DIVINITY TAKES PART. What might be called God exists in the stuff of everyday existence, the impossible infinity and necessary limitations of embodied relations. Divine names matter, but only if they help us better to recognize these embodied infinities and limitations. Only if they help us to better understand our taking part in them. Catherine Keller turns the apophatic requirement for expressing divine existence on its head: rather than the abstract inevitabilities of “not that” and “greater than” that characterize the via negativa, divinity here participates in the infinity of worldly embodiment, in the inexpressible multiplicity of real, fleshy, and limited relations. It is the very kataphatic claim of worldly entanglement that requires apophasis. Because God exists in the stuff of everyday existence, the impossible infinity and necessary limitations of embodied relations. Divine names matter, but only if they help us better to recognize these embodied infinities and limitations. Only if they help us to better understand God’s (and our) taking part in them.

Out of many lines that grab me in Cloud of the Impossible, there is one that I want to take up here. She writes, “The work of apophatic entanglement would be nothing but spiritual frivolity if it did not face us, in the end, with this: the possibly impossible chance of getting back in touch” (268). In touch is a phrase with many trite lives. But Keller is dead serious, and she means us to take “in touch” variously and complexly, of course, and it is this “possible impossibility” that provokes me to further thought.

Wislawa Szymborska’s poem “Conversation with a Stone” is a dialogue between a narrator who asks at the start of each stanza to be allowed into the stone. The stone’s refusals come back each time to the narrator’s missing capacity (emphasis mine):

“You shall not enter,” says the stone.
“You lack the sense of taking part.
No other sense can make up for your missing sense of 
             taking part. 
Even sight heightened to become all-seeing
Will do you no good without a sense of taking part.
You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that
             sense should be,
only its seed, imagination.”

Following Keller we can say that “taking-part” is what we are at a most foundational, ontological level—each is part of “it all” (whatever story of all you like to tell). Each of us is therefore only partly ourselves, never complete, always also entangled and partly other. But this does not mean we are only a swamp of indistinction. In this deeply, abyssal, apophatically possible relational concept we (in whose compass I include every sort of human and other-than-human “I”) are both part and yet not subsumed, part and apart.

Participation—at once ontological interrelation and image of democratic action is a “metaphor of relation” at the heart of this project (ch. 8). But ontological interrelation is difficult to articulate in positive terms in the shadows of Kant. If only relations can be fully parsed, come out of the cloud into view like strands of DNA. The error we’ve so often made, of course, is assuming that what can be brought into view (a DNA strand, say) completes relation, inheritance, provenance, future. That’s Keller’s point. Hence the “cloud.”

So I agree with Keller that participation is a metaphor of relation and a key to our “doing otherwise,” but also with Szymborska that having a sense of it is essential to un-doing the crusader complex, to Islamophobic, gaiaphobic conquest. Had we any sense of taking part to begin with, perhaps what follows from that sense would have been the sense that when you smash a stone (a people, a culture) to enter it, you just have rubble, you remain outside.

But do we have a sense of taking part? Or is the stone right, and all we have is a vague sense of that sense? Are we (post)moderns, unlike the stone, unlike all of the other parts of everything, somehow lacking the impossibly simple capacity, appendage, or skill that is the sense of taking part? Must we make do with the second-order sense, namely imagination? I suspect that, given the evidence of human history, we must.

In tracing the genealogy of Islamophobia Keller contextualizes this apparent incapacity we [humans? Westerners?] have. Via Gaia’s loss of the human child on the Pergamon Gate she calls it “broken touch” or having lost touch—which is, by the way, a brilliant reflection on the possibility that we might have once had a sense of touch, have been in touch—with Gaia, with worldness (Glissant). This is touch/sense riven by war and rumors of war, by greed, conquest and the elimination of every sense but that of separation. Which means we “take part” regardless of our sense of it. But because we do not, really, possess the sense of taking part, we end up always it seems, taking things apart, instead of sensing how we take part . . .

I am not just playing word games here. Taking part and taking apart are the result of different affective sensibilities—taking apart parodically displaces taking part. Does understanding come from breaking things apart? Is relation established by various forms of genetic or historic dissection? In part, yes. But Szymborska adds something here, refusing us a sense of participation and I imagine that in desperation over that missing sense we madly take things apart, including our own selves, to find the point of connection, the sense where we do, actually take part. And sense it. The irony of Szymborska’s poem is, of course, the intuition that if we had this sense of taking part, we’d already be there—in the stone, the leaf, the drop of water. The sensing it does not enable or disable the participation because as Keller argues we always already participate. But without the sense of or for it, we settle for, then pursue, then need, separation as conquest and so needlessly, catastrophically—take ourselves, and the world, apart.

I dwell on Szymborska’s image of the stone refusing us entry into itself as a result of our own missing organ of sense because it helps me to think about what is so significant in Keller’s project here. She is—I suggest—imagining a sense of taking part, locating us in irreducible tangles rather than clear strains of relation. The cloud is metaphor and harbinger, opacity and irreducibility its grammar of expression. This is a deft reframing of relationality into a whole new realm of imagination (imagination being the seed of the sense of taking part, as the stone reminds us) that requires cloudy imprecision, a light touch, like fog. Can we learn to talk about relation in ways far more complex than the usual linearity of family trees (that are not trees, but maps of simplification)?

Although Keller is undertaking a self-avowed apophatic exercise here, we could see it’s result as a kind of queer failure of apophasis—queer failures, of course, being queer successes at failing the norm in productive, if dissenting ways. We are in a density of relations that only disappear when taken apart. They depend on being present, in the way that clouds are present. Relations in this sense demand a new kind of theorization because of their irreducible thereness, lost when squeezed, like clouds. Dissatisfied with the aporia of ontological affirmation and with our cognitive tendencies toward negation when faced with relations (even to stones), Keller is leading us toward a smarter, more careful and intellectually complex affirmation that reveals apophasis, in her hands at least, to be the affirmation of what is im/possibly there. Of course classical apophasis is rooted in the effort to say what is impossible to say about what exists beyond saying, but there seems to be a difference here. Cloud ventures a kind of ontological accounting of complexity and wholeness that brings us closer to the prosaic everydayness that we are. It confounds all static, reductive ontologies by its constitutive motion and its insistence on finding—doing—God in the tangled impasses and endless unfoldings that life/existence is. Its apophatic affirmations do not result in the usual, flat not-thats or greater-thans but in a more sensible and poetic affirmation of what can be experienced of the world without mistaking that experience, ever, for the whole story. Whole stories are marvelously multiple and so must be held lightly, told carefully, attentive to the new stories that they invariably produce in the telling.

In other words, Keller is knitting together all of the skeptical exceptions and reversals that postmodern feminist, postcolonial, postcapitalist, queer, and eco/planetary criticisms have wrought in the possibility of thinking theologically as a mode of invoking divinity. Speaking of God, she tells us in the end-that-isn’t, is not the point. Doing God may be. This is an apophasis that isn’t, a recognition that the God indicated by “not-that” isn’t.

So, if Cloud is the most sophisticated and comprehensive argument to date for our sense of taking part as a means of thinking ontologically, politically and theologically in ways that defuse rather than reinscribe the conquest-complex, then it seems to me that it succeeds philosophically in guiding us toward a new way of thinking that is tied to—entangled with—a need to feel our way back to touch. Being enfolded in an endlessly changing and dimensionally multiple web of relations confounds the reductive rules of argument that rely on logics of linearity, simplicity, and closure.

