A Grace Dispelled (Part Two)
III. These Great Bones of the Dying Sun
This is,
for our purpose, to say that the world essentially lost intrinsic meaning. The noumenal
thing-in-itself was inaccessible, and any phenomena
as we perceived it was already codified within the matrix of the a priori categories of reason, and God
himself seemed to be reduced and contained quite literally to the moment of
subjective apprehension within the thinking subject and was by no means a
literal part of the world.[1] In various ways the split between a world
inherently meaningless in itself, and the subjective meaning of the subject,
repeated itself in post-Kantian philosophy up to our contemporary times. Fichte discarded even the idea of a noumenal thing-in-itself and argued the
ego posited its own world to provide
a medium for personal moral endeavors;[2] Feuerbach interpreted the Kantian
transcendental concept of God via Hegel’s reading of the “death of God” and
noted that God was simply a projection of man and his values;[3]
Nietzsche abolished all regulating concepts, most explicitly that of God or the
Kantian transcendental rationality, and unapologetically focused on meaning as
the sheer will-to-power of the individual;[4]
Heidegger and Sartre made the meaningless world a key to their own
existentialist philosophies, Sartre in particular naming the individual
“for-itself” as an agent who annihilates and re-arranges the given
meaninglessness of the world for her own ends.[5]
The point
in outlining these trajectories is that, though there is no straight line of
development, they all combine in various ways to essentially abolish sacred
meaning—or in fact any meaning—from the world itself. The sacred was “privatized, spiritualized,
and transcendentalized.”[6] The direct corollary of this is that in the
secularization of the world as mere geometrical space, the subject or Ego
became elevated as the creator and manipulator of meaning over-against the
world reduced to a mere “thing”, whose nomothetic regularities were now
transparent to the artificing reason of man.
In the so-called “postmodern” situation, whatever the plasticity and
even vacuity of the term, a theme of this inherent meaninglessness arises in
its philosophies as an articulation of an ontology of violence whereby the
world is understood as fundamentally chaos against which various restraining
violences—the state, reason, law, warfare, retribution, civic order—must be
deployed.[7] The other side of this thesis is that
Being itself could now be conceived of only in
absolutely opposite terms: as a veil, or an absence [of meaning]…The entire pathology
of the modern and postmodern [of Derrida, Levinas, Foucault, Nancy, Lyotard,
Deleuze] can be diagnosed as a multifarious narrative of the unrepresentable
sublime, according to the paradigm of Kant’s critical project: what pure reason
extracts from experience and represents to itself is neutral appearance,
separated by an untraversable abyss from everything “meaningful..”[8]
Or as Hart
puts it elsewhere:
We believe in nothing...that is not to say we have no
beliefs, the truly modern person may believe in almost anything, or perhaps
even everything...so long as all these beliefs rest securely upon a more
fundamental and radical faith in the nothing--or better, in nothingness as such.
