Crusade, Capital, and Cosmopolis
Reenact the truce, as it is commonly called, which was proclaimed a long time ago by our holy fathers.
—Pope Urban II, Speech at the Council of Clermont
Consider that the West itself has produced the variables to contradict its impressive trajectory every time. This is the way in which the West is not monolithic, and this is why it is surely necessary that it move toward entanglement.
—Édouard Glissant
FLASH BACK, A MILLENNIUM BACK: Clermont, France. Here, before a great gathering of clerics and nobles, Urban II preaches the First Crusade. He is responding to the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus’s plea for military support against the incursions of the Seljuk Turks. In Fulcher of Chartre’s account of the 1095 speech, the pope first of all appeals for peace. He calls his fellow Western Christians on a continent roiling with feudal warfare to respect the “Peace and Truce of God.” Barely a decade old, the truce was the product of the first organized peace movement of the continental Christian world, a barely precedented attempt by the church and grassroots leaders to limit the wars of the nobility by nonviolent means. “I exhort and demand that you, each, try hard to have the truce kept in your diocese. And if anyone shall be led by his cupidity or arrogance to break this truce, by the authority of God and with the sanction of this council he shall be anathematized.”1
Upon the consent of the gathered multitude to work for peace in the “provinces” of what would become Europe, the pope then calls them, however, to put that truce to work against the Turks and Arabs: “Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now fight in a proper way against the barbarians.”2 The pope’s speech may count as the prototype of unity through enmity, of “peace” as the exportation of violence. Not that the church has a monopoly on this genre of political double-talk. Peace talk was subject to Orwellian impossibilities from the start, as in Aristotle’s bon mot: “We make war that we may live in peace.” The pope inverts it: make peace so that we may go to war. Peace is now the means to “proper” fighting.
If the Crusade—called, at the time, perigrinatio, “pilgrimage”—would advance the coherence of the Western Roman Empire and its political economy, it did so by unifying Christians against a late version of the “barbarians.” These happened to be Christendom’s most disturbing religious Other. Islam, after all, had been for centuries the only successful competitor and threat to a religion that might otherwise have traced its triumph in a great arc from East to West. Fusing pilgrimage with pillage, perpetrating in Jerusalem and elsewhere collective atrocities, and orienting Roman Christians again to the East of their origins, the Crusade arguably began to produce “the West.” As Enrique Dussel notes, “the Crusades can be seen as the first attempt of Latin Europe to impose itself on the eastern Mediterranean.”3 The attempt fails, the colonial ambition oscillates in and out of activation. Let us consider that the European West thereby consolidates itself around a crusade complex.
Now zoom forward, to another epoch altogether: a shocking Muslim assault on a great cosmopolitan center, an unprecedented triumph over a largely Christian land, rocks the world. Terror reverberates across nations. The call sounds from on high for a new crusade: the West must stand united against Islamic aggression.
Have I fast-forwarded you almost a thousand years, to New York, 2001? Not yet. Only halfway: to Constantinople, 1453. The Ottoman emperor Mehmet II has conquered the city and so freed Anatolia of the remnants of the Roman Empire. Byzantium is terminated. Mehmet claims the title of Caesar, and refugees from the East stream into Europe with tales of cruelty and horror at the hands of the Turk. The humanist Pope Nicholas V wants to prevent the conquest of Europe, and not without reason. Mehmet, a sophisticated patron of Renaissance painting, envisions the eventual absorption of Italy. And the Ottomans are already making great headway in conquering Eastern Europe. The pope calls for Christians once again to get over their internal squabbles and join together in a “new crusade.” In response many prepare for a preemptive strike, but many others remain preoccupied by local crises. All are informed by the long theological tradition of polemics against Mohammed’s Satanic mendacity. Additionally, the humanists are indignant at the loss of access to the great Constantinopolitan repository of Greek learning.
At the heart of this difficult moment, we bump back into none other than Nicholas of Cusa, now a cardinal. He was rare for his firsthand experience of Constantinople: recall he had undertaken the great ecumenical journey fifteen years earlier that had brought back to Italy and to reconciliation with the Roman faith both the Byzantine emperor and the patriarch. Friendships had formed. The destruction of Byzantium was personally devastating to Cusa. Within two months of the conquest, he has written On the Peace of Faith. It opens with the device of an anonymous person imploring “the Creator of all things that in his mercy he restrain the persecution, raging more than ever because of different religious rites.”4 He writes of this figure receiving a vision in which multireligious plaintiffs are invited to a council convened by an archangel. In context it is strange that the book never singles out its representatives of Islam as perpetrators. Rather, with tones of great respect, he includes a disproportionate number of Muslims in his imaginary—and in his time impossible—peace conference.
This chapter pursues a multidirectional itinerary, rhizomatic rather than chronological in its historical narrative. Surfacing the crusade complex lets us air a phobia that repeats itself across the millennial formation of the “West.” In De Pace Fides, midway through the millennium, an apophatic theology yields a peace-making strategy for religious violence. After considering Cavanaugh’s critique of the myth of religious violence, Dussel’s analysis of the Islamophobic formation of the West leads us to the present and to the violence of a pax economica. How might political theology, if it plies a constructive and pluralist relationalism that is actually theological, support the religiopolitical complexity of the planet? Connolly’s sense of the cosmopolitical may offer, with Whitehead’s support and Paulina Ochoa Espejo’s panentheistic supplement, a cosmopolitics for a world of fragile becoming.
THOUSAND-YEAR CRUSADE
“Because of religion,” Cusa announces, “many take up arms against each other and by their power either force men to renounce their long practiced tradition or inflict death on them. There were many bearers of the lamentations from all the earth.”5 These fictional representatives then speak for the known faiths of the earth, voicing their complaints against one another in conversation with Peter and the Logos. Cusa here addresses head-on the question of religiously driven violence. In this he was not absolutely alone among Christians of his epoch. His old friend from the days of the conciliar debates, Juan de Segovia, wrote him in 1453 about his own lifelong interest in a nonviolent approach to Islam and a responsible translation of the Koran. They corresponded about the idea of a conference—a contraferentia—as an alternative to a new crusade.6
In De Pace Fides what Cusa, perhaps uniquely, does not seek is the conversion of all to Christianity. Rather, through “Wisdom” he calls for a peaceful coexistence of the different faiths: “one religion, multiple rites.”7 The phrase religio una in rituum varietate appears indeed to be a citation of Muhammad from a text Cusa had in his possession. There the prophet answers a Medinan Jew concerning the earlier prophets. “The religion or the faith of all of them was indeed one, but the rites of the different prophets were actually diverse.”8 Amidst a great irruption of Islamophobia, Cusa seems to be applying this early strategy for concord amidst monotheistic difference not just to Christian-Muslim alterity but to the far wider multiplicity of his time. His “one religion,” not surprisingly, resembles, as we will see, his own highly abstract and apophatic version of Catholic Christianity. But it pointedly does not for him signify Christianity, which remains one among the “rites.” For, as we have explored already at some depth, his notion of the “one” cannot be opposed to “many,” whose variations come enfolded in and unfolded from the infinite complicatio.
