When reading through Catherine's much appreciated interview it caught my attention if what she was referring to in terms of theological entanglements or spiritual interconnectedness was perhaps the same concept put forth here not many months ago pertaining to the concept of synchronicity (LOST in Purgatory, "Synchronicity," Part 2 of 2).
I had thought at the time when discovering the concept many years earlier, that this concept was at once singular and multifaceted; rare in observance but readily performed in everyday life; a substance (both metaphysical and temporal) bound to the immortal person and being of God in His power, presence, being and divine embrace of His creation basically understood then, as now, as a "joined collective dynamic."
And so, Catherine draws this same coincidence out from within her own view of process theology, whereas I, whether rightly or wrongly, whether inconsistently and naively, have done the same through my bias towards classical theism (that I have since revised as relational theism; see sidebars for further discussion). Let us then consider her interview and the greater matters of how God works through us, the world, time and attention in mysterious and marvelous ways hidden from us but yet ever in plain view!
R.E. Slater
November 14, 2001
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Quantum Theology: Our Spooky Interconnectedness:
An Interview with Catherine Keller
November 2, 2011
*Beatrice Marovich is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Division of Religion at Drew University in Madison, NJ. She also works as a writer, editor, and communications consultant, specializing in ideas at the crowded intersection of theology, philosophy, faith and public/political life in North America.
Before I knew anything much at all about theology, I knew about creationism—theology’s old anti-evolutionary fracas. I knew, in other words, that in the worst case, theology and science were at war. In the best case, I assumed, they had a rather awkward relationship—something like bad first date. And then I read Catherine Keller’s
Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (Routledge, 2003).
What occurred was nothing short of a paradigm shift. What Keller was up to was beyond me—in the very best way. She wasn’t doing apologetics (defending theology from its outside objectors). Instead, she was pulling playfully from the feisty texts of her tradition (in this case, the first book of Genesis, the creation story) in order to cast an evocative, spirited, poetic web over the cosmos that scientific research was revealing to us. I realized that there was no one else I’d trust as much to help me wade into this ancient discipline—theology. Here, Keller speaks with me about her forthcoming book.
BEM: Let’s start simple. The book you’re currently working on is called Cloud of the Impossible: Theological Entanglements. Perhaps the first question I should ask is: What is a “cloud of the impossible”?
CK: Well, it’s a metaphor that just engulfed me and wouldn’t let me go. I tried to work with other names. But it wouldn’t go away, this little cloud.
It comes from
Nicholas of Cusa, who’s a theologian of the 15th century. It’s a phrase that he uses in his book called
The Vision of God. When he talks about the cloud of the impossible he’s talking about the cloud that, at a certain point in your spiritual journey, you just can’t avoid if you want to evolve.
The cloud that you simply can’t not enter, if you’re not going to settle for clichés and incoherencies, or repressed questions, in your spirituality.
So this cloud that you have to face… what is it? Well, for him, it’s a point of dire contradiction. It’s when two different things that you believe come into conflict and contradict each other.
What does the cloud of the impossible have to do with God?
Cusa says that we have to face the contradictions that the cloud confronts us with. The fundamental contradiction that haunts him throughout all of his work—and attracts him as well—is that we are utterly finite creatures who don’t have the capacity to grasp the infinite, which is God. So it’s a contradiction between finitude and the infinite.
But the contradictions, for me, can also be the contradictions between our life calling and a relationship to a loved one, or the contradiction between our ecological awareness and our economic practice. In his cloud meditation, Cusa suggests that these contradictions (which seem to be utterly resistant to our reason, which strike us as utterly impossible to resolve) suck us deeper into the cloud. We’re drawn ever deeper, until we hit a wall. We come to an awareness of a wall that seems to be woven of these intractable, irreconcilable opposites.
