No Werewolves in Theology? Final

NO WEREWOLVES IN THEOLOGY?
TRANSCENDENCE, IMMANENCE,
AND BECOMING-DIVINE IN
GILLES DELEUZE
JACOB HOLSINGER SHERMAN
The world is deep: deeper than day can comprehend. . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche
1
Is there a mysticism of the Event, and if so, what does it look like? Does such
a mysticism take us out of the world of bodies and politics, of relationships
and locales, or does it somehow give these things back to us? Surprisingly,
these questions have recently been raised by revisionist studies of the
thought of Gilles Deleuze. Radicalizing and improving upon the earlier
critiques of Alain Badiou and Slavoj iek, Peter Hallward argues that there
is a theophanic philosophy or spiritual theology waiting to be extracted from
Deleuzes writings. For Hallward, this theological element contaminates and
cripples the political and social value of Deleuzes work, transforming him
from a thinker of materiality, corporeality, and relation into a theorist of
contemplative and immaterial abstraction,
2
a philosopher who is most
appropriately read as a spiritual or subtractive thinker, a thinker preoccupied
with the mechanics of dis-embodiment and de-materialization.
3
Hallward
claims that the centre of Deleuzes project is a process philosophy that
equates being simply with creativity and issues in a kind of philosophical
mysticism that dismantles the daylight world in order to nd union with the
dark eternal ux of pure becoming, casting aside all our relations, bodies,
projects, and political aspirations.
4
Hallwards reading of Deleuze seems to demand a theological response. In
what follows, I rst introduce Hallwards critical reading of Deleuze, andthen
Jacob Holsinger Sherman
Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, CB2 3AP, UK
jps68@cam.ac.uk
Modern Theology 25:1 January 2009
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)
ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
2008 The Author
Journal compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
weigh it in light of Deleuzes own writings, including Deleuze and Guattaris
important Plateau 10 on becoming. My response to Hallward includes both
applause and critique. Hallward is to be congratulated both for showing
clearly the presence of a crypto-theological becoming-divine throughout
Deleuzes texts, and for exposing the dualistic, anti-relational, and quietist
tendencies in these same writings. However, where Hallward reads these
latter invidious tendencies as a consequence of the former mystical elements,
I want us to be more discerning still. Deleuze intends his divine line of ight to
deliver the world from a reductive naturalism to a more robust, ecstatic, even
enchantedmaterialism. Ultimately, Deleuze fails at this project, but rather than
tracing Deleuzes shortcomings to his irtations with theology, as Hallward
does, I argue that these aporias stem from the peculiar theology of absolute
immanence that Deleuze develops. It is Deleuzes immanentism and not his
theophanic mysticism that nally vitiates so much of his thought. We can,
therefore, preserve what is most valuable in Deleuzehis project of cosmo-
logical and metaphysical re-enchantmentnot by expunging the theological
element in his thought, but by completing it in the direction of transcendence.
Drawing attention to a remarkable mid-century essay by Thomas Merton,
I argue that where Hallward faults Deleuze for his contemplative and
theophanic elements, Merton suggests that it is only by fully and adequately
engaging these through a recuperation of transcendence that the world of
bodies, polities, and relations can be saved. Hallward concludes his study by
dismissing his subjectthose of us who still seek to change our world and to
empower its inhabitants will needtolookfor our inspirationelsewhere,but
it may be that by laying bare the theophanic and contemplative Deleuze,
Hallward has instead pointed the way to his redemption.
5
Transguring Deleuze
Peter Hallward wants us to think differently about Deleuzes legacy and
importance. Deleuze is regularly regarded as the liberator of an anarchic
multiplicity of desires, a materialist champion of embodied minoritarian
politics, and an atheist of the most rigorous variety, but this view is increas-
ingly contested. Badiou began the trend in The Clamor of Being by calling into
question Deleuzes commitment to multiplicity, arguing that Deleuze in fact
subordinates the Many to the One in a Parmenidean fashion: Deleuzes
fundamental problem is most certainly not to liberate the multiple but to
submit thinking to a renewed concept of the One.
6
Deleuze is thus rendered
a monistic, aristocratic, and even ascetic philosopher whose fundamental
political posture is a Stoic amor fati. Less cautious and still more contentious,
ieks Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences repeats many of
Badious arguments but suggests even more strongly that Deleuze is trapped
in a shuttle between idealism and materialismbetween The Logic of Sense,
on the one hand, and Anti-Oedipus, on the other. Moreover, iek holds that
2 Jacob Holsinger Sherman
2008 The Author
when Deleuze is at his most materialist he is also least revolutionary, even
going so far as to accuse the materialist Deleuze of being the ideologist of
late capitalism.
7
Both Badiou and ieks critiques require that they drive a wedge between
Deleuzes early texts and the later co-authored material with Flix Guattari.
These latter writings are inevitably treated as some sort of contamination
(guatarrization) of the Deleuzean oeuvre, which is not in any way directly
political.
8
Hallwards study, by contrast, is far more powerful than either of
its predecessors because it pays much closer attention to the entirety of
Deleuzes published material. Although ultimately his judgment is going to
be very negative, Hallward takes Deleuze seriously before dismissing him.
