Panentheism: Ontology of the Future, or Poetics?

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• PanentheismOntology of the Future, or Poetics?
• Daniel T. O'Hara (bio)

"Panentheism" in theology is the belief in the co-inherence of God and the world. However else God and the world are defined, it is this relationship that distinguishes it. Neither absolute transcendence nor total immanence describes God vis-à-vis the world or the world vis-à-vis God. Similarly, the world, while emerging or emanating from God, is not God's mere reflective mirror, but instead, by virtue of its divine inherence, acts as provocation to divine development. Unlike, say, Gnosticism, in which there are two or more divinities—the original alien god whose plenum or extended presence contains the God of this world (or Demiurge) who constructs it, and many archons or minor administrative, largely evil heads of the cosmos—panentheism argues for all beings as gods-in-potential expression. The violence of all this onto-theological procession, as you might imagine, is internalized and externalized, leaving no being long at peace before a new event of co-inherence arises to produce a new phase.

I became interested in panentheism in part as a response to my reading of Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future, a provocative 2021 book by Zahi Zalloua, and Cormac McCarthy's award-winning Border Trilogy of the 1990s (All the Pretty Horses [1992], The Crossing [1994], and Cities of the Plain [1998]), which led me into reading McCarthy's entire work and that of many of his scholarly commentators. McCarthy has long been seen, at least partially, as putting Gnosticism to use in generating the mythological dimensions of his fictions, and given the superb promptings of Zalloua's book (is our species already in an inchoate posthuman state?), I became hooked. The term panentheism itself I first observed in Steven Frye's introduction to his edited collection of critical essays on McCarthy in the Cambridge Companion Series (2013).

Zalloua introduces the reader to the emergent ontologies of cyborgs, animals, material objects, and Black Being (with a line through the second [End Page 174] term). All of these topics are read by their theoretical champions as being at the center of their critical movements, all of which are components of a new materialism and a radical, often racially informed polemical critique of all that has been in the name of what must become, in this present moment of universal crisis. The interface between machine and human, animal and human, real-world objects and humans, and Afro-pessimists and conventional left-wing ideologues (who are for only a piecemeal peaceful change) forecast what has already emerged elsewhere and is now pervading American society: a quest to move beyond all inherited and too-well understood material and cultural realities. Traditional academic humanism, like the rest of society, is being exposed to increasingly violent individual and small-group insurrections against the very fabric of everyday life.

This is for me where McCarthy comes in. His entire corpus deals with earlier occasions of a similar kind in the South and the Southwest of the United States. The successful film versions of his award-winning novels, No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006), as well as his often-cited masterpiece, Blood Meridian (1985), have pervasively disseminated the exceptional violence of this time of ours, which leads to a revelation of a "strange equality" in the Southwest desert on both sides of the border. Here is a passage to the point:

In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships.

This "strange equality" is an "optical democracy," a perfect political form for the postmodern and perhaps posthuman society of the spectacle. The echoes of Emerson's "transparent eye-ball" passage in "Nature" come easily to my revisionary...