of Christ: Three dimensions of deep incarnation. In N. H. Gregersen (Ed.), Incarnation: On the scope and depth of Christology (pp. 225–251). Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Haubst, R. (1956). Die Christologie des Nikolaus von Kues. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder. Hoppe, K. (2017). Eine neue Ontologie des Materiellen? Probleme und Perspektiven neomaterialistischer Feminismen. In C. Löw, K. Volk, I. Leicht, & N. Meisterhans (Eds.), Material turn: Feministische Perspektiven auf Materialität und Materialismus (Politik und Geschlecht 28) (pp. 35–50). Opladen, Berlin & Toronto: Verlag Barbara Budrich. Keller, C. (2007). On the mystery. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Keller, C. (2014). Cloud of the impossible. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Keller, C. (2017). Tingles of matter, tangles of theology. In C. Keller & M-J. Rubenstein (Eds.), Entangled worlds: Religion, science, and new materialisms (pp. 111– 135). New York, NY: Fordham University Press. King, U. (1997). Christ in all things: Exploring spirituality with Teilhard de Chardin. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Book. King, U. (2016). The cosmotheandric vision of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Raimon Panikkar (Teilhard Studies 72). Woodbridge, CT: American Teilhard Association. Logos und Weisheit. Judith Hartenstein erläutert die Übersetzung. Retrieved from www.bibel-in-gerechter-sprache.de/wp-content/uploads/logossarx.pdf Löw, C., Volk, K., Leicht, I., & Meisterhans, N. (2017). Einleitung. In C. Löw, K. Volk, I. Leicht, & N. Meisterhans. Material Turn: Feministische Perspektiven auf

20  Aurica Jax Materialität und Materialismus (Politik und Geschlecht 28) (pp. 11–20). Opladen, Berlin & Toronto: Verlag Barbara Budrich. McFague, S. (1987). Models of god: Theology for an ecological, nuclear age. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. McFague, S. (1993). The body of god: An ecological theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. McFague, S. (2004). Andere Gottesbilder für eine andere welt. Concilium, 5(40), 534–542. McFague, S. (2013). Falling in love with god and the world: Some reflections on the doctrine of god. The Ecumenical Review, 1(65), 17–34. Mortimer-Sandilands, C.,  & Erickson, B. (Eds.). (2010). Queer ecologies: Sex, nature, politics, desire. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Nicholas of Cusa. (2003). Sermon XXII. In J. Hopkins (Ed.), Nicholas of Cusa’s early sermons: 1430–1441. Loveland, CO: Arthur J. Banning Press. Nitsche, B. (2008). Gott – Welt – Mensch: Raimon Panikkars Denken – Paradigma für eine Systematische Theologie in interreligiöser Perspektive? (Beiträge zu einer Theologie der Religionen 6). Zürich: Pustet. Panikkar, R. (1995). Der Dreiklang der Wirklichkeit: Die kosmotheandrische Offenbarung. Salzburg: Pustet. Panikkar, R. (2004). Christophany: The fullness of man. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Remenyi, M., & Wendel, S. (Eds.). (2017). Die Kirche als Leib Christi: Geltung und Grenze einer umstrittenen Metapher. Freiburg: Herder. Schiwy, G. (2001). Ein Gott im Wandel: Teilhard de Chardin und sein Bild der evolution. Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag. Schneider, L. (2010). Promiscuous incarnation. In M. D. Kamitsuka (Ed.), In the embrace of Eros: Bodies, desire, and sexuality in Christianity (pp. 231–245). Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Schneider, L. (2013). The gravity of love: Theopoetics and ontological imagination. In R. Faber & J. Fackenthal (Eds.), Theopoetic folds: Philosophizing multifariousness (pp. 109–121). New York: Fordham University Press. Schneider, S. (1979). Die‚ kosmische Größe Christi als Ermöglichung seiner universalen Heilswirksamkeit an Hand des kosmogenetischen Entwurfes Teilhard de Chardins und der Christologie des Nikolaus von Kues (Buchreihe der CusanusGesellschaft 8). Münster: Aschendorff. Schrein, S. (1998). Quilting and braiding: The feminist Christologies of Sallie McFague and Elizabeth A. Johnson. Collegeville, MI: The Order of St. Benedict. Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1960). The cosmic life. In P. Teilhard de Chardin (Ed.), Writings in time of war (pp. 13–71). New York, NY: Harper & Row. Wendel, S., & Nutt, A. (Eds.). (2016). Reading the body of Christ: Eine geschlechtertheologische Relecture. Paderborn: Schöningh.

2 The son as the paradigm and soul of the world The cosmic Christ in Origen Christian Hengstermann

Introduction: the cosmic Christ – Origen’s Christology of the world soul In speculations that bear impressive testimony to the depth and daring of their author’s speculative mind, the ancient Christian Platonist Origen identifies Christ with the world soul. The cosmos, he avers in his early Alexandrian philosophical work On First Principles, is one “immense, monstrous animal, held together by the power and reason of God as by one soul.”1 In one of his later Homilies on the Psalms, preached to his congregation in Caesarea, he likewise gives praise to Christ “whose body is the whole of humankind, if not the whole of all creation.”2 Not only is Christ truly divine and truly human, but he is also truly cosmic, revealing the goodness of the creator in the heights and depths of a world of which he is both the transcendent principle and the immanent form and soul. Origen, the first major Christian metaphysician, is at once revered and reviled for the boldness of his metaphysical vision. However, while the two most (in)famous tenets of Origenism – i.e., the protology of the eternal creation of souls and the eschatology of the restitution of all things  – have been bones of contention since his own lifetime, his cosmic Christology, though arguably equally contentious, has to this day received comparatively scant scholarly attention. Only relatively recently has it been rediscovered in modern theology and philosophy of religion, most notably in contemporary process thought.3 Process theologian Daniel Dombrowksi hails Origen as a proponent of what he, quite appositely, terms the “possibility of a genuinely Platonic type of Christianity, wherein the world soul is taken seriously.” Its author, insists Dombrowski, thereby managed to steer clear of two equally unappealing options of religious philosophy: “He was a Christian theist who avoided both impersonal pantheism and the view of God as supernatural (cosmological dualism).”4 No less significantly, Origen’s original Platonic theism, notably his Christology and pneumatology of prayer with its emphasis placed on the feminine dimension of the soul’s passive openness to the active formative work of the Holy Spirit, has recently been reclaimed as a vital patristic resource for a re-evaluation of the topical issues of God,

22  Christian Hengstermann sexuality, and the self.5 The only book-length study on the subject by James Lyons, published posthumously in 1982, has established the seminal influence that the 3rd-century father of cosmic Christology exerted upon its foremost 20th-century apostle, Teilhard de Chardin.6 Notwithstanding its relative neglect in ancient and medieval controversies and modern patristic scholarship alike, Origen’s doctrine of the cosmic Christ may inspire a new cosmic vision of Christ that eschews all bounds of race and gender. Its sources are equally Platonic and Christian. Origen’s cosmic Christ, for one, is the world soul of Plato’s Timaeus, created in the Father’s or demiurge’s bowl as a mixture of the greatest kinds of identity and difference to communicate to the world as a whole the riches of his dipolar being of rest and motion. For another, he is the eponymous heroine of the cosmological speculation of Old Testament wisdom literature, which Origen viewed as the pinnacle of biblical metaphysics, of the cosmotheism of the Psalms, which he expounded in countless commentaries and homilies, and of the cosmic apocalyptic visions of the world to come in the Epistles of Paul and the Revelation of John to which he dedicated a host of metaphysical meditations. As the embodied symbol of God’s universal creative and salvific love, Christ, in Origen, is the alpha and the omega, John’s “[w]ord in the beginning,” creating the world at the Father’s behest, and Paul’s “all in all” in the end, restoring it to its pristine bliss. At the same time, Christ is the middle of God’s motion extending between eternal creation and universal salvation, and consummating divine and human freedom.7

The “middle” of “god’s motion” – Origen’s incarnational metaphysics Among the books of the Holy Writ singled out as the most metaphysically demanding and profound are the Old Testament angelophanies  – i.e. the visions of the Cherubim and Seraphim in Ezekiel and Isaiah. Not only are those so-called δευτερώσεις or “mishna” extolled for their metaphysical depth, which only the most spiritually advanced among the Jews and the Christians are able to fathom, but they are also credited with anticipating, if not surpassing, even Plato’s sublime theology of the three gods or the triad of first principles or hypostases in his apocryphal Second Letter.8 In the extant typological exegeses of the apogee of biblical metaphysics, Origen identifies the God of the Old Testament theophanies with the Father whom the angelic types of the Son and the Holy Spirit at once reveal and conceal. Borrowing from Plato, the “greatest kinds” that mediate between the One and the “indefinite dyad” at the top and at the bottom of the Athenian’s hierarchy of being, Origen buttresses his claim that Hebrew prophecy surpasses Greek philosophy by crediting the greatest of the metaphysical prophets with a vision of a dipolar deity transcendent in his contemplative “rest” and immanent in all things in its active “motion.” As is intimated by the angels’ three pairs of wings, the Trinity’s consummate intelligible “being” is at once

The son as the paradigm and soul of the world 23 defined as “motion” and “rest.” While the Son and the Spirit are at rest in their eternal union with the Father, whose face and feet they conceal with the highest and lowest of their pairs of wings, they undergo motion when, as is symbolized by the middle pair, they share the “fullness of knowledge”9 about him with the rational beings populating the spatiotemporal world: “Thus, they stand and move. They stand with God and they move when disclosing God.”10 The knowledge that the Son and Holy Spirit receive from the Father in their timeless contemplation and share with creation in their economic action is that of the Father’s holiness extolled in the timeless doxology of the Trishagion. The sole object of human cognition is the Father or “God’s motion,” whose principles and purposes no one but themselves can grasp. With God’s face and feet, the beginning and the end of the Father’s work, concealed from all but the Son and the Spirit and the highest of rational beings, only his body or the “middle” is visible to the frail human mind’s eye: It is impossible to find God’s beginning. Nowhere can you grasp the beginning of God’s motion – I do not say “you,” but neither anyone nor anything that is. Only the Saviour and the Holy Spirit who have always been with God, see his face, and so, perhaps, do the angels who constantly see both the face of the Father who is in the heavens and the beginnings of his works. In the same way, however, the seraphim also conceal the feet from man, as it is impossible to tell what the last things are like.11 To God’s body or the “middle” of his motion correspond “that which is” (haec quae est) – i.e., creation – and his “actions” (negotia) in history whereby the Father makes himself known to humankind in his benign selfcommunication in the Son and the Holy Spirit: That which we see – if indeed we allow that we see anything at all – is the middle. We are ignorant of what was before the world, though there was something before the world. Nor can we know for certain what will follow after the world, though there will be something after the world.12 The two “motions of God” are inextricably intertwined. They both revolve around the notion of divine agency as the disinterested self-giving of goodness in creation and salvation. As goodness in person, the Father, Origen avers, cannot but create and give life to beings capable of sharing in his own moral and intellectual nature in the Son. God who is good by nature, willed to have those to whom he might do good and who might enjoy receiving his goods. He, therefore, made creatures capable of himself, that is, creatures capable of receiving him, whom, as he also says, he has “begotten as sons.” (Is. 1:2)13

24  Christian Hengstermann In other words, God cannot be God without a world that he creates and governs in his original creative and his subsequent salvific motion. Created in the one Son in his image and likeness, the many sons with whom the Father ungrudgingly shares his goodness in “God’s motion” are likewise defined as rational and accountable self-movers. As befits the logic of perfect goodness as undiminished giving, there can be no divine self-communication without the free and autonomous assent of beings capable of either embracing or rejecting his gift of love. To the gift of the fullness of God’s own being, therefore, corresponds the freedom of the rational beings who are called upon to “preserve” it “by their own free will”: “For the Creator,” Origen brings home the link between God’s and man’s “motion” as archetypal good and ectypal free moral agency, respectively, “granted to the minds created by him the power of free and voluntary motion in order that the good that was in them might become their own, as it was preserved by their own free will.”14 However, once the rational beings fall away from him in misguided indolence, the Father allows himself to be “moved” by their suffering and woe, freely embracing the “passion of love” (passio caritatis). “The Father himself,” Origen states with great conceptual care and clarity, “is not impassible.”15 Moved by pity, he himself engages in economic motion, descending, in the Son and the Holy Spirit, all the way down from his “throne” among his angelic host above to the “footstool” of his fallen creation below: “The heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool” (Is. 66:1) – not the places, but the beings in those places. The earth is his footstool because of the vast motion and long way undertaken (διὰ τὴν μεγάλην κίνησιν καὶ τὴν πολλὴν ὁδόν).16 The chief instrument whereby the Son and the Holy Spirit effect the Father’s or “God’s motion” of salvific self-communication is the soul of Christ whose incarnation and death on the cross they announce in their prophetic Trishagion. Of all the self-movers created at the beginning of “God’s motion,” only Christ never wavered in his devotion to the Father’s vision of creative love and goodness. As a consequence, the Son and the Holy Spirit find his soul to be of such width that they not only dwell, but also spread their wings in it, sharing with it the “fullness of” the Father’s “knowledge” and holiness. Hence, his every self-motion, in turn, becomes a visible representation of the Trinitarian God’s intelligible vision of creative goodness. In another typological exegesis of Old Testament prophecy, Christ’s divinized self-motion is viewed as “the shadow” under which the fallen rational selfmovers live “among the nations,” participating in the intelligible divine light through the visible shadow of his deeds in flesh and blood: I think, too, that the prophet Jeremiah understood what is the nature of the Wisdom of God in him, which was also the nature he had assumed

The son as the paradigm and soul of the world 25 for the salvation of the world, when he said: “The breath of our countenance is Christ the Lord, of whom we said that we shall live under his shadow among the nations” (Lam. 4:20). For just as the shadow of our body is inseparable from the body and unswervingly undertakes and performs its motions and gestures (motus ac gestus), so I think the prophet wished to allude to the action and motion (opus ac motus) of Christ’s soul, which was inseparably attached to him and performed everything in accordance with his own motion and volition (pro motu eius ac voluntate), and that it was this which he called the “shadow of Christ” the Lord, under which shadow we were to “live among the nations.”17 It is through the joint double agency of God and man in Christ, therefore, that the latter’s humanity eventually brings about the “sanctification” of “the whole earth” announced in the prophetic Trishagion. In doing so, Christ consummates “God’s motion,” restoring all of humankind to their pristine vision of divine holiness and fullness of knowledge forfeited in the fall: “He who sanctifies is the Saviour in that he is a human being receiving holiness from God the Father.”18 Origen’s Christology of the ἐπίνοιαι or the Son’s modes of being and action provides a systematic account of God’s eternal being and historical becoming. His philosophical exegesis of Christ’s titles amounts to a sustained inquiry into divine agency by which the Father creates and saves the world through the plethora of his different modes of existence revealed in the Holy Writ.

Transcendent intellect and cosmic soul – the son’s Ἐπίνοιαι as modes of divine being and becoming The son’s eternal vision – the father’s “will” and “wisdom” The Son is defined as “the beginning of God’s action”19 or “God’s motion.” It is as a twofold hypostatic vision that the Son fulfills his creative and salvific raison d’être both within the Trinity and without. For one thing, he is the sum total of all abstract principles and forms of creation, which he contemplates as the Wisdom of Old Testament sapiental literature and communicates to all rational beings as the word, truth, and life of John’s sublime fourth gospel. For another, as is revealed in the Book of Wisdom, he foresees each and every motion of the finite “number” of self-movers created in the beginning, endowing them with the requisite “measure” of corporeal matter. In his account of divine agency, Origen is careful to distinguish between the Son’s eternal ontological and his historical economic ἐπίνοιαι. While the former, adopted for the sake of fallen humankind, is infinite in number, the latter is only few in number. Once the former has been removed, the Son is

26  Christian Hengstermann revealed as Solomon’s “wisdom” and John’s “word,” “truth,” and “life” alone: “Once we have collected the titles of the Son, therefore,” Origen lays down the chief hermeneutical maxim of his Christology, we must examine which of them came into existence later and whether they would have become so numerous if the saints had begun and continued in blessedness. For perhaps Wisdom alone would remain, and so would Word, Life and certainly Truth, but surely not also the other titles which he adopted in addition for our sake.20 The many economic ἐπίνοιαι that trace the Son’s historical becoming in the redemptive process are contingent upon the fall of humankind. By contrast, the few original ones are tied together by a bond of logical necessity. They express the Son’s eternal being as the principle of God’s motion or the “fullness of the Godhead” as creative and salvific agency: “Although in our mind they are regarded as being many, yet in fact and substance they are one, and in them resides the ‘fullness of the godhead’ ” (Col. 2:9).21 Throughout his inquiry into the Son as the principle of the Father’s agency in creation and salvation, Origen identifies John’s ἀρχή in the first verse of his gospel with the σοφία of Solomon’s proverbs. “Wisdom,” which the Father, according to the Old Testament philosopher king, creates as the “beginning of his ways,” is the most original of his ontological ἐπίνοιαι. It designates the contemplation of all “the principles and forms of the future created world.”22 Proceeding from the Father “like the will from the intellect”23 and being his hypostasized will for creation or universal self-communication,24 Wisdom is “an incorporeal existence comprised of the various ideas which embrace the principles of the universe”25 and “a system of ideas.”26 She is of such mesmerizing beauty that her contemplation instills the creator himself with the greatest of joys: “Her Father rejoiced at her, rejoicing in her manifold spiritual beauty which only spiritual eyes see.”27 As Word or Truth and Life, the Son, at the Father’s behest, communicates to the rational beings made in his image the beauty of his own cosmic vision as Wisdom: But it is as the beginning that Christ is creator, according to which he is Wisdom. Therefore as Wisdom he is called the beginning. For Wisdom says in Solomon: “God created me the beginning of his ways for his works (Prv. 8:22) so that ‘the Word might be in the beginning’ ” (Jn. 1:1), i.e. in Wisdom. While Wisdom refers to the structure of the contemplation and thoughts of all things, Word designates the communication of the things contemplated to spiritual beings.28 To God’s bipolarity as supreme rest and motion, therefore, corresponds the Son’s twofold existence as self-vision and self-communication in wisdom and Word, respectively. Like the Father who, as creator and governor,

The son as the paradigm and soul of the world 27 cannot be without a world with which to share the riches of his goodness in creation and salvation, the Son, as contemplative Wisdom, can never be without the creative and salvific Word. The original ἐπίνοιαι, therefore, reveal the “beginning of God’s action” to be both contemplative Wisdom and creative Word: “The Word was not made ‘in the beginning,’ however, for there was no time when the beginning was without the Word, wherefore it is said, ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ ”29 Not only does the Son or Wisdom’s original vision contain the transcendent forms of the cosmos and all the kinds and species of living beings inhabiting it, but also those of all the individuals over whom he watches with providential care from the original creation of the empirical world to its eventual salvation. In the beginning, the Father creates all things “by number and measure” which, as Origen establishes in a first major metaphysical reading of Wisdom 11:20, refer to the rational beings and the matter, respectively. The “number” of rational beings created is necessarily finite, since not even God could watch over an infinity of creatures. “Had there been no limit,” Origen reasons, “then certainly created beings could neither have been controlled nor provided for by God. For by its nature whatever is infinite will also be beyond comprehension.”30 The matter of which both the world and the bodies of a finite “number” of rational beings are composed is created in exactly such amount or “measure” as will serve God’s redemptive purposes in the course of salvation history. Making use of his consummate foreknowledge about each of the finite number of self-movers and each of the countless cognitive, volitional, and affective motions of which their souls are composed, he places each of them into a coherent whole of successive eons of mutually beneficial interaction guided not by chance but by divine and human freedom and motion alone. As befits divine goodness, the role assigned to a rational being in the drama of salvation is such that, for one, it either deliberately and on purpose or unbeknownst to and even despite itself contributes to the highest good of the eventual restitution of all things. For another, the Son effects the “ordering” of all agency without infringing on or undoing any rational soul’s freedom. If salvation or participation in God as the good in virtuous action and contemplation were imposed on a soul from without, God would both do violence to the concept of virtue, whose very “substance” (οὐσία) is a rational and responsible agent’s “free will” (τὸ ἑκούσιον), and deprive the rational creature of its very essence, which is free agency. In his providential work, the creator, hence, sees to it that “each spirit or soul [. . .] should not be compelled by force against its free choice to any action except that to which the motions of its own mind lead it, which,” he adds, “would change the very quality of their nature.”31 The Son’s vision of the later empirical world that supplements that of the original intelligible one is, therefore, one of a structured whole composed of a large, albeit finite, number of centers of rational moral agency. While their free choices are the sole cause of the motion of the succession of consecutive eons, the

28  Christian Hengstermann Son arranges them in such an “order” (dispositio) that they will eventually form the one coherent whole of “God’s motion” – i.e., the universal sanctification and restitution promised in the Trishagion: But God who, by the unspeakable skill of his wisdom, transforms and restores all things, whatever their condition, to some useful purpose and the common advantage of all, recalls these very creatures, so different from each other in mental quality, to one harmony of work and endeavour, so that, diverse though the motions of the souls may be, they nevertheless combine to make up the fullness and perfection of a single world, the very variety of minds tending to one end, perfection there is one power which binds and holds together all the diversity of the world and guides the various motions to the accomplishment of one task lest so immense a work as the world should be dissolved by the conflicts of souls.32 Throughout, evil self-motion, however despicable, fulfills a providential function foreseen and preordered in the Son’s eternal vision. Thus, while originating exclusively in the soul’s own misguided volition and not willed by God and contrary to his benign purposes of the world’s holiness, it is, nevertheless, part of his providence. It serves as an indispensable moral challenge for the more advanced souls or as punishment for the less circumspect and wary ones. Thus in the Old Testament, Pharaoh’s deliberate malignity acts as a foil to Moses’s probity at that key stage of the drama of redemption, thereby highlighting the greatness of God’s omnipotence. In the New Testament, Judas’s culpable greed is instrumental in bringing about Jesus’s crucifixion, the peripety of the cosmic play of “God’s motion.” Wisdom’s eternal vision of the one divine motion composed of the rational self-movers’ rational agency, whether good or evil, is gradually realized by virtue of a succession of incarnations. Not only does the Son assume one “immense” Cosmic Body, created in the intelligible image of his own wisdom and word, but he also “becomes all to all” to divinize each of its members in a process of patient pedagogy and persuasion. Christ’s Cosmic Body – the “light of the world” As soon as his creatures begin falling away from the vision of God’s holiness, which they abandon in blameworthy indolence so as to pursue lesser goods, the Son, at the behest of the Father, avails himself of the “measure” of matter created in the beginning to furnish the finite “number” of rational beings with an empirical world. To this end, he endows the intelligible archetype of his Wisdom and Word, which they are no longer able to intuit, with visible corporeal forms and shapes: And we should add that having created, so to speak, ensouled wisdom, he left her to hand over, from the types which were in her, to things

The son as the paradigm and soul of the world 29 existing and to matter, the actual emergence of them, their moulding and their forms.33 Not only, however, is the Son the world’s archetype and demiurge as Wisdom and Word but also its soul, which pervades the whole of empirical reality in its heights and depths: And how will it be possible to set the text: “Do not I fill heaven and earth?, saith the Lord” (Jer. 23:24) side by side with the whole world understood as Jesus’ shoe? It is worthwhile, however, to give attention to whether we must understand the words in reference to the fact that the Word and Wisdom have permeated the whole world and that the Father is in the Son, as we have pointed out, or he who first girded himself with all creation, because the Son was in him, granted to the Saviour, since he was second after him and God the Word, to pervade the whole creation.34 Christ, hence, is “God’s soul” by which the Father and the Son alike are intimately present to all of nature in its spatial and in its temporal extension.35 His pre-eminent power, as expressed by his original ἐπίνοιαι, is such “that although he is invisible in his deity, he is present with every man and is coextensive with everything, including the whole universe.”36 In the fullness of his creative essence, he is present at every single moment of time, each of which is the ever-present “today” of Psalm 103, when the Father begets the Son in eternal generation: “The time, if I may put in this way, which is coextensive with his unoriginated and eternal life, is today for him, the day in which the son has been begotten.”37 It is precisely by virtue of its transcendence that the Son’s creative substance as wisdom and word is beyond all spatial and temporal bounds whatsoever. Such, then, is the world created in his image and likeness, and suffused by his original essence that it discloses to man the goodness of its creator both in its many parts and as one unified whole. Christ himself, as Origen establishes in an a fortiori conclusion, confirms the “sacramental mystery of nature,”38 which is based on the differentiated identity of intelligible archetype and empirical image, in his parables. As Wisdom and Word, Christ animates the cosmos from its lowest to its highest strata, as is testified by the minute mustard seed, which serves as a symbol of God’s creative goodness: “And perhaps all individual things on earth have an archetype in heaven similar to them so that even the mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds, has an archetype similar to it in heaven.”39 The whole of the cosmos is one consummate harmony of motions, which cannot but be due to one world soul as a unified source of God’s ubiquitous creative substance and agency by which the Son renders visible the transcendent Father’s benignity: The world possesses unity throughout its whole self and therefore cannot have been made by many makers. Nor can it be held together by

30  Christian Hengstermann many souls which then move the whole heaven. For one soul is enough, which bears up the whole fixed sphere from east to west, and comprehends within itself all that the world needs and this is not complete in itself.40 However, not only is creation a rich spiritual symbol of its creator, whose benignity it is meant to disclose to humankind, but it is also an animate agent itself whose laudable and reprehensible motions are integral parts of the universal drama of salvation. Driven by and composed of the motions of its many free agents, which Christ guides toward the one end of the restitution of all things, the emergent cosmos is not an inanimate chaos, but rather “an immense, monstrous animal, held together by the power and reason of God as by one soul” (animal quoddam inmensum atque inmane [. . .] quasi ab una anima virtute dei ac ratione teneatur).41 The stars in its highest spheres are viewed by the Christian Platonist of Alexandria as a supreme visible embodiment of consummate moral motion. Expounding Old Testament verses like Isaiah 45:12 in which God issues “precepts to all the stars” or Job 25:5, where he laments that “the stars are not clean in his sight,” Origen, thus, not only attributes motion and agency to the celestial bodies but also elevates them into the rank of superior moral agents: And since the stars move with such majestic order and plan that we have never seen their course deflected in the slightest degree, is it not the height of stupidity to say that such order, such exact observance of rule and plan is accomplished by things without reason?42 In his solar theology in particular, Origen credits the highest of the celestial bodies, the sun, with a crucial redemptive role comparable to Paul’s. Like the apostle, the sun, though a near perfect moral agent, retains its base corporeal form, thus imitating Christ’s kenosis in, paradoxically enough, choosing to persevere in a state of bondage for the sake of the unsaved many: And he who does bodily things unwillingly does what he does because of hope. It is as if we should say that Paul wishes “to remain in the flesh” (Phil 1:24), not willingly, but because of hope. For though he preferred ‘to depart and be with Christ’ (Phil. 1:23), it was not irrational for him to wish “to remain in the flesh” because of the benefit to others and progress in things hoped for, not only his own progress, but also that of those benefited by him.43 At the bottom of the cosmos, the earth likewise participates in the drama of fall and restoration. The prophetic invective against the “sinful earth” in Ezekiel 14:12 must not be dismissed as a metaphor. Instead, it makes inescapable the downright panpsychistic inference that “this visible word is

The son as the paradigm and soul of the world 31 animate.”44 As our mother, the earth shares our sorrows. Worse, her plight, undergone for the sake both of her own and humankind’s redemption, is one far graver than ours because she has to endure the trial of unwilling embodiment much longer. Paul’s dictum of a world “groaning and travailing until now” (Rom. 8:22) is, hence, given its full metaphysical and ethical weight. To Origen’s cosmic psychology corresponds a soteriology that is emphatically nonanthropocentric in scope. Origen goes to great pains to prove that the ἐπίνοια “light of men,” contrary to the parochial anthropocentrism common among many Christians of his days, does not restrict Christ’s salvific work to humankind. Instead, man, as is intimated by the synonymous ἐπίνοιαι of “light of the world” and “true light,” is a species pro genere, thus not referring to man alone, but all spiritual beings alike, whether astral, angelic or demonic. As well as being the soul of the world as a whole, the cosmic Christ also chooses to assume the bodies of each of the many different species of rational beings that constitute his visible cosmic nature. In Christ, which is “God’s” embodied “motion,” the Son surpasses Paul in literally becoming “all things to all to gain all” at each and every stratum of the fallen cosmos: “The Saviour, therefore, in a way much more divine than Paul, has become ‘all things all’ that he might either ‘gain’ or perfect ‘all things’ ” (1 Cor. 9:22).45 Whereas the Father is one, the Son, therefore, is a one-many as he becomes “all things” in endeavoring to spread his selfdiffusive goodness on all the levels of the hierarchical empirical cosmos. God, therefore, is altogether one and simple. Our Saviour, however, for the sake of the many things, since God “set him forth as a propitiation” (Rom. 3:25) and firstfruits of all creation, becomes many things, or perhaps even all things that the whole creation capable of being freed needs him as.46 The infinite “all” that the Son, as is expressed by the infinity of his economic ἐπίνοιαι, chooses to become has a twofold reference that corresponds to the two stages of his eternal vision. For one thing, it designates all the kinds and species of rational creation, each of which he aids by assuming the various corporeal forms in consecutive cosmic incarnations. Thus, the Johannine ἐπίνοιαι “alpha and omega” and “first” and “last” do not restrict his incarnational presence to either the first and last species or humankind alone. On the contrary, they are meant to express the strict universality of his incarnational motion: “The Saviour, therefore, is first and last, not that he is not what lies between, but it is stated in terms of the extremities to show that he himself has become ‘all things’ ” (Col. 3.11). For another, his incarnation and accommodation are such that his many economic modes of becoming cater to the needs of each and every individual within each of the species between the “alpha” and “the omega,” and “first” and the “last.” It is by transforming all the kinds and species and all the individuals

32  Christian Hengstermann into his own image that Christ brings about the restitution of all things in “God’s motion,” of which he is the middle and center. Origen’s ecclesiology is emphatically cosmic in character. At its heart is the cosmic Christ as the formative principle of all reality. The church is the community of all rational beings, whether astral, angelical, human, or demonical, whose soul Christ moves and forms through the salvific and creative vision of his economic and ontic ἐπίνοιαι. As such, it is “the light of the world”;47 its historical εἶδος, or its κόσμος.48 Informed by Christ’s presence in his untiring pedagogy and persuasion by which he continues to become incarnate in all individuals of all kinds and species of a dynamic cosmos, rational agency will eventually be transformed into “God’s motion” in an irreversible recapitulation or “totaling up” (ἀνακεφαλαίωσις) of all self-movers among the stars and upon the earth: Thus, in the management of all things in heaven and in the administration of all things on earth, there are many principles which, seeing that they are parts of the one overall cosmos, cooperate and converge towards the one result. But the “totalling” up is in Christ.49

Conclusion: the dipolar god of process Origenism – divine agency as cosmic incarnation and embodied freedom Origen’s Christian metaphysics revolves around self-motion as the chief article of his rational belief in God as self-diffusive goodness, which is both the transcendent principle and immanent form of all things. It is inextricably intertwined with a first comprehensive doctrine of divine bipolarity. Origen’s is a God who is at once perfect contemplative reality and perfect active process. As goodness, God cannot but engage in motion and create a world of self-movers with whom he wants to share the riches of the all-encompassing cosmic vision in the Son and the Holy Spirit resting with him in eternity. As such, moreover, he cannot but be moved by his creatures’ plight once they have fallen away from him, commiserating with them and creating an empirical world fashioned in the image of his Son. In his cosmic Christology and soteriology, Origen applies the concept of divine and human motion of all of visible reality. Suffused by the Son’s creative substance and agency, the visible world provides the stage for his dynamic ordering of the many centers of self-motion and agency which, guided by his primordial vision, gradually approximate the foreseen end of the Father’s one single motion – i.e., the sanctification or restitution of all things announced in the Son and the Holy Spirit’s prophetic Trishagion. The world’s motive power is not a divine fiat by which God would undermine the soul-making process, but the perfection of each and every individual’s moral agency in a historical process of persuasion and pedagogy to which all of empirical reality, by way of a visible image and symbol of divine goodness, is directed. To this end,

The son as the paradigm and soul of the world 33 Christ not only assumes a Cosmic Body but also becomes incarnate at all of its strata, thus bringing about the eventual recapitulation of all rational agents in the fullness of his own divine goodness. Only a strict soteriological universalism, which conceives of salvation not in anthropocentric but in cosmic terms, may aspire to do justice to the human soul’s first and highest idea  – i.e., the idea of God’s infinite goodness, contemplated in the original vision of his wisdom and communicated to all self-movers in his word. There is very little reason to dispute Origen’s original insight.

Notes 1 On First Principles II 1, 3. The quotations from Origen’s works all follow the complete edition in the series of critical patristic texts in Origenes (1899–2015). 2 Homilies on Psalms 36–38 2, 1. 3 The elective kinship with Origenism goes back to a few scattered, albeit highly illuminating, remarks in the founding fathers of process philosophy. Whitehead (1926, p.  133) praises Origen and his early modern heir Erasmus for being among those few theologians who kept abreast of the best metaphysics of their day. In their classic collection Philosophers Speak of God, Hartshorne and Reese (2000) view one of Origen’s meditations on divine passability as “one of the rare genuinely dipolar utterances in all patristic theology.” 4 Dombrowski (2005, p. 30). 5 See Coakley (2013, pp. 126–132). 6 The comprehensive exposition of Origen’s doctrine of the cosmic Christ in Lyons (1982, pp. 89–145) is a major contribution to patristic scholarship and systematic Christology alike. Its prime shortcoming, which the subsequent account seeks to remedy, is the neglect of the notion of divine and human freedom which, as I  shall argue, informs Origen’s Christological vision of God’s creative and salvific ubiquity. 7 Cf. throughout the interpretation of Origen as a metaphysician of divine and human freedom put forward in the most recent monographs on Christian philosophy by Hengstermann (2016), Fürst (2017). See also the earlier monograph by Schockenhoff (1990) and seminal classic articles by Holz (1970) and Kobusch (1985) who were the first to propose a thorough rereading of Origenian metaphysics in terms of divine and human freedom. 8 See Origen’s praise of prophetic literature in Commentary on the Song of Songs, prologue, where he draws on the said Jewish distinction and against Celsus VI 18, which reveals Origen’s general intention of improving on all preceding metaphysical thought, notably Plato’s. 9 According to the etymology of their angel name reproduced in Commentary on Romans III 8,5, the Old Testament angelic types reveal the “fullness of knowledge” about the Father, which is specific to the Son and the Holy Spirit. 10 Homilies on Isaiah 1, 2 (my italics). 11 Homilies on Isaiah 4, 1. 12 Homilies on Isaiah 4, 1. 13 On First Principles IV 4, 8. 14 On First Principles II 9, 2. 15 Homilies on Ezekiel 6, 6. 16 Commentary on Isaiah, frgm. 5. 17 On First Principles II 6, 7. 18 Homilies on Isaiah 4, 1. 19 Commentary on John I 18, 108.

34  Christian Hengstermann 0 Commentary on John I 20, 123. 2 21 On First Principles IV 4, 1. 22 On First Principles I 2, 2. 23 On First Principles I 2, 6. 24 Commentary on Ephesians, frgm. 1. 25 Commentary on John I 34, 244. 26 Commentary on John II 18, 126. 27 Commentary on John I 9, 55. 28 Commentary on John I 19, 111. 29 Commentary on John II 19, 130. 30 On First Principles II 9, 1. 31 On First Principles II 1, 2. 32 On First Principles II 1, 2. 33 Commentary on John I 19, 115. 34 Commentary on John VI 39, 202. 35 On First Principles II 8, 2. 36 Commentary on John VI 30, 159. 37 Commentary on John I 29, 204. 38 The concept of mystery, as applied to his philosophy of nature in the classic study of the Christian Platonists of Alexandria in Bigg (1886, p. 134), informs the interpretation of Origen of the two foremost 20th-century theologians HansUrs von Balthasar (1936/37) and Karl Rahner (1973, p. 36). 39 Commentary on the Song of Songs III 13. 40 Against Celsus I 23. 41 On First Principles II 1, 3. 42 On First Principles I 7, 3. 43 Commentary on John I 17, 100. 44 Homilies on Ezekiel 4, 1. 45 Commentary on John I 31, 217. 46 Commentary on John I 20, 119. 47 Commentary on John I 25, 163–164. 48 Commentary on John VI 59, 301. 49 Commentary on Ephesians, frgm. 6.

Bibliography Bigg, C. (1886). The Christian Platonists of Alexandria. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Coakley, S. (2013). God, sexuality, and the self: An essay ‘On the Trinity.’ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dombrowski, D. (2005). A platonic philosophy of Religion: A process perspective. New York, NY: State University of New York Press. Fürst, A. (2017). Origenes: Grieche und Christ in römischer Zeit. Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann. Hartshorne, C., & Reese, W. L. (2000). Philosophers speak of god. New York, NY: Humanity Books. Hengstermann, C. (2016). Origenes und der Ursprung der Freiheitsmetaphysik. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag. Holz, H. (1970). Über den Begriff des Willens und der Freiheit bei Origenes. Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie, 12, 63–84. Kobusch, T. (1985). Die philosophische Bedeutung des Kirchenvaters Origenes: Zur christlichen Kritik an der Einseitigkeit der griechischen Wesensphilosophie. Theologische Quartalsschrift, 165, 94–105.