But Cusa describes this as the wall of the coincidence of opposites: coincidentia oppositorum. It’s the very realization that these opposites are interwoven that points to something else, a sort of third way. It’s a struggle to get there. There’s a kind of logic of “either-or” that has to be overcome. But then a gate opens and, at least for a moment, one is in paradise. This moment never lasts. But, for Cusa, the experience of the divine is precisely that: coming smack up against this contradiction and then, if we hang in there, the opening.
Is this the impossible?
That’s the impossible transmuting into possibility itself. It’s the possibility within the impossible.
Your book is also going to cover a kind of correlate phenomenon of impossibility in the world of physics?
I’ve been fascinated with a kind of quantum apophasis*. What we face in this field is a kind of fundamental contradiction between relativity theory (which is classical) and quantum physics, which “unsays” the laws of classical physics. I think this contradiction is its own cloud.
Brian Greene, a physicist at Columbia opens The Fabric of the Universe with a dramatic image of physics being under a dark cloud, which is this basic contradiction. So a lot of physicists are looking for the coincidentia oppositorum between these not entirely reconciled sets of laws. But the contradiction itself isn’t something that I, as a theologian, am looking to solve. I’m more interested in a phenomenon that comes out of this cloud, out of what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”—quantum entanglement.
In classical physics, nothing can happen faster than the speed of light because no signal can propagate faster than the speed of light. But what was showing its ghostly face in quantum entanglement is a kind of influence that seems to be instantaneous and seems to take place between two connected particles, no matter how far away they are. So, rather than become more and more indifferent to one another the further away they are, these particles will forever respond to each other instantaneously as though you are effecting both of them in the same way, at the same moment [known as the Laws of Mutual Entanglement - res].
They’re entangled?
Right. It looks like, from a certain point of view, nothing is separate from anything at all. As the novelist Jeanette Winterson puts it, in her book Gut Symmetries: our separateness is a sham.
But what is a theological entanglement?
My book [laughs]. It’s a way of understanding our sometimes spooky, sometimes trustworthy, relationships… theologically.
Theological entanglement is a way of reflecting on our relationships—all of our relationships, at once, together. When we do this, we get to such an impossibly infinite place that, I think, we resort to God language. The metaphors of the divine, of a love that permeates all things instantaneously, an embrace that holds everything everywhere in its mindfulness, a spirit (even a holy ghost) that has the character of spooky action at a distance is a metaphor by which can gather our very mysterious interdependencies (as creatures) on each other.
We are constituted, in every moment, by our relations. Some of them we compose, but they comprise the conditions in which we are composed. Theological entanglement is a form of what’s called “relational theology.” Entanglement is meant to give a more physical, and spooky edge to our interconnectedness.
This isn’t just about the apophasis of an infinite God, but about the element of unknowability in all of us—as creatures made in the image of the unknowable. It looks, even from the vantage point of quantum indeterminacy, that every creature has an element of the unknowable or unpredictable to it. For every electron, you’re unable to measure (simultaneously) its location and its momentum.
What do you think your readings in quantum physics have done for your theology?
My study of physics strengthens my faith, because it exposes the depth of the mystery of what theologians call the incarnation. There is a way in which various branches of science, in a kind of postmodern vein (the corners of scientific fields where reductionism has not obtained for decades) the mystery of our interdependence is actually fleshed out with a kind of precision that I think theologians should be aware of. The universe that is showing itself in various fields, (not just quantum physics, but the fractals of chaos theory, for example) is a universe far more appealing to theology than was the [classic] universe of the past 300 to 400 years—made up of bits of dead, impenetrable matter, interacting predictably in a mega-machine.
The more you get into these cutting edges of science, the more the mysterious materializes. It turns out, even, that what we call “matter” is ultimately a kind of myth. You can’t really say this, as a theologian. It sounds like you’re trying to turn the actual world into some kind of illusion. That’s not what I’m talking about. Rather, I’m saying that what we call matter is something much more mysterious, subtle, apparently interconnecting faster than the speed of light, just pulsing in its inter-linked processes with the unknown. I think all of us have a lot to learn there. Clearly the scientists are not going to be, for the most part, reflecting on the possible meanings of their own science. That’s not what they’re trained for. This is why transdisciplinary work is so crucial.