He carefully presents Deleuze in his own words and draws attention to the
novel concepts and philosophical creatings that are the heart of Deleuzes
project. In doing so, Hallward nds a consistency throughout Deleuzes
corpus that even Deleuzeans have previously found elusive.
For our purposes, the essence of Hallwards account is discernible in three
themes. First, and most importantly, at the centre of Deleuzes thought is the
claim that there is nothing but creativity. Being just is creativity. This is the
main idea that informs virtually all of [Deleuzes] work.
9
In other words,
Deleuze is fundamentally a process philosopher. His is a universe of verbs
and adverbs rather than nouns and adjectives, of the innitive rather than the
indicative. Because creativity is what there is and it creates all that there can
be, Deleuzes is also a philosophy of singular afrmation.
10
Creativity pro-
duces difference and this difference is not merely the relative distinction of
one thing from anotherthis would collapse into a negative understanding
of difference, e.g., I am this rather than thatbut is instead a positive power
of pure production. What is constant in the universe is only this continual
production of novelty.
Second, and closely allied to this overwhelming emphasis on process and
creativity, is the role Deleuze assigns to the twin concepts of actuality and
virtuality. Essentially, Hallward maps these terms to Spinozas natura naturata
and natura naturans. We mustnt think virtual reality in the way that our
digital culture does, as a shadowy realm of fantasy, games, and escape.
Rather, the virtual, as Deleuze so often says, is real without being actual,
ideal without being abstract. For Deleuze, following Bergson, virtuality is
dynamic, open, and robust, where actuality is passive, determinate, and
ephemeral. The actual may be what is produced, but the virtual is what is
productive. The virtual secretes actuality as if it were a hair, a nail, or a web.
In short, the actual is constituted, the virtual alone is constituent. This is the
key to Deleuzes whole ontology of creation: the one is creative, the other created;
the one composes, the other is composed.
11
All of the many dualisms in
Deleuzes thoughtterritorialized and deterritorialized, molar and molecu-
lar, movement image and time image, arboreal and rhizomaticthese all
name vectors that diverge inasmuch as they aim at either the virtual or the
Becoming-Night, Becoming-Divine 3
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actual, the creating or the created.
12
It is only the creating that differs or
produces, and it is only the creating as such that can claim to be properly
new. Hallward is emphatic. This is perhaps the most important distinction
in the whole of Deleuzes work.
13
Hallward demonstrates, thirdly, the way that Deleuze works the concepts
of creativity, virtuality, and actuality into a cosmological scheme of exitus and
reditus with neoplatonic and theophanic overtones. Hallward structures his
chapters according to this scheme of procession and return. Thus chapters
one through three describe the way that virtual creatings condense into the
static actuality of bodies, persons, and matters of fact [etats des choses], while
chapters four through six explore the counter-actualisation and creative sub-
traction that frees the virtual event conned within creatural actuality. It is in
the process of returnwhen the innite distribution of creativity in the
crowned anarchy of all beings reaches its terminus and abruptly changes
directiononly then, when thought reaches this extremity, does the essen-
tially mystical or contemplative nature of Deleuzes project become clear. So
Deleuze describes:
Asingle and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single
andsame Oceanfor all the drops, a single clamor of Beingfor all beings: on
the condition that each being, each drop and each voice has reached the
state of excessin other words, the difference which displaces and dis-
guises themand, in turning upon its mobile cusp, causes themto return.
14
Trading heavily on comparisons with theophanic thinkers such as Al-
Ghazali, Meister Eckhart, and John Scotus Eriugena, and making the most of
Deleuzes indebtedness to the likes of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Bergson, Hall-
ward argues that this aspiration towards union with the creative heart of the
cosmos animates and determines almost the entirety of Deleuzes work. Thus
Hallward points to a continuation in Deleuzes project of Bergsons last work
in which he envisions the mystic as a guarantor of philosophys highest
aspirations and a carrier of the creative lan. As Deleuze describes it, At the
limit, it is the mystic who plays with the whole of creation, who invents an
expression of it whose adequacy increases with its dynamism.
15
For Bergson, the ultimate end of mysticism is the establishment of a
contact, consequently of a partial coincidence, with the creative effort which
life itself manifests. This effort is of God, if it is not God himself.
16
Deleuze,
however, on Hallwards reading, will go even farther along this line than
Bergson, claiming that philosophy itself has a properly mystical vocation.
17
For it is the philosopher, even more than the artist, who counter-effectuates
the virtual Event and so establishes an unmediated connection to the divine
energy that sweeps through the universe.
18
The language is clearly exalted but rather than amplifying our regard for
the world, Hallward argues that in connecting God and creation, Deleuze
elevates the former and voids the latter.
19
For Hallward this is evident in the
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way that Deleuze establishes a relationship of nonreciprocal dependence
between the actual and the virtual, the upshot of which is that the actual
inevitably loses all signicance. So, for example, when Deleuze contends that
the real task of creation is always to extract an Event from things and
beings, this extraction can only be understood, says Hallward, in terms of a
process which will eventually require the evacuation of those same things.