Modernity's highest ideal--its special understanding of personal autonomy--requires
us to place our trust in an original absence underlying all of reality, a
fertile void in which all things are possible, from which arises no impediment
to our wills, and before which we may consequently choose to make of ourselves
what we choose. We trust, that is to say, that there is no substantial
criterion by which to judge our choices that stands higher than the
unquestioned good of free choice itself, and that therefore all judgment,
divine no less than human, is in some sense an infringement upon our
freedom...the ethos of modernity is--to be perfectly precise--nihilism.[9]
This
evaluation may seem esoteric or too speculative to have any pertinence to a
discussion on regaining perspective on Christian ecological ethics, but it is
of the utmost significance. The gestalt
of the situation outlined is the frame of reference and contextual horizon in
which current options are outlined and dialogued about. The world-picture supposed by many
Christians—even by ones who still hold to supernaturalist models—is this
architectonic theme of the world as a system of molecular components or
mathematical quanta which can be manipulated to various benefits or goals. Devoid of intrinsic meaning the secularized world
is locked into itself, apart from any transcendent upper tier—be it the
supernatural, or, now, the Kantian subject—and is as such homogenized by a
narrative which understands it as nothing more than a controllable interchange
of systems of energy. On the other hand
the subject, freed from religious restriction has an “absolutization of earthly
aquisitiveness” which now receives control only via the demands of society.[10] That is to say, this is an inherently economic discourse disguised as a moral
science relating to nature.[11] In this situation the ethic masquerading as a
pure physics of nature is fundamentally (though cryptically) a pure discourse
of capitalist-type exchange.[12]
This
appears to be an ironic observation when most ecological theory champions
conservation of resources, and so appears to be the diametrical opposition of a capitalist
metabolism. Yet the prima facie disjunction disappears when we realize ecological
rhetoric is itself based upon the sustainability
of our current lifestyle. In order to
continue to perpetuate itself it metastasized its discourse into ecology. While terminologically moral concepts and
debate are here used, these no longer seem to refer to discourse of the common
good, but “moral ecology” stands as a trope for either the assumption of the good of our current state and how to maintain
that equilibrium under the threat of scarcity, or it refers to the niche
preferences of certain aggregations of like-minded individuals who happen to
prefer ecology and bastion their position by vox populi appeal. In other
words between the twin “neutralities” of the free subjectivity of man and the
unthematized “naturality” of the natural stands the representative and
evaluative filter of money which under our contemporary ethos is the only space
in which universal value can find any type of stability.[13] This is because money, under the
presuppositions of the various trajectories examined earlier, is the only
modality left which can find conceptual justification even in our culture as a
trans-subjective expression of a subjectivity’s own freedom.
Economically, money functions as the value of value, the value that allows
exchangeability or interchangeability of values.[14] This
means as such that money provides the rare medium of a valueless value; it has value but only as it is used as the expression or utilization of each
persons own will.[15] It becomes a shared fiction in which
otherwise atomic and unrelated wills can interact with one another via a medium
supposedly neutral or germane to each individual’s ability to follow their own
desire without infringing on another person’s desires. To misappropriate a set of terminology: money
is the visible sign of the invisible wills of humanity. It is plastic enough to cover the unique
whims of each person and definite enough to be translatable across these whims
without destroying them a priori[16]
(unlike, say the perception of a religious universal, which would be taken as
oppressive). Simultaneously there is no
intrinsic material such as printed paper, an electronic bank statement, or gold
coins which exhaustively answers the question “what is money?” Rather than indicating a particular material,
the visibility of money is the deputization of any given medium, it does not
signal the physis of a thing but its mode of being as representation of the
will, and the system of belief which this inspires.[17] The nature of money explains exchange: it
represents an anticipation of the future, which means that money is essentially
credit.[18] Money is the promise of value, which means a
promise to pay which creates a debt, a form of capital that works when supplied
with sufficient energy flows. But the
creation of financial wealth is at the same time the creation of debt, which
means that modern economic freedom of purchasing power ends up being deeply
constraining
It is no
accidental feature of moral ecology then that it must appeal to sustainability
of our lifestyle in order to appear as a moral
exortation: if, as Hart noted above, the only true moral value is the
preservation of the unfettered volition of individual
subjectivity then the only true way to make a universal moral claim across these pluralistic and punctiliar
subjectivities to supposedly value-free nature, is by translating the
value-free quanta into the only universal
value-medium of money. This is the
precise variability of economics[19]—ecological
and environmental sciences in this manner merely provide content for the
variables in order to sustain the current systems of exchange from exhausting
themselves with their own input and output.. Money is generally understood narrowly, in terms of
one of its functions rather than broadly, ecologically speaking. But their convertability becomes undeniable
on deeper analysis. Modern industrial civilization is based upon the ability to
capitalize upon new sources of energy, primarily fossil fuels, and these
deposits of “ancient sunlight” have reached peak rates of extraction and
exploitation, which means that the financial crisis is also an energy crisis
and vice versa: the energy crises of
conservation is summarily convertible as a crises of economy. Money, which controls the value of value, can
now be replaced with the word “nature” because of the logic of this
convertibility: nature is the anticipation of value, i.e. it is seen as credit. As such it is secured as value-laden because
as credit it participates functionally in the only true value, namely the
individual ability toward self-realized volition.