Should we be afraid to reflect, theologically, on the meaning of scientific data, or the findings that come out of scientific research?
We should be careful. We should do a lot of reading before we jump to conclusions. But I think that’s true for any form of responsible thinking. There’s a lot of great, accessible material out there today, however. So I don’t think there’s any real reason to be afraid. To cite Cusa: the problem is not our ignorance. That’s unavoidable. But if we realize the shape of our ignorance, then we can learn a lot more.
And we don’t have to be afraid that we can’t know it all. We can’t all be physicists. I’m always very knowing of my own ignorance of the natural sciences. So I’m grateful for how much is being communicated across disciplinary boundaries. And I hope that this can, increasingly, go both ways. Perhaps, now, as the planet heats up and cooperation—not just between disciplines, but populations—becomes more and more a matter of life and death, there will be more interest in transdisciplinary conversations.
Perhaps theologians, pastors, spiritual leaders, people who are spiritually attuned to irreligious forms of creativity, will find some new ways to communicate about these things. But if science is left out of the mix, we will always be off in lala land. We need the incarnational practice of taking into account the most precise knowledge we can find, in the face of the mystery of our embodied existence.
As a theologian, what do you think is left out of the mix if God, or the divine, isn’t entangled with other forms of knowledge?
I think if God-talk simply drops out of sophisticated discourse and is just replaced by a wide range of philosophical, spiritual, poetical metaphors that avoid the Abrahamisms of the past, what’s left behind is simply our consciousness of who we are. That is, if we shift into atheism in the name of being in the know, we’re actually shifting into an unknowing ignorance.
We’ve been comprised by these traditions, massively. So to think that we can simply repudiate them by dismissing their more vulgar and clichéd forms is to do violence to what the prophetic and poetic strands of atheism always were: a more spiritually and affectively alive sense of life.
It’s possible to avoid God-talk for long stretches of time. Any canny Christian can do that, in order to make friends and influence people. Or just to get relief from bad clichés. But, at a certain point, one has to face up to the profundity and brilliance of the conceptual work that was done in the Western world for more than 1500 years, when it was dominated by the discipline of theology.
But we don’t want to reduce post-Christian criticisms of Christian idolatries to mere anti-faith, either. It wouldn’t do justice to the depths of the agnostic and atheist traditions which are, themselves, deeply prophetic traditions. Still, I think it’s important to stay mindful of God-tropes. Being mindful of these metaphors doesn’t necessarily cause us to believe in them. But we might find that the whole language of belief falls short of what’s meant by faith, anyhow—faith has never been a matter of little bits of knowledge parading as certainty.
COMMENTS
I find this subject fascinating and look forward to seeing Keller's book; however, it is somewhat disturbing for Keller to refer to "theology" and assume Christian theology only, and for the article to neglect to mention important influences that predate Cusa like the fourteenth century Christian work "The Cloud of Unknowing"**; not to mention far earlier apophatic works from Eastern Orthodox, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish sources. Indeed, Keller's discussion of opposites reminded me of nothing so much as the Zen way of putting the conscious mind into crisis by posing riddles — koans — which scramble the brain's tendency to make sense and order out of everything. And while Zen is not considered a theology, as such, including Buddhism in a discussion of "unknowing" is surely appropriate.
"Religious" cultures did not, for the most part, emerge in isolation. Historians find increasing evidence of cross-cultural influence that goes back thousands of years (recalling that peoples interacted through trade, conquest, and settlement before times for which we have written records). Historians of Western religion are pointing more and more to outside influences on Christianity by noting that Thomas Aquinas and other European theologians read the Jewish thinker Maimonides, who in turn is thought to have been influenced by Islamic philosophers such as al-Farabi and al-Ghazali, who themselves were heirs to ancient Greek and other philosophies. And back into the mists of time and place the influences go.