20
The Event is freed from actuality becoming the ash of a sword or a smile
without a cat, as Deleuze often says, or it is like an episode from Plutarchs
moralia: Aman plucked a nightingale and, nding but little to eat, said: You
are just a voice and nothing more.
21
We have already seen where Hallwards understanding of this leads. The
creatural qua creatural is unredeemable. . . . There is nothing properly cre-
ative to be salvaged from the actual or creatural per se, other than the energy
released by its own dissipation.
22
Because the actual must be dismantled in
order to release the virtual Event, Deleuzes philosophy is nothing other than
a machine for the dissipation of the actual, not the solidication of materials
but their dematerialization, not the preservation of embodiment but an inten-
sive disembodiment.
23
It is hard to know what to make of this coincidence of apotheosis and
virtual apocalypse that Hallward claims is a rigorous consequence of
Deleuzes logic. Certainly, after Hallward, we cannot fail to recognize the
prevalence of religious, mystical, and contemplative themes throughout
the Deleuzean corpus, but I think it fair to say that Hallward exaggerates the
extent to which these particular themes necessarily lead Deleuze and his
readers in acosmic, apolitical, and incorporeal directions. Of course, Hall-
wards judgments are not without reason. If virtuality and actuality are as
starkly opposed in Deleuze as Hallward claims, then political strategies that
depend on more resilient forms of cohesion, on more principled forms of
commitment, on more integrated forms of coordination, [or] on more resis-
tant forms of defence,
24
are admittedly difcult to envision and sustain. But
Hallward seems to overstate the stridency of this dualism. That is to say, while
Deleuze does at times pose his alternatives (including virtual and actual) in a
rigid manner, at other times he explicitly and irenically withdraws from this
absolutism. Hallward produces a kind of Deleuze-hobgoblin only by reading
a foolish consistency into a mind that was always sharp, but equally rest-
less, experimental, and revisable.
25
For Deleuze, as for Whitehead, it is more
important for a proposition to be interesting than true (philosophy is a
toolkit) and one way to read Deleuzes occasional extremism is to see it as a
machine for producing this interest.
26
At least as often as he rhetorically divides them, Deleuze connects the
virtual and the actual at the level of ontology so that the one never appears
apart from its liaison with the other. As Deleuze writes, The plane of imma-
nence includes both the virtual and its actualization simultaneously, without
there being any assignable limit between the two.
27
This seems to render
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virtual and actual as coexistent termini on a unied continuum, both ends of
which always accompany singularities in their intensive adventures. The
virtual is the multiplicitous whole that always exceeds but never abandons
the actual. Moreover, there can be no dreams of pure virtual existence for we
cannot create concepts and Events while resting in virtuality, but must
instead rub up against the stubborn fact of actuality. The virtual that we
release by counter-effectuating the actual is no longer the aboriginal chaotic
virtual that preceded actualization but the chaoid Event that has drawn a
measure of consistency from its sojourn in the actual.
28
Indeed, already in
Difference and Repetition it is only and always something in the worlda
fundamental encounterthat forces us to think, to form concepts, and thus
frees us to draw lines of ight.
The body is the irreducible vehicle for such encounters and this is why
Deleuze never renounces his project of transcendental empiricism. Again and
again, he says, we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do,
in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into
composition with other affects, with the affects of another body.
29
Deleuzes
entire project is bound up with this ideal of embodied experimental inquiry,
of philosophy as an integral way of life, but the key here is what Deleuze
means by life, body, and world. He writes:
We must believe in the body, but as in the germ of life, the seed which
splits open the paving stones, which has been preserved and lives on in
the holy shroud or the mummys bandages, and which bears witness to
life, in this world as it is. We need an ethic or a faith, which makes fools
laugh; it is not a need to believe in something else, but a need to believe
in this world, of which fools are a part.
30
What Hallward sees as Deleuzes ight out of this world is not a ight from
reality but a rejection of the way we habitually abstract ourselves, bodies, and
thoughts from the dynamic nonorganic life that is the essence of the cosmos.
If, in Deleuzes writings, the world occasionally seems only t to be evacu-
ated, it is in such cases only because that world is an abstraction of our own
making, as James, Bergson, and Whitehead all knew. We cannot understand
his apparent ight from the world unless we see it in the context of Deleuze
proposing an alternative process cosmology. What Deleuze wants to reject is
the misplaced concreteness to which the carelessness of custom and the
demands of survival have habituated us. In its place he would offer a robust,
immanent re-enchantment without supernaturalism. And yet, even here,
Deleuze cannot be nally successful. It is certainly true that, for Deleuze, the
virtual is not hierarchically above the actual in a neoplatonic manner but
exists as a penumbral presence around the surface of the actual like the Stoic
incorporeal or the smile of the Cheshire cat. However, precisely because this
virtual is entirely immanent it must nally unravel the actual with which it is
always hopelessly entangled. This aporetic relation of virtual to actual is thus
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not a result of Deleuzes theophanic and contemplative interests, but rather
stems from the entirely immanent ways that theology and re-enchantment
are deployed his thought.
