‘In whom we live and move and have our being’ : Spirituality, embodiment and an eco-theology of reverence
Published in Cherishing the Earth, Lindsey Press, ed. Maria Curtis
Realising God
To one who realises God there is no difference between the Spirit and the senses. God is seen but God is also heard, tasted, felt and smelled. Angelus Silesius[2]
There is a Welsh* phrase ‘Dechrau wrth dy draed’ – Start at your feet. The saying derives from farm-work; if you’re faced with a seemingly impossible task, start where you are.
This must be the strategy of all those of us who want to begin to resist the current culture of eco-cide. Start at your feet and consider the ground on which you stand.
In Geneva in 1553 at the trial of heretical thinker Miguel de Servet (Latinized Michel Servetus) who suggested (among many other heresies) a kind of proto pantheism, that Deity is consubstantial (of the same substance) with nature, John Calvin is said to have stamped his foot and cried: ‘If I stamp on the ground … I stamp on your God!’[3]
Calvin of course intended this mockery to dismiss Servetus’ idea that God is fully present in the world, but in this chapter, I want to consider that our understanding of God might indeed correspond with our understanding of ecological reality. We must remember that God, as a ‘ground of all being’[4], is all around us, in our lungs, in our blood, and beneath our feet.
Like the Rabbi quoted by Carl Jung[5] who said that the reason people no longer see God is that they do not look low enough, we must ‘dechrau wrth dy draed’, and begin with the earth itself.
Unitarian receptivity to a concept of God which is immanent, present in the world, begins early then, with Servetus, whose work ‘On the Errors of the Trinity’, 1531, was to so enrage Calvin, but is also evident in the work of the Unitarian minister Joseph Priestley (1733 -1804) a natural scientist whose ‘Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit’ (1777) argues against Cartesian dualism, suggesting that mind and spirit are integral to material being and that the human soul and the Divine substance are indivisible.
Later Unitarians have been influenced by, and have developed a unique perspective on, the thinking of the German Idealist philosophers.[6] Because of the significant theoretical overlap between Unitarians, German Idealists, English Romantics and American Transcendentalists, there have existed corresponding areas of shared interest as these streams of thought have developed. Nowhere is this shared development more apparent than in the ready uptake of the related theological idea of Panentheism amongst contemporary Unitarians. [7]
Panentheism as a theological position differs from both Pantheism (the idea that God is identical with the substance of the cosmos) and Classic Theism (which emphasises God’s difference from nature) and occupies a bridge place between them.
Panentheism, which literally means ‘All within God’-ism, proposes that whilst God and the cosmos are indivisible, it is equally true that God is also transcendent and illimitably ‘other’. That while God is in all things, so also all things are in God. In one symbolic understanding of Panentheism (inevitably there are many) the cosmos, or the creation, is the body of God. [8]
When I discovered the Unitarian church I found a new way of relating to God and worship, and along with these a form of resistance to the mainstream narrative of contemporary scientistic culture. This mainstream narrative proposes that all the physical reality we can perceive is composed of the building blocks of matter (and is known as ‘Materialism’ or ‘Physicalism’). These building blocks can be de-constructed, much as you could take apart a machine in order to see how it works. Physical reality can be subdivided and reduced into atomic and sub-atomic particles in an ever-diminishing process. Conversely these infinitely tiny particles combine to construct elements of greater and greater complexity. Materialism admits that its narrative isn’t complete yet (for example there is no explanation offered as to how these elements combine in such a way as to give rise to life or consciousness) but its proponents claim that this is just a matter of time; the scientific progress of knowledge will eventually yield the missing answers. Liberal religion, as I discovered it in a Unitarian chapel, offers a different story; it claims instead that material reality far from being random and inert, is alive and fully conscious, and moreover is fully accepting, and fully loving. I found this alternative perspective nothing short of astonishing. At first I couldn’t take it further than this, I couldn’t take any cognitive leap beyond this initial vision, but as a first step, it was enough. Because from this first step, the understanding that life is alive, I was eventually able to make a further step to understand that life, which is alive, is sacred, and fully present throughout time and space.
ii. Elargissez Dieu – God at large
I began studying for ministry at Harris Manchester College in 2011. As part of my training I researched Unitarian theologies of the Spirit. I was fascinated by interpretations of the second verse of Genesis: “… And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” (Gen.1:2 KJV). The Orthodox Jewish Bible renders this: “…And the Ruach Elohim was hovering upon the face of the waters.”. Ruach is a Hebrew word meaning ‘spirit’ or ‘breath’. So we could equally well read the second line of Genesis ‘And the breath of God moved on the face of the waters’. The equivalent word to Ruach in Greek is Pneuma, and in Latin is Anima or Spiritus. Both Pneuma in Greek, and Anima or Spiritus in Latin can refer to ‘spirit’ or ‘breath’.