The son as the paradigm and soul of the world 35 Lyons, J. A. (1982). The cosmic Christ in Origen and Teilhard de Chardin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Origenes. (1899–2015). Origenes Werke: Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller. Leipzig and Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Rahner, K. (1973). Schriften zur Theologie 11: Frühe Bußgeschichte in Einzeluntersuchungen. Zürich, Einsiedeln and Cologne: Benziger. Schockenhoff, E. (1990). Zum Fest der Freiheit: Theologie des christlichen Handelns bei Origenes. Tübingen: Matthias Grünewald-Verlag. Von Balthasar, H. U. (1936). Le Mysterion d’Origène. Recherches de Science Religieuses, 26 (1936), 513–526. 27(1937), 38–64. Whitehead, A. N. (1926). Religion in the making. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

3 Christ and the Cosmos in Nicholas of Cusa’s universe Inigo Bocken

In his Mystic Fable, the French theologian, psychoanalyst and historian Michel de Certeau (1925–1986) describes in a very subtle and detailed way the crisis of the corpus mysticum at the end of the Middle Ages and early modernity.1 Certeau elaborates in this book the insights of his theological teacher, Henri de Lubac (1896–1991); however, he turns these in a different direction. He shares with his teacher the awareness of the fundamental meaning of the historical process that was at the basis of this cultural crisis: the radical disintegration of the mystical body, which has been the absolute unity of church and society since the days of Dionysius Areopagita and during the Middle Ages, and which found its cornerstone in the Eucharistic event – the presence of the absent Body of Christ.2 Unlike Lubac’s criticism of modern secular and dualistic culture as the tragic consequence of this disintegration, requesting for reconstruction and rebuilding of the original mystical body, Michel de Certeau seems to have chosen a radically different path.3 For in his Mystic Fable – but also in books like The Weakness of Faith4 or even in his more secular scholarship – The Everyday Life Practices5 – Certeau seems to affirm the historical event of the dismemberment of the Mystical Body as the necessary condition not only of culture in general but also of Christian faith and theology – and, of course, of mysticism which in his view is, being a proper and autonomous discourse, mainly a result of (and a reaction to) this crisis. Mysticism is the expression of the underlying melancholy about the absence of God in his creation, the silence of the living Word within reality after the breakdown of the procedures representing the mystical body.6 Nominalist philosophy and theology are in Certeau’s view of just the expression of a more profound crisis which infected the whole society and culture and which is a crisis of the desire for the Body of Christ. The tragic separation between the sophisticated institutions and the inner experience of the Divine  – which also revealed the abyss of the modern ­subject – the dominance of technocratic respectively instrumental reason, these are some of the cultural consequences of this crisis. Instead of repairing the mystical body – that Henri de Lubac’s theology seems to stand for – Christians of the modern era need to redefine and rearrange the core elements of their tradition against the background of the dismembered

Christ and the Cosmos in Nicholas of Cusa’s universe 37 Mystical Body. Certeau makes clear that even the melancholy and the grieve from the mystics in the 16th and 17th centuries about the silence of God and the emptiness of the universe only have a meaning within the same fundamental experience that also was the foundation of the Medieval Mystical Body. It is the experience of the empty grave, the experience of Mary of Magdala when she arrived on Easter morning at the grave: “Where is the body?” she asked. And this question of Mary is, according to Certeau, the issue of every Christian since then, until today. The rise of mysticism in early modernity is in a way the modern version of the answer given by medieval culture – although it seems to be an answer that is characterized by melancholy, grief, and emptiness, the affirmation of desire opposite the dominant modern tendency of controlling and organizing, in a way the negation of desire, which is exactly a power escaping every mode of control. If Certeau is right – and if it is true that this experience of the absence of God and the pain that this entails is the modern answer to Mary’s question: What does this mean for the role of Christ in the modern era? How can theology reflect on the search for the body in a culture that is precisely characterized by the separation between general organization and, respectively, knowledge and bodily experience? Is the melancholy of the mystic just a kind of nihilistic melancholy, as the prominent theologian Graham Ward seems to suggest7 and as also Henri de Lubac thought when he rebuked his student Certeau? In this contribution, it is not my goal to defend the case of Michel de Certeau. I refer to Certeau because he discovers in his Fable Mystique not just the modern melancholic restlessness, since the second volume of La Fable Mystique starts with an analysis of 15th-century theologian and philosopher Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464). Nicholas’s theological reflections seem – in Certeau’s view – to resist the crisis of the mystical body, or at least to offer a new model of thinking God that fits with the modern era – the era of the separation between scientific thought and spiritual meaning, between material reality and visions of the whole, in short, the age of dualism, as Lubac observed rightly. In Certeau’s Fable Mystique, however, Cusa’s theology is not elaborated as a whole. In this contribution, I want to go beyond Certeau’s reading, yet against the background of his conviction that in Nicholas’s paradigm of thought, a new and modern version of the mystical body becomes manifest, stressing Nicholas’s fascinating Christological reflections, mainly in the third book of his main work De docta ignorantia, On Learned Ignorance from 1441.8 I hope to show that for Cusa, the bodily experience is indeed the foundation of his search for God and that the search for God makes a difference for the concrete experience and thought. Before coming to the Christological core of Cusa’s thinking, however, I want to show how he is aware of the bodily – incarnational – dimensions of human knowledge and thinking, in his famous book The Vision of God in the significant year of 1453. This book had been finished some days before the fall of Constantinople, in a way the political end of the Christian Empire as it was in the

38  Inigo Bocken minds of medieval society. It is essential to add this political dimension since we should not forget that the theologian Nicholas of Cusa was one of the leading politicians of his time. Being the vicar of Rome, he was the secondmost important leader of the church, the mystical body in crisis, which he also in his life attempted to reform. Although these attempts failed, it is not unnecessary to undertake them. It is also this book, containing a practical experiment, that was in the center of Certeau’s attention.9

The vision of god – bodily perspectives Cusa wrote his book The Vision of God (De visione Dei) on behalf of the Benedictine monks of the Abbey of Tegernsee, who asked the cardinal for help in their spiritual search. With the book, they received from Nicholas a painting, an all-seeing portrait, whose gaze follows the viewer of the picture. It is interesting that Cusanus refers here in the text to a self-portrait of the Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden, which was in the town hall of Brussels in the time of Cusanus. This reference not only attests to the awareness of Cusanus of the newest developments in the visual arts of his time but also shows how he is of the opinion that the vision of God – or theoria – can be found within actual cultural and human practices. Cusanus develops a scene that the monks are invited to participate in. It is a kind of experiment, which only makes sense if the reader, as the viewer, really becomes part of it in an active way. The experiment is a practice (praxis) in which – in Certeau’s words – the act enables the words.10 The vision of God cannot be achieved through theoretical efforts but only if the reader/viewer of the painting himself follows the path shown by Cusanus. Whoever enters this scenic space understands how he will be able to see the invisible divine light. The monk has to move from the right to the left and vice versa around the portrait, getting the impression that it has been made only for him and that he is in the center of attention of the gaze. The more the viewer explores this way of seeing, the more he feels the confirmation of his impression that he is indeed at the center. The amazement of the viewer circling the portrait is intensified further when his brother in faith, performing the same experiment, reports the same experience. The fact that the second monk, coming from the opposite direction, has the same experience is incomprehensible for the first one. He cannot understand this unless he believes what his colleague on the circle around the portrait is telling him – that he is in the center of the attention as well. “And so, through the disclosure of the respondent, he will come to know that that face does not desert anyone who is moving – not even those who are moving in opposite directions.”11 He discovers that what he sees is only his way of seeing, from a concrete, determined point of view. He is not at the center at all; his way of seeing is just one of many forms of seeing. The goal of the experiment, however, is that Cusanus does not see any reason to deny the truth of this concrete way

Christ and the Cosmos in Nicholas of Cusa’s universe 39 of seeing – this perspective. Both perspectives are true. It is only within his particular form of seeing that the viewer understands that it is impossible to see correctly and wholly what he sees.12 He does not see what he sees – he sees something that only can be seen if it was possible to take all possible positions around the portray. In other words, we see the invisible with our human eyes – the hidden truth of God is part of the visible world before our eyes.13 Furthermore, the viewer understands why he is not able to see the portrait as it is in itself. For it is impossible to take a point of view other than his own. In De docta ignorantia, Cusanus stresses that even if we would try another thousand years to imitate the position of the other, we never will achieve it.14 We may be tied to our own perspective, but we are not its prisoners. The fact of being bound to our concrete way of seeing and experiencing is, in the view of Cusanus, not the expression of a tragic situation at all. For it is only from within this perspective that we can understand that there are other ways of seeing and understanding. There always will be perspectives that we do not immediately grasp. However, this knowledge opens the possibility of seeing different perspectives. A human being can move in several directions to collect more points of view, although he only can integrate these within his way of seeing. Therefore, Cusanus can quote in the sixth chapter of De visione Dei the critical argument of the Greek philosopher Xenophanes.15 There he says that God is for the lion a lion, for the ox an ox, for the young man he appears as a young man, for the old man like an older man. It is exciting and crucial that Cusanus quotes Xenophanes here – a citation that, as far as I know, is not found in any other medieval text.16 For Cusanus, the argument gets a new meaning: It does not demonstrate the anthropomorphic way of religious thinking as it was the case in Xenophanes. Instead, it stresses a certain character of human practices, in this case, the practice of making images – it stresses the particular role of bodily experience, which contains an infinite number of possibilities. In the view of Cusanus, this specific character of bodily images gives reason to take concrete severe human practices. Even the most abstract metaphysical insights and ideas are bound to the practical human imagination. The images are only what they are inasmuch as they are connected to our concrete making of images. Therefore, the vision of God necessarily takes place within the context of human acting and practice by interrupting the direction of the gaze. What is at stake in this experiment is that Nicholas understands the ultimate goal of the human being to be a living image (imago viva) of God  – he is not a dead image (imago mortua).17 It is the awareness of the fact that what we, being a living image, are expressing is a reality that human beings never can fully manifest. However, as the art of painting of Cusa’s time showed (like, e.g., Jan Van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden), it is possible to express precisely this by showing unexpected perspectives – amazing possibilities that in one way or another can be connected with the realized possibilities that we already are.

40  Inigo Bocken In another book – De coniecturis – On Conjectures (around 1441–1444), Nicholas refers to the ancient metaphor of the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm – which in his view is a relation of an image.18 There is a difference between macrocosm and microcosm, but it’s only visible from within the microcosm: We cannot say what an image expresses without making a new image. The image, therefore, refers to itself and at the same time to a different reality.

A living picture – successful and creative – invites the viewers again and again to picture her-/himself The reverse interpretation of Xenophanes’s critique of anthropomorphic religion implies the living presence of the Divine within our most concrete and bodily experiences  – and this presence is present as creativity, as the ability to transcend the mere facts of our life; it is the possibility of transformation toward a goal that we do not know now. In this reverse interpretation of Xenophanes, one can find Cusa’s description of incarnation – the incarnation is everywhere and always, although we tend to forget this. Every being has this infinite possibility of creativity. The human mind is one of such beings, although it is somewhat different: Since it can be aware of these endless possibilities, it has the awareness that every creature is an image of the divine, that it always has more options than the realized ones – but it is an image as it shows this infinite number of possibilities from this point of view, as it is.

Christ being the living image? How does Nicholas of Cusa now understand Christ? De visione Dei ends with a long prayer to the Lord Jesus – Christ, being an image of God, seems to be somewhat different than other images. In a book written shortly after De visione Dei – namely, The Peace of Faith (De pace fidei, 1453), this problem is still more virulent. The book is written on the occasion of the fall of Constantinople on May 29, 1453. I will not elaborate on the argumentation of this book fully since it presupposes the logic of De visione Dei. The different religions and cultures coming together around the throne of the unknown God in Heavenly Jerusalem all are living with images of God, stressing different aspects of the Divine as – e.g., the Christian perspective. The Christian can learn from the Muslim that God is “indeed one,”19 which is precisely what Christian doctrine is teaching – and on the other hand, the Muslim will, according to Cusa, be able to understand that the Trinitarian God shows him that we never can think of God without His relation to us.20 God always is relational, although he is the indivisible one. And so this dialogue between the religions continues with several virulent topics of the history of theology or from Nicholas’s time.

Christ and the Cosmos in Nicholas of Cusa’s universe 41 Christ, however, is not just an image, although He is an image and even a living image. The image of Christ is different since it shows us how to deal with images. He is also the Word (verbum), but he is the living Word, which means that He shows how to deal with words. If we use words, we have to presuppose that not a particular word fixes the ultimate meaning of the words; we need to understand the deeper layers, the infinite possibility of the dynamics of speaking, and the same is real for Christ being an image. We know that God is not a child (when a child is thinking of God), but we can understand that the infinite possibilities of God are present within the image. Therefore, Christ is the image of imagination; He is the limit of the image, presupposed present in the different visions.21 In this sense, the incarnation is presupposed in the possibility of the dialogue going on in De pace fidei. To understand this is the goal of the conversation. At the end of the book, the participants do not have to change their images but their way of dealing with their images. However, is this interpretation of Christ not far too abstract? Is He not reduced to be a kind of universal principle instead of the historical man with His specific message and character? Does this universal meaning of Christ not mean the end of the Christian faith? Serious critical remarks like these can be found in a book written by Johannes Wenck, De ignota litteratura, a radical critique on Nicholas of Cusa’s first main work, which was countered by Nicholas very soon in his book Apologia doctae ignorantiae.22 Of course, it was the traditional argument of the danger of pantheism, which was at stake in this critique. Wenck also criticized Nicholas’s Christological reflections by arguing that to understand Christ as a universal and cosmic principle, presupposed in all human ways of dealing with the world, does not do justice to the concrete historical meaning of Christ, and it takes its proper character away from Christianity. Rightly, Nicholas of Cusa has shown in his Apologia doctae ignorantiae that Wenck was not able to understand Cusa’s Christology in De doctae ignorantiae and that he remained attached to the Aristotelian thought model, which was in the view of Nicholas not able to understand reality beyond the abstractions of the mind. In other words, Wenck was not able to see truth with the eye of the higher intellectual abilities.23 This inability means in this case that he was not able to understand how abstract ideas and the concrete reality belonged together – namely, as a contraction of possibilities. The discussion between Wenck and Nicholas got back to the first main speculative work of Nicholas On Learned Ignorance (De docta ignorantia 1441), and it is here where we will find the fundamentals of Cusa’s Christology and its relation to cosmology.

The cosmic Christ in de docta ignorantia De docta ignorantia consists of three volumes. The first book is on the maximum absolutum, the “absolute greatest,” which means God’s infinity. The

42  Inigo Bocken second book is the cosmological book – it is on the maximum contractum – the “contracted greatest” – which is the infinity of the universe, whereas the third book is on the maximum absolutum pariter contractum – “the greatest which is absolute and contracted at the same time.” It may be clear that the maximum is partly a reference to Anselm’s unum argumentum in his famous Proslogion.24 Partly, it refers to Cusa’s relational thinking.25 He stresses more than Anselm the fact that the maximum is the reality that escapes our knowing abilities that are fundamentally relational – knowing something is measuring something we do not know concerning what we already know. There is at least one reality that escapes this comparative relational process, it is the “superlative” maximum, which is the infinity of God.26 We are never able to think this maximum as it should be thought – for if we think it, there is something greater; therefore, it is not the maximum anymore that we think. However, we can know this, as “learned ignorance” (docta ignoratia) shows us. At the end of the first book of De docta ignorantia, Nicholas discovers that this is not only true for the name “maximum” but that it’s true for all possible names.27 Every name can name God, although no name names Him because of the same reason that no name fits with His reality (Nicholas quotes Hermes Trismegistus here). The absolute maximum is the whole of all possible relations, and it may be clear that our mind involved in the whole network of connections will never be able to comprehend this whole, since it is a necessary part of this whole. In Chapter 3 of the first book, Nicholas compares the relationship between the mind and the infinity of God with a polygon within a circle, which is the infinite polygon, but which never can be reached perfectly through the polygon, however much the number of angles are increased.28 In this process, Nicholas, who was unable to make integral calculations, shows how the mathematician can see “suddenly” that the polygon is moving toward the circle. There is no fixed point from which this “sudden seeing” can be founded. In the second, cosmological book Nicholas describes the tension between the absolute maximum and contracted maximum. The contracted maximum is the whole of all possible relations seen from one point of view, not as it is in itself. In an infinite universe, every point is the center – or at least the circumference has the same distance to every position, which is the same.29 Only God can understand what it means that every point is the center. Human beings can know what it is like from a specific, determined point of view: their point of view. We can understand that God is the real center, but we can only understand this from our point of view. The center we think of as the center is not yet the actual center. There remains an unbridgeable difference between the center that we see from our point of view and the real center. Here one can find the cosmological respectively speculative foundation of the “learned ignorance”: the awareness of the fact that we do not know the infinite truth as it is in itself and that this is not just true for God, but that this applies to every form of knowledge. There is always a perspective that

Christ and the Cosmos in Nicholas of Cusa’s universe 43 escapes our viewpoint. This escape is not the cause for a tragical awareness. On the contrary, it is this difference between what we know and what we do not know of which we have a consciousness, which is the condition for all forms of creativity, to see new links and possible relations, a possibility that is endless. These dynamics are true for knowledge, but, as Cusanus is stressing mainly in the second book of De docta ignorantia, also for language and music – at the end of all possible universes of meaning.30 The discovery that this tension is not only present in knowledge but also other human practices is the reason why he intends already in the second book of De docta ignorantia to develop his ars coniecturalis – his theory of conjectures. “Conjecture” does not refer merely to how we understand this word in the modern language, somewhat reduced to the field of knowledge – conjecture relates to the spaces of meaning that exist between a particular point of view and the infinity of its possible relations. It is precisely here that Nicholas locates his Christology. Christ appears there where the tension between the absolute maximum and the contracted maximum, the universe, lies. Christ, according to Nicholas in the third book of De docta ignorantia, being the firstborn of the universe, is the human being par excellence. He realizes the possibilities of what is humanly possible, which means that he also knows the limits of every finite being, which is a maximum contractum.31 His appearance in creation shows the infinite number of possibilities – which in itself is God – the fact that human beings are creative is only possible inasmuch as this one connection ever has been realized.32 The fact that we meet our limits (e.g., that we see the whole of things only from our viewpoint) even if we would try for a thousand years is only possible since God once contracted himself and showed himself as a finite, mortal being.33 We know that we are not wholly what we can be – and never will be – since God, the absolute infinity contracted himself toward a concrete point of view. In the view of Nicholas, Christ is the foundation of the relation between the maximum contractum – the finite infinite – and the maximum absolutum – the infinite infinite, which is God, since He is the realization of their belonging together. The fact that there is a relation between the two comes into appearance inasmuch as human beings can discover that the center of their world is not yet the real center since there is an infinite number of centers. This real center – God – is not an abstract point of view from which one can see that there is an endless number of centers – and therefore no one, as the nihilistic modern logic asserts. Nicholas of Cusa is very well aware that for human beings, it is impossible to know what it means that every point is the center. The abstract, nihilistic idea – a dominant modern idea – is in the view of Cusanus nothing else than one possible view from a specific point of view. Although we are not able to be on the divine point of view, we are fundamentally oriented toward it, since this is the limit and goal of our perspective. Christ, being a mortal man and a historical figure, is the guarantee that the particular point of view relates to the absolute divine point

44  Inigo Bocken of view.34 Human beings can know that the number of centers is infinite, but they know it from their point of view.35 The Japanese Cusanus scholar Kazuhiko Yamaki noticed that in these considerations, an elliptic logic is presupposed. For in the experience of human beings, from a particular and bodily embedded point of view, we can discover that our center is not the real center.36 This discovery is the starting point of a rediscovery of our being, of who we are. The condition for the creative invention cannot be an abstract principle. It is a concretely realized unity of these both centers, which is Christ, who is mortal, but whose resurrection refers to the fact that this process starts again and again from every point in the universe. Regarding the living Body of Christ, his flesh is unavoidable in Nicholas of Cusa’s view – even the most abstract principles and ideas connect with this very particular relation toward the Divine, the source of our creativity. Nicholas introduces here the expression “veritas personalis” – Christ is the veritas personalis par excellence, his bodily revelation enables the fact that we as concrete desiring beings experience the difference between our position and the Divine center of all being.37 This tension between the finite infinite and the infinite infinite is in Cusanus’s view the space for desire – it is the foundation of the dynamics that exceeds all limits of the categories and classes that form the organization of our life.38 Christ is the paradigm of what every human being, as the living image of God, is and can become. In this sense, Christ is not just a contingent unique reality from outside, he is historically real. This historical character fits with Cusa’s idea that the infinite possibility of every human being is not just an abstract possibility – it is a concrete and realized, bodily embedded reality, in modern concepts: a materially realized a priori – and at the same time the goal of every desire.

Conclusion Although most of Cusa’s interpreters avoid discussing his Christology as if it were a private and nonrational conviction of the great philosopher, I hoped to have shown that Christ – as a bodily incarnated person – is the cornerstone of his whole philosophical theology, his anthropology, and his cosmology. Christ is the presupposed connection between Cusa’s anthropology and cosmology – he is the guarantee for the fact that his anthropology is always cosmologically oriented, toward the whole, without losing its proper conjectural identity since Christ is a living image, even the living image “par excellence,” showing how to deal in concrete earthly life with concrete and particular images. In this sense, Michel de Certeau’s intuition was right that Nicholas of Cusa’s way of thinking is resistant to the crisis of the mystical body at the end of the Middle Ages and of early modernity. It is, however, not the case that Nicholas wanted to save the old model. I hope to have shown that he intended to redefine the meaning of the mystical body, offering a framework

Christ and the Cosmos in Nicholas of Cusa’s universe 45 to see in the abysses of modern nihilism something of the absent presence of the divine – the empty grave and the noli me tangere as the flooding source of the divine in our time.39 Again and again, bodily experiences show something of the divine – “suddenly” as Certeau stresses – as a kind of interruption within the continuous experience – as – e.g., the mathematician who understands suddenly that the polygon orients toward the circle. That is why we, according to Cusanus, really see the invisible through our natural eyes. The desire is the power of what is possible – and according to Cusanus, this is always more reasonable than we can think.

Notes 1 Certeau (1982, p. 12), passim. 2 Lubac (2006, pp. 5–10), passim. 3 Hoff (2013, pp. 87–90). 4 Certeau (1987). 5 Certeau (1980). 6 Bocken (2012, pp. 173–180). 7 Ward (2001, p. 515). 8 Nicholas of Cusa (1932b). 9 Certeau (2013, pp. 25–76). 10 Certeau (2013, p. 65). 11 Nicholas of Cusa (2000), praefatio. 12 Certeau (2013, p. 44). 13 Bocken (2018, p. 93). 14 Nicholas of Cusa (1932b, n.225). 15 Nicholas of Cusa (2000, n.19). 16 Watts (1982, p. 115). 17 Cusa writes about the opposition between imago viva and imago mortua in his book Idiota de mente, c.XVII, n.149. 18 Nicholas of Cusa (1972, c.14, n.143). 19 See Nicholas of Cusa (1970, n.16–17). 20 See Alfsvag (2014, p. 80ff). 21 See Alfsvag (2014, p. 90). 22 Both writings are translated and edited by Jasper Hopkins in Hopkins (1981). 23 See Nicholas of Cusa (1932a, n.24–26). 24 See Duclow (1982, pp. 25–27). 25 See Bocken (2013, p. 180ff). 26 See Nicholas of Cusa (1932b, n.9). 27 See Nicholas of Cusa (1932b, n.75). 28 See Nicholas of Cusa (1932b, n.10). 29 See Nicholas of Cusa (1932b, n.156). 30 See Nicholas of Cusa (1932b, n.175). 31 See Nicholas of Cusa (1932b, n.183–184). 32 See Nicholas of Cusa (1932b, n.185). 33 See Nicholas of Cusa (1932b, n.194). 34 See Nicholas of Cusa (1932b, n.203). 35 See Germ (2008, p. 188). 36 See Yamaki (2002, pp. 175–177). 37 See Nicholas of Cusa (1932b, n.202).

46  Inigo Bocken 8 See Nicholas of Cusa (1932b, n.205). 3 39 Since both of these themes are in the view of Certeau central for Christian theology. See Certeau (1987, p. 185).

Bibliography Alfsvag, K. (2014). Reading de pace fidei Christologically: Nicholas of Cusa’s verbum dialectic of religious concordance. In I. C. Levy & D. Duclow (Eds.), Nicholas of Cusa and Islam (pp. 49–67). Leiden: Brill. Bocken, I. (2012). Everyday life as divine practice: Modernity and transcendence in Michel de Certeau. In W. Stoker & W. Merwe (Eds.), Looking beyond? Shifting views of transcendence in philosophy, theology, art and politics (pp. 173–192). Leiden: Brill. Bocken, I. (2013). Die Kunst des Sammelns: Philosophie der konjekturalen Interaktion nach Nicolaus Cusanus. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag. Bocken, I. (2018). Jan van Eyck and the active mysticism of the Devotio Moderna. In L. Nelstrop (Ed.), Art and mysticism: Interfaces in the medieval and modern periods (pp. 88–103). Abingdon: Routledge. Certeau, M. de (1980). L’invention du quotidien I: Arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard. Certeau, M. de (1982). La fable mystique I: XVIe-XVIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard. Certeau, M. de (1987). La faiblesse de croire. Paris: Seuil. Certeau, M. de (1994/1968). La prise de la parole et autres écrits politiques. Paris: Seuil. Certeau, M. de (2013). La fable mystique II: XVIe-XVIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard. de Lubac, H. (2006). Corpus mysticum: The eucharist and the church in the middle ages. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. Duclow, D. (1982). Anselm’s Proslogion and Nicholas of Cusa’s wall of paradise (22–30). Downside Review, 100(338). Germ, M. (2008). Christology of Nicholas of Cusa and Christological iconography in self-portraits of Albrecht Dürer. IKON: Journal of Iconographic Studies, 1, 179–198. Hoff, J. (2013). Mysticism, ecclesiology and the body of Christ – Certeau’s (Mis-) reading of corpus mysticum and the legacy of Henri de Lubac. In I. Bocken (Ed.), Spiritual spaces. history and mysticism in Michel de Certeau (pp. 87–110). Louvain and Paris: Peeters Publisher. Hopkins, J. (1981). Nicholas of Cusa’s debate with John Wenck: A translation and an appraisal of De ignota litteratura and apologia doctae ignorantiae. Baltimore, MD: Banning Press. Nicholas of Cusa. (1932a). Apologia doctae ignorantiae (Opera omnia II). Hamburg: Meiner Verlag. Nicholas of Cusa. (1932b). De docta ignorantia (Opera omnia I). Hamburg: Meiner Verlag. Nicholas of Cusa. (1970). De pace fidei: Cum epistula ad Ioannem de Segobia (Opera omnia VII). Hamburg: Meiner Verlag. Nicholas of Cusa. (1972). De coniecturis (Opera omnia III). Hamburg: Meiner Verlag. Nicholas of Cusa. (1983). Idiota de sapientia, de mente (Opera omnia V). Hamburg: Meiner Verlag.

Christ and the Cosmos in Nicholas of Cusa’s universe 47 Nicholas of Cusa. (2000). De visione dei (Opera omnia VI). Hamburg: Meiner Verlag. Ward, G. (2001). Michel de Certeau’s spiritual spaces. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 100(2), 501–517. Watts, P. M. (1982). Nicolaus Cusanus: A fifteenth-century vision of man. Leiden: Brill. Yamaki, K. (2002). Elliptisches Denken bei Nikolaus von Kues – Den Anderen als Gefährten suchend. In K. Yamaki (Ed.), Nicholas of Cusa: A medieval thinker for the modern age (pp. 271–277). New York, NY: Routledge.

4 Teilhard de Chardin, apostle of the cosmic Christ Ursula King

Since the 20th century, the Cosmic Body of Christ metaphor has attracted much new interest, and the works of the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) have contributed considerably to this renewal. Besides being a Jesuit, Teilhard was also a geologist, paleontologist, poet, and mystic who brought together faith and science through a synthesis of Christian doctrine and evolutionary theory. All his life, he felt he had seen something new: God as Christ in all things. Seeing the unity of all things, of all life, of the entire cosmos as a “divine milieu,” he expressed the desire to be an “apostle of Christ in the universe.” He began writing during the First World War when he worked in the French Army as a stretcher-bearer at the Western Front. He described then his deeply changed perception of God and the universe in light of his recently acquired understanding of evolution, which empowered him to envision the interdependent unity and organicity of all living things as animated by the spirit of God and the presence of Christ. His first essay of 1916, written before the major battle of Verdun, was called “Cosmic Life.” It proclaimed that [t]he true summons of the cosmos is a call consciously to share in the great work that goes on within it; it is not by drifting down the current of things that we shall be united with their one, single soul, but by fighting our way, with them, towards some goal still to come. This essay culminates in a great prayer to the cosmic Christ where he writes, “To live the cosmic life is to live dominated by the consciousness that one is an atom in the body of the mystical and cosmic Christ.”1 “Cosmic Life” describes Teilhard’s awakening to the cosmos, his vision of its unity, first experienced as a “temptation of matter,” but now understood as a “communion with Earth.”2 But such communion, so important and necessary, was a stage that had to grow into a fuller “communion with God through Earth.” This is linked to two important insights: the cosmic Christ and the holiness of evolution – insights that

Teilhard de Chardin, apostle 49 had come to Teilhard when he first discovered the immense impact of evolution in 1911 while still studying theology in Hastings on the South Coast of England. He remembered his earlier initiation into the cosmos as an initial temptation, a crisis that his faith and his transformative encounter with evolution helped him to overcome. Many passages of his Writings in Time of War, his diaries, later essays, and vast correspondence speak of this cosmic, universal Christ who is linked to the historical, biblical, and Eucharistic Christ. Of special significance are his late essays “The Heart of Matter” (1950) and “The Christic” (1955). At Teilhard’s death in 1955, a picture of the radiant heart of Christ was found on his desk, inscribed in his handwriting with “My Litany,” a long text on both sides of the picture that begins with “the God of evolution, the Christic, the Trans-Christ, Jesus, Heart of the world, Essence/Motor of evolution.”3 Teilhard discovered in the evolutionary process of life the rhythm and breath of spirit, the lineaments of the face and hands of God, the taking shape of what he called “the cosmic Christ,” later also referred to as “the universal Christ” and “ChristOmega.” His first essay “Cosmic Life” finishes with the strong statement: To live the cosmic life is to live dominated by the consciousness that one is an atom in the body of the mystical and cosmic Christ. The person who so lives dismisses as irrelevant a host of preoccupations that absorb the interest of other people: his life is projected further, and his heart more widely receptive. There you have my intellectual testament.4 Many of Teilhard’s essays contain specific suggestions for further constructive theological work, especially in Christology. Seeing Christ in all things and all things in Christ touches the heart of Teilhard’s vision. It is a perspective that unlocks all others and represents one of the most essential aspects of his thinking. Teilhard makes an important original contribution to modern Christological thought. As the Australian James A. Lyons observed in the 1980s, “Although Teilhard created no finished theological system, his writings on Christology over almost forty years made, through their cumulative effect, the most impressive systematic contribution in modern times to the idea of a cosmic Christ.”5

Christ, the cosmic person and the world as god’s body To make people “see and make them feel”6 the presence of God everywhere was Teilhard’s primary aim, and this presence is most fully embodied in the notion of the cosmic Christ. This is so important that he could argue that the cosmic is a third nature of Christ, besides his human and divine nature. He understood this incarnation as a universal, ongoing process; God’s word to humanity is not primarily the word spoken in a book, in sacred literature,

50  Ursula King but it is a word that is incarnate, not only as a human being but also present as an element in all beings, in all created reality, all of which needs completion, fulfillment and redemption. God is incarnate in matter, in flesh, in all of creation, in the whole cosmos. The incarnation of Christ is an event and mystery of cosmic extension. As he wrote in his rhapsodic prose poem The Mass on the World, “Through your own incarnation, my God, all matter is henceforth incarnate.”7 We are all of us together “carried in the one worldwomb; yet each of us is our own little microcosm in which the Incarnation is wrought independently with degrees of intensity, and shades that are incommunicable.” Teilhard firmly believed that everything around him “is the body and blood of the Word.”8 Thus Teilhard’s spirituality is characterized by going to God via the universe in its process of becoming and development. The evolutionary process is both cosmic and christic in the sense that creation since its beginning is developing toward its complete fullness in what Teilhard calls “ChristOmega.” This concept has a twofold foundation: It is the outcome of combining his vision of faith, grounded in Bible and tradition, with the evolutionary perspectives of modern science. Teilhard’s biblical references are mostly to St. Paul’s cosmic hymns and to St. John’s gospel. His theological training had included studying the New Testament in Greek, which led him to make detailed summaries of all the passages speaking of Christ and creation – passages in which he found his own experience of the ultimate oneness of all of creation confirmed. The cosmic hymns of St  Paul, especially in Colossians, resonated strongly in him. Here he felt that the incarnation event was linked to the density of life stretching out from its fossil forms in the distant past through present life and nature toward some future point of maturation. All of creation was like a continuous stream of living matter, energy, and spirit – a cosmic web animated by divine life itself, an occasion for an incarnate presence that for him took on everywhere the figure and face of Jesus Christ, “the soul of the world.” Teilhard loved the Greek fathers and knew their works well. He was familiar with their teachings on incarnation and divinization, especially on the possible deification or theosis of the human being. For Teilhard, creation, incarnation, and redemption are not single events, completed once and for all, but they are ongoing processes that culminate in “pleromization,” in a fulfillment and plenitude where all is made whole and one. The Mass on the World contains some of Teilhard’s strongest and most personal statements about Jesus Christ, Lord of the universe, center of universal consecration and communion. Written in 1923, somewhere near the Yellow River in China, when there was no opportunity to say mass, Teilhard expressed with great poetic power the symbolic offering up of the whole world to God. This text provides undeniable evidence that for him, Christ is inclusive not only of all of humanity but also of all creation, all life, and all beings and elements in the cosmos. Christ is not exhausted

Teilhard de Chardin, apostle 51 by the human Jesus but means ever so much more. He is the fullness that embraces and contains the immense richness of creation in his mystical and Cosmic Body. The depth and dedication of this prose poem, the grandeur of its vision – sometimes described as a “cosmic liturgy” – invite a separate study that I  cannot pursue here but it has been undertaken by Father Thomas King, SJ.9 As Teilhard admits in The Mass on the World, As long as I  could see  – or dared see  – in you, Lord Jesus, only the man who lived two thousand years ago, the sublime moral teacher, the Friend, the Brother, my love remained timid and constrained. Friends, brothers, wise men: have we not many of these around us, great souls, chosen souls, and much closer to us? It is above all the power of the resurrection that makes Christ “shine forth from within all the forces of the earth,” makes him into the “Sovereign” of the cosmos to whom Teilhard can surrender himself. This central position of Christ in the cosmos is symbolically expressed in the image of the heart, “a furnace of fire,” around which the contours of the body melt away and become enlarged beyond all measure until the only features he can distinguish “are those of the face of a world which has burst into flame.”10 Teilhard then moves into a prayer of great power and beauty that includes another anthropomorphic description of the figure of Christ: Glorious Lord Christ: the divine influence secretly diffused and active in the depths of matter, and the dazzling centre where all the innumerable fibres of the manifold meet; power as implacable as the world and as warm as life; you whose forehead is of the whiteness of snow, whose eyes are of fire, and whose feet are brighter than molten gold; you whose hands imprison the stars; you who are the first and the last, the living and the dead and the risen again; you who gather into your exuberant unity every beauty, every affinity, every energy, every mode of existence; it is you to whom my being cried out with a desire as vast as the universe, “In truth you are my Lord and my God.”11 This is a glorious proclamation of faith and surrender, but it is also a vision of a cosmic person, of what the Indian Vedas call purusha. Anne Hunt Overzee, in her study The Body Divine,12 has shown how Teilhard’s vision of the divine form as Lord of the cosmos has an extraordinary parallel in the vivid description that the 11th-century Hindu theologian Ramanuja has given of the cosmic vision of Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita. Both theologians – the Hindu Ramanuja in the 11th century and the Christian Teilhard de Chardin in the 20th century – see the Lord’s unique and proper form as pervading, encompassing, and illuminating the world, which is his body. The world as

52  Ursula King God’s body is a rich metaphor for contemporary ecological and sacramental theology, and much insight and material, unexplored so far, can be drawn from both theologians. It was Teilhard’s particular concern to express again and again God’s universal influence and omnipresence, upholding everything in existence in and through Christ: “Nothing, Lord Jesus, can subsist outside your flesh [.  .  .]. All of us, inescapably, exist in you the universal milieu in which and through which all things live and have their being.”13 If others are called to proclaim the splendors of God as pure Spirit, Teilhard thought his own particular vocation was to preach “the innumerable prolongations of your incarnate Being in the world of matter [. . .] the mystery of your flesh, you the Soul shining forth through all that surrounds us.”14 The “diaphany” of God in and through all things is connected for Teilhard with the action and proclamation of “the ever greater Christ” involved in the evolutionary development toward ever greater plenitude, a process he also called “Christogenesis.” This is certainly a high Christology, which enhances and expands traditional Christological thinking by adding new categories, especially when Teilhard speaks of the universal, cosmic Christ and of Christ-Omega – words that capture the universal extension and complexity of “the body of Christ” – a much used expression that has several meanings in Teilhard’s writings. It can refer to the person of Jesus of Nazareth, but it is also a body that forms a personal center for humanity and the material world. It is a physical, organic center, a christic element in all things, so that all things can be an opening, an occasion for a disclosure of Christ to us.

Evolutionary understanding of the cosmic Christ James Lyons’s book The Cosmic Christ in Origen and Teilhard de Chardin provides particularly helpful elements for further Christological reflection by tracing cosmic Christ terminology from patristic times to the modern era. Both Origen’s and Teilhard’s visions of the cosmic Christ are based on the New Testament, but Origen gave the theme a Platonizing treatment, whereas Teilhard dealt with it in an evolutionary manner: allowing for new Christological developments that theologians have little acknowledged so far. Such a development is urgently needed in light of modern science, especially contemporary knowledge of cosmology and evolutionary biology. In Lyons’s view, the rise of cosmic Christ language has introduced a newly perceived issue into Christological discussion, which he considered legitimate, necessary, and ongoing: It is legitimate not only because it is founded on scriptural data and continues matters that were raised in theological traditions of the past; it is also at the point where contemporary views about the universe make an

Teilhard de Chardin, apostle 53 impact on the Christian faith. It is a necessary issue, since it upholds the Christian belief, that however vast and strange the universe may turn out to be, it is Christ who is at the centre of all. It is an ongoing issue because the teaching Church has scarcely begun to concern itself with the cosmic Christ.15 Teilhard had already expressed this vision of Christ as the center of all development and growth in 1916 in his first essay “Cosmic Life”: Since Jesus was born, and grew to his full stature, and died, everything has continued to move forward because Christ is not yet fully formed: he has not yet gathered about him the last folds of his robe of flesh and of love which is made up of his faithful followers. The mystical Christ has not yet attained to his full growth; and therefore the same is true of the cosmic Christ. Both of these are simultaneously in the state of being and of becoming; and it is from the prolongation of this process of becoming that all created activity ultimately springs. Christ is the end-point of the evolution, even the natural evolution, of all beings, and therefore evolution is holy.16 This passage shows clearly how the human Jesus grows into the cosmic and mystical Christ and how all evolutionary becoming is incorporated into Him. As mentioned earlier, Teilhard was not primarily interested in the human Jesus, the historical person born in Palestine about 2,000 years ago. As he wrote on October 30, 1926, from China to one of his friends, the American scientist and writer Ida Treat, I do not like that evangelism which limits itself to a glorification of the purely human or moral qualities of Jesus. If Jesus were no more than “a father, a mother, a brother, a sister” to us, I would have no need of Him; and, in a sense, the past does not interest me. What I “ask” of Christ is that He be a Force that is immense, present, universal, as real (more real) than Matter, which I can adore; in short, I ask Him to be for me the Universe: complete, concentrated, and capable of being adored. This is why, while acknowledging the irreplaceable value of the first three Gospels in presenting the real, historical beginnings of Christ [. . .]. I prefer Saint John and Saint Paul, who really present in the resurrected Christ a being as vast as the World of all time. Have you read, for example, the beginning of the Epistle to the Colossians (Chapter I, verses 12–23), and tried to give it the full, organic meaning it requires? Here Christ appears as a true soul of the World. It is only thus that I love Him.17 Teilhard had already entitled one of his 1918 essays “The Soul of the World,”18 where this soul is presented as a distinct reality, an immanent center, and a focus of energy for the world. Speaking of such a soul might be

54  Ursula King vivid and concrete, even for those who do not believe in Christ, although for Teilhard such a soul is linked to “a cosmic element divinized by Christ.”19 From 1920 onward, he referred to the “universal Christ,”20 which he understands as “the organic centre of the entire universe,” a center “not only of moral and religious effort,” but “of all physical and spiritual growth.”21 He criticizes theologians for not recognizing “the primacy of the organic over the juridical”22 and for interpreting the “mystical body” in an analogous rather than realist sense. He refers to a long series of Johannine and Pauline texts in which “the physical supremacy of Christ over the universe is so magnificently expressed” that only “timid minds [. . .] escape the awesome realism of these repeated statements.”23

The ever greater Christ Paul’s “theandric Christ” becomes for Teilhard the cosmic Christ, the supreme center of spiritual consistence of the entire universe, present as a universal, incarnate element throughout the world: The presence of the Incarnate Word penetrates everything, as a universal element. It shines at the common heart of things, as a centre that is infinitely intimate to them and at the same time [. . .] infinitely distant.24 In later years, he calls this element the “Super-Christ,” by which he means not another Christ25 but a term used “to express that excess of greatness assumed in our consciousness by the Person of Christ in step with the awakening of our minds to the super-dimensions of the world and of mankind.”26 This is “Christ the Evolver,” not Christ the King and Master whose universal power over creation is primarily seen in an extrinsic and juridical manner, but a Christ who physically and literally [. . .] fills all things: at no instant in the world, is there any element of the world that has moved, that moves, that ever shall move, outside the directing flood he pours into them. It is Christ who consummates the world and achieves its final plenitude. All structural lines of the world converge upon him, and “it is he who gives its consistence to the entire edifice of matter and Spirit.”27 As Teilhard writes in his important essay “How I  Believe” (1934),28 the universal Christ is for him “a synthesis of Christ and the universe,”29 not a new godhead, but an inevitable development of the mystery of the incarnation reinterpreted in the light of modern science. The full recognition and acceptance of the universal Christ requires a new theological orientation and reinterpretation of Christianity or what Teilhard sometimes calls a “neoChristianity.” But a Christ renewed by contact with the modern world is still the same Christ as the Christ of the gospel; it is in fact an even greater Christ.

Teilhard de Chardin, apostle 55 Teilhard could say about his position, By disclosing a world-peak, evolution makes Christ possible, just as Christ, by giving meaning and direction to the world, makes evolution possible [. . .]. I have been reproached as being an innovator. In truth, the more I  have thought about the magnificent cosmic attributes lavished by St. Paul on the risen Christ, and the more I have considered the masterful significance of the Christian virtues, the more clearly have I realized that Christianity takes on its full value only when extended [. . .] to its cosmic dimensions.30 These quotations express clearly that Teilhard understood the immense evolutionary process as having an overall direction and goal to be reached eventually through the convergence of all of humanity and the whole cosmos on an ultimate summit reached by the spiritual maturation of the earth. He called this final point “Omega” and identified it with the cosmic Christ: This evolutionary summit is ultimately “Christ-Omega.” As he wrote in his essay “Human Energy,” the existence of the universe requires for its maintenance and functioning a true pole of psychic convergence: a centre different from all the other centres which it ‘super-centres’ by assimilation [. . .]. The world would not function if there did not exist, somewhere ahead in time and space, “a cosmic point Omega” of total synthesis.31 From the perspective of his Christian faith, he saw this as happening through Christ who is Alpha and Omega, plenitude and plenifier, principle and ultimate end of the unification of the universe – a process for which he could find no other more appropriate name than that of “omegalization.”32 Teilhard saw himself as an “apostle of the cosmic Christ” and was convinced that if a greater place were accorded to the universal, cosmic Christ, this would lead to a new era for Christianity, an era of “a vast movement of interior liberation and expansion.”33 He was a stringent critic of his own church, which he sometimes perceived as no longer “Catholic,” but as “defending a system, a sect.”34 One of his harshest judgments of the church dates from 1929, perhaps the harshest ever according to Henri de Lubac, who wrote a prefatory essay to Teilhard’s Letters to Léontine Zanta where he quotes from one of Teilhard’s letters, written in 1929: The only thing that I can be: a voice that repeats, opportune et importune, that the Church will waste away so long as she does not escape from the factitious world of verbal theology, of quantitative sacramentalism, and over-refined devotions in which she is enveloped, so as to reincarnate herself in the real aspirations of mankind.  .  .  . Of course I  can see well enough what is paradoxical in this attitude: if I  need

56  Ursula King Christ and the Church I should accept Christ as he is presented by the Church, with its burden of rites, administration and theology [. . .]. But now I can’t get away from the evidence that the moment has come when the Christian impulse should “save Christ” from the hands of the clerics so that world may be saved.35 Here he is attacking those who retreat into the past, theological writers “whose ‘dead prose’ is never brought to life by any ‘religious sap’ and in whom only ‘truths already digested a hundred times and with no living essence’ are to be found.”36 Yet for Teilhard, Christian faith and spirituality can be revitalized and draw new energies from a much more enlarged understanding of Christ. As he wrote in Science and Christ, By making plain the splendors of the universal Christ, Christianity, without ceasing to be for the earth the water that purifies and the oil that soothes, acquires a new value. By the very fact that it provides the earth’s aspirations with a goal that is at once immense, concrete and assured, it rescues the earth from disorder, the uncertainties, and the nausea that are the most terrible of tomorrow’s dangers. It provides the fire that inspires man’s effort. In other words, it is seen to be the form of faith that is most fitted to modern needs: a religion for progress – the very religion of progress of the earth – I would go so far as to say the very religion of evolution.37 Teilhard made repeated suggestions for a renewal of Christian theology,38 Christian life and holiness, and Christian spirituality and mysticism.39 It was particularly toward the end of his life that he was most concerned with these themes of renewal. Returning from China to Europe after the end of the Second World War, he noticed especially the growing credibility gap between traditional Christianity and the modern world. He had written years before that “we must, with all that is human in us, re-think our religion [.  .  .]. Christianity must at last accept unreservedly the new dimensions (spatial, temporal and psychological) of the world around us.”40 As a Christian, he did not believe that Christianity would disappear, but he recognized that it was undergoing a period of profound transition and that “Christianity (exactly like the humanity it embraces) is reaching the end of one of the natural cycles of its existence.”41

Concluding discussion of Teilhard’s ideas on the cosmic Christ Teilhard considered it theologically important to complete the unfinished task of the Christological developments of the first five Christian centuries by reflecting on the cosmic nature of Christ. He called for a new “Nicea,” not to deal once more with Christ and the Trinity, but with the problem

Teilhard de Chardin, apostle 57 of a newly understood relationship between Christ and the universe. For him, three different Christs have to be recognized and exalted: the historical, cosmic, and transcendent Christ. Within the given limits of this chapter, it is impossible to provide an extensive critical discussion of the numerous authors who have written on Teilhard’s understanding of Christ; my comments remain restricted to just a few examples. Ewert Cousins, in Christ of the 21st Century,42 considers Teilhard’s vision of the cosmic Christ an important part of “the fullness of the mystery of Christ,” which we have to rediscover for a renewal of Christian spirituality. It is a tremendous challenge to comprehend this christic mystery within a wider cosmic and evolutionary framework, where evolution is understood to possess a broad directionality toward increasing complexity and convergence of all things material and spiritual. Several contemporary theologians wrestle with new interpretations of the interdependent relationship between the data of evolutionary science and the central tenets of the Christian faith. My discussion can only give a few examples. Of particular importance in this context are the writings of Ilia Delio, especially her books Christ in Evolution43 and The Emergent Christ.44 The first provides mainly an introduction and overview of the themes of evolution, Christ, and consciousness, surveying the rich resources of the New Testament, the Patristic Fathers, and the modern period. This is followed by Franciscan cosmic Christology and the understanding of Christ found in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Raimon Panikkar, Thomas Merton, and Bede Griffiths, who, each in their different way, have presented challenging ideas on Christ as the center of an evolving universe. After expounding the cosmic and evolutionary Christology of several 20th-century Catholic theologians in her earlier book Christ in Evolution, Delio has presented her own vision of what a new understanding of Christ and evolution means for the church and the world in The Emergent Christ. Written with boldness and exuberance, this is an important and very inspiring book. It explores in a fresh and radical way how Christ is the future of our becoming and what the role of Christian life is in relation to the emergent Christ. Delio is passionately involved with the story of evolution, whose full understanding requires a revolution in our thinking about God, Christ, the Trinity, and all other theological topics. One of her aims is to illuminate the God of scandalous love, who is in evolution. The emergent Christ in evolution is not only understood as the process of divine-created unfolding life but also as the evolution of God. Like Teilhard de Chardin, Delio speaks of “Christ the Evolver” and of the evolution of the universe as the great work still in process of further completion. A succinct presentation of the development of Teilhard’s cosmic Christology is also found in the brief monograph on “Christogenesis” by the Spanish Jesuit and geophysicist Agustin Udias.45 He shows how Teilhard’s original Christology developed through the different periods and writings of his life by progressing from the early universal Christ to Christ-Omega.

