Plant-Thinking and Arboreal Theology

The last ten years have arguably seen a “vegetal turn” in Continental philosophy; its most pronounced form perhaps in the ongoing–and increasing–engagement with Michael Marder’s Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013). Marder draws on the traditions of phenomenology, deconstruction, and weak thought to enable what he calls an “encounter with plants” (7), so that humans (specifically those influenced by western philosophical traditions) can access “plant-thinking” and perhaps escape from the “fictitious shells of _our_ identity and _our_ existential ontology” (13). The aspect of plant-thinking that I will consider in this paper is the nonconscious, non-verbal self-articulation of plants; for Marder, plants demonstrate that physical presence within space functions as a kind of language. If language can be understood as a coming-into-being as plant–a self-articulation into space–or, as Marder paraphrases Merleau-Ponty, as the “pre-reflective intentionality of corporeity” (which, as briefly as possible, I interpret as the articulation of body in space prior to cognition)–then I argue that plant-thinking provides a new lens through which to consider the ecological significance of apophatic theology. I will ask: what is “God-talk” if language itself can be corporeal? Further, if language is spatial articulation, then trees are “speaking” themselves constantly–and perhaps also communing with the divine? This is not a new idea–Thomas Merton wrote about trees giving glory to God in their own irreplaceable and unrepeatable ways (_New Seeds of Contemplation_ , 1949). Marder himself draws on the theological possibilities of plant thinking–and their medieval roots–in his work on Hildegard of Bingen (_Green Mass_, 2021). In my paper, I will argue that plant-thinking (as described by Marder and similar thinkers) can be read with apophatic theology and argue that this may suggest that the very doing of theology derives from a property of matter.

Other theologians, of course, have pointed to the need for theological reevaluation of the material world. Ecofeminist theologians have opined the devaluation of matter in Christian thought for decades–and matter naturally includes plants. More recently, through new materialism and other relatively recent philosophical movements, ecotheology has been focusing increasingly on matter and nonhuman nature–as part of which, plants or “the vegetal” are often mentioned (for examples, see many of the essays in _Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking_, 2023). But there has yet to appear a full theological treatment of either plants or “the plant” in opposition to the concept of humanity in theological thought. Although such a project is beyond the scope of my proposed paper, I intend for this paper to contribute to discourse that does for the vegetal what Eric Daryl Meyer’s _Inner Animalities_ (2018) does for the animal.