Where theology tries to encompass or clarify it runs the risk of reifying, once again, crusader capitalism instead of the sense of taking part. The work of theology—of “doing rather than saying God” therefore suggests a methodological shift that might be described by the directive to “get back in touch, don’t go back.” Touch the earth. Touch the body. Begin to feel. Get some sense, even if it isn’t quite up to the stone’s snuff. By this I mean that theology cannot afford to explain itself without some mucky feeling for the world. In challenging us to go beyond saying God to doing God Keller is suggesting that is the theologian’s job to notice where God is being done; which takes feeling. Touch.

But, finally, what if the poet is right? What if the most we can do is sense our lack of sense of taking part and only imagine that sense? Perhaps this is so, or perhaps the lack is merely an atrophied muscle. The sense of taking part requires a change of genre, of theological and religious expectation. So—if the sense that feels the relation, the entanglement, has gone missing in the human animal but remains abundant in stones—and other non-human persons with whom we are complexly entangled—the question becomes how do we recover, recapitulate, feel again without going back? For getting back in touch, Keller argues, should not be a going back. There is no pure origin from which we fell. There is everything that we are, and “doing God” is a homeopathic way into our missing sense of taking part.

I have spooled out some threads here to see what fertile tangles they get us theologians into. Could the im/possibility of a chance of getting back in touch be is as simple and as infinitely complicated as feeling the thoughts we think? Could it be giving greater value to imagination—that seed of the sense of taking part? Imagine taking part. Imagine feeling it. Think theology from that feeling, that sensitivity. Accept an apophatic posture that, far from establishing exception, embeds divinity in the present and in presence.

So—imagine your sense of taking part, keep imagining it, keep making sense. Be affected in your reading, your writing, your thinking. Clarity is not the clearing of the mist or the disappearance of opacity. It is not the complete argument, doctrine, or revelation. Clarity is becoming conscious of the persistently swirling cloud of relations, of inheritances that we cannot go back and undo. Clarity is knowing the productive vitality of fog. Sensing the part we take in all of it, theologians can bring that sense, sometimes, to words.

“IS THIS HOW ‘PURE IMMANENCE’ is to be achieved after all—by acts of allergic simplification?” In chapter 5, “The Fold in Process,” Catherine Keller (to engage one of her favorite homonyms in Cloud of the Impossible) plies with origami precision many distinct yet strangely unified topics in this singular reflection relating to Gilles Deleuze’s late work The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Keller’s latest tour de force is deceptively complex in its multivalent attention to the vast theopoetic legacy that is Negative Theology and its antecedents. I say “deceptively complex” in no way to im(ply) that what bursts forth could (or should) be more simply rendered in some flattened or direct dogmatic discourse. Rather, akin to the central motif of clouds that morph, gather, dissipate and break forth into unexpected storms or silently break faith with the sky above allowing a Heideggarian clarity (aletheia) to arise between that which transcends and that which falls earthward on failed waxen wings. It is a destabilizing text in the tradition of early Mark C. Taylor and his attempts to heed the muse—in Taylor’s case the scholarly and poetic implications of deconstruction after Derrida—and allow the form of the text align with the implications of the subject. Where Erring, Hiding, and Tears were Taylor’s attempts to unwrite the essentialist academic monograph in the 1980s, Keller’s Cloud in a similar fashion floats and speaks forth at its own pace and offers little analog to other scholarly tomes addressing such rich and diverse conversation partners. and ultimately requires a calm repose akin lie with our backs to the earth, watching the sky in silence, and taking in the fullness of what comes forth come rain or come shine.

Many of the scholarly threads that constitute the tapestry that is Cloud of the Impossible will be familiar to anyone au fait with conversations in the book hall of the American Academy of Religion in recent years: the renewed cause célèbre of Nicholas of Cusa, the continued interplay of quantum theory with theological method, Process thought reimagined and reframed as hermeneutic intertext with Denys the Areopagite and the deep undercurrent of various iterations of Death of God theology that continues to break upon the theological shoreline wave upon wave upon since the 1960s. Yet in her aside mentioned earlier relating to Deleuze—“Is this how ‘pure immanence’ is to be achieved after all—by acts of allergic simplification?”—there are two themes that I would welcome further commentary and seem to continually billow the many clouds Keller brings to foreground: that of the unending search in scholarship for a grand unifying Theory of Everything and the “spooky distance” in theological discourse after modernity in regard to materialism.

As Keller rightly acknowledges, “Theology, in its temptation to a Theory of Everything (TOE), is mirrored back to itself in the certainties and teleologies of Western civilization.” As she continues Keller offers the following as counterpoint: “Yet there appears in cloud perspective no lack of purpose, but rather a myriad of purposes, often cross-purposes, including the purpose to counter teleological presumption. Such purposeful multiplicity offers no omega point, closure, final eschaton” (166). Keller’s beautifully rendered appeal to “cloud perspective” in the threefold movements of the complications implicit in the cloudy motif of YHWH found in Judeo-Christian scriptures, David Bohm’s revolutionary explications with his turn in quantum physics toward atomic particles as “best regarded as a poorly defined cloud” (139) and the deeply embodied self-implications of the Christographics of the cloud which calls us to an ethics of radical love (which Keller acknowledges is “just as wastefully overnamed as it most solemn metonym, God”) which still seems to reach out for that elusive forbidden fruit that is a Theory of Everything that this time is rendered as a cloud by day rather than a tree in the garden. In this sense Keller goes a bit steam punk Victorian in her sensibilities in framing a wildly multidisciplinary work circling a grand motif that puts her in good company with George Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Darwin. In the introduction to The Foundations of a Creed George Henry Lewes makes the prophetic comment in regard to the Victorian period: “The great desire of this [Victorian] age is for a Doctrine which may serve to condense our knowledge, guide our researches, and shape our lives, so that Conduct may really be the consequence of Belief.”1 Such a statement would be a good summation of Cloud of the Impossible if Lewes were to leave an Amazon.com review today.

Of those who heard these words and responded to the challenge of Lewes in the nineteenth century, none was so close in ideological proximity than Lewes’ partner, Marian Evans, known widely by this time through her nom de plume as George Eliot. Like Keller, whose interests range broadly from the humanities to the sciences, Eliot is well documented as reading widely among the scientific theories of the day as well. She refers in her letters to Herbert Spencer, whose 1857 essay, “Progress: Its Law and Its Cause,” argued that “the law of organic development from homogeneity to heterogeneity governed all the spheres of natural and social science from physiology through to astronomy, anthropology, and philology.”2 Geologist Sir Charles Lyell, mentor to Darwin and author of Principles of Geology (1830–33), proved intriguing to Eliot with his theory of uniformitarianism which is an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth’s surface by reference to causes present to observation. As Lyell states, “the history of the earth’s surface can be accounted for using the same forces we see around us now—erosion, uplift, sedimentation, volcanic phenomena, etc. Operating at similar rates and intensities.”3 In short, one need only observe the here and now of a river’s course, a lake’s stillness, a tree’s seasonal changes, or even the form of the smallest pebble and one can see the same forces at work that have been at work since the beginning of the world. This age is the same that has been and the same that will be to come. Essentially, things throughout nature are as they are and in the process, ever so slowly, of further becoming that which they will always be. Similarly, the trend is picked up by Keller in seeking a natural motif by which to frame, understand and perhaps release us from the confusion that overt reason can provoke. Yet as George Eliot mused in relation to Darwin, there is still a “mystery beneath the processes” that will escape such metaphors and motifs.