For this interview to make it appear as though Cusa put something new together when there are many earlier sources (even if one stays within the Christian tradition) is alarming. To neglect to even mention "The Cloud of Unknowing" when the title of Keller's book is clearly a reference (if not an homage) to that important work is something of a travesty.
Indeed, the focus on Christianity in this article — not overt yet obvious to the reader — adds fuel to a polarization of traditions which is, sadly, becoming increasingly popular today. Writers of such pieces need to be very careful to avoid reinforcing such misconceptions.
Keller's thinking about quantum mechanics and religious mysticism has been anticipated by a number of thinkers. For example, the 1996 edition of "The Cloud of Unknowing" (published by Doubleday, text edited by William Johnston [1973]) features a foreword by Huston Smith, in which Smith writes about the importance of quantum mechanics to our consideration of works like "The Cloud". I'm sure (at least one would expect) that Keller pays due credit to earlier thinkers — and to earlier works than Cusa's from around the world — in her book, but a sentence or two in this article would have sufficed to put her work into context.
– Beth, Dept. of History, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
* * * * * * * * * * * *
DEFINITIONS
*Apophasis - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis
IN GENERAL
Apophasis was originally and more broadly a method of
logical reasoning or
argument by denial—a way of describing what something is by explaining what it is not, or a process-of-elimination way of talking about something by talking about what it is not.
A useful
inductive technique when given a limited universe of possibilities, the exclusion of all but the one remaining is
affirmation through
negation. The familiar guessing-game of
Twenty Questions is an example of apophatic inquiry.
This sense has generally fallen into disuse and is frequently overlooked, although it is still current in certain contexts, such as
mysticism and
negative theology.
IN CHRISTIANITY
An
apophatic theology sees
God as
ineffable and attempts to describe God in terms of what God is not.
Apophatic statements refer to transcendence in this context, as opposed to cataphasis referring to immanence. It stands in contrast with
cataphatic theology.
Apophatic theology (from
Greek ἀπόφασις from
ἀπόφημι - apophēmi, "to deny")—also known as negative theology or
via negativa (
Latin for "negative way")—is a
theology that attempts to describe [the transcedent]
God, or Divine Good, by
negation. To speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God.
[1] It stands in contrast with
cataphatic theology that speaks to the immanence of God.
In brief, negative theology is an attempt to achieve unity with the Divine Good through discernment, gaining knowledge of what God is
not (
apophasis), rather than by describing what God
is (cataphasis).
The apophatic tradition is often, though not always, allied with the approach of mysticism, which focuses on a spontaneous or cultivated individual experience of the divine reality beyond the realm of
ordinary perception, an experience often unmediated by the structures of traditional
organized religion or the conditioned role-playing and learned defensive behavior of the outer man.
Apophatic Theology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophatic_theology
In negative theology, it is accepted that
the Divine is ineffable (inexpressible), an abstract experience that can only be recognized or remembered—that is, human beings cannot describe in words the essence of the perfect good that is unique to the individual, nor can they define the Divine, in its immense complexity, related to the entire field of reality, and therefore
all descriptions if attempted will be ultimately false and conceptualization should be avoided;
in effect, it eludes definition by definition:
Neither
existence nor
nonexistence as we understand it in the physical realm, applies to God; i.e., the Divine is abstract to the individual, beyond existing or not existing, and beyond conceptualization regarding the whole (one cannot say that God exists in the usual sense of the term; nor can we say that God is nonexistent).
God is
divinely simple (one should not claim that God is one, or three, or any type of being.)
God is not ignorant (one should not say that God is wise since that word
arrogantly implies we know what "
wisdom" means on a divine scale, whereas we only know what wisdom is believed to mean in a confined cultural context).
Likewise, God is not
evil (to say that God can be described by the word 'good' limits God to what good behavior means to human beings individually and en masse).
God is not a
creation (but beyond that we cannot define how God exists or operates in relation to the whole of humanity).
-
God is not conceptually confined to assumptions based on
time.
