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I was losing my way a bit with these Substack posts, because sharing readings and ideas as I go along can result in rather rambling reflections. I’m going to try being a bit more focused and sharing sections that I’ve worked on and edited. This means that I’m sharing drafts that are probably going to find their way into the book in some shape or form, so I’m restricting future posts to subscribers. The posts are free and people are welcome to sign up, but I won’t be sharing them publicly.
Here is a draft of the opening section of the book. Comments, questions, and criticisms are welcome.
September 2022. I am sitting in a small chalet on the banks of the Zambezi River in Zambia as the sun comes up. I’m writing to the gentle murmur of turtle doves, the haunting lament of the fish eagle, and the ragged cries of the hadeda ibis. A crocodile ripples its way through the river, and over by the far shore a family of hippos bobs and grunts to welcome the day. After years of research and reflection, I am ready to start writing a dialogue with Pope Francis’s creation-centred theology, and I have come to this remote and beautiful place in the country of my birth to begin.
This book has been gestating since I first read Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Si’, in 2015. In some ways it is continuous with my previously published monographs, all of which drew on critical theory, gender studies, and Lacanian psychoanalysis to explore theological questions of sacramentality, embodiment, gender, and desire. Here, my focus shifts from the human to creatureliness in general, asking what it means to be a created being in a graced creation that is endowed with intrinsic dignity by the creator, but which is threatened more than ever before by the profligacy of the human creature created in the image and likeness of God.
This is not a study of the science of climate change, nor is it an environmental study. There are excellent books from both these perspectives, by theologians, philosophers, and theorists as well as by scientists and environmentalists. Rather, it is an exploration of the relationship between language and desire in the context of our relationships with one another and with the rest of creation. It is about what it means to be a creature among creatures that is, a created being—but also to be, in the words of the psalmist, “a little lower than the angels”. (Psalm 8:5) Eleonore Stump uses the expression “metaphysical amphibians” (p. 17) to describe Thomas Aquinas’s situating of the human in a form of existence that is suspended between immanence and transcendence, with a sense that we are hovering above an abyss. One might say that human consciousness is the loom upon which the metaphysical and the material are woven together. In Aristotelian terms, this is the inseparability of form and matter in our awareness of the universe, and I shall return to that.
To focus on consciousness in relation to creation means that style and substance are inseparable. Perception and expression are two sides of the same coin, for as we interpret the world so we experience it, and as we experience it so we communicate its meanings. Whatever states of worldless contemplation we might attain to, these must find some form of language if they are to be interpreted and shared. There are languages of music, poetry, art, architecture, indeed of every form of human expressiveness and creativity, as well as the multitude of spoken and written languages by way of which cultures and traditions interpret the world.
Francis repeatedly points to the significance of language for all our relationships, including with the natural world of which we are a part. Environmentalist Mary Colwell calls Laudato Si’ “a poem to the world”. She appeals to environmentalists to “only use words that are used in poems, because actually, love of the earth is all about love—it’s all about our emotional response to what’s around us, to what we’re part of’”[1] In Querida Amazonia, Pope Francis writes that “poets, contemplatives and prophets, help free us from the technocratic and consumerist paradigm that destroys nature and robs us of a truly dignified existence. … Poetry helps give voice to a painful sensation shared by many of us today.” (QA, #47 and 48) In a quote that might enrage doctrinal purists, he cites Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes: “Only poetry, with its humble voice, will be able to save this world.” (QA #46)[2] These appeals to the language of poetry invite theological writers to find a style that can speak again of beauty and goodness in the creativity of words.
My quest for a narrative style that allows a poetic vision to shine through the open weave of language is a quest to write a book about joy—not the transient happiness of pleasant experiences and encounters, but the kind of enduring joy that is birthed from a profound struggle with our deepest desires and fears—a joy that necessarily has yearning and mourning as its closest companions. I do not want this to be another doom-ridden book, for I don’t think that inspires hope or motivates us to act. We know the scientific facts, but at best many of us are half-hearted in the changes we are willing to make, and we continue to elect leaders who are more concerned with short-term economic growth than with care for the earth. We may feel like Atlas with the world bearing down on our backs as we read the dire warnings emanating from so many commentators, researchers, and environmentalists, but by and large we continue in the same old ways. We do not know how to shrug off the burden that neoliberalism with its avaricious appetites places upon us. My concern is not with facts, statistics, and data, important though these are. I want to ask rather why it is so difficult for us to change, and what needs to happen to our philosophical, anthropological, and psychological ideas if we are to discover a new way of being in the world. So my book is about desire and its discontents, about how the wisdom of Christianity’s neglected traditions might guide us, alongside and in dialogue with the wisdom of many other traditions, including many secular thinkers who can help us to think differently in order to live differently.
[1] Mary Colwell, talk given at Catholic Women Speak Symposium, Pontifical University Antonianum, Rome, 1st October 2018.
[2] Quoting Vinicius de Moraes, Para vivir un gran amor, Buenos Aires, 2013, p. 166.
A CS Lewis quote, from the Screwtape Letters (letter 8):
"Humans are amphibians-half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy's determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change."
Thinking about your emphasis on desire, and the way that Christian history has focused on the dark side of desire ("concupiscence"). This negative hermeneutic has mainly been brought to bear on sexual desire (sometimes, with disastrous results). Your text makes me think that we need to revive the language of concupiscence (or some modern equivalent), but with a focus on economic greed and environmental destruction.
I've been working my way through the Rowan Williams anthology "A Century of Poetry", and this morning I read a sonnet by John Burt on the outrageous notion that Mary taught Jesus how to be human, and hence how to be God incarnate. Which was a good counterpoint to your picture of human consciousness as a loom for the metaphysical and the material.
The test of any introduction is whether it makes you want to carry on reading! And yes, yours does, most certainly.
“...human consciousness is the loom upon which the metaphysical and the material are woven together.” Incredible in its simplicity and density. This reflection could only be accomplished by a truth seeker and risk taker with enormous intellectual gifts and a genuine love of others sustained by faith. A full body dive into what meaning can be given voice to our human experience in our world, together
Thank you. A joy to read