Our Intertwined Animality: Forgoing Ultimacy for Intimacy in Dialogue with Eschatology and Science

Introduction

All things inevitably die. Such is the predicament of being a living entity within a species that emerged from the Earth in the complex evolutionary processes of continuity and discontinuity of which humanity is but one member. This macabre statement is true of both humans as individual organisms and in terms of scientific projections for the universe: death is a surety. Such a commonplace observation could be understood as so pedestrian that it hardly merits forthright acknowledgment. However, Christianity has spent much time grappling with this reality and it continues to register concern, both doctrinal and existential, in light of eschatology. How do we respond to death theologically, both for individuals and for creation as a whole? How do we understand eschatological hope in light of our evolutionary past with other species and in view of a growing body of scientific literature on the cosmological future? The following argument will be divided into two sections. First, I will chart the terrain of what I see as the primary issues confronting eschatology with particular reference to its relationship with science, ethics, and method. Second, I will develop a constructive account of interspecies eschatology in dialogue with the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which outlines a possible path to maintain eschatology’s futurity, albeit in a highly qualified tone.

Surveying Eschatology

The death of the individual is a certainty that expresses itself, not as something over-against what it means to be human, but that is given by the very finitude that makes humans the sort of thing we are. Heidegger described humans as thrown into the world, and this givenness entails a fallen reality for humans. This is not in the sense of classical theology’s understanding of a protological fall into sin, but is rather, that finitude and embodiment in a world entails that we are moving towards our death. Heidegger argues that a failure to recognize this is an indication of an inauthentic life. But even more so, death is falling into non-relationality where others and world fade and where care is no longer possible (Heidegger, 1962: 303). Christian theologians in the 20th century have grappled with this reality. In what he calls “personal eschatology” Jürgen Moltmann (1996) argues that death is “characteristic of frail, temporal creation” but will be overcome in Christ (1996: 78, 90–93). Alluding to Heidegger (1962: 256, 261–267), he argues that the “centre of Christian eschatology is neither the human ego nor the world. It is God, who in Christ has thrown open to us his future [der uns in Christus seine Zukunft geöffnet hat]” (Moltmann, 1996: 103). Here the problematic of individual death reflects the Pauline concern found in the New Testament, that if it is only for this life that individuals may hope, then this is a pitiable thing (1 Corinthians 15:19). The typical response, and indeed Paul’s response, is to locate in the Christian account of the resurrection of Christ, hope for death’s sting to be lost.

The issues that arise on the level of the individual are compounded when seen in terms of scientific projections for the fate of the cosmos (Wilkinson, 2010: 12–16). Einstein’s theory of general relativity accounts for matter, cosmic radiation, and gravity in ways that allow for mathematical predictions regarding shifts and changes in the universe’s expansion. For decades scientists held that the rate of expansion was slowing and saw two possible futures: (1) the universe begins to eventually retract and collapse under the gravitational forces of the mass in the universe: a so-called big crunch; or more likely, (2) insufficient mass entails that the forces of entropy will ensure continued expansion until a lack of energy makes the universe a cold and lifeless place where expansion ceases due to insufficient energy: a cosmic heat death. Since 1998, cosmological thinking has shifted in the scientific community. The Supernova Cosmology Project of Saul Perlmutter and the High-Z Supernovae Search team each sought to look at universe expansion by analyzing the brightness of objects using supernovae explosions as standard measurements. Rather than expansion decelerating, it was seen that the rate/velocity of universe expansion is increasing. It was hypothesized (later confirmed by results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) that a sibling of the well-known “dark matter” called “dark energy” is accelerating universe expansion, discernible only on scales of a billion light years or more. So what does all this say about the cosmological future? Wilkinson (2010) notes:

When the Universe is 10¹² years old, stars cease to form, as there is no hydrogen left. At this stage all massive stars have now turned into neutron stars and black holes. At 10¹⁴ years, small stars become white dwarfs. The Universe becomes a cold and uninteresting place composed of dead stars and black holes. According to some theories of particle physics, protons themselves should decay at 10³¹ years. (2010: 15–16)

Contemplation of such ideas has led some to consider what Jean-François Lyotard (1991) has called the inhuman. The “inhuman” is the recognition of the end of humanity and a sense of nihilism upon the realization of the hopelessness that all lives, that life itself, ends in death. John Caputo (2015) captures this when recounting how one is confronted with the potential cessation of all that is living. Hope becomes impossible. He writes, “Everything will die with the sun, and in that sense, if we allow ourselves to look that far ahead, everything’s dead already, before the fact. If to be alive now means to hope in the future – to hope that things have a point – then we are already dead” (Caputo, 2015: 6). Theologians have responded to this problematic via eschatology, albeit in different registers.