Even though the
via negativa essentially rejects theological understanding as a path to God, some have sought to make it into an intellectual exercise, by describing God only in terms of what God is not. One problem noted with this approach, is that there seems to be no fixed basis on deciding what God is not, unless the Divine is understood as an abstract experience of full aliveness unique to each individual consciousness, and universally, the perfect goodness applicable to the whole field of reality
[citation needed]. It should be noted that this is also a kind of definition, namely that the Divine is an experience, which - because of the very definition of apophatic theology - the then Divine cannot be.
Cataphatic Theology
(sometimes spelled
kataphatic) theology is the expressing of
God or the divine
through positive terminology. This is in contrast to defining God or the divine in what God is not, which is referred to as negative or
apophatic theology.
To speak of God or the divine kataphatically is by its nature a form of limiting to God or divine. This was one of the core tenets of the works of
St Dionysus the Aeropagite. By defining what God or the divine is we limit the unlimited as Saint Dionysus outlined in his works. A
kataphatic way to express God would be that God is love. The apophatic way would be to express that God is
not hate; or to say that God is
not love, as he transcends even our notion of love.
Ultimately, one would come to remove even the notion of the Trinity, or of saying that God is one, because The Divine is above numberhood. That God is beyond all duality because God contains within Godself all things and that God is beyond all things. The apophatic way as taught by Saint Dionysus was to remove any conceptual understanding of God that could become all-encompassing, since in its limitedness that concept would begin to force the fallen understanding of mankind onto the absolute and divine.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
**The Cloud of Unknowing
| The Cloud of Unknowing |
|---|
| Author(s) | Anonymous |
|---|
| Original title | The Cloude of Unknowyng |
|---|
| Country | England |
|---|
| Language | Middle English |
|---|
| Subject(s) | Spiritual guide to contemplative prayer |
|---|
| Genre(s) | Christian mysticism |
|---|
| Publication date | late 14th century |
|---|
| Followed by | The Book of Privy Counseling |
|---|
The Cloud of Unknowing (
Middle English:
The Cloude of Unknowyng) is an anonymous work of
Christian mysticism written in
Middle English in the latter half of the 14th century. The text is a spiritual guide on
contemplative prayer in the late
Middle Ages.
Manuscripts of the work are today at
British Library and
Cambridge University Library.
[1][2]
History and influence
The Cloud of Unknowing draws on the mystical tradition of
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Christian
Neoplatonism[3], which focuses on the
via negativa road to discovering
God as a pure entity, beyond any capacity of mental conception and so without any definitive image or form. This tradition has reputedly inspired generations of mystical searchers from
John Scotus Erigena, through
Book of Taliesin,
Nicholas of Cusa and
St. John of the Cross to
Teilhard de Chardin (the latter two of whom may have been influenced by "The Cloud" itself). Prior to this, the theme of "Cloud" had been in the
Confessions of St. Augustine (IX, 10) written in AD 398.
[2]
This work had already become known to English Catholics in middle 17th century, later ascetic and Benedictine mystic,
Augustine Baker (1575-1641), wrote an exposition on its doctrine. Today a transcript of the work dated 1677 is at the
Ampleforth College , apart from several at the British Library. English mystic
Evelyn Underhill edited an important version of the work in 1922.
[3]
Description
The book counsels a young student to seek
God, not through knowledge and
intellection (faculty of the human mind), but through intense contemplation, motivated by love, and stripped of all thought. This is brought about by putting all thoughts and desires under a "cloud of forgetting", and thereby piercing
God's cloud of unknowing with a "dart of longing love" from the heart. This form of contemplation is not directed by the intellect, but involves spiritual union with
God through the heart:
"For He can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you must step above it stoutly but deftly, with a devout and delightful stirring of love, and struggle to pierce that darkness above you; and beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens."[4]
In a follow-up to
The Cloud, called
The Book of Privy Counseling, the author characterizes the practice of contemplative unknowing as worshiping God with one's "substance," coming to rest in a "naked blind feeling of being," and ultimately finding thereby that God is one's being.
