Holy Fools in the Anthropocene

Being Human in the Time Between Worlds

Increasingly, I've been feeling myself summoned by the question of what the human being ought to be doing here on Earth. Not just what we are doing (that catalog of follies writes itself daily in headlines both apocalyptic and banal), but what we ought to be doing. I think the problem is that in past periods of human history, in the ancient and medieval worlds, humans in not only the European context but on every continent felt that we were intended to be doing something. We felt intended by some kind of creator or creators. We were characters in a cosmic drama whose playwright had at least sketched out our motivations, if not our every line.

In the modern period, we increasingly came to feel, beginning in Europe and the West, as though there was no larger intention for our species. The universe became a clockwork orange: mechanical and somehow perverse in its meaninglessness. Through some non-miraculous process, the human being emerged as an apex predator—a clever ape, a primate in pants with an ancestral lineage that struggled to survive and carved out a niche. For now, the human being's niche is the entirety of the planet. But we are so devastatingly good at niche construction that we've turned it into niche destruction. We're not just fouling the nest—we're setting it ablaze while still sitting in it, arguing about the temperature of the flames.

In the modern period, the idea of divine stewardship was lost, thrown out with the bathwater of superstition, though perhaps it was the baby all along. To stick to the biblical tradition for a moment (though we can and should explore this from other points of view, eg, the Taoist sage who knows when to act and when to yield, the Buddhist bodhisattva who vows to save all beings), human beings are supposedly given dominion over the Earth, but we're really intended to be stewards. This is because the Earth belongs to the divine, and we human beings, as creatures made in the image of the divine but not in fact divine (or at least not yet divine: theosis whispers as a possibility), have a responsibility to take care of this world. Yes, it's our home for now, but it's also been entrusted to us by its creator. We were meant to be gardeners, not strip-miners.

Having lost that perspective in this modern individualistic, self-interested age of ours—this age of the sovereign self, the buffered self, the self-as-brand—creation becomes something that we do. Creation of meaning, creation of value, creation of worlds, creation perhaps even of consciousness through artificial general or super intelligence. And won't that be a delicious irony? Creating minds that might judge us as harshly as we've judged our own creator? This represents literally an epochal shift from the ancient view of being intended by a creator to inhabit the earth in a particular way, to the modern view of self-invention and self-intending. We are here to do whatever we want to do. That gives us a lot of freedom—terrible, vertiginous freedom. And as Nietzsche pointed out with his characteristic mix of exultation and dread, we're now faced with this task of becoming worthy of the murder of God. Only other gods could kill God.

That's what we are taking on in the Anthropocene: becoming the makers or the unmakers of worlds. This is a responsibility that we don't yet have the wisdom to adequately live up to. We're cosmic toddlers with nuclear weapons, AI algorithms, and gene-editing tools. I think we're in a moment in history where we have an opportunity for a learning curve, but it's going to be a rocky road for a while yet. In an important sense, the catastrophe has already occurred. It is too late. Look around: the sixth mass extinction, climate chaos, the meaning crisis, social and political upheaval. But the takeaway is not hopelessness or nihilism, but learning to live virtuously in a wounded world.

I think there is a synthesis position here between the old forms of divine dispensation (and even for the non-theistic traditions, a kind of Tao or Dharma implicit in the nature of things that gave us a sense of meaning and purpose—like "this is what we ought to be doing as human beings") with an external locus of that purpose, and the modern period where we're just self-creating individuals spinning our own webs of significance in an indifferent void.

I think the synthesis would be the process of theosis: the human being becoming conscious of their role as sub-creators. The synthesis is that we don't think of ourselves as prime creators (that way lies only more hubris), but as participant creators with God, or perhaps better, as participants in God's own becoming. God the intimidating Father became God the intimate Son who died: the World Parent was born into its creation and died with the creatures composing that creation as a fellow sufferer who understands (this is process theology's great insight: God changes with us, suffers with us, becomes with us.) The Holy Spirit, then…well, that's us.

We establish the eternal life of the Spirit of God by building this bridge between absent father and messiah child, by holding the tension between the mystery and the revelation, between spirit and matter, between the One and the Many. The human being is the being between God and the world, the being between the past and the possible. We are the μεταξύ—Plato's term for the in-between, but also the alchemical mixing bowl where divine and earthly ingredients combine. We are the birth canal through which the future emerges from the womb of the past, the rope that Nietzsche spoke of stretched over an abyss.

The thing about spirit—the Holy Spirit, the ruach (רוּחַ), the pneuma (πνεῦμα), breath that animates—is that what feels like falling to the unawakened spirit is flight for the awakened spirit. Sin is the source of our salvation—not because we should seek it, but because it's the crack where the light gets in, the wound that teaches compassion. Sin is the curl in creation that makes the whole world go round, the necessary deviation from perfection that allows for growth, change, novelty. We are not here to control or cure it through some cosmic extermination program. We are here to return it to source, to complete the circuit, to close the loop that was always meant to spiral.

The only way to heal the world is love—not sentimental Hallmark love, but the fierce and tender love that sees sin clearly and embraces anyway, the love that knows how to grieve what's lost while nurturing what might yet bloom. This is our calling in this liminal moment: to be (meta)physicians of the soul in an age of spiritual emergency, to be midwives of the possible in an age of planetary collapse, to be holy fools who know that the way up and the way down are one and the same.