“The Door in the Dark”: Theosis, Theurgy, and Cybernetics

In going from room to room in the dark, 

I reached out blindly to save my face, 

But neglected, however lightly, to lace 

My fingers and close my arms in an arc. 

A slim door got in past my guard, 

And hit me a blow in the head so hard 

I had my native simile jarred.

So people and things don't pair any more 

With what they used to pair with before.

-Robert Frost

Robert Frost’s short poem “The Door in the Dark” is striking because it depicts a sudden moment when something deeply disturbing happens—when the outside is suddenly felt to be inside in such a way that jars our native similes and the metaphors we live by, offering a form of sudden catharsis or aporia that can transform our sense of who, what, and where we are.

I use this poem to introduce the idea that part of the value of the techniques, technologies, and mediations of both religion and literature is in how they provide opportunities for participants to engage in new technical environments, which through an encounter with a real “outside,” afford opportunities to suspend habitual causal patterns and forge new patterns through the medium of embodiment. Works and activities that can disarticulate and/or rearticulate our ways of seeing are valuable because by doing so they call attention to the postures of attention we typically occupy. It is the posture of attention that we take that ultimately determines what is legible in any given partition of the sensible.

Given this general situation I want to draw together several interrelated aspects or approaches to the question of theosis and the boundaries of being. I begin by drawing upon recent work by Niklaus Largier on the “ground of the soul” as "a space or a mental theater that is filled with media and that allows the effects of these media to unfold.” What we can, have, and should do with this capacity for soul-craft are key questions this talk seeks to explore by sketching the broad trajectory of participatory ritual, scripture, and rhetoric that can be traced back to debates about theurgy in Neoplatonism and forward to emergent possibilities within various strands of contemporary Ecopoetics and Ecotheology.

My focus will be on three key figures in this trajectory: Iamblichus, Jacob Boehme, and S. T. Coleridge. The interest in the theurgy of the Neoplatonic thinker Iamblichus is in how it attempts to appropriate the signatures (sunthēmata) of the gods in nature and awaken resonant correspondences to these signatures within one’s own soul. Through the power of ineffable symbols (apporetōn synthematōn), the theurgist “takes on the shape (skēma) of the gods.” I will then highlight Jacob Boheme’s image of the candle in The Election to Grace, and how it serves as an emblem of human consciousness within a world of divine emergence. The image of the candle re-presents the notion of the trinity realized through the mediation of human consciousness. Meaning is only made manifest when there is a reader attuned to what is being said. The reader is the necessary fourth element that completes the circuit of representation centered in the image, by providing the imaginative and affective energy that sets the image in motion. Finally, I will end this sequence by turning towards how Coleridge adopts and suggestively modifies Boehme’s model of theosophy in an effort to overcome Boehme’s perceived “tendency to pantheism.”  

One of the key additions Coleridge makes to how we might realize theosis is an emphasis on the category of Reflection. Why he does so can be better understood by making connections to theoretical conversation surrounding cybernetics. A quick sense of how cybernetics relates to religion can be obtained by recalling one of William James’s definitions of religion— “Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” To talk about how we are informed through processes of harmonic adjustment is to speak in the language of cybernetics. 

As N. Katherine Hayles explores in How We Became Posthuman, the development of cybernetics was organized around three main stages: first there was an emphasis on homeostasis, then there were renewed concerns around reflexivity; and finally there is the stage we are still in which highlights virtuality, emergence, and autopoesis. I argue that understanding the technologies, techniques and mediations that can inform our experience of theosis would benefit from a consideration of how the categories of cybernetics could help clarify our thinking.

One advantage of this approach is that it may help us theorize the postsecular as well as the posthuman.  Drawing upon the work of anthropologists like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, I will end by arguing that beyond the multiculturalist ideals of secularism, which assume that there is a stable and objective world that is glimpsed through different cultural lens, there lies the postsecular possibilities of a multi-naturalism, wherein different experiences of “nature” can be inhabited within the same cultural neighborhood. In the face of such discordant possibilities the question becomes how best to assemble ourselves within the social structures of a functioning polis or democracy, and to orient ourselves through or towards some form of re-ligio or theosis within the wider worlds in which we dwell.