In the post-war theology of 20th century Europe, Pannenberg and Moltmann each sought to recover eschatology. Pannenberg argued that history itself was revelatory. At the end, God would be retroactively revealed as the God of hope, and thus Christians live proleptically empowered through the Spirit’s work. Moltmann saw God as entering into the suffering of creation revealed in the history of divine promise outlined in the prophets, and pre-eminently in the resurrection of Christ, to inaugurate the coming future where God is all in all. For both, the metaphor of the Kingdom of God is central: for Pannenberg as proleptic anticipation and action, for Moltmann in Christ’s person and the Spirit’s action in Christian life (Harvie, 2008). For both, the resurrection is the focal point for prolepsis and eschatological hope respectively.

The resurrection also fills an important role for theologians involved in the scientific questions raised by projections of the fate of the cosmos and Lyotard’s description of the “inhuman.” John Polkinghorne has written extensively on astronomical matters and the dialogue between science and religion. He argues for the necessity of maintaining both continuity and discontinuity between the current state of creation and future eschatological states. Polkinghorne (2002) criticizes both Pannenberg and Moltmann for being too focused on matters terrestrial and on emphasizing the rupture of discontinuity between the present, evolutionary processes and the future eschatological world. The discontinuity noted is framed in terms of resurrection hope. Polkinghorne (2007) writes,

Yet the eventual futility of the physical universe shows also that the ultimate fulfillment of the Creator’s eternal purposes will have to take place beyond this present world – which is what I take to be the meaning of the Christian doctrines of the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. (2007: 95)

However, a problem arises in how the doctrine of the resurrection is deployed methodologically as an epistemological safeguard in theology’s dialogue with science. An analogy may be taken from protological accounts of creation’s origins. Theologians have long dialogued with evolutionary accounts of the emergence of biological life and have attempted to grapple with the implications for theological anthropology and understanding the relationships between humans and other forms of biological life. In these accounts theologians engaged with evolutionary science have rightly demurred in locating divine action in current gaps of knowledge or as yet undiscovered links in the evolutionary chain. The epistemological flaws of arguing from gaps in knowledge where theology might insert divine action are that these have proved methodologically unsatisfactory and unfruitful in terms of both science and theology. However, the error which is rightly avoided in terms of protology consistently occurs in eschatology. In light of gaps or absences in knowledge of how life might continue, theologians are content to insert the category of resurrection in the same “God-of-the-gaps” fashion as has been rejected in accounts of creation’s origins.

With few exceptions, such eschatological accounts focus on the fate of humans as elevated above or apart from other forms of life in a value-hierarchy which reveals the anthropocentric assumptions, which are questionable in light of an evolutionary world (McLaughlin, 2014a, 2014b; Southgate, 2008). Ratzinger (1988), for instance, entirely neglects the place of the non-human world in his eschatology. He fails to address both non-sentient biological life and the lives of other animals alongside the cosmological dimensions for eschatology found in such New Testament passages as the hymn to the cosmic Christ in the epistle to the Colossians (Ryan, 2017). More recent eschatologies similarly neglect the role of the non-human, and other animals in particular John E. Thiel’s development of an “eschatological imagination.” Thiel (2013) writes, “The last things are not possible objects of sensible experience but instead are objects of a hope inextricably tied to faith” (2013: 5). Such a negation of embodied, affective, sensible experience in eschatological desiderata reveals the methodological problems noted above vis à vis origins and eschatology, but also reveals a dualism present in such epistemological hurdles. Even in eschatologies where the presence of non-human animals is taken seriously the world is present simply by way of negation. In these accounts, the world is deemed to be “the devastation” and no engagement with scientific accounts of the world is attempted. The world and non-human life within it are mentioned as something to be negated and left behind, or redeemed in such a way that the integrity of the distinctly non-human features of such lives is unrecognizable. In addition to the potential for Jansenism in such accounts, the same methodological flaws through insertion of the resurrection to cover gaps in eschatological ontology are present (Griffiths, 2014).

