AFTER ALL, STILL, the God question. With one last gasp of theological authority, let me therefore say unto you—that for which God is a nickname cares not whether you believe in God. Doesn’t give a damn. Isn’t in the damning business. What matters, what might matter endlessly, is what we earth-dwellers now together embody. Not what we say about God but how we do God.1
Or to put that in traditional language: theopoiesis, “God-making.” Materializing in and beyond speech a love-relation to your widest world. “It undoes me / wider than wide . . .” (Hadewijch).2 Facing the economies of indifference, it may work to name that relation love itself. Facing the hardened impossibilities, it may help to name the im/possible posse ipsum, possibility itself . . .
As you see I am trying to conclude something that is behaving with recalcitrant endlessness. But the logic of the infinite provides me no further excuses. There must be a fin, however endlessly any ending might echo into the future, repeating its last words beginningly or gesturing beyond words de fin itively. Not that contemplation ends now and action begins. Such a binarism of inside and out, theory and practice, cloud and crowd, or alpha and omega collapsed a while back. The whole assymmetrical co-incident of this book folds in and out of its own cloud. As an apophatically entangled becoming it would activate potentialities spooky or sensuous, upclose or planetary, that work together in mindfulness of their enigmatic co-implication. The divine complication—that nickname appeals to its own explication, its unfolding, its getting done. It urges a practice that remains contemplative even in its most activist, most affirmative, most gender-queerclassraceabilitypluralistecopolitical unfoldings. How could it not? All this language will come to an end. Its entanglements may not.
. . .
But wait, really—God-making? Theopoiesis?
That early Christian lexeme arose with Gregory of Nyssa, in the unfolding infinity of his dark cloud. It signified “divinization” or “becoming God,” later contracted to theosis. To most ears then and now divinization sounds not amorous but arrogant, like one pretending to be the Omnipotent, competing with His damning and saving Sovereignty. So the ancient teaching of theosis blacked out in the West. No great loss, had there then resulted a culture of humility, wary of sanctified power plays. Instead we got empires puffed up with pride in their Christian supremacy. Always bending the knee modestly before the Lord. With current secularized superpower the imposition of an economics unaccountable to the collective good depends on the support of a conservative Christian constituency that considers any notion of divinization, any bodying of God beyond the one exception, to be the height of heresy. This is one reason some of us on the other side won’t quit doing God.
By whatever names, what is named God, when it resists objectification as the Big Other, billows into an infinity uncontained in any over-against, any above-and-beyond. One can ignore it but one cannot move out of it. There isn’t somewhere else to live. One might ignore it responsibly, attending to the particular becomings. Or one might ignore it willfully, resentful of the whole fragile world of becoming.3 By whatever names, participation in the cloud-infinity always already invites care for its finitudes. And only therefore does it do God.
Certainly the apophatic theory practices theosis all along.4 The Neoplatonic heritage as we noted along the way had, however, little vocabulary for the becomingness of the God implied in “becoming God” if God is changeless. We scrutinized Cusa’s hint of a creatable God closer to the truth in his cloud than the creating God, he said, and both true only in their unsaying. (Apophasis lent cover to questionable orthodoxy.) Yet the ancient formula of theopoiesis had the most orthodox of sources. As Athanasius pronounced it incarnationally: “He [the Logos] became human that the human might become God.”5 This becoming, far from entraining all bodily becoming, all too readily signifies “bearing nothing earthly in ourselves.”6 But the loss of the participatory radicality of this early form of Christic chiasmus only contributed to the intensifying dualism. I do not mean, however, to begin another story.
For present purposes christology has not been erased but decentered, its self-implicating love turned against its own constitutive exclusions. Theos-logos thus translates into theopoiesis in an opening beyond christocentrism, androcentrism, anthropocentrism. So then it is opening into and never beyond a cosmos whose logos embodies itself endlessly: as in Laurel Schneider’s polydoxically “promiscuous incarnations.” The incarnation, in other words, becomes intercarnation. The becoming of any creature reverberates in a universe readable as God’s body. Thus the “inhumanist” poet Robinson Jeffers:
The human race is one of God’s sense organs
Immoderately alerted to feel good and evil
And pain and pleasure. It is a nerve ending7
Affect materializes minimally, maxi mally, as I hope I have helped you to feel, and for us therefore, in the earth. Doing God means acting not as separable agents but in differential collectives mindfully enfleshing our planetary entanglement. And planetarity itself enfolds our earthbound participation in the whole unfathomable universe of mostly dark energy. The entangled apophasis of this meditation encourages agential collaborations, not isolating mysticisms or sufficient micro cosms. So any theopoiesis here repeated as a contemporary possibility will (by a now familiar maneuver) quickly unsay itself.