58  Ursula King Christ is seen as the convergent focus of cosmic evolution, and Teilhard understood it at his mission to universalize Christ and christify the universe. As Teilhard wrote, Christianity is much more than a fixed system, presented to us once and for all, of truths which have to be accepted and preserved literally. For all its resting on a core of “revelation,” it represents in fact a spiritual attitude which is continually developing; it is the development of a Christic consciousness in step with, and to meet the needs of, the growing consciousness of humanity.46 Such growing consciousness was for Teilhard closely connected with a fuller, richer development of an all-embracing spirituality. Can we see the signs of such a development in our present world? Our sensate and materialistic culture leaves many people deeply dissatisfied. They yearn for a richer, fuller vision and a more inclusive way of being human. Teilhard was of the view that many of the neo-humanisms of our times dehumanize us, whereas the still living forms of theisms, including Christianity, tend not to develop our humanity to the full because they are still systematically closed to the wide horizons and great winds of Cosmogenesis, and can no longer truly be said to feel with the Earth – an Earth whose internal frictions they can still lubricate like a soothing oil, but whose driving energies they cannot animate as they should.47 Teilhard adhered to his faith with immense saintliness and suffering. It was not an easily won faith, but one continuously developed with great effort, cost, and struggle. His spirituality was not only one of ardent fire, ever closer union, and divine adoration, but quite literally also a spirituality of resistance and strength, grown from painful seeds of affliction, as Kathleen Duffy has shown with such subtlety in her study on Teilhard’s Struggle: Embracing the Work of Evolution.48 His was a truly christic consciousness, a mystical spirituality of a fresh and original kind. I conclude my reflections on Teilhard de Chardin’s cosmic Christ with a quotation from his “Prayer to the Ever-Greater Christ,” found at the end of his extraordinary spiritual autobiography “The Heart of Matter,” written in October 1950: Because, Lord, by every innate impulse and through all the hazards of my life I have been driven ceaselessly to search for you and to set you in the heart of the universe of matter, I shall have the joy, when death comes, of closing my eyes amidst the splendour of a universal transparency aglow with fire [. . .]. Lord of consistence and union, you whose distinguishing mark and essence is the power indefinitely to grow greater, without distortion or

Teilhard de Chardin, apostle 59 loss of continuity, to the measure of the mysterious Matter whose Heart you fill and all whose movements you ultimately control – Lord of my childhood and Lord of my last days – God, complete in relation to yourself and yet, for us, continually being born [. . .]. Let your universal Presence spring forth in a blaze that is at once Diaphany and Fire. O ever-greater Christ!49 It is appropriate to mention that after Teilhard’s death a picture of the radiant heart of Christ was found on his desk, personally inscribed with “My Litany” – reflective notes that speak vividly about God, about Christ and Christianity, about Jesus and his heart. By way of conclusion, I quote a few passages from this long litany, which convey some powerful glimpses of Teilhard’s large vision of the cosmic Christ that embraced the whole universe and inspired him throughout his life: The God of evolution The Christic, the Trans-Christ Heart of the world Jesus Essence Motor of evolution Sacred Heart The motor of evolution The heart of evolution The heart of matter Heart of the world’s heart Focus of ultimate and universal energy Centre of the cosmic sphere of cosmogenesis Heart of Jesus, heart of evolution, unite me to yourself.50

Notes 1 Teilhard de Chardin (1968a, p. 32). 2 Teilhard de Chardin (1968a, p. 14). 3 Teilhard de Chardin (1978, p. 104). 4 Teilhard de Chardin (1968a, pp. 69–70). I have discussed Teilhard’s war experience and essays in more detail in my biography (King, 2015). 5 Lyons (1982). For an excellent earlier study of Teilhard’s Christology see Mooney (1966). 6 Teilhard de Chardin (1968a, p. 15). 7 Teilhard de Chardin (1965, p. 23). 8 Teilhard de Chardin (1965, p. 27). 9 King (2005). 10 All quotations are from Teilhard de Chardin (1965, p. 32). 11 Teilhard de Chardin (1965, p. 33). 12 See Hunt Overzee (1992).

60  Ursula King 3 Teilhard de Chardin (1965, p. 33). 1 14 Teilhard de Chardin (1965, p. 35). 15 Lyons (1982, p. 219) emphasis added. 16 Cited in Teilhard de Chardin (1965, p. 121), a different translation is found in Teilhard de Chardin (1968a, p. 59). 17 Teilhard de Chardin (1972, p. 48). 18 Teilhard de Chardin (1968a, pp. 177–190). 19 Teilhard de Chardin (1968a, p. 189). 20 See his “Note on the Universal Christ” (1920) in Teilhard de Chardin (1968b, pp.  14–20) also the section on “The Universal Christ,” Teilhard de Chardin (1968b, pp.  53–66) in “My Universe” (1924), which includes a discussion of “Christ-Omega.” 21 Teilhard de Chardin (1968b, p. 14). 22 Teilhard de Chardin (1968b, p. 19). 23 Teilhard de Chardin (1968b, p. 54). 24 Teilhard de Chardin (1968b, p.  57). See his entire essay “My Universe” from which this quotation is taken. 25 Teilhard de Chardin (1968b, p. 164). 26 Teilhard de Chardin (1968b, p. 167). 27 Teilhard de Chardin (1968b, pp. 166–167). 28 Teilhard de Chardin (1971, pp. 96–132). 29 Teilhard de Chardin (1971, p. 126). 30 Teilhard de Chardin (1971, pp. 128–129). 31 Teilhard de Chardin (1969a). The important essay “Human Energy” is found in the book of the same title, 113–162. The quotation is from Teilhard de Chardin (1969a, p. 145). 32 Teilhard de Chardin (1970, p. 56). 33 Teilhard de Chardin (1968b, p. 125). 34 Quoted in Teilhard de Chardin (1969b, p. 34). 35 Quoted in Teilhard de Chardin (1969b, p.  34f), see de Lubac in Teilhard de Chardin (1969b, pp. 27–44). 36 Quoted in Teilhard de Chardin (1969b, p. 35). 37 Teilhard de Chardin (1968b, p. 124). 38 See, for example, his reference to “new theological orientations,” Teilhard de Chardin (1971, pp. 173–176). 39 See Teilhard de Chardin (1971, 183), where he has a section titled “A New Mystical Orientation,” written in 1945. 40 Teilhard de Chardin (1968b, p. 126). 41 Teilhard de Chardin (1971, p. 94). 42 Cousins (1992), see especially his section on “Teilhard’s Christology,” pp. 176–178. 43 Delio (2008). 44 Delio (2011). See also Delio (2013), where some of her ideas are developed further and where the chapter “Birthing a New God” includes a section called “Teilhard de Chardin and Omega.” 45 Udias (2009). 46 Teilhard de Chardin (1971, p. 167). 47 Teilhard de Chardin (1978, p. 98). 48 See Duffy (2019). 49 Teilhard de Chardin (1978, pp. 55–57f). 50 Excerpts taken from Teilhard de Chardin (1971, p. 244f).

Teilhard de Chardin, apostle 61

Bibliography Cousins, E. H. (1992). Christ of the 21st century. Rockport, MA: Element Books. Delio, I. (2008). Christ in evolution. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Delio, I. (2011). The emergent Christ: Exploring the meaning of catholic in an evolutionary universe. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Delio, I. (2013). The unbearable wholeness of being: God, evolution, and the power of love. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Duffy, K. (2019). Teilhard’s struggle: Embracing the work of evolution. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Hunt Overzee, A. (1992). The body divine: The symbol of the body in the works of Teilhard de Chardin and Ramanuja. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. King, T. (2005). Teilhard’s mass: Approaches to “The Mass on the World.” Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. King, U. (2015). Spirit of fire: The life and vision of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Rev. ed.). Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Lyons, J. A. (1982). The cosmic Christ in Origen and Teilhard de Chardin: A comparative study. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mooney, C. F. (1966). Teilhard de Chardin and the mystery of Christ. London: Collins. Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1965). Hymn of the universe. London: Collins. Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1968a). Writings in time of war. London: Collins. Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1968b). Science and Christ. London: Collins. Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1969a). Human energy. London: Collins. Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1969b). Letters to Léontine Zanta. Introduction by Robert Garric and Henri de Lubac. London: Collins. Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1970). Activation of energy. London: Collins. Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1971). Christianity and evolution. London: Collins. Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1972). Letters to two friends 1926–1952. Prologue by René d’Ouince. London: Collins. Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1978). The heart of matter. London: Collins. Udias, A. (2009). Christogenesis: The development of Teilhard’s Cosmic Christology (Teilhard Studies Number 59). Chambersburg, PA: ANIMA Books, American Teilhard Association.

5 Following Raimon Panikkar toward an understanding of creation as incarnatio continua Bernhard Nitsche Anyone who inquires into the world as the possible Body of Christ will, in the Christian context, comes directly into contact with Christology. Since the Council of Chalcedon (451), Christology has approached the relationship between divine and human reality with the help of four adverbs. The Council defined Christ as a unity of divine and human natures without confusion, without division, without change, and without separation. Anyone who wants to understand the earthly in its connection with the divine more intensively can see the world and human nature unified by the divine Logos-Son in Jesus Christ as both the foundation and the goal of the relationship between God and the world. This purposive relationship, whose foundations lie in the incarnation and in the hypostatic union, allows us to position the inner unity of the world with God on the basis of God’s loving attention to the world without division and without separation. This union is significantly more intimate than would seem possible in the traditional doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.1 Originating in the divine sovereignty of the Old Testament and furthered in the Christology of the New Testament, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo understands creation as the product of God’s will and freedom (Col 1:16; Hebr 1:2; John 1:3; Eph 1:2–10). For instance, Paul writes, “For from him [God] and through him and to him are all things” (Rom 11:36) and that God “calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom 4:17). Historical scholarship has identified five central concerns of the creatio ex nihilo doctrine: (1) it disputes the idea of matter as a counter principle to God because such an ontologically equal and “noncreated” eternal principle would jeopardize monotheism; (2) it refuses a Manichaean separation between God and Sophia; (3) it rejects a platonic juxtaposition of God (good) and creation (evil); (4) it emphasizes God’s unconditional sovereignty; and (5) the goal of the act of creation is salvation. According to the doctrine, everything that exists owes its existence to the creative power and love of God. In view of these central concerns, I would like to reformulate the problematic aspects of the creatio ex nihilo doctrine in light of a creatio ex amore. In doing so, I will also remodel the idea of creation in the larger context of soteriology and the doctrine of the Trinity. God in his overflowing love desires not only his inner Trinitarian other (the Son and the Spirit) but also the other of creation (world and humankind).

Following Raimon Panikkar 63 God as the divine ground of creation desires the world in its enormous multiplicity, its plural unity, its creative potential for growth, and its opening of animate and loving relations. Creation arises not only from divine love (creatio ex amore); it is also an expression of God’s inner life. God’s love initiates, accompanies, and maintains (creatio continua) the world and human kind. If love and freedom belong together internally, then creation is the free opening of the other to God and the source of self-empowerment. Creation is a constant, loving, and creative setting free [Freisetzung], so that every type of existence or process is made possible through God’s constant active presence.2 Many of these elements can be found in the work of Raimon Panikkar and in his understanding of creation as an incarnatio continua. I sketch Panikkar’s ideas next.

Raimon Panikkar’s cosmotheandric vision Raimon Panikkar understands the core of his spiritual path and experience through what he calls a “cosmotheandric vision.”3 This vision reflects a holistic experience of inner belongingness and the interdependent relationality of God, world and humankind in the human experience: “The divine, the human and the earthly [.  .  .] are the three irreducible dimensions which constitute the real, i.e., any reality inasmuch as it is real [for humans].”4 Cosmotheandric thinking, in which the divine and the human are constitutively intertwined, aims at a universal determination of being.5 It addresses the inner connection between the world in which we find ourselves and in which we live, our orientation to a larger reality that encompasses us and that we cannot simply comprehend, and the entanglement of both standpoints in human life. Because the accordance between (divine) transcendence and (earthly) immanence is reflected in human spiritual selftranscendence and in what Helmuth Plessner calls their “eccentric positionality,” transcendence and immanence find harmony in human existence. The transcendental orientation to a beyond and a boundedness to the bodily and the earthly are mutually implied in human beings. Panikkar understands the trinity of limitation and contingency, boundlessness and transcendence, and the linking of both perspectives in human beings who are at once from God (a Deo) and to God (ad Deum) as a general experience that Jesus Christ symbolizes: Christ’s uniqueness lies, for me, in the lived experience that I  am at once finite, infinite, and on the way. This is a threefold but single experience, which by a thinking process I would apply to any human being. We all experience ourselves as finite, limited, even contingent. We also feel and are convinced that we are not finished, finite, that we are capable of growth without any preestablished limit, that we are in this sense, infinite. We also are directly aware that there is a link between the two, without which we would neither experience finiteness nor infinitude.6

64  Bernhard Nitsche The link between earthly limitation and mortality on the one hand and dynamic openness in the formal unboundedness of transcendental human spirit on the other has received various cultural interpretations. Panikkar calls these interpretations “analogies of a third degree”; they are the functional equivalents between culturally or religiously divergent spheres of understanding. These functional equivalents do not seek to derive one reality from another. Rather, they correlate elements in different conceptual cosmoses to bring out the intrinsic values they share. As an example, Panikkar cites the Hindu notions of brahman, īśvara, śākti, which he sees as possible correlates of the Christian Trinity: the Father as the origin of everything, the Son as the personal mediator, and the Holy Spirit as the inner force of apotheosis and the power that relates the two. The dimension of what is most fundamental or ultimate finds different expression in different contexts. The Christian calls it God; the Hindu, brahman; the Buddhist, nirvāṇa; the nihilist, the nothingness, or meaninglessness of existence. Moreover, there is the correlation between different spiritualities, and the way they represent and interpret transcendence. In differentiating these various spiritualities, Panikkar adopts the Hindu distinction between the model of ritual reconnection with the origin through the deeds and obligations (karma-mārga: iconology), the path of the loving encounter and surrender (bhakti-mārga: personalism), and the path of contemplative meditation and spiritual knowledge (jñāna-mārga: advaita).7 Panikkar relates these spiritualities with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as the divine prerequisites of the world and humanity and identifies corresponding relationships between God and the world – the iconological, the personalistic, and the adhyātmic.8 At the same time, Panikkar falls back on the Christian concept of the Trinity to classify the various relationships to transcendence achieved on these spiritual paths. The Father, as set down at the Councils of Toledo, represents the radical origin of reality and everything divine. The Son, as Ignatius of Antioch put it, is the original word from the original silence of the Father; as such, he is the personal mediator and the personal-symbolic mediation between earthly immanence and radical transcendence. The Holy Spirit, by contrast, can be experienced as dynamic movement and unifying divine immanence in human life and through human spirituality, which brings the spiritual life back to its radical origins.9 Taking the formulation of Marius Victorinus (“The Father is related to the Son as Nothingness [.  .  .] to Being”)10 and loosening the traditional systematic assignments to a “radical trinity,” Panikkar will later write the following in the trans-traditional and post-traditional language of the cosmotheandric vision: There is God, a Source, an Origin, an Abyss, Silence, Nothingness, Nonbeing. There is also an Image, a Result, a Book, a World, an Offspring,

Following Raimon Panikkar 65 a People, Being. There is further a Return, a Love, an all-permeating Energy, a Spirit. There is Heaven, Earth and Man, etc.11 He lends a Trinitarian accent to the adventure of reality in Christian experience: I repeat, the whole of reality could be called, in Christian language, Father, Christ, Holy Spirit the Font of all reality, reality in its act of being (that is, it’s becoming, the existing reality which is ‘the whole Christ’ (Christus totus), not yet fully realized, and the Spirit (the wind, the divine energy that maintains the perichôrêsis in movement)).12 Inspired by the nondual Hindu thinking of the Advaita Vedānta, Panikkar seeks to overcome the dissociating spirit of analytic thought by using the inner relatedness of different dimensions of reality and their common bond. This form of thinking is Christian and has its foundations in the Christological and Trinitarian concept of the perichôrêsis as mutual immanence (circuminsessio) and mutual penetration (circumincessio). It can also be found in the Hindu idea that everything contains within it everything else (sarvam sarvātmakam) and in the Buddhist principle of a never-ending dependence of all phenomena with each other (pratītyasamutpāda).13 On the basis of these fundamental religious concepts and their intuitions of mutual connectedness, Panikkar advocates a relational ontology that understands the dynamic nexus of God, world, and the human as an “inter-in-dependence” under the guiding concept of “ontonomy.”14 As Francis D’Sa aptly observes, “This cosmotheandric cosmovision is Trinitarian; each of the three dimensions is unique and irreducible but at the same time interindependent.”15 The three basic dimensions encompass the factor of freedom in the reciprocal relatedness of God and humanity. Hence, one can speak of an interin-dependence in the reciprocal structure of the relationship. In eternal life, there is dynamism; in reality, there is a Holy Spirit of truth that flows from the innermost heart of humans if they do not keep it locked up within. The Holy Ghost penetrates the other and other people on its own initiative without anything having to be programmed in advance. This is freedom. “Where there is Spirit there is freedom” (2 Corinthians 3:17). Cosmologically and spiritually, the cosmotheandric vision challenges us to find a new perception and appreciation of the cosmic world as a reality that is not only natural but also animate. Panikkar calls this view “ecosophy.”16 It describes not only the art of handling nature but also the appreciation of wisdom that lies hidden in cosmic nature. Ecosophy aims at a holistic view of nature that considers people, animals, and plants as a part of creation or as co-creation. In this way, the cosmic nature itself can be understood as a subject whose needs and life utterances are perceived and considered by human beings. In the ecosophical perspective, the world as

66  Bernhard Nitsche a whole is understood as a fabric woven from the three dimensions of the divine, the human, and the cosmic.

From being as Christophany to incarnatio continua Trinitarian theology is not the only language that Pannikar uses to describe cosmotheandric intuition. The concepts he employs are also decidedly Christological: As the symbol of the whole divinization of the universe, Christ is the thesis of the Greek fathers. The Roman liturgy for centuries has chanted, Per ipsum, cum ipso, in ipso (“Through him, with him, in him”) all the dimensions of reality meet and “all things hold together in him” (Colossians 1:17). The whole universe is called to share the Trinitarian perichoresis, in and through Christ.17 From this arises the idea of creation as an incarnatio continua that reveals the universal mediation of the Logos-Son as the theological inner determination of the world in its symbolic power.18 Systematically and in the fluctuation between Trinitarian and Christological emphases, Christ emerges as the prominent symbol for mysterium coniunctionis. In the symbol of Christ, the earthly visible (the phenomena) and the transcendental invisible (noumena) are inextricably linked. For Panikkar, the symbol is the embodiment of the intuition that heaven, earth, and humanity (consciousness) – form a single unity.19 Panikkar does not shy away from delving into the transreligious connections of the mediator symbol. His concept of “Christophany” reinterprets not only the Hindu tradition in terms of this Christian notion but also the Christian tradition in terms of basic Hindu concepts. Christophany means that the mysterium coniunctionis figures in many traditions, and Jesus Christ represents the normative figure of this mediator “between divine and cosmic, eternal and temporal, etc., which religions call Īśvara, Tathāgata or even Jahweh, Allah and so on.”20 If we look back on previous tradition, it is clear that Raimon Panikkar, especially in his earlier writings, follows the lead of Maximus the Confessor and adopts two basic ideas of the late antique mediator between East and West: the universal Christology of the Logos-Son that in becoming man is also a cosmic incarnation and the potential of priestly participation in the mediation of Jesus Christ according to the order of Melchizedek. A typical idea in the early work of Panikkar is the notion of a Christological mediation in creation that interprets Genesis 1:1 in the mirror of John 1:3 and comprehends the all nondivine being in its positive function as an appearance of Christ (christophany). Both in his earlier and later works, Panikkar takes a highly systematic-theological view on the relationship between God and the world: The Son is the mediator, the summus pontifex (Great High Priest) of creation and also of the redemption and glorification, or transformation,

Following Raimon Panikkar 67 of the world. Beings are in so far as they participate in the Son, are from, with and through him. Every being is a christophany showing forth of Christ; it is only that.21 Here Panikkar picks up a central insight of Maximus the Confessor: “The Logos of God, who is God, wills always and in all his creatures to accomplish the mystery of his embodiment.”22 If God’s becoming man is linked with a cosmic embodiment and spiritual meaning through which the eminently divine proves itself profoundly human, and the divinity of God finds its measures in true humanity for the benefit of human beings, then the effect of the divine Logos-Son cannot be limited to a singular event in history. Although the presence of the Logos-Son has its binding figure and definitive self-expression in the history of Jesus, the principle of mediation in the relationship between God and world is not limited to Jesus. Christ is thus the integral symbol for the mysterium coniunctionis.23 In this creation founded on the idea of Christ as Logos and its supralapsarian understanding as Christophany, the Logos-Son has not only created everything; in becoming man in Jesus, God created all of humankind and the entire world as his dwelling and property. For that reason, the theology of creation leads us back again to the inner-Trinitarian requirements of divine initiative, earthly being and human existence. The Logos-Son is the embodiment of the divine act of being, the first word from the original silence of God’s original foundation. From this, Panikkar concludes that creation is the implication of the inner-Trinitarian expression of the Father, because the Trinitarian dynamism of the nondual divine life grounds the ad extra God ab intra: “Unum idemque actu quo Deus generat Filium creat et mundum” [With the same act which God begets the Son he created the world.]24 Thomas Aquinas, to whom Panikkar attributes this statement, was more reserved: “For God by knowing Himself, knows every creature. [. . .] But because God by one act understands Himself and all things, His one only Word is expressive not only of the Father, but of all creatures.”25 In his decidedly Trinitarian viewpoint, Thomas writes that the “processes of the divine Persons are the cause of the processions of things”26 so that a clear interconnection exists between the internal divine processions and the actions in the history of salvation. Combined with Thomas’s statement that God, by knowing himself, knows every creature, Panikkar’s idea becomes easier to understand. In accordance with the processions, the role of creator falls primarily to the Father, whereas the Son through whom everything happens is the mediating instance, and the spirit is the dominion that gives life to everything and that wants to guide us to the good and a fortiori to the Father.27 Panikkar’s thought comes out more clearly in the work of Meister Eckhart, who identifies the internal correlate of what is created by spirit to the spiritual being of God: In speaking the Word, He [the Father] utters the Word and all things in another Person to whom He gives the same nature that He has himself.

68  Bernhard Nitsche And he utters all rational spirits in that Word as equal to that Word according to their image as it dwells within (Him). Yet each image as it radiates forth, existing by itself, is not the same in all respects as the Word.28 Elsewhere Eckhart writes, “At once, and as soon as God was, when He begot His coeternal Son as God fully equal to Himself, He also created the world.”29 This statement need not be false if the prefiguration of the wisdom of the world is seen in God’s wisdom, and if we remember that in the work of Augustine, Thomas, and Eckhart the eternity of God represents the other of the world’s temporality. For the creation of the world is already thought and willed in the begetting of the Son and in the spiration of the Spirt; the internal divine begetting and the inner divine decision to create the world cannot be brought together in a temporal succession. Rather, the eternal begetting and the eternal will to creation (onto)logically precedes the being of the world. At the same time, human spirituality can, with Eckhart, be understood as the image and allegory of the spirituality of God in the difference of infinitude and finitude. According to Panikkar, this process of becoming and the path of its completion in Christophany is also codetermined pneumatologically so that the theology of creation is not only a theology of Logos but also is determined by the Spirit: “In traditional words, the Son is generated and the Spirit proceeds from the Source. The whole universe is engaged in the process. In Christian language, the whole of reality is Father, Christ, and Holy Spirit.”30 If we take this perspective and consider the effect of the Logos-Son and the Spirit from their inner viewpoint, creation is a creation through the Father as well as an incarnatio continua and a vivificatio continua, even if Panikkar does not use the latter term and does not think about the spirit’s effect on creation. In terms of this Christological interpretation, we can say that human beings are not caught in a closed universe that operates accordingly to purely mechanical laws. Rather they live in a universe that is open to the unreachable “encompassing” [das Umgreifende] in which the mystical “encompassing” can be heard. Incarnation describes the divine mystery that is present in the flesh of matter and that reveals it from within. In this sense, Christ represents the complete innermost unity between the divine, the cosmic, and the human that is realized in Christ and that determines the final purpose of the world insofar as the Spirit-enacted divinization fulfills itself in the incarnation of the Logos-Son. For Christ is the real symbol of divinization that speaks to the fullness of human beings: “For in him the whole fullness of divinity dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9). Or as Panikkar puts it, “There are not two universes, one divine and the other material.”31 Only one universe exists, and it must be understood in terms of Christ. But the Son is a mere reflection of God’s glory and only a likeness of his essence (Hebrews 1:2–3). That is why creation in general and everything in creation are called

Following Raimon Panikkar 69 to share and participate in the presence of God in creation – entering this mystery as in the Eucharist – in order to take in the pharmakon of immortality. “It is not only all the divine mysteries but likewise the whole mystery of creation,” Panikkar writes, “that is held within this Christ – in a process of growth and maturation.”32 This idea has three consequences: (A) The idea of incarnatio continua requires openness to growth and a dynamism in the web of relationships between God, world, and humankind. This openness to growth overcomes the relatio rationis of Thomas Aquinas. In contemplating a new religious path, Panikkar writes, What develops, in fact, is the entire cosmos, all creation, reality. The whole universe expands. In a word, there is real growth in Man, in the World, and, I would also add, in God, at least inasmuch as neither immutability nor change are categories of the divine. The divinity is constant newness, pure act as the scholastics said.33 (B) The spiritual reality of the incarnatio continua includes the possibility that the experience of Jesus as the Son is open to all human beings. By following the path of Jesus that he made possible, every one of us can become a son or a daughter of God in the full sense of the word. According to the First Epistle of John, part of the fullness of human beings is that they are children of God and become like Christ (1 John 3:1–2). In the letter to the Colossians we read, “When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (Col 3:4). Hence Panikkar emphasizes the word of Jesus in John, where he calls on the apostles to remain in him so that he can remain in them (John 15:4– 10).34 In doing so, Panikkar draws on the inner link between the high priest Jesus Christ and the priesthood of the order of Melchizedek.35 This picks up on the position of Maximus the Confessor who saw in this priestly understanding the performance of the relationship between individual human beings and the unconditional affirmation of God. The being of the searching believer is sanctified by this priestly dignity. Maximus notes, This, I  think, that wonderful and great man, Melchizedec, knew and experienced, about whom the divine Word in the Scriptures declares great and wonderful things, that he had transcended time and nature, and was worthy to be likened to the Son of God. For, as far as is possible, he had become such by grace and habit, as the Giver of grace is himself believed to be by essence.36 For this reason, Panikkar highlights the idea of the divinization of man used by early and medieval Christian thinkers: “He (Christ) became Man in order to divinize us” (Athanasius). “The Word of God became Man and the son of God the son of Man, so that Man, united to the Word of God and receiving

70  Bernhard Nitsche sonship, might become son of God” (Irenaeus of Lyon). “In each one of us the son of God becomes Man and the son of Man becomes the son of God” (Meister Eckhart).37 In this idea of divinization, the unity of Jesus with the Father embodies the unity of the religious subject with the divine source. In this oneness, the divine source on which human beings subsist is inseparable with humanity itself, though the difference between man and God remains infinite. The reason is that God’s infinitude and perfection marks his difference to world and man: We have, time and again, repeated his words: “I  have said, you are gods” (Psalms 82:6; John 10:34). Why should we not feel authorized to speak as Gods? Personal dignity implies this: not only are we one of many rings in a chain of beings (or even of Being) but each one of us is also unique, unsubstitutable precisely because each one of us bears infinite divine value.38 But this indicates a process of becoming one with God that is not yet finished (1 Corinthians 15:20–28). (C) From the incarnation continua, we must conclude that every form of salvific exclusivism of sole possession is overcome through the universality of divinization and its unique fulfillment in different subjects. The word of God that incarnates itself offers universal salvation. “God’s word is not chained” (Verbum Dei non est alligatum: 2 Timothy 2:9). God wants to become word and deed throughout the entire cosmos and in every person, just as he did in Jesus. The symbol of Christ can qualitatively incorporate all epiphanies of the holy and the divine while deciding which formations and anticipations especially correspond to him. With this universal orientation, Panikkar writes, A Christ who could not be present in Hinduism, or a Christ who was not with every least sufferer, a Christ who did not have his tabernacle in the sun [Psalms 18:6], a Christ who did not represent the cosmotheandric reality with one Spirit seeing and recreating all hearts and renewing the face of the earth, surely would not be my Christ, nor, I suspect, would he be the Christ of the Christians.39

The relationship of immanence and transcendence and its perichoretic determination In trying to find an appropriate language to express the inner connection of immanence and transcendence, Panikkar sought to find an alternative to the European models of dualism (theism) and monism (pantheism). He found it in Trinitarian perichoretic thought and the corresponding Hindu model of nondual connection known as advaita, which neither

Following Raimon Panikkar 71 a duality nor a monistic unity. Panikkar interprets the Advaita Vedānta of Adi Sanakara as a differentiated relational unity in the manner of Ramanuja’s Vishishtadvaita.40 Panikkar links this idea with the experience of contingency, of embeddedness in a larger reality and of earthly connection: In the experience of contingency I do not experience myself as “creation” (of somebody else) because I touch the infinite, nor do I experience myself as the “creator” (of myself) because this touch is actualized in a point that has no dimensions. I realize that I participate, that I am an integral part of that very flux we call reality, although the word “participate” does not express the experience adequately. [. . .] I am neither matter nor spirit, neither devil nor angel, neither earth nor heaven, neither World nor God. I am the point of the tangent in which those two poles meet: I stand in between.41 This could be called a “tangential” experience, one in which the tangent of the infinite and the curve of the finite intersect. Human beings transcend their finitude by becoming aware of it in the formal interminability of the spiritual act. In Panikkar’s earlier work, he regarded this tangential experience in connection with the four adverbs of Council of Chalcedon.42 Among the Council’s famous four adverbs, two were formulated to safeguard the oneness of Christ so that Jesus Christ exists without division (adiaretōs/indivise) and without separation (achoristōs/inseparabiliter). The two other adverbs were formulated to safeguard the distinction between the truthfully divine and the truthfully human and earthly level of existence. The two natures exist without confusion (asynchtōs/inconfuse) and without change (atreptōs/immutabiliter). It reveals the person of Jesus Christ as the symbol of full divinity as well as of true and eminent humanity through a nonduality and nonseparation of the divine and the human. Panikkar’s model of tangential experience can perhaps be better expressed as two differently sized parabolas that intersect at their vertices (like a tangent and curve). The smaller parabola expresses the finite, and the larger parabola represents the divine. The parabola of the infinite encompasses the smaller finite one within it. At the same time, the smaller parabola of the finite in human beings is open for the interminable and the unending. In the true humanity of sincere clarity and loving devotion – when the truly divine has become deeply human and when the truly human occurs in a divine fashion, when the divinity has completely taken human form and the human being has arrived with God – the parabolas come together in consonance. In this model, both an asymptotic approach of the two dimensions of reality and a dynamic, dialogical, and relational unity are possible. In it, the divine and the earthly reality do not separate into a dualism but reach formal convergence and consonance though remining formally distinct. At least in Jesus Christ, this process of approximation is more than asymptotic.

72  Bernhard Nitsche Rather, it becomes the highest unity of the radically different. With this in mind, I  want to identify some basic systematic implications and consequences beyond Panikkar’s work that are important for thinking about creation as an incarnatio continua: God qua god is the ground of familiarity and difference If there is a world because God gives it, then the basic volition of the world that has always existed and that is given in the begetting of the Son and in the spiration of the Spirit is the ground of the world’s familiarity with God. In the presence of the Spirit, God strengthens the processes of the world and enables it to have a fullness of life, freedom, and love that is possible in finite being. In the presence of the Logos-Son, God brings his steadfast and death-overcoming love into the presence of human beings as a sign of his affirmation. The life of the Son is the path and the truth that liberates the humans from the alienating powers of the world and of death. Paul on the Areopagus emphasizes that human beings should seek God because he is not far from them: “For in him we live and move and have our being. As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring’ ” (Acts 17:28). The Isha Upanishad describes the Hindu equivalent: “Everything that moves in this changing world is entwined by God.”43 At the same time, God in his divinity is the ground of lasting difference. Insofar as God qua God is infinite, unconditional, and unreachable, he is, and he posits the difference between him and the world. God’s infinitude marks his difference from all finite events in the world; his unconditionality marks his difference from all conditionalities of the earthly being; his unreachability marks the difference from the tangibility of earthly givens and the scientific comprehensibility of processes in the universe. As the source and origin of all reality, God is the first ground of all being that can be identified as the world. This ontological debt is decisive for Thomas Aquinas, for whom, as Gottfried Martin notes, “An existence of the world for eternity does not contradict its character as something created and existing.”44 God exists from within himself. The world is not the ground of itself; it exists through God. In this sense, the character of God is that he is not the world and is subject to the conditions of the world only insofar as he wants to make himself present within it. A formal cause of god’s activity “from within” need not be excluded for the processes of nature and human freedom God as the source and origin of all reality can make himself present as, in the words of Karl Rahner, a “formal cause” in his loving attention from within. He can do this insofar as he is the preoriginal provider of everything that occurs within nature and human history, because without him nothing would happen.45 But God is also the one who wants the other of the

Following Raimon Panikkar 73 world and of human beings. He is the ground that sets free the laws and activity of the universe that is known to and potentially comprehendible by humankind. For that reason, God’s activity need not be placed outside the universe’s creative potential and or thought of as an interventionism contra naturam. Rather, God’s activity can be said to express the unfolding, variable processes of nature and their capacities that exceed mere deterministic comprehension. (Consider the interminable processes in the area of microphysics.) Biological forms of life and development unfold between the limits of chaos and cosmos (order). As complexity rises so too does the fragility that enables variation; small changes can have large effects for the system as a whole. Theoretical models that accept self-organization and self-surpassing can give us new ways of speaking about the effect of God in nature.46 The same applies for the (formally unconditional) transcendental freedom of human beings provided that God possesses unconditional and perfect freedom, and as such uses it to create freedom as the enabling ground of human freedom.47 Understood in this way, God describes the free and freedomforming inner ground of human consciousness and human freedom that is autonomous but not autarkic and thus does not create itself but experiences its existence as indebted to something else other than itself.48 In this way, the grace of God can be understood as a setting free of human freedom in a transcendental (noumenal) difference between divine and human freedom.49 Perichoresis – solution or problem? The creation and infused grace of the world are expressions of God’s overflowing love, which not only freely wants the other of himself (the son and the spirit) but also thee nondivine autonomous and free other (the world and human beings). God’s omnipotence can achieve everything that love can – a love that frees others and opens space for them, a love that invites, solicits, beckons, a love that with patience and compassion encompasses, and helps bear the self-alienation and suffering of life and that leads one to a salvific fullness of eternal life. Through the Son and the Spirit, God is not only present as the dynamic ground (Ezekiel 36:27; 1 Corinthians 3:16–17) and a public sign of reconciliation (Romans 3:23–28) in the evolution of nature and human history; he can also be affected by nature and human history if he desires. This inter-in-independence expresses the relational freedom in the free relationality of both sides. As such, it must partly distance itself from the model of perichoresis that Panikkar endorses. For the idea of mutual penetration (circumincessio) describes the interference and interpenetration of different dimensions of reality. As such, it risks softening the distinction between God and world as highest unity of two distinct (asynchytos, inconfuse), and different dimensions of the same reality. By contrast, accordance as consonance expresses intense communication between the divine and the human without conflating them. From a

74  Bernhard Nitsche Christological standpoint, this communication is idiomatic, representing the highest dialogical unity in formal difference. It is not an exchange, a transformation, or an idiomatic conversion. The problem of mutual penetration (circumincessio) can be found in the Eucharistic image of wine mixed with water as an allegory of the connection between divine and human reality. By contrast, mutual immanence (circuminsessio) is possible if conceived as an act of freedom – i.e. as an analogy for how human beings let themselves be affected by other human beings and give space and resonance to others and their concerns. Translation: Dominic Bonfiglio

Notes 1 For more, see Oord (2015), May (1994). 2 See Vail (2015, p. 58f). 3 Panikkar (1999a, pp. 69–101). 4 Panikkar (1993, p. 60). 5 See D’Sa (2005, pp. 230–245, especially 232). 6 Panikkar (1997, pp. 111–115). 7 Panikkar (1970, pp. 9–40). 8 Panikkar (2004, pp. 54–73). 9 See Cousins (1979, p. 147). 10 Panikkar (2004, p. 139). 11 Panikkar (1990, p. 70). 12 Panikkar (2004, p. 146). 13 For more on these concepts, see Panikkar (2004, p. 194f). 14 Panikkar (2004, p. 119f), Panikkar (1953, pp. 182–188). 15 D’Sa, pp. XI–XVII, XII). 16 Panikkar (1989, pp. 341–356), Panikkar (1996, pp. 58–66). 17 Panikkar (2004, p. 147). 18 See Panikkar (2005, p. 349). He writes, “To speak as a Christian, I would dare to substitute Gen 1:1 with John 1:3: ‘Through him all things were made.’ And they are made in a constant ‘creation,’ in a creatio continua that is also an incarnatio continua. This will sound like a heresy if the sentence is interpreted with a Western concept of time.” 19 Panikkar (1991, pp. 3–21, 6). 20 Panikkar (1970, p. 54): Panikkar adds the following by way of clarification: “I am referring (unless it is explicitly stated otherwise) to the Lord of whom Christians can lay claim to no monopoly. It is Christ, then, – known or unknown – who makes religion possible. Only in the Lord is there ‘religatio.’ Christ, manifest or hidden, is the only way to God. Even by definition the unique link between the created and the uncreated, the relative and the Absolute, the temporal and the eternal, earth and heaven, is Christ, the only mediator. Between these two poles everything that functions as intermediary, link, ‘conveyor,’ is Christ, the sole priest of the cosmic priesthood, Ruler of the Universe par excellence.” Panikkar (1970, p. 53). 21 Panikkar (1970, p. 53). 22 Maximus Confessor (1863, p. 1084). 23 Panikkar (2004, pp. 180–184). 24 Panikkar (2004, p. 129). See the condemnation of Meister Eckhart (DH 953).

Following Raimon Panikkar 75 5 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, q 34:3 ad 3. 2 26 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, q 45:6 ad 1. 27 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, q 45:6 ad 2. 28 Meister Eckhart (2009a, Sermon 6, p. 66. 29 Meister Eckhart (2009b, p. 26). See also DH 953. 30 Panikkar (2004, p. 139). 31 Panikkar (2004, p. 129). 32 Panikkar (2004, p. 139). See also pp. 124–129. 33 Panikkar (1999b, p. 99). 34 Panikkar (2004, p. 98f). 35 Panikkar (2015, pp. 137–145). 36 Maximus the Confessor (1996, pp. 112–113 [1137]). 37 Quoted in Panikkar (2004, p. 16). 38 Panikkar (2004, p. 116). 39 Panikkar (1981, p. 20). 40 Panikkar (1981, p.  152). Later he writes, “The mystical philosopher Tulsidas equates Īśvara with Brahman. This Īśvara is essentially saguṇa, yet somehow claims also be nirguṇa” (ibid., pp. 158–159). 41 Panikkar (2004, pp. 79–80). 42 Panikkar (1981, p. 87). 43 Quoted in Panikkar (1975, p. 182). 44 Martin (1969, p. 52). For more on the general issue and on Thomas Aquinas, see ibid., pp. 48–58. 45 See Nitsche (2017). 46 See Smedes (2004), Gregersen (2003), Nitsche (2017). 47 See Pröpper (2011). 48 See Wendel (2010, pp. 57–63). 49 See Nitsche (2017).

