Pandemic, Ecology and Theology

Perspectives on COVID-19

Alexander Hampton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000291421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ecology

As the sequential stages of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic have unfolded, so have its complexities. What initially presented as a health emergency, has revealed itself to be a phenomenon of many facets. It has demonstrated human creativity, the oft neglected presence of nature, and the resilience of communities. Equally, it has exposed deep social inequities, conceptual inadequacies, and structural deficiencies about the way we organize our civilization and our knowledge.

As the situation continues to advance, the question is whether the crisis will be grasped as an opportunity to address the deep structural, ecological and social challenges that we brought with us into the second decade of the new millennium. This volume addresses the collective sense that the pandemic is more than a problem to manage our way out of. Rather, it is a moment to consider our broken relationship with the natural world, and our alienation from a deeper sense of purpose and meaning.

The contributors, though differing in their diagnoses and recommendations, share the belief that this moment, with its transformative possibility, not be forfeit. Equally, they share the conviction that the chief ground of any such reorientation ineluctably involves our collective engagement with both ecology and theology.

1 Viral visions and dark dreams
Ecological darkness and enmeshment in the time of COVID-19

Joshua L. I. Gentzke

COVID-19 has ushered in tenebrous times. The pandemic is truly a global event, affecting “all” (pan) “people” (dêmos). Yet the collectivity this implies—a sentiment distilled into slogans such as “we are all in this together”—obscures glaring disparities in how this situation affects communities along economic, racial, and geographic lines with a naïve holism. Nevertheless, on microscopic and macroscopic scales, the pandemic has foregrounded the precariously interconnected nature of our existence in radical ways. It has forcefully existentialized ecology by returning the questions it asks about reality to reality. But while the crisis disabuses us of the illusion of a segmented reality, wherein self, other, human, and nonhuman occupy autonomous existences, its virulence impels us to fear the very linkages it reveals.

Viewed through the lens of “ecognostics” like Timothy Morton, this radical enmeshment catalyzes an ecstatic vision wherein, “[l]ife-forms constitute a mesh that is infinite and beyond concept—unthinkable as such…too ‘large’ but also…infinitesimally small.”¹ However from a Schopenhauerian angle, one could also characterize the shift in terms of what Eugene Thacker refers to as a “‘de-scaling’ of the human”: a disintegration of the humanist subject into a meaningless “network of forces that course through the human in ways that function at once at the macro-scale and micro-scale (global travel, inter-species contagion, protein–protein interactions).”² In light of this ambiguous instability, as well as the increasingly fraught relationship between humans and their environment, the social imaginary is being transformed in ways that intimately affect large swathes of the population.

These imaginal shifts generate an affective overtone, which, when amplified via social discourse, resonates through a massive network of lives at various intensities. And the virus has “gone viral” as well; not only does it permeate our biologically shared reality, it also saturates the mediascape that shapes and blurs our private and political lives. Thus augmented, this event has fostered an emergent vocabulary of tenebrosity, which employs the language of theology and myth to articulate a narrative marked by fearfulness, trauma, and, at times, mystery, yet distances it from its metaphysical context(s).

There is the dull darkness of the op-ed stock metaphor—“How to find your silver lining in dark times!”—and the infinitely deeper darkness that seeps from the spectral images of institutional failure and precarity that both haunt and escape visual representation, a shadow under which every glint of sheen disappears. But a more nuanced “stygian symbology” is also emerging that cuts across spectrums of cultural criticism and frames this moment within the mythic imagery of darkness and abyss. Three examples illustrate the richness of this symbology.

A symbology of shadow

In his March Urbi et Orbi, Pope Francis evoked biblical epiphany in his contention that a “[t]hick darkness has gathered over our squares, our streets and our cities, “which” fill[s] everything with a… distressing void.”³ Ideologically distant, yet close in tone, Slavoj Žižek contends that the virus is a “dark shadow,” which reveals “the ultimate abyss of our being” and plagues Western consciousness, as if it were one of the “undead”—images that thread together Christian symbolism, psychoanalytic parlance, and hauntological imagery.⁴ Timothy Morton, the aforementioned proponent of “dark ecology,” imagines the pandemic in terms that both buttress and “make strange” the material(ist) horizons of the situation. For Morton, the virus is a “hyperobject,” an object so massively distributed in spacetime that it challenges our understanding of objecthood, which grimly announces the greater hyperobject of climate change; it also heralds the arrival of an ambiguous “goddess” who reveals an immanentist nondualism antithetical to Western patriarchal metaphysics.⁵