The Holy Spirit in Trinitarian Christian theology is also co-equally God and (despite the later trinitarian personalising of the Holy Spirit as a distinct persona) Ruach Elohim/Ruach Hodesh is indivisible from God in Jewish theology. Spirit always seems to be identified as an animating force, the life of life.
It is important to acknowledge that orthodox theology in the Abrahamic traditions has generally affirmed that God has no body, is incorporeal and transcends or is beyond physical matter, emotion, and time; placing God beyond the forces which affect embodied creatures. Over many centuries significant controversies and debates have accompanied any attempt to suggest otherwise, as claims for the supremacy of God is usually underpinned by the affirmation that God is of a different order of reality than ‘base matter’. The proposition of a spirit/material duality has grown to represent many theological and philosophical perspectives (the priority given to the notion of a dis-embodied God allows atheists to propose that invisible is identical to un-real). Yet the etymology of all the words for Spirit in so many ancient languages; Ruach; Pneuma; Spiritus, Anima, forcefully remind us that the spirit is synonymous with breath.
And it is impossible to imagine a breath without a body.
In the sevenstained glass windows[9] which light the Chapel of Harris Manchester College, six angels are depicted carrying the earth through the process of Creation. The motto which accompanies each image is ‘Elargissez Dieu’. This slightly enigmatic motto can be translated as Enlarge God, or perhaps the sense to be gained from Diderot’s ‘Pensees Philosophiques’ is ‘Broaden your idea of God’[10]. As someone who spent a certain amount of my ministerial formation staring at these windows, I think there is also a sense of liberation, perhaps associated with the contemporary phrase ‘at large’. God can be ‘at large’ in the world and out of the confinement of classic theism, Elargissez Dieu can be to ‘Set God free’.
The panentheism discovered in Servetus and developed through Unitarian tradition and elsewhere allows space to explore the moral and ethical implications of God conceived as embodied by the creation itself, embodied by the cosmos.
A felt sense of the reality of God perceived through all five senses allows the worshipper to progress from a disembodied spirituality to an engagement with devotional physicality encountered in various forms of contemplative prayer and ritual; pilgrimage, chanting, dancing, some singing and walking meditations which emphasise the connection between breath and spirit in embodied form. It is a curious anomaly that the popular term ‘mindfulness’ re-asserts the primacy of the mind when it could equally be termed ‘whole awareness’, not so snappy admittedly, but closer, I think, to the intention of Christian contemplation.
Panentheism perceives God as both within and simultaneously ‘more than’ the cosmos and provides a grounding to reconnect spirituality with ecology.
iii. God’s World, God’s Body [11]
Nowhere has a holistic religious perspective been more productively explored than in feminist theologies which began in the 1970s to re-examine the patriarchal assumptions of Classic Theism.
Many feminist theologians have shared a view well expressed by Margaret Farley that the body / spirit dualism with which religions have struggled since late antiquity are not integral to traditions such as Judaism and Christianity but are instead influences from later doctrinal movements. She points out that a worldview evident in the Christian scriptures seems to sacralise all of the natural cosmos. Nature, she says, is ‘valuable according to its concrete reality which includes an interdependence with embodied humanity’.[12]
Anyone moderately acquainted with contemporary Unitarian thinking will recognise the resonance of the term ‘interdependence’ which, since its appearance as the seventh of the Seven Principles[13] adopted by the Unitarian Universalist Association in America in 1985, has encapsulated a major hermeneutical perspective in Unitarian theology; a commitment to ‘Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part’. This commitment has widening significance in the current century. Like much Unitarian theology however, the interdependence of all life has remained at an intellectual level and has rarely been intentionally applied or embodied so as to understand our participation in the lively being of an all pervading, inherent and transcendent God.