It is abundantly clear that Keller has no interest in creating a “key to all mythologies” akin to Eliot’s Rev. Dr. Causabon in Middlemarch who was so consumed with finding a grand Theory of Everything that he neglected the very real suffering of the people in his parish in order to hide himself in his many books. Yet the grand attempt of Cloud of the Impossible to draw such complex and disparate intellectual, cultural and political concerns under a unifying motif—as amorphous and free floating as the cloud may be while even acknowledging its limits—leaves me wondering if we will ever escape the temptation of the search for a Theory of Everything and lose the “mystery beneath the processes” along the way. It is here that I turn my attention to the many clouds that pass in and out of Keller’s book and wonder if all the earnestness to free us to float with the clouds only grounds us evermore. “Thank goodness we ply theology here,” Keller muses, “and need not rehearse the whole onto-epistemological journey from Plato to Kant, from Hegel to . . . whomever floats our method. Our vessels in this century are less stately but no less dependent upon philosophy. This one is built for the waters of chaos” (169). Again and again we come back to the lashing together of vessels to weather the waters of chaos and yet . . . and yet. Isn’t the very calling of the deep crying out to deep one of finally releasing our grasp from a dominant motif—be it cloud by day or fire by night or the temptation for yet another unifying metaphor that is ultimately yet another “Key to All Mythologies”—and kenotically relinquishing ourselves to the waves, the thunder, and the possibility (the Posse ipsum of Nicholas of Cusa’s final work) that there is no ultimate motif and no grand metaphor beyond this moment of awakening so why seek one? I doubt publishers will embrace a monograph without some central thesis, some “this is what is tying it all together” and therein lies the reality of the ever-expanding book hall at the American Academy of Religion, which sadly looks more and more like the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark with each passing year: endless rows upon rows of monographs grasping for that one unifying motif only to lose the Divine as it is codified, boxed up and filed away never to be truly unearthed as the credits roll on. What Keller’s poetry, grace and profound grasp of manifold disciplines offers is a choir of so many beautiful and engaging voices. I fear that the central motif that threads through the work perhaps “clouds out” and totalizes these distinct voices in ways that are only necessary for marketing a book and not fully realizing a polytonal community of truth.

Second, I was intrigued by Keller’s acknowledgement that there is more to say on the topic of materialism and was hoping that it would have been teased out a bit more. “Theology, especially Protestant,” states Keller, “cut off its own cosmological potentiality early on and inspired materialism of the capitalist sort. So we need something like the new materialism” (121). I wholeheartedly agree. Early in Cloud of the Impossible Keller pulls in Slavoj Žižek, albeit all too briefly, as a conversation partner. True, giving Žižek the microphone is risking quite a bit but I do think given the question that is only partially raised in regard to materialism that he is worth bringing on stage for a bit longer. Much of what Keller draws forth in her work has been chronicling the coming-of-age narrative of Theology after the secular/sacred wall has collapsed after the fall of modernity and allowing for “love [to fold] the distance of its transcendence into intimacy” (76) and what the ramifications might mean across disciplinary, racial, cultural and economic division. As she notes in relation to Nicholas of Cusa, “the divine boundlessness, in other words, belies the boundary formed by classical theo-logic: of mover versus moved, active versus passive, aseity versus affect” (99). Yet what this seems to announce and has been sounded loudly by Terry Eagleton and Žižek are the implications for a revised material reality in the twenty-first century. As Žižek has offered, similar to Keller, there is before us a radical call toward encountering the multivalent aspects of the real in particularity and imminence—what Žižek eludes to as the “the perverse core of Christianity” which is the subtitle to his first extended reflection on Christianity in 2003, entitled The Puppet and the Dwarf. This “perverse core” is the preservation of universality and surplus of meaning in the particularity of materialism—what post-Marxist critique has termed “dialectical materialism”—and when coupled with the person and ministry of Jesus Christ what I have written about as “dynamic incarnationalism.”4 As Keller weaves in and out of her reflections I remained concerned that too often the discourse was seeking more of a transcendence in its poetics rather than immanent grounding. Perhaps this is due to materialism having come under fire recently as seen in the article by Charles Taliaferro and Stewart Goertz in the spring 2008 issue of Christian Scholars Review, arguing against Christian materialism by supporting dualism, stating that (referring to articles by Kevin Corcoran and Peter Van Inwagen) “‘most, if not all, orthodox Christian theologians of the early church were anthropological dualists… [and] God has allowed dualism to dominate Christian anthropology for two millennia.’ Hence, it is relevant to make clear that while contemporary Christian materialists advocate going materialistic, [Taliaferro and Goertz] support remaining dualistic.”[foonote]See Charles Taliaferro and Stewart Goertz, “The Prospect of Christian Materialism,” Christian Scholars Review 37.3 (2008) 307.[/footnote] I don’t have time to go into the argument set forth by Taliaferro and Goertz, but suffice it to say that the call to dualism is spurious to an incarnational understanding of personhood and ultimately a heresy of the church.

On the notion of Christian universality of meaning found in the particular and material, Žižek seeks a via media through the dominant modes of contemporary understandings of spirituality found in New Age Gnosticism that permeates much of the postmodern rhetoric on the one hand and the thoroughly deconstructionist turn of some continental theorists on the other. In his most overt critical engagements with Christianity (On Belief; The Fragile Absolute; The Puppet and the Dwarf; The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-Theory) Žižek aligns himself with Alain Badiou5 in seeing the heart of the Christian gospel as a deep instantiation of authentic subjectivity that is neither based essentially on the strictures of Judaic Law nor the disembodied conventions of a Greek Logos that strives to be freedom from embodiment akin to the Gnostic aphorism “the body is ultimately a tomb.” As Žižek states in The Parallax View:

The accusation against Saint Paul’s universalism misses the true site of universality: the universal dimension he opened up is not the “neither Greek nor Jew but all Christians,” which implicitly excludes non-Christians; it is, rather, the difference Christians/non-Christians itself which, as a difference, is universal, that is to say, cuts across the entire social body, splitting, dividing from within every substantial ethnic, etc., identity—Greeks are divided into Christians and non-Christians, as well as Jews. The standard accusation thus, in a way, knocks on an open door: the whole point of the Pauline notion of struggling universality is that true universality and partiality do not exclude each other, but universal Truth is accessible only from a partial engaged subjective position.6

Rather, Žižek places the relationship we have of and with others squarely between the Symbolic and the Real best articulated in his three modalities of the Real:7 The “symbolic real” where the signifier is reduced to a meaningless formula; the “real real” where the Real becomes a horrific thing, that which conveys the sense of horror as manifested in contemporary horror genre; and the “imaginary real” which for Žižek is “an unfathomable something that permeates things as a trace of the sublime.” Again, Cloud of the Impossible floats across so many eras, traditions and voices that to take up such a deep dive such as more discourse on materialism is perhaps for another volume. But holding the book in my hand, turning the pages, seeing and hearing the racial unrest that continues to break forth in our urban centers, connecting the economic and social implications of “how the cloud surrounding what we say about ‘God’ here enfolds the entire crowd of our relations” (5) with the strong reminder that “love carries the divine outside itself” and “folds the distance of its transcendence into intimacy” (76) yet still left wanting to put hands and feet to this intimacy. I believe that the call to theopoetics in the final chapter is a grounding material step but we need more than “every now and then a powwow in the cloud.” The racial and economic demands of this decade alone required a truly embodied response that will surely benefit from the critical challenge that Catherine Keller offers yet will not tolerate our heads remaining in the clouds for too long.

WELL, SOMEONE’S FINALLY DONE IT.

Someone has finally plunged into the cloud of contradiction that enshrouds so much of what we write and teach. By “we,” I mean those of us who work and play in and around Christian orthodoxies, polydoxies, heresies, and deconstructions, entranced as we are by the apophatic on the one hand and the relational on the other hand and musing, as we do, “someone at some point should really think these things together.”

