Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth

Toward a Deleuze-Guattarian Micropneumatology of Spirit-Dust

 Toward a Deleuze-Guattarian Micropneumatology of Spirit-Dust L U K E H I G G I N S The task of perception entails pulverizing the World, but also one of spiritualizing its dust. —gilles deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque Christian ecotheologians of the last four decades have been pointed in their critiques of the metaphysical hierarchies lying at the foundations of Christian thought. Traditional cosmological mappings place God at the top of a metaphysical ladder that descends to the human male as God’s primary ‘‘image,’’ then down to the human female, animals, plants, and, finally, inanimate matter. This theological model of creation has been rightly criticized for its justification of human (not to mention male) domination of the earth. Less attention has been paid to the way this hierarchical model also functions to bind humans and nonhumans into ‘‘essentialized’’ roles or identity constructs that limit the modes of relationship possible between them. The work of ecofeminist theologian Sallie McFague exemplifies a rather typical, critical approach toward this ‘‘Great Chain of Being.’’ She attempts to balance divine transcendence with a reinvigorated notion of divine immanence, conceiving creation, metaphorically, as the ‘‘body of God.’’1 God is no longer a cosmic ruler, fundamentally separate from creation, but a ‘‘Spirit-being’’ infused within the full plurality of creaturely reality. Divine transcendence, however, is by no means abandoned in her model: ‘‘In this body model, God would not be transcendent over l u ke h i gg i n s 兩 253 the universe in the sense of external to or apart from, but would be the source, power, and goal—the spirit—that enlivens (and loves) the entire process and its material forms. The transcendence of God, then, is the preeminent or primary spirit of the universe.’’2 For McFague, locating the divine on this ‘‘macrosphere’’ of reality unites divine immanence and transcendence in such a way that they are able to mutually enhance one another. While there are compelling aspects to McFague’s alternative theological model of creation, I want to ask whether her renewed emphasis on the immanence of God goes far enough in dismantling the environmentally destructive logic of the Great Chain of Being. To begin with, God is still conceived as an entity occupying the highest level of reality—a preeminent ‘‘macro-Spirit’’ from which all creatures derive their life, their goal, their very reason for being. Multiplicity and diversity are af- firmed but only insofar as they can be traced back or added up to a higher, ‘‘macrotranscendent’’ unity. If the divine continues to function as the guiding logic, or telos, for all that lies beneath or within it, does not the singularity of the transcendent divine consistently end up trumping the multiplicity of an immanent divine? In short, I wonder if this model’s renewed emphasis on immanence really moves us forward if the immanence is always immanence to a transcendence. My contention is that this logic of ‘‘macrotranscendence’’ can only hinder ecotheology’s effective engagement in the political, ethical and spiritual work of ecological transformation. This argument will be supported in part by the insights of philosopher of science, Bruno Latour. Latour provocatively argues in his Politics of Nature that political ecology should have nothing whatsoever to do with ‘‘nature.’’3 For Latour, the concept of nature carries with it a whole slew of illegimate, socially damaging assumptions held over from the West’s Enlightenment heritage—the chief of which is the idea that the earth’s constitutive entities can be objectively understood and ordered in advance from some unitary, ‘‘neutral’’ position of authority. If we are to develop a truly democratic political process capable of transforming human modes of relationship to nonhumans, invoking totalizing concepts for the Whole—of which ‘‘nature’’ is a quintessential example—can only set us back. What is demanded is a collective process of decisionmaking able to put up for grabs again who gets included in creation and 254 兩 e c os p i ri t what we can all become together.4 Latour’s critique of the concept of ‘‘nature’’ highlights problems inherent to a theo-logic of macrotranscendence . The latter’s tendency to view creation’s dynamic multiplicity only under a unitary, divine ‘‘umbrella’’ risks essentializing the identities, roles, and relationships among the earth’s diverse creatures. A god that functions as the guarantor of a particular (albeit idealized) order of creation...