This must urgently change if we are to adjust to the current global crisis of ecocide with a substantial and constructive theological framework.
Historically Unitarians have been over dependent on rationalistic intellectualism as our habitual way of understanding; we forget that ‘understand’ is a word derived from the same Germanic word root as ‘intestine’, and literally meant ‘gut feeling’. Beverly Wildung Harrison points out that ‘…all our knowledge, including our moral knowledge is body mediated… Ideas are dependent on our sensuality. Feeling is the basic bodily ingredient that mediates our connectedness to the world…’ But she also reminds us that while feeling is the basis of ‘our relational transaction with the world’, religious pietism is not sufficient to advance real change: ‘The moral question is not ‘What do I feel but rather what do I do with what I feel.’[14]
For the theological concept of the interdependence of all life to be rooted in a dynamic way within Unitarian theology, worship and practice I believe that we must recognise the truth of the feminist precept that our bodies and our selves are the same. That we dwell within God’s body / God’s spirit. And that re-unifying the division created by spirit / body dualism; rejecting any split between the body and the self, and our selves and our earth, is also a step towards that liberation which God calls us towards and which we must necessarily embrace in order to avert global catastrophe.
iiii. God’s fellow workers [15]
Rosemary Radford Ruether (the brilliant theologian who died aged 85 in 2022), explored the social and ethical implications of a Biblical theology of embodiment. In ‘New Woman, New Earth’ (1975) she reminds us that the interconnection between God and the world is present from the beginnings of the Jewish tradition (and earlier, as Judaism integrated and developed some elements of contemporary Near Eastern religious thought). She describes pre-Exilic Judaism as a religion of ‘socio-natural renewal’, and she underlines the importance of the relational collaboration between God and humanity described as ‘covenant’. As we know, the Hebrew scriptures deeply represent the inherent sacredness of the world, with natural spaces such as wells, fords, mountain tops, caves and fields bearing witness to God’s presence. In one of the most famous episodes of God’s self-revelation,[16] God seems to assume the appearance of a bush which burns, but is not consumed by fire, an eerie and increasingly resonant image in our age of continual conflagration and spontaneous wildfires.
I would argue that traces of the same naturalistic theology are also recognisably present in Christian scriptures too; many passages relate consciousness of the indwelling nature of God, Jesus’ mixes earth with his own saliva to heal the blind at the pool of Siloam; he uses earthly proxies of bread and wine as representations of his body and blood; in the Gospel of Thomas Jesus says: ‘Split a piece of wood: I am there. Lift a stone, and you will find me there.’ [17] Such earth-centred spirituality is picked up and transmitted through later developments of Christian spirituality despite never being representative of mainstream or orthodox Christian authority.
Reuther asserts that the body / spirit duality implicit in such mainstream renderings of Christian thought, and western philosophy more generally, serve the dominant, authoritarian political ends of subjugation and control instead of amplifying the relational view of nature actually present throughout scripture. It is materialistic human demand placed upon our ecosystem which Ruether identifies as the source of our coming catastrophe: ‘infinite demand incarnate in finite nature, in the form of infinite exploration of the world’s resources for production, results in ecological catastrophe.’[18] Reuther examines the ego-centric religious tendency to identify with the spiritual and transcendent whilst relegating the body, the material and the immanent to a lesser status, and she describes the necessity of an entirely new social vision based on her prophetic understanding of the bodily theology of God. ‘The centre of such a new society’ she writes ‘would have to be a new social vision, a new soul that would inspire the whole. Society would have to be transfigured by the glimpse of a new humanity appropriate to a new earth…’ This new state she envisions as one of ‘reciprocal interdependence’, an eminently practical vision which critiques the traditional Christian goal of transcendent ‘self-infinitizing’[19]. Instead, she exchanges the prior religious preoccupation with immortality for an entirely new religious sensibility (one which may seem familiar to many Unitarians); a sensibility which prioritises the protection of the earth and sees the earth as the ground of being, the body of the transcendent and immanent God from which we arise and to which we return.
When Ecological Economist, Professor Julia Steinberger of the Priestley International Centre for Climate, University of Leeds, recently tweeted: ‘Climate & ecological crises endanger the possibility of human civilization within this century’[20], it is chastening to recognise that Radford Ruether’s work, largely (and scandalously) overlooked nowadays, was prophetically calling out the disaster and providing so clear an analysis of the potential solution fifty years ago.