The question of religious multiplicity is, of course, today posed altogether differently. It cannot begin or end with any “one religion.” The pluralism both of theology and of politics rule out any discourse of unification. After centuries of further atrocities between “rites,” and of immense political efforts of tolerance and containment, then of secularization and pluralism, the problem and the possibility of a convivial multiplicity still presses. It arises now, for instance, within a renewed discussion of the democratically appropriate role of religion in the public sphere. That sphere now envelopes the planet. And that world appears pervasively complicated not only by the troubled relations between the religions but also between religion and secularism. These terms themselves bear the modern symptoms of the trouble they try to cure. Scholarship in religion may unsay religion, even as secular thinkers unsay secularism. “Postsecularist” language sprouts from the negations. Its kataphases are hopeful: what, for example, Namsoon Kang names “theological cosmopolitanism” finds multiplying nontheological formulations, such as “a constitutional frame for an emerging multicultural world society” (Jürgen Habermas), “the co of cohabitation” (Judith Butler), “the transmodern project” (Enrique Dussel).9 Such names evoke variations of a pluralist desire, beyond relativism. It finds no equivalent in Cusa’s religio una, but a convivial precursor and, as I will suggest, a supplement, located just where the millennium can be folded in half.
Into our own unfolding present, marked as the new millennium, there burst an unexpected effect of the thousand-year history. For if the First Crusade defined the eleventh century, what opened the twenty-first if not another war defining the Christian West against Islam? The events of 2001, including the performative presidential utterance—“this crusade, this war on terrorism”—have already faded into a past of catastrophe tinged with national embarrassment, failure, even a certain ineptitude reminiscent of the buffoonish crusaders in Monty Python’s film The Holy Grail. The crusade complex might now seem to be reserved for psychotic outbursts of Islamophobia, as in the Danish episode timed as a millennial commemoration of the crusades.10 But our international agenda will for the foreseeable future have been shaped by wars and rumors of wars—with Muslims.11 If we simply move on to other pressing issues (they do press) and forget again the current of Christian Islamophobia in which the modern West comes implicated, do we not repress and therefore intensify the complex?
Poised at the halfway point of this thousand-year crusade, just before the end of explicit crusading and the beginning of modernity, Cusa’s sapiential council may offer an ancestral, if spectral, clue to the cosmopolitics we need today. The clue matters only to the extent that religious violence remains a problem insoluble by geographic or national separation.
If so it is because the complex implicates us in a wider complication and a widening precarity.
RELIGION, VIOLENCE, AND THE PRODUCTION OF THE WEST
In The Myth of Religious Violence William Cavanaugh argues that the idea that religions are especially or uniquely prone to violence is a “modern myth,” produced to strengthen the power of the secular state. “In what are called ‘Western’ societies, the attempt to create a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is essentially prone to violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of the liberal nation-state.”12 He demonstrates persuasively that a “myth of religious violence” helps to construct and marginalize a religious Other, prone to fanaticism, as the foil of “the rational, peace-making, secular subject.” He was writing in the first decade of the millennium, with our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq very much in view. “This myth can be and is used in domestic politics to legitimate the marginalization of certain types of practices and groups labeled religious, while underwriting the nation-state’s monopoly on its citizens’ willingness to sacrifice and kill. In foreign policy, the myth of religious violence serves to cast nonsecular social orders, especially Muslim societies, in the role of villain.”13
Cavanaugh exposes the politics of a politically enshrined secularism that with dogmatic petulance mistakes the constitutional separation of church and state for a warrant to confine all religious expression to the private sphere. We are reminded that the “new atheist” stereotype of religion as the primary obstacle to a reasonably peaceful world is not new. The story of the religious cause of violence has legitimated the centuries-long political reorganization of the modern West into modern states. If one reads modernity as rational progress toward justice and peace, then the story, however simplified, has served a noble end. If, by contrast, one finds much deformation of modern democratic hope by the totalizing structures of violence and of capital, equally modern, then one surfaces the complicity of secularism in the betrayal. In this Cavanaugh’s argument supports the postsecularism that characterizes the more nuanced versions of recent political theory. Recent iterations of political theology—often by nontheistic thinkers—pursue a comparable complication of the story of religion. Indeed Cavanaugh is among those theological thinkers showing how the very notion of religion is a modern construct. But his own story in turn needs complicating. There are indeed myriad economic, cultural, and political motives involved in most apparently religious violence. (Pope Urban, we noted, used religious rhetoric to launch a crusade evidently aimed to pacify his own realm and enrich it.) But do the secular motives necessarily wash out the religious ones? Such a countersimplification may strip away the stereotype of the Dark Ages only to restore a glowing icon of medieval theocracy. Would we—even we theologians—want to relieve our own traditions of responsibility for their legitimations and motivations of violence?
Or to put the question differently: how would Cavanaugh’s thesis account for Cusa, writing at the end of the medieval period and in direct response to Muslim violence? The cardinal’s claim directly contradicts Cavanaugh’s thesis: “because of religion many take up arms against each other.”14 This “each other” serves in De Pace to distribute responsibility across the whole spectrum of religious cultures—including the author’s own. In so doing it specifically avoids incrimination of Muslims—despite the evident Ottoman violence. In this early Renaissance thinker, steeped in worldly Greek thought and anticipating key elements of a much later science, do we have a secularist avant la lettre? (Certainly his earlier conciliarism anticipates some aspects of modern parliamentary polities.) But on Cavanaugh’s thesis he would be a perpetrator of the antireligious myth.
Of course Cusa was writing right before religion had become the modern signifier of forms of belief and practice separable from each other and from the secular. He was questioning, as we shall see, a set of social habits. He was, however—and this seems key—making a profoundly theological argument. His point is neither to blame religion nor defend it, but to call it to its own best sapientia. The figure of Wisdom herself crosses between Socratic and biblical registers, seeking a framework of translatability between the world’s religious dialects. Indeed Cobb would have us replace the term religions with wisdoms. If a nonviolent—indeed cosmopolitan—wisdom was finding Christian language in that moment, it could no more disentangle itself from its Latin cosmos than we can cut free of an Anglophone globality. I am only insisting that the entangled difference we have examined in terms of relational ontologies also characterizes religion. So theological Wisdom will be on the lookout for the collusions of our own traditions with the powers of violence from which we also teach liberation. The modern myth of religious violence complements the perennial myth of religious purity.