It will negate this very language of God-making, of divinization, before it congeals—only to say it again, in some moment of the self-implicating inscription of our tiny, humble, and crowded oikos, nerve ending or microorganism, in the unfathomable body of bodies, “worlds without end.”8 Amen, almost.
. . .
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –
—Emily Dickinson
The discourse that now on occasion calls itself theopoetics—as has this book—marks its God-talk with its proper im/possibility. Yet in its proximity to radical theology in the patrilineage of the death of God, most self-designated theopoetics remains detached from the ancient theopoiesis, with its metaphysical associations. If I am to keep doing God, I need both. The poetics by which I have occasionally transcribed logos highlights language as constructive, poietic, making something: but never quite from nothing. Words that body forth meaning are not just words. They do not materialize surface without volume, face without deep.
“Theopoetics as the insistence of a radical theology” has here quietly been folded together—and never identified—with theopoiesis as the persistence of an ancestral iconoclasm.9 The epistemic intensity of theopoetics as such, bound up with deconstruction, highlights what language itself does, makes, constructs. And from the time of the coining of the term (coincidentally, in my institutional space, just decades before my time) it was bound up with the genres of literature, of poetry.10
Conversely, the cosmological explicatio of an apophatically unfolding God ultimately brought the creation itself into theopoiesis, expanding boundlessly and contracting relationally into each quantum of becoming. Attention to language was acute all along, but mainly in the negation, and double negation, of doctrines far from poetry. Hence the chiasmus that structured this meditation. It invites crossings between its material chaosmos, so vibrant with entanglement, and its linguistic chasm, so precariously, poetically charged—“in a bottomless abyss, Never could I come out of it.”11
Yet theopoetics in this present form lends also dwelling place (shakan, shekhinah) in the abyss: home amidst the bottomless, ground amidst the clouds—indeed, a constructive theology amidst the deconstructions. The theopoetics of the cloud is then the affirmation made possible by the negation. This does not mean we replace our theos-logos with poetics or that we become poets; sometimes we train, entrain, with them. After all, it is the “poet’s pen” that “gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.”12 (The no-thing of the air was of course never a void—cloud note.) And for Emily Dickinson poetry is itself the “house of possibility.”13 Her poem continues:
Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –
Her earthbound house rises beyond visibility. Into a negatively theological imperceptible?
Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –14
Enfolding, vulnerably contracted, unfolded wider than wide. And yes, the poem ends there, with a dash—the syntactical impropriety of her resistance to closure.15 Recall that in Cusa’s narrative there is within the cloud the wall that cracks open into paradise: “and it is there in paradise that you reside.”16
Still, does even such a generously fenestrated house suggest too much structure—earth, community, construction—for a cloud? Surely. And so the cloud is never enough; it is not any of the ensembles elemental or social that it makes possible; is not the theology, not the theopoetics. It lets us face an impossibility of our oikos with some new possibility. In the present book the cloud has offered itself not as a home, not as an earth, but as a perspective hospitable to experiments in dwelling differently. They are therefore hard to end—
The ending one wants to avoid is the apocalypse. And the atmosphere that beclouds the planet now provokes ever more scientifically reasoned apocalypses. Thoughtful philosophers startled by climate change now decry hope as a delusion and a distraction.17 They intone Milton’s “abandon all hope . . .” It is not God damning us to hell this round but we ourselves. And yes, “often, by clinging to hope, we make the suffering worse.”18 But, really, beyond the inadvertently apophatic gesture, is no-hope the answer to a misguided hope? Will hopelessness before the eco-apocalypse stimulate the still possible adaptations and mitigations? It is of course easy to confuse hope with optimism, which by way of disappointment hardens into willful ignorance, indeed cruelty.19 The unshadowed positivism of the optimist has trapped time and language into the straightness of progress toward a final goal. It plays offits equally determinist opposite, the purposeless pessimism that clings to false realism. Which sends people running into the arms of false hope again.20 Latour puckishly captures the alternative: “abandon all hype, ye who enter here.”21 (Not a bad poster for negative theology.)
We have explored the third space, alien to pessimism or optimism, of the luminous darkness. In its present incarnation it stirs up the amorous chance—future unknown—of some contagious conviviality. Concretely that means that intentionally earth-entangled structures already dwelling in the possibility of a just and sustainable common life can lurch toward its actualization. Let me borrow a concluding statement of purposefulness from William Connolly: “The overriding goal is to press international organizations, states, corporations, banks, labor unions, churches, consumers, citizens, and universities to act in concerted ways to defeat neo-liberalism, to curtail climate change, to reduce inequality, and to instill a vibrant pluralist spirituality into democratic machines that have lost too much of their vitality.”22 I read there an apophatically hopeful answer to apocalypse.