Becoming-Divine
Rather than continuing to move back and forth at will throughout Deleuzes
many writings, let us consider this problematic in light of a single text. In
particular, I want to attend to Deleuze and Guattaris important essay on
becoming, Plateau 10 in A Thousand Plateaus. This account of becoming is in
keeping with Deleuzes radically processive viewof the universe. It is becom-
ings, not beings, that interest Deleuze and Guattari, but here our English is a
little misleading. When they speak of a becoming, they do not employ a
gerund but instead nominalize the innitive (un devenir) in a way unavailable
to Anglophones. For Deleuze and Guattari, this nominalization of the inni-
tive plays a very specic function. They explain, the verb in the innitive is
in no way indeterminate with respect to time; it expresses the oating non-
pulsed time proper to Aeon, in other words, the time of the pure event or of
becoming.
31
To speak of a becoming (un devenir), therefore, is to speak on the
virtual plane of sheer afrmation, movement, and intensity. These becomings
are verbal and dynamic: The wolf is not fundamentally a characteristic or a
certain number of characteristics; it is a wolng.
32
More than merely
dynamic, becoming always involves a block, a pack, a multiplicity. For
Deleuze, there is no agent of becoming behind the event of becoming. A wolf
stalking its prey at dusk should not be written merely as an animal-stalking
but must instead include an entire assemblage of becoming: This should be
read without a pause: the animal-stalks-at-ve-oclock.
33
This ontology of the Event undergirds Deleuze and Guattaris account of
how we ought to embark on our own adventures of becoming-animal,
-woman, -child, -molecular. These becomings seem impossible: how can a
human become-animal, especially if we refuse to speak in terms of metaphor,
resemblance, and imitation? Deleuze and Guattari are clear, however, that
such becomings are perfectly real. But, they ask, which reality is at issue
here?
34
Becoming-animal does not mean really transforming the human
into an animal, certainly not into those animals already conned by the
categories genus and species, and the boundaries of liation and descent. We
must switch ontological registers. What is real is the becoming itself, the
block of becoming, not the supposedly xed terms through which that which
becomes passes.
35
In a processive universe, becoming involves the inaugu-
ration of relationships that are not mediated through language and subjec-
tivity, relationships of intensity and symbiosis, proximity and alliance.
Becoming is relational, not representational; it establishes lines of force that
run between terms and beneath identiable boundaries. And so we are
encouraged to act: Schizoanalysis, or pragmatics, has no other meaning:
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Make a rhizome. But you dont know what you can make a rhizome with,
you dont know which subterranean stem is effectively going to make a
rhizome, or enter a becoming, people your desert. So experiment.
36
To establish these relations is always precarious, for whereas representation
occurs within the safe walls of an inviolate subjectivity, becoming only oper-
ates by risk, danger, the throw of the dice, and contagion. This is not mimesis
but methexis, not imitation but the event of participation. One becomes only
by sinking into the undulations of the plane of immanence. The painter and
musician do not imitate the animal, they become-animal at the same time as
the animal becomes what they willed at the deepest level of their concord with
Nature.
37
Although becoming establishes relationships, these are not rela-
tionships of pity or sympathy or affection that can be entertained from within
subjectivity. We are dealing with relations of force. It is within us that the
animal bares its teeth . . . or the ower opens its petals; but this is done by
corpuscular emission, by molecular proximity, and not by the imitation of a
subject or a proportionality of form.
38
Becoming violates subjectivity and
dissembles forms; it forces one to swallow the heart of the world and explode
with the beating of its cosmic tempo. When the rat bares its teeth in the poet
Hofmannsthal, this is not the animal acting upon the man, nor the man
feeling for the animal, but the Event of being itself jeopardizing, transform-
ing, and relating both rat and man.
It is a composition of speeds and affects involving entirely different
individuals, a symbiosis; it makes the rat become a thought, a feverish
thought in the man, at the same time as the man becomes a rat gnashing its
teeth in its death throes. The rat and the man are in no way the same thing,
but Being expresses themboth in a single meaning in a language that is no
longer that of words, in a matter that is no longer that of forms, in an
affectability that is no longer that of subjects. Unnatural participation.
39
We can already discern a vector to these becomings, like a great wave that
sweeps us up in endless transformations until it crashes with the force
of Nature itself. Becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-animal,
-vegetable, or mineral, becomings-molecular, becomings-particles. . . .
What are they all rushing toward? Without a doubt, toward becoming-
imperceptible. The imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming, its
cosmic formula.
40
In becoming-imperceptible, one unites with the cosmos
itself. This is the plane of consistency, the intersection of all concrete forms,
where all becomings are written like sorcerers drawings on this plane of
consistency, which is the ultimate Door providing a way out for them.
41
The
plane of consistency saves becoming-imperceptible from becoming-nothing.
It does not abandon relationships, but paradoxically renders the impercep-
tible perceptible by radicalizing relations through the working of what
Deleuze and Guattari, following Whitehead, call prehension. Perception is no
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longer mediated but just is the relations of force that traverse the plane of
consistency and initiate novel becomings.
[Perception on the plane of consistency] will no longer reside in the
relation between a subject and an object, but rather in the movement
serving as the limit of that relation, in the period associated with the
subject and the object. Perception will confront its own limit; it will be in
the midst of things . . . as the presence of one haecceity in another, the
prehension of one by the other or the passage from one to the other: Look
only at the movements.