Newcomers to Unitarianism often assume that rejection of the doctrine of the trinity, or disavowal of the deity of Jesus, must be the unifying principle around which the denomination coheres. I would like to suggest in conclusion that another principle, the theology of universal incarnation, is far more likely to provide motive and inspiration to our movement in its stand against climate catastrophe.
In 1891 James Martineau wrote: “The incarnation of Christ is true, not of Christ exclusively, but of Man universally and God everlastingly. He bends into the human to dwell there, and humanity is the susceptible organ of the divine”[21]. Martineau’s genius is in recognising the validity of the ancient theology of embodiment, expressed in Isaiah as Immanuel, God with us,[22] and recasting it to provide a sustaining vision for a reason-based spiritual tradition.
To provide a coherent account of itself in relation to its historical tradition – a tradition of rational dissent which maintains a living relationship with the transcendent – and in relation to the emerging realities of climate change and the pressing need for the ethical realisation of a new society, Unitarians must begin to work towards the religious integration of our own conception of God as universally incarnate. Now though, we must go further than Martineau did and recognise God manifested in all creation, throughout the interdependent web of all life. We might say: The incarnation of God is true of humankind universally, and all creation everlastingly…
To understand creation as God’s body is to recognise spirituality as embodied. Humans are not the temporary inhabitants of ‘flesh clothes’ to be modified or disregarded before they are either discarded or ‘self-infinitized’ in supernatural heaven, as both mechanistic consumerism or transhumanism on one side; and fundamentalist religion on the other misdirect us to believe.
Our urgent spiritual challenge is to realise that our bodies are the sacred sites of connection to the natural world in which we live and breathe and have our being.
Jo James August 2022
Notes
[1]Acts 17:28
[2] The Cherubinic Pilgrim Johann Scheffler/Angelus Silesius
* Quoted by Menna Elfyn
[3] “He held that God was present in and constitutive of all creation. This feature of Servetus’s theology was especially obnoxious to Calvin. At the Geneva trial he asked Servetus, ‘What, wretch! If one stamps the floor would one say that one stamped on your God?’”
https://uudb.org/articles/michaelservetus.html accessed 02/02/22
[4] the phrase is from Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, pp. 235–6
[5] In Man and his symbols CJ Jung Doubleday 1964 p.92
[6] The Philosophy of Martineau in Relation to the Idealism of the Present Day Jones, Henry. Nature 74, 53 (1906). https://doi.org/10.1038/074053b0, or Gender Power and the Unitarians in England, 1760-1860, Watts, Ruth Routledge 2014, p46, p121-126
[7] For a brilliantly articulated example of this see: http://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2009/12/follow-child-and-if-you-look-youll-find.html (accessed 02/02/22), https://danny-crosby.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-essence-of-truth.html, accessed 02/02/22
[8] see for example Grace Jantzen’s God’s World God’s Body DLT 1984
[9] Designed by Edward Burne Jones for the William Morris co. in 1885
[10] ‘Enlarge God. See him everywhere he exists, or say he doesn’t exist at all’ Denis Diderot from Pensees Philosophiqes no.26 1764
[11] the title of Grace Jantzen’s book DLT 1984
[12] Feminist Theology and Bioethics in Feminist Theology, a Reader ed. Ann Loades, SPCK 1993, p.243
[13] https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/principles accessed 19/06/2022
[14] The Power of Anger in the Work of Love Beverly Wildung Harrison in Feminist Theology, a Reader ed. Ann Loades, SPCK 1993, p.205/206
[15] For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building. St Paul 1 Corinthians 3:9
[16] Exodus 3:2
[17] Thomas saying 77
[18] New Woman New Earth, Rosemary Radford Ruether Seabury Press 1975. p 194
[19] New Woman, New Earth, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Seabury Press, 1975, p. 211
[20] https://twitter.com/JKSteinberger/status/1540607081945997312 accessed 19/06/1966
[21] In “Tracts for Priests and People” found in “Essays, Reviews and Addresses”, Longmans, Green & Co, London and New York, 1891, Vol. 2, p. 443
[22] Isaiah 7:14
A Space of possibility 