Attempts to overcome these issues can be seen broadly in two approaches. First, there are those who attempt to rework futurity in eschatology in light of scientific findings in both cosmology and evolutionary biology. Examples can be seen in those who follow the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, such as Thomas Berry. However, the moral dimensions of attending to particular and concrete others, specifically non-human others, is left neglected in favour of larger conceptual categories such as omega point or cosmic liturgies (Berry, 2009). In speaking of the cosmos, the practical lives of animals are neglected. The attempts at grand narratives of hope have recently undergone critique by political theologians such as Miguel De La Torre (2017), who argues that these accounts of hope work to perpetuate the oppressive conditions of those who suffer. He argues that “accepting a historical metanarrative with a purposeful end frustrates our ability to establish an ethical response rooted in our estrangement brought about by the hopeless situation in which the world’s disenfranchised find themselves” (De La Torre, 2017: 24). He advocates for hopelessness as “an act of courage to embrace reality and to act even when the odds are in favor of defeat” (2017: 140). The moral problems of totalizing eschatologies are so strong for De La Torre that he states with some exasperation, “I’m not necessarily rejecting some afterlife, it’s that I simply don’t care. This present age has too much oppression to be distracted by visions of kingdoms not yet seen” (2017: 52). De La Torre limits his exploration of the political hopelessness to human politics and neglects implications for the more-than-human world, in particular those earth-others whose animality reveals a kinship between humanity and other species. In neglecting humanity’s relationships with other species, De La Torre himself ignores key systems of oppression and violence, which leaves unfulfilled a profound aspect of his own liberative ethics.

Second, attempts to remove futurity from eschatology have also been proposed. Kathryn Tanner (2000, 2001) is a prominent example of such an approach. In light of scientific projections for the future of the cosmos, Tanner (2001) argues for eschatology without futurity. She argues that: “what is required here is an account of a saving relationship with God that undercuts the religious importance of the question whether the world will end” (2001: 103–104). She argues that God maintains a relationship with the world regardless of whether the world exists. On this account, eternal life is an “unconditional, already realized possession” (2000: 233) yet the account fails to describe how this is the case, either in light of current violence and ecological destruction or with regard to how a relationship with a future non-existent world is possible. Moreover, she fails to explain how a relationship with an incarnated God is possible with a non-existent world. Relationships require an affirmation of the created embodiment of those with whom God relates. Similarly, Caputo (2015) argues for an eschatology of the living, prior to death. The grace of life is not at odds with “the temporality of our lives and the incredulity it induces about eternity,” he writes, but rather enhances life in the now and makes faith possible. Such is not a faith requiring doctrinal assent, but a recognition of the varied relationships we have in the present in light of embodied temporality. Caputo (2015) writes, “[I]t is almost amusing to counsel beings who live in time and can feel time rushing through their bodies to stop thinking about the future” (2015: 162). Here faith is an interrogative, carnal faith – in the world – and “a bodily affective feeling-for-the-world” (2015: 162). Even here, however, hope is strictly a human hope. Even if it is embodied human feeling toward the world, it is yet only a human feeling.