There is for us, however, something more to ask of Cusa’s mid-fifteenth-century context, just a generation prior to the Iberian irruption of the first modern nation-state. If the conditions for the emergence of the West were festering since the First Crusade, what emergency makes its modernity, its Europe, possible? Of this charged transitional moment, Enrique Dussel exposes a crucial spatiality: “When the Turks took over Constantinople in 1453, Europe found itself surrounded and reduced to a minimal role.”15 The Ottomans were impinging from East and South. “Latin Europe of the fifteenth century, besieged by the Muslim world, amounted to nothing more than a peripheral, secondary geographical area situated in the westernmost limit of the Euro-Afro-Asian continent.”16 But Europe never had been the center of world history. It “had to wait until 1492 to establish itself empirically as the center with other civilizations as its periphery.”17 For, until that moment, what we call Europe “was peripheral and secondary to Islam.”18 Dussel, however, is making a double argument. Against Hegel’s “myopic Eurocentrism” he disputes the story of the northern, Germanic origin of the modern in the Protestant Reformation. That narrative manages to marginalize the defining events that occurred just before, on the Spanish peninsula—which, not insignificantly in its proximity to Africa, marks the western edge of its continent.
Dussel’s argument for the Iberian origin of modernity then brings to light the Islamophobic framework of Western European identity. At the end of the fifteenth century Spain and Portugal were the first and only European powers with the capacity for external territorial conquest, as demonstrated both in Africa and in the conquest of the Islamic Kingdom of Granada in 1492. This was the final phase of the centuries-long Christian Reconquista of Andalusía.19 Modernity is forged in the iterative momentum of this particular violence. “The Iberian Reconquest, with the extreme sectarian violence it unleashed in its final stages (broken treaties, elimination of local elites, endless massacres and tortures, the demand that the conquered betray their religion and culture under pain of death or expulsion, the confiscation and repartition in feudal form of lands, towns, and their inhabitants to the officers of the conquering army), was, in turn, the model for the colonization of the New World.”20
With this remarkable account Dussel is describing a planetary violence that is at once definitive of modern statehood and nonetheless religious. It repeats the conversionist misery and slaughter that Cusa was denouncing. Its brand of religion is intensified by Spain’s new statist deployment of the Inquisition at home and in its New World—that supposed “East” that so inflated the West.
Dussel’s thesis, in other words, lands “the modern” in the Americas. The Argentine and Mexican philosopher had articulated his model of Islamophobic modernity in response to the quintecentennial of the colonial success of Columbus (Spanish Colon). Columbus sailed forth, in his own words, as the emissary of the “enemies of the sect of Mohammed.” The Reconquista that made his journey possible had marked the end the old convivencia—of the dream, impossible to be sure, of the peaceful Iberian coexistence of the three Peoples of the Book.21 The Reconquest was not a crusade, but a new state-building deployment of Christian resentment against the Moors and the tiny, if influential, minority of Jews. Almost simultaneously with these expulsions and massacres the same aggression was applied to those new infidels without—the Africans, so many of whom were Muslim. (The aggression against indigenous Africa, and then America, was facilitated by the versatile logic of a faux East—the natives were branded in each case as “oriental,” as “Indians.” Dussel thus argues that as Europe “broke the Muslim siege, which had been in effect since Mohammed’s death,” it is in the conquest of Mexico that “the European ego first controlled, colonized, dominated, exploited, and humiliated an Other, another empire.”22 The shadow of Islam explains the perplexing images in certain early colonial frescoes in Latin America of the turbanned and menacing figure of the Moor.23
With the opening of modernity and the end of the Renaissance—extending to the Americas and only thereafter to the battle at the gates of Vienna—we can say that the explicit crusade folds into an implicit complex. The success of the new Western empires finally drives the long-central Muslim into the periphery. I am suggesting that this is a defining event, a reversal that folds history otherwise. Geopolitically reoriented European modernity largely represses its resentment of Islam and the ragged old dream of convivencia. Of the repression that constitutes what he calls the political unconscious, Jameson writes: “history is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its ‘ruses’ turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention.”24 The biblical hospitality to the stranger turns to colonization, the pax christiana to crusade, our planetary entanglement to global dominance: ruses of a systemically willed ignorance.
The docta ignoranti awould be one counter-ruse, one name for attention to the unconscious complexes that metastasize in the grisly reversals. It isn’t that we could make our history transparent: our constituent entanglements will always recede into opacity. So this chapter tells one defining story, plucking a few threads stretched over a millennial arc, among many possible stories. Why this one, this implicating narrative, has insisted itself upon the present theological exercise will become, I hope, yet clearer.
. . .
“For what does the living seek except to live?”
—Nicholas of Cusa, De Pace Fides
To better sense the texture of Cusa’s interfaith—indeed comparative theological—strategy, positioned on the eve of the modern, we may briefly sample the religio-economico-political complexity of his context. He lives, as noted, half a century before the Reconquista. In 1453 Nicholas V is failing to raise a crusade, the Ottomans are penetrating Eastern Europe. The year before, this pope had issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, granting the king of Portugal the right to reduce any “Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers” to hereditary slavery.25 While
the papacy had all along supported slavery, it had qualms about institutionalizing a practice that condemned infants to be born into slavery. Nicholas V overcame that scruple and legitimized the modern colonial slave trade in Africa, and soon in the Americas, through anti-Muslim (Saracen) affect. Divergent Christian reactions to Islam register during this time. For example, the Transylvanian Vlad III boasts in 1462: “I have killed men and women, old and young . . . 23,884 Turks and Bulgarians without counting those whom we burned alive in their homes or whose heads were not chopped off by our soldiers.”26 Most of us know Vlad as Count Dracula, whose link to Islamophobia is not usually noted. The crusader complex comes to us rich in undead symptoms.