42
Here all things open into everything else in a fullness of innumerable dimen-
sions. It is this fullness alone that, for Deleuze and Guattari, keeps all things
from either bogging down, or veering into the void. Although Deleuze
rarely uses the word, we have a name for this fullness that upholds and
creates all things and it is thus clear that becoming-imperceptible is also
becoming-divine. In becoming imperceptible, one becomes the whole world,
everybody and everything. Deleuze and Guattari write about this in a lan-
guage that is implicitly theological, creational, and divinizing. Becoming
everybody/everything (tout le monde) is to world ( faire monde), to make a
world ( faire un monde).
43
But what kind of God is this? The virtual telos of becoming-imperceptible
is at the same time a becoming-divine, but for Deleuze and Guattari the God
one unites with is a very specic sort of divinity. The immanent divine energy
that creates and undoes all things with an innite speed lies beneath form
and subjectivityit knows and will know nothing of the transcendence
associated with classical theologies. Deleuze and Guattari everywhere make
it seem as if transcendence is simply another name for the cessation of
movement that stulties life and they never genuinely consider that it could
be otherwise. Nevertheless, there is a lingering tension in their rejection of
transcendence, as if even the attempt to construct a world of pure immanence
could only succeed through a series of gestures in the direction of a mystery
that exceeds immanence itself. For instance, when they rightly celebrate the
music of Messiaen at the end of Plateau 10 and even more so in Plateau 11 on
the refrain, they do so because he returns music to a cosmic register; but
Messiaens Catholic cosmos is wider than theirs. His music gives expression
to the cosmic time of rock, and the biological time of birds, but he also brings
in the rhythms of human memory, the eternal periods of angelic remaining,
the silence of contemplation, and the hope of eschatological fullment.
44
Messiaens own understanding of his music certainly involves a dialogue
with the likes of Bergson, but also with Thomists such as Etienne Gilson and
Jacques Maritain for whom transcendence is the superlative form of imma-
nence, and not its rival. There is in Messiaen, then, not only an afrmation of
immanence but of cosmic transcendence, and yet Deleuze and Guattari
remain deaf to these rhythms. (A similar argument could be made for the
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way they neglect the entheogenic side of drug culture, preferring to focus
solely on the side of immanence and transgressionit is always Burroughs in
Tangiers, never James on nitrous, or Huxleys mescalin.)
Deleuze and Guattari reserve the name theology for all ways of being and
speaking that make an appeal to transcendence. For them, the theological is
always at odds with the movements of innite becoming that they seek to
open. As they write, Theology is very strict on the following point: there are
no werewolves, human beings cannot become animal. That is because there is
no transformation of essential forms; they are inalienable and only entertain
relations of analogy.
45
They offer no citation for this viewfor them, it is
theology de jure as the discourse of transcendence that prohibits becomings.
But is this true? Are there really no werewolves in theology? Perhaps not
at rst glance, but the more one searches beyond theological manuals into the
tradition itself, the more one nds becomings-animal even within theology.
Angelology is especially suggestive, with its monstrous combinations of
human and animal affects, proliferations of eyes and wings, its unnatural and
varied velocities, its synaesthesia. In angelic proximities, humans become
angel but also, just as often, they become animal, as in the visions of 1 Enoch
or even Christs story of the sheep and the goats. Apparently, for the apoca-
lyptic writers, the proper way to speak about humans in the presence of
angels is to speak about animals. Angels it seems, no less than the daemons
of Deleuze and Guattaris sorcerers, are threshold creatures that initiate
strange and precarious becomings; next to the angel, Balaams ass becomes a
voice alone.
If angelology is still too discursive, hierarchical, and aristocratic, consider
the phenomenology of religious enthusiasm, the Great Awakenings, and
revivalism. This populist strand of Christian practice engages in precisely the
sort of becomings-animal that interest Deleuze in the case of Little Hans or
Hofmannsthals becoming-rat. The most dramatic recent account of this
stems from the events, beginning in January, 1994, at a charismatic church in
Toronto, which brought hundreds of thousands of people to a warehouse
where many underwent their own becomings-animal: barking, roaring,
stalking, chirping, and swooning.
46
Whatever else we make of these strange
accounts, we have to admit that here, if nowhere else, theology has to deal
with the question of werewolves.
But perhaps Deleuze would say that even if it technically occurs in the
church, there is still no theological account for these becomings-animal
more to the point, wouldnt theology like to prohibit these diagonals and
stick to its manageable axes? Can theology consider these to be anything
more than local transports, crossing neither the barriers of essential forms
nor the thresholds of subjects and substances? Admittedly, many theologies
have sought to quell such becomings, but such prohibitions are not a priori
requirements for theology itself. In other words, a discourse of transcendence
does not, by itself, prohibit a robust vision of real becomings. Indeed,
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transcendence can and sometimes does open our language to otherwise
unimaginable becomings. The paradigmatic case of this for theology is the
lavish account of becoming in Eucharistic transguration. Eucharistic trans-
guration is nothing if not a becoming that involves the affects of bread,
wine, congregation, voices, divinity, and the explicit crossing of substantial
boundaries while leaving accidents intact. This is perhaps the most audacious
assertion of becoming that humanity has ever uttered; Deleuzes werewolves
positively pale in comparison. And it is only the logic of transcendence that
allows for this kind of alchemy.