Seriously, it’s been a big problem. Almost without exception, whether we are process people, liberals, liberationists, neo-medievalists, or death-of-godders, we all love negative theology. And with even fewer exceptions, whether we are Arians or Athanasians, Scotists or Thomists, Nietzscheans or Hegelians, Whiteheadians or Butlerians, Harawayans or Baradians, we all love relation. Our love of relation has become so exceptionless, in fact, that those of us who seek to defend it often find ourselves having to invent enemies to defend it against (“down with that burgeoning throng of Cartesians!”).

Trouble is, our relationalism is not all that hospitable to the apophatic, tending either:

• to reject it outright (recall Deleuze on Spinoza’s “positive theology” of “pure affirmation”), or
• to prefer its kataphatic twin (think of those effusive litanies of intra-active networks, systems, and organisms in complexity theories and new materialisms), or

3)   simply to have no time for it, preferring to get on with the work of making life livable for those intercarnate earth-creatures increasingly threatened by toxic entanglements of racism and global capital.

To put it frankly, whether it’s ontologies, biologies, wind-farms, or prison abolition movements we’re building, what use is indeterminacy? Or worse yet, uncertainty?

Conversely, apophasis seems inimical to relation. The mystical journey as we tend to encapsulate it is one of progressive detachment—from material goods, familial ties, sensual pleasures, intellectual aids, spiritual benefits, and finally one’s own self—along with the One for whom it conducted the journey in the first place. Marguerite, Angela, Teresa, John (one could go on): each of them drawn up the ladder of detachment only to be abandoned by God Godself. And even if this abandonment does give way to union (it may not; you might just be abandoned) it is a union of a subjective not-I with a divine abyss, which is to say, with Eckhart, of nothingness to nothingness. What kind of relation is that? And how could it possibly care about universal healthcare or the minimum wage?

In many of these examples, apophatic antirelationality might be said to be politically useless; in others, it becomes politically disastrous. As Clement of Alexandria reminds us, Moses has to separate himself from the crowd in order to climb the mountain; no illumination for the dark multitudes (Keller, 57). The works of Pseudo-Dionysius are riddled with warnings that none of his teachings should come within earshot of “the uninitiated” or “the hoi polloi.” This sustained ochlophobia finds its crescendo in the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, which charges deacons with the task of purging the church of those who are: possessed, uninitiated, incompletely initiated, previously-initiated-but-now-degenerate, intemperate, intemperate-yet-resolved-not-to-be-intemperate, and finally, “those who . . . are neither completely unblemished nor completely unstained” (3.3.7.436a–b). Get the masses out of the Mass. Can’t have them profaning the holy mysteries, clouding the ascent of the adept.

What Catherine Keller intuits, however, is that such crowd-hatred is not inherent to the apophatic—that it may even sabotage the unknowing it so regularly attends. Elitism and surreptitious certainty: these, at the end of the day, prompted Derrida’s real concern with “negative theology,” his sense that it wasn’t negative enough. Somewhere behind all those unsayings, he kept saying, negative theology knows where it’s going . . . and who’s invited. What Keller’s Cloud allows us to glimpse is that these failures of negativity are dual functions of the same thing: in short, negative theology in its classical form has a cosmology problem.

Classical cosmology puts the earth at the heart of the universe, with concentric rings of water, air, fire-and-sometimes-aither around it. Divinity lies beyond this cosmic nesting-doll, binding its finitude with infinite power, cognition, benevolence, and/or beatitude, depending on the divinity in question. The way to God, then, follows a straight line out of the universe: from material (earth and water-y) things to conceptual (air and fire-y) things to the no-thingness that creates and eludes them. Hence the strict order of naming and unnaming in Dionysius: the affirmations proceed from the godliest things (goodness, wisdom) to the ungodliest things (drunkard, stone), and the negations work their way back up—which is to say out. And yes, the Celestial Hierarchy does say that it might be more appropriate to call God a worm than, say, a man, since our minds will be unlikely thereby to think they have truly named God. But even this logical tortion depends on a straightforward ontology: men are nearer to God than worms (and women, and nut-trees, and stones); this is the reason anthropomorphic names can deceive us into thinking we’ve got Him [sic].

To be sure, classical apophaticism does not ignore or reject relation. But one might argue that it instrumentalizes relations, ordering them hierarchically in order to transcend them. Relations are necessary but penultimate, leading the soul beyond them into nonrelational identity with The Great Neither-This-Nor-That. One might argue the opposite, as well (in fact, one has) but the task is just so strenuous. The author needs to do constant theological gymnastics to invert or tangle up the Great Chain that keeps rattling alongside the apophatic voyage. And yet there are those who find the energy, because something about the via negativa keeps promising to unsettle the structure of the via; something about the cloud seems like it ought to entangle us with the crowd—and it is here that Keller’s diagnostic powers are so acute: the problem is cosmic. Get rid of the nesting-dolls and the apophatic will actually be able to do the work of unworking, unknowing, disrupting, and remaking we keep wanting from it.

Insofar as it will require nothing short of a cosmological revolution, Keller explains that “the chiasmus of crowd and cloud will depend upon a Cusan crossing” (48). It was Cusa, she reminds us, who first and most radically shattered the antique universe, taking the earth out of the center and replacing it with nothing—or anything, depending on your perspective. As the unfolding of God Godself, the Cusan universe is necessarily boundless—and neither earth nor sun nor anything else can occupy the “center” of boundlessness. That said, if nothing is the center, then anything can be: “It always appears to every observer, whether on the earth, the sun, or another star, that one is . . . at an immovable center of things and that all else is being moved” (Cusa, De docta ignorantia, 2.12.162). So start from any cosmic body, he suggests, and the visible area around it is what we call a world. The moon’s world will overlap to some extent with the sun’s world, which will overlap to some extent with the world of the North Star . . . and in a boundless universe, these overlapping worlds will extend forever, each of them centered on any point in the centerless universe.

With nothing/anything at rest in the middle of the universe, no element or creature is closer to divinity than any other. Rather, God suffuses the cosmos at equal intensities everywhere, inhering as much in vegetality as animality, as much in minerality as intelligence. This is what Keller calls “the breaking up of the face of God across an endless cosmic surface of faces” (113). With faces pan-carnationally distributed, there is no static order to creation, which is to say no single path beyond it to God. Rather, as Keller illustrates with Cusa’s “all-seeing image” (87) and as Nicholas will say of nut trees and mustard seeds (De visione dei, 7.24, De quaerendo deum, 3.44), anything in the universe can transport the learner to God, not by carrying him (still him) outside the universe, but rather by delivering him more fully into it, where God dwells everywhere equally, and where all things dwell in God.

Already, then, Cusan apophatics makes two radical departures from Neoplatonic negativity: (1) it follows not one but an endless number of indeterminate paths, and (2) these lead to a God within the world rather than a God beyond it. Of course, God remains beyond the world—as Keller points out, Cusa manages to evade even the stingiest charges of pantheism (94)—but here divine transcendence is inseparable from cosmic enfolding and unfolding. In other words, it is a transcendence that secures relation without capitulating to Thomist analogy, with its tireless relinkings of the old Great Chain.

It is a transcendence, moreover, that unsettles relation’s verticality, fragmenting it out across all imaginable vectors. And this, I think, is what Keller finds most exciting about Cusa: if God is in all things and all things are in God, then we can only conclude that “all are in all and each is in each” (Cusa, in Keller, 114). Incarnation is pan-carnation (118) and pan-carnation is inter-carnation (308); put less tidily, God’s unfolding all things means that all things holographically infold God and one another. Here, then, finally: the coincidentia of the apophatic and the relational, of cloud and crowd, of beyond and between.