Amidst mass enslavements, slaughters, and the call for the new crusade, Cusa’s contraferentia signifies an impossible dream, a Christian way not taken. The emergent West would stay the course of the religiously sanctioned—I do not say caused—state supremacism that, beginning with Spain, produced the new empires. Against this background let us return to his vision of religious diversity. Cusa presumed and supported the Roman church. Yet his little book does not argue for the triumph or even the protection of Catholic—or Christian—civilization, but, much more basically and materially, that “the sword and the bilious spite of hatred and all evil sufferings will cease.” The means would be not conversion but conversation. Here is the surprising first step of the argument of De Pace Fides: “But you know, O Lord, that a great multitude cannot exist without considerable diversity and that almost everyone is forced to lead a life . . . full of miseries . . . in servile submission under the subjection of the rulers who [dominate] them. [So] only a few have enough leisure that they can proceed to a knowledge of themselves using their own free choice.”27
It is not some generic sin or inferiority but specific conditions of social and epistemic oppression that keep the multitude from questioning their own assumptions about religious truth: “it is a characteristic of the . . . human condition that a longstanding custom which is taken as having become nature is defended as truth.”28 In other words, the social habitus gets naturalized; my group’s customs, endlessly repeated, are mistaken for the only truth. He is not repudiating the perspectives of specific cultures, but relativizing them by recognizing them as such. (Recall the perspectivism of De Visio Dei). His Latin Christians are not excepted: they too defend a naturalized custom as truth. This evenhanded discourse, almost unheard of in the church up to that point, includes all religious traditions. “Thus not insignificant dissensions occur when each community prefers its faith to another.” But this competition, if not conducive to the truth it claims, nonetheless is read here with compassion. In each case it is a symptom of the desire for truth.
For, he writes in the mode of prayerful address: “this rivalry exists for the sake of you, whom alone they revere in everything that all seem to worship.”29 That is an extraordinary concession, light years from the standard presumption of Satanic delusion or sinful culpability: “For each one desires in all that he seems to desire only the good which you are; no one is seeking with all his intellectual searching for anything else than the truth which you are. For what does the living seek except to live?”30 And, if read against the background of Cusa’s cosmology, we hear the interrelated life of all creatures pulsing in this desire. Desire may expose us to dire limitation, distortion, our very undoing—but it is at root holy. Here the eros lures everyone toward the good, which he interpellates as divine, you, the life of the multiplicity of diverse lives, with their diverse truths.
In a gesture for which there is little precedent in Christian thought, Cusa next argues for the possible truth-content of all faiths. The following disarmingly plain inference may convey to some a mystical non sequitur. In cloud perspective it precipitates a breakthrough for religious diversity then or now: “Therefore it is you, the giver of life and being, who seem to be sought in the different rites by different ways and are named with different names, because as you are you remain unknown and ineffable to all.”31
Because none of us (not even a cardinal) can—de docta ignorantia—“know” God, no religion can rule out the truth of other religions. For in all of their difficult differences of name and way, each seeks the life that is beyond names. We have earlier witnessed the Christian negative tradition, by way of Dionysius, articulating the boundless multiplicity of the names of that which has no name. But it had not (except, and with reservations, for certain Jews and Greeks) yet signaled an opening to the unknown divinity of other “ways.”
So here again a repetition of a classical apophatic gesture effects novelty. As the negating of God lets us affirm a vast multiplicity of divine names, so now it lets us affirm the multiplicity of ways. Indeed the unknowability of the infinity explicates the diversity of finite faiths. De Pace represents its multiplicity with four Muslim figures, a Jew, an Indian, an Italian, a Spaniard, a German, a Frenchman, a Tartar Englishman, and others (obviously not the modern list of “the religions”). In spite of the primacy of the Ottoman crisis, Cusa’s dialogue does not limit itself unduly to the Abrahamisms. It will then specifically clarify, in answer to a worry voiced by the Muslim about idols and images, that the “Indians,” and others with their many statues, may also rightly revere divinity in multiple expressions—indeed as many gods. His presiding archangel has, startlingly, no problem with this divine multiplicity as long as each agrees—which his imaginary Indian informant assures him the learned certainly would do—that it is always divinity they name and they worship in each statue or god.
Cusa’s theory proves disappointing, however, if one abstracts him from his context and holds him to the criteria of current religious pluralism. As he enters more confidently into his fantasy, with Peter, Paul, and the Logos proving formidably Socratic interlocutors for all the representatives, the Christian perspective becomes ever more explicit. He is able to persuade, for instance, the Chaldean (Muslim) and the Jew—whose commitment to the One he affirms with unqualified respect—that they are already trinitarians. Not in the language of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, to be sure, which as “names which are attributed to God” are “taken from creatures”; God remains “ineffable and beyond everything that can be named or spoken.”32 This is the ecumenical aptitude of negative theology. The Word then swiftly accounts for the traditional language of the trinity as “not proper terms” but convenient ones, convenienter. More appropriate, he avers, would be to derive from the relation they signify terms “more suitable, such as ‘unity,’ ‘thatness’ and ‘identity.’”33 His select interlocutors have no problem at all with these abstractions! Indeed if an Advaita Vedantan or Theravada Buddhist were among them, neither would they.
Cusa’s little peace book responds to an ethicopolitical crisis. But its terse argument is anticipated—in the language of folds—in a passage in De docta where he reflects on ancient pagans: “Pagans have given various names to god with regard to creatures.”34 And here in his cloud encryption he already applies the Dionysian multiplicity of names to religious multiplicity: “All the names are unfoldings of the enfolding of the one, ineffable name, and as this proper name is infinite, so it enfolds an infinite number of such names of particular perfections. Although there could be many such unfoldings, they are never so many or so great that there could not be more.”35 And in the following inference note the interreligious generosity of the final twist: “The ancient pagans used to ridicule the Jews, who worshiped the one, infinite God whom they did not know, while the pagans themselves were worshiping God in God’s unfoldings, that is, they were worshiping God wherever they beheld God’s divine works.”36 In other words, Cusa’s apophatically entangled infinite plies what it implies: what we might call (did it not, as ever, sound too negative) a negative comparative theology.
Still, isn’t this—in terms of the methodological options for comparative theology—just Christian inclusivism? Its unifying approach, as in the theology of Karl Rahner or the comparativism of John Hick, has been—however trailblazing in their moments—largely abandoned by scholars of interreligious encounter as inadequate progress beyond exclusivism. Nicholas certainly fails to become a postmodern pluralist. He remains a premodern and Christocentric Christian, conjecturing, in the face of the actually threatening imperial aggression of the old ethnoreligious Other, a universal alternative to crusade. And he is writing to his fellow Catholics in language that could imaginably persuade them—certainly not to the fantasized representatives of faiths about which so little still was known. And so of course the “one religion” of religio una in rituum varietate—however unorthodox, indeed Muslim—can surely be read, as can the many forms of the One, as its own subtler imposition of Christian presumption.37 But his very failure in this regard retains an odd helpfulness. The fact is that today global Christianity, in its most successful, dynamic, and usually Protestant forms, is still dominated by an unapologetic exclusivism. As in much Islam, the exclusive truth claim need not produce violence against the religious other, but justifies and fuels the violence when—out of multiple causes—it arises. The imaginary of a convivial, all exceeding and enfolding Mystery may help more than mere arguments for democratic tolerance, allied with secular pluralism. It will approximate what Catherine Cornille, in the relevantly named Im-Possibility of Interreligious Dialogue, affirms as “open inclusivism.”38 Indeed comparative theology, as for instance John Thatamanil frames it polydoxically, increasingly troubles the triad of exclusivism, inclusivism, pluralism.39 The apophatically entangled diversity, hauntingly prefigured in Cusa’s reach through and beyond tolerance toward a dialogical peace process, offers a needed cosmopolitical tool.