Bibliography Cousins, E. H. (1979). Raimundo Panikkar and the Christian systematic theology of the future. Cross-Currents, 29, 141–155. D’Sa, F. X. (2004). Foreword. In R. Panikkar (Ed.), Christophany: The fullness of man (pp. XI–XVII). Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. D’Sa, F. X. (2005). Der trinitarische Ansatz von Raimon Panikkar. In B. Nitsche (Ed.), Gottesdenken in interreligiöser Perspektive: Raimon Panikkars Trinitätstheologie in der Diskussion (pp. 230–245). Frankfurt am Main and Paderborn: Lembeck, Bonifatius. Gregersen, N. H. (Ed.). (2003). From complexity to life: On the emergence of life and meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, G. (1969). Immanuel Kant: Ontologie und Wissenschaftstheorie. Berlin: de Gruyter. Maximus Confessor. (1863). Opera Omnia. Ed. Migne. (Patrologia Graecia 91). Paris. Maximus the Confessor. (1996). Difficulty 10. Maximus the confessor (pp. 91–152) (A. Louth, Ed. and Trans.). London: Routledge. May, G. (1994). Creatio ex nihilo: The doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in early Christian thought. Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Meister Eckhart. (2009a). Intravit Jesus in templum. In The complete mystical works of Meister Eckhart (M. O’C Walshe, Trans.). New York, NY: Crossroad.

76  Bernhard Nitsche Meister Eckhart. (2009b). Articles condemned in the bull of John XXII. In The complete mystical works of Meister Eckhart (M. O’C Walshe, Trans.). New York, NY: Crossroad. Nitsche, B. (2017). Handeln Gottes: Eine schöpfungstheologische und transzendentallogische Rekonstruktion. In B. Göcke & R. Schneider (Eds.), Gottes Handeln in der Welt. Probleme und Möglichkeiten aus Sicht der Theologie und analytischen Religionsphilosophie (pp. 204–242). Regensburg: Pustet. Oord, T. J. (Ed.). (2015). Theologies of creation: Creatio ex nihilo and its new rivals. New York, NY: Routledge. Panikkar, R. (1953, August  20–26). Le concept d’ontonomie. In E. Nauwelaerts (Ed.), Actes de XIe Congrès international de Philosophie. (Vol. 3, pp. 182–188). Bruxelles and Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing. Panikkar, R. (1970). The trinity and world religions: Icon, person, mystery. Madras: Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society. Panikkar, R. (1975). Spiritualita indu. Brescia: Morcelliana. Panikkar, R. (1981). The unknown Christ of Hinduism. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Panikkar, R. (1989). Anima Mundi – Vita hominis – Spiritus Dei. Some aspects of a Cosmotheandric Spirituality. In E. Schadel (Ed.), Actualitas omnium actuum: Festschrift für Heinrich Beck (pp. 341–356). Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Panikkar, R. (1990). Cosmic evolution, human history and trinitarian life. The Teilhard Review, 25(3), 62–71. Panikkar, R. (1991). A Christophany for our times. Theology Digest, 38(1), 3–21. Panikkar, R. (1993). The Cosmotheandric experience: Emerging religious consciousness. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Panikkar, R. (1996). Ökosophie, oder: Der kosmotheandrische Umgang mit der Natur. In H. Kessler (Ed.), Ökologisches weltethos im dialog der kulturen und Religionen (pp. 58–66). Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Panikkar, R. (1997). Whose uniqueness. In L. Swidler  & P. Mojzes (Eds.), The uniqueness of Jesus. A  dialogue with Paul Knitter (111–115). Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Panikkar, R. (1999a). Gott, Mensch und Welt. Die Drei-Einheit der Wirklichkeit. Petersberg: Via Nova. Panikkar, R. (1999b). The intrareligious dialogue. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. Panikkar, R. (1999b). The intrareligious dialogue. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. Panikkar, R. (2004). Christophany: The fullness of man. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Panikkar, R. (2005). Stellungnahme. In B. Nitsche (Ed.), Gottesdenken in interreligiöser Perspektive. Raimon Panikkars Trinitätstheologie in der Diskussion (pp. 322–355). Frankfurt am Main and Paderborn: Lembeck, Bonifatius. Panikkar, R. (2015). Meditation on Melchizedek. In Opera Omnia, Volume 2: Religion and Religions (pp. 137–150). Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Pröpper, T. (2011). Theologische Anthropologie. Band I. Freiburg: Herder. Smedes, T. A. (2004). Chaos, complexity, and god: Divine action and scientism. Leuven: Peeters Publisher. Thomas Aquinas. (1936). Die deutsche Thomas-Ausgabe Band 4. Summa Theologica I. Frage (pp. 44–64). Schöpfung und Engelwelt. Salzburg: Pustet. Vail, E. M. (2015). Creation out of nothing remodeled. In T. J. Oord (Ed.), Theologies of creation: Creatio ex nihilo and its new rivals (pp. 55–68). New York, NY: Routledge. Wendel, S. (2010). Religionsphilosophie. Stuttgart: Reclam.

6 The “world as the body of God” (Sallie McFague) The cosmic Christ as the measure of the body of God Margit Eckholt The methodological starting point: a metaphorical theology The Anglican theologian Sallie McFague (born 1933), who worked from 1970 to 2000 at the Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, USA, and at the Vancouver School of Theology in British Columbia, Canada, provided important impetus for the development of a feminist ecological theology that takes one of the great signs of our times seriously – namely, the global threat to humanity and the planet through environmental destruction and depletion of resources. Her theology also helps to lay the foundation of a nondualistic understanding of the universe and the world on the basis of systematic theology in dialogue with process philosophy and scientific approaches, especially the theory of evolution. Her theological approach to the concept of creation deconstructs the body-hostile traditions of Western Christianity from the feminist perspective and reconstructs the creator God’s life perspectives for the entire real world by a rereading of the biblical and theological traditions of Christianity. Her inquiring theology develops theories in lively interaction with present-day challenges and constantly reflects her point of view as “a white, middle-class, American Christian woman writing to first-world, privileged, mainstream Christians (and other interested persons)” and wants to present a liberation theology for the North Atlantic region.1 Following both Karl Barth and the cultural-theological approaches of Paul Tillich and H. Richard Niebuhr, Sallie McFague sees a connection between theology and biography. The key to her personal creed, which she formulates in her autobiographical book Life Abundant, is the belief in the “incarnated” God, Jesus Christ, who embodied that love to which we are created and called: “We live to give God glory by loving the world and everything in it [. . .] made in God’s image, we are to grow into reality by doing what God does: love the world.”2 The foundation of this profoundly spiritual, but also political and practical dimension of her theological approach was already laid in her first theological studies. In her doctoral thesis published in 1966, “Literature and the Christian Life,” she points to the “unity of life and thought” in a survey of great theologians, such as Paul, Luther, Calvin, Bonhoeffer, or Barth as well

78  Margit Eckholt as secular Christian writers. Life and thought, personal history and religious existence are related to one another in a symbiotic way. As McFague writes in her second study Speaking in Parables (1975), we can only think with our “blood”; we are “a body that thinks.”3 This is exactly the image that was to become one of the most creative metaphors in McFague’s theology, the cornerstone of her cosmological-ecological theology in which the dualisms of mind and matter, of body and soul, life and practice are overcome in an “embodied thinking.”4 The center of this new approach is the metaphor of the “world as the body of God.”5 The methodological starting point is a “parabolic” or “metaphorical” theology, as propounded in her third study Metaphorical Theology. Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia, 1982). She examines the parables of Jesus and poses the question of how religious language functions and how to speak responsibly of God in dialogue with contemporary scientific approaches. Against the background of Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy and the scientific theoretical discussion of model concepts in the 1980s, she enters into an interdisciplinary debate with the natural sciences. This crossing of the border to scientific theory was to gain central significance for McFague’s further work. The parables of Jesus represent central “models” of theological reflection in which language, faith, and life are interrelated: They help one to find one’s faith; they interpret us more than we interpret them,6 thus making it clear that faith is a living process of coming to believe and an attempt to put into practice the words that make it known. This is precisely the essence of “the” parable of God or “the” model, Jesus Christ; he is the “paradigm of God’s relationship to the world,” “a model or parable through which we can grasp something of God as well as discover a way to speak of God.”7 McFague makes recourse to Paul Ricoeur’s reflections on metaphor as she unfolds her “metaphorical theology” and her search for a creative way of speaking about God that is embedded in the world of human experience and thus acts with and upon us, setting something new free: “Metaphor is the way by which we understand as well as enlarge our world and change it.”8 The metaphor has the ability to express something “as this,” but at the same time to demonstrate that it is different from “this” – and thus novel and “different”: “Good metaphors shock, they bring unlikes together, they upset conventions, they involve tension, and they are implicitly revolutionary.”9 The metaphor is the “creator of a new meaning”;10 thus, metaphorical recognition can lead to a new way of being in the world. A  hermeneutic approach centered on the metaphor aims at an understanding of the world, which both “expands” and “changes” the world. Metaphorical recognition brings recognition and action, theory, and practice in relation to one another. This is precisely where McFague’s theological approach assumes the character of liberation theology, focusing on the “process of coming into belief, ‘which takes place’ through the ordinary details of historical life” and aims at the practice of faith.11 McFague develops the combination of the terms, metaphor, and model in reference to Max Black’s metaphor theory. The model represents the bridge to scientific discourse. A model is a “metaphor that has gained sufficient stability

The “world as the body of God” 79 and scope so as to present a pattern for relatively comprehensive and coherent explanation.”12 Models are not images of entities, but networks or structures of relationships that aim at behavior; they form connections between different fields and have transforming character.13 From a scientific point of view, they represent change, discovery, creativity, relativity, and partiality; they are not finalized, they have an inner tension and are open to new ideas. Theoretical models are novel mental constructions. They originate in a combination of analogy to the familiar and creative imagination in creating the new. They are open-ended, extensible, and suggestive of new hypothesis [. . .] such models are taken seriously but not literally. They are neither pictures of reality nor useful fictions; they are partial and inadequate ways of imagining what is not observable.14 Models bring concepts and metaphors together, connecting the theoretical with the practical approach. Theological work can retain the specific, figurative character of religious language and space is gained for experiences and emotions, but at the same time, by recourse to the concept of a model, the claim of scientific validity is not invalidated. With the help of the metaphor and model concept, McFague tries to make Christian faith intelligible within scientific discourse in an age of pluralism and relativism and to keep theological work open to new ideas. Metaphorical thinking has an “intrinsic iconoclastic and transformative character”;15 it releases innovation, precisely because it starts with the relationships of experience which have altered. When space is made available to women, who have long been excluded from religious and theological discourse, that has a highly creative and liberating significance for all theological work. McFague sees her metaphorical theology as a “heuristic” theology. It is not merely a matter of a fresh access to the biblical and traditional metaphors used by Christians when speaking of God – which would be the hermeneutical procedure – but above all “in contemporary life and its sensibility for images more appropriate to the expression of Christian faith in our time.“16 A  heuristic theology “experiments and tests, that thinks in an as-if fashion, that imagines possibilities that are novel, that dares to think differently.”17 This is the scientific basis for proposing the metaphor of the “world as the body of God.” Theologically, it is Jesus, the Christ, who forms the crystallization point. He represents the central model of theological thinking, which on the one hand, in an age of “holistic paradigm,”18 provides orientation in the relationship between God and the world, and on the other hand is interpreted anew. What is needed for a holistic sensibility to become a reality in our time is a change of consciousness in the way we see our world and ourselves in relation to the world. The destabilization of the parables is a necessary radical first step: when extended to the cosmos, it proclaims the end of the conventional, hierarchical, oppressive dualism of human/nonhuman.19

80  Margit Eckholt

The metaphor of the “world as the body of god” – the Christological reference point: the cosmic Christ Jesus Christ – the “parable of god” Jesus is the “parable of God,” the “root metaphor” of Christian faith, to which the other metaphors of religious language refer. His life, including his death, stands for a new kind of existence in the world. His life, his road to death, and his resurrection demonstrate in a concentrated form all that McFague ascribes to metaphor from a methodological point of view: entering into a process of understanding, conversion, and new practice. Jesus, “the” analogy of God, expresses in exemplary fashion the basic tension between God and the world, and in him the transforming power of the Kingdom of God for the world is made concrete.20 The biblical texts offer access to this root metaphor, and that is why the Bible is a “poetic classic or classic model, its metaphorical characteristics mean that tension, dialectic, openness change, growth and relativity must be intrinsic to a proper understanding of its authority.”21 Just as the metaphor derives its epistemological power precisely from the tension connecting “is” with “is not,” the “parable” of Jesus Christ stands for the tension between “is and is not” with regard to the relationship between God and the world. The mystery of God’s reality is not “dispersed” by his relation to the world. In him, it is both immanent and transcendent; in a unique way, the tension between God’s reality and the world is sustained in him. The “parable” Jesus Christ stands for God’s affirmation of reality; it extends to the tension between life and death, which – according to the testimony of the resurrection recorded in the language of the biblical texts – is concealed in the horizon of the God’s reality. God is “the greater,” but Jesus, as the “parable of God,” stands not only for the “is not,” but – in this tension – he “is” exactly the expression of “God’s relationship to us.”22 Referring back to these biblical foundations, theological language is affirmative, as reflected in the Christian tradition by the formulation of dogmatic statements at the Councils. McFague makes repeated reference to the Council of Chalcedon (451 after Christ): “Christianity’s most distinctive belief is that divine reality is always mediated through the world, a belief traditionally expressed in the Chalcedonian formula that Christ was ‘fully God, fully man.’ ”23 In Jesus Christ, the divine Word made flesh, God’s transcendence has been “embodied.”24 In him, the world is and becomes the “body of God”; on the one hand, he points to the “origin,” to God’s relationship to the world, and is in that way “fully God”; on the other hand, he stands for the fullness of the relationship to God and of human relationships through God – i.e., for authentic, integral, liberated life – for healing relationships with other people and with nonhuman nature, and is in this way “fully man.” Jesus Christ is thus the “root metaphor of Christianity,” standing for a new quality of “relationship,” “a way of being in the world under

The “world as the body of God” 81 the rule of God.”25 In him, we can recognize how history demonstrates the truth of God’s original approval and how, in orientation to him, new healing relationships between God and the world take shape. God’s relationship to the world is made manifest as Jesus encounters men and women of his time, opening up new and healing life opportunities. These are bodily life opportunities that enable participation in the body of God. The resurrection and the “cosmic Christ” For McFague, the incarnation is the fundamental perspective, but it is not detached from the testimony of the resurrection. God’s relationship to the world in Jesus Christ is concrete. It signifies a bodily reality that combines the original affirmation of creation with the affirmation of completion  – that is, the “cosmic Christ,” which is the measure of the body of God. The theological starting point for the definition of the “cosmic Christ” is the “parable” Jesus of Nazareth, who is the Christ. Jesus Christ is the “root metaphor” of Christian faith, which introduces a new kind of relationship between God and the world, assumed a paradigmatic form in Jesus and was confirmed in the resurrection as fulfillment and perfection for humanity and the whole cosmos. According to McFague, the resurrection is “the presence of God to us, not our translation into God’s presence,”26 and she justifies that with the Easter narrative, connecting it to the image of the “cosmic Christ.” In the post-resurrection appearances, a new quality of relationship emerges between Jesus and the people of his time, especially the outcasts, which has received too little attention in a Protestant theology that concentrates on the cross. It signifies a fulfilling and integral relationship with fellow humans and the world.27 Referring back to patristic and mystical traditions, and the Christocentric cosmological approach of the Jesuit theologian and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, McFague combines the image of the growth of the “cosmic Christ” with the metaphor of the world or the cosmos as the “body of God” and speaks of a “new common history of creation” and a new “cosmic panorama.”28 Resurrection is the promise of God to be “bodily” present in the world, “in all places and times of our world.”29 That means that the “cosmic Christ” takes shape, understood as “fulfillment for all of creation,” as “a destabilizing, inclusive, nonhierarchical vision of fulfillment [. . .] as permanently present in every present and every space: it needs to be grasped, in the most profound sense, as a worldly reality.”30 Every individual is included in this life, and this connection to the “cosmic Christ” means that all are constantly involved in exchange, growth, and development.31 McFague introduced the metaphor of the “world as the body of God” in her book Models of God, published in 1987, and it became the great leading metaphor of her work, by which she was able to reread tradition and to form associations with the thinking of Hebrew scriptural writers, with stoicism, the Church Fathers Tertullian and Irenaeus, with mystical traditions – from

82  Margit Eckholt Hildegard of Bingen to Dorothy Day and Iris Murdoch – as well as the philosophy of Hegel and Alfred North Whitehead.32 To speak of the “world as the body of God” means for McFague a “re-mythologization”33 of the confession “Christ has risen” and a connection to the sacramental tradition of Christianity, which had been lost in Protestantism, as well as to the notion of the sacramentality of creation, which shaped the medieval approach to theology, especially in the monastic orders, for example, for Hildegard von Bingen. If the world is imagined as self-expressive of God, if it is a “sacrament” – the outward and visible presence or body – of God, if it is not an alien other over against God but expressive of God’s very being, then, how would God respond to it and how should we? [. . .] if the entire universe is expressive of God’s very being – the “incarnation,” if you will – do we not have the beginnings of an imaginative picture of the relationship between God and the world peculiarly appropriate as a context for interpreting the salvific love of God for our time?34 The redemptive event of the presence of God in the world is manifested in the salvific participation in the growth of the cosmic Christ, which finds expression when partaking of the “body of Christ,” the sacramental presence of the risen Jesus Christ, an intense token of the saving love of God: We meet the world as a Thou, as the body of God where God is present to us always in all times and in all places. In the metaphor of the world as the body of God, the resurrection becomes a worldly, present, inclusive reality, for this body is offered to all: “This is my body.”35 From this resurrection perspective, which in sacramental form becomes a present reality – healing and saving – Christianity has an immanent, profoundly inclusive perspective. The biblical statement, “This is my body” or “This is my body, given for you,” is an invitation to all to share in the redemptive and perfect presence of God in it. The resurrection body is given to all. A “relativistic” Christology – the question of the uniqueness of Jesus Christ When Sallie McFague speaks of the world or the cosmos as the “body of God,” this is a radicalization of divine immanence, for God is not present to us in just one place (Jesus of Nazareth, although also and especially, paradigmatically there), but in and through all bodies, the bodies of the sun and

The “world as the body of God” 83 moon, trees and rivers, animals, and people. The scandal of the gospel is that the Word became flesh; the radicalization of incarnation sees Jesus not as a surd, an enigma, but as a paradigm or culmination of the divine way of enfleshment.36 So God is not only “embodied” in Jesus Christ, but he is “incarnate or embodied in our world, in both cosmological and anthropological ways.”37 For the Christian faith, the “event” or the “new way of being” connected with Jesus of Nazareth is the key to interpretation of this “embodiment” of God.38 He is, according to McFague in “Models of God,” “our historical choice as the premier paradigm of God’s love.” Whereby he is “ontologically” no different to paradigmatic figures in other religions, because the entire creation stands in such a relationship of love to God.39 The extent to which McFague runs the risk of relativizing Christology, as the Franciscan Shannon Schrein writes in her study “Quilting and Braiding,”40 can only be judged against the background of her understanding of metaphors and her definition of the relationship between metaphor, model, and dogma. The relationship between God and man, expressed in Jesus Christ as the “parable” of God, is one that cannot be “captured” by a metaphor or a model.41 Terminology is to be found in the creed and in dogmatic statements of tradition that harks back to the biblical understanding of metaphors and models, and is characterized by their openness and dynamism. A model lies between metaphor and terminology, and is a “dominant metaphor”;42 theological models offer a “redescription of reality in the sense that they offer new ways of being in the world.”43 The “dominant,” “founding models,” to which dogmas also belong, refer to that and formulate the truthfulness of the theological models. The reference back to “founding models” does not exclude the possibility of searching for other, new models that correspond to the cultural and political context of the respective time.44 From this point of view, McFague is open to new ideas regarding tradition and dogma. She opts for a creative interpretation of dogma that sees Jesus Christ as the “founding” model from which new models can emerge. The Christocentrism that shapes her thinking is not to be understood as “exclusive.” That is the thinking behind the metaphor of the “world as the body of God”; McFague offers the hypothesis of a new relationship between God and the world that she sees as nonhierarchical and inclusive. This opens up wide opportunities for new perspectives on other religious and cultural traditions, enabling a connection with pluralistic and inclusive religious approaches. The reference point of her line of thought is the risen, cosmic Christ in whom God’s relationship to the world, his “embodiment,” proves to be healing and salvific for the whole universe. The breadth of the relationship between God and the world, opened up by the cosmic Christ, gives room to other forms of “embodiment”; they are set free by the connection to the “root metaphor” Jesus Christ, the paradigmatic expression of the fundamental tension between God and the world.

84  Margit Eckholt A “universal” Christology – “abundant life” Sallie McFague never poses the abstract question as to the “truth” of a model. With the metaphor of the world as the body of God, she introduces a new model of the relationship between God and the world that is “nonhierarchical,”45 characterized by responsibility and concern for the cosmos, especially for all that is damaged. In this leading metaphor of her ecological theology, creation, and grace are interrelated. If the world  – in all its fragility and brokenness – is the body of God, then God is also affected by the suffering. Figuratively speaking, he is nailed to the cross over and over again. The “cosmic Christ” is the risen, crucified Christ, drawing attention above all to the bodies that are wounded and in pain. “The cosmic Christ is the physical, available, and needy outcast in creation, in the space where we live.”46 Thus the cosmic Christ is the promise of salvation for all life; he grows in and for the creation. In him, God is a God with us, in suffering and in the fight against suffering. The resurrection is a hope for the entire cosmos, transforming humanity and the cosmos, and leading to a presence of God that calls everyone to take on responsibility and be involved in the continuing action of redemption. This view of the “cosmic Christ” leads to a universal Christological perspective. That is to say, the “cosmic Christ, the body of Christ, is not limited to the church or even to human beings but, as coextensive with God’s body, is also the direction of the natural world and the place where salvation occurs.”47 This broad space of the “cosmic Christ” becomes the starting point for the “utopia of a new togetherness, a good life for the whole creation,” whereby the church is understood as a “sign” of this good life, standing in the service of the common creation story. The institutional church as manifest in concrete, local churches can become a critical social body helping to bring about the new reality. Needless to say, this does not necessarily occur in the institutions we call churches, nor does it occur only in these institutions. It may occur there but it does occur elsewhere. To say that the church is a sign rather than the symbol of the inbreaking new creation makes a modest statement about the church. It relativizes the church and describes it in terms of its function, not its being.48 That is the ecclesiological perspective of the Anglican Sallie McFague.

A new epistemological approach: “embodiment” and the “loving eye” The metaphor of the “world as the body of God” is the starting point for the draft of an ecological or “embodied” theology, which links theory with practice, the doctrine of God, and creation with an ecological ethic and

The “world as the body of God” 85 creative spirituality. The new concept of the relationship between God and the world is summed up in the sentence: “We meet God in the body of the world.”49 This implies that it is impossible to build a relationship with God as long as we practice a destructive relationship to the world – to other living creatures and to ourselves. We can only encounter God if we encounter the world in a motherly, friendly, and loving attitude. In this way, the metaphor of the “world as the body of God” is proved to be true and relevant when finding fitting ways of speaking about God. If we love ourselves, if we take care of others and the world, then we can shape adequate terms for God. The world is our “meeting place with God,” and in the vast expanse of the universe and the world God’s immanence is “universal” and God’s transcendence “worldly.”50 The diversity of bodies indicates the beauty of the world as well as its vulnerability, and on this basis, it is possible to speak of God. In The Body of God (1993) and Super, Natural Christians (1997), McFague develops an epistemological perspective for speaking of God and for theological work, ascribing a new philosophical and theological status to the body with the intention of overcoming the anthropological dualism of body and soul, or body and spirit, and the anthropocentrism that has been built up in Western modernity. As she writes in the preface to The Body of God, the point is “to begin to think and act differently, to think and act as if bodies matter.”51 This statement is based on the incarnational approach of her thinking: She takes incarnation seriously and radicalizes it. In Jesus Christ, the divine Word has become flesh and “embodied” God’s transcendence.52 “The implication of this picture is that we never meet God unmediated or unembodied.“53 This approach does not mean that God is dispersed in the world, which the criticism is leveled at a pantheistic view connected with the metaphor of the “world as the body of God.” With reference to Exodus 33:23, McFague repeatedly emphasizes that we can only see God’s “back”; there is no detraction from God’s transcendence, but when following the radical incarnational approach, it must always be thought of “incarnately,” because God is to be understood as the one who stands in a living relationship with the world from the very beginning.54 Thus we can encounter God in the world, but this is always mediated in various forms of “embodiment,”55 especially in bodies that are suffering. In this sense, people’s pathway to a relationship with God leads them to the different forms of practice and of care for others, above all for the suffering bodies. For McFague, this includes a concrete, “incarnated” perception of the other bodies, for which she has coined a new, creative image in an epistemological perspective: the image of the “embodied,” “loving eye.”56 The epistemology of the West is characterized by vision, by the “eye of understanding,” because of the significance gained by the Platonic epistemology. Sallie McFague deconstructs this primacy of seeing, which has led to a subject-object dualism, a detached view of the world. She describes such recognition as an “arrogant eye.” In contrast, she starts with feeling, the sense of touch. If we give preference to feeling, there is a change in the way we perceive others.

86  Margit Eckholt The act of seeing through the “loving eye” is embedded in another, more fundamental sensory perception – namely, touching.57 It is contact, the sense of touch, which is the primordial way in which humans relate to another. It enables us to recognize others with the “embodied eye,”58 the “eye of the body,”59 which develops a loving gaze, forming relationships with another person from subject to subject: To be in touch with others, touching them and touched by them – if this is our basic sense of who we are – we will have taken an important step toward an ecological model of being, a model that says we exist only in interrelationship with other subjects.60 By means of this recognition, which begins with the sense of touch and is not detached from the bodies, a relationship to the world comes into being that is characterized as a subject-subject relationship. I touch the other person and am myself touched by him or her. My “counterpart” is a subject in this relationship, just as I am. In such a relation, the others are not “objectified,” not “controlled” by the recognizing subject;61 the others are not mere “objects”; they are perceived and taken seriously as subjects who can give us an answer and offer resistance, a source of friction. Feeling the body enables us to perceive limits; the others are taken seriously in their diversity, their particularity, and their difference. Such a cognitive model, originating in the sense of touch, is the starting point of an integral and ecological worldview; the decisive key is the relationship that exists between all reality. We engage in relationships with all kinds of highly differing others, who are just as much subjects as we are. A “loving eye” then creates a network of relationships that can enable fellowship in the sense of a good life. For an ecological theory, the “network idea”62 is of fundamental importance. Relationship, “interrelationship,” is marked by our concrete, “embodied” existence in the world. McFague calls such a model a “functional cosmology,” a new way of understanding existence in the world, based on the biblical and philosophical concept of friendship and going beyond interpersonal relationships to take account of nature as well.

Outlook: ecological ethics and creative spirituality Sallie McFague has further developed her approach to creation theology, Christology, and epistemology, which she based on the metaphor of the “world as the body of God” into an ecological ethic and a creation spirituality as a line of thought that brings cultures and religions together in the service of common life, and the “care” for “our common home of creation,” of which Pope Francis was to speak in his encyclical letter “Laudatosi.” To speak of the world as the “body of God” enables the creation of a vision of co-existence of “relationship, reciprocity, interest in the particular, listening,

The “world as the body of God” 87 openness, paying attention, care, concern – all this sort of language becomes relevant to how we know others.”63 If life becomes “abundantly” possible through involvement for justice and sustainability, if “abundant life” becomes possible for humankind and the world, then glory is given to God. At this deep level, mysticism and practice are linked with one another. Securely rooted in a living faith in the God of Jesus Christ, the God of life, Sallie McFague finds the spiritual source of all her works in that faith. “The glory of God is every creature fully alive and, therefore, we live to give God glory by loving the world and everything in it”64 – that is her credo, as formulated in her last, most personal work. God, the “breath of life in every being that exists,” is the context of her theological work.65 Her work is characterized throughout by an “incarnational” spirituality; the theological reference point for the unfolding of the metaphor of the “world as the body of God” is Jesus Christ, the “cosmic Christ.” He is not to be understood exclusively; anchored in this Christocentric point of view, McFague’s theology stands for an openness to other cultural and religious traditions. But she repeatedly points to the great significance of Christianity’s liberating contribution to the history of religion through the basic idea of the incarnation and the resurrection, both in the past and in the present. McFague can teach a Catholic theologian how tradition may be creatively transformed, can teach her to be confident in conducting open theological investigations, because God’s ultimate reality always lies ahead of us, and we can only grow into it as each of us pursues the search in our own areas. Translation: Neville Williamson

Notes 1 McFague (1993, p. 13). The following considerations are fundamental in Eckholt (2009). 2 McFague (2001, pp. 10–13, 17–23). 3 McFague (1975, p. 181). 4 McFague (1975, pp. 176–181). 5 Cf. also Verstappen (2003, p. 38). 6 McFague (1975, p. 72), cf. also McFague (1975, p. 3). 7 McFague (1987, p. 56). 8 McFague (1982, p. 18). 9 McFague (1982, p. 17). 10 Verstappen (2003, p. 57). 11 McFague (1975, p.  86). On the critical examination of McFague’s metaphor theory: Schrein (1998, pp. 5–15), Bromell (1993, pp. 485–503), Peters (1988, pp. 131–140). 12 McFague (1987, p. 34). 13 McFague (1982, p. 102). 14 McFague (1982, p. 91), quotes this definition of the model. 15 McFague (1982, p. XI). 16 McFague (1987, pp. 32–33). This is the starting point to search for new metaphors and models for the speech of God (cf. pp. 36–37). 17 McFague (1987, p. 36).

88  Margit Eckholt 8 McFague (1987, p. 4). 1 19 McFague (1987, p. 51). 20 McFague (1982, p. 65), Also McFague (1982, p. 18): “A metaphorical theology, then, starts with the parables of Jesus and with Jesus as a parable of God.” 21 McFague (1982, p. 64). 22 McFague (1982, p. 19). McFague finds the idea of relationship in feminist theological approaches like those of Carter Heyward, among others  – Heyward (1982) – and develops it further. 23 McFague (1993, p. 134). 24 McFague (1993, pp. 184–185). 25 McFague (1982, p. 109). 26 McFague (1987, p. 60), McFague (1993, pp. 75–82). 27 McFague (1987, p. 57). 28 Cf. McFague (1987, p. 60). 29 McFague (1987, p. 60). 30 McFague (1987, p. 60). 31 Cf., e.g., McFague (1987, p. 4), where Teilhard is quoted: “I realized that my own poor trifling existence was one with the immensity of all that is and all that is still in process of becoming.” 32 McFague (1987, p. 61). 33 McFague (1987, p. 62). 34 McFague (1987, pp. 61–62). On the Sacramentality of Creation cf. Koch (1992, pp. 81–104). 35 McFague (1987, p. 77). 36 McFague (1993, p. 133). 37 McFague (1987, p. 184). 38 McFague (1994, p. 378): “Freeing the essential core of Christianity to live once again in people’s lives. This essential core is not any book or doctrine or interpretation, but the transformative event of new life, a new way of being in the world that is grounded in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth.” McFague (1994, p. 326): “What is paradigmatic in Christianity is the event of transformed existence associated with Jesus of Nazareth.” 39 McFague (1987, p.  136): “Jesus’ response as beloved to God as lover was so open and thorough that his life and death were revelatory of God’s great love for the world. His illumination of that love as inclusive of the last and the least, as embracing and valuing the outcast, is paradigmatic of God the lover but is not unique. This means that Jesus is not ontologically different from other paradigmatic figures either in our tradition or in other religious traditions who manifest in word and deed the love of God for the world. He is special to us as our foundational figure: he is our historical choice as the premier paradigm of God’s love. But all creation and all human beings have potential as the beloved of God to reflect or respond to their lover.” 40 Schrein (1998, p. 42). 41 McFague (1982, p. 165). 42 McFague (1982, p. 28). 43 McFague (1982, p. 134). 44 McFague (1982, p. 103). 45 McFague (1987, p. 78). 46 McFague (1987, p. 181). 47 McFague (1993, p. 182). 48 McFague (1993, p. 206). The Church is at the service of the new “common history of creation.” 49 McFague (1987, p. 184).

The “world as the body of God” 89 0 McFague (1987, p. 185). 5 51 McFague (1993, p. VIII). 52 McFague (1987, p. 185). 53 McFague (1987, p. 184). 54 McFague (1993, p.  134): “In the universe as a whole as well as in each and every bit and fragment of it. God’s transcendence is embodied. The important word here is ʽembodied’: the transcendence of God is not available to us except as embodied. We do not see God´s face, but only the back. But we do see the back” (133). “Radicalizing the incarnation, therefore, by using the model of the universe as God´s body is neither idolatry nor pantheism: the world, creation, is not identified or confused with God. Yet it is the place where God is present to us.” 55 McFague (1993, pp. 131–136). 56 McFague (1997, p. 77). 57 McFague (1997, pp. 93–95). 58 McFague (1997, p. 77). 59 McFague (1997, p. 94). 60 McFague (1997, p.  95). McFague refers among others to Fox Keller (1985), Code (1991). 61 That is how McFague characterizes the subject-object-recognition model of modernity: McFague (1997, p. 78). 62 McFague (1997, p. 51ff). Already in “Metaphorical theology” the relationship aspect is a leading moment of McFague’s theology. “Our lives and actions take place in networks of relationships,” and our knowledge of ourselves, of God, and of the world is “profoundly relational and, hence, interdependent, relative, situational and limited.” McFague (1982, p. 194). 63 McFague (1997, p. 37). 64 McFague (2001, p. 128). 65 McFague (2001, p. 127).

Bibliography Bromell, D. (1993). Sallie McFague’s metaphorical theology. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 61, 485–503. Code, L. (1991). What can she know? Feminist theory and the construction of knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Eckholt, M. (2009). Schöpfungstheologie und Schöpfungsspiritualität: Ein Blick auf die Theologin Sallie McFague. München: Don Bosco. Fox Keller, E. (1985). Reflections on gender and science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Heyward, C. (1982). The redemption of god: A theology of mutual relation. Washington, DC: University Press of America. Jüngel, E., & Ricœur, P. (1974). Metapher: Zur Hermeneutik religiöser Sprache: Mit einer Einführung von Pierre Gisel. München: Kaiser. Koch, K. (1992). Schöpfung als das universale Sakrament Gottes: Christlicher Schöpfungsglaube und die Krise des Sakramentalen. In K. Koch (Ed.), Gottlosigkeit oder Vergötterung der Welt? Sakramentale Gotteserfahrung in Kirche und Gesellschaft (pp. 81–104). Zürich: Benziger. McFague, S. (1966). Literature and the Christian life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

90  Margit Eckholt McFague, S. (1975). Speaking in parables: A study in metaphor and theology. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. McFague, S. (1982). Metaphorical theology: Models of god in religious language. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. McFague, S. (1987). Models of god: Theology for an ecological, nuclear age. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. McFague, S. (1993). The body of god: An ecological theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. McFague, S. (1994). An epilogue: The Christian paradigm. In P. C. Hodgson & R. H. King (Eds.), Christian theology: An introduction to its traditions and tasks (pp. 323–336). Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. McFague, S. (1997). Super, natural Christians: How we should love nature. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. McFague, S. (2001). Life abundant. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Peters, T. (1988). McFague’s metaphors. Dialogue, 27, 131–140. Ricoeur, P. (1975). La métaphorevive. Paris: Seuil. Schrein, S. (1998). Quilting and braiding. The feminist Christologies of Sallie McFague and Elizabeth A. Johnson in conversation. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. Verstappen, B. (2003). Ekklesia des lebens: Im dialog mit Sallie McFague‘s Kosmologie und der Befreiungstheologie von Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Münster: LIT Verlag.

Part II

Investigations

7 Embodied conscious life: The idea of an incarnated God and the precarious metaphor of the Cosmic Body of Christ Saskia Wendel Christophe Galfard’s The Universe in Your Hand is actually a wonderful introduction to the world of modern physics for general readers.1 Immanuel Kant famously remarked that empiricism woke him from the dogmatic slumber. There is a similar feeling after reading Galfard’s book: It left us wondering how long we will remain able and willing to create narratives that, in view of the discoveries of modern physics, turn out to be nothing other than myths. Consider our beliefs about God. We suppose he is an omnipotent being, but often we act as if this omnipotent being contacts only us earthlings, as if the earth and its creatures were his only creation, and humanity his crowning achievement. In 1584, Giordano Bruno, inspired by the Copernican Revolution in cosmology, formulated his doctrine of the infinity of worlds, a doctrine that would be right at home in modern-day astrophysics. For this and other reasons, Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic on the Campo di Fiori in Rome. Today, heretics are no longer burned at the stake, but official church teachings still assume that a single individual on Earth is the unique incarnation of a singular divine being. This view is terracentric, centered on Earth. Of course, it is also anthropocentric, centered on humankind, and, ultimately, androcentric, centered on man, because both the divine being and the incarnation of the divine being as a single individual were imagined to be male and continue to be imagined as male today. In this chapter, I ask whether it is still possible to speak of divine incarnation without this myth, and, if so, what it means for our understanding of Jesus as the Body of Christ and whether this metaphor still makes sense as a designation for an alternative idea of incarnation.

God – conscious life in the coincidence of the mental and the physical Whether God exists is a question we cannot answer. God is not an object of possible experience and is thus not an object of knowledge. But if we assume that God exists, it is important to think about what must constitute such a divine being and what ontological commitments accompany that belief. Moreover, we must ask whether these commitments are compatible with the

94  Saskia Wendel discoveries of modern physics. Here it will not suffice to follow Anselm of Canterbury in defining God as that of which nothing greater can be thought. Instead, we have to look more closely at what is meant by “nothing greater.” Martin Heidegger criticized classical theism as an “ontotheology” that hypostasizes God as the highest form of being and the maximum infinite substance.2 The upshot of this criticism is the ontological distinction being and existence: God is being but not existence, substance, or essence. Accordingly, God is not a something or someone in the sense of an individual entity, not a person in the everyday use of the word. But simply defining God as being is problematic, for the concept of being recalls Aristotle’s idea of the unmoved mover or Parmenides’s idea of being as immutability and absolute identity. The problem is that being and substance are so inextricably linked that it is difficult not to think of a maximum unmoved immutable substance when characterizing that which nothing greater can be thought as being. Moreover, the ancient notion of divine being assigns God the attributes of unconditionality and perfection, which implies that God contains within himself his own cause (aseity), making him both timeless and immutable. At the same time, if God is only being, then we cannot think of him in relation to time and history. This is why some metaphysical theories seek to temporalize God by defining him as an ontological event. But simply replacing the concept of being with the concept of event is insufficient, for it ignores the difference between what we call God and what we call nature. One might argue that “God” is a questionable ontological assumption anyway and that we should best speak only of nature, but this naturalistic metaphysics would render the religious conviction that God exists completely irrelevantly. I would thus suggest that we define God neither as being nor as event but as unconditional conscious life par excellence. Unlike being, life implies dynamism, power, and change; unlike an event, life can be distinguished from that of nature, and its laws provide that life is conscious life. But more precision is required here. In naturalistic theories of consciousness, “conscious life” still remains caught in the problems I  just identified. “Consciousness” may be restricted neither to intelligible (reflective) activities nor to mental states (including nonreflective activities). Attempts to restrict consciousness in either of these ways is called mentalism. Mentalism equates consciousness with the mind and uses it as a replacement for what the traditional metaphysics of substance called the soul, without, nevertheless, overcoming the dualism of body and mind. By contrast, current cognitive theories point out that mental states of consciousness are always embodied, which is to say they arise in relation to and in active participation with the physical states of the body. These cognitive theories identify the 4 Es of consciousness: embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive.3 The last “E” in particular makes clear that the body is not a mere passive organ of perception, a supplier and representation of the external world. Rather, it is a creative enaction of the world through conscious life. Conscious life, which unfolds in a mutual relation of the mental

Embodied conscious life 95 and physical, is  – unlike the assertions of nonegological conceptions of consciousness – not egoless (analogous to an anonymous event). Rather, it implies an irreducible first-person perspective. In other words, the activity of conscious life is unavoidably “mine” and thus one can describe this as the subjective component of conscious life. This subjective structure should not be confused with an ontological parameter, much less an “egosubstance.” Consciousness thus conceived could still be interpreted naturalistically. Consciousness may be an autonomous phenomenon, but it emerges from a physical process. And this would take God out of the equation along with any conviction that he exists. But one could object that it is remains unclear how something mental can arise out of something physical without the speculative assumption of a qualitative leap that bridges (rather than eliminates) the explanatory gap between the neuronal activity and mental states.4 Conversely, if one assumes that everything that exists (including the physical) stems from a purely mental interpretation of the ground of consciousness, the question still remains how something physical can emerge from it. This is known as the problem of mental causation: How can the mental be both the origin of the physical and that which acts on it? In view of these questions, I believe that we have no other option than to make the ontological assumption that conscious life arises from an inherent principle that belongs equally to the mental and the physical but itself is neither mind nor matter. The mental and the physical coincide in this principle, and conscious life unfolds in the coincidence of the mental and the physical. This principle brings God back into the equation for two reasons. First, one can understand under “God” an absolute, unconditional being that contains within him the cause of himself. Aseity is a necessary component of that which nothing greater can be thought. And it is through this aseity that God serves as the principle of everything that follows from him. He is a groundless ground, a self-originating origin. Second, one can understand under God not only a self-originating principle but also, following Nicholas of Cusa, the unity of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum) – and thus the coincidence of the mental and the physical. God is conscious life in the unity of the mental and the physical, and he is also the principle of everything that exists, whether as a mental or a physical state, whether as a mind or body, whether as animate or inanimate existence. God is the principle of everything that is, which means he is the principle not only of the earth and all those who inhabit it but also of the entire universe, all of its building blocks, everything that arises and passes away, all possible worlds, all multiverses. Now physics says that everything that exists ultimately consists of two components: mass and energy. Energy is able to release mass, and mass is able to create energy. As Einstein’s famous formula puts it: E = mc2. I would argue that what physics says about mass and energy corresponds with the coincidence of the mental and the physical. Indeed, the mental and the physical encompass both mass and energy.