What is needed is an eschatology that recognizes our embodied connections to earth and other animals – one that recognizes and explores our own animality in evolutionary and ecological relations with other species – and yet maintains a sense of futurity. This might not be a futurity able to overcome cosmological outcomes, but neither is it an abdication of a hopeful future (albeit a limited future) nor a neglect of the moral obligations to overcome violence and oppression of marginalized humans and negated members of the more-than-human world (Sideris, 2003). To this end, the following section briefly sketches what such an approach might entail, in dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Merleau-Ponty and Eschatological Flesh

In a lecture titled “Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1988) states that “There is a kinship between the being of the earth and that of my body…This kinship extends to others, who appear to me as other bodies, to animals whom I understand as variants of my embodiment, and finally even to terrestrial bodies since I introduce them into the society of living bodies” (1988: 44–48). This kinship between species by virtue of the embodied flesh with which we perceive, encounter, and manifest the world is the locus of what Merleau-Ponty (1964) elsewhere calls the “ontological rehabilitation of the sensible” (1964: 167). While the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas for Christian theology have begun to be explored in important areas such as incarnation, ethics, notions of creation and ecotheology, few have explored the possibilities for such an account in eschatology. The embodied relationships between humans and other animals, and the haptic perception of earth-potentialities, appear to become disentangled when posed in the realm of eschatology. These variant strands, when viewed together in dialogue with ethological studies of other animals, can see a cohesive eschatology beginning to take shape. Eschatological time occurs and erupts within the relational connections made through the haptic fields of our sensory flesh. This manifests a world in which species may flourish by their own capacities as the animal (human or otherwise) embodies past, present, and future in the flesh.

Body and World

Arguing that perception of the world is neither the idealist account of internal consciousness as the ground of phenomena nor that objects are transparently given to us complete as in a purely empiricist vision, Merleau-Ponty argues that perception is an embodied, participatory activity that is relational in nature. The French phenomenologist opens his magnum opus on perception by stating that “existence should never be reduced to my bare awareness of existing, but that it should…include my incarnation in some nature and the possibility, at least, of a historical situation” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: xiv). He goes on to argue that such perception is a reflection that, contra Thiel and Griffiths, “does not withdraw from the world…it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: xv). This transcendence in connection with the world is how Merleau-Ponty understands Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity.

For Merleau-Ponty, “perception is always both passive and active, situational and practical, conditioned and free” (Carmen, 2008: 79). The relationship between the body and world entail that while the two may be distinguished, they are never wholly distinct. The world is a perceptual field of which the body is a part and aids in its manifestation. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues for the world’s pre-existence, but that such a pre-existent state cannot be seen or experienced and therefore cannot be a world as such, apart from the body. He argues that “The relations between things or aspects of things having always our body as their vehicle, the whole of nature is the setting of our own life, or our interlocutor in a sort of dialogue” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 373). In this sense a person is an “inter-sensory entity” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 370). This phenomenological approach to the body’s relationship to the world is not merely a descriptive enterprise of intersubjectivity. It is much more a reconfiguration of the world as an embodied perceptual field and a new ontology of species and the world. Carmen (2008) writes, “The body is not just a causal but a transcendental condition of perception, which is itself not just an inner subjective state, but a mode of being in the world” (2008: 82). However, as Anthony Fernandez (2015) has argued, this is a contaminated transcendental. It is contaminated because it is full of the contingency of the world. For eschatology this contingency is seen not only in the historical particularity of individual theological doctrines. It is seen most acutely when theology itself is narrated within the evolutionary context of the earth and the (non)eschatological future of the cosmos.

This contamination is the result of the body existing as part of the perceptual field and always interactive and connected with others. It is relational and plural. The body and world form a system comprised of a plurality of forces that is exemplified by a dialectics of connection and disconnection; striving for equilibrium but being overcome in the fecundity of its own livingness. The old dualisms of mind/body, subject/object, are overcome in the dialogical field of irreducibly plural bodies (Wilkerson, 2013). The plurality is not merely an exchange of species-specific interests or analogies, but is what enmeshes all bodies in a shared world and space that transcends the limitations of species and the demarcation of boundaries between the elevated human and the generalized, non-specific “animal.” This is what Merleau-Ponty calls the chiasm.