The practical prayer advice contained in
The Cloud of Unknowing forms a primary basis for the contemporary practice of
Centering Prayer, a form of
Christian meditation developed by
Trappist monks
William Meninger,
Basil Pennington and
Thomas Keating in the 1970s.
[5]
Quotations
| Ch. 39-40 quotation: other versions |
Evelyn Underhill (1922/2003)
And if we will intentively pray for getting of good, let us cry, either with word or with thought or with desire, nought else nor no more words, but this word “God.” For why, in God be all good.. Fill thy spirit with the ghostly bemeaning of it without any special beholding to any of His works—whether they be good, better, or best of all—bodily or ghostly, or to any virtue that may be wrought in man’s soul by any grace; not looking after whether it be meekness or charity, patience or abstinence, hope, faith, or soberness, chastity or wilful poverty. What recks this in contemplatives?.. they covet nothing with special beholding, but only good God. Do thou.. mean God all, and all God, so that nought work in thy wit and in thy will, but only God. [6] |
Middle English original
And yif we wil ententifly preie for getyng of goodes, lat us crie, outher with worde or with thought or with desire, nought elles, ne no mo wordes, bot this worde God. For whi in God ben alle goodes.. Fille thi spirit with the goostly bemenyng of it withoutyn any specyal beholdyng to any of His werkes whether thei be good, betir, or alther best, bodily or goostly—or to any vertewe that may be wrought in mans soule by any grace, not lokyng after whether it be meeknes or charité, pacyence or abstynence, hope, feith, or sobirnes, chastité or wilful poverté. What thar reche in contemplatyves?.. thei coveyte nothing with specyal beholdyng, bot only good God. Do thou.. mene God al, and al God, so that nought worche in thi witte and in thi wile, bot only God. [7] |
From a description of how to practice contemplation (from chapters 39 and 40):
When we intend to pray for goodness, let all our thought and desire be contained in the one small word "God." Nothing else and no other words are needed, for God is the epitome of all goodness.. Immerse yourself in the spiritual reality it speaks of yet without precise ideas of God's works whether small or great, spiritual or material. Do not consider any particular virtue which God may teach you through grace, whether it is humility, charity, patience, abstinence, hope, faith, moderation, chastity, or evangelical poverty. For to a contemplative they are, in a sense, all the same.. Let this little word represent to you God in all his fullness and nothing less than the fullness of God.[8]
From elsewhere (chapter 23,
The Book of Privy Counseling):
"And so I urge you, go after experience rather than knowledge. On account of pride, knowledge may often deceive you, but this gentle, loving affection will not deceive you. Knowledge tends to breed conceit, but love builds. Knowledge is full of labor, but love, full of rest."[9]
Popular culture
- Leonard Cohen refers to "The Cloud of Unknowing" in the 1979 song "The Window" (of Recent Songs)
- Todd Rundgren refers to "a cloud of unknowing" in the 1989 song "Parallel Lines" (on the album "Nearly Human")
-
-
-
John Luther Adams' orchestral work "Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing", completed in 1995, was inspired by "The Cloud of Unknowing"
-
Don DeLillo refers to "The Cloud of Unknowing" in the 1998 novel "Underworld"
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The words spoken here by Frederick Schmidt are as good as any words can be spoken in declaring that Christians first and foremost speak Christ and stay to their mission of outreach and discipling. Any other activity is secondary to the Church's primary missions of speaking Jesus to a world seeking life and deliverance.
The Reverend Dr. Frederick W. Schmidt, Jr. is Director of Spiritual Formation and Associate Professor of Christian Spirituality at Southern Methodist University, Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas. An Episcopal priest, he also serves as the director of the Episcopal studies program. He is the author of several books, including Conversations with Scripture: The Gospel of Luke (Morehouse, 2009) and What God Wants for Your Life (Harper One, 2005).