Given the precarity of planetary cohabitation, a relational pluralism happens not over and against the variously separative Ones.40 It breaks through their walls of mutual contradiction from within a cloud that they may im/possibly recognize they share. And in the historic context of Cusa’s thought the identity of the One is one not opposed to any many: “Identity is enfolded difference.”41 So the Supreme Complication also enfolds—in their diversity—the multiple faith practices of the world. They cannot be forced or tricked into unity, but in conversation explicate, and in practice, unfold, the ecumenical religio in which they are already unknowingly tied together. The folds of difference, heretofore cut into a history of catastrophe, thus unfold into peaceable conversation. In theory.
In practice, however, this pacific contraferentia remained “caught up in a certain intellectual height”42—and tucked into the impossible, even for its author. The book exercised minimal influence. Wars between Catholics and Protestants would in the following century outdo violence between religions. Willed ignorance of the other ways remained fundamental and manipulable by the political theologies and economic interests of the emerging European powers. This willful—habituated—ignorance remains widespread, if mitigated by religious liberalization and secularizing education. It remains manipulable by the new forms of power. The apophatic entanglement of religion itself, mindfully practiced, implicates, already half a millennium ago, a planetary diversity of human rites, practices, cultures, politics, theologies. Now we add sexes, economies, ecologies. But without its corresponding Wisdom, entanglement—the same entanglement—yields not convivial complexity but global complexes. Complexes are folded within complexes. We fold now fast-forward to consider the pervasive present form and crusade of such a complex, that of the global economy.
FROM PAX DEI TO PAX ECONOMICA
The global dimension of capitalism increasingly entangles everyone with everything.
—William Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style
The folds of human complexity have taken new planetary forms. The North American version of Western globalism envelopes South and East in the geopolitics of its markets. Amidst the smooth folds of economic transnationalism, the crusader complex remains cloaked in an aura of medieval irrelevance.43 Globalization now signifies the neoliberal corporate economics in which oil—and therefore Islam—figures prominently. And in the wake of the nationalist world wars, Bretton Woods did disarmingly link international commerce with peace: make deals, not wars.44 Of course, there is also the long history of big peace deals that come detached from justice and make bigger wars: we began with the pax dei as it was co-opted for the First Crusade; there had been long before the pax romana and then the pax romana Christiana. At the turn of this millennium the pax Americana declared by neoconservatives (who are economic neoliberals) proudly echoed the ancient imperial ideal. The United States version, however, comes ensconced in a capitalist world order itself religiously sanctified—unquestioningly by moderate Christianity and aggressively by the avowedly crusading evangelism of the prosperity gospel. The new religious right was forged in an unlikely symbiosis with late capitalism: hence William Connolly’s “evangelical-neoliberal resonance machine.” So the religiously indifferent market absorbed the unquestionability of faith. Thomas Frank argued in One Market Under God, the 1990s produced a shift: there exists now, though no longer as visibly, “the general belief among opinon-makers that there is something natural, something divine, something inherently democratic about markets.”45
So now a pax economica is extended as the presumed condition of all political futures. Trade deals, no matter how secretive or predatory, are trusted to stabilize the world. It is faint say that “most people in the United States appear to find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”46 Indeed in the U.S. a certain Wild West nationalism, faith inflected, complicates also the wider West of our corporate internationalism. The latter is called by Namsoon Kang, who has helpfully distinguished a whole series of cosmopolitanisms, elite or market cosmopolitanism.47 In the name of unlimited prosperity it secures relations of pyramidal dependency from the planetary majority living precariously close to creaturely limits. Those who can never hope to achieve the pale ego ideal propagated through the global media must be content that at least their own elites enjoy business-class cosmopolitanism.
Economic globalization “entangles everyone with everything.” Yes. The dominance of late capitalism is not based simply on imperial aggression,48 let alone religious collusion. Its flexible interactivity captures something of the ontological process of entanglement, of its instantaneous exchange and its productive risks. This is why any pure opposite, such as a determinist state uniformism, is doomed to lose. But of course capitalism does not advertise the all-in-all and each-in-each of our nonseparability. To the contrary it features the ego-by-ego of corporate individualism. That billboard ideal projects the smoothest uniformity as the new and the different: a new ruse of a separability that stays “connected.” Our mutual immanence, our embodied interdependence, is systemically ignored while our external links are commodified—indeed electrified. So the cosmos-persona or undone vastness of the mindfully entangled subject can emerge only as alternative and antidote to this market-entangled individualism. For as the quantum parable has suggested—we cannot become disentangled again. The capitalism of entanglement is its Babylonian captivity.
So might our planetary entanglement itself ironically expose the violence of the pax economica, the coloniality of its free markets and the hopelessness of its triumph? This is another version of the problem of all relational thought: it is not that relation itself is good or responsible. It is mindfulness of relation that plies the ethical—as opposed to the corporate mindlessness of entanglement. In his luminous Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant, writing out of the legacy of North Atlantic slavery, supplies the missing clue to this doubling. He distinguishes two faces of our world-relation: “Worldness is exactly what we all have in common today: the dimension I find myself inhabiting and the relation we may well lose ourselves in.”49 Such is the face of connectivity and loss of ego that he honors. “The wretched other side of worldness is what is called globalization or the global market: reduction to the bare basics, the rush to the bottom, standardization, the imposition of multinational corporations with their ethos of bestial (or all too human) profit, circles whose circumference is everywhere and whose center is nowhere.”50
Glissant has inverted the hermetic trope that surfaced in Cusa: the sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Now the globe displays the ubiquitous closure of an absolute boundary, a territorialization that encloses terra. The sphere composed all of circumference is strangling the shared life of the creatures. What would be the alternative? Precisely a world of undone boundaries in which each of us comprises a worthy and mobile center nonseparable from all the other centers. We had observed that same enigma of the infinite sphere unfold a scientifically prescient cosmology in Cusa.