Let me add one more voice to this chrestomathy of theological becomings.
Wasnt Pico of Mirandola at his most theological when he celebrated the
capacity for innite becoming that denes human nature precisely inasmuch
as it is imago dei? Not only does Picos protean theological anthropology give
the lie to Deleuzes caricature of theology as incapable of thinking were-
wolves, but it raises questions about Deleuzes own handling of becoming.
For Deleuze every genuine becoming is an unnatural participation because it
dismantles the settled order of essences, genera, species, and lines of descent.
But what if, as Pico thought, there is a creature whose nature it is to be capax
universi and so capable of innite transformation? On this account, there
simply are no unnatural participations for the human beingthough, of
course, there remain unnatural ways of participatingbecause the human
being is properly a becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, becoming-
imperceptible, and also a becoming-heavenly, becoming-divine.
Indeed, for Christian theology at least as much as for Deleuze, the trajec-
tory of becoming aims at nothing less than becoming-divine, theosis, or
deication. In deference to Deleuzes habit of culling resources from the
margins, I have mostly called upon minoritarian counter-examples (Messi-
aen, angelology, the phenomena of charismatic awakenings, and Pico) as
rejoinders to Deleuzes caricature of theology as unable to think becoming.
With deication, however, we step away frommarginal discourses into one of
the central theological loci of the church catholic. Although it was once
fashionable to consider the doctrine of theosis as belonging properly only to
the Eastern Christian traditions, a wave of recent studies have shown how
important deication is not only for the Orthodox but also for the Roman
Catholic and Protestant churches, as well.
47
The doctrine is not shy about the
extent of the transformation involved: it is a theopoiesis as Justin Martyr rst
called it, a becoming-God. Already in the second century, Irenaeus stated
programmatically that, through his love, the Word of God became what we
are in order to make us what He is Himself.
48
Following Irenaeus, Athana-
sius adopted the formula and employed it in his fourth-century contest with
the Arians. The Son of God became human in order that we might become
God.
49
In the Latin west, Augustine called his church to attend to the innite
reciprocity involved in this most extreme metamorphosis, In order to make
gods of those who were merely human . . . one who was God made himself
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human.
50
This daring embrace of becoming at its most extreme continued
after the fall of Rome. In the seventh century, Maximus the Confessor writes,
We lay hold of the divine to the same degree as the Logos of God . . . became
truly human.
51
Thomas Aquinas inherits the same tradition and writes in the
thirteenth century, The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us
sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might
make men gods.
52
Thomas goes further, saying in his commentary on Johns
gospel, We are gods by participation under the effect of grace.
53
Later still,
for Teresa of Avila, the end of contemplation is divinization, when the soul,
or rather, the spirit of the soul, is made one with God.
54
And Teresas little
Seneca, John of the Cross, breathlessly declares, Everything can be
expressed in this statement: the soul becomes God from God through par-
ticipation in him and in his attributes.
55
Long before Deleuze, then, theology, far from prohibiting becoming,
opened innite lines of ight by inscribing a becoming-divine within the
very heart of the human being. This becoming-divine is only possible
because of the Protean expansiveness of the human whose transformation
goes even beyond the boundaries of immanent virtuality, becoming by grace
that which exceeds his or her own grasp. This theosis, however, is not
Deleuzes apotheosis, precisely because theology is able to envision a becom-
ing so radical that it involves the preservation and not simply the diremption
of the subject. For the subject is never so self-possessed that its becoming
necessarily entails dispossession; rather, we always discover our very selves
as continually given from and tending towards a transcendent source with
whom, therefore, we are never in competition and whom we can never
possess. As imago dei, the human capacity for transformation is thereby
unbounded and thrusts us into the most intimate of relations not only with
God but also with the diverse beings of creation in all of its plenitude.
Already, for Thomas Aquinas, the innite capacity in the human soulthe
capax universii, which is a corollary of the imago deimeant that in knowing
a thing we do not so much mirror its form as we realise and develop this
form in the milieu of our minds.
56
Thus, for example, in knowing a rose,
there is both a becoming-rose on the part of the knowing soul and a
becoming-soul on the part of the rose. Such becomings, especially as they
approach the upper limits of becoming-divine, may exceed our power to
enact, but not our capacity to receive, which is another way of saying that the
human is constituted by a natural desire for the supernatural, as de Lubac
reads Aquinas.
57
The point is that a theology open to transcendence can
imagine an innite becoming that does not dissemble forms but both opens
and realizes them in a more profound manner.
58
Because our self-possession
is simply our transformation in the direction of the God who gives us to be,
theology is able to think innite becoming without indulging in that Bataille-
styled Nietzscheanism that can only celebrate what it simultaneously labels
transgressive.
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Deleuze and Guattari admit that every molecular becoming is tied to a
molar form, but equally they insist that no becoming-molecular is possible
without tearing apart other molarities. Becoming is, for them, essentially
violent, its combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are inter-
kingdoms, unnatural participations. That is the only way Nature operates
against itself. . . .