Does a voice yet whisper—is it too late? If so another answers: isn’t it always? When else do we mobilize before what is—already before us?
In other words we may break apocalyptic closure into dis/closure (the meaning of apo-kalypsis, after all) along the same diagonal that cracks open the im/possible. Hope here remains clouded, not canceled, by tragic knowledge and manifold uncertainty.
The coincidentia of light and darkness runs as we have seen through multiple ensembles, each of which disclose a different register of apophatically entangled becoming—precipitating in this book theologically, physically, philosophically, ethically, poetically, politically, ecologically. But a wider recapitulatio, and with it another co-incident, wants voice here. It happens that during the last years of the last millennium I wrote a book on the last book of the Bible. And then during the first years of the new millennium I wrote a book on its first book, indeed its first verses. But it isn’t that I had some master plan for an authorial opus writing its way back from omega to alpha.
With Apocalypse Now and Then I surrendered to a demand that possessed me for some U.S. theologian to address the force with which the religious right, then empowered at the highest political level, was making Revelation a self-fulfilling prophecy.23 I resisted a tempting feminist antiapocalypse (the text is profoundly misogynist), proposing instead a counterapocalypse. John of Patmos wrote the major denunciation, after all, of the Roman Empire, parodying it as the cross-dressing “whore of Babylon,” with its wrapping of the planet, human and nonhuman, in a vast spiral of destruction: fires, droughts, marine death, deforestation, disease, wars, hunger, conflagration. . . . Toxic in its finalism—the original case of “running Genesis backwards”—it never actually announces the “end of the world.” Fundamentalists do that. And the vengeful indifference toward the planetary weal is colluding efficiently with carbon-pumped capitalism to bring on the End. But the history of the effects of the old text is as progressive as it is reactionary (just check out Bloch’s Principle of Hope). Might we (I wondered) deconstruct the determinisms of planetary doom with an apo/calypse of prophetic responsibility? Open up the endpoint, the omega, to its uncertainty?
And then, with no intention to answer the omega with its alpha—I wrote The Face of the Deep, the book that confronts, well, yes, in depth, the unquestionability of the doctrine of the creatio ex nihilo. Not only does the theology of a single origin from omnipotent transcendence lack biblical warrant. The ancient texts narrate genesis from the fluent deep, abysmally, wombily, no thing . . . but nothing like “nothing.” Process theology has always denied absolute origin along with absolute end or a deity who would do them: there are multiple, dramatic events of novelty; a universe may come and may go, but this would signify one phase of a process. There needed however to unfold from the deconstruction of the origin, I thought, right in its face, a theological construction, a poiesis: the chaosmos of a scripturally entangled, ecofeminist theology of becoming. In its creatio ex profundis the beginning opens into an affirmative cocreativity—“it is good!”—vibrant with relations of indeterminacy.
So then between the fires of endtime and the waters of beginning, yet after both, the cloud appears. It writes a third space that is not a midpoint between poles, between alpha and omega, but that folds opposites assymmetrically into itself. Tempestuously menacing, or cherubically pink and peaceful, the cloud perhaps can only appear when the time line running straight, so straight, from the omnipotently determined origin to the final punishments and rewards, breaks up. Breaks into folds. The supernaturalist and secularist inscriptions of the time line together come undone.
The salvation historical narrative had been crafted early, already with Irenaeus, producing the temporality of creation-fall-cross-church-eschaton. Its linearity conducted the multiple spatiotemporalities of the earth into a single forward-moving momentum. In the next millennium this surged powerfully forward in the secularized translations of progress, with its vastly uneven distribution of rewards. Modern optimism horizontalized the heavenward eschatology, while modern pessimism cast the perduring shadow of apocalypse. I am simplifying; I am recapitulating. The point is not to deny the adventurous gains in empirical knowledge and democratic pluralism made possible by the historicism of the West, built upon the God of history.
Attention to the creativity of time’s process does not erase the forward surge. It nuances and complicates it. It interferes with it. Quantum uncertainty—only with entanglement, we are just learning—“is the putative source of the arrow of time.”24 At its multiple scales, variant rhythms of nonseparability, waves, currents, and vortices fold and unfold the irreversible and nonlinear space-time of our becoming. The ocean of creativity and the fire of apocalypse no longer sit at opposite ends of a time line. But the cloud does not unite them; it does not extinguish or absorb them. What, now, is its drift?
