The Ecological Darkness of the Divine: Theosis as Radical Interrelational Possibility in the Works of Jacob Böhme 

In the wake of poststructuralism, Platonism has been branded as a pernicious "metaphysics of presence" that promotes either a thoroughgoing dualism (Nietzsche-Heidegger) or, conversely, a tyrannical monism that effaces all difference (Deleuze and Guattari, Timothy Morton). Today, considering critical theory's engagement with the ecological crisis, philosophies suspected of promoting either metaphysical transcendence or mystical nondualism are envisioned as being historically and philosophically complicit in a host of structural injustices. Neoplatonism, then, a tradition seen as far removed from the sobriety of Socratic thought, appears as an archaism at best and a malevolent ghost at worst. But this reading is reductive; it reifies its subject and thereby obscures the tradition’s historical diversity as well as the intellectual resources it might have to offer.

Within this framework, the Neoplatonic notion of theosis, the deification of humankind, is often understood to promote a unilaterally “vertical” movement, wherein the once earthbound human seeks to be mystically conjoined with a fully transcendent, otherworldly deity. Sounded in this key, theosis would seem to entail a de-worlding of humankind, a radical betrayal of Nietzsche’s admonishment to “remain true to the earth.” And thus, read by way of a hermeneutics of suspicion, even the radically nondualistic tendencies within the tradition might be understood to conceal a pernicious ontological and ethical dualism—one that severs humankind from both the nature world and other-than-human animals.

However, this ultimately reduces the expansive and nuanced interpretations of theosis throughout the diversity of Neoplatonic traditions to a homogenous caricature. From the pre-Christian roots of the concept, through its formalized expressions in Eastern Orthodoxy, to the esoteric traditions that continue to flourish in the wake of early modernity, I will argue that, far from fostering divisive boundaries, theosis has served as a structural concept that holds open a space of  radical boundlessness and interrelational possibility. One such space of radical possibility, which complicates the charge of anti-worldly transcendence and offers resources for contemporary ecopsychology, can be found at the intersection of early modern Naturphilosophy, Christian esotericism, and the via negativa or “apophatic” tradition.

Referencing apophatic iterations of theosis may seem to be an idiosyncratic way to begin a discussion attuned to ecopsychological concerns; apophaticism’s ostensive focus on radical transcendence and submission to mystical modes of “unknowing” (agnosis) would appear to make it antithetical to ecological thought as such. However, both traditions are fundamentally concerned with experientially attending to other-than-human worlds, or otherness as such; they depend upon ontologies that are rooted in epistemic claims that can only be verified by mystically, speculatively, or technologically extending the reach of human consciousness beyond its horizons. In other words, although not all forms of ecopsychology or apophaticism claim to be confident in definitively achieving self-verification, by nature of their shared focus on stepping outside of Kantian “correlationism” (Quentin Meillassoux) and communing with a reality prior to and somehow beyond human consciousness by cultivating a particular orientation toward reality, I maintain that the two traditions converge in substantive ways. Moreover, I will argue that these two traditions continue to intermingle in suggestive ways within contemporary speculative discourses that seek to reimagine the boundaries of the human/world chiasm.

Engaging with the contemporary French “non-philosopher” François Laruelle’s Du noirs Univers (“On the Black Universe”), I will examine a postmodern appropriation and inversion of apophatic theosis that seeks to turn human consciousness toward a radically immanentist and “horizontal” orientation, and thereby dispel the “illusion” of all transcendental interpretations of humanity’s relationship to the other-than-human world. I will argue that Laruelle’s inversion of apophaticism, akin to other structurally analogous speculative realisms, paradoxically produces its own transcendental position, one that blocks off new paths for cultivating more ecologically empathetic relationships with the other-than-human world. However, the Neoplatonic tradition, I will argue, does offer such resources.

I will then address what I understand to be a dialectical insubstantiation of apophaticism found at the intersection of the works of Paracelsus (1493 —1541) and Jacob Böhme (1575 —1624), and echoed by Angelus Silesius (1624 —1677), which gives rise to a “sophiological” apophaticism with an earthly “pansensist” (Ernst Mach) orientation. Between Paracelsus, Böhme, and Silesius, I will locate a subtradition wherein the language of theosis, in conversation with apophaticism and the early modern esoteric notion of the “feminine” aspect of Divinity, Sophia, gives rise to a unique speculative realist position. I maintain that this discourse challenges both the “vertically” transcendental mode of classic apophaticism and the flattening immanentism of postmodern appropriations of apophaticism.

In closing, I argue that this subtradition points toward a medial realm of discourse that can aptly be called “mesophysics”— a mode of thought that falls outside of the conceptual and ontological binaries implied by the epistemological notions indexed to the concepts of metaphorics and metaphysics, thus complicating, if not subverting, the implied antonymic duality of the transcendence/immanence divide from “within” the Neoplatonic tradition.