59
In order to become, one has no choice but to tear down
the stabilities of identity, agency, and subjectivity. In their becomings, the
world, the horse, and the child, cease to be subjects to become events, in
assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an
air, a life.
60
All of this has the appealing air of radicalism about it, but I
wonder if Deleuze isnt much more conventional here than he seems. To my
ear, this insistence that becoming is something utterly monstrous sounds
tellingly like the reactionary voice that opens Marie de Frances twelfth-
century werewolf (or Garwaf) lais, Bisclavret.
61
I dont want to forget Bisclavret;
. . . the Normans call it Garwaf
In the old days, people used to say
And it often actually happened
That some men turned into werewolves
And lived in the woods.
A werewolf is a savage beast;
While his fury is on him
He eats men, does much harm,
Goes deep in the forest to live.
In Deleuzes bestial account of becoming do we not hear echoes of these
opening lines? And yet Marie refuses to stop with this savage notion of what
becoming means, for she immediately continues her fable: But thats enough
of this for now: I want to tell you about the Bisclavret. She quickly shifts the
readers attention from the reactionary description of a generic monstrosity
to an individual, that is to say, to a being capable of sustaining identity and
preserving relationships throughout the most extreme metamorphoses. The
real monster in her story is not the lycanthrope, but the destruction of relation
that leads to injustice. In a strange twist of fate, then, it seems that the
twelfth-century Marie de Franceeven with her inherited assumptions of a
patriarchal status quois able to conceive of transformation in a more radical
way than the twentieth-century philosophical radical, precisely because she
is able to preserve identity through the adventure of becoming, rather than
opposing the two as if identity were always at war with metamorphosis. If
there is no identity, then there is never any transformation, but only the
banality of eternal replacement. If there are no wolves, then there are perforce
no werewolves.
Deleuze is right that transcendence and identity are irrevocably conjoined
and so he tries to eradicate both from his chaosmos. Deleuzes Absolute, a
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wholly immanent divine force of creativity, is at war with itself, trapped in an
aporetic shuttle between creation and destruction.
62
Precisely because this
divinity is not transcendent, it can only continue its cascade of life by chal-
lenging and devouring the creatures to which it gives rise. It is this necessary
evacuation of subjectivity and more complex enduring forms of being that
troubles Hallward so much. And he is right to warn that, for Deleuze, the
renewal of creation always requires the paralysis and dissolution of the crea-
ture per se. The notion of a constrained or situated freedom, the notion that
a subjects own decisions might have genuine consequencesthe whole
notion, in short, of strategyis thoroughly foreign to Deleuzes conception of
thought.
63
This is a problem that seems endemic to any process philosophy, but it can
be overcome. Those inuenced by Whitehead, for example, have long con-
tended with the criticism that Whiteheads atomistic dipolar account of con-
crescence cannot do justice to our sense of enduring macro-identity and the
ineluctable sense of responsibility we feel for our past actions and future
decisions. If what I really am is a momentary drop of experience that perishes
almost immediately into objective immortality but does not endure in its
subjectivity, then what binds me to the decisions of the untold occasions of
experience that preceded me? Why should I be punished or praised for
achievements of the past if at this moment I am an entirely new actual entity?
This conundrum is solved in various ways by process philosophers such as
Nancy Frankenberry, Judith Jones, Joseph Bracken, and Brian Henning, but
all argue that subjectivity and agency must be extended beyond the sheer
moment of becoming. Such holistic models involve restoring creative power
to the past and redistributing value to macrolevel agencies that are wider
than any singularity, actual occasion, or haecceity. Of course, this also
involves them, either explicitly or implicitly, in some afrmation of transcen-
dence, but such an afrmation is the cost of preserving relationships, agen-
cies, and strategies. If one wants fresh air and relief from the dark, one must
open a window to the sky. Only the recuperation of transcendence allows the
rehabilitation of the subject. This is true for process thinkers such as White-
head and it is especially true for thinkers like Deleuze, for Deleuzes antihu-
manist polemics against the subject are explicitly tied to his Nietzschean
understanding of subjectivity as the internalization of transcendent authority
(the name for this is Oedipus, and to this extent Deleuze agrees with Lacans
diagnosis of western subjectivity, even if his schizoanlaysis balks at Lacans
prescriptions). It is clear that, for Deleuze, there is no subject without tran-
scendence. But can we admit transcendence without eclipsing immanence?
July 4, 1952: Fire-Watch
Abba Lot came to Abba Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able,
I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and
2008 The Author
contemplative silence; and, according as I am able, I strive to cleanse my
heart of thoughts: now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply
and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his ngers became like ten
lamps of re. He said: Why not be changed into re?