Two big questions, then, for the author (hello, Catherine!), both predictable, I fear, and both concerning difference.

The first is what difference God makes. To me, Cusa feels so precariously perched between the medieval and modern worlds: push him in one direction and he tumbles into scholasticism, push him in another and he pitches into pantheism. The latter, of course, was Bruno’s downfall: if the universe is the boundless explication of God, he reasoned, and if God is present to all things “as if by mediation of the universe,” then it seems like the universe is what traditional theology would call the second person of the Trinity. Interestingly, we could stop right here—with the universe as both logos and site of in(ter)carnation, and while we would have a disaster from an orthodox Christological perspective, I’m not sure we’d quite have pantheism (or maybe we’d have a pantheism whose identity is also a difference). After all, God and creation would, along this heretical line of hypostatic thinking, be really distinct, but also “of one substance.” So here, I suppose, is the question: what difference does the difference between God and world make?

To be sure, there’s no apophasis or relation without difference. But I wonder whether difference isn’t already built into Cusa’s concept of identity. When, for example, he says that all things are in all things, he is proclaiming a kind of pancosmic identity à la Lauryn Hill: “everything is everything.” But this isn’t, I don’t think, to say there’s no such thing as difference; a nut tree is not a mustard seed, even though each of them incarnates God and the whole universe, including one another. This, then is the second question, which will hopefully lend clarity and texture to the first: in what sense is any thing different from any thing else, insofar as all are in all and each is in each? And does this principle of differentiation obtain at the level of God and world, or is the difference between God and world different from differences among creatures (an especially complicated question, given that in each creature, God is the creature!)? In the ancient and medieval cosmos, the answer was simple: there’s an ontological (vertical) difference between God and creatures and an ontic (horizontal) difference among creatures. But what happens to difference as such when God is enfolded into every point of an infinite unfolding of God? This may simply be to ask: what is the apophatic counter-movement of the kataphatic “all things in all things”?

I’m thrilled to be part of this conversation and excited to see what comes of it!

FITTINGLY ENOUGH, CATHERINE KELLER’S Cloud of the Impossible is entangled everywhere with possibility. It is, in fact, a text that opens possibilities, many of them, in many directions. I’d like to trace out just one, though with plenty of tangles of its own, to ask about the strange things that happen to bodily boundaries when we take entanglement seriously.

The first thought in that line is about bodily resurrection. There is a marvelous late ancient and medieval Christian preoccupation with the very material problem of resurrection and body parts. Upon resurrection, what becomes of parts that are not with the body just at that moment—the toenail clippings and cut hair, the weight gained or lost? Do we all become enormous, having regathered our bits? What becomes of our wounds and openings, our losses and damage? If we cannibalize one another, who finally gets the flesh? It’s easy to miss, in the sheer weirdness of these ideas from a contemporary perspective, the stubborn refusal to devalue matter, against those who found flesh so nasty that they insisted that spirits must rise cleanly, alone. These two kinds of thoughts—on the extreme difficulty of sorting out bodily bits and on the infinite value of materiality—might come together in a quite new way if we rethink them in light of the deeper, complex, mobile interconnections that Catherine brings out. There might then be neither a singular body nor a single time of resurrection, but rather a constant, transcorporate, and fragile process of rebirth. I offer this thought with the realization that there might not be much more to say about it, but hopefully, nonetheless, as a way to repurpose a strangely lovely doctrine, not least to return us to that insistence on the value of matter.

In these openings of possibility, I also wonder about the possibilities for openings. In this work of folds, it might be fascinating also to think about breaks; about breaking-through, and cutting open. In this regard, Catherine cites a particularly fascinating statement from Nicholas of Cusa, a central figure in her text: “You, Lord . . . are moved with all that are moved and stand with all that stand” (97). As Catherine notes, “This apparently innocent theologoumenon releases the discursive turbulence of something which ‘seems wholly inaccessible and impossible.’ It will require, beyond any calm unsaying (let alone any placid feminist acquiescence), ‘courage to do violence to myself’” (98). That this is an ethical version of violence is clear. Yet given the utter, all-the-way-down interconnectedness that this text unfolds, how can it be; how can one ethically do violence to oneself, without doing violence to others?

Nicholas does not offer us language that would let us wiggle out of this by suggesting, as philosophers sometimes do, that particular sorts of benign violence—the usual example is surgery—are ethically allowable. Nor is his violence that of ascetic self-mortification; Nicholas is no flagellant, as Catherine reminds us.

Perhaps this self-violation is the sort of breaking-through favored by Meister Eckhart, whose work Nicholas knew well, in which we break through our individualized selfhood to realize our inseparability from God. From possessions, Eckhart advocates detachment (gelazenheit, and perhaps it is good that there is no time to go wandering off into Heidegger here). But this detachment is not separation either. To treat what is as if it could be possessed is precisely to separate oneself out from the rest of creation and to position oneself as owner, the rest as owned, in a hierarchy that does not move. Like The Cloud of the Impossible, Eckhart’s texts resist approaching the natural world through carelessness, ownership, and consumption.

In Eckhart’s wonderfully odd version of emanationism, breaking through is the “return” to God, which is greater than the going-out by which seeming-individuality becomes. What must be broken is a kind of illusion, the temporal appearance of separation that applies as much to God as to any other. What is wounded, broken open, is a false integrity. The breakthrough is a breaking out of self—but it is more, too. “In the breakthrough . . . I am above all created kind and am neither God nor creature. Rather, I am what I was and what I shall remain now and forever.”1 The breaks, here as in Catherine’s cloud, seem to be out of false separation—though I think that she must have more room for difference than Eckhart does, and I would love to hear more about that. For her, we are “plurisingular,” not monstrously absorbing others, but becoming, in our interactions with them, something of them: “The ethical implications become explicit . . . in concrete events of particular self-implication. Implicating yourself in the others before you, your difference ceases . . . to be the exception. You become exemplification. You mind your implication in all the ethically questionable systemic powers. You ply collective resonances with more affect and more effect, energizing the ripples, the fractals. You are not just you singular; you are not just you plural; you are plurisingularly you. . . . It keeps self and other in question and so unfolding” (288).

Is Nicholas’s violence like Eckhart’s, not only for the sake of some sort of metaphysical accuracy, but for an ethical and theological overcoming of the illusory wholeness essential to disconnection and indifference? Could this help us, if we move a little further, to think about the possibilities of distinguishing ethical violence, as the kind of boundary-breaking movement that shifts our modes of wholeness to vulnerable connection?

Modes of violence, as Catherine rethinks them, rearrange and alter our sense of the vulnerable, too. Entanglement requires us to reconsider not only what it is to be vulnerable, but what it is to protect, and why. The book emphasizes several aspects of vulnerability. There is the importance of attention to the most vulnerable—to the “multiple jeopardy” of the vulnerable subjects of liberation (32; cf. 37, 227, 301), to the vulnerability of all flesh, ours (53) and the world’s (207). There is the vulnerability particularly pronounced in affection—“the vulnerability of love” (271) or “of hope” (282). And there is, most centrally, the mutuality of vulnerability. We are vulnerable to one another, but unequally—“the separation of the over-resourced few from the vulnerable rest of us cannot hold” (282). The planet is vulnerable, not least to us, who foolishly imagine ourselves invulnerable to the rest of it (e.g., 269, 277). And the divine itself is vulnerable; process theology, particularly, offers us “a contingent and vulnerable deity” (260).