Thus the ecological attitude of creating low
impact fuel systems or reducing carbon emissions are all couched in an implicit
economic theory of debt in which the
production of wealth has realized, thermodynamically speaking, that it has
begun to produce an entropic disequilibrium because it cannot pay back the
“loans” it takes out on nature as the wealth of the current system is based
solely on anticipations of future value.
But a postulated null point of production in the future here invalidates
the viability of the current debt based system which can only operate now if it can operate perpetually
without ceasing in the future. Due
respects must then be paid to atrophy as the hegemonic principle of the whole
system. Hence the inner logic becomes apparent as to why one of the
recurrent themes regarding solutions or resistance to solutions of global
warming center around questions of resources and proper interpretation of the
scientific data. While these are
certainly important, unless one simply assumes a pragmatic ethical outlook,
they do not answer the ethical
question of what is the right course of action.
Moreover, and this is the other side to the same stream of thought,
current solutions—e.g. regarding alternative fuels or emergency emissions
limitations— presuppose the necessity or rightness of action based upon the ability to recorrect the world, like the
repair of a machine or the catharsis of an organism. Rejection of these methods by many
conservatives center mainly around either a skepticism of what is perceived as
amphibolous data, or a disagreement about the ability of resources to correct
the current situation, which could then be better utilized in other areas.
Insofar as this logic is followed—the pure logic of
a vast and irresistible economy which must be appeased lest we perish—the secular economic model of our understanding
ironically repristinates the classical Indo-European mythical consciousness. This was
the myth of “cosmos”[20]—of
the universe as a precarious equilibrium of contrary forces—which undergirded a
sacral practice whose aim was to contain nature’s promiscuous violence within
religion’s orderly violence.[21]
Gods and mortals were bound together by necessity; we fed the gods, who
required our sacrifices, and they preserved us from the forces they personified
and granted us some measure of their power. “There was,” writes David Hart,
“surely, an ineradicable nihilism in such an economy: a tragic resignation
before fate, followed by a prudential act of cultic salvage, for the sake of social and cosmic stability.”[22]
Taking the thought
slightly out of context, we can understand Jüngel’s words as pertinent here:
“Do we not have, do we not need, an unending atrophy of gods?...Do we not live
on the basis of eschatological atrophy?...Is not the modern world [seen]
as an eschatological process of atrophy without end? And is not ‘God’ the code word for this
unending process of atrophy?”[23] Reversing this, noting that the stochastic
concept of entropy itself now assumes the traditional position of the divine
who must be appeased we might say “do we not now need the unending god of
Atrophy?” If this narrative undergirds
the logic of ecological choice, then ecology is inherently justified by an
economical parody of the cosmological
myth; financiers and ecologists are simply now the ones who speak the hieratic
language of the priests.