A cloud is of course a phenomenon of the circulation of fire and water—of shifting intensities of the sun’s heat interactively producing earth’s vapors from its waters. Now more than ever we are recognizing ourselves in the complex feedback loops of Gaia, the circulations of elemental, vegetal, animal, personal relations. I have argued that the relationality exhibits its more promising potentiality in cloud perspective. For here endings and beginnings coincide. Here where no God spells out time from alpha to omega, an Elohimic plurisingularity instead complicates each in each and all in all.25 And urges us, lures us, to some particular configuration of sociality, institution, church, movement, art, and media by which, with irreducible difference, we may now mindfully implicate our histories in each other—and therefore in our entangled futures.
Here we have to make our world, but never alone. We are doing a deity who does not do for us or to us, but does make do with us. Us altogether. Not a personal God-entity, this. Is God then the personal nickname of the mere impersonality of the universe? Or of something endlessly more complicating, inclusive of all persons inhabiting it? And therefore suggestive of a more than, not less than, personal embrace, enfolding personality, animality, vegetality, elementality in the instantaneity of its superpositions?
The “I am” in burning bush or Red Sea waters stirs the elemental imagination even as it entangles itself unspeakably in each witnessing “I.” The cloud continued to host new liberations. “I am the alpha and the omega.” Was this, as the desperate hope goes, the exodus from the earth—at last? Or only from the known order, from all that represses the new creation, the new atmosphere and earth?
So we might say, among friends: the coincidentia of alpha and omega comes as a phenomenon of cloud. It yields for the earthlings a house of possibility, billowing shekhinically into the unknown.26 In this temporal crossover of genesis and new creation, in its co-incident now, the threat of doom is not disappearing. Or we might say in a more public language: the pressure of looming climate cataclysm has been deepening the dangerous denials, the willful ignorance. And at the same time it may—if relayed in wisdom rather than panic—provoke the shift forward, beyond this epoch of our species’ suicidal momentum.
Inside the apocalyptic warning lurks the lure. Its hope may be a dim nuance of improbable future. But without the attractive power of amorously shareable possibility, the frightening facts cannot be heard. Fear hardens denial and seeks easy foes to finger. Prophetic discourse will work best if it attends both to the “sixth extinction” and to “the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love.”27
. . .
To sum up, again, otherwise: a fold of nonseparability and nonknowing, whether as relational and apophatic theologies, or as crowd and cloud, patterned this book. Its chiasm can now also locate itself in the theopoetic time of a co-incident of alpha and omega. But then, admittedly, a specter of classical salvation history—creation, Christ, new creation—does seem to linger. Inasmuch as a christographics of love has inscribed itself upon the present cloud, and so upon a space where genesis coincides with new becoming, this book honors the Nazarene it largely unsays, that is, respects with silence. But cloud-inscriptions yield porously to the multiplicity of religious and ethical Ways, insofar as they remain mutually questionable and questioning. “The Way that can be spoken of is not the constant Way; the name that can be named is not the constant name.”28
So Logos does not arrive—just in time—to recenter the timeline. The apophatic constancy of the Way is not an intersecting eternity. Nor does it unfold the straight temporality of a one-way truth. When Christ comes again (now and then) it is to deconstruct the christomonist certainties. Jesus was not about—himself. What he nicknamed Abba, what he did, the love he made, was redistributing itself in him to the wretched. Given that “the least” remain so many, was this embodiment a failure? Always a kosher question. The incarnation remains an experiment, result still indeterminate, in intercarnation.
. . .
Indeterminacy however comes entrained in the cumulative determinations of the past. The very climate circulates figures and parables of impossibility. The economies of indifference spew planetary death. And at the same time a rosy-cheeked morning cloud floats graciously before you.
No facts will bring closure; no apokalypsis will trump its own apophasis. “As imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown,”29 fresh ecoreligiopolitical strategies, effectual lamentations, resilient coalitions, nonviolent militancies, unexpected breakthroughs will keep happening. Across the threshold of catastrophe, the convivial cosmopolis can—posse ipsum—yet coalesce. There is no God-guarantee on the outcome; but there is the lure. To come forth, to come out, to come again, and, further, to encounter in the knowingness of nonknowing whatever comes. It may never have left, and never left off multiplying. “It is capable of being the mother of the universe; I do not know its name.”30
Every now and then a powwow in the cloud may transfigure figures of speech into agencies of planetary creativity. To the practice of nonseparable difference and by way of its smudged panentheism are invited any theisms, atheisms, pluritheisms, anatheisms, pantheisms willing to tarry there. All are invited to practice mindfulness of their own apophatic entanglement. Enfold a world as you breathe in; unfold it differently as you exhale. Many will have their own amorous nicknames for the entangled life of the universe. Many will ignore everything but the endangered lives of the earth.
Too much, too many? But each of us is that already, as Cloud Cult sings it:
And everybody here is a crowd,
we all walk around with a million faces.
Somebody turn the lights out.
There’s so much more to see
In our darkest places.31