The Gravity of Love

An excerpt from “The Gravity of Love: Theopoetic Multiplicity and Postmodern Sacramentality” by Laurel C. Schneider, delivered in public Convocation at Chicago Theological Seminary, September 15, 2010

I understood love to be the very gravity holding each leaf, each cell, this earthy star together.

-Joy Harjo

…During my sabbatical, one of my research efforts, among others, has been the theological implications of gravity.  It is part of a larger project that I am working on, one that I hope to find the writing time to finish, entitled Promiscuous Incarnation.  I've played with the idea of gravity for a long time, ever since hearing an astrophysicist colleague tell me that gravity is the most mysterious, least understood, and yet simplest character of the cosmos.   Playfully I thought: Eureka! Deus qua gravitas.

But there is more to the problem of gravity than just another cool metaphor for the divine.  There are ontological implications that challenge the whole philosophical basis upon which divine ultimacy in Christian doctrine has been characterized, that is if gravity reveals something constitutive of reality, and so of divinity.

For one thing, as we already know, gravity is the basis of falling.  It is, we might say, the principle of falling, of a fall, the Fall.  This is rich, is it not?  God falls, is falling, is the very character of the Fall.  What a queer notion this is; what could it offer to Christian theology?

But there is even more than that here, more than a queer reading of the Fall – although god bless us there’s a great deal to do there.  More than a queer reading of the Fall, there is the problem of thinking about falling, thinking gravitationally, of thinking theologically in such a way that the implications of such an apparently simple thing as bodies and their constitutive attractions can emerge.
It is one thing to say, there are bodies and they are for some reason pulled into orbit with each other, attracted to each other, as though attraction comes after the fact, and is accidental to, their prior existence as bodies.  It is another thing altogether to say that bodies are a priori constituted and made possible, in themselves and in relation, by mutual attraction.  Familiar laws of linear logic begin to pixilate here: bodies attracted to bodies in order to be bodies, bodies composed of attraction to bodies prior to being bodies.  A domino theory of linear motion just doesn’t work here.  Nor, dare I say, does any classical notion of unilateral divine potency and creativity which rely on such Aristotelian notions of motion.  Don’t get me wrong, I am sympathetic to those dominant notions about God, they completely avoid the messy complications and contradictions of actual bodies by relegating them to the status of Other-than-God.  But taking bodies seriously as theological source material for understanding divinity is, I venture to say, a requirement for Christians, given that little notion we bandy about called “incarnation.”

So what sort of logic can help to really take incarnation seriously, if incarnation requires us to take bodies seriously, and taking bodies seriously disrupts foundational presuppositions about divine immutability, independence, sovereignty, and aseity?  Many of you already know that I think that a “logic of multiplicity,” as I call it, can help at this impasse.  But although I have worked on some salient features of divine multiplicity, doing so has led me deeper into the problem of the body, especially to the philosophical challenge of reasoning that privileges the character and qualities of bodies, namely their transience, fluidity, excess, porosity and incompletion: Their gestural quality, their humor, their prosaic thereness.   Their constitutive multiplicity, in other words.  What does reasoning that privileges those qualities look or sound like?  Incarnational theology that takes actual bodies seriously, I argue, requires a mode of reasoning that does not dismiss such qualities as problems to be overcome, or eliminated.

Some poetry is the trace of such reasoning.  Such poetry invites the philosopher theologian to think in a mode of gravity.  Such poetry understands itself to be poesis, the stuff of creation, by which I mean it recognizes, with Harjo, that “every day is a reenactment of the creation story.  We emerge from the dense unspeakable material, through the shimmering power of dreaming stuff.”  Singing weaves the world.  And, as I have already indicated, the nations of the Eastern Woodlands in this continent have always understood that stories, and bodies, and gravity are prerequisites of creation, putting the lie to ex nihilo….