96  Saskia Wendel That God is the principle of the universe does not imply a quasi-natural event or the aseity of the universe itself. The universe emerges not from itself but from a principle that it cannot be itself. It emerges from a principle that unites the mental and the physical as conscious life, and that like every conscious life, it is not egoless but is tied to a first-person perspective. In contrast to a finite, conditional life, what we describe as God is not individuated by a body or a substance or form that comes from it. Like every conscious life, God is singular on account of the first-person perspective of consciousness, but he is not an individual, for singularity and individuality are not the same. Nevertheless, one can describe God as a person if one uses the concept of person that designates a relation. God is a person insofar as he relates to himself and to others. Because God is not limited by a body, he can relate to everything that comes from him – and hence to all possible worlds, to individual creation, and to the totality of all possible multiverses. God is, therefore, both principle and person.

Creation – god’s image and incarnation, and Jesus of Nazareth as an instance – not the constitutive part – of incarnation and redemption If God is the principle of the universe, then the universe emerges from the unity of the mental and the physical. Spinoza defined God as the sole substance that encompasses infinitely many attributes, of which we know only thought and extension. By contrast, I  have proposed that God be understood not as a substance but as a conscious life. Accordingly, the mental and the physical are not divine attributes but elements and states of God that go beyond thought and extension. Borrowing from Giordano Bruno, I suggest that mind and matter are unified in the absolute as the condition of the possibility for emergence of possible worlds from God.5 In this, we can comprehend the universe as a manifestation, self-expression, and image of divine conscious life in the coincidence of the mental and the physical. This expression is not a mere reflection of a divine archetype; it is not a mere representation of God in a Platonic sense. It is an image in the sense of an apparition, an appearing, a showing oneself. One encounters this conception of the image in various traditions: in Kabbalah (to describe the seal of the mystical symbol),6 in Anselm of Canterbury (to describe a humanity made in God’s image and God’s word made flesh),7 in Meister Eckhart (to describe the ground of the soul in which God perpetually gives birth to himself),8 in Johann Gottlieb Fichte (to describe the self-consciousness that emerges from the absolute),9 and even in Theodor W. Adorno (to describe the function of the artwork as the appearance of truth and the nonidentical, respectively).10 The universe is not simply God’s body, as some theories of process theology maintain,11 for this implies a dualism between an intelligible God and a physical world. Rather, the universe is an expression of the divine coincidence of the mental and the physical. The universe is the great explicatio, the big bang of God’s expansion, and the

Embodied conscious life 97 great implicatio of God’s contraction – not into nothing but into himself. In this way, the universe can be understood as God’s incarnation beyond mere inspiration or mere incorporation, just as the concept of Christ’s incarnation encompasses more than mere inspiration or mere incorporation. The incarnation brings together not only the human and divine but also the mental and the physical, and puts them into a relationship in which they are neither mixed nor separated. One could object that this model implies the eternity of the world, coexisting with the eternity of God, and that this eternity negates a creation from nothing and the difference between God and the world, and reduces creation to a necessary event. Such model would, according to this objection, lead to problems not only for the determination of God and the relationship between God and the world but also for theodicy and eschatology. One can counter this objection by pointing out that creation is not a creation from nothing but from God, a creatio originans, not ex nihilo, and that creation returns to this origin – in a process of flux, becoming, and change. It is creatio continua, though not in the “bad” infinity of the endless “on and on.” It occurs intentionally and corresponds with what starts by positing everything from itself and ends by drawing everything back to it. This can be thought of as an incarnatio originans and an incarnatio continua insofar as what God posits is not completely other than himself but something that comes from him, is unified with him, and yet different from him as an image of himself. God and the universe are in a relationship of unity in difference. This process is not necessary. It does not stem from the causality of nature. It results from the causality of the divine principle as conscious life, which possesses the creative power known as freedom. Through this ability to bring forth the new, God posits the universe from the elements of mind and matter that belong to him. Bruno also tried in this way to think the contingency of creation despite the eternity of matter that belongs to God, arguing that the eternity of matter does not imply the eternity of the world. Since its beginning, the world has coexisted with God, since the world cannot exist without God. But God does not always coexist with the world, because he can exist without the world, without unfolding the mind and matter contained within him. But isn’t the conception of the universe as a divine incarnation a kind of pantheism or, at least, a panentheism? It is not a kind of pantheism because the world is not God, but an image of God. It emerges from God and his expression, but it is not identical with him in an absolute sense. And it is not a kind of panentheism because it does not conceive the world or its creatures as a part and element of God. The language of the “world in God” model – its talk of a transcendental form of perception, its metaphorics of God as a container – can be seductive, as Nietzsche might have said. But God should not be thought of as an infinite enclosure of infinite space, as the container of all creation, a maximum volume that encompasses all possible elements. This would be a form of “bad” infinity, conceived in purely quantitative terms. Instead, we must think of God as an element of the universe, which

98  Saskia Wendel is present in him as his principle, and in him appears as the multiplicity of worlds, a multiplicity that corresponds with God’s own dynamism and relation. It is not the world in God but God in the world. This is also how we should understand God’s temporality: God takes part in the process of explication and implication in what we call time and history. And none of this detracts one bit from God’s perfection, for the classic definition of God’s aseity by no means includes the immutability of God. God may be without a beginning and without an end, but he is not without time. Thinking of the incarnation in this way shifts the basic self-evident basic parameters of Christology. The incarnation of God occurs quasi-permanently both in the individual and in the totality of worlds. This means that it occurs not only multiple times, more diverse times across multiple universes. It occurs in a diversity of ways across multiple universes. And what about the singularity of God’s annunciation in Jesus of Nazareth? In view of the universality of the incarnation, one cannot speak of a singularity or of a constitutive event. God always announces himself in manifold form. He does not announce himself in an act absolutely identical with himself. God announces himself and no other, because the universe is a positing of God. God announces himself in a variety of ways because the universe is the mirror of God’s infinite relation in himself. And where does the particularity of Jesus lie in all of this? Answering this question demands that we look at Nicholas of Cusa’s ideas on the relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm, and his definition of Jesus as a “divine person” and “intermediary.” For Nicholas, the microcosm and the macrocosm have an analogous relationship: the least (the image of the microcosm) corresponds with the greatest (the image of the macrocosm). In terms of physics, one could say that the theory of relativity’s perspective on the universe and quantum physics’ perspective on the smallest particles (quarks and the like) ultimately rest on a common principle in which the greatest and the smallest, the macrocosm and the microcosm, become one. God, the unity of the microcosm and the macrocosm, incarnates himself not only in the universal of the macrocosm but also in the particular of the microcosm, including all its individual creatures. For Nicholas, it was clear that God’s incarnation in an individual person is a special case of divine incarnation, as only in human beings do mind and matter unite, only in them do the microcosm and macrocosm become one. This is how Nicholas thinks of concrete persons. In an individual, the coincidence of the microcosm and the macrocosm expresses itself completely in such a way that it is God without ceasing to be human: And, assuredly, this being would be a man in such way that He was also God and would be God in such way that He was also a man. [He would be] the perfection of the universe and would hold preeminence in all respects. In Him the least, the greatest, and the in-between things of the nature that is united to Absolute Maximality would so coincide that

Embodied conscious life 99 He would be the perfection of all things; and all things, qua contracted, would find rest in Him as in their own perfection.12 Strictly speaking, what constitutes itself in the divine person is not first and foremost incarnation and divine self-annunciation. Rather, what constitutes itself in the divine person is a concretion of, an individual instance of, and an element of a universal divine incarnation. The divine person is the culmination of divine incarnation only insofar as the greatest and the least come together with him – or her. Jesus is an example of God’s incarnation, but he is not a constitutive element of man as the image of God. And strictly speaking, the salvation that appears in and through Jesus is the appearance of something that can appear in principle in anyone. Of course, Nicholas’s clearly anthropocentric viewpoint blinds him to the possibility that there are other forms of conscious life beyond humankind in the infinite number of possible worlds that God has created – that, in other words, the microcosm and the macrocosm, the divine and the creaturely, might come together in other finite forms of existence. We cannot rule out such a possibility. Those who would object that this possibility relativizes the importance of Jesus should note that a different appearance of God elsewhere in the universe takes nothing away from what found expression in Jesus. For God cannot appear in some entirely different way, because then he would not be God, because then he would not be that which nothing greater can be thought.

And the Body of Christ? In view of what I  have argued so far, it may already be clear why the metaphor of Christ’s body does not work with my model. For one, it would entail an implausible reduction: Why should God only express himself in the Body of Christ? God has incarnated himself since the start of creation, not just since the birth of Jesus. And even if we take Christ as a metaphor for one of God’s inner relations (that of Logos, say), we would still have to ask why God incarnates himself only in this person. An attitude of superiority lies in the identification of the cosmos with the Body of Christ. The world carries the signature of Christ (and Christianity), whether it wants to or not, because Jesus of Nazareth is interpreted to possess not only an individual body but also a corporative personality that encompasses the actions and salvation of all other human beings. Understanding the cosmos as God’s incarnation does not necessarily mean that God is the Cosmic Body of Christ. And then there is the problem of the body metaphor itself. First, incarnation is not the same thing as incorporation, and the universe cannot be conceived solely as the Body of Christ. Second, the idea of total incorporation, of absorbing every individual thing as a “limb” into an all-encompassing body with a clear location and function, connotes violence. For anything that

100  Saskia Wendel leaves the confines of this body must, therefore, be considered unnatural, in violation of the organic body. In conclusion, we should dispense with the metaphor of Christ’s body along with any understanding that conceives of the world as God’s body. We should speak instead of God’s universal incarnation, one that has encompassed and will encompass every creature in every galaxy and universe, and Jesus of Nazareth should be seen as a special instance of God’s incarnation, an example to which we can refer even against the backdrop of the universe’s infinite expanse. Translation: Dominic Bonfiglio

Notes 1 Galfard (2015). 2 Heidegger (1957). 3 Varela, Rosch, and Thompson (1991), Gallagher (2005). 4 Nagel (2012). 5 Bruno (1977, p. 80ff). 6 Scholem (1991). 7 Anselm von Canterbury (1946). 8 Meister Eckhart (1936, p. 491ff). 9 Fichte (1971, Volume II, pp. 696–709, Volume V, pp. 431–460, pp. 538–545). 10 Adorno (1993, pp. 130, 148, 182). 11 Jantzen (1984), McFague (1993). 12 Nicholas of Cusa (1932, n.199).

Bibliography Adorno, T. W. (1993). Ästhetische Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Anselm von Canterbury. (1946). Monologion 38. In Anselmi opera omnia: Volume I (F. S. Schmitt, Ed.). Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson & Sons. Bruno, G. (1977). Von der Ursache, dem Prinzip und dem Einen. Hamburg: Meiner. Fichte, I. H. (Ed.). (1971). Fichtes Werke: Volume II, V. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Galfard, C. (2015). The Universe in your hand: A Journey through space, time, and beyond. London: Flatiron Books. Gallagher, S. (2005). How the body shapes the mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, M. (1957). Identität und Differenz. Pfullingen: Neske. Jantzen, G. M. (1984). God’s world, god’s body. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press. McFague, S. (1993). The body of god. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Meister Eckhart. (1936). Pr. 16a/b. In M. Eckhart (Ed.), Die Deutschen Werke. Volume I. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Nagel, T. (2012). Mind and cosmos: Why the materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nicholas of Cusa. (1932). De docta ignorantia (Opera omnia I). Hamburg: Meiner Verlag. Scholem, G. (1991). Die jüdische Mystik in ihren Hauptströmungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Varela, F., Rosch, E., & Thompson, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge: MIT Press.

8 Deep incarnation between Balthasar and Bulgakov The form of beauty and the wisdom of God Celia Deane-Drummond In this chapter, I intend to explore the theological concept of deep incarnation as it applies to creaturely existence in more detail, drawing on the theological writings of the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Russian Orthodox theologian Sergii Bulgakov. Both offer insights as to what deep incarnation might mean,1 but their work needs to be interpreted in the light of our current understanding of living organisms, both in the sense of ecological dynamics and evolutionary history. This chapter attempts to offer a comparative discussion of this aspect of their work in order to lay a foundation for further development. While I have written on deep incarnation and on Hans Urs von Balthasar and Sergii Bulgakov in an earlier publication that sets out the case for a constructive approach to Christology in the light of evolutionary theory,2 the purpose of this chapter is somewhat different. Here I begin with an interpretation of the way both these authors explore creaturely being, since this is in alignment with the more secular notion of materiality as having aspects that are neither constructed nor given – that is, toward different varieties of New Materialism.3 A focus on creaturely being also, I suggest, brings to the surface what the depth of incarnation might signify in a new way. In particular, I am drawn to the idea of understanding the human, created materiality through an evolutionary and richly entangled interspecies lens.4 In so far as Christ is fully human, he fully shares in that entangled relationship with living beings. However, I also push against those who argue for what could be termed a thin interpretation of the incarnation based on an understanding of Christ’s divinity as somehow emergent from his material, creaturely nature. This is the theological flaw that I perceive under the surface of various philosophies of New Materialism, including that of Thomas Nagel, who attempts to offer a purely naturalistic interpretation of transcendence. Instead, I insist on the idea of Christ’s reception of divinity as a particular form of beauty and wisdom of God through divine encounter that is not simply emergent from his creaturely nature, but rather translucent to the unique endowment of the loving, Divine Spirit within him. Such an endowment does not need to be understood as promoting an anthropocentric gendered bias to God’s action in the world, or presuming that we can give a fully reasoned Platonic

102  Celia Deane-Drummond account of God as absolute Other, but rather representing the first step in the hope for transformation and divinization of the whole cosmos, the Cosmic Body of Christ.

The form of beauty How far was what Hans Urs von Balthasar proposed close to deep incarnation? It is useful at the start of this chapter to consider the way in which he treated creaturely being from a theological perspective. It is also impossible to understand his position without being aware of the influence of the early Church Fathers on his thought, most especially Irenaeus of Lyons and Maximus the Confessor.5 Irenaeus and Maximus the Confessor both wrote sharply against those who sought to deny the significance and value of the material world. For Balthasar, deep incarnation was self-evident in the thought of Irenaeus, so that the becoming flesh of God means that the “redemption and resurrection of the entire earthly world is not just a possibility but a reality.”6 For Maximus the Confessor, as interpreted in Balthasar, the Transcendent God appears in the unity of heaven and earth, sense and intellect, so that transcendence is not to be understood as somehow separated from immanence, the spiritual from the material. The vision of Maximus is that of a dynamic cosmic liturgy, where all creation joins in praise of God. Creation does not so much tell us what God is like, but what the divine is not, so that a negative apophatic theology remains firmly in place, creation tells us what Being is not like. At the same time, there is an emerging understanding of an analogy of being, where the “fecundity of the divine unity” is reflected in all created things as “an image of the divine unity and uniqueness.”7 The basis for making these claims is firmly Christological, so that in one sense, the idea of analogy is indeed founded on a concept of incarnation that is fully present to the material world: In other words, incarnation has depth in it in the sense of pervading the material world. Given this background, it is hardly surprising that when Balthasar turns to his Explorations in Theology, his first volume is titled The Word Made Flesh.8 This title is not, however, intended to deny the significance of creation, but rather to raise its importance. In this respect, I part company with Noel O’Donoghue’s understanding of Balthasar, who believes that in rejecting the concept of “pure nature,” Balthasar was “left without any clear or confident concept of humanum, of natural man and natural law[.  .  .]this attitude has been disastrous.”9 While admitting that Balthasar finds the need for philosophy elsewhere in his work, O’Donoghue does not find this sufficiently embedded in his Glory of the Lord. Of course, the crucial issue here is whether affirming a strong Christological presence in creation ever weakens the material creation’s significance. Balthasar does perhaps lean a little in this direction by speaking in his Glory of the Lord of God’s revelation emerging in the tension first between body/spirit and second between cosmos and creator as only existing

Deep incarnation 103 for the sake of the tension between sinner and God who reveals himself as redeemer.10 The focus in this respect seems to be back to a traditional understanding of human-divine relationships and their healing through Christ’s redeeming work. But his theological affirmation of creation through the Word does not necessarily have to lead to the conclusion of marginality or a downplaying of the significance of the material. Creation has within it a rational character, a Word of God permanently “lying deeply hidden in the nature of things.”11 Balthasar is correct, in my view, to resist both the alternative of German idealism that identified creation with a simple manifestation of divine Being, and the sharp dualism between natural revelation and that coming from the Word of God in Christ. Secular discourse on materialism does something similar in resisting a simplistic either/or – that is, constructive or deconstructive approaches to material reality. Although Balthasar never uses the term deep incarnation, this seems to me to be precisely what he proposes. He also rejects a third alternative, which is to see revelation in the Word as that which emerges simply from the natural order as its crown and summit. Arguably, Karl Rahner takes this position, which is closer to Balthasar compared with German idealism or dualism, but does not, it seems to me, express the idea of deep incarnation in the same way as I am suggesting here.12 Hence, when God created the world, for Balthasar, it was done in and through the Logos so that something began that was to be perfected when God became flesh. It is worth mentioning Balthasar’s reliance on the concept of analogy of being understood as the “speech of revelation” presupposing “the speech of God’s creation.”13 He also uses the term analogy of being in this context in order to describe a parallel analogous relationship between humanity and other creatures. Balthasar’s perception of beauty in the world is not a judgment of taste, but a response to the form of material reality that finds its theological equivalent in the term glory. The Word breaks the divine silence, speaking first in the cosmos and then in the incarnation.14 His analogy of being expands the thought of Aquinas, but it is also influenced by Ignatian spirituality so that when we see a form in the material world it does not simply point beyond itself, but to the participation of the creature with God, leading to awe, light falling not from above or outside, but, significantly, breaking forth from the deep form of the interior.15 Given the aforementioned, when it comes to a discussion of living things, often not more than a flower, Balthasar perceives an interior reality and a mystery of the rhythm of growth that speaks of a deeper mystery of Being.16 Arguably, there is an ongoing tension that exists in Balthasar’s thought between natural revelation and divine revelation in Christ, between maintaining the “dignity of existence” along with keeping the “transcendental beauty of revelation” distinct from inner worldly natural beauty.17 He believes, therefore, that we will never be able to tell how far the splendor that is visible in creation corresponds with that found in the Word made visible and external in God made flesh.18 For Balthasar, the shattering of inner

104  Celia Deane-Drummond worldly natural beauty takes place when Christ is viewed as the form of beauty even in his suffering, death, and descent into hell. The incarnation of the Word means “the most extreme manifestness within the deepest concealment.”19 The manifestness of God becoming human is concealed through reliance on one particular human being, who is condemned to failure, death, and sinking into hell. This is a deep incarnation indeed, to the very limits of creaturely experience, including suffering, death, and the experience of what happens after death. Although Balthasar’s theology lends itself to an inclusive approach to redemption, he has a tendency to lay to one side the significance of the cosmic sense in which Christ is deeply incarnate in all that is, not least in his discussion of eschatology.20 He also has an uneasy relationship with evolutionary science, viewing it as far more predatory on theological ideas than is strictly necessary or even illuminating, assuming a pure nontranscendental materialism. But he is correct in his caution that Darwinian science presents the view that the spiritual nature of humanity is emergent from below.21 His own preference is for viewing the action of God in history in terms of theodrama, the climax of which is concentrated on the action of Christ on Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Day. Deep incarnation combined with current knowledge of evolutionary science invites a widening of this theodrama beyond the human community to all creaturely beings as well.22

The Wisdom of God Orthodox theologian Sergii Bulgakov relies less on the language of form and drama compared with Balthasar and more on a Sophiology that interlaces his whole works, a comprehensive theology of the Wisdom of God. One of the most provocatively original aspects of Sergii Bulgakov’s work is that he proposes Divine Wisdom to be not simply one of God’s energies, but a reflection of God’s Being or Ousia and eternal divine life, so that it is “the sum and unity of all his attributes.”23 The grounding of Wisdom in Ousia is an essential aspect of Bulgakov’s sophiological theology, for he believes it gives God a nature in a manner that is in some sense analogous to the human body. His view that we find in God a counterpart in the human creaturely sphere, while robustly distinguishing God from creaturely being, shows strong parallels with Balthasar’s preference for viewing the relationship between God and the world in terms of the analogy of being, as noted earlier. Bulgakov, however, takes this analogy further in drawing additional parallels between the human rational soul and spiritual body that is then mirrored in the rational Logos and the Holy Spirit of Glory.24 While Bulgakov’s speculations have been criticized on the basis that he says, from an Eastern Orthodox perspective, rather too much about what God is like, he attempts to avoid this by proposing that God as Absolute can never be known. This has some parallels with the double analogy of Being that Balthasar proposes, where God is also beyond all Being. Like Balthasar, Bulgakov intends

Deep incarnation 105 the energy for material, creaturely being to be rooted in the action of God. He does this somewhat differently by asserting more distinctly the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, but now God establishes this “nothing” in order to express the positive side of creaturely becoming dependent on bestowal of divine power. Such power should not be thought of as manipulative, but the power of love and Wisdom. Given Bulgakov’s traditional view of God as Other, creation is not necessary for God’s being, but reflects it like a mirror, and the divine prototype is expressed in terms of divine Sophia or Wisdom. In other words, creation is not simply completed in a wise manner by the action of a wise creator, but Wisdom is the power through which the material creation comes to exist. Wisdom, too, is not simply identified with the Logos, as he believes this would make the Logos the creator of the world. In this way, importantly, the beginning of creation is less a temporal category as an expression of the principle of life rooted in the divine life that is the essential Wisdom of God.25 The created world is, therefore, expressive of creaturely Sophia in that the principle on which it is based belongs to the being of God, divine Sophia, even though the world remains God’s creature, rather than the creator. The originality of Bulgakov’s position as far as the Church Fathers are concerned is that he resists the all sufficiency of the Logos in providing the unifying principle between God and the world, a position that is echoed in Balthasar’s systematic theology. However, Balthasar leans toward Bulgakov’s view in his notion of the analogy of Being. Both seem to be influenced by Platonic notions of divine prototypes, so that for Bulgakov, the creaturely likeness of divine Sophia only approximates the way the world has in fact developed. He, therefore, speaks of the difference in terms of creaturely and divine Sophia. This strong sense that what happens on Earth has echoes in the divine leads Bulgakov to speculate that the incarnation is an expression of the eternal “humanity” in God, but it is our whole humanity, rather than one particular characteristic, such as reason. The latter may rescue this concept in terms of its extension to the world of other life forms, since for Bulgakov, as for many other Church Fathers, humanity is representative of all of creation as a microcosm. Hence, the Bulgakovian notion of the eternal humanity in God can also be viewed as an expression of deep incarnation, though this time deep as signifying the springing forth from the eternal heart of the godhead. In the divine Logos, human nature is eternally hypostatized, he is the everlasting human being, the divine prototype. While both the Logos and the Holy Spirit express divine humanity, only the Logos expresses a hypostatic center for heavenly humankind. For Bulgakov, the possibility of divine Sophia becoming fully expressed in creaturely Sophia is marred by human sin, so that in the incarnation, there is a reinstatement of divine humanity and the prospect of a wider restoration of the created world. The incarnation is, therefore, in one sense also an atoning act, whose purpose reaches deep back into time to include the fall of Adam, as well as forward toward “the complete divinization of creation.”26

106  Celia Deane-Drummond But just as the divine is written into the human and the human into the divine, there is no sense in which God becoming incarnate does violence to that humanity. For Bulgakov, the incarnation of Christ means the unity of two natures expressed as the union of creaturely and Divine Wisdom. In human beings, creaturely Wisdom is obscured by sin, but in the incarnation, the Logos comes to be expressed as the human person Jesus, but without ceasing to be God, the second person of the Holy Trinity. The incarnation is, therefore, a kenotic act, a limitation of Divine Wisdom as glory in order to take up the mantle of creaturely wisdom in the state of becoming. Bulgakov expresses this idea succinctly in his book The Lamb of God where he claims explicitly, The Incarnation is first of all, a kenotic act: “The Word was Made Flesh.” For the human essence to be united with the Divine essence without being dissolved or annihilated, Divinity had to descend, to diminish itself to the human essence.27 Bulgakov recognizes such a process as a paradox: “The eternal God becomes the becoming God in the God-man [. . .] to make man capable of receiving God, of living the life of God, of being the God-man.”28 The passion, death, and resurrection of the incarnate Christ permit, therefore, not simply a recovery of humanity to a state before the fall, but the prospect of full divinization, theosis. The incarnation, therefore, grounds not only the affirmation of creation but also its future redemption.

Sophia, the new ecology and interspecies anthropology How far might the ideas of either Balthasar or Bulgakov make sense in the light of our knowledge of material living systems? Current understanding of ecology has, over the last quarter century, shifted more toward an understanding of ecological dynamics in terms of flux than stability. Ecology in its original formulation viewed ecological systems as essentially closed, self-regulating, free of disturbance, and independent of human influences. The idea of “wild” nature untouched by human interference captured the imagination of pioneers in environmental ethics.29 As research progressed, ecosystem boundaries came to be viewed as being far more fluid than previously thought so that the prospect of self-regulation seemed unlikely, and at best in any one case, there seems to be an equilibrium state, rather than a persistent equilibrium. This leads to the view that ecological systems are in a state of flux, are open to external as well as internal influences, are subject to a multiplicity of complex control systems, and are open to human disturbance. Such a new understanding of a philosophy of ecology is in alignment with the broad shift toward New Materialism philosophies, with their stress on matter being viewed as self-organizing and matter-energy, rather than

Deep incarnation 107 being made of inert passive “stuff.” The constant flux and creative capacities of matter implies a flat ontology, rather than a hierarchy of forms.30 It also implies that there is no self-centered unity or essence to any beings, including human beings. The idea of hylomorphism or a theory of forms is, therefore, out of the question; instead, there is a constant flowing state of becoming. In John Reader’s analysis of the application of New Materialism to religious studies, humanity is viewed in a different light so that “the study of religion is a kind of Deleuzian transcendental empiricism engaged in the examination of ever-changing assemblages that are part of that process of immanent becoming  – becoming-human, becoming-woman, becomingman, becoming-saint.”31 He also acknowledges that the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and its influence on Bruno Latour is not far behind. Such a process philosophy, by its stress on fluidity of becoming, could imply that attempts to articulate constructive distinctions between different forms in the evolutionary tree, including the emergence of life, are just convenient placeholders and, therefore, to some extent are illusionary. Instead of specific, individual forms, there is a cosmic flux of becoming in a single interlaced body of beings. In practice, however, ecologists and biologists still use clear and constructive definitions of different species and subspecies according to distinctive and well-defined characteristics, even if those distinctions are recognized as to some extent heuristic tools to enable some insight into the complexity of interrelationships. There is, therefore, some retention of concepts of hierarchy in ecological food chains and other ecosystem structures, as without that acknowledgment, the system itself would not function. Further, in an analogous way, classic or standard evolutionary theory that assumes that it is only specific genetic “units” that are selected has now been challenged by developmental systems theory that puts much more stress on the gradual processes of becoming in the system as a whole. At the same time, few evolutionary biologists wish to dispense with genetic theory altogether, and the former insistence on the validity of natural selection of specific genes provides an important framework for empirical work on evolutionary change.32 The point I  am trying to make here is that the New Materialist philosophies of science also have their limits, even within specific sciences, particularly when dealing with life forms. Further, if that is the case, then one might anticipate limitations in understanding the divine just according to a process model. An attempt to fill that void by speaking of an apophatic dimension to God does not necessarily help either, not least because that apophaticism will be shaped by the imagination that informs the way God is understood as present in the world of becoming. On one level there are, I suggest, still elements of a process view embedded in the works of Balthasar and Bulgakov, who retain a classic understanding of God but avoid static imagery that is sometimes associated with such views. Bulgakov’s perception of the dynamism inherent in the way Sophia works in the material world in the manner of an unfolding presence

108  Celia Deane-Drummond resonates with the New Materialist view of becoming. Both Bulgakov and Balthasar’s views on Christ as incarnate in material created reality are still colored somewhat by the influence of early Church Fathers, but Maximus the Confessor’s notion of God acting through divine motion would fit with a dynamic view of God’s action in the world. The relative stability engendered by Platonic ideas of the divine prototypes found in the material world will not be appealing in view of the drastic changes that are being witnessed in ecological and evolutionary history. But perhaps their very different ontological presuppositions can act as a warning not to reduce material reality to such accounts, for even Bulgakov and Balthasar were ready to admit that knowledge of God’s intentions go beyond that of human reasoning. Indeed, it forms the qualifying basis for the relative claim of human wisdom compared with the Wisdom of God. At this juncture, I  would like to be clear where I  am prepared to follow New Materialist views and where I think they are more explicitly problematic when adopted wholesale into a theological understanding of Christology, specifically Christ’s Cosmic Body and the meaning of the incarnation. Theological anthropology has, traditionally, taken its cues from an understanding of Christ: humanity is made in the image of the divine image, which is, in perfected form, Christ. Concerns that such a view could narrow an understanding of the incarnation to anthropocentric renderings of its meaning, so the Word becomes flesh is reduced to the Word becomes human, or even, in its gendered variety, the Word becomes man can be offset by widening the notion of the Word becoming flesh to include the whole of material reality in deep incarnation. An alternative approach, and one that I have developed, is to stress the entangled and interspecies aspects of human life and the gradual process of becoming human through those entangled interrelationships.33 So, traditional distinctive marks of the human person through our so-called unique abilities to engage in reason, language, and religion are understood not as a basis for power or dominance over other creatures, but as part of a much wider process of becoming where the lines between human and other animals are far more blurred. All such moves in theological anthropology fit with a process view of human becoming with its stress on the importance of dynamic relationships and an unfolding sense of who we are in the world, including a sense of the divine. Given the challenge to the human/animal divide and other traditional boundaries through the influence of Jacques Derrida, it is, therefore, not all that surprising that some more adventurous philosophers are prepared to explore the possibility of transcendence as an emergent property within the material world, but without necessarily either taking refuge either just in the new physics or in an assertion of faith in a divine Being.

Nagel, transcendent being and the Body of Christ Thomas Nagel is one of those philosophers prepared to challenge a purely materialistic understanding of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and

Deep incarnation 109 pressed instead for something that is rather more akin to a process theological understanding of the presence of transcendence in materiality.34 Nagel rejects the idea of a transcendent being of any kind and admits that he has no sensus divinitatis.35 At the same time, unlike the process philosophers, he resists the view that an ultimate theory of everything can simply emerge from the laws of physics, including the post-Newtonian laws that many New Materialists have habitually found resonant with their views and indeed a material basis for it. For Nagel, “theism pushes the quest for intelligibility outside the world. If God exists, he is not part of the natural order, but a free agent not governed by natural laws.”36 He avoids, in this respect, any theologies of the incarnation, quite apart from any attempt to consider the work of the Spirit  – that is, a pneumatology. What bothers him about his perception of traditional theism is the distinctive break between God and the natural world, the Otherness of God who seems to speak as a voice of authority from without, rather than from within. Leaving aside his somewhat naive understanding of God as incarnate and his ignorance of theologies of the Trinity, it is worth asking how Nagel attempts to solve the problem of understanding transcendence as arising within the material world. Nagel recommends that we do not give up on the search for a transcendent view of our place in the universe while avoiding what he terms “psychophysical reductionism.”37 The task is one that seeks a naturalistic interpretation that goes beyond explanations of transcendence as a “side effect” of natural processes while avoiding any notion of divine “interventions.”38 It would be tempting for theologians to align with such openness to the possibility of transcendence and align their understanding of Christ in such terms as an exemplar of emergent divinity, but one in principle who could be found in all human beings. The theological movement in this respect is from the cosmos to Christ, to the Divine, rather than flowing the other way around, from the divine to the cosmos mediated in the person of Christ. In so far as Christ shared in our human nature, the entangled, interspecies, and evolutionary basis of Jesus of Nazareth’s being on earth was just as fully human as any one of us living today. It is in this sense that I am prepared to speak of intercarnations in a manner that resonates to some extent with the thinking of Catherine Keller.39 I, too, acknowledge with gratitude the multitude of forms that exist on planet Earth and our dense and entangled, and even participatory relationships with them all. At the same time, I suggest that it is vitally important that an understanding of ourselves and the figure of Christ is not reduced just to such accounts. This is where a more traditional understanding of divinely and naturally endowed forms, and divine encounter can provide a potential corrective. That encounter need not be one of power over, but rather an encounter of love in relationships, love that opens up to new being and becoming rather than closes in on itself or resorts to abdicating responsibility by leaving it to God, understood, falsely, in the manner of Nagel, just as an external force. Such a view edges toward

110  Celia Deane-Drummond that articulated by Paul Fiddes when he speaks of the importance of understanding God’s love in a relational way, but without reducing God either to the material aspects of the world or losing sight of the importance of not coming to too hasty a decision about envisioning God as object. The God to whom we relate is also a God of mystery.40 The life of Christ represented in the gospel narratives highlighted his intense need for an ongoing dialogical relationship with God as a means of gaining a different perspective that then informed his specific choices and decisions. Jesus of Nazareth consciously aligned his will and decisions with those of God, rather than just allowed them to simply emerge from the situations that he found himself in. I suggest that naming Christ as Wisdom incarnate rather than the Logos incarnate can help restrain any tendencies toward a mind-matter or power over dualism that can sometimes emerge in Logos Christologies.41 Further, Wisdom stresses interrelationships rather than just reasoning over, while not avoiding the importance of reason and insight. Deep incarnation is, therefore, in my view, Wisdom incarnate in all that exists. Such a view of God as still being in some sense Divine Other avoids total identification of Divine Wisdom with the material world in a way that shows up problematic aspects of evil in the world, unless God is considered malevolent as well as beneficent. Further, the Body of Christ is the Body of Wisdom incarnate in the world, while recognizing that the material body in which humanity and all of creation is embedded has not yet grown to full maturity. Process theologians are, therefore, correct to insist on a lure of God arising within the world, while at the same time, I would wish for a movement the other way around as well, a speaking into the world in its becoming, an encounter with a Divine Other that is capable of challenging toward new growth so that the earth more perfectly reflects the Cosmic Body of Christ that it will eventually become. I see, therefore, the Cosmic Body of Christ imagery as an eschatological goal, rather than a present reality – a work that has only just begun to be perceived in the material world around us.

Conclusion I began this chapter with an outline of two influential theologians in Christian theology, one from a Roman Catholic and one from an Eastern Orthodox tradition. Both stress the importance of God as Other than the creature, but both also have a rich understanding of transcendence that is not sharply divided from immanence. While Balthasar achieves such a joining of God and creation through his concept of an analogy of Being, Bulgakov relies on Divine and creaturely Sophia. In both, Christology is critical to such an understanding, in Balthasar through creation becoming an echo of the Word of God, where the forms perceptible in the material world are related to God’s glory, breaking in from creaturely interiority, rather than from without. In Bulgakov we find, instead, creation envisaged as a principle of

Deep incarnation 111 life rooted in the divine life and an eternal humanity in God where a holistic understanding of human nature becomes hypostasized. The incarnation in Bulgakov is a self-emptying kenosis of Divine Sophia, a paradox of God’s humiliation in becoming unlike God, temporal and enfleshed, while still remaining God. Such views resonate with new materialistic philosophy in so far as the dynamism of the divine life is stressed, rather than notions of creatures as fixed or static forms. At the same time, both Balthasar and Bulgakov resist reducing the spiritual to the material or understanding Christ’s incarnation as an emergent divinity. I believe that both their views need to be challenged in so far as they do not take sufficient account of the gendered nature of our material bodies, or the entangled interlaced patterns of ecological life, or the promise of evolutionary science. However, their perspectives are, I  suggest, important in showing the limits of a purely naturalistic understanding of transcendence. Thomas Nagel illustrates this view, not least through his own presumption that God is necessarily understood as an Other who intervenes in the world in a way that does not do justice to theological thinkers, such as Balthasar or Bulgakov. Further, a purely emergent Christ does not seem to provide the possibility of a radical transformation of the world that is evident when the movement of God in the world is understood as a coming toward that world rather than just an emergence from that world. Jürgen Moltmann expressed a similar idea through his conception of the importance of understanding the action of God in terms of adventus, rather than futurans.42 Although Moltmann is rather too confident both about what God is like and what the future of creation looks like, his distinction between scientific emergence and a metaphysics that presupposes God’s transcendence is important. The Cosmic Body of Christ in so far as it accurately reflects the materiality of Christ in the world is in this sense also a future hope, engendered through an encounter with the living God, rather than just a present reality. There are hints at the presence of Christ in all that is, but the atoning elements of the incarnation are not yet complete. As long as sufficient care is taken to address the limitations of their views, the Balthasarian theme of the Form of Beauty and the Bulgakovian perception of the Wisdom of God, therefore, can still inform how Christ as deep incarnation is to be perceived, even within a broader vision of the Cosmic Body of Christ in all that is.

Notes 1 See also Gregersen (2015), which includes a chapter where I focus on developing the specific contribution of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s understanding of theodrama in the light of a stress on historically grounded hermeneutic of the word made flesh, rather than its cosmic aspects. I did not wish in that chapter to leave the impression that I thought that all cosmic aspects were mistaken. 2 Deane-Drummond (2009). 3 For example, Reader (2017).

112  Celia Deane-Drummond 4 Deane-Drummond (2014). 5 Von Balthasar (1988, 1990). 6 Von Balthasar (1990, p. 9). 7 Von Balthasar (1988, pp. 69–70). 8 Von Balthasar (1989). 9 O’Donoghue (1994, p. 258 n. 2). 10 Von Balthasar (1982, p. 441). 11 Von Balthasar (1989, p. 23). 12 I have commented on Rahner’s view elsewhere; see Deane-Drummond (2009, pp. 40–43). 13 Von Balthasar (1989, p. 84). 14 Von Balthasar (1982, p. 28). 15 Von Balthasar (1982, p. 151). 16 Von Balthasar (1982, p. 444). 17 Balthasar (1982, pp. 25, 41). 18 Balthasar (1982, p. 449). 19 Balthasar (1982, p. 451). 20 Deane-Drummond (2010, pp. 46–64). 21 Balthasar (1958, p. 41). 22 Deane-Drummond (2009). 23 Bulgakov (1993, p. 54). 24 Bulgakov (1993, p. 58). 25 Bulgakov (1993, p. 67). 26 I have to leave to one side here whether the fall of Adam is still convincing in the light of evolutionary biology, but I have written on this elsewhere, such as in Deane-Drummond (2008, pp. 13–32). 27 Bulgakov (2008, p. 219). 28 Bulgakov (2008, p. 221). 29 Deane-Drummond (2004, pp. 29–38). 30 Reader (2017, p. 3). 31 Reader (2017, p. 45). 32 I discuss different evolutionary theories in more detail in Deane-Drummond (2020). 33 Deane-Drummond (2014). 34 Nagel (2012). 35 Nagel (2012, p. 12). 36 Nagel (2012, p. 26). 37 Nagel (2012, p. 32). 38 Nagel (2012, p. 32). 39 Keller (2019). 40 Fiddes (2019). 41 See, for example, my discussion of the comparison between Logos Christology and wisdom Christology in Deane-Drummond (2000, 2009, pp. 103–104, 134–137). 42 See, for example, Moltmann (1979).

Bibliography Bulgakov, S. (1993). Sophia: The wisdom of god: An outline of Sophiology. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press. Bulgakov, S. (2008). The lamb of god (B. Jakim, Trans.). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Deep incarnation 113 Deane-Drummond, C. (2000). Creation through wisdom: Theology and the new biology. Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Deane-Drummond, C. (2004). The ethics of nature. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Deane-Drummond, C. (2008). Sophia in Christological perspective: The evolution of sin and the redemption of nature. Theology and Science, 6(1), 13–32. Deane-Drummond, C. (2009). Christ and evolution: Wonder and wisdom. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Deane-Drummond, C. (2010). The breadth of glory: A Trinitarian eschatology for the earth through critical engagement with Hans Urs von Balthasar. International Journal of Systematic Theology, 12(1), 46–64. Deane-Drummond, C. (2014). The wisdom of the liminal: Evolution and other animals in human becoming. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Deane-Drummond, C. (2020). Theological ethics through a multispecies lens: Evolution of wisdom volume one. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fiddes, P. (2019). God is love: Love is god? Perplexities about the relation between love and truth. Unpublished paper, European Academy of Religion Annual Conference, Bologna, March 4. Gregersen, N. (Ed.). (2015). Incarnation: On the scope and depth of Christology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress. Keller, C. (2019). Members of each other: Intercarnation, gender and political theology. In A. Jax & S. Wendel (Eds.), Envisioning the cosmic body of Christ: Embodiment – Plurality – Incarnation. Paderborn: Schöningh. Moltmann, J. (1979). The future of creation (M. Kohl, Trans.). London: SCM Press. Nagel, T. (2012). Mind and cosmos: Why the materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Donoghue, N. (1994). Appendix: Do we get beyond Plato? A critical appreciation of the theological aesthetics. In B. McGregor & T. Norris (Eds.), The beauty of Christ: An introduction to the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (pp. 253–266). Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Reader, J. (2017). Theology and new materialism: Spaces of faithful dissent. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Von Balthasar, H. U. (1958). Science, Religion and Christianity. London: Burns & Oates. Von Balthasar, H. U. (1982). Glory of the lord, vol. 1: Seeing the form (E. LeivàMerikakis, Trans.). Edinburgh: T  & T Clark and San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. Von Balthasar, H. U. (1988). Cosmic liturgy: The universe according to maximus the confessor (B. E. Daley, Trans.). San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. Von Balthasar, H. U. (1989). Explorations in theology vol. 1: The word made flesh. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. Von Balthasar, H. U. (1990). The scandal of the incarnation: Irenaeus against the heresies (J. Saward, Trans.). San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press.