Chiastic Bodies

In his mature, yet incomplete work, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty develops his notion of chiastic flesh. Here dialogics embrace the tactile experience of rough and sleek, the active passivity of touching as always also being touched, and what he calls the “touching of the touch” such as when the right hand touches the left and experiences the irreducible plurality in a phenomenology of touch (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 133–134). There is a thickness of experiential flesh that portends the thickness of embodied encounter. “The thickness of the body, far from rivaling that of the world, is…the sole means I have to go unto the heart of things, by making myself a world and by making them flesh” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 135). This connection through the body is ontogenesis. It creates a world from the world that already exists and offers an invitation of communion through those who inhabit it and mutually enter in to the haptic life of the world. If the world is flesh, then our mode of being is what Merleau-Ponty (1968) calls the intertwining (1968: 136, 144). We are enmeshed as a part of a broader, richer world, wherein flesh becomes the mode of perception, knowledge, relationship, potential, and transcendence. Articulating the content of flesh is not a description of substances, such as soul and body, form and matter. Rather, Merleau-Ponty (1968) argues that flesh is an element in and of the world. It is the “formative medium of the subject and the object” (1968: 147). As such it is the element through which humans experience themselves, articulate their life; but it is also the medium that is the world and embraces the manifold species and lives within it, that reciprocally calls the narratives of elevation, hierarchy, and disconnection into question. It troubles human claims to independence from the rest of the earth and its inhabitants. It is through the ontogenesis of our human selves as animal selves in evolutionary connection with the plurality of species, of which we are but one part, that we become reconfigured in the perceptual field of our intertwined flesh.

In his lectures at the Collège de France (later posthumously published as Nature), Merleau-Ponty (2003) notes that in terms of evolution, “the human entered silently.” There was no rupture that clearly denotes the ontogenesis of the mind of the modern human (2003: 267). Louise Westling (2010) argues that in affirming the broad evolutionary view, the interconnections and continuities between humans and other animal species in the embodied world of flesh manifest the relational intersubjectivities present in descriptions of the perceptual field. Animals are not “poor in world” as Heidegger affirmed but rather are co-sharers and shapers of the common world of the flesh through which we come to be (Westling, 2014; Tonner, 2011). There is a continuum of flesh, mind, and expression that connects humans as one species of animal to the myriad others. “A continuum [implies] that many kinds of consciousness and perception evolved over the hundreds of millennia of life’s emergence. Human sentience would then be understood as one of many kinds of animal awareness” (Westling, 2014: 71). Giorgio Agamben (2004) notes something similar when he writes that “the caesura between the human and the animal passes first of all within [the human]” (2004: 16). The “anthropological machine of humanism” is a denial of the nature of evolved flesh (Agamben, 2004: 29). Westling (2014) picks up this stream of thought and writes, “Our very bodies attest to the impossibility of a world without animals and to our own biological enmeshment within and inclusion on a continuum with other creatures” (2014: 72). We are intertwined with other species, and they with us. This is also true with the eschatological temporality of our flesh.

Enfleshed Temporal Eschatology

The remaining question is what, if anything, does this intertwining of our animality and chiastic notions of flesh speak to eschatology? Clues may be derived from Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on temporality. In Phenomenology of Perception (2002) he argues that “the synthesis of horizons” between species “is essentially a temporal process.” It is neither purely passive nor active in relation to time. He writes (2002), “Through my perceptual field, with its spatial horizons, I am present to my surrounding, I co-exist with all the other landscapes which stretch out beyond it, and all these perspectives together form a single temporal wave, one of the world’s instants…I possess the remote past, as I do the future, therefore, only in principle, and my life is slipping away from me on all sides and is circumscribed by impersonal zones” (2002: 385–386). Time is not simply a succession of punctiliar instances we label the present and it is not merely a psychological understanding of time as future anticipation or past recollection, as Augustine (1997) posited. Rather, time is an embodied presence to the world and in the world. “What is past or future for me is present in the world” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 478).

Temporality, for Merleau-Ponty (2002), is a spatial phenomenon (2002: 482). It is spatial because it is connected to the movements of the body and the synergies enacted in the chiasm. Monika Langer (1989) has argued that “perception…requires the synthesis of the body itself; and this synthesis involves a spatiality and motility whose existence implies that of time” (1989: 123). Movement in the world through the fleshly enactment of our animal bodies reconfigures the perception of time’s passing and locates it in the shared corporeality of our evolved selves. As Langer (1989) notes, “True temporality is not something which we conceive or observe; it is the process of living our lives and there is a sense in which our present is not only this moment…but our entire life” (1989: 127). The perceptual field becomes an ontology of embodied presence in which we learn the interrelation of temporal dimensions. Merleau-Ponty (2002) argues that “What is past or future for me is present in the world” (2002: 478). He says the future is a “brooding presence” moving to meet us, “like a storm on the horizon” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 478). In either recalling the past or anticipating the future, we reopen time in actuality because these activities are embodied and not the fruit of an incorporeal psychology (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 483).