Here too are echoes of Nicholas, for whom “seeing ‘coincides with being seen, hearing with being heard, tasting with being tasted, touching with being touched . . .’ This series comprises a disclosure of divine passivities, each correlated to an activity. And each is ‘impossible,’ forbidden by the Aristotelian logic ‘guarded by the angel stationed at the entrance of paradise.’ But Cusa, in this thinking, this sensing, this writing that hurts, is resisting the angel of actus purus” (102).

Vulnerability undoes the binary purities of action and passion, actual and possible, because it is an ability to a passivity, the capacity to undergo a wounding violence. A wound may open from without to expose or to harm the within, but this text reminds us that inside and out are also uneasy limits—“at any moment that Other ‘within us’ may turn impatiently imperious—and rip right out of all the tangles” (4). This is not the salutary violence that intends to break artificial boundaries, to remind us of our unspeakable shared-ness. It is rather the sort of reaction that is labeled “autoimmune.”

The most influential philosophical understanding of autoimmunity comes form Jacques Derrida, who tells us that its effect is that “repression in both its psychoanalytical sense and its political sense—whether it be through the police, the military, or the economy—ends up producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm.”2 This understanding depends upon a sense of immunity that maintains clear distinctions, even when it gets them wrong. At its heart is a strong differentiation between that which is to be tolerated and that which is to be annihilated. The body (politic or person) is vulnerable to danger. The immune system does violence to those dangers by engaging in battle; it recognizes the body’s isolationist desires and acts aggressively against what is not-self, to kill it or to contain it within protective boundaries—to imprison it.3 It is said to “tolerate” self. Autoimmunity happens when the system mis-takes itself for an enemy.4 With these as the metaphors for protection, small wonder we create such disasters, trying to maintain an artificial purity that would “erase the chaos” (186).

We want, in very common metaphors, to have well-armed immune systems to fight off illness, to win the battle against disease. When the disease “wins,” we may nonetheless say that the “loser” “fought valiantly” in a “long battle.” Yet the boundaries between persons (and things) are not the only ones that we realize are far more fluid and strange than we’d thought. “Each” of us, each permeable being in a veil of skin, is a colony. I have read repeatedly that we are far more inhuman than not, meaning that our bodies host astonishing quantities of bacteria and virus, but the claim seems odd to me, as if “we” hosted a “not-us.” Perhaps this is a trace of the ancient fear that Catherine calls “ecophobia” (268). “Neither the minimal microorganisms nor the maximum planetary organism map onto any traditional sense of the body,” she rightly notes (175). We as human are far more multiple than we thought, collectives within collectives.

And in keeping with this collectivism, medical researches are now speculating that we don’t need your war machines, after all. What we need are better gardens. Immunity may be a matter not so much of killing off as of living further—cultivating not warriors, but tiny horticulturists and abundant flora. In “Tending the Body’s Microbial Garden,” Carl Zimmer writes, “Rather than conducting indiscriminate slaughter, Dr. [Julie] Segre and like-minded scientists [at the National Human Genome Research Institute] want to be microbial wildlife managers.”5 As in other ecosystems, some elements of “the” body must be nurtured to prevent radical, even fatal systemic imbalances. Gratifyingly for our metaphors, this nurturing approach has shown promise not only in responses to “invasive” bacteria, but to obesity, antibiotic induced ailments such as those caused by Clostridium difficile (highly treatable by the slightly infamous fecal transplant), and perhaps even disorders such as diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis—precisely those autoimmunities so central to the Derridean analysis.6 In fact, some researchers hypothesize, “Autoimmune diseases are more likely passed in families because of the inheritance of a familial microbiome, rather than Mendelian inheritance of genetic abnormalities.”7

“The boundary between inside and out is never more than an abstraction imposed—whether for care, for convenience, or for conquest” (165), Catherine reminds us. Rather than thinking the body politic in terms of repression and tolerance, we may remind ourselves that protection of the vulnerable is protection of us all. That there are no fully closed systems. A military force always prone to mutiny and self-destruction might be rethought both as a semiotic error—as misreading of a sign that was not “danger!” after all—and as a need for ecological cultivation. This is not to argue that Derrida is wrong in his implication that what seeks violently to eradicate violence will turn against itself. But it is to suggest that we shift metaphors, and in so doing, our focus; in that, our practices, to emphasize the kinds of deep implication that Catherine develops.

Nor is theology less implicated. “Even at the scale of the teeny tiny quantum,” Catherine points out, “we witness how the material effects of common belief and presumptive knowledge tangle with our ethics. Does that tissue structure or quantum field of infinitesimal relations begin to take on the feel of an infinite body” (129)? An infinite body, as the most macro of microbiomes, requires infinite care—requires, and gives.

Perhaps it infinitely rises again, refolds, regroups. And Catherine’s clarification from the introduction to the text takes on a still greater resonance in this way of thinking bodies: “If the boundary marking difference shows itself also as fold, membrane, or connection, alterity requires an alter-knowing of its others, an altered state of radical interlinkage: what you do to the least of these you do also to me” (23). The least—the virus, the microbe, the self as multiple other in “the ecologies of an unbounded relationalism” (24). Catherine Keller does not deny that there are dangers. But not every risk is an evil, and perhaps our tendency to over-identify them thus is entangled in the vigilant violence of our response. Maybe some serpents speak Wisdom, after all. And perhaps we can surpass some of our fear of the possible, which has kept us shut outside of our own gardens.

Usually a catastrophe has at least the capacity to shake folk into fast action and cooperation. This climate crisis approaches with a more treacherous temporality: it is too fast and too slow. Too fast to prevent irreversible destruction; too slow to make it a top priority even of those who do not deny it.

Just a few days after the release of the Encyclical I happened to be wandering in Glacier National Park. I was delighted finally to see these glaciers and enjoy perfect weather for the hike. The ancient icefields were nestled glistening in the Rockies, emanating a gorgeous foreverness. They sit there in their icy stillness, melting at rates that keep shocking the USGS team—scientists tuned to geological time—who measure them.1 Only by reading just afterward did I realize that they are simply doomed: the remaining 25 of the original 160 glaciers will be gone in two decades. Forever. The Himalayas, upon which depend not only tourist joy but the water and therefore food supply of much of India and China, has a bit more time, and so a bit more opportunity to be rescued.

The weird slowfast time of the planetary catastrophe—of fire and ice, of water and soil, of atmosphere and all who breathe—is not readable as “global warming” except by way of mind-melting abstractions like the annual global average temperature shift of less than a degree. And this subtle catastrophic pace only shows itself as “climate change” in and as the space of an entire planet. Nor does the space read as “ours” except when “we” are the species. But to be a species demands a sense of collectivity, even of universality, that cuts against the more vivid sense of human difference and disparity—for much of the right or of the left. So to parlay this crisis into the needed mass response seems much harder than other more than national crises, like, say, a World War. This maddeningly abstract slowfast planetarity demands of us a new sense of global public.

And this is why we need theology. There is perhaps no more comparably vivid, global vocabulary for thinking about—all times and places, all at once. For thinking, first of all, about us as creatures of an integral earth, for thinking about obligations that no national or local or group ethos can trump, for facing oncoming planetary catastrophe—apocalypse—and for proclaiming the chance, in the face of it, of a new earth.2 At least, there is outside of theology no more planetarily extended vocabulary that retains at the same time ancient currency, profound ancestral resonances, and ongoing symbolic force. That has a globally audiable moral voice. That therefore might just have the capacity, mainly through various still living and often traditional Christian communities, institutions, and cultures, to change enough minds and to impact enough choices.