9 Incarnational presence Sacramentality of everyday life and the body or: unsystematic skeptical musings on the use of a central metaphor Maaike de Haardt Setting the scene: sacramentality and theology of everyday life I will approach my reflections on the metaphor of the Cosmic Body of Christ from my “theology of everyday life” perspective. In this approach, the body, embodiment, and actual everyday practices are epistemologically central and sensual knowledge of touching, tasting, smelling is a source that is at least as important as the traditionally more privileged senses of seeing and hearing.1 This perspective, inspired in particular by womanist theologian Delores Williams, by mujerista theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz, and by the critical cultural turn to the everyday initiated by historian and cultural theorist Michel de Certeau, demonstrates a preference for “the ordinary” as the starting point for theological reflections, even though the ordinary or the everyday may be difficult to define.2 With his now famous image of the city seen from the World Trade Center, de Certeau described the price paid by “the ministers of knowledge” for taking their view of the whole – the panorama city with it lines and grids – as the norm of knowledge and truth. The price of what he calls this “visual simulacrum” is a picture that is detached from intertwining daily behaviors; it is a misunderstanding of practices and an oblivion of the condition of possibility.3 The actual spatial tactics and practices of the city walkers, their networks, and their creative appropriation of prescribed expectations, images, symbols, concepts, and rules of the dominant political, social, or religious order remain invisible. Nevertheless, these are precisely the spaces and practices that, according to de Certeau, allow people to stay alive. Or as Ada María Isasi-Díaz, mujerista pioneer of the quotidian, has said, these “reveal people’s hopes and expectations.”4 They reveal the how of belief, much more than the what of belief, the subject of the ministers of belief. Besides the ethical and political choice implicated in this approach, there is yet another important dimension, which I have called a sense of presence, or aesthetic presence, sacramental presence, or incarnational presence. For both de Certeau and myself, this sense of presence is related to a “capacity for being filled with wonder.”5 And, following Bauerschmidt, in his interpretation of de Certeau, this encounter with the wonder

Incarnational presence 115 of daily life is one of the many forms of the experience of “presence” (or may we say “God”?) that reveals itself as “that without which life is impossible.”6 As for me, de Certeau refers here to the kind of experiences of presence that I encountered in Alice Walker’s description of her mother’s art, creativity, and spirituality while working in her garden.7 I also saw it in the experiences of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz when she was banned to the kitchen and discovered, to her surprise, that even there she was able to find the work and the presence of God,8 and when Teresa of Avila speaks about God moving among the pots and pans.9 As the famous food writer M. F. K. Fisher wrote, “There is always a more in speaking of cooking and having a meal.”10 It is my conviction that such an experience of a “more” can be found any place one is willing to see it, hear, smell, touch, and taste it, and is willing to wonder. In this sense, experiences of presence are a response to that which is present. Not only artists and mystics, but ordinary women and men, too, bear witness to these experiences or respond to that which cannot be fully described in rational or logical terms and can, therefore, only be articulated under an apophatic provisio. This sensual, ordinary, and experiential embodied knowledge encompasses an almost self-evident openness toward the unknown, the experiment to trying over and again. These kinds of experiences of “presence,” whether explicitly labeled as religious, sacramental, or incarnational, reveal the power, resistance, openness, and creativity that “allow people to stay alive,” as well as their “hopes and expectations.”11 This kind of experiences of presence refer to that which in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions is called “sacramental,” hence the choice to speak of sacramental presence and the sacramentality of everyday life. To develop a theology from an everyday life perspective with as its starting point all kinds of ordinary and cultural practices, such as cooking; having a meal; caring; struggling; loving; watching a movie; seeing a painting or a sculpture; gardening, participating in city life; and making pottery, is my way of countering a transcendent or traditional theism, a compulsory doctrinal or symbolic conformity, and a clerical authoritarian Roman Catholic form of Christianity in the hope of being able to contribute to a theological and religious perspective to a more just world, or whatever words or images we might use to articulate the deep and strong hope and vision that, in the slogan of the World Social Forum, “another world is possible.” A hope and a vision feminist and other theologians share with a diverse group of contemporary philosophers like Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, and Nicolas Smith, as well as public intellectuals like Terry Eagleton and Rebecca Solnit who recently, against the academic and the populist grain, brought the theme of hope and vision back into critical thinking.12 This aim, following Rosemary Carbine, makes this type of theology a form of public theology. In Carbine’s view, the “public” dimension of theology should be determined – and that is my point here – by its “convocative capability.”13 Or, as she states, “Its imperative to perform community-building work, to create an overarching, transcendent, or ‘ultimate public’ in which

116  Maaike de Haardt we live, move and have our being, sociopolitically speaking.”14 According to Carbine, for a constructive feminist public theology to be effective it needs to create a more inclusive and just common life, instead of “influencing a debate in a not-quite-shared community of rational discourse, fostering an array of democratic practices that aim to remake the public itself.”15 In my search for reconfiguring Christian discourse, symbols, and metaphors, I consider this convocative capability, or as others would say, this “world making ability,”16 important and, with regard to my own approach, leading. The vision of a just world, as a critical, hopeful, and, possibly, even prophetic challenge for society and churches, is always and unavoidably located in a specific political, cultural, economic, and religious context, in a particular place. My cultural, political, and religious context is a secularized Western Europe, more specifically the Netherlands, and qua religion even more specific: a progressive Dutch post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism. This specific context, following de Certeau again, has thoroughly conditioned my religious language, interpretations, and experiences. And I need to confess here that neither the metaphor of the Body of Christ, nor the feast of Corpus Christi, was part of my religious socialization, nor of my theological education. It is from this perspective that I  see more potential in revitalizing notions as sacramentality presence, sacramental presence, and, perhaps, incarnational presence, than in updating the metaphor of the Body of Christ, either cosmic or not. So I first turn to what in my view is the convocative potential of sacramentality – or better, of sacramental presence – that appeals to supporting and developing practices for social, economic, and ecological justice – as a revitalized notion of sacramentality that does not only concern Christians.

The ambiguous possibility of sacramentality To be sure, the broad and old principle of sacramentality, generally understood as the inherent potential or possibility of the material world, matter, to be a manifestation of the divine, is not a Christian invention. It is much older and can be found in many different images, symbols, rituals, and words, in divergent religious and perhaps even secular traditions.17 Nevertheless, it is a formally highly acclaimed principle in the Roman Catholic tradition. Sadly, this principle is hardly ever promoted fully, let alone in this general sense. It is even contradicted by the church. Not only by Christianizing this principle but also by institutionalizing, legalizing, and controlling it. In this sense, the Christian tradition has concealed and reduced the sacramental potential of matter to a countable number of monopolized inner-church action words. It comes as no surprise that many people feel alienated from these historically developed and ecclesiastically authorized conventions of sacramental imagination and practice.18 Contemporary traditional sacramental theologians speak about a “sacramental crisis,” which for that matter, and according to Kristine Suna-Koro, is a specific problem

Incarnational presence 117 of the Western church and Western theology. It would be too easy to put the blame for the crisis of a sacramental worldview, notably in its ecclesiocentric shape, on secularization, as many sacramental theologians do, according to both Brown and Suna-Koro.19 This can be seen as an excuse for refusing a “much needed and profound soul-searching and courageous examination of their own dualistic entrapments both on the level of theological imagination and doctrinal orthodoxies as well as authoritarian ecclesial power and gender dynamic.”20 According to Agbonkiamanghe Orobator, the real sacramental crisis is the question, “How the Church, this basic and fundamental sacrament of Christ, also conspires to conceal God’s ‘extragavant affections’ from the people of God.”21 Or, as Susan Ross states, “The sacramental crisis is in essence an institutional and moral crisis.”22 My concern here is not primarily about the sacraments in a stricter sense or as liturgical practices, although I will return to this point later in relation to the Body of Christ metaphor. I am mainly interested in the underlying general sacramental principle that everything/everyone might embody and communicate the divine. This means that the divine can only be approached in and through the world. Therefore, more than just a principle, sacramentality is constitutive of revelation.23 I consider the recent interest in sacramentality, on the part of feminist, liberation, and postmodern and postcolonial theologians, a specific, critical, religious, political, and affirmative approach of the material dimensions of corporeal life. It even occurred to me that sacramental and incarnational thinking could be considered to be a kind of New Materialism avant la lettre since matter really matters for a sacramental approach. Recent philosophical and theological interest in materiality, embodiment, and the ordinary is more than a simple epistemological critique on models and methods of thinking that seem to have lost their explanatory power. It is rather fueled by developments in science and technology in which processes, energy, forces, and changes of matter are more central, as well as by environmental issues and the insights in what Keller calls “planetary entanglement.”24 It is not by chance then that renewed interest in sacramentality from the outsiders of the classic sacramental and liturgical theological traditions move in step with the development of critical, gender-sensitive body theologies.25 To some extent, the complex theological history of sacramentality parallels the complex theological history of the body.26 Taking sacramentality seriously has, therefore, strong ethical implications, and sacramentality cannot be left to a romantic, nostalgic, or pious affirmation of the beauty of the earth, or to ecclesial provisions of what counts as sacrament. Sacramentality is referring to the possibility of divine presence, but it needs a response in order to actualize that presence in a beneficial way. It presupposes discernment: not every act, touch, smell, or word is just or beautiful. It may just as well be evil. Taking sacramental presence seriously can be dangerous and risky, since the sacramental is ambiguous, complex, and fluid. It is volatile, finite, and vulnerable in its materiality or bodylines. Experiences of presence come

118  Maaike de Haardt and go: They escape stable and objective description and cannot be controlled. Hence the fear of the churches and their need to domesticate the sacramental. There is always a “more,” whether in a piece of bread, in a poem, in the instrumental sacrament, or in oppressive and exclusive political, social, and cultural systems. Some will call this “more,” this presence, the divine; others call it God, life force, Eros, spirit, vitalism. Some will call it Christ. However, irrespective of the name it is, the responsiveness to this presence that for better or worse, embodies the possible power of this presence. Elsewhere, I used the model of Thirdspace or “lived space,” as developed by geographer Edward Soja in his interpretation of Levebvre’s Production of Space, while reflecting on incarnational presence in the city.27 Thirdspace refers to places in which creative appropriation transcends and reshapes both given reality (Firstspace) and powerful prescriptive symbols and regulations regarding all domains of life (Secondspace). It is in the margins of Thirdspace that new coalitions arise, where new ways for building bridges are sought and the foundation for solidarity and for political, social, artistic, and religious practices can be found. This hybrid meeting ground, where ties can be severed and new ties forged, can, according to urban geographer Soja, “be mapped but never be captured in conventional cartographies; it can be creatively imagined but obtains meaning only when practiced and fully lived.”28 Can this Thirdspace, this provisional, elusive, embodied, and located space be considered a response to sacramentality, to sacramental presence with and beyond Christ? And considering that Thirdspace is a ground for new and unlikely coalitions, does the articulation of the experience of a “more” that enables people to stay alive, that manifests their hopes and dreams, indeed contain the convocative capability to engender bridges and solidarity, to engender a cosmopolitan conviviality of a more just world, in which differences are respected and human flourishing for all is central – in other words: to engender the conditions of possibility? I am inclined to answer in the affirmative, assuming that specific and explicit Christological articulations are minimalized, which is not to say that they are neglected, forgotten, let alone forbidden. As indicated earlier, not only Christians foster hope and not only Christians have visions of another possible world in which ontological relationality is central. Braidotti even calls faith in the future, as well as the acknowledgment of ontological relationality, a form of postsecular spirituality. It is a postsecular position, in that it is an immanent not transcendental theory, which posits generous bonds of cosmopolitanism, solidarity and community across locations and generations. It expresses sizable doses of residual spirituality in its yearnings for social justice and sustainability. [. . . .] We are confronting today a postsecular realization that all beliefs – their different propositional content not withstanding – are acts of faith. The operational concept is faith itself: the belief in a social

Incarnational presence 119 narrative, in its imaginary hold, and its normative implication. All belief systems contain a hard core of normativity and of spiritual hope.29 Of course, there is much more to be said about this view, but for now, I consider it to be extremely important that with this postsecular position, many so-called and self-identified secularists like Braidotti challenge European political theory and European feminism through acknowledging that religious engagement and religious agency indeed can – and in fact do – support practices of transformation.30 The feminist project itself, according to Braidotti, is a hopeful, visionary, and prophetic project driven by a desire, like a forward-moving horizon that lies ahead and toward which one moves. “Between the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’ desire traces the possible pattern of becoming.”31 It is at this point of acknowledging the need of a more visionary power and the pursuit of practices of hope that Braidotti argues in favor of “mobilizing resources and visions that have been left untapped and by actualizing them in daily practices of interconnections with others.”32 In my view, this appeal to mobilizing different, and formerly excluded, religious sources of hope and visions of transformation in critical theory, and in the corresponding appeal to pursue practices of hope, rooted in ordinary micro-practices of everyday life, also represents the attempt to provide – on a theoretical level  – the scope for what was impossible in strict perhaps dogmatic secular thinking  – that is, to create unlikely coalitions working toward a better future, motivated by the hope and vision that another world is possible. In my complex European-Dutch context, Christianity has begun, quite understandably, to acquire a bad reputation. Christian churches in many countries explicitly or rather implicitly support sexism, racism, and rightwing nationalism, by way of, for example, ridiculing gender ideology, by demonizing the strange other, and through increasingly neo-orthodox tendencies. Hence, we need critical unlikely coalitions that include religiously motivated people and practices that do not fuel this antireligious sentiment by advocating an ultimately predominant Christocentric Christianity that refers to the world as the Cosmic Body of Christ. A sacramental approach of embodied, experiential, ethical, relational, located, and, ultimately, apophatic theology of divine presence, attempts to counter an imperialist theism by emphasizing – in traditional terms – divine immanence or immanent transcendence. In my view, this approach does not need any further Christological specifications connected with, for instance, salvation, Christ’s uniqueness, his cosmological presence, or sacraments, in order to be convocative for many visionaries and dreamers of another world. Although I am well aware of the fact that for others, in a different context, defending this critical sacramental approach necessarily or strategically ends with the sacraments, especially the Eucharist and Christ.33 Sacramentality in my open general sense does not refer to a specific Christian content, but primarily to a spiritual attitude beyond oppositions

120  Maaike de Haardt between religion and secularity or different religious traditions. My favorite description of this “both and beyond” spirituality is derived from the Indian theologian Samuel Rayan in his search for a this-worldly, historic, nonindividualistic, and transformative description of spirituality. In his view, this description should be open to “any kind of incarnation or ‘descent’ of God.”34 A  definition of spirituality, especially in the cultural and religious plural world, should go beyond a Christian or any other specific religious framing, without however denying their value. It should, moreover, be a definition that is not only open to different religious sources but can also encompass the stories of people, women and men, and relate to their struggles, their dignity, and their pain, hope, and courage. This leads him to describe spirituality as “the openness and the response-ability that goes beyond mere accountability to the willingness and readiness to respond to situations of importance for life.”35 In this definition, Rayan understands the Spirit as an energizing and transformative force aiming at “fuller life, finer humanity.”36 As such this, in my view, can be “matched” with religious, secular, and postsecular cosmopolitan hope and visions. A spiritual attitude as a way of being in the word. In this definition, spirituality is a two-sided attitude: a radical openness to the unpredicted, the unexpected, and, perhaps, the unwanted, and the human ability to respond in a responsible and ethical way. To take up responsibilities can be considered to be an almost universal appeal that is found in many wisdom traditions and grounded in ontological relationality: (post)secular thinkers like Braidotti and Butler, as well as many theologians would agree. Accounting for “the hope that is in them’’ is, Braidotti would probably say, “for love of the world,” thereby referring to Hannah Arendt.37 Many Christians would probably say “out of love for God” and would probably somehow refer to the narrative tradition in which the person of Jesus plays the central part.

Sacramental presence and the (Cosmic) Body of Christ How then, does this transformational praxis oriented sacramental perspective relate to the metaphor of the body or the Cosmic Body of Christ? It does not seem a coincidence that most of the recent approaches to the Cosmic Body of Christ, to Incarnational and Cosmic Christologies at first sight seem to concur with many of the questions and aims of my sacramental everyday approach. And one of my reasons for using the notion of incarnational presence every now and then is that this sacramental approach is explicitly – though in a vague and opaque way – rooted in the broad and highly diverse Christian tradition. At the same time, using the word “incarnational” is emphasizing the material, fleshy dimensions of this sacramental approach. I can certainly see the relevance, sometimes even the necessity of the use of the metaphor of the Cosmic Body of Christ or simply the Body of Christ both in liturgical practices and in recent theological discussions, especially

Incarnational presence 121 those from a postcolonial perspective that refer to the broken, vulnerable Body of Christ in situations of AIDS, war, domination, exclusion, and the exhaustion of the earth.38 I  do, however, find it problematic when some authors prefer a “commitment to espousing a Nicene theology,”39 or spend a lot of energy “proving” that their proposal “fits” in the tradition without questioning the power dynamics that function in qualifying the normativity of the tradition. Why are we asked to submit to a specific and compulsory dogmatic and symbolic conformity? Are the discussions and deep differences regarding the who and what of God, Christ, world, and human, including the question of what “truly” Christian might be, not part and parcel of the theological traditions of which we are a part? The tradition itself is full of contradictions and struggles, and is far more polydox as these authors or these theses seem to suggest.40 My most nagging mental barrier concerning the use of the metaphor the Body of Christ, whether or not a Cosmic Body, is connected with the inseparable relation of the metaphor with Eucharistic practices and their actual liturgical-clerical setting. To elucidate this point, let me quote from the political and eco-environmental circles generally well-received papal encyclical Laudato Sí: The Eucharist joins heaven and earth; it embraces and penetrates [sic!] all creation. The world which came forth from God’s hands returns to him in blessed and undivided adoration: in the bread of the Eucharist, creation is projected towards divinization, towards the holy wedding feast, towards unification with the Creator himself.41 As I  said earlier, at this moment in time, I  find it difficult to “neutralize” the image of penetration, so overwhelmingly present in much cosmic or (deep) incarnational Christology, old and new. On the one hand, there is the confrontation with the arrogance of clerical power that again and again comes to light in the ever-continuing protection and exoneration of the institute and its abusive clerics. On the other hand, there are subversive, creative, and challenging theologies dealing with the Body of Christ or the Cosmic Body of Christ, from a wide range of perspectives, inside or outside the (self-developed) lines of confessional and doctrinal confirmation, which I love and find fascinating and stimulating. But since the metaphor of the Body of Christ, perhaps more than any other metaphor or symbol, is deeply embedded in actual and fixed liturgical practices and deeply related to its controversial and disputed performers, I cannot believe in the convocative capability of this metaphor. Making excuses, however important and much needed, will, therefore, not be enough. It is not enough to blame celibacy or the weakness of the priest, or the lack of a proper priestly education, or even to admit the institute’s lack of responsible action against known abuse without reflection on a much deeper theological and ontological level. I agree with Mary Hunt

122  Maaike de Haardt when she insists that not only is clericalism the problem here, but that it is, on a deeper level, the distinction created by the clergy-laity structure that grounds the problem of the abuse of power and its covering up.42 The Eucharist, so central to the Body of Christ, seems not only to be at the heart of the liturgies and of many discussions on theological eco-responsibility but also on discussions about ordination, power, and authority. Seen from my context, perhaps a moratorium on both the Body of Christ and the Cosmic Body of Christ would be a wise move for a theology that searches for a broad convocative capability. A theology that is, nevertheless, aware that there is always a more.

Notes 1 De Haardt (2002a, 2002b, 2017). 2 Highmore (2002). 3 De Certeau (2002, pp. 91–93). 4 Isasi-Díaz (1993, p. 34). 5 Giard (1998, p. xxi). 6 Bauerschmidt (2000, p. 211), De Certeau (1966, p. 22). 7 Walker (1984, p. 241). 8 De La Cruz (1994, p. 75). 9 Avila, St. Teresa of (2002, p. 22). 10 Fischer (1990, p. 353). 11 Isasi-Diaz (1993, p. 34). 12 De Haardt (2018), Braidotti (2013, 2014), Smith (2005), Solnit (2016), Eagleton (2016). 13 Carbine (2014, p. 151). 14 Carbine (2014, pp. 150–151). 15 Carbine (2014, p. 151). 16 Schneider and Ray (2016). 17 Brown (2004). 18 Ross (1998), Brown (2004, 2008, pp.  5–9), Suna-Koro (2017), De Haardt (2001). 19 Brown (2004, pp.  5–32), Suna-Koro (2017, pp.  1–10). See also De Haardt (2001). 20 Suna-Koro (2017, p. 4). 21 Orobator (2012, p. 19). 22 Ross (1998, p. 32). 23 Ross (1998, p. 35). 24 Keller (2015). 25 De Haardt (2001), Isherwood and Stuart (1998, pp. 126–131). 26 De Haardt (2001), Brown (2004, 2007). 27 De Haardt (2010). 28 Soja (1999, p. 276). 29 Braidotti (2014, p. 264). 30 Van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2012, pp. 31–33). 31 Van der Tuin and Dolphijn (2012, p. 32). 32 Van der Tuin and Dolphijn (2012, p. 36), Braidotti (2008). 33 Compare in this regard for instance Suna-Koro (2017) or Pryor (2016). 34 Rayan (1992, p. 18). 35 Fabella et al. (1992, p. 3), Rayan (1992), p. 22).

Incarnational presence 123 6 Rayan (1992, pp. 25, 28). 3 37 Braidotti (2006, p. 277). 38 For instance, Van Klinken (2010), Urbaniak (2018), Suna-Koro (2017), Callaghan (2015), Eaton (2014), but also the works of McFague (1992) and Johnson (2018) come to mind. 39 Santmire (2003, p. 260). 40 Compare for example Keller and Schneider (2011). 41 Pope Francis (2015, p. 236). 42 Hunt (2018, p. 1).

Bibliography Avila, St. Teresa of. (2002). The complete works of St. Teresa of Avila: Volume 3 (E. A. Peers, Trans and Ed.). London and New York, NY: Burns & Oats. Bauerschmidt, F. C. (2000). Introduction: Michel de Certeau, theologist. In G. Ward (Ed.), De Certeau reader (pp.  209–214). Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Braidotti, R. (2006). Transpositions: On nomadic ethics. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2008). In spite of the times: The postsecular turn in feminism. Theory, Culture & Society, 25(6), 1–24. Braidotti, R. (2013). Becoming world. In R. Braidotti, P. Hanafin, & B. Blaagaard (Eds.), After cosmopolitanism (pp. 29–66). Abingdon: Routledge. Braidotti, R. (2014). Conclusion: The residual spirituality in critical theory: A case for affirmative postsecular politics. In R. Braidotti, B. Blaagaard, T. De Grauw, & E. Midden (Eds.), Transformations of Religion in the public sphere (pp. 249–270). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, D. (2004). God and the enchantement of place: Reclaiming human experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, D. (2007). God & grace of body: Sacrament in ordinary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Callaghan, P. (2015). Cosmic Christologies and the reclamation of Christ’s relevance in the 21st century. Graduate Annual, 3(1), Article 5. Carbine, R. P. (2014). A  feminist view of political subjectivity and praxis. In L. Boeve, Y. De Maeseneer & E. Van Stichel (Eds.), Questioning the human: Toward a theological anthropology for the twenty-first century (pp. 148–164). New York, NY: Fordham University Press. De Certeau, M. (1966). Culture and spiritual experience. Concilium, 19, 293–306. De Certeau, M. (2002, 2nd edn). The practice of everyday life (part 1. Arts de Faire). Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. De Haardt, M. (2001). Bodiliness and sacramentality. In J. A. Selling (Ed.), Embracing sexuality. Authority and experience in the Catholic Church (pp.  42–57). Aldershot: Ashgate. De Haardt, M. (2002a). “Kommt, esset mein Brot.  .  .  ” Exemplarische Überlegungen zum Göttlichen im Alltag. In H. Meyer-Wilmes (Ed.), Tango, Theologie und Kontext: Schritte zu einer Theologie des Alltags (pp. 5–32). Münster: LIT Verlag.

124  Maaike de Haardt De Haardt, M. (2002b). “A way of being in the world”: Traces of divinity in everyday life. In M. de Haardt  & A-M. Korte (Eds.), Common bodies: Everyday practices, gender and religion (pp. 11–27). Münster: LIT Verlag. De Haardt, M. (2010). Making sense of sacred space in the city. In A. L. Molendijk, J. Baumont, & C. Jedan (Eds.), Exploring the postsecular: The religious, the political and the urban (pp. 163–182). Leiden: Brill. De Haardt, M. (2017). A momentary sacred space? Religion, gender and the sacred in everyday life. In A. Berlis, A. M. Korte & K. Biezeveld (Eds.), Everyday life and the sacred (pp. 209–220). Leiden: Brill. De Haardt, M. (2018). ‘ . . . een innig fluisteren’: Over hoop, verlangen, en verandering. Valedictory Lecture, Radboud University Nijmegen. De La Cruz, S. J. I. (1994). The answer/ la respuesta: Including a selection of poems (E. Arenal & A. Powell, Trans and Ed.). New York, NY: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Eagleton, T. (2016). Hope without optimism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Eaton, M. (2014). Enfleshed in cosmos and earth: Re-imagining the depth of incarnation. Worldviews, 18, 230–252. Fabella, V., Lee, P. K. H. & Kwang-sun Suh, D. (Eds.). (1992). Asian Christian spirituality: Reclaiming traditions. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Fischer, M. F. K. (1990). The art of eating. New York, NY: Willey Publishing. Giard, L. (1998). Introduction to volume 1: History of a research project. In M. De Certeau, L. Giard, & P. Mayol (Eds.), The practice of everyday life volume 2: Living and cooking (pp. xiii–xxxv). Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. Highmore, B. (2002). Introduction: Questioning everyday life. In B. Highmore (Ed.), The everyday life reader (pp. 1–34). London and New York, NY: Routledge. Hunt, M. E. (2018). Real change against abuse starts with church’s clergy/ lay structure. National Catholic Reporter. Retrieved August 21, 2018, from www.ncronline.org/ news/accountability/real-change-against-abuse-starts-churchs-clergylaystructure Isasi-Díaz, A. M. (1993). En la lucha / In the struggle: A Hispanic women’s liberation theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Isherwood, L., & Stuart, E. (1998). Introducing body theology. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Johnson, E. A. (2018). Creation and the cross: The mercy of God for a planet in peril. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Keller, C. (2015). Cloud of the impossible: Negative theology and planetary entanglement. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Keller, C., & Schneider, L. C. (Eds.). (2011). Polydoxy: Theology of multiplicity and relation. New York, NY: Routledge. McFague, S. (1992). The body of God: An ecological theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Orobator, A. E. (2012). A global sign of outward grace: The sacramentality of the world church in the era of globalisation. CTSA Proceedings, 67, 14–22. Pope Francis. (2015). Laudato Sí. Retrieved from http:// w2.vatican.va/content/dam/francesco/pdf/encyclicals/documents/ papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si_en.pdf. Pryor, A. (2016). Body of Christ incarnate for you: Conceptualizing God’s desire for the flesh. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Incarnational presence 125 Rayan, S. (1992). The search for an Asian spirituality of liberation. In V. Fabella, P. K. H. Lee, & D. Kwang-sun Suh (Eds.), Asian Christian spirituality: Reclaiming traditions (pp. 11–30). Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Ross, S. (1998). Extravagant affections: A feminist sacramental theology. New York, NY: Continuum. Santmire, P. (2003). So that he might fill all things: Comprehending the cosmic love of Christ. Dialog: A Journal of Theology, 42(3), 257–278. Schneider, L. C., & Ray, S. G. Jr., (2016). Awake to the moment: An introduction to theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Smith, N. H. (2005). Hope and critical theory. Critical Horizons, 6(1), 45–46. Soja, E. W. (1999). Thirdspace: Expanding the scope of the geographical imagination. In D. Massey, J. Allen, & P. Sarre (Eds.), Human geography today (pp. 260– 278). Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Solnit, R. (2016). Hope in the dark: Untold histories wild possibilities. Edinburgh: Canongate Books. Suna-Koro, K. (2017). In counterpoint: Diaspora, postcoloniality, and sacramental theology. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. Urbaniak, J. (2018). Between the Christ of deep incarnation and the African Jesus of Timyiko Maluleke: An improvised dialogue. Modern Theology, 32(2), 177–205. Van der Tuin, I., & Dolphijn, R. (2012). New materialism: Interviews and cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Van Klinken, A. S. (2010). When the body of Christ has AIDS: A theological metaphor for global solidarity in light of HIV and AIDS. International Journal of Public Theology, 4(4), 446–465. Walker, A. (1984). In search of our mother’s garden: Womanist prose. London: The Women’s Press Limited.

10 Divine promiscuity Laurel C. Schneider

Is Christology still possible? Given the long history and continued trajectory of Christian triumphalism and exclusivism imposed on and distributed by the various bodies of Jesus Christ in a history that has contributed significantly to modernity’s global effects, can there be a viable Christology for ecofeminist, antiracist and decolonial Christians? The short answer is “yes” but not without some serious rethinking of some of the deepest assumptions about incarnation. A good number of contemporary theologians engaged in constructive theology share with other emergent disciplines a deep interest in social materiality with its relationship to questions of social justice. It is certainly not a stretch to say that materiality is the Urgrund of Christology itself, and so a Christian notion of incarnation should, therefore, be a natural locus for theologians concerned with divinity’s intimate affairs in flesh.1 But the question remains whether there is a christic ontos that survives the distortions wrought within it by Christianity’s colonizing sovereignty. And the question also remains whether that distortion is essential, in the end, to any Christological undertaking. These questions emerge directly out of the conviction that if the locus of Christology is to help Christians in this contingent and compromised world of climate change, racism, political madness, militarism, sexualized panic, and economic mayhem, it must be fundamentally reconceived, both in itself and in its relation to the constellation of Christian theological loci. And I would venture further to suggest that perhaps this (re)conception of Christ should not be undertaken by virgins, human or divine.

Bodies are funny things “Nanette,” a comedy routine recently filmed by Hannah Gadsby, swept social media.2 Gadsby is a white lesbian comedian from Tasmania, and her show packed the Sydney Opera House. “Nanette” is a complex routine that touches on a matter of importance for the question of Christology’s viability in theology. In this monologue, Gadsby questions the fundamentals of

Divine promiscuity 127 professional humor in a way that is both funny and serious at the same time. Comedy, she suggests, relies on the setting up of tensions (often involving humiliation) that resolve in the release of those tensions in such a way that the actual harm, violence, or even trauma limned by the sketch is not only obscured but also domesticated by laughter. This is a serious enough problem at the root of comedy for those most often kicked and belittled by it that she announces that this performance is her letter of resignation from the profession. As if she can. As if a Christian theologian can quit Christology. Nevertheless, in the process of deconstructing the very genre of comedy Gadsby is somehow, paradoxically, illuminating its constitutive participation in the substance of its own serious substructure. Gadsby’s entire performance brings her audience into the heart of the trauma of being “clearly gender-not-normal” as she describes her upbringing in a frighteningly and violently normative setting. She talks about having used this personal, traumatic experience to fund her successful stand-up comedy career. “Punchlines,” she says, “need trauma, because punchlines need tension and tension feeds trauma.” But in this show, she calls all of her work into question and helps her audience to realize the utter complexity of how comedy, in her case built on self-deprecating humor, both gives her “permission to speak” as an otherwise deviant outsider and keeps her self-regulating and oppressed at the same time. She states that she simply will no longer denigrate herself or anyone for the sake of her career. Gadsby is doing something to and with humor here that exposes its substructural enmeshment with dominant, status quo interests. She may be quitting the comedy industry, but her claim on humor, in this routine at least, is vibrant. She is funny, regardless. But she does not shy away from the realities that lurk behind or just beyond punchlines, realities that are anything but funny, but that live in the humor. Gadsby’s announcement that she is quitting comedy may be, in a nod to the late Jose Esteban Munoz, a suicidal “jete” out the window of the professional humor circuit.3 In doing so, however, she constructs something else, something more true and more ancient at the same time, akin to what Langston Hughes suggests about “negro humor” or what Vine Deloria knew as “Indi’n humor” – the kind of ontologically laced funny that comes up out of the depths of experience, that reveals something true and often searing. It exposes an intimacy between tears and laughter, between comedy and tragedy, familiar to the ancient Greeks and to contemporary students of theater. Gadsby points us toward a revelatory humor that, in the face of overwhelming oppression is, as Hughes wrote, “what you wish in your heart were not funny, but it is, and you must laugh.”4 It is a humor that does more than make the pain bearable; it opens a door to another reality, one that is not determined entirely by the language of the institutions that claim to have sovereignty over it. So there is a depth of humor in Hannah Gadsby’s routine that is also her depth of insight. She cannot not be funny, even in eschewing humor. She cannot not be serious, even in being funny. This essential correlation

128  Laurel C. Schneider actually brings those who listen carefully somewhere. Her refusal to dodge the horror behind the humor actually teaches those who listen carefully something; it opens a door to something beyond, rather than running in ruts of familiarity and repetition. It seems clear that Gadsby is constitutively funny and cannot not “do” comedy when she thinks about serious matters, even as she is realizing her own increasing distance from the institutional norms and standards of what seems to make most men laugh. I have argued elsewhere that Christian theology is suffering a slow death-by-dessication because of its lack of humor.5 My interest in Gadsby’s “Nanette” routine comes partly from that conviction but it comes mostly from the symmetry of her question about comedy, especially comedy done by and for society’s outsiders, with my own about any Christology that takes seriously concerns of gender, sexuality, ecology, race, decoloniality, militarism, and poverty. My question about the meaningful viability of Christology in Christian theology is both a serious, direct question and a sideways, half-joking one. Christology cannot be extricated from Christian theology. Perhaps this means that theologians cannot not “do” Christian theology when we think about flesh both cosmic and social, even as some of us realize our own increasing distance from the institutional norms and standards of what makes Jesus’s flesh important to the men who have written about it. But as more contemporary theologians dig into the deep materiality of incarnation and struggle to think past the binarized grasp of Platonized polarization, perhaps we will find possibilities regnant in the concept of incarnation itself that can move Christology back (or forward?) into actual bodies, revealing divine flesh and divine presence embodied in ways that defy the kind of split between body and spirit, humor and seriousness, human and divine, male and female, and other splits that the kenotic mystery of Christology thus far has tended to enforce. And if there is a cosmic dimension to Christ, it is a deeply enfleshed and more open ontos of divine occurring. A Christological sensibility of this sort should start from what Aristotle called the “complex plan” of tragedy, meaning it does not resolve neatly into just desserts, or happy endings for righteous victors (the Greek understanding of comedy). Christology’s humor is not comedy in this sense at all; it is the complexity of frailty and persistence that constitutes lives worth living, a cosmos shot through with “what you wish in your heart were not funny, but it is, and you must laugh.”

Facing the errors In order to take a cosmic dimension to Christology seriously, there is the problem, on the one hand, of the historical tendency of Christian theology to colonize the cosmos in its universalizing claims for Christ. This persistent error dogs even the most cautious and sensitive of Christological attempts. It may be a shadow that is so firmly entrenched in what Willie

Divine promiscuity 129 James Jennings calls the Christian imagination that it cannot be dispelled.6 But this tendency can be named, and its effects attended to, a muscle memory that will always tend us toward erasures of difference. On the other hand, I  suggest that new Christologies face the challenge of conceptualizing incarnation as the widely occurring flesh of God, the result of which I have called divine promiscuity.7 Promiscuous incarnation presumes the quantum physicality of deep relationality in which nothing is lost, nothing exists in absolute separation or exclusivity, a cosmic claim to be sure. It also presumes the logic of multiplicity in which everything is unique in its time-being and cannot be absorbed or subsumed in a colonizable swamp of indistinction. This is what Baudrillard calls impossible exchange; a necessary characteristic of things that I  have argued characterizes bodies in their constitutive multiplicity.8 These new knowledges and possibilities push us into a completely different realm of Christology if we are willing to take materiality as seriously as the present moment demands. But there is humor here too. Incarnation as it has been wrangled through the logic of the One in which the aseity and contradictory paternity of God is torturously preserved through the virginal strangeness of the Son is actually funny, the historical consequences of this contortion (especially for women) aside.9 But like Hannah Gadsby, we see that it is possible to hold humor and horror at the same time, lest humor be mistaken for avoidance or horror be mistaken for the whole story. There is humor in the seriousness of the materiality of God, a materiality that draws us beyond the mere assertion of a creedal homoousias draped in the robes of a single status quo male figure, to a cosmic understanding of homoousias revealed in the world in all of its strange, dappled, and idiosyncratic embodiments. One consequence of taking seriously the idea that God is truly material in any instance (Jesus Christ) is that there is no longer any way to keep God’s indiscriminate materiality from any other instance. The early church theologians knew this, which is why they struggled so mightily to contort Christology into a unique finality of divine consorting with matter. But the exclusion of God’s own materiality from all the world beyond Jesus’s body has been a funny error of fact about matter as well as a tragic error of moral judgment in the history of Christian theology. This persistent error is linked more to the control issues of bishops and emperors in an ancient context of political jockeying and a contemporary context of defensive nostalgia and fundamentalist terrorism than to any theological necessity of finality in the “matter.” As a result, Christian inheritors of the incarnation story miss out on God’s generous promiscuity, God’s own serious laughter in the face of nationalist and racist patriarchal demands for Christian chastity in service of “his” ownership of the church – a chastity that we could say only makes sense in service to an anxious sperm-donor god and does nothing for a world in desperate need of better, more generous forms of salvific presence.

130  Laurel C. Schneider

Promiscuous incarnation I have suggested that the Chalcedonian tale of Jesus Christ, fully human and fully divine, is at heart an ontological story of divine promiscuity. The word “promiscuity” in English refers, in its first definition, to chemical mixture. This sort of mixing, of course, is a relatively noncontroversial use of the term. But the sexual connotations of promiscuity have largely overtaken the chemical meaning in common parlance – few people outside of the chemical sciences even know this original definition now. Promiscuity generally understood is a sexualized term of denigration intended to shame and is applied especially to women, prostitutes, racial outsiders, and homosexuals. This is why I have used the phrase “promiscuous incarnation” in reference to God – it is an ambiguously provocative moniker, evoking dangerous mixture and sexualized, colonialized, and racialized penalization. It is a potent reference to incarnation that disturbs whatever function Christology has of holding and policing idealized (and erroneous) boundaries between divinity and world. I became interested in pursuing the idea of promiscuity in relation to incarnation precisely because of the complicated and provocative possibilities carried by the term. Mixing seems to have always been a problem in human history, and it still is. The rise of nationalisms and fundamentalisms of all sorts indicate deepening anxieties about categories, boundaries, and purities. These anxieties are no different in academic discourses. Referring to her own field of philosophy, Alexis Shotwell suggests, “The disciplining of philosophical boundaries has come out of a fear of monstrous or unpredictable mixing.”10 Monsters always invoke sexual, racial, and nationalist fear, as Shelley’s allegorical tale of Frankenstein’s creature demonstrates. Monstrous mixing entails the introduction of unfamiliar flesh  – monsters – into our own midst, provoking boundary anxieties and breaking illusions of racial, cultural, or nationalist purity. Racial, cultural, and nationalist illusions of purity are, we know, erroneously and nostalgically cathected with ideas of peace and hope for the future. It is monsters, those embodiments of impurity, that threaten the future and range outside the illusory gated communities of homogeneity and racist, heteronormative ideals of beauty. But even more threatening than monsters to illusory visions of a purified future are unpredictable mixtures. The gravitational force of different bodies from the atomic to the cosmic level cannot be wholly or completely kept apart, policed, or held in place. Bodies move, relate, and change  – they mix – in relation to each other. Mutation, for example, is not always predictable. Nor is erotic attraction or pain. Shotwell points out that the anxious disciplining of boundaries is always about something at stake, some monster behind the closet door. As readers of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, or Mary Douglas realize, the disciplinary stakes in ideas of morality illuminate Christianity’s theological drive in Christology to sexualized purity.11 Marcella Althaus-Reid further argues that the purification

Divine promiscuity 131 of Christian ideals is colonial power in theological drag.12 Understanding the massive historical weight of colonization as a construction of idealized racial and sexual stratifications strained through Christian evangelism may be necessary to undoing its terrible and persistent hold on the horizons of Christian “decency.” In short, Christian theologians are faced with deeply structured disciplinary boundaries and anxieties about purity instantiated by church doctrine in the very flesh of Christ. Despite recent labors in a variety of new theories and approaches to theology, the philosophical myths of divine perfection and absolute otherness still largely function to control the radical possibilities that these insights might imply. God in the Christian frame – especially and ironically in the incarnational frame – is over and over again reduced to absolute otherness, an otherness secured by the isolation of Jesus Christ. As interested and committed as we may be to envisioning God in terms of the incarnational claim and what that might do for us in a world stumbling under the toxic weight of the world’s utter desacralization, I suggest that we attend to the ways that uncritical attachment to Christ, to the theological claim of divine incarnation, has laid the foundation and authorizes the predicament we are in, which is the demonization of the flesh of all else. In other words, the absolute aseity of God may actually be secured by incarnation. The logic of the One, supporting and even requiring a theology of divine separation, is a phantasm, perhaps best understood through the lens of what Emilie M. Townes calls the fantastic hegemonic imagination.13 The logic of the One demands endless boundary maintenance and blesses endless demonizations of variegated bodies. Eboni Marshall-Turman has helpfully argued that the political and theological context of the struggles among the theologians and politicians of the patristic period did not disappear with the Chalcedonian mediation. Instead, regardless of its famous resolution of “fully divine/fully human,” she points out that a “primary (mis)conception of bodily integrity” remained and still remains despite that mediation. Christian claims of incarnation, she argues, remain “severely distorted by the ‘either/or’ movement of Jesus that precede[d] the mediating Chalcedonian Doctrine of Faith,” distortions that show up particularly in the demonization and categorical othering of darker-skinned bodies.14 I would add to her argument that it is not only the failure of Chalcedon to take hold in Christian thinking such that the cosmos and all that it contains can begin to be seen, at least in Christian doctrine, as sacred flesh, but the reverse is secured as well precisely because the so-called Chalcedonian mediation channels all of divine promiscuity (and love) into the body of one figure, easily deployed for ordering the world in support of elite powers. This theological error codified in doctrine asserts a Christological incarnation that is safely controlled by finality, never (again) resulting in an indecent exposure, or unpredictable, miscegenous, or monstrous issue. Thus, if the Chalcedonian mediation has any possibility for helping us to think anew about incarnation in our complicated time  – and with

132  Laurel C. Schneider Marshall-Turman, I do believe that it might – we must begin to think about what the promiscuity of divinity and humanity might mean as corrective to the pre-Chalcedonian obsession with opposition and purity. And with theologians like Marshall-Turman, Catherine Keller, and Maaike de Haardt, we need to reframe incarnation and its effects, and affects according to philosophical, scientific, and ethical principles (including everyday practices) that are updated from those on hand to theologians in the 5th century or even in the 19th century.15 If promiscuity is a provocation that, among other provocations, can help restore the viability of the Chalcedonian claim for mixture, I suggest that we return to mixture as a point of entry to the issue in incarnation just as it was for the ancients; it is the Pauline scandal and the enduring theological puzzle. However, we stand in a different state of knowledge about materiality and physics than they did, though we are arguably more confused than they are about spirit, affect, and the ontological creativity of dreams and stories. We may be more open to those ancient heresies and minority strains of theology  – at least those that seem to prefigure mixture in nonbinary ways, but we need to be clear about certain of them, heretical or orthodox, that cannot abide the constitutive and intrusive promiscuities of quantum physics, as well as those that appear to authorize disregard of others outside of Christian communion.

