In our seminar on Mary-Jane Rubenstein's
Pantheologies today, we finally reached the closing section of the book. The section, called "Theos," completes a trajectory begun with "Pan," "Hyle" and "Cosmos," and most of it concerns the debates about Einstein's faith in "Spinoza's God" and how Bohr points beyond it to something more like the pluralist pantheism she's exploring, with cameos from other scientific luminaries, as well as theologians Bonhoeffer and Tillich (with lesser lights fulminating). Very exciting but also very, well, abstract. The little burst in the book's final pages of rich indigenous and womanist insights into interdependence and the divinity of
change only accentuates the aridity of what precedes it.
While several found the book's denouement "epic," discussion really got going when one student reported that reading the book had from the start been an uncomfortably "disembodied" experience for her, and she had come to the conclusion that the author's "personal god" was not hers. Another student told how she'd tried to find out what Rubenstein's beliefs were in an online search and had been frustrated to find almost nothing. I told them this was the sign of a professional scholar of religion, a little different from the understandings of scholarship in the service of art, activism and diversity of voices widespread at our school. I find Pantheologies suffused with a distinctive voice and critical sensibility, but to some of these students it just seemed like discussion of other people's ideas.
Happily, other students wanted to discuss these ideas - especially Einstein's plaintive "faith in reason" and the kindred desire for a fixed ultimate reality beyond the hurly burly of experience and change. A mystically inclined student spoke of "stillness," and I averred that there was none in the world Rubenstein conjures (unless it's like the stability co-created by the gajillions of symbiotic species of Gaia) and that her ultimately very Jamesian book should make us suspect claims to and for fixed, ultimate, unchanging realities as efforts to stop, order, or step out of our teeming world. This is a hard teaching, and I'm sure we'll be discussing it more in the coming weeks.
But the desire to know Rubenstein's "personal God" generated some interesting discussion too. "Personal God" isn't a term Rubenstein uses (though she discusses and dismissed Tillich's use of it) but came rather from the student's sense that everyone's deepest ideas must be rooted in their bodies, their lives. Others noticed the consistent invocations of feminist, anti-racist and ecological concerns throughout the book, but acknowledged that they didn't get a sense of the author's life.
I directed the class to a passage which I thought gave a glimpse of the author's lived life which happens also to question the anthropocentrism of "personal" questions. It's in the parentheses of the second long sentence of this 3-sentence paragraph from page 182:
I'm pretty sure, I said, that we're hearing about the non-hypothetical challenge of an ecofeminist's putting up a wood-frame house for her family and dogs and cats and having to decide what to do about a colony of termites in the ground. The "thoughtful deliberation" she menions was real and difficult and necessary in that place and time, and is real and difficult and necessary all the time in different ways. Could we think about Rubenstein's dicussions of James, Spinoza, Bruno, Margulis, Einstein, Bohr and Octavia Butler as resources for doing this in a more sensitive way? The word "omni-personal" typifies the paradoxical task: it's as abstract a term as they come and yet it seeks to name the ongoing reality of a world always more animated, more relational and more locally embodied and co-created than we can ever truly grasp.
Pantheologies tries to help us clear away the preconceptions - especially the preconception humans are the only persons, and that divinity is likewise "humanoid" - that get in the way of participating in the world. It doesn't supply the termites; they're already there. It also doesn't tell us how to negotiate coexistence with them, but it makes us more likely to recognize their claim on existence, their co-responsibility for sustaining the world we share, and to try to find ways of thriving together. A book can't make us embodied (any more than the many books that try to make us disembodied can do that) but it can help us realize we are embodied, and this book (for which embodied also means divinely entangled) does that, no?
My presentiment of divinity (let's say that instead of "personal God") is also not Rubenstein's. I find her delight in "holographic" perspectivalism and her emphasis on the fearful as well as grateful affects of wonder off-putting and hard to reconcile with the stupendous symbiosis of Gaia. But that seems less significant than a shared resonance with the open-ended pluralism we both learn from James and recognize in the figures and narratives of traditions from around the world, though I don't see them in all the places she does - and of course James still relies on a humanoid understanding of persons, too. As ever in the pantheistic mutivers there is work to do!
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Had occasion to revisit an event from twelve years ago in "Religion and Ecology" today. Our general topic for today's session was Jewish environmentalisms. I've been trying to get the students to think both religion and ecology in more practice- and less belief-defined ways, so I remembered the "Sukkah City" competition in Fall 2010 when a dozen new takes on the ceremonial "booths" for the Sukkot holiday were erected on Union Square. (This is a picture I took then of my favorite, made entirely of carpenters' shims.) Several students remembered sukkahs from their childhoods but for most it was an exciting new discovery: a temporary religious structure designed to let starlight in, to which one moves as much of one's life as one can for a whole week each year? How might having this as part of your life shape your understanding of vulnerability, nature, community, time?