For the most part, however, the conservative majority of churches remains untouched by or actively reactionary toward the emergent networks of ecologically-minded Christians. Ecotheological traditions have their own deep ancestry and planetary networks, but they remain fragile minorities, affiliated with feminist, liberation, process, and other dissident traditions, and are prone to drift discouraged or disenchanted from the exhausted oldline institutions that support or tolerate them. The asymmetrical schism runs right through some old denominations, most manifestly through Roman Catholicism. Theology in its various ecological and interreligious registers keeps trying but has not been equal to the challenge.

This is why we need the Pope.

The genius of Laudato Si’ will be studied—recycled, encycled—for generations (if we have them). More importantly, it will, it must, exceed the first news cycle to make its impact felt now, and the intensive interest of non-Catholics and lapsed Catholics in it, or I should say, the affirmative interest, displays its nonparochial reach. If I had to summarize its strength, I would say something like this: Pope Francis enfolds social justice and ecological viability into a document, simultaneously persuasive in its climate science and its socio-economic analysis, with biblical and creedal theology; therefore, his “integral ecology” can reach at once a global public, of any religion or lack thereof, while most specifically targeting the Christian, and particularly Catholic, constituency that is answerable to him. But what makes all this matter, now, is that Laudato Si’ answers to the slowfast time of climate catastrophe.

The Roman Catholic tradition changes through time at, well, glacial speed. And now its icy stability has been brought to bear—with the cadenced processional of statements from Papal precedent never distracting from the ecosocial momentum of the argument—upon the immediacy of the crisis. Often it plays upon the dual temporality: in one paragraph. For instance, it “shows the urgent need for us to move forward in a bold cultural revolution.” And yet: “Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and the great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur.” And so there is the need at once for a contemplative slow-down and an urgent acceleration.

Otherwise our actions will be dispersed in fragmented virtuous efforts that do not collect the momentum, that do not produce the collective movement, “the bold cultural revolution,” which alone can make the difference. And without that revolutionary collectivity, the urgency is dissipated through the smooth functioning of “the alliance between the economy and technology,” which “ends up sidelining anything unrelated to its immediate interests. Consequently, the most one can expect is superficial rhetoric, sporadic acts of philanthropy, and perfunctory expressions of concern for the environment, whereas any genuine attempt by groups within society to introduce change is viewed as a nuisance based on romantic illusions or an obstacle to be circumvented.” This is relentlessly nuanced rhetoric, exposing the ruses, the green-washing, the dismissive realisms that slow climate awareness down to its current international failure.

And so we must “slow down and look a different way” if we are to see it, and to see through the high-speed distractions that are slowing down the needed change.

The pope is calling for a new sense of planetary consciousness, dependent upon his radical ecumenism—that is, his call to all human beings, in their endless diversities. It is not a matter of reducing the difference, which means ultimately indifference. It is about gathering differences into alliance. He puts it precisely: “We need to strengthen the conviction that we are one single human family. There are no frontiers or barriers, political or social, behind which we can hide, still less is there room for the globalization of indifference.”

Of course when a Pope calls down the metaphor of the family, we feminists run for the exits. Not without reason, as I will consider later. But in this millennium I have found that I must keep my own feminism—with its fast reactions—from sidelining the other major issues, particularly of global economics and its ethnic implications, that can now only be addressed in the context of climate change. Yes, then, to think ourselves as a species within the evolutionary tree of life means something very like recognizing our family resemblances. This is not a declaration that we are all “one,” nor that we might now embrace each other in a great family reunification. The family of our species remains not only endlessly variegated in its differences but fundamentally dysfunctional in its legacy of collective abuse, exploitation, patriarchy, racism, classism, etc. And no less, therefore, a family: but all the more disturbingly so. Yes, sinfully. There is no exit from our “common home.”

El Papa Francisco is calling for an immense reflective process in which we may think together in new ways and with multiple metaphors about this very togetherness. “Just as the different aspects of the planet—physical, chemical, and biological—are interrelated, so too living species are part of a network, which we will never fully explore and understand. A good part of our genetic code is shared by many living beings. It follows that the fragmentation of knowledge and the isolation of bits of information can actually become a form of ignorance, unless they are integrated into a broader vision of reality.”

He has with brilliant precision implicated the method of a fragmentation of knowledge in the breaking apart of planetary life. The newness of the answer requires a slowfast thinking—not new at all for process thinkers, Whiteheadian or Teilhardian, for ecofeminists, or for followers of Saint Francis—of radical material interdependence, gathered into the “integral ecology.” Attention to the “cry of the poor and the cry of the earth” will prevent the vaporization of the vision into a merely abstract connectivity. And attention to its edges of unknowability—“which we will never fully explore and understand”—is not only a matter of rigorous scientific openness but of a mystical nonknowing. “We believe in the dimension of ‘not-knowing,’” wrote Ivone Gebara years ago, “that makes us humble and at the same time more combative in order to gain respect for differences and the possibility of building an interdependent society.”3 Ecofeminism would be a pale thing without this Roman Catholic sister.

Speaking of sisters, I am struck by the parallelism of the Pope’s call to slow down and think the connectivity of the common home with another voice of ecological prophecy. In her crucial new text This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein writes that “any attempt to rise to the climate challenge will be fruitless unless it is understood as part of a much larger . . . process of rebuilding and reinventing the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic after so many decades of attack and neglect.”4 She is an activist tuned to the “bad timing” of the slow surface and the alarming speed of climate change. And in her sense of urgency she remains clear that activism will fail without a shift of “worldview.” For capitalism in its global development has depended upon the defeat of the idea of the common. And the academic left, sadly, has colluded whenever it pits the notion of “difference” against the collective or “particularity” against the communal. What is needed is the recuperation of the collective as the dwelling place of difference. Interdependence means neither dependence nor independence but a complex family of divergent particulars.

Klein places her hope neither in a sovereign state nor in greener techno-economies, but in the new movement she calls Blockadia—unprecedented alliances forming recently of indigenous groups, local farmers, eco-activists, citizen groups. (It has been especially active in the Pacific Northwest and Australia in blocking the shipment of coal.) And she makes no references to religious movements against capitalism, like liberation theology, or to eco-theological alliances. Her voice is purely secular.5 So I find extraordinary the fact that her sense of hope in the face of inevitable climate disaster and mounting capitalist depredation anticipates the key papal move precisely. This can be briefly demonstrated: “The double jeopardy of social injustice and global warming should not discourage us. Climate change, with its rising flood waters—“could become a galvanizing force for humanity, leaving us all not just safer from extreme weather, but with societies that are safer and fairer in all kinds of other ways as well . . . It is a matter of collectively using “the crisis to leap somewhere that seems, frankly, better than where we are right now.”6 In other words—in the face of the one-two punch of capitalism and climate, the catastrophe itself can be the catalyst.

And hear the parallel answer of the Pope: “The same mindset which stands in the way of making radical decisions to reverse the trend of global warming also stands in the way of achieving the goal of eliminating poverty.” The economic enemy of the common home is unambiguous. It was interesting to watch powerful Catholic Republicans reacting to the encyclical, like Rick Santorum and Jeb Bush, who normally love church hierarchy, scramble to restrict papal authority to private faith, stripped of political and of scientific meaning. Just like secular humanism does.