Glissant writes of a silence and indifference that he predicts will continue, for decades, to enshroud the “chaotic sufferings of the countries of the south.”51 This is the willed ignorance of planetary entanglement. And it tangles us in a chaos not of new creation but of the degradation of the multitude. The crusading capitalism of the West does not, need not, acknowledge the violence of its side effects. The cloud has become shroud, the impossibility long-term and deadly. Yet not without its crack, its possibility. Indeed by a mysterious coincidence Glissant already was channeling the quantum trope: “Consider that the West itself has produced the variables to contradict its impressive trajectory every time. This is the way in which the West is not monolithic, and this is why it is surely necessary that it move toward entanglement. The real question is whether it will do so in a participatory manner or if its entanglement will be based on old impositions.”
Participation names, then, the mindful alternative to the old impositions: to conquest and crusade, to slave markets and “free” markets. In answer to the stranglehold of capitalist entanglement, this participatory entanglement offers a key to inverting the inversions of each ruse of our political unconscious. It lets us comb out some snarls of Western history without pretending to have cut loose. Participation, a metaphor at once of ontological interrelation and of democratic action, lets its agents at once face the contradiction and open the wall. For what is part of us, repeating itself in us, we may iterate otherwise. The ambiguous entanglement is not severed but rewoven. The relational ontology of becoming exists to intensify that possibility: the “third repetition,” the fold into the new.
Even more coincidence: Glissant has unfolded his allusion to entanglement from the trope of “opacity”: “Agree not merely to the right to difference, but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity.”52 Butler may not have known of this usage, but echoes it in her relational opacity of unknowingness. The nonseparable singularity in this nonsubstantial subsistence has wrapped itself in the radical poetics of Glissant’s cloud, from which it precipitates with fresh force. The participatory entanglement deepens an oceanic mystery—an “unknown we do not fear.” So here the singularity of difference has wrapped itself—in the strongest alternative to indivdualism—in our mindful participation in one another. “Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics.”53 Is this not apophatic entanglement, Caribbean style?
The old trail of clouds could seem to be converging incompossibly with present political theory. Connolly approaches the very language of negative theology: “when you encounter unfathomable mystery in your faith in the right spirit, you may become inspired to appreciate corollary elements of paradox, mystery, or uncertainty at different points in other faiths.”54 He recommends an ethos that collects “these points of insufficiency, mystery, or uncertainty—operative at different points in each creed.”55 Connolly is no theist, however, but a Jamesian, Deleuzean pluralist preoccupied with the field of affects that motivates political postures and policies. So he includes, among the creeds, the “existential faiths” of various kinds of “nonbelief.” (Like Tillich, faith then signifies not “belief” but “ultimate concern.”)
He is especially a nonbeliever in the “self-defeating drive to pretend that religious creeds and modes of spirituality can be quarantined in the private realm.”56 It was on grounds of progressive coalitional politics that he wrote Why I Am Not a Secularist.57 This patience to suffer the mystery of multiple faiths is hard-won within progressive political thought. It pushes the secular envelope of political pluralism into religious diversity, just there where religious pluralism must also engage irreligious diversity. A rigorously transdisciplinary thinker, Connolly enfolds natural science as well as theology in an expansive political philosophy that abides in the perspective of a radically participatory subject: “energized complexities of mutual imbrication and interinvolvement, in which heretofore unconnected or loosely associated elements, fold, bend, blend, emulsify, and resolve incompletely into each other, forging a qualitative assemblage resistant to classical models of explanation.”58 Here the fold finds a new politics. In Connolly’s rhizomatic political ethics the mutual implications enfold and unfold, form a rhizome between a Deleuzean language and an “unfathomable mystery” alien to Deleuze.59 It may be that without mobilizing this negative capability, with its deepening of the folds of multiplicity, there will not emerge a movement strong and resilient enough to counter that resonance machine built of capitalism and the religious right. In the pluralist spirituality Connolly plies, to mind the unknown and uncertain is to make new forms of mutual participation and therefore of coalition possible.
In other words, a politics of apophatic entanglement may already be implicated in the nonviolent hope of a cosmopolitanism beyond that of corporate modernity. Dussel, for instance, after locating the birth of modernity in the Reconquista, has stressed the connection between “Descartes’s ego cogito and the ideal conquistador, the ego conquiro.” He argues that the “I conquer” precedes and sustains the “I know.” So any project of decolonization works to undo this ego—not any “I,” not the singular subject of a participatory paradigm, but the knowing subject of our West. Yet it is not the methodological doubt that is the problem, but its unambiguous overcoming. The movement from doubt to certainty also describes the formation of the ego conquiro; “if the ego cogito doubts the world around him, the ego conquiro doubts the very humanity of conquered others.”60 Dussel had exposed the conquering Euro-ego spurred and shaped from the outset by self-doubt in relation to Islam. So it is shadowed by an inferiority complex that it acts out in every phobic aggression since. The point is not that Islamophobia drives every crusading phobia—xeno, homo, gyno—but that it is implicated, requiring a millennial mindfulness. No monocausal account supports—or survives—participation in entanglement.
If the self comes inextricably entangled in its others—human and otherwise—its ego comes undone—for better and for worse. Uncertainty, we have seen, is irreducible. A subject will not be able to control and conquer even the others within itself, those influences that make existence coexistence from the start. A certain convivencia, a life-together, remains, quite apart from any mythic Golden Age, ontopoetically irreducible. It calls from the very nodes of our complexity. All the more so in a world exposed ever more to its own boundless sphere—and to the crusading religion of infinite growth that would conquer even the infinite.
If, then, as Dussel suggests, the modern certainty that doubts the humanity of others begins in a Cartesian doubt that cannot make peace with uncertainty, we find ourselves in what he calls “the transmodern project.” He intends no negation of modern reason, but of a “violent, Eurocentric, developmentalist, hegemonic reason.”61 A transmodern reason pursues “the corealization of solidarity” which he characterizes as “analectic, analogic, syncretic, hybrid, and mestizo, and which bonds center to periphery, woman to man, race to race, ethnic group to ethnic group, class to class, humanity to earth.”62 And surely such a corealization also ties religion to religion, thereby unpredictably altering the forms of faith, historical and existential, that seek to actualize a planetary solidarity. Does it bring with its own postcapitalist peace—a pax convivencia? If so, it will not resemble “its bastard substitute, anaesthesia.” For peace, pace Whitehead, “is removal of inhibition and not its introduction.”63 The realization of possibilities otherwise locked into a political unconscious remains the work—always apophatically clouded—of a transreligious solidarity.