In doing so, it is in the intertwined temporality of evolved flesh that eschatology can be newly understood. In traditional Christian thought, the kingdom of God is a spatial metaphor denoting a particular mode of life that features ethical approaches to life and newfound relational modes of being that can be construed in Merleau-Ponty’s thought as intersubjectivities. These include the potentialities of corporeal realities through notions of resurrection and new bodies found in the Christian scriptures. What I am arguing is not a facile reading of Merleau-Ponty in an uncritical fusion of horizons with the New Testament. Rather, I submit that Merleau-Ponty’s insights to our chiastic bodies illumines how these symbols can be reconfigured in light of our evolutionary selves, our continuum with other animal species, and the potential of these bodies to have a future in a universe with a specific end. Resurrection is not simply a metaphor, but rather is a participatory ontological reality given by our embodied encounters with the flesh of the world.

To this end, the phenomenological category of enactivism might be useful. Gregor Etzelmüller (2016) describes enactivism in the following way: “Every living organism not only adapts to the environment, but also contributes to the shape of the environment – thus, in a sense creating it” (2016: 207). Evan Thompson (2007) has argued that a key feature of enactivism is that “a cognitive being’s world is not a prespecified, external realm, represented internally by its brain, but a relational domain enacted or brought forth by that being’s autonomous agency and mode of coupling with the environment” (2007: 13). While there are accounts of “radical enactivism” which seek to deny internal or noncorporeal states altogether, what I am advocating for is a sort of soft-enactivism that describes the dialogical interactions between an organism and its context (Roberts, 2018; De Jesus, 2014, 2016). Such a soft account will de-emphasize Thompson’s categories of autonomy as problematic and emphasize affective embodiment. The result is that the dialogic envisaged here shapes both the organism and its surrounding ecosystem in ways that shape new potentialities for both (Massumi, 2015). In short, it creates a future. Such a future cannot simply be a negation of the evolved potentialities of our animal flesh. Christ’s flesh, too, was evolved animal flesh – flesh in process. Rather, it must work with both animal bodies and other earth-bodies. As such, certain futures might not be possible. Shaun Gallagher (2011) writes, “It is not simply the fact that the size and shape of the thing, plus the fact that I can reach it with this hand, constitute the ‘grabbiness’ of the thing – if my pain prevents or slows my reach, then it is not so grabby” (2011: 11). Given the pain and finitude of our animal selves and our temporality, some futures (i.e. futures posited in eternity) may not be graspable. However, enactivism does allow us to have a future along with other animals and other earth-bodies. This future will likewise be finite, but it maintains an eschatological future that cannot simply be understood as the kingdom that is fully realized in the present.

Our intertwined animality reveals a new mode of humanity, not only in an altered ethics, but a new spirituality for the human as recognizing our inextricable connectedness to other species and the creative connections which may yet be forged. The embodied field of our haptic being sets us in a broader and more complex world that bears future potentialities within its very flesh. This future potentiality involves the flattening of a hierarchical relationship with other animals that has typified not only Western anthropomorphism, but also our images of God. Eschatology is the enfleshed possibilities of myriad and distinct bodies where God is the dynamism immanent in the flesh of the world without being coextensive with it. This flattening of both hierarchies elevating the human and humanizing the divine means that the enactment and lived realities of the eschatologically spatialized future are possibly manifest in the natural lives of the diverse species found in Darwin’s tree and separate from the human. Each species and each animal in a given species manifests the potencies of eschatological living within its flesh and amidst the flesh of the world. Eternity is a predicate of disembodied rational subjectivity. Eschatology is a predicate of evolved flesh in which the spirit of life finds new and changing relational potentialities. Enactivism may offer a conceptual category to make sense of this.