Yet
if the metaphysical picture of participation painted in the first section of
this essay is largely correct—and it is here argued that a true concept of God
as infinite demands it to be[24]—then
questions regarding the possibility or impossibility of reestablishing the
world’s homeostasis, or questions of resources, are secondary. Our theology
calls for an entirely different economy of valuation. If the world is God’s creation, and as such
an analogical index whose beauty and goodness are constant semeiotic
participants—at an analogical remove, of course—in God’s own beauty and
goodness, then it follows by logic that a defamation of the world’s beauty, or
a wanton abuse of its resources, is analogically an assault upon God’s own
beauty and goodness. This is not to argue, as some have,[25]
that the world is God’s body, or some facsimile of the divine, or divine
itself. Quite the contrary,[26]
the concept of participation demands that analogy always describe likeness by
an ever-increasing differentiation between creation and God.[27] Nonetheless “The God who is shows his glory not as the nimbus of otherness that dwells like
a phantom glamour about all finite things…[rather] all that is finitely
apprehended (which is to say aesthetically as a continuous series of objects
appearing...) fills the distance as light, approach, proximity, and peace,
because God gives his beauty as expression…”[28]
Or put otherwise, “All things that are dwell in the glory of God, and yet the
glory of God becomes visible as a beauty among the world’s beauties.”[29] In the words of Paul himself “for from the
creation of the world the unseen things [of God] have nevertheless been seen,
through having become known in the
creatures.” (Rom 1:20).[30]
This
analogia entis also resituates the
apparent perversion rendered to the concept of the dominion of man into
“license without stewardship,”[31]
by the Western intellectual tradition into a more appropriate reading of the
responsibility implied in the Genesis narrative’s concept of the Imago Dei. The analogical nature of the world is not a
mere linguistic novelty, but actually shapes the character of man by a constant
increase and purification of his concepts of, and relationship to, God.[32] This destabilizes the autonomous post-Kantian
subject who simply is himself and creates the world by resituating our
identity within the analogical world process itself.[33] “Is it not the case that man cannot expect an
answer to the question about himself without knowledge of the world, of
society, of history, and of God?...The understanding of the world and of God
are not merely the expression of
man’s question concerning himself [i.e. as in Bultmann] but, on the contrary,
the relationship to the world…and to God is what first mediates man to himself.”[34]
This is not
to elevate the world to a priority over
man, it is rather to indicate that humanity only exists within the formative processes of the
world—the world is in fact the medium
of our communion with God.[35] Conversely, creation in this manner is
contextualized as being God’s good creation for
man—the importance of ecological awareness is not an interest in nature per se or in nature qua nature, but in nature as it is the environment within which
humanity relates to God (Rom. 8:19-22; Eph. 1:10).[36] Moreover this highlights the anthropological issue hidden within
ecology that the abuse of nature quite often redounds upon other humans as
famine, poverty, and desolation. The
world is not merely the barren desert of a geometrical exteriority forever
exiled from our true spiritual and interior existence, nor is this a mystification, an
arbitrary rhetoric foisted upon an otherwise empirical and “factual,”[37] reality: “the vanity of the
world outside the light of divine grace is not a thesis concerning an ultimate
indifference to the world’s content…for the world seen in the light of divine
grace is the world seen as that light.”[38] Indeed this
“viewing-as,” must reflect the ontic
structure of the world for “how could God be love if his love did not pervade
all cosmic processes, the world itself being his creation?”[39]
This is decisive for “it is only the true
which deserves to be called beautiful.”[40] If the theology here presented is accurate,
then ecology and this theological view of the world are just as much an act of discipleship as any effort to
evangelize.
The
theological project of this paper has attempted to demonstrate a properly theological understanding of the world
which could ground the context for an inherently Christian ethical evaluation of how we should view and act
ecologically. The conclusions drawn here
are that we should not be “going green” because of our fear that we must save the world, nor can we reject
ecological activity because we deem the world’s salvation impossible. Nor indeed should certain Millenarian
expectations that God is going to destroy the world to recreate it—even if a
proper reading of the apocalyptic image—dissuade us from acting
ecologically. The world, as God’s good
creation and our medium of communion with Him and each other, reflects the very
beauty and goodness of God and, as such, at every point we should attempt to
respect it, cleanse it, and moderate our dealings and consumption of it. This is not an activity isolated or exterior
to our “spiritual” existence, but is in fact demanded by it. This
theological habitus does not mean
that ecological decisions will suddenly be easy, or that the right course of
action will be obvious. What it has
done, however, is to contextualize our reasons
for acting or not acting. The historical
trajectories elaborated on here often conceal deeper rhetorical and conceptual
structures which make modern modes of decision making appear to be common
sense. But an uncritical adoption of
contemporary parlance by the Christian church can often lead to an implicitly
untheological process. While certainly
many things we do in our daily lives—such as driving cars or working at
factories with toxic emissions—will often be inescapable, nonetheless like the
rest of our Christian lives, so too does our ecological activity require a
constant humility and act of repentance before God, and is a fact of Christian
existence that cannot be dismissed lightly or flippantly through either
pragmatic argumentation or questionable eschatological reasoning.