Indeed I would consider the encyclical a rare reason for real hope: not just the hope that it proclaims for a cultural revolution, but the hope generated by the fact that this voice—with more moral authority than any other single voice on the planet—is channeling the double cry of the double jeopardy of the poor and of the earth. And so it amplifies the double possibility of a systemic alternative. This hope is not the same as optimism. The pope’s own hope is not optimistic: “Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth.” As Bruno Latour, facing global warming, paraphrases Dante at the gates of hell: “Abandon hype all ye who enter here.”7

Does hope itself then double or does it divide when one considers the radical difference of its sources? A set of movements is forging new alliances for the sake of climate justice, from the bottom up. And on the other, simultaneously, there resounds the voice from the very top, from the top of the top—with angelic fanfare—right down to the misery and filth of the planet. But certainly top-down. And to most ears, theist or atheist, the gesture of a power from above that may descend, or condescend, to help us is just what one would expect from theology, Catholic or otherwise. In this context I can only whisper in such ears that process and feminist theologies have for half a century worked, often in tandem with biblical exegesis, to deconstruct from the deep within of faith itself the divinization of top-down power, its hierarchy, its patriarchy . . .

Oh dear. There is no way around a certain papal patriarchalism, is there. And it does run all the way up to its paternalist Heaven. At a certain point well into the encyclical, one encounters paragraph 75:

A spirituality which forgets God as all-powerful and Creator is not acceptable. That is how we end up worshipping earthly powers, or ourselves usurping the place of God, even to the point of claiming an unlimited right to trample his creation underfoot. The best way to restore men and women to their rightful place, putting an end to their claim to absolute dominion over the earth, is to speak once more of the figure of a Father who creates and who alone owns the world. Otherwise, human beings will always try to impose their own laws and interests on reality.

This is that omnipotent Creator whom process theology has from His [sic] origins recognized as incoherent in the face of creaturely suffering. Why not the call, the lure of God, that sin ignores and betrays—rather than a coercive force that will surely step in and save the planet for us if it is in His Plan? This incoherence may only get compounded by the idealization of the patriarchy of ownership: God the Father as proprietor of the world. Of course, these properties are being lifted up, as they not infrequently are by well-meaning theologians, to take down the human delusions of grandeur, the arrogance and greed that funds every oppression and also drives climate change. Paragraph 75 reads to me as something added not just to reassure but to mobilize a constituency, perhaps the crucial constituency of this document, that is not yet on board with the earth and the poor—but might yet swing. It does make me wince, though, having read 74 paragraphs in almost uninterrupted companionability with el Papa.

This must be noted, then, before our feminism turns us icy: that paragraph is the worst of the theo-patriarchalism of the document, and it is itself embedded in a capacious eco-theological reflection that is astute in its biblical interpretation. It has taken on the problem of the Gen 1 “dominion” passage, beloved of every anti-environmentalist and climate denialist organization. He locates it within his larger theological analysis of the triune sin against our “three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbour and with the earth itself.”

The harmony between the Creator, humanity and creation as a whole was disrupted by our presuming to take the place of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations. This in turn distorted our mandate to “have dominion” over the earth (cf. Gen 1:28), to “till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15).

Here is an invaluable move, one that I missed despite having written a book focused mainly on Genesis 1! I always argue that in this text touting the divine delight in every creature (“God saw that it was good,” over and over) there is no way that you can read the “have dominion” as “have your way with it—use, use up, demean, ignore, destroy, and exterminate the species.” Dominion does not mean domination but responsibility. Not to mention that the culminating reward of the dominion is Gen 1:29f: you get to be vegans, like all the others who breathe! But Francis splendidly couples and several times repeats the linkage of “have dominion” with “till it and keep it” from Gen. 2, and clarifies that “keeping” “means caring, protecting, overseeing and preserving.” He persists (at much greater length than the patriarchal paragraph is afforded) to lay out numerous ecological mandates of the biblical text.

Therefore, I certainly intend to teach this text to the very students to whom I am—at the same time—introducing the alternative metaphors of a God whose power is not classically omnipotent but lovingly omnipotential, requiring us to actualize it responsibly and creatively. A God Jesus addressed—a novelty then—as “Father,” a radicalization of intimate relation, whom we now for the same reason refer to as Love, Mother, Father-Mother, Poet of the Universe, Friend, the Enfolding, or just—mysterious Infinity beyond names and beyond knowing. The endless nameability and unnameability of the divine is as sister Elizabeth Johnson made dauntlessly clear key to the work of feminist theology.8 And it allows me to include citations of many ancient texts and some recent ones that use paternal language.

Contradiction?

No, complicity. Indeed, a very protest/ant feminist complicity with this pope whose mission has defined itself as one great protest on behalf of the poor and the earth. Great, and not infallible. And in this case I admit to recognizing that even the bit of the encyclical I disagree with is needed: if he omitted it, or indeed if he spoke (in the tongues of angels) the language I long to hear, beyond paternity, possession, omnipotence, beyond the constrictions of women’s choices and callings, his encyclical would not have a chance of making the difference it might just make, not just preaching to the eco-choir, but to traditionally Roman Catholic populations.

We must not wait to agree on all our namings, not even on all our burning issues. There isn’t time. At stake is the future of livable life for us all. The whole dysfunctional family. And in the meantime the most vulnerable among us, often women, will be thrown by droughts and meltings and fires, collapsing coastlines and islands, agricultures and cultures, into rapidly intensifying jeopardy. Might we then all consider joining—in our acute differences—this com-plicity: folding-together in collective mindfulness of the complications of our wondrously fragile and complex earth system? It isn’t a matter of putting off our issues of gender and sex and race and ability, let alone class, but of colluding in the spirit of the grassroots movements and their dynamic entanglements. Then we can keep talking, arguing, contesting particular priorities—amidst difference there are always shifting deferrals—without delaying commitment to earth-keeping. As Klein puts it, “the environmental crisis—if conceived sufficiently broadly—neither trumps nor distracts from our pressing political and economic causes: it supercharges each one of them with existential urgency.”9

Under planetary pressure, and with a little help from the Pope, we just may form an alliance in the name of the universe and its source. In their complication they extend endlessly beyond our comprehension—but they give us timely clues. And in the fastslow temporalities of this encyclical, appealing to old texts and to possible futures, the movement down from above forms a vortex with the movements interlinking us and all our social contexts from below. Catastrophe, etymologically, comes from kata-strophe, a “turning down.” Might we let the catastrophe we face turn us down, not in a great terminal meltdown, but in a turning down to earth? Where we already are, earthlings dwelling in the context of all our contexts. Then catastrophe becomes catalyst for the cultural revolution we need.

Early in the encyclical, after just two paragraphs, the human gets a magisterial clue as to our widest context. It comes with a single italicized sentence: “Nothing in this world is indifferent to us.” This is neither traditional Catholic teaching nor natural science. It sounds more like process thought or the new materialism, with a vibrant materiality composed of responsive interdependencies that entangle any observer and anything observed. But not indifferent?

Really, what do the glaciers as they melt care for us, or indeed the ancient strata of the stony earth upon which they reside? Right, they don’t care, they don’t have conscious concern. And neither do most of us, for almost all the rest of us, most of the time. We are too vastly limited to care for the rest, except—on principle. And in faith. But this need not render us indifferent to any.

In particular moments the vibrant interplay of our differences shines through—a stranger’s grin, an owl’s glare, a glacier’s sparkle. And then we recognize difference as the precise opposite of indifference. Difference does not separate but relates. If indifference occludes difference itself—it is because the world is wrought of entangled differences. And these differences matter—in their interdependencies across every stratum of geology, chemistry, biology. Indifference is the opposite of difference. It conveys a world of separables and exploitables and expendables, blind and wasteful of the ways, willy nilly, we recycle each other endlessly. But there is no room for “the globalization of indifference” in this house of many mansions, this complex homeostatic system, Gaia, sister-mother, our body of bodies, this momentously encycled earth-home.

Laudato si’.