PANENTHEISM AS POLITICAL THEOLOGY
We must then ask how a theology of apophatic entanglement, cosmopolitically developed, may begin to engage the largely nontheological conversation that proceeds under the heading of the postsecular and of “political theology.” That latter concept was notoriously relaunched under Carl Schmitt’s definition: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”64 Here I turn to the political theorist Paulina Ochoa Espejo for a crucial clue. She acknowledges that Schmitt’s analysis remains meaningful in the face of the failure of the exhaustive secularization of Western public discourse. She questions, however, the particular God enthroned as Schmitt’s secular theological power. Schmitt designated the power of decision “in the exception” as the sovereignty crucial to a head of state; civilized order depends on an unrestrained ruler who can carry the sacred justification of authority. “Even if, for historical reasons, we were willing to grant that the modern state has institutionalized the function of a God-like sovereign,” she writes, “we need not accept that it corresponds to this idea of God: an omniscient, omnipotent, eternal and unfathomable, commanding personal deity.”65 This notion of sovereignty sits enthroned amidst the desires and ruses of the Western democratic powers. For it draws upon power-complexes predating the modern nation-states.
Here a brief thousand-year return to Fulcher’s rendition of Urban’s speech will illustrate. The speech performs the congruence between the power of God, the crusade, and the one who summons it. “All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested. O what a disgrace if such a despised and base race, which worships demons, should conquer a people which has the faith of omnipotent God and is made glorious with the name of Christ!”66
In other words, the divine omnipotence “invested” in the pope infused the assaults on Islam with political force—a force still feeding the crusade complex. Are these investments after all this time still yielding returns, even in secular capitalist states? Schmitt, a great admirer of certain conservative Catholic critics of the liberal state, and for a time a Nazi jurist, would want to increase the yield by returning to the sovereign his “power of the exception,” the miraculous—the singular. He also drew upon Kierkegaard’s sense of the miraculous exception. Secularism with some reason finds the answer only in separation from theology, hidden or overt, and its vested powers. More recently, leftist thinkers from Agamben to Žižek have in the postsecular modality acknowledged the constituent force of this theology of power: of the sovereignty of the decision maker who transcends the laws he [sic] makes. Clayton Crockett argues that Schmitt’s tainted critique of liberalism cannot be avoided in our period, with its dual crisis of the death of God and the disintegrating boundary between the religious and secular spheres. Of course the relational theologies that partly frame the present project all participate in some form of avowedly theological political theology critical of both liberalism and conservative reactions. So the conversation among political theorists is captivating.67
The question becomes: can we have some transmodern rendition of political theology that does not take its cue from the militant ghosts of this premodern omnipotence? Ochoa Espejo, along with many thinkers of the left, including her former teacher Connolly, pursues such alternatives. But she recognizes something further: that an alternative notion of God—more than, for instance, that of the pantheism implicit in the pure immanence of Connolly and his Spinozan/Deleuzean heritage—must be discerned. Indeed, in a startling bit of transdisciplinarity, tucked away in a single essay, she experimentally offers panentheism in answer to what she calls Schmitt’s “functional secularization.” “What would a political analogy with the God of panentheism produce?” she asks. “Instead of a sovereign decision maker who is outside the state, the analogy would yield a source of political authority that is both identical to the polity, and beyond the polity. . . . In this case we can find actual views of political authority that share a common structure with panentheism. In classical democratic theory, for example, the citizens are held to be both citizens and subjects at the same time.”68
In the God who enfolds and exceeds the world she draws an analogy to a democratic polity. “In sum, a functionalist analogy using a panentheistic God as a reference yields democratic politics, rather than decisionistic sovereignty.” Remarkably, she found in John Cobb’s Process Theology as Political Theology a key to her critique of political theology.69 But then with uncanny intuition she also dug up Cusa, who, she writes, “developed in the 15th century a conception of God as Non Aliud.” She recognized here an ancestral panentheist whose conception of God as “not-other” well “mediates between transcendence and immanence.”70
It is process theology that features the most systematically enunciated alternative to classical omnipotence. It offers in its place not impotence—except from the viewpoint of the disappointed hope for intervention—but a contingent and vulnerable deity. It operates by invitation, not dictation. Its lure cannot be read off the surface of events. If we choose to launch new crusades we are not acting in the image of this one, this complicatio not reigning over and above the cosmos but entangled in it and host to “the democracy of creatures.” Not without political sensibility, then, Whitehead figured God as exemplification of the categories of process and relation—and precisely not as the “Supreme Exception.” And, instead of a Sovereign Decider, there is suggested a divine eros desirous of our diversities and provocative of our decisions—new, but not disentangled from history. The panentheistic divinity, as we saw, depends upon the solidarity of creatures for co-realization. It continues to lure me to its Whiteheadian nicknames inasmuch as they also sabotage any certainty of their own. An apophatically darkened panentheism keeps political theology theological—and therefore possible— in the face, the double face, of authoritarian exceptionalism and liberal failure.
FRAGILE COSMOPOLIS
Unfolding the political philosophy of a “world of becoming,” Connolly has in recent works been directly engaging Whitehead’s cosmology. Its matrix of intertwined spatiotemporal events is hospitable to the ecoegalitarian pluralism Connolly fosters. He notices the divinity, transcendent in its immanence, that comes attached to the model. It will not make him a panentheist, but it serves the existential ecumenism of his own resonance machine. What he wants from Whitehead is the intensification of the time of becoming, complicit with Bergson and Deleuze. Whitehead’s universe of “creative advance into novelty” offers a sustained sensitivity to resonances between a novel event and multiple layers of the past. It lets us come “to terms with an immanent world of becoming in which the future is not entirely implicit in the past.”71 This sense of implication is crucial: at stake is the event of the fold discussed earlier, without which relationality may holistically fold down the indeterminacy of the new. The past potentialities do not repeat as the same but are provoked into contrasts with new possibilities. And, as Connolly reads them, the “wavelengths and vibrations” that Whitehead locates as “primitive feeling” (the physical prehensions of the human and the non) are “always in play and accelerate when a novel production is in the works.”72 This sense of time explains my compulsion to risk the rhizomatic narrative of the present exercise. The layered resonances that may be released into awareness (by the newly exposed and still primitive affects of Islamophobia of this millennium, for instance) might make more probable an improbably convivial outcome.