[1] Jüngel, God as the Mystery pp.111-151.
[2] Grenz The Named God p.83f; Davies Theology
of Compassion p.83f.
[3] Jüngel God as the Mystery p.141ff.
[4] Hart Beauty of the Infinite pp.93-135; Davies Theology of Compassion pp.115-118.
[5] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York:
Routledge, 2002) pp.461-462.
[6] Milbank, Theology and Social Theory p.9.
[8] Hart Beauty of the Infinite pp.44-45, 81.
[9] David Bentley Hart The Atheist Delusions: The Christian
Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2009) pp.20-21.
[10] Pannenberg ST 2:204.
[11] Knight, The Eschatological Economy pp.217ff.
[12] This critique should not be
misunderstood as a wholesale dismissal of capitalism. Rather it is attempting to disallow for
capitalist logic to become the metaphysics undergirding our ethical decision
making as Christians.
[13] Much of the following
observations are heavily indebted to Philip Goodchild A Theology of Money (New York: SCM Press, 2007) p.63.
[16] Though ultimately of course,
as is argued here, money or economics itself becomes a totalitarian system
which coerces into specific sets of behavior like its own religion. Ibid
p.174.
[22] Hart “Christ and Nothing.”
[23] Jüngel God as the Mystery p.160.
[24] F. LeRon Shults Reforming the Doctrine of God (Grand
Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing Co., 2005) pp.97-132; Pannenberg Theology and the Philosophy of Science
p.305.
[25] Sallie McFague The Body of God: An Ecological Theology
(Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1993); Rosemary R. Ruether, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of
Earth-Healing (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
[26] John Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in
Personhood and the Church ed. by Paul McPartlan (New York: T&T Clark,
2006) p.95 argues along the same lines: “the alternative to a depersonalization
of nature is not necessarily the personalization of it.”
[27] Hart Beauty of the Infinite pp.241ff.
[30] C.f. Jenson ST 2:153ff.
[31] Jenson ST 2:114-115; C.f. Pannenberg, ST
2:235: “Since the natural world…remains God’s creation, self-aggrandizing
exercise of divinely commissioned dominion must recoil on humanity itself…The
ecological crises at the end of self-emancipating modernity may be understood
as a reminder that the God of the Bible remains lord of his Creation.”
[32] Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy pp.325-343; Hart Beauty of the Infinite e.g. pp.187-210 though in its own way it is
arguably a major theme of the whole book.
[33] Pannenberg Metaphysics and the Idea of God Ch.3.
[34] Wolfhart Pannenberg Basic Questions in Theology vol. 1
trans. George Kehm. (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1970) pp.110-111.
[35] Davies A Theology of Compassion pp.29ff; Hart Beauty of the Infinite pp.142-151.
[36] Zizioulas Communion & Otherness pp.95-97.
[37] Contra Kant, The Critique of Pure Judgment sect.VII:
“That which is purely subjective in the representation of an object, i.e. what
constitutes its reference to the subject, not to the object, is its aesthetic
quality.”
[38] John Milbank, “Can a Gift Be
Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic,” Modern Theology 11, no.1 (1995): 134.
[39] Pannenberg Systematic Theology 3:196.
[40] Eberhard Jüngel, “‘Even the
Beautiful Must Die’—Beauty in the Light of Truth: Theological Observations on
the Aesthetic Relation.” In Eberhard Jüngel Theological
Essays vol. II ed. J. B. Webster (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995) p.62;
C.f. Jean-Luc Marion God Without Being
trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)
pp.108-138
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