Other to the flesh of the world There are at least two key stumbling blocks to the development of promiscuous incarnation as Christology. The first is the dogmatic requirement that classical monotheism imposes on God of absolute difference. The second is, as already indicated, the association of divinity with purity, furthermore, of purity with essential nonmixture. To the first stumbling block, the so-called scandal of incarnation in which God and human can be conceived of as being mixed in patristic logic is scandalous only because of a prior assertion of their absolute difference. God is bound by this categorical requirement to a position of “not that” in the world, and most theologies of incarnation content themselves with some variation on the idea of divine penetration into the alien flesh. God is thereby in the world, but not of it, bound in it, but not bound by it. There is the logical problem of suggesting that an omnipotent God is bound by anything, and the incarnational theologians from Athanasius forward have struggled to keep God’s freedom and distinction from the world fundamentally intact, always at the expense of the world’s constitutive divinity – or possibility therein. As Saskia Wendel suggests, contemporary attempts to describe the world as “God’s body” approach the possibility of an innate materiality to the divine but end up retaining the basic opposition and so may not go far enough in thinking about divine materiality.16

Divine promiscuity 133 Anselm argued in Cur Deus Homo that it is not that God is unable to be flesh in the categorical distinction between God and cosmos – indeed Jesus Christ proves God’s ability to cross that divide – rather, it is that God created the world to be not God, and so to do otherwise would necessitate God choosing to be not God. Being God, God does not so choose.17 Essentially, this argument makes the fleshy exception of Jesus Christ into proof for the rule of divinity’s other-than-flesh essence. The exclusivity of Jesus’s divine flesh preserves the rule not only of God’s otherness but of God’s greatness, thereby conflating other than flesh with greatness. Parsed through the long history of monotheism, God’s greatness and omnipotence function as synonyms for perfection. It is on the basis of this aggregation of characteristics associated with Divine Otherness that God cannot be flesh in the first place. As a result, Jesus’s divine nature is his other-than-flesh greatness rather than his irreplaceable, impossible-to-exchange uniqueness that constitutes his body. This hegemonic confusion of divinity with disembodied otherness poses a central problem for any reconception of Christian incarnation now. There is a long and important intellectual history out of Jewish, Hellenistic, and, later, Christian and Islamic thought that values the “not that” in conceptualizations of divinity. The apophatic move preserves a necessary distinction to God, including a distinction beyond the limits of human understanding. The value of the apophatic, what I have called the “metaphoric exemption” and what Catherine Keller develops in her concept of the “cloud of the impossible” should not be mistaken or lost here.18 The categorical and dogmatic requirement that divinity be other than flesh is not precisely apophatic because it is merely oppositional. As Keller has demonstrated so comprehensively, apophasis is best understood in terms of entanglement, which means it is never a simplistically negative gesture. But the patristic oppositional presupposition about the absolute immateriality of divinity, and the resilience of that strange idea through the centuries in spite of the Chalcedonian mediation and doctrinal efforts at supporting the mediation by way of homoousious means that the incarnation in Christian hands does virtually nothing to retrieve God from exile to the safely meaningless category of the simplistically nonmaterial. As Marshall-Turman points out, there has been a practical failure of the Chalcedonian mediation to undo this polarized distinction of divinity from humanity in the Christian claim of incarnation. The radicality of homoousias, if we were to truly take it seriously and practically, has been cauterized and reduced to a nominal exception. This has occurred in part because the incarnational claim is restricted to the person of Jesus alone and in part because it is cobbled by the logic of the One, itself a terrible obsession with purity as indifference. Only Jesus Christ experiences and embodies this mysterious union of divinity in his person, only he is made multiple by what Marshall-Turman evocatively calls “the unfamiliar flesh of God.”19 Whatever Christians say God has done in the incarnation of Jesus Christ is effectively minimized by Christian requirements of exclusive finality – God must not do too much.

134  Laurel C. Schneider But this is not so surprising, given the political and theological struggles for control out of which the primary Christological doctrines emerged. What unpredictable and monstrous mixtures of divinity and everyday persons might have ensued had not the church taken a firm hand on the limits of divine flesh? But now, in a different time and place, asking questions out of a different world wearied by empires and holocausts and stubbornly resilient racisms, emboldened by critical theories, democratic enchantments, and scientific hunches, we must ask whether this commitment to ontological difference between God and world actually protects divine perfection, or has it created a false perfection founded on a devilish lie of immateriality? Has it in fact eviscerated incarnation by preserving an oppositional binary that in effect determines divine nonbeing and makes all flesh categorically indifferent? God, as other to the flesh of the world, is therefore other, simply stated. Interestingly, it is this very form of othering that race theorists and feminist theorists, womanist theorists and queer theorists have understood to be the designation of lack – a designation of negation  – long ascribed to female and darker-skinned bodies. This is the othering, in effect the nonbeing, that authorizes and establishes the patriarchal, white supremacist norms of being. So we could ask whether God – this other to humanity in a binary that theologians like Karl Barth have argued actually establishes the meaning and being of the human – whether this God is just a boundary, a nonbeing – a prime negative – that effectively and ontologically establishes and privileges human being?20 Does this God paradoxically secure the normativity of human presence by constituting its lack? The relationship of Christian imperialism and the current state of the anthropocene that problematically underscores the human in all of its positivity of power and ubiquity of presence might support such a claim. The primacy of the human in presence follows from the theological binary of absolutes that the doctrinal status of incarnation effects, a binary that favors the arbiters of the status quo (divinity conceived in their image) and is deployed whenever indecent outsiders start to think that the incarnation may mean something about the image of God in them. So in thinking about Christ as God incarnate, we are faced with the resilient primacy of the negative, as Pheng Cheah puts it.21 That the simple negation structured in the absolute binary between divinity and world reflexively funds and founds an absolute ontological difference between them paradoxically and simultaneously requires static sameness, or indifference, at either pole. I cannot see what good incarnation is doing for Christianity or for the world if this error persists on the ground, as it does. There are theologians who have already moved beyond the stasis of this polarization, but there may be additional thinking required to help it gain purchase across our discourses and spheres of practice. Keller directly addresses this constitutive error in negative theology by thinking past the primacy of the negative without making the mistake

Divine promiscuity 135 of simply flipping the binary. As she says in concluding her magnificent project Cloud of the Impossible, “such a binarism [. . .] collapsed a while back.”22 Furthermore she says, “An apophatically entangled becoming [.  .  .] activate[s] potentialities spooky or sensuous, upclose or planetary, that work together in mindfulness of their enigmatic co-implication.”23 The metaphysical negativity of the classical absolute distinction between God and world negates any reality to the notion of homoousias, relegating it to a vapid and easily controlled abstraction in which all of our unpredictable, monstrous, kinky, queer, mucky, black, funny, and promiscuous materialisms have no purchase. Absolute difference rests on the necessity of polarized indifference and stasis, a toxic structure for creaturely thriving and a paltry vaporousness for the divine.

The impure will see god Along with the categorical indifference of flesh that God’s absolute difference entails, there is the related and resilient question of divine purity. I am influenced by multiple sources that focus on the complexity of materiality and its spooky conformation with the stories we tell. As Karen Barad has suggested in physics, “Knowing is [. . .] a practice of intra-acting with the world as part of the world in its dynamic material configuring [.  .  .]. ”24 Mayra Rivera takes this a step further, noting that “social relations leave marks on our bodies [. . .] Social norms are always becoming flesh.”25 These insights suggest that materiality cannot be imagined purely, at least not when purity opposes mixture, or promiscuity. Promiscuous mixtures are surprising, and sometimes very funny. Purity is a kind of drear antipromiscuity. It is simply not possible for bodies, and eschews the beauty, humor, and pain of material cohabitation. As Shotwell argues, “Purity is never possible in the world, and it is only unevenly possible in concept.”26 But because of the ancient confusion of purity with the good, we stumble over and over again over on the world we comprise and keep dreaming otherwise, like Thomas King’s coyote dream of a big “g.o.d.”27 There is tragic humor in our hubris, rooted in our humorless mistakes about purity, flesh, and the messy world. Entanglement is a threat, if you think that it stands against the good and against the fundamental character of God. Drawing on Barad’s social physics, Shotwell suggests, “The experience and tangle of entanglement is partially responsible for [.  .  .] a purity politics of despair.”28 She argues that purity drives a shift in political action “away from what could be characterized as righteous politics – [namely] collective work toward a future prefigured in present practice.” Instead a purity politics of despair drives us “toward a self-righteous politics [. . .] [in which] what matters is whether you, individually, have the correct language, analysis, and critique.”29 Perhaps if we can address the purity politics of despair by revealing its foundation in a deformed purity view of the good, we can rebuild a politics of hope

136  Laurel C. Schneider founded on a reformed, impure view of the good. Impurity as a function of the good is deep relationality, contingency, pedagogy, and movement that cannot be oversimplified. It is both tragic and humorous. An impure theology that can undergird an impure politics of hope requires an ontos and ethic that does not deny its character of being apophatically and meaningfully entangled. If we theologians are to learn something from the affect theorists, quantum physicists, New Materialists, and queer comedians, it is that we jump headlong and together into the mess and promise of incarnation as a worldly doctrine, reorienting our understanding of Christology toward the deep interaction and critical intra-action of social norms becoming flesh. Which is also necessarily a political commitment for theology. There are many possible approaches to this challenge. Maria Lugones, for example, looks at Latina lesbian resistance as a form of stubborn impurity – mestizaje – that cannot be homogenized in a dominant neo-colonial blender. Thinking of the way her mother used to make mayonnaise, she turns to the metaphor of “curdling.” She writes, When I  think of metizaje, I  think both of separation as curdling, an exercise in impurity, and of separation as splitting, an exercise in purity. I think of the attempt at control exercised by those who possess both power and the categorical eye and who attempt to split everything impure, breaking it down into pure elements [. . .]. And I think of [. . .] something impure, something or someone mestizo [. . .]. Mestizaje defies control through simultaneously asserting the impure, curdled multiple state and rejecting fragmentation into pure parts.30 Following Lugones, the impurity of incarnation is also potentially a resistance to neo-colonial domination. It suggests a rising up of all those of unfamiliar, monstrous, and curdled flesh – which is divine and which is each of us, really. I suggest, in conclusion, that Christology can be a theological locus of all that matters in both the physical and ethical senses of the term. Without denying its specificity for Christians or its limitations for others, Christians can see in the Christological doctrine all that unfolds in flesh and understand God to be the very character of indiscriminate love. This Christ resists homogenization or domestication, does not demand obedience but challenges every righteous stoning, defends those who do not follow the christic path, and so makes love to worlds and is the love in worlds, vast and miniscule. Promiscuous incarnation, therefore, is a Christology of unbridled and indiscriminate relation that fails all ecclesial and imperial demands for its decency and chastity. It is a wide-spreading pleasure in the unfamiliar flesh of every rabbity unfinished thing  – a divine creativity that makes worlds from its own great mestiza heart. This god/christ is humble, and funny, the face of each counter, original, spare and strange thing.31 This god/christ

Divine promiscuity 137 communicates in flesh, walks dusty roads, and is the dust, touches wounds and is the blood. This god/christ is the beauty and the pain, the horror and the humor of the earth. This god/christ shows up and loves steadfastly, with what Katie Geneva Cannon calls “unshouted courage.”32 This god/christ is shameless.

Notes 1 Rivera (2015). See also the collaboratively written volume by the Workgroup on Constructive Theology Schneider and Ray (2016). 2 Gadsby (2018). 3 Munoz (2009, p. 147) passim. 4 Hughes (1966, p. vii). Also Deloria (1988). The intimacy of tragedy and comedy was known to the ancient Greeks, the twinned masks – an icon of theater. In Aristotle’s Poetics (2008, 44–45), comedy refers more to satisfaction than to humor wherein good characters win and bad characters lose without “complex plan,” as he put it. 5 Schneider (2011). 6 Jennings (2010). 7 Schneider (2010). 8 Baudrillard (2001). 9 For a fuller critique of the “logic of the one,” see Schneider (2010). 10 Shotwell (2010, p. 121). 11 Nietzsche (1996), Foucault (1972), Part II, Douglas (1966, p. 117ff). 12 Althaus-Reid (2000, p. 9). 13 Townes (2006, p. 7ff). 14 Marshall-Turman (2013, p. 37). 15 See de Haardt’s and Keller’s and contributions in this volume. 16 See Wendel’s chapter in this volume. 17 Anselm of Canterbury (2016, pp. 8, 15–17). 18 Schneider (1999, p. 14) passim, Keller (2015). 19 Marshall-Turman (2013, p. 38). 20 Barth (1933, p. 49), passim. 21 Cheah (2010, pp. 71–72). 22 Keller (2015, pp. 306–307). 23 Keller (2015, pp. 306–307). 24 Barad (2007, p. 379). Quoted in Shotwell (2016, p. 197). 25 Rivera (2015, p. 156). 26 Shotwell (2016, p. 195). 27 King (1993, p. 1) passim. 28 Shotwell (2016), ibid. 29 Ibid., p. 196. 30 Lugones (2003, Chapter 6). 31 Hopkins (1985, p. 30). 32 Cannon (1988, p. 143) passim.

Bibliography Althaus-Reid, M. (2000). Indecent theology: Theological perversions in sex, gender, and politics. Abingdon: Routledge. Anselm of Canterbury. (2016). Cur Deus Homo. n.p: Pantiamos Classics.

138  Laurel C. Schneider Aristotle (Release Date 2008). Poetics XIII, Para 2. Project Gutenberg. Ebook #1974. (S. H. Butcher, Trans.). Retrieved March 27, 2019, from www.gutenberg. org/files/1974/1974-h/1974-h.htm#link2H_4_0015 Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barth, K. (1933). Epistle to the Romans (E. C. Hoskins, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baudrillard, J. (2001). Impossible exchange. London: Verso. Cannon, K. G. (1988). Black womanist ethics. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Cheah, P. (2010). Nondialectical materialism. In D. Coole & S. Frost (Eds.), New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics (pp.  70–91). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Deloria, V. (1988). Indian humor. In V. Deloria (Ed.), Custer died for your sins: An Indian manifesto (pp. 146–167). Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Foucault, M. (1972). Archaeology of knowledge. New York, NY: Random House. Gadsby, H. (2018). Whyte, K., McCarthy, K., Nishimura, L., Praw, R., Grigioni, J. (Executive Producers). Parry, M., Olb, J. (Directors). Nanette [Video file]. Retrieved from www.netflix.com. Hopkins, G. M. (1985 [1953]). Pied beauty. In G. L. Hopkins (Ed.), Poems and prose (p. 30). London: Penguin Classics. Hughes, L. (1966). A note on humor. In L. Hughes (Ed.), The book of negro humor (pp. 1–7). New York, NY: Dodd, Mead. Jennings, W. J. (2010). The Christian imagination: Theology and the origins of race. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Keller, C. (2015). Cloud of the impossible: Negative theology and planetary entanglement. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. King, T. (1993). Green grass, running water. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin. Lugones, M. (2003). Pilgrimages/peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield. Marshall-Turman, E. (2013). Toward a womanist ethic of incarnation: Black bodies, the black church, and the council of chalcedon. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Munoz, J. E. (2009). A jete out the window: Fred Herko’s incandescent illumination. In J. E. Munoz (Ed.), Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer utopia (pp. 147–168). New York, NY: New York University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1996). On the genealogy of morals: A polemic. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rivera, M. (2015). Poetics of the flesh. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Schneider, L. C. (1999). Re-imagining the divine: Confronting the backlash against feminist theology. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim. Schneider, L. C. (2008). Beyond monotheism: A theology of multiplicity. London: Routledge Press. Schneider, L. C. (2010). Promiscuous incarnation. In M. Kamitsuka (Ed.), The embrace of Eros: Bodies, desires, and sexuality in christianity (pp. 231–246). Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Schneider, L. C. (2011). Crib notes from Bethlehem. In C. Keller & L. C. Schneider (Eds.), Polydoxy: Theology of multiplicity and relation (pp. 19–35). London: Routledge Press.

Divine promiscuity 139 Shotwell, A. (2010). Appropriate subjects: Whiteness and the discipline of philosophy. In G. Yancy (Ed.), The center must not hold: White women on the whiteness of philosophy (pp. 117–130). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Shotwell, A. (2016). Against purity: Living ethically in compromised times. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Townes, E. M. (2006). Womanist ethics and the cultural production of evil. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Workgroup on Constructive Theology. Schneider, L. C., & Ray, S. G. (Eds.). (2016). Awake to the moment: An introduction to Christian theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

11 “These are my bodies . . .” Cosmic Christology between monotheism and polytheism Matthew Eaton

In the past I  have argued that few Christian theologies adequately account for the possibility of divine incarnations beyond the human. Silencing other-than-human expression, most theologies that do consider the more-than-human favor constructive historical approaches that emphasize logocentric philosophies that unnecessarily restrict divinity to human forms. I  have suggested instead that the roles of incarnate divinity (the Son) in the Christian tradition  – the revelation of infinity beyond humanity, the co-creation of the world, and the salvific gift of creaturely meaning – are performed and fulfilled by a number of bodies, human or otherwise. They are encountered in ecological economies that elicit feelings, which precede and overwhelm logocentric analyses and historical reconstructions that restrictively determine the shape of divinity.1 Such expressions perform divinity and are thus ontically inseparable from God. I wonder, is this idea inadequate as well; is it too conservative in its scope? Affects, of course, are plural, as are the revelations, creations, and the soteriologies proclaimed in bodily expressions. I  would like then to play around with plurality a bit and wrestle with what irreducible divine expression might say about the nature of divinity and the religious ecologies in which we live, move, and have being. Concretely, it seems that a plurality of divine expressions soliciting humanity in several (often contradictory) directions invites a questioning of the logic of divine sameness and unity – a logic grounding classical monotheism. Might the nature of divinity be more robustly kenotic than Christianity has recognized, to the point where divine unity is so relinquished in a religious ecology that the result is the emergence of something more akin to polytheism (or henotheism, monolatry, or animism) than monotheism? No matter how we finally articulate such a theology of God, my suggestion is that existence is best understood as a thoroughly religious ecology, incarnate with a plurality of – to follow Eve Sedgwick – “queer little gods,” each of whom reveal infinities beyond human horizons, create subjective worlds outside of themselves, and provide various salvific narratives for life.2

“These are my bodies . . .” 141

“This is my body . . .” Religion is a material and temporal phenomenon driven not simply by logocentric reflection but by the visceral embodied feelings that occur outside of and prior to thought. Logos, of course, need not be ignored in religion, so long as we recognize that it is driven by pathos and ethos. While this is not at all a novel idea – a genealogy of the idea would go back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric – it fits the contemporary emphasis on (new/vital) materialist explorations in theology that neither deny nor enshrine logos and emphasize (as this essay does) the active role all matter plays in creativity.3 Religion, as such, is otherwise than a product of pure intellectual ingenuity; it erupts out of the sensuous, relational tissue of bodies. Following Maurice MerleauPonty, we “can no longer think according to this cleavage: God, [hu]man, creatures,” because such divisions obscure the materiality of religion, rooted in the prelinguistic matrix of face-to-face relations.4 Affect is a material phenomenon dependent on bodies, though not absolutely incarnate in any single creature. The material phenomena that elicit human affects – from rage and fear; to desire, lust, and love; from panic and grief; to wonder and awe – are entangled throughout relational webs, carnal economies that eschew reification and reductionist identification as absolutely wrapped up in this or that particular body. Sarah Ahmed, exploring the relational dynamism of feeling, suggests that “emotions work as a form of capital: affect does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced as an effect of its circulation.”5 Thus, while fully incarnate, the ground of affect is nomadic, residing simultaneously within and outside of a plurality of bodies – human or otherwise. This phenomenon eschews the possibility of precisely locating or pinning down an incarnate reality and dispenses with a logic of sameness that insists on identifying the world as inhabited by absolute individual nodes of subjectivity that connect to other nodes. Affect is also a temporal phenomenon but does not reside solely in the present time of a subject who reflects on, judges, and analyzes feelings. Feelings begin prior to awakening of the subject in the durative present dominated by perception. While erupting into the present, affects originate in what Emmanuel Levinas calls, the anarchy of time  – the time prior and oppositional to the ἀρχή (beginning, origin) of a self-sovereign, subjective consciousness that names others and identifies phenomena.6 In the absolute past, where bodies feel prior to thought, speech, analysis, judgment, and freedom, sensuality facilitates a proximity between differentiated beings, which erupts into emotions and moods that reveal something outside of the self, create individual subjectivities, and drive meaning and desire for a telos beyond the self. We are able then to identify two distinct affective temporalities, neither of which is dispensable in affective economies and religious ecologies. In a diachronic understanding of affect, there is (1) anarchic or anoetic affect (i.e., the feelings and emotions emerging prior to the origin of self-reflective consciousness), and (2) awakened or autonoetic affect (i.e.,

142  Matthew Eaton self-sovereign cognitive reflection and action predicated on one’s moods and emotions).7 Diachronic affect connects subjects to worlds beyond their own – worlds that reveal an infinite alterity irreducible to the same, create subjectivity, and give meaning to life. From such affects, incarnate divinity is felt and eventually comes to mind, calling into question the perceived sovereignty of a logocentrism that elevates the religious ideas of texts and traditions over the visceral feelings of the numinous. This is the idea of religion found in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, though his philosophy is underdeveloped insofar as it is restrictive in its affective scope and subject to an incoherent anthropocentrism that betrays the basic impulse of his thought. In The Thinking of Being and the Question of the Other, Levinas writes of anarchic relationships that open up to religion and the idea of God. There would be exteriority where one term is affected by that which it cannot assume, by the Infinite. This is a being-affected by what does not enter into a structure. [. . .] This is a being-affected by the absolutely other.8 Being-affected amounts to subjective passivity; alterity expresses bodily without becoming enchained to the self-sovereign power of the same. In this sensuality, that is at once material but never phenomenal, the subject is drawn into the proximity of divinity, who faces the subject and creates her as responsible through the anarchic trauma to which one awakens in the present: “The dia-chrony of time as a fear of God.”9 This eschewal of logocentrism in the approach to God is necessary to preserve divine infinity by rejecting the reification of divinity by a sovereign subject who betrays alterity in the act of naming. As such, for Levinas, logocentric religion runs the risk of becoming anthropology whereas anarchic religion allows divine alterity to be otherwise than the alter-ego of the subject. Thus, “the dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face” and the affective economies of vulnerability that elicit care in one who will awaken as a subject.10 The absolute nakedness of a face, the absolutely defenseless face, without covering, clothing or mask, is what opposes my power over it, my violence, and opposes it in an absolute way, with an opposition which is opposition in itself. [. . .] The face is the fact that a being affects us not in the indicative, but in the imperative, and is thus outside all categories.11 God is thus not mediated in the world as a transcendent deity from a spectral beyond but exists as the face of alterity and thus embedded in the world. “Beyond,” writes Adriaan Peperzak, does not entail separation. God cannot be set off against the totality of phenomena (i.e., the finite universe), as if God were only greater,

“These are my bodies . . .” 143 better, more beingly than the universe. [. . .] God is present in and as the phenomena, whose dissimilarity hints to and darkly signifies that presence.12 Insofar as things reveal the infinite, co-create existence, and bestow meaning, we might find overlap with the Son’s role in classic Trinitarian theology, whose divinity comes from his performance as revealer of an infinite God, co-Creator of the universe, and Redeemer of bodies.13 In such a theology, incarnate divinity is present in and as phenomena as such  – the universe itself as the possibility of Christ’s Cosmic Body, from dogs and cats, to flowers and trees, to the elements themselves. While Pierre Teilhard de Chardin cannot be said to hold this precise theology, the ontic overlap he sees between Creator and creation illustrates the idea presented here. Teilhard’s God is not simply a transcendent person rendered immanent and present to the world all the while drawing creation to a particular end. Divinity, for Teilhard, in embedded in materiality as such. Matter is monstrous, an ontic hybrid encompassing spirit and flesh, much like the dual natured Body of Christ in classical Christian theology, where God is not simply mediated through the world but bound up in and as it.14 The universe develops as the body of God moving toward a predetermined telos of greater and greater degrees of unity. Each thing, for Teilhard, is a differentiated but entangled body, existing dependently and inconceivable apart from the co-creative power of divinity and the totality of the cosmos without being swallowed up and lost into the totality.15 Such is revealed, for Teilhard, and only describable in the context of the incarnation of Jesus and the transmutation of the Eucharist elements. Building on the incarnational logic of the Christ event which is extended forward to the sacramental theology of the Eucharist, Teilhard insists that when Christ, carrying farther the process of his Incarnation, comes down into the bread in order to dwell there in its place, his action is not confined to the particle of matter that his Presence is at hand, for a moment, to etherealize. The transubstantiation is encircled by a halo of divinization real, even though less intense – that extends to the whole universe.16 Divine incarnation is not a one-time historical event breaking into the world at the birth of Jesus and extended to the liturgical life of the church; it is the basic paradigm of being and becoming. Creation is a Christological event resulting in an inherently divinized cosmos emerging within the body of God: Through your own incarnation, my God, all matter is henceforth incarnate. [. . .] Over every living thing which is to spring up, to grow, to flower, to ripen during this day say again the words: This is my Body.

144  Matthew Eaton And over every death-force which waits in readiness to corrode, to wither, to cut down, speak again your commanding words which express the supreme mystery of faith: This is my Blood.17 Yet, as helpful as such a reading of religious materialism and theological affectivity is, we must wrestle with its shortcomings. The line of thinking presented earlier harbors clear monotheistic assumptions of the shema concerning affectivity; the Lord alone is God, and the Lord is love and no other affect. The obvious problem is, of course, that the one religious ecology expresses in a plurality of economies that function similarly and perform dramatically different notions of divinity. The plurality of religious ecologies and economies could result in an incoherent and contradictory perspective on divinity. Anger, fear, and hate; and desire, lust, and greed, for example, function within their own economies, revealing an outside infinite, creating subjects, and providing their own meaning for being. If love is divine through its performance, it is hard to argue that in the aforementioned framework that the various material affects express as otherwise than religious. The shema, however, can be read otherwise than as indicative of strict monotheism. It could easily, and likely should be, read henotheistically – you shall have no other gods besides the Lord, or you shall be devoted to love. Thus, the problem at hand: if the structure of all affective solicitation is similar – though not synonymous – to the expression of love, are there in fact a plurality of irreconcilable incarnate expressions of divinity within our religious ecology? If so, to what degree does this disrupt our understanding of monotheism?

Beyond sameness Wrestling with the possibility of divinity beyond monotheistic unity and even beyond human love, entangled in being and becoming as such, is somewhat horrifying to consider. There are worries that such a theology, insofar as it flirts with pantheism and polytheism, could baptize evil or lead to relativism, thus eroding the religious ground of ethics. Divinity may be otherwise than good or evil, but the synonymous connection in the Christian and other traditions between God and goodness might prove challenging to abandon. There are other worries that arise at the idea of thinking divinity beyond the human form. For many, divinity and humanity are inseparable, and freeing God to mingle with materiality results in monstrous hybrids that inappropriately unite incompatible substances. Yet in the face of such fears lies the equally haunting possibility that we have been duped by religious constructions out of some deep allegiance to sameness. We should be skeptical, at least, of any idea of God that conveniently reflects idealist qualities of our species and supports our position atop Earth’s hierarchical ordering. The pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes, cynical of the blatant similarities between the gods and their worshipers, famously jokes, Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men [sic.] do, horses would

“These are my bodies . . .” 145 paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds.18 While Xenophanes’s concern is not precisely my own, his point that we ought to be skeptical of images of God that look suspiciously and absolutely like its religious adherents needs to be taken seriously. Thus, any Christology privileging normative, human characteristics determined ahead of time as the sole markers of incarnation betrays the possibility of metaphysical anthropocentrism. How then might we speak of the gods? I suggest we begin the discussion by engaging the work of Laurel C. Schneider, whose work in divine multiplicity provides a framework for plurality, even if she does not embrace the precise ideas I offer today. In Beyond Monotheism, Schneider addresses and eschews theology proceeding from a logic of oneness or sameness.19 Such a logic assumes the imperial, sovereign power over of the subject over alterity; it disallows transgressive bodies to have a say in what worlds are like and amounts to a reduction of the other to the same. In a logic of the same, alterity can be absolutely understood, pinned down, and named within the horizon of the subject, and there is nothing beyond this horizon. Within monotheistic theologies, this logic demands that “there can be only one specific revelation. The logic of the One insists that truth is one, and so the one revelation also sets the truth of divinity against all falsehoods.”20 Beyond an absolute embrace of divine sameness, Schneider recognizes the potential of divine plurality to make sense of the idea of God. Beyond sameness in divine expression, there would be, Schneider insists, incarnations of divinity throughout materiality, a sacredness entangled in potentially in all bodies, “a divine reality not only implicated in but explicated out of the very fabrics of the worlds we inherit and incorporate.”21 The expression of this sacredness, following the perspective outlined earlier, is not limited to a logocentrism reduced to the signs, syntax, and metaphors of intentional human language that names alterity as this or that. It shows up most clearly in embodied demand of ethics, as when another asks for a drink of water or protection from the elements. Such expression is an ontic reality inseparable from material actuality; it is never an otherworldly law, virtual reality, or the construction of the subject – it is incarnate within the sensuous tissues of Earth.22 Because such tissues are always peculiar and particular, such divine incarnation could not be reduced to a logic of oneness or sameness; it would always originate in and be unique to the flesh that speaks directly: Literally meaning “in the flesh,” incarnation is about bodies and so already cannot be reduced to oneness without withdrawing, again, from actual bodies in their necessary particularities. The challenge of thinking multiplicity is therefore, in part, one of thinking bodies against abstraction, against universals and generalizations.23

146  Matthew Eaton As such, “Divine multiplicity is first and foremost characterized by fluidity which means it is characterized by change,” and thus cannot be dogmatically reduced to the totality of universal sameness.24 As in negative understandings of God, theologies of multiplicity can never say absolutely and precisely what it is or is not to be divine. Thus, as soon as we acknowledge divine incarnation in the world, we recognize that infinity necessitates kenosis or self-emptying. An incarnate, kenotic God such as this gives up absolute identity, shape-shifts and wanders nomadically throughout materiality, resisting absolute identification. Such an understanding of incarnation “voids all numerical reckoning” and “resists reduction to the One and resists reduction to the Many while affirming a more supple and effective (rather than absolute) unity.”25 Divinity, as such, is both unified and plural without reduction to one or the many. Such a paradoxical idea of divinity, one in which the divine eschews humanist understandings of subjectivity, would seemingly remain open to the language of both mono- and polytheisms, depending on what precisely we wished to say regarding God. Without absolutely eschewing monotheism, I see no reason why we might not follow Schneider’s thought and speak of a limited (i.e., nonabsolute) polytheism when we are concerned with making sense of divine plurality. In light of the possibility of emergent, kenotic multiplicity within the divine and its irreconcilable revelations to which humans are summoned, it would make sense to speak, in limited fashion, of a plurality of gods birthed out of a unified divine ground. Such language would be descriptive of divine reality without becoming solidified as theological metaphysics. Polytheism would be a partial description of a certain eruption of the divine, despite the necessary betrayal of the full reality of divinity that is inherent whenever we speak of a transcendent alterity that overflows the sameness of subjective language.26 Schneider, at least in Beyond Monotheism, does not appear to desire to use such language. Her clearest eschewing of polytheistic language appears predicated on a sense of ultimate ontic unity present within incarnate expressions of divinity even as it takes on a plurality of embodiments. Rejecting mono- and polytheistic logics, she considers the idea of “Ogbonnaya’s ʽcommunotheism’ [which] may be a good alternative [to monotheism and polytheism]. It is a multiplicity that cannot be reduced to the One, nor can it be divided into separate ones, or the many.”27 Building on Trinitarian logic allowing difference within sameness, divine multiplicity cannot equate a logic of the Many because of the “ontological sociality” of a plurality of incarnations – “Each is because they are. Each belongs, and, therefore, is.”28 My sense, explored next, is that such unity is not abandoned in a stronger sense, because there is still perhaps an element of sameness in this understanding of God – a sameness united under the divine banners of love, peace, and justice, which brings together the irreconcilable plurality expressed in various incarnations. There is a sense in which this argument works and there may indeed be an underlying unity to the idea of divinity insofar as divine expression unfolds

“These are my bodies . . .” 147 within similar affective structures. But, if we return to the nature of divine expression described earlier, we may again note the plurality of affects and the real, potentially irreconcilable differences they express and create within human subjects. Thus, I raise the same question with Schneider that I raised earlier with Levinas: If there are a plurality of incarnate religious affects, and if some reveal potentially irreconcilable paths to meaning and redemption in the creation of human subjects, would these constitute a plurality of divine expressions in a stronger sense of divine kenosis than has been previously granted? Insofar as incarnate religious affects guide humans to wildly different places of subjective meaning, I am open to the value of polytheistic language and logic. The multiplicity of an ultimately unified divinity field appears to express in such profoundly different incarnations that we are no longer able to consider the divine expressions within our religious ecology as unified beyond their expressive structure. Eschewing polytheistic language might make sense if we found ourselves summoned only to compassionate, loving ends, but such is unfortunately not the case. I suggest then that a radical kenosis takes place within the structure of incarnation, resulting in an absolute self-emptying of a divinity who ultimately eschews all names and even confronts the sovereignty of those that surface.

“These are my bodies . . .” It might be helpful then to develop a vocabulary indicative of divine plurality. If our religious ecology is inhabited by irreconcilable divinities, we might borrow a phrase from Eve Sedgwick and speak in a polytheistic manner of a world full of “queer little gods.”29 This framework, articulated in dialogue with the literary and poetic ecologies of Proust and Cavafy, envisions the possibility of a Christianity “within the same gestalt as paganism.”30 In these ecologies, the God(s) of love exists within a world also inhabited by countless other divinities, named by a plurality of cultures and existing within various relational webs. These “queer little gods” – transgressive of monotheistic normativity and lacking in the omnipotency of high gods in general – are “ontologically intermediate figures [persons or beings] that are somewhat superhuman. [.  .  .] But still they’re not omnipotent, not omnipresent, not universal.”31 They “lack the somber sublimity of monotheistic deity” but create and direct human life as the gods have always done.32 The virtue of such gods is plural, some being “tutelary [. . .] protective. Though they might also be demonic.”33 These gods “generate this world that’s so filled with them” and exist alongside of the wider ecology, whether human, plant, elemental, or otherwise.34 They are material realities that also transgress physical boundaries insofar as their infinite nature allows them to incarnate and flow between a multiplicity of bodily economies. They are “loosely attached [. . .] to places, persons, families, substances, ideas, music, buildings, machines, emotions, and natural elements.”35 They are creative of world and may be helpful or malevolent, providing meaning in human

148  Matthew Eaton life consistent with their particularity and peculiarity. These gods are not the otherworldly subjects of abstract belief, but material subjects, forces, and/or assemblages with whom humans enter into relation through performative rituals, prayers, superstitions, and devotion. While we need not view such gods as differentiated beings in their own right, I  would draw on much of the language that Sedgwick employs to describe the incarnate powers of our religious ecology. I imagine the birth of the gods as incarnate, personal/relational forces, intimately and irreducibly entangled within a plurality of bodies, sometimes closely attached to particular subjects and other times flowing freely within and between the economies of corporeal assemblages. There is a sense in which the divinity of a religious ecology is not necessarily absolute, but, nevertheless, inherent in and through the performance of divinity or acting like gods are understood to act – at least the idea of divinity erupting from the monotheistic traditions. Divinity may ebb and flow in a continual cycle of kenosis and divinization depending on the force ecologies exert in the world. Such a kenosis also presents itself insofar as competing divinities call each other’s sovereignty into question, demanding irreconcilable devotions to conflicting approaches to life. As such, divinity is insofar as relational assemblages or particular bodies reveal infinity, create subjective worlds, and give meaning to life  – divine roles I  understand mainly from the doctrine of incarnation in the Christian tradition, where Christ is revealer, co-creator, and redeemer. Divinity thus emerges and does not characterize material assemblages absolutely; religious ecologies are transubstantiated in events of incarnation, what we might call kenotic economies of divinity. They are otherwise emptied of a divinity that belongs as well to a multiplicity of others, taking radically different shapes and expressions. Thus, the corporeal assemblages that inspire an anarchic and awakened feeling could be conceived of as gods who inhabit our religious ecologies. How we speak of the gods could follow a number of patterns. We could speak of gods associated with their affects: pain, fear, hate, wonder, and love, all of whom reveal themselves and create human subjects by pulling them in a plurality of directions. Alternatively, we might speak of the gods based on the relational patterns they inspire in us: gods of alterity, who offer an escape from selfsovereignty, and gods of the same, who draw us inward. In either case, each god or pantheon would need to be understood according to its own expressive logic and judged on the merit and the resultant individuals and communities they create.36 Thus, while Teilhard is perhaps turning over in his grave at the thought, we might radicalize his thought and declare not only all matter potentially incarnate, but recognize the deep kenosis in the divine proclamation over everything that springs up, grows, and flowers: These are my Bodies.

Conclusion This religious ecology is transgressive of classical monotheism, and while it supports an underlying unity in the structure of religious affects, the

“These are my bodies . . .” 149 revelations, creations, and meanings that erupt are radically different, precluding a sense of ontological sociality. In such a religious ecology, we are forced to choose which powers to follow, and while such cannot necessarily be ontologized as divine beings, they could be understood as gods – personal forces that reveal, create, and redeem. As such, the language of polytheism, while limited, is helpful. Perhaps then, in thinking theology as otherwise than pure monotheism or absolute polytheism, we might recognize a yes and no to both, simultaneously – embracing each to a degree, before language collapses under a weight it cannot bear. Unity, and monotheism as such, may not be annihilated, but the severe kenosis in creative differentiation – the absolute self-emptying of God to the point of divinity calling itself into question – necessitates the recognition of a substantial qualitative plurality in our religious ecologies. We are faced then not by God, but by a plurality of little gods or a plurality of divine performances. The bigger question would be how this might fit into Christology and manifest the Cosmic Body of Christ. Is the second person of the Trinity simply creation itself, in all of its multiplicity and all its divine expressions, for good or ill, for peace or violence? Or, would Christ continue to reside and express under the banners of love, peace, and justice, a plurality of cosmic bodies limited by the gospel’s idea of God? In either case, we need not succumb to a flat relativism and baptize all as unequivocally good. Christianity might continue serving the same divinities it has always claimed to, albeit in recognition that its god is incarnate in the face of things and affective economies under the banners of love, peace, and justice. Such divine incarnations could be seen as ultimate for all, not simply humanity, though this would reinscribe a logic of oneness and sameness.37 An alternative could be that some divine incarnations simply call the sovereignty of divinity itself into question, without insisting on reclaiming the sovereign status of god above all, but recognizing that various ways of being are more or less meaningful to a particular community or species. There could thus be a sense in which some expressions of divinity call other gods into question, echoing to Mosaic call to have no other gods besides this one (or these few) in full recognition that others exist. In this radical kenosis, emergent divinity calls its deeper, unified structure into question, suggesting that there are better and worse ways for being to unfold. The question then would be, which god(s) is (are) to be followed? Such a confusing, and perhaps preposterous, theology might eschew the idea of monotheism and polytheism, and opt for something like a species-specific henotheism, kathenotheism, or monolatry – ideas limiting the gods followed in religious ecology based on the particularity of our humanity. So why follow the god(s) of alterity – i.e., love, peace, and justice – and why eschew the gods of the same – i.e., hate, rage, and fear? I am just not convinced that the later liberate or redeem human life, even if they fulfill certain desires. They do not lead to human fulfillment qua humanity. They cannot liberate or redeem because they enchain us to ourselves and isolate

150  Matthew Eaton us from a divinity otherwise than ourselves. I suppose then that I am unable to give up a normative anthropology, insisting that humans are unredeemed apart from the common good or the normativity of love. The gods incarnate in economies of care, empathy, compassion, pity, grief, and love – met in the faces of corporeal vulnerability, whether a shivering human, the cowering of a scared cat, or the desolation of a mined mountain top – exercise a special power over humanity and create the possibility of species-specific salvific communities.38 They alone draw subjects outside of themselves, offering an escape from the nauseating and horrifying isolation of a life lived alone, in attitudes of human exceptionalism and narcissism that are oblivious to a common ecological good. In them, we find liberation as the “redemption from the negative” and salvation as “the gift of the positive.”39 No one is saved apart from the other, without whom we are damned by our own humanity.

Notes 1 See, for example, Eaton (2016). 2 Kosofsky Sedgwick (2011), Kosofsky Sedgwick and Snediker (2008). 3 See, for example, Baker, James, and Reader (2016), Crockett and Robbins (2012), Ingold (2011), Keller (2017), Rieger and Waggoner (2016). 4 Merleau-Ponty (1968, p. 274). 5 Ahmed (2015, p. 45). 6 Temporality is a major theme throughout Levinas’s writings. See, for example, Levinas (1998b). 7 On anoetic and autonoetic affect, see Panksepp and Biven (2012, pp. 15–23). 8 Levinas (1998a, pp. 111–121, at 118). 9 Ibid. Levinas distances himself from the language of incarnation in this passage and many other places in his writing. The problem with this language, as he sees it, is that an incarnate divinity is necessarily phenomenal and thus open to perception and intentional consciousness. When I refer to incarnation, I do so in a different sense, that of simply being embodied, while simultaneously transcendent from a subjective horizon. I do not see why his notion of incarnation must be dogmatically rejected philosophically or inscribed into the Christian tradition. As long as the infinity of alterity is safeguarded in a philosophical theology, incarnation can express directly and not through a mediator to a more ultimate transcendence. The face is for Levinas, after all, a fully embodied, social expression, even if irreducible to any definitive set of characteristics. For more, see Gibbs (2010). 10 Levinas (2013, p. 78). 11 Levinas (1987, p. 21). 12 Peperzak (2003, p. 102). 13 See Eaton (2020). 14 “I plunge into the all-inclusive One; but the One is so perfect that as it receives me and I lose myself in it I can find in it the ultimate perfection of my own individuality” Teilhard de Chardin (1965, p. 19). Likewise, Teilhard writes, “Christ, it is true, does not destroy nor dissolve us. He does not modify our nature nor wipe out our human personality  – on the contrary, by melting us into himself he completes our differentiation as individual persons” Teilhard de Chardin (1968b, p. 266). The universe is conceived as a universal element, or a divine milieu, which links all things with the incarnation of God while allowing existents to take particular shapes of their own.