Pope Francis’ “thick darkness” evokes spiritual calamity and the obscurity of the hidden God, threading this embattled moment into a larger metaphysics; Žižek’s darkness is functionally nihilistic—“the virus hides no deeper meaning”—and yet he speculates that it may catalyze novel forms of enlightened communism;⁶ for Morton, the virus is an epiphenomenon of an all-consuming ecological crisis, a darkness that is equal parts “dark-depressing” (we are complicit in this inescapable crisis), “dark-uncanny” (self and world become strange as distinctions between human and other-than-human worlds dissolve), and strangely “dark-sweet” (new ways of “being ecological” may emerge).⁷

Given the ecological implications of the crisis, it is fitting that darkness, a hybrid phenomenon—indexed to environmental, sociopolitical, aesthetic, and religious registers—has been galvanized within the Western social imaginary. And there is something ethically significant about these evocations of darkness: despite representing opposing ideological commitments, the shadowy symbology invoked by Pope Francis, Žižek, and Morton challenges us to radically rethink our relationships to others, ourselves, and the environment; in such dark times, there can be no “business as usual.”

Intuitively, this symbology makes sense. From the separation of light and darkness recounted in Genesis 1:4, to Plato’s promise of enlightenment from a world of shadows, the binary of light/dark animates many of the West’s sacred stories. Moreover, these metaphorics conceal an implicit metaphysics. Light signifies knowledge, morality, productivity, and other commodities; darkness is sinister, light’s other. This translation of natural phenomena into the cultural currency of metaphorical and metaphysical narratives conceals a subtle politicization of nature and naturalization of political ideologies, which has also shaped discourses on race, gender, and colonialism. Understood through this filter, as a recent Reuters column has it, “the coronavirus is the dark side of a highly productive, urbanized, interconnected and increasingly prosperous world.”⁸

A primal image of chaos that collapses the distance between metaphor and metaphysics within a historically nyctophobic—and as Catherine Keller argues, “tehomophobic”—culture, darkness speaks to the radical blurring of the existential and ecological that the current crisis portends.⁹ The language of darkness militates against teleological notions of reaching the light at the end of the tunnel as quickly as possible. It also rejects the triumphalist rhetoric that frames the experience of the pandemic in terms of waging, as the White House would have it, “total war on [an] invisible enemy” who will be “conquered” by “innovation and sheer will power,”¹⁰ as well as the quasi-holistic (and necropolitical) logic of sacrifice for a greater good, as in Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick’s contention that Americans should be ready to give their lives for the sake of the economy, in order to keep “the America that all America loves for [our] children and grandchildren.”¹¹

Because of the fact that the virus exploits the efficiency of the neoliberal world order, short-term responses have focused on fighting the crisis by containment and armament. And naturally the situation demands protective withdrawal on personal levels as well. Paradoxically, however, if long-term changes are to be made, the ecological reality revealed by the pandemic—the interdependence of all life laid bare—calls for new practices of imagining openness, of learning how to be affected. What then might be gained by employing darkness as a lens? Might there be historical resources for staying with this present darkness long enough to adjust our eyes to a different ecological vision?

My chapter focuses on an iteration of apophatic mysticism that both resonates with, and challenges, contemporary discourses on darkness. I explore this counter-discourse in two exemplary sites, wherein a focus on darkness links up with concern for “the ecological,” namely Theodore Roethke’s 1960 poem, “In a Dark Time,” and Jacob Böhme’s (1575–1624) ecopoetic vision of the Quellgeister. I argue that Böhme places the apophatic tradition in conversation with Western esotericism and early modern Naturmystik, in ways that effectively transpose it into an ecological key. I trace an emergent “existential ecology” that envisions humans and nature as nonquantifiable phenomena, advocates for a reciprocal relationship between them, and prioritizes embodied experience—in short: a mode of being that resonates with the radically enmeshed vision of reality unveiled by the virus. In closing, I suggest that this heterodox intersection of apophatic mysticism and Western esotericism offers resources for a hermeneutics of darkness that challenges the technophiliac logic of late capitalism and offers resources for forging a countercultural mode of perception and an ethics of affect....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: theology and ecology in a time of pandemic
• 1 Viral visions and dark dreams: ecological darkness and enmeshment in the time of COVID-19
• 2 Ecology and the unbuffered self: identity, agency, and authority in a time of pandemic
• 3 What happened to touch?
• 4 The gallop of the pale green horse: pandemic, pandemonium and panentheism
• 5 Eschatology in a time of crisis
• 6 The multidimensional unity of life, theology, ecology, and COVID-19
• 7 Between catastrophes: God, nature and humanity
• 8 COVID-19, human ecology and the ontological turn to Gaia
• 9 The recovery of nature’s religious role in the context of the pandemic
• 10 Listening to the pandemic: decentering humans through silence and sound
• Index