Connolly reads us all as participants “in a world of becoming in a universe set on multiple zones of temporality, with each temporal forcefield periodically encountering others as outside forces, and the whole universe open to an uncertain degree.”73 With attention to the affective field, we mind what is not yet known, but is nonetheless making itself felt. Connolly, with his propensity to stage surprising convergences of politics with natural science, solicits from Whitehead the imbrication in every becoming of a nonhuman depth of feeling. He recently pursued further this cosmological thread, following it beyond the biological layers of his previous work with the biology of self-organizing complexity into the quantum intra-actions.74 I should not have been so startled to find him writing that Whitehead offers in the actual entity, as it comes “both enmeshed with others and metamorphizes according to the time scale appropriate to it,” not just the quantum background but “an image of multiple entanglements.”75
Even if entanglement is not a Whiteheadian term, it supports Connolly in his unfolding of the implications of process cosmology for the politics of an alarmingly fragile world. We have discussed the fallacy of misplaced concreteness as a critique of the substance metaphysics and materialism of the West. Abstractions mistaken for the concrete (an individual through time, countable economic units, etc.) conceal the constituent relationality. I would add that mutual participation does require an interval of time, which is not empirically discernible in any measured entanglement. However, space and time are for Whitehead relations between things, not the frame of relations. Relations, one might say—as is now being speculated of entanglement at the quantum level—give rise to space and time. Then one may agree with Connolly that
for Whitehead, misplaced concreteness means more broadly the tendency to overlook entanglements between energized, real entities that exceed any atomistic reduction of them, as when a climate pattern and ocean current system intersect and enter a new spiral of mutual amplification, or when a cultural disposition to spiritual life befuddles the academic separation between an economic system and religion by flowing into the very fiber of work motivation, consumption profiles, investment priorities, and electoral politics.76
So now we have from Connolly—who noted the capitalist entanglement of all in all—an added criterion for distinguishing the good from the bad: in the marketplace of misplaced concreteness, concrete or cosmological entanglements are masked by the abstractions that atomize, separate, and all too smoothly commodify them. So global capitalism profits from a misplaced entanglement—disguised in the disentangled relations between the personae of individualism and its atoms.
If there emerges in the cosmos of this becoming a new, radically indeterminate interplay between the quantum minimum and the complicating maximum, the human between is still cloudily emerging. No longer ego conquiro or ego cogito, but, we might say, ego complico: “I fold together” a world, out of its excess of impinging diversities. But the I in its concreteness already vanishes—perishes—into the we of the becoming world. The kosmos-persona evanesces and coalesces again, in the coalitions of a new politics. No one more than Connolly is teaching its terms: those of a cosmopolitics with cosmos. So I must cite this passage from The Fragility of Things, epitomizing his thoughts about “the cosmopolitical dimension,” climate change, and his interchange with “the magesterial Whitehead and the agonistic Nietzsche.” It will not only prepare us for the next chapter’s ecocosm but conclude this one’s cosmopolitics:
This, then, is a cosmic dimension folded into contemporary politics, in part because it speaks to a time when several planetary forcefields become entangled densely with several aspects of daily life, in part because our capacities to explore and respond politically to such imbrications with affirmative intelligence are severely challenged, in part because dangerous existential dispositions surge and flow again into defining institutions of late modern life, and in part because these very intersections convey the need to rethink the contemporary condition.77
I know of no more direct route to the “existential dispositions” of great portions of the population than through their religion. It is responsible for some of the most dangerous patterns of history, and the hope of their cure. In the context of democratic participation, the negative capability of theology—to challenge its own presumptions and to make common cause with multiple forms of affirmative intelligence—may be of special cosmopolitical value.
The narrative experiment of this chapter has attempted to respond to the “dangerous simplification” (Gerle) of the complex with the cosmopolitics of a complication. As the Supreme Complication, it claims some Christian ancestry. For theology, particularly in a Christian vein, will contribute to the evolving postsecular discourse of political theology only inasmuch as we bear our own baggage—or should I say our own cross? This means for example curing the crusade complex where the Western Christ became an Islamophobic warrant for conquest in the name of peace. But the only cure will come from homeopathic remedies, alternative theologies that circulate through the historical vicinity of the destruction. The ancestral Christian sources of a relational pluralism move through the cloud of unknowing—of our own and therefore of every religious or irreligious ultimate. But theological remedies matter little in our time if they do not stimulate, motivate, feed the unknown and therefore possible future—a possibility wrenched from the impossible—of a planetary convivencia. The diversity would be enfolded now not in una religio but una terra. Any theological perspectives that unfold loving justice for a living world will help, rather than distract from, the construction of a live answer—for the sake of the living—to the deadening faith in the pax economica. God: either He who blesses corporate globalism or a name for the precarious life of all who are entangled in it.
Where the apophatic entanglement comes politically into play, it will negate any name worth killing for; it will affirm all names worth living for. Sometimes it offers its gift in the name of Christ. And most often—not. Though no comparative theology, with a credible examination of other than Christian sources for a cosmopolitical theology, is possible in the present text, this chapter needs the contrast of a Muslim voice. For the healing of our crusader peace complex, the last word—by way of ritual and resonance, not argument—goes to the astonishing Iberian Muslim philosopher-poet and mystic Ibn Arabi (1165–1240). Prodigal, prolific, disciple, and caregiver of a ninety-five-year-old female teacher, he wrote when the ideal of convivencia still haunted the crusading present. And he wrote the cloud itself. He offers this rendition of the Quran, recognized as a stunning, improbable, indeed apophatic formulation: “Where did God come to be? He came to be in the Cloud.”78 The Cloud is “the Breath of the All-merciful.”
In Ibn Arabi’s exegesis blossoms the cloudiest of religious crowds: “God is the root of every diversity (khilaf) in beliefs within the cosmos.” Therefore, “the paths to God are as numerous as the breaths of the creatures.” In another instance of the path modernity failed to take, the cloud perspectives writes diversity “like the letters in the breath of the speaker at the places of articulation.”79
The affirmation of an indeterminate multiplicity is apophatically articulated and embodied as “heart.”80 In an ecumenical discourse achingly wider and wiser than most Abrahamic practice then or now, diversity implies, it implicates, divinity. Its human persona—“my heart”—echoes the vast entanglement we have heard in other poetic incarnations. Does it still perform the nomadic way of a new convivencia, planetary in its nonviolent cosmopolitics? Beyond calculable likelihood, Ibn Arabi enfolds the amorous ecumene that ever more of us across the planet would practice:
Wonder,
A garden among the flames!
My heart can take on any form:
A meadow for gazelles,
A cloister for monks,
For the idols, sacred ground,
Ka’ba for the circling pilgrim,
The tables of the Torah,
The scrolls of the Qur’an.
My creed is love;
Wherever its caravan turns along the way,
That is my belief,
My faith.81