“These are my bodies . . .” 151 15 “My starting-point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material, organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him [sic.]” Teilhard de Chardin (1968a, p. 14). 16 Teilhard de Chardin (1968c, p. 207). 17 Teilhard de Chardin (1965, pp.  17, 23). The result of divine creativity is an incarnation of the sacred within the fabric of things as they unfold in time; there is a deep unity between matter and spirit, creation and Creator. This is seen throughout Teilhard’s theology. 18 Xenophanes, Fragment B15, in Burnet (1945, p. 119). Xenophanes, of course, depicts the idea of divinity in other ways that could be deemed anthropomorphic. The point here is simply to reveal the historical depth of the problem of correlating absolutely the creature with the creator. 19 Schneider (2008). 20 Schneider (2008, p. 193). 21 Schneider (2008, p. 5). In engaging Schneider, my focus is on divine plurality. Not discussed in depth is a conversation concerning divine ubiquity – the divine all – that moves not only toward poly- or henotheism, but also to pantheism. For more, see Levine (2014), Rubenstein (2018). 22 Schneider (2008, p. 129). 23 Schneider (2008, p. 142). 24 Schneider (2008, p. 154). 25 Schneider (2008, pp. 4–5). 26 I would say the same of monotheistic language. Divine unity betrays divinity just as divine multiplicity does. Speaking of a unity would betray the incarnate particularities the erupt in materiality, just as each kenotic divine face is separate from others and unable to reveal all that there is in the infinite sacred. 27 Schneider (2008, p. 167). 28 Schneider (2008, p. 67). 29 Sedgwick (2011, pp. 42–68). 30 Sedgwick (2011, p. 59). 31 Sedgwick and Snediker (2008, p. 209). 32 Sedgwick (2011, p. 15). 33 Sedgwick and Snediker (2008, p. 209). 34 Sedgwick and Snediker (2008, p. 211). 35 Sedgwick (2011, p. 45). 36 Much more commentary is needed here, but for now, I  reiterate the crucial nature of a kenotic economy because it is difficult, if not impossible, to simply suggest that divine incarnation is restricted to any individual body but may only erupt across and within the porous boundaries of multiple differentiated beings. Likewise, each divine economy is called into question by others. Gods of hate, for example, cannot be said to simply incarnate bodies who become the objects of rage but rather the total economy that summons a subject to violence. For more on hatful economies, see Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 46. Other gods, however, might reside more intimately in particular bodies. The vulnerability that demands ethics, for example, that takes up residence as the other within the same, could be seen as more intimate divine incarnation expressed in effects of care, empathy, compassion, pity, grief, and love. The body of the subject would play a role, becoming entangled in the economy, but we cannot underestimate the summons and authority of a particular, differentiated, irreplaceable alterity in the eruption of ethics. Here, another has a direct say in the divine expression and invitation to love, whereas in an economy of hate there is no such invitation to violence from the other. In these examples, we can recognize the kenotic differentiation of divinity in the incarnations of gods of the same, and gods of alterity, expressed through a variety of bodies and affects.

152  Matthew Eaton 37 If such is the case, it seems that perhaps we have not escaped a logic of the one insofar as the gods compete for sovereignty. 38 This would not reinscribe a logic of sameness or oneness, because it recognizes the fundamentally human dimension of this discussion of religion and salvation. Divinity surely transcends the concerns mentioned here and there may be redeeming values other than ethics – though not for humans. 39 Burrgraeve (2008, p. 14).

Bibliography Ahmed, S. (2015). The cultural politics of emotion. New York, NY: Routledge. Baker, C., James, T. A., & Reader, J. (2016). A philosophy of Christian materialism: Entangled fidelities and the public good. London: Routledge. Burnet, J. (1945). Early Greek philosophy. London: A & C Black. Burrgraeve, R. (2008). “No one can save oneself without others”: An ethic of liberation in the footsteps of Emmanuel Levinas. In R. Burrgraeve (Ed.), The awakening to the other: A provocative dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas (pp. 13–65). Leuven: Peeters Publisher. Crockett, C., & Robbins, J. (2012). Religion, politics, and the earth: The new materialism. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Eaton, M. (2016). Theology and an-archy: Deep incarnation Christology following Emmanuel Levinas and the new materialism. Toronto Journal of Theology, 32, 3–15. Eaton, M. (2020). An-archy and awakening: The ethical and political temporalities of Christology and pneumatology. Heythrop Journal, 61. Gibbs, R. (2010). The disincarnation of the word: The trace of god in reading scripture. In K. Hart & M. A. Signer (Eds.), The exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas between Jews and Christians (pp.  32–51). New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. London: Routledge. Keller, C. (Ed.). (2017). Entangled worlds: Religion, science, and new materialisms. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Kosofsky Sedgwick, E. (2011). The weather in proust. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kosofsky Sedgwick, E., & Snediker, M. D. (2008). Queer little gods: A conversation. The Massachusetts Review, 49(1–2), 194–218. Levinas, E. (1987). Freedom and command. In E. Levinas (Ed.) & A. Lingis (Trans.), Collected philosophical papers (pp. 15–24). Dordrecht: Nijhoff. Levinas, E. (1998a). Of god who comes to mind. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Levinas, E. (1998b). Otherwise than being or beyond essence (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University. Levinas, E. (2013). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levine, M. P. (2014). Pantheism: A non-theistic concept of deity. London: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible (C. Lefort, Ed. & A. Lingis, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

“These are my bodies . . .” 153 Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The archaeology of mind: Neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Peperzak, A. (2003). Affective theology, theological affectivity. In J. Bloechel (Ed.), Religious experience and the end of metaphysics (pp. 94–105). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Rieger, J., & Waggoner, E. (2016). Religious experience and new materialism: Movement matters. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rubenstein, M-J. (2018). Pantheologies: Gods, worlds, monsters. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Schneider, L. (2008). Beyond monotheism: A  theology of multiplicity. London: Routledge. Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1965). Mass on the world. In P. Teilhard de Chardin (Ed.) & K. Gerald Van (Trans.), Hymn of the universe (pp. 9–38). New York, NY: Harper & Row. Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1968a). Cosmic life. In P. Teilhard de Chardin (Ed.) & R. Hague (Trans.), Writings in time of war (pp. 13–71). New York, NY: Harper & Row. Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1968b). Forma Christi. In P. Teilhard de Chardin (Ed.) & R. Hague (Trans.), Writings in time of war (pp.  249–270). New York, NY: Harper & Row. Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1968c). The priest. In P. Teilhard de Chardin (Ed.)  & R. Hague (Trans.), Writings in time of war (pp.  203–224). New York, NY: Harper & Row.

12 Members of each other Intercarnation, gender, and political theology Catherine Keller

Universal or universe Despite its long legacy of Christological triumphalism, of exclusivism, of anthropo- and androcentric exceptionalism, we have been invited to reconsider the metaphor of the Body of Christ. For this collective project, we were reminded by the editors of a lineage that opens the Christological body into a “universal dimension.” In the hospitality of such a conversation, we recognize ourselves participating in the branching multiplicity of that theological lineage – and at the same time of its world. The following question then arises: Might the messianic and sacramental figure of that body still host a cosmology – a world? If I have largely traded the language of the universal for that of the universe, it is to keep faith with particularity – with the earthbound challenges of the materializing multiplicity of the world. It is to find theological language hospitable to the universe, to its particular world of entangled particularities, and so to a relational pluralism by which we might – together and more responsibly – address the multiplicity of its mounting urgencies. Those urgencies become emergencies in which particular universals, in our particular corner of the universe, contest, contradict, or collude with other universals in the naming of the particular crisis. So then partly for political reasons, partly for theological ones, we find ourselves always again turning and twisting within the fraught binary of particularity and universality. Abstractly it poses no problem, as the particulars embody their universal in ever differing ways. But in practice, in the practice of Christian theology, I find no escape from what this volume calls the “aporetic tension” of universal and particular. The Christology that is universal because it is cosmological activates precisely the problem it means to solve: the problem of an inclusion that in its monophony excludes the polyphony of the particulars it hosts. The regnant uni, the One, that unifies, tends toward uniformity and therefore to the imposition of its own universalized particular: its exceptionalist Christ. At the same time, the reverse move, performed for decades now, of the deconstruction of oppressive unifications, totalizations, and universalizations

Members of each other 155 has not satisfactorily replaced the universal with sheer différance or mere multiplicity. The problem lies not with continental deconstruction, or postructuralism as such, but with its habituated transdisciplinary effects as they combine with internally divisive liberal/progressive purities. This pluralism often sacrifices the vital connectivity, the mutual participation, the very ground (common, material or metaphysical) of those differences. Within or without theology, it ends up fragmenting into a vaguely inclusive relativism – a disavowed shadow-universal, poor in universe. It fails to foster the broad, even planetary coalitions that any serious ecosocial justice now demands. It is important to note that the unity of universalism provokes reactions not just on the political left of pluralism but on the right of neonationalism, committed on principle to the trumping of liberal universals, of international, let alone planetary, cooperation (except, of course, in the form of its own shadow-universals, such as neoliberal economics, white supremacism, Christian civilization). So it is a good moment to reconsider theologically the universal dimension of cosmological Christologies. On the one hand, a conservative Christianity claims to possess in the absolute exception of its Christ the one true universal, to which everyone must submit or be damned. Here the Christological exception becomes the rule. It hardens into a strangely narrow universal. At the same time a liberal/progressive Christianity has been pushing for a more inclusive Christ, somehow embracing non-Christians but nonconversionist. Yet due to both orthodox religious and modern rationalist universals, as they morph into monoliths of aggressive uniformity, we often hesitate to claim any normative universalism, except perhaps in terms of human rights. It may, therefore, prove religiopolitically fruitful to linger longer in the aporia. I understand the purpose of extending the Body of Christ cosmically as an attempt to overcome the unifying Christian exceptionalism without falling into a self-defeating relativism. Might this extension then mean to enfold the universal in the universe? Do we thereby translate the very carne of incarnation into its cosmos of endlessly interrelated bodies, indeed into the entangled materiality from which traditionally that body had been metaphysically excepted – ex-cipere – taken out? Does the body here signify such corporal connectivity as has recently been giving glimpses of itself in female, in Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transsexual Queer Intersex Life, in dark, in nonhuman and other queerly Christic bodies: “promiscuous incarnations”?1 We cannot then avoid asking, does universe carry the same problem of the uni, the unifying oneness of all beings? Here the Latin root may come to our aid: universus, with its versus, meaning “to turn, toward or against” – perhaps even against the One; it may turn into uni just because it is not already one, but bends toward and into one. A many seems to precede any one it turns toward. So then our twisting and turning with the question of the many, and the One may be performing the root meaning of universe. A wondrous novel about immigration at the U.S. southern border, Yuri Herrera’s Signs

156  Catherine Keller Preceding the End of the World, lends a clue. Its key “sign” appears as the neologism “verse,” used to mean “leave,” but lending it fresh verve, dynamism – as in “she versed from the room” and then from her country.2 So universe can be read as twisting into a temporary unification, or in inverse simultaneity, as leaving one. This universing suggests not just a twisted universalism but also an alternative cosmology: what William James called “a pluralistic universe.”3 That 19th-century burst of radical pluralism inspired A. N. Whitehead’s cosmological first principle of “creativity”: “The many become one and are increased by one.”4 In this universe in process, without absolute beginning or ending, a many precedes each of the becoming ones. Each one is the creature of the universal creativity – no exception. No sovereign and simple One preexists the multiplicity of becomings. The universal creativity is the creativity of the universe. The creativity of divine becoming is read as twisting all multiplicities into itself – after their becomings. To name God’s universal relation to a multiplicity of bodies human and otherwise – without subjecting them to a sovereign uniformity – sends language itself twisting. I have elsewhere proposed “entangled difference” as the universal condition, and before that translated Elohim as “Manyone,” twisting language to express “plurisingularity.”5 Amidst names that verse in and out of (any) language, incarnation as the Manyone’s pretrinitarian revelation of the becoming flesh can on occasion get transcribed as intercarnation.6 Intercarnation highlights the intermittencies, the intervals, and the interdependencies, of all our relations – as the twisting texture of a vibrant universe. The One incarnate within intercarnate multiplicity then calls for an earthly intensification of human participation: not only in the hospitable creativity of the Christian God but also in our mindful participation in each other. And here “each other” twists into the endless others making up the body of the creation, and of our extraordinarily hospitable planet.

Paulitical theology In the meantime, the human part of the participatory creation is rapidly, in systemic mindlessness, compromising the earth’s ability to host our species  – and innumerable others. That is why I  wrote a Political Theology of the Earth.7 I had until then kept distance from the recent assemblage of political theorists (mostly not theologians) exegeting Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology of the sovereign exception.8 But I was motivated to enter that conversation by the deleterious anti-Earth direction of a perilously sovereign U.S. political exceptionalism, fervently supported by our Bible-thumping Christian right (or with the biblically ignorant 45th president signing bibles at rallies in the U.S. deep south, call it “Bible-trumping”). I found myself, therefore, entangled in the Pauline metaphor of the Body of Christ – partly through the same nontheists, from Agamben and Badiou on to Zizek, in their enthusiastic embrace of Paul vis-à-vis political theology. This was something of a perplexity for one who has forever shared the feminist

Members of each other 157 critique both of Paul’s sexism and of the identitarian masculinity of Christ’s sovereign body. These recently Paulitical thinkers lured me into a particular pathway of connections in the Pauline corpus that trace out a corporeality crucial to any political theology mindful of its actual theology. The Pauline connectionalism of the interdependent members of the body as membership en christou (1 Cor 12.13), and obedience to our head, surely does align all too smoothly with a hierarchical ecclesiology of church membership. But often the slightly later version is neglected: There Christ’s embodiment consists not simply of members of Him, but of “members of each other” (Rom 12.3–5). It is a mutual participation that materializes as the Body of Christ. A relational ontology flashes brilliantly and briefly into view. We may thereby link that relationalism also to Paul’s metaphor of the “contractions” (synestalmenos) of the present time. And thence we flash to the contractions, the cosmic labor pains of the “whole creation” (Rom 8.22). Then the messianic flesh is not exception to but exemplar of its cosmos. In the birth contractions of that universe-body, whose body, precisely, is envisioned? Surely, Christ as such cannot be intended, but a bodiliness that the incarnation contracts in itself, the materiality of the creation in which Jesus of Nazareth is one among innumerable creatures. Which body “has been groaning in labor pains until now”? One theological tradition whispers, “The body of God.”9 If the universe is figured as the body of God, the Cosmic Body of Christ names its messianic manifestation – its gathering into human form of the vastly more-than-human new creation. The gathering is ekklesia, “called out,” but precisely not as exception. Rather the human church would be called as novel exemplar, called to flesh out the body that would gather all into itself, that would ultimately, mindfully, enfold the creation. So the human finds redemption in its cosmic ekklesia with or without – so very often without – the name of Christ. The contracting or enfolding of the universe of all bodies claims the universality of universe: In the eschatological renewal of the creation, the radically new Earth and heavens, ouranos better now translated as atmosphere (including ozone layer.) Instead of the exception, Political Theology of the Earth proposes the inception: the initiation, that is, the birth, of a new possibility. The possibility ceases to be that of a mere abstraction by being born as exemplar. The kainos of the kairos, great or small, takes place in Paul at the eschatos, the verge, of the now time. An edgy now: for as Agamben in The Time That Remains renders Paul (1 Cor 7.28), the remaining time is contracted. Synestalmenos: not the same, not as simple, as the usual translation as “short.”10 And given the closing window of climate change that nuance of difference matters. It materializes. The kairos evokes a participatory creativity that is happening: not completed then or now, a universe versing in its contractions away from the status quo, twisting in its agonies toward something new. Is this the messianic process by which God becomes all in all (1 Cor 15.28)?

158  Catherine Keller

Recapitulating Christ Paul’s eschatological all in all may name then not the end but the edge, eschaton, of the kairotic possibility. God becoming all in all: It begins – on principle, en ho logon, in principium, in the beginning that is the inception of every becoming, every Genesis. Agamben deftly couples the contraction of time in Corinthians with the figure of “recapitulation” in Ephesians: “To gather up all things in him, things in heaven and on earth” (Eph. 1.10). Agamben finds here a kairos in which “the past (the complete) rediscovers actuality and becomes unfulfilled, and the present (the incomplete) acquires a kind of fulfillment” – the pleroma.11 So Agamben makes subtly audible the resonance between the ancient recapitulatio of all things and Walter Benjamin’s messianic iteration, his “ungeheure Abkürzung.”12 The trauma of unfulfilled history contracts in the messianic recapitulation with a novel possibility. So it in-gathers, collects, contracts not in completion but in opening. Thus in its contracted density the moment, the kairos, may burst open. If all, pan, is always already en theou, what happens en christou figures its Verwirklichung as embodiment, as materialization. We may thus articulate a Christology that does not supersede, does not except itself from the all, but takes it all in, contracts it all in itself, in and as the matter of messianic inception. For this climactic recapitulation Ephesians 1.10 uses the language of the kairos, not chronos: pleroma ton kairo: “As for the economy of the pleroma of times, all things are recapitulated in him.” “This recapitulation of the past,” writes Agamben, “produces a pleroma, a saturation and fulfillment of kairoi (messianic kairoi are therefore literally full of chronos, but an abbreviated, summary chronos), that anticipates the eschatological pleroma when God ‘will be all in all.’ ”13 This figuration carries the glimpse of redemption not as supernatural takeout but as immense intake. All in. We could recapitulate these readings of the recapitulatio through Irenaeus’s rendition of Heilsgeschichte, or more cosmologically, through the complicans of Cusa, Leibniz’s microcosmic monad, and then Whitehead’s “actual occasion” as recapitulation of its past universe. The latter two influenced Gilles Deleuze’s atheist reading of “repetition” and its cosmic folds of difference.14 We might branch over to the “new materialism,” with Karen Barad finding in every individual, indeed every quantum of matter, an “entangled multitude” of all possible histories. She has recently through Butler and Benjamin discerned the messianic written into the most elemental texture of matter.15 Whitehead in his theism did not resort to a messianic language to express the cosmological rhythm that brooks no exceptions, that iterates the history of the universe from the particular space-time perspective of each becoming creature. But each becoming does get repeated in the “consequent nature of God,” which, moment by moment, enfolds all particulars in itself – with a difference.16 That difference would be of and in the divine itself, as universally, pleromically becoming body. And as divine, it issues in the next

Members of each other 159 moment as lure, as invitation to an inception, however unconscious or minor, and however little materialized, in each occasion. That divine lure contains as its content the universals he called “eternal objects,” pure possibilities lacking in actuality. The theologian John Cobb translated the lure into Christology: Christ as logos, versing from the imaginary of the sovereign Son of the omnipotent Father, to become audible instead as the call to “creative transformation.”17 In this lineage, resistance for the sake of a common earthly good to, for instance, the U.S.-dominated global politicoeconomic order, counts to the messianic and vulnerable work of creative transformation. It resists all subjugation of creativity to the name of Jesus Christ. But it resists the Christ-exceptionalism in that very name. If the human gets “summed up” with everything else in that cosmic exemplar, it is through that exemplary human’s explicitly antihierarchical connectivity: “What you do to the least, you do to me” (Mt. 25.31–46). “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven” (7.21). No classical sovereignty survives the irony and the radicality of this deep entanglement. But it may still offer a biblical radix for an intersectional ethics in a time of unveiled white supremacism, misogyny, Islamophobia, and climate denialism. I am guessing that, under the pressure of the now time, no ethic can hold, can breathe, without the amorous spirit of that pleroma. And, as Jacob Taubes insists, surprisingly, far from diluting Jesus’s rendition of “love the neighbor as yourself,” Paul radicalizes it.18 That “radical Jew” (as Daniel Boyarin calls Paul, echoing Taubes) reads there the whole summation of the law.19 “For the entire law is fulfilled in obeying this one commandment, love the neighbor as yourself” (Gal. 5.14). Taubes thinks that Paul is deliberately not adding the “and God” of the dual commandment. The dividing of love between neighbor and God may in practice dilute the rigorous ethic of outreach to the human other. But what matters is that love in its radicality does not then work as an exception to the law but for its “fulfillment.”

Messianic intra-actions The kairotic possibility of “radical hospitality” means to “welcome one another, as the Messiah welcomed you” (Rom. 15.7). It climbs across the differences of race, class, or gender: “No longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Meschiach Jeshua” (Gal 3.28). It is not that, for example, gender equality was historically derived from Paul’s body talk. On the contrary, the Pauline corpus in both senses was routinely used to maintain social hierarchy. But his figuration of body does support equality. Indeed, its collapse of hierarchical identities has been admired as Paul’s “militancy” by such a leftist atheist as Badiou. Badiou finds in Paul a politically utopian and revolutionary “contemporary,” mobilizing a truth event that shuns every

160  Catherine Keller ethnocentric return and every nationalist or commercial territorialization: “For if it is true that every truth erupts as singular, its singularity is immediately universalizable. Universalizable singularity necessarily breaks with identitarian singularity.”20 But from Badiou, one receives at the same time a unifying Marxist universal, impatient with, for instance, social movements focused on sexual or racial rights. The Second Testament scholar Larry Welborn, with a more democratically radical Paulinism, checks Badiou’s antipluralism: Thus the “communitarian particularisms” against which Badiou rails as impediments to a universal truth, are not erased in the Messiah, but embraced and affirmed. “The one who loves the other, the other as the very embodiment of difference, is the one who fulfills the law.” (Rom. 13.8b)21 A mattering incarnationalism thus finds coalitional flesh in this material filling-full. Its intercarnational pleroma resonates to a concept articulated early within African American women’s movement and critical race theory as “intersectionality,” as the insistence that race, sex, gender, class cannot be understood in abstraction from each other.22 Such intersectionality requires fresh fleshly articulation in every generation  – as does, theologically, the corrolary intercarnation. So now, if we have ears to hear, we may hear  – almost – an oddly soprano echo of Paul, still writing, “Neither Black nor white, Christian nor Muslim, neither citizen nor immigrant, neither straight nor queer.” Then in a voice like a hooting owl, a whistling wind: “Neither human nor nonhuman.” In this sequence of a neither/nor that is a both/and, that nonhumanity vibrates beneath hearing. Yet it has achieved fresh audibility in the rapidly evolving explorations of the so-called New Materialism. In Jane Bennett’s affectively “vibrant matter,” the passageways between the human and the nonhuman become dense with ambiguity and communication.23 The “beneath” runs deep down: from whence in Karen Barad’s human/nonhuman assemblages of “intra-active agency,” the messianic intensity of matter itself, tuned to the microcosms of subatomic entanglement, “flashes up.”24 So across multiplying registers we find ourselves entangled in one another for good and ill, human and nonhuman, in our aching earthbound precarity. But in amorous agonism membership in each other becomes a calling, a responsibility, an ecology of new creation. This is a crucial amplification of political theology, as it seeks to coalesce across a fuller spectrum, in emergent coalitions never only local, never only planetary. In the intersections of vulnerable and defiant new publics, it twists its own secularizations toward their messianic edge. The aporetics of the universalized particular will not cease to obstruct our passage, even within the poros, the plenitude, of this amorous calling. The unstraight movement of such a vocation will not escape the tension of the universal and the particular even in and as the messianic body. But the

Members of each other 161 tension can recharge our attention to what calls us each and all now – at this kairos, this moment of universe, with its lure of a possibility that matters. If the Cosmic Body of Christ refuses reduction to one event of incarnation, it remains at the same time indissociable from that particular Jewish and male-bodied becoming. The world-shifting uniqueness in its manifold inceptions expresses neither the exception to nor the rule of the human. Jesus taught not himself, not “Lord, Lord,” but attention to the any or all the vulnerable bodies of our world (Mt 25). So in its intercarnation, that messianic body materializes “through all and in all” (Eph 4.6) – in all of the ecosocial density and precarity of our gender and sex and race and class and now (the ellipsis does not stop) . . . nonhuman species.25 The intersectionality as it becomes mindful unfolds in the dynamism of struggle on behalf of all of the fragile bodies of the world. Multiple multiplicities of religious and irreligious members are therein ever entwined. Tired ecumenisms of bounded religions can only fall away. A wilder honesty, a wider hermeneutics, calls with seculareligious urgency for theological embodiment. But then the ancient Body does not matter less. It materializes all the more recognizably when we follow its own shift of attention away from its exceptionalized self to all the others, those neighbors, victims, enemies, strangers – and ever stranger others. It may be its ability to translate in and out of Christ language that will let Christology keep living even if the institutional churches do not cease to bleed out. Theologians now have many apocalypses, many revelations of collective precarity, to mind. Global warming relativizes the collapse of churches. The hospitable assemblage, the ekklesia, of the earth itself is in jeopardy. Each intersection of the creaturely threads of our cosmos forms its own cross. Perhaps that always happens in a universe of mortal creatures, perpetually perishing. The living universe figured as the body of God signifies an endlessness of creative incarnation among creatures who – without exception – die. Yet mortality never excuses indifference, injustice, or blindly systemic destruction. As fragile creatures, we are called to courageous care for our particular and shared worlds. From what or whom that call is heard as coming will vary as multiply and as uncertainly as our worlds. That is to say that we are universally called – unexceptionally and in the uniqueness of our differences. In this planetarily collective jeopardy, our time is not exceptional but extreme. And in the gracious space of the universe-body, that mysterious body endlessly exceeding and translating the name of Christ, we find ourselves members of each other, intercarnate in entangled multitudes. What verses even here, even now, toward unexpected inception?

Notes 1 Schneider (2010, pp. 231–246). Schneider is currently completing a book by the same title. 2 Herrera (2015).

162  Catherine Keller 3 James (1909). 4 Whitehead (1978, p. 21). 5 Keller (2003, pp. 172–182). 6 Keller (2017). 7 Keller (2018). 8 The brilliant wave of German post-holocaust theology taking “political theology” back from the Nazi-tainted grasp of Carl Schmitt, Jurgen Moltmann, Johannes Metz, and Dorothee Solle had receded by the late 1970s in the face of the political particularisms of social movements (feminist, black, ecological, gay, etc.) of the late 20th century. 9 McFague (1993); She drew the great metaphor of the universe as the body of God from Hartshorne (1984). 10 Agamben (2005, p. 19). 11 Agamben (2005, p. 75). 12 Benjamin (2007, p. 263). 13 Agamben (2005, p. 76). 14 See my account of this lineage of folds in Keller (2014). 15 Barad (2017). 16 Whitehead (1978, p. 345). 17 Cobb (1998, p. 75). 18 Taubes (2004). 19 Boyarin (1994). 20 Badiou (2003, p. 11). 21 Welborn (2015, p. 69). 22 Crenshaw (2019), Collins and Bilge (2016). 23 Bennett (2010). 24 Barad (2017). 25 Crucial to affirm in this context the force of Teilhard de Chardin’s vision, deeply Pauline, on the body of Christ as becoming “all in all” through the process of “Christogenesis,” involving the entire nonhuman creation, as it was then mobilized for ecological vision by Father Thomas Berry and his disciples. In the current epoch, this intellectual current flows through the multireligious wisdom and prophetic activism of Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, directors of the Yale Forum for Religion and Ecology. See also the book series by Tucker and Grim.

Bibliography Agamben, G. (2005). The time that remains: A  commentary on the letter to the romans (P. Dailey, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Badiou, A. (2003). St. Paul: The foundation of universalism (R. Brassier, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Barad, K. (2017). What flashes up: Theological-political-scientific Fragments. In C. Keller  & M-J. Rubenstein (Eds.), Entangled worlds: Religion, science and new materialisms (pp. 21–88). New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Benjamin, W. (2007 [1969]). Illuminations: Essays and reflections (H. Arendt & H. Zohn, Ed. Trans.). New York, NY: Schocken. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Boyarin, D. (1994). A radical Jew: Paul and the politics of identity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Members of each other 163 Cobb, J. B. Jr., (1998). Christ in a pluralistic age. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers. Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2016). Intersectionality. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Crenshaw, K. (2019). On intersectionality: Essential writings. New York, NY: The New Press. Hartshorne, C. (1984). Omnipotence and other theological mistakes. New Haven, CT: SUNY Press. Herrera, Y. (2015). Signs proceeding the end of the world (L. Dillman, Trans.). London: And Other Stories. James, W. (1909). A pluralistic universe: Hibbert lectures at Manchester college on the present situation in philosophy. New York, NY: Longmans Green & Co. Keller, C. (2003). Face of the deep: A theology of becoming. London: Routledge. Keller, C. (2014). Cloud of the impossible: Negative theology and planetary entanglement. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Keller, C. (2017). Intercarnations: Exercises in theological possibility. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Keller, C. (2018). Political theology of the earth: Our planetary emergency and the struggle for a new public. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. McFague, S. (1993). The body of god: An ecological theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Rubenstein, M-J. (2018). Pantheologies: Gods, worlds, monsters. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Schneider, L. C. (2010). Promiscuous incarnation. In M. D. Kamitsuka (Ed.), The embrace of Eros: Bodies, desires and sexuality in Christianity (pp. 231–246). Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Taubes, J. (2004). The political theology of Paul (D. Hollander, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Tucker, M. E., & Grim, J. (Ed.). (1997). Religions of the world and ecology. Published by the Center for Study of World Religions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Welborn, L. L. (2015). Paul’s summons to messianic life: Political theology and the coming awakening. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Whitehead, A. N. (1967). Adventures in ideas. New York, NY: Free Press. Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and reality: An essay in cosmology (D. R. Griffin & D. W. Sherborne, Eds.) (Corrected Edition). New York, NY: Free Press.

Index

affect 140 – 141: anarchic 141; autonoetic 141 – 142; diachronic 142 agential realism 16n7 anarchic religion 142 animism 140 anthropocentrism 1; cosmology, and 44, 83; creativity, and 41; criticism of 15, 40, 99, 145; divine image 108; dualism 85; exceptionalism 154; gender bias 101; incarnation, and 8; interspecies 106 – 108; overcoming 14; parochial 31; salvation and 33; theological 108; Western modernity 85 aseity of God 94, 95, 98; incarnation 131 being: Christophany, as 12, 66 – 70; creativity, and 40; divine 25 – 28; eternal 25; finite 43 – 44, 72; hierarchy 22; incarnatio continua 66 – 70; living 15, 39; new way of 80, 83; rational 23 – 24, 28; re-discovery 44; spiritual 31; time-being 13; universal determination 63 Bible: classic model 80; poetic 80; translation into German 7, 8 Bible-thumping 156 binarism 128, 132, 134 – 135 bodily experiences 37, 38, 40, 45, 141 – 144; divine plurality, and 147 – 148 bodily images 39 – 40, 140 Body of Christ: absence of 36; Christological 11; cosmic, as see Cosmic Body [of Christ]; God as 99 – 100; Jesus as 93; living 44; male, as 9; multiple aspects, as 10, 13; transcendent being 108 – 110; unfolding, as 14 Buddhism 64 – 65

celestial bodies 30 Certeau, Michel de 2; background 36; bodily perspectives 38 – 40; concept of Body of Christ 36 – 37; writing 36 – 38 Chardin, Teilhard de 2; absoluteness 10; background 48 – 49; concept of Body of Christ 9 – 10, 49 – 52; consciousness 57 – 58; ever greater Christ 54 – 56; evolutionary understanding of the cosmic Christ 52 – 54; spiritual autobiography 58 – 59; struggles 58; world as God’s body 49 – 50; writing 48 – 49 Christ the Evolver 54, 57 Christ: bodily incarnated person, as 44; cosmic, as 41 – 42; different forms 57; divinity, and 43; living image, as 40 – 41, 44; mortal man, as 43; recapitulating 158 – 159; third nature 49 Christian materialism 7, 15n3, 16n13 Christianity: conservative claims 155; credibility 56; development 56; European-Dutch 119; Jesus, centrality of 80; new era 55; Platonic 21; reinterpretation of 54; reputation 119; sacramental tradition 82, 119; Western 77 christic paradigm 11, 15 Christogenesis 52, 57 Christology: becoming, of 15; Christ, and 62; divine and human reality 62; ecological 12; from above 11, 13; high 52; relativistic 82 – 83; universal 84 Christology: bodies as funny things 126 – 128; Christian theology,

Index  165 and 128; facing errors 128 – 129; possibility of 126 Christ-Omega 50, 52, 55, 57 Christophany 12, 66 – 79 Church Fathers 81, 102, 105, 108 clericalism 56, 115, 120 – 121 consciousness 94 – 95 corporeality: assemblages 148; forms 28, 30, 31; materiality, and 1, 7 – 8, 15, 117; vulnerability 150 Cosmic Body [of Christ]: Body of Christ, and 12, 14 – 15, 33, 49 – 52, 108; evolutionary understanding 52 – 54; God, as 99, 102; imagery 110; materiality of Christ 111; messianic manifestation 157; metaphor, as 2, 7, 48, 114, 120 – 122; plurality of cosmic bodies 149; world as 119 cosmic liturgy 51, 102 Cosmogenesis 58 cosmotheandric vision 63, 65 Council of Chalcedon 9, 62, 71, 80 creatio continua 7, 63, 97 creation 96 – 99; agency in 26; being, and 102 – 103, 110; Christ as Logos 67; divine love, and 63; eternal 21, 22; event, as 10, 143; God’s image 96 – 99; God’s will 62 – 63; incarnatio continua, as 63; incarnation 96 – 99; original 27; material 105; rational 31; renewal 157; theology of 67 creation ex nihilo doctrine 62, 97 creative spirituality 86 – 87 creaturely being 101 – 104; God, and 104 – 106 Cusanus 2; absolute and contracted maximum 41 – 42; Christ as living image 40 – 41; concept of Body of Christ 9, 37; cosmic Christ 41 – 42; influences 9; relational thinking 42 deep incarnation 1, 12 – 13, 110 – 111; creaturely being 101 – 104; form of beauty 102 – 104; human-divine relationships 103; meaning 101; revelation 103 – 104; wisdom of god 104 – 106 divine image: anthropocentricism, and 108 divine plurality 140, 144, 146; bodily experience, and 147 – 148; Cosmic Body of Christ, and 149; framework 145

Divine Wisdom: God, of 104 – 106; meaning 8 – 9; original vision 27; will from intellect 26 divine Word: God, of 69 – 70, 103, 110; importance 27; selfcommunication 26 dogma 83; Christological 12, 14, 132, 133; nature 7; thinking 119 Eastern Orthodox tradition 101, 104, 110, 115 ecological crisis 14 – 15, 77 ecological ethics 86 – 88 ecology 106; deep 12; definitions 107; new 106 – 108; philosophy of 106 – 107 ecosophy 65 – 66 embodiment: God in Jesus 83; new epistemological approach, as 84 – 86; sacramentality, and 117 empiricism 27 – 29, 32, 93, 107 entanglement 135 – 136 environmental ethics 106 environmentalism 7, 117, 121 eternity 25 – 28, 31 – 32; God, of 38, 97; world, of 72, 97 ethos 141 Eucharist theology 12, 15, 36, 119; Christ 49; image of wine and water 74; practices 121 evolutionary perspectives 50, 52 – 54 exclusivism, Christian 12 – 15, 126, 154 feminism 7; corporeal materialism 8; Paulitical theology 156 – 57; universalism 159 – 161 feminist theology 77, 116 finite and infinite relationship 25, 27, 43 – 44, 71 Firstspace 118 free choice 27 – 28, 30 functional cosmology 86 Gaia hypothesis 12 gender equality 159 God: conscious life 93 – 96; familiarity and difference 72; flesh, as 10 – 11, 13, 50; formal cause of activity 72 – 73; gender bias 101; image of 39; infinity 41; male, as 93; language of 64 – 65; nihilistic view 43 – 44; Old Testament, in 22 – 25; scandalous

166 Index love, of 57; source of reality 72; speculative concept 9 God as Other 102, 105, 110, 111 God’s motion 22 – 24; rational agency 32; the Son, as 25 – 26, 32 gospel narratives 54, 83, 110, 149 Gospel of John 7, 8, 25, 26, 50 Greek philosophy 22, 39, 50, 127 Hebrew writing 22, 81 henotheism 140 heretics 93 Hinduism 64 – 65; Christophany, and 66; nondual connection 70 – 71 holistic paradigm 79 humour 126 – 128 immanence 82; becoming 107; Christ 21; God 32; transcendence, and 63, 70 – 74, 80, 102, 110, 119; universal 85 incarnatio continua 7, 12; being, as 66 – 70; creation, as 63; requirements 69; salvation 78; spiritual reality 69 – 70 incarnation 8 – 10; approach 85; cosmic 32 – 33; creativity 40; deep see deep incarnation; divine mystery, as 68; exclusivism 13 – 14; flesh, and 145 – 146; multiple 13; presence 1; promiscuous 13; queer paradigm 13; resurrection, and 81 inclusivism 12, 15 intercarnation 1, 13 – 14, 109, 156, 160 – 161 intersectionality 161 interspecies anthropology 106 – 108 Jesus of Nazareth: body 9 – 15, conceptualising 98 – 99; historical person 53; parable of God, as 80 just world 115, 116, 118 kenotic economy 146, 148; nature 151n36 liberation: goal 80; redemption 149 – 150; Son, the 72; theology 13, 77, 78, 117 living image: God, of 39; Christ as 40 – 41 logos 141; Christ as 159; rational 103, 105 – 106 Logos-Son 62, 66 – 68, 72 loving eye 84 – 86; relationships 86

macrocosm 40, 98, 99 McFague, Sallie 2; background 77; concept of Body of Christ 10 – 11; embodiment and the loving eye 84 – 86; importance 77; Jesus as parable of God 80 – 81; metaphorical theology 77 – 79; new epistemological approach 84 – 86; relativistic Christology 82 – 83; resurrection 81 – 82; universal Christology 84; world as body of god 80 – 84; writing 77 – 78 metaphor: benefits of 78; dispensing with 99 – 100; model, and 79, 83; problems 120 – 122; reconstruction 2; use 1 metaphor theory 78 – 79 microcosm 40, 98, 99 monolatry 140 monotheism 62; beyond sameness 144 – 147; classical 132, 140 – 149; language 146; one-ness 13 Mystical Body 11, 36 – 37 mysticism 36 – 37; Christian 56 nature: cosmic 31, 56, 65; God, and 94; human 62; meaning 7; matter 8; processes 72 creatio ex nihilo 62, 73; pure 102; relevance 15; third 49; wild 106 neo-humanism 58 New Materialism 2; application 107; perspectives 7 – 8; philosophies 106, 107, 111; posthumanism 12; varieties 101 New Testament 28, 50, 52, 57, 62 new way of being 80, 83 normative universalism 155 Old Testament: creatio ex nihilo 62; divine sovereignty 62; God, in 22 – 25; wisdom literature 22 omnipotence 28, 73, 93, 132 – 133, 147 omnipresence 52 ordinary, the 114, 115 Origen 2; Christ’s Cosmic Body 28; dipolar god of process 32 – 33; importance 21; incarnational metaphysics 22 – 25; motions of God 22 – 23; solar theology 30; the Son’s eternal vision 25 – 28, 31; transcendent intellect and cosmic soul 25 – 32; world soul 21 – 22

Index  167 Panikkar, Raimon: being as Christophany to incarnatio continua, from 66 – 70; concept of Body of Christ 11 – 12; cosmotheandric vision 63 – 66; different cultural concepts 64; process of becoming 68; relationship of immanence and transcendence 70 – 74; tangential experience 71; writings 66 – 67pantheism 97 parable: language 80 – 81; models of reflection 78 pathos 141 perichoresis 65, 70, 73 Platonic theism 21 – 22, 85, 96, 101 – 102, 105, 108 polytheism 144 – 149; benefits 147; language 145, 147; ontology 146 postcolonial studies 7, 117, 121 posthumanism 8; new materialist 12 post-structuralism 155 prayers 148 promiscuous incarnation 1, 130 – 132; deep relationality 129; meaning 130; other to the flesh of the world 132 – 135; provocation 130 – 132; unpredictability 130 prophecy: Christ’s divinization 24 – 25; metaphysical 22 purity 135 – 137 queer little gods 1, 140, 147 queer theory 7, 134, 155 racism 119, 126, 129, 130 radical hospitality 159 radical plurality 12 religion, idea of 141 – 142 resurrection 81 – 82, 84; process 44; texts, in 80 rhetoric 141 right-wing nationalism 119, 129, 130, 155 ritual 64, 116, 148 sacramental crisis 116 sacramentality: aim 115 – 116; ambiguous possibility of 116 – 120; cosmic Body of Christ, and 120 – 122; meaning 119 – 120; presence 114 – 115; spiritual attitude, as 119 – 120; theology of every day life 114 – 116

salvation 24 – 25, 27; creation, and 62; Jesus 99; positive gift, as 150; promise of 84; universalism 33, 70 scientific knowledge 77 – 79; politics, and 8; relationship between science and faith 57; spirituality, and 37 Secondspace 118 sexism 11, 119, 130; Pauline corpus 157, 159; messianic intra-actions 159 – 160 sinful earth 30 – 31 social constructionism 7 soul: Christ 24; freedom 27; God’s soul 29; process 32; salvific selfcommunication, as 24, 26; world 21 speciesism 14 Super-Christ 54 superstitions 148 symbolism 114, 116; conformity 121; creation as 30; creator 30; divine goodness 29,32; heart 51; poetic 50; power 66 technological developments 117 theological anthropology 108 theology: history of 9 – 14; ontotheology 94; solar 30 theory of evolution 10, 48 – 49, 57 third gender 13 Thirdspace 118 time-being 13, 129 transcendence: becoming 107; Christ 21; God 32; immanence, and 63 – 65, 70 – 74, 80, 102, 110, 119; worldly 85 Trinitarian theology 143; Father 67; God 24, 40; One 146; other 62; reality 65 Trinity, the: doctrine of 62 – 63; being 22; comparison to other cultures 64; Son’s role 25; transcendence 64 Trishagion 23 – 25, 28, 32 uniqueness of Jesus Christ 10 – 11, 63, 82 – 83, 119 universe: Christ as firstborn 43; development 154; gender, and 159 – 161; infinity 42; open 68; universal, or 154 – 156; whole 68 Western theology 116 – 117 Xenophanes 39 – 40