64
We have been considering the themes of becoming, theophany, re-
enchantment, and divinization, in the philosophy Gilles Deleuze, and have
found a fundamental ambiguity in his treatment of these, an ambiguity that I
suggest stems from his axiomatic disallowal of transcendence. I want to bring
this essay to a close by considering a different iterationof our themes ina short
workbyThomas Merton, the remarkable Fire Watch: July4, 1952 withwhich
The Sign of Jonas closes. Although Merton has often been tamed and Oedipal-
ized by being cast (rather perversely) as a devotional writer and what the
Germans used to call a beautiful soul, he is in fact a profound writer, monastic
theologian, and cultural critic, and Fire Watch is one of the most perfectly
realizedof his earlyworks. The essayis his account of makingthe rounds as the
rewatcher for his monastery during a very dark, very hot summer night,
but the real concern of Mertons essay is to explore the twin movements of
descent and ascent in the contemplative life. This is what makes it so interest-
ing when read alongside Deleuze as a sort of counternarrative, for Merton is
able to include in his account of descent the innite becomings, the strange
alliances, and the cosmic planes that animate Deleuzes own project, but for
Merton this immanent becoming-night is night as traversed by a transcendent
line that reinstates non-Oedipalized subjects, redemptive relationships of
responsibilityandcare, community, opentraditions, livingmemoryandhope.
In Mertons essay, the daylight world occupies the place of Deleuzes molarity
or territoriality, while Mertons journey into night is so akin to Deleuzes
becoming-molecular or imperceptible that, as writers, theyseemtobe drawing
from the same rhythms and semantic elds: we encounter monstrous becom-
ings, geological strata, swarms, packs, invisibilities, contagions, erce desires,
meteorological events, desubjectivizations, hauntings, collapse, madness.
Nevertheless, despite these similarities, in Merton, neither the nocturnal nor
the diurnal is absolutized, as theyalways threatentobe for Deleuze. InMerton,
bycontrast, sunandmoonalike are suspendedbythe Mysterythat alone gives
themthe power to be and the gift of relationality, one with the other. The task,
then, is not to counter-effectuate molarity or to territorialize molecularity, but
to redeem both the molecular and the molar through a yet more eventful
transguration.
The essay begins, as Deleuze would have wanted, with dismantling day-
light structures. The monks are packed in the belly of the great heat before
the night angelus unlocks the church and sets them free. The holy monster
which is The Community divides itself into segments and disperses through
airless cloisters where yellow lamps do not attract the bugs.
65
This dispersal
initiates Mertons becoming-night. No single creature rises to the fore in this
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becoming; the night is an event that thrusts Merton into proximity with
living forces, voices, presences, disturbances. The entire journey commences
with silence, but this human silence is merely preparatory.
Then I begin to hear the eloquent night, the night of wet trees, with
moonlight sliding over the shoulder of the church in a haze of dampness
and subsiding heat. The world of this night resounds from heaven to hell
with animal eloquence, with the savage innocence of a million unknown
creatures. While the earth eases and cools off like a huge wet living thing,
the enormous vitality of their music pounds and rings and throbs until it
gets into everything, and swamps the whole world in its neutral madness
which never becomes an orgy because all things are innocent, all things
are pure.
66
As he makes the rounds through the monastery at Gethsemane, the swelling
night leads him further and further away from the cares and conventions of
daylight aspirations. The night builds and initiates a crisis. Confronted by the
immensity of this immanent inhuman life, Merton stares into the void, faced
with the brutal sober knowledge that the entirety of his articulate life and
even the structures to which he is bound might all come to naught. I feel as
if everything had been unreal. It is as if the past had never existed.
67
Merton
searches his memory for scraps of meaning. What endures? He remembers a
man, almost a bumpkin, who used to walk by the back road every summer
morning singing his own ritornello, interrupting the novices communion.
And he remembers as well, the heat in the beaneld the rst June I was here,
and I get the same sense of a mysterious, unsuspected value that struck me
after Father Alberics funeral.
68
Merton approaches the nadir of his descent
as the night threatens to swallow the huge but fragile artefacts of day. In the
midst of the night, the whole world seems to be made out of paper, ready to
crumble, tear, and blow away.
How much more so this monastery which everybody believes in and
which has perhaps already ceased to exist! O God, my God, the night has
values that day has never dreamed of. All things stir by night, waking or
sleeping, conscious of the nearness of their ruin. Only man makes
himself illuminations he conceives to be solid and eternal. . . . The tall
towers are undermined by ants, the walls crack and cave in, and the
holiest buildings burn to ashes while the watchman is composing a
theory of duration. . . . The living things sing terribly that only the present
is eternal and that all things having a past and a future are doomed to
pass away!
69
However, this point of radical dissipation, so similar to Deleuzes virtual
apotheosis, is not Mertons divinization but is precisely the place from which
Merton rouses himself to meet God. Theosis needs this becoming-animal,
-molecular, andimperceptible, but it is not exhausted in these becomings.
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As Mertons journey moves upwards towards the monastery tower, his
reections move outwards to the concerns of the community: to his respon-
sibility for those brothers under his care; to the world that looks at him as a
stranger, an outcast, a celebrity, a model; even to the ags of a compromised
state and the condemned books of a church too comfortable in its power. In
this section of the essay, Merton moves through Gethsemane as through a
religious city, and it seems as if there is a molar becoming-polis that is as
creative and ambiguous as the molecular becomings of night. Becoming-
divine, however, is neither of these, but a diagonal that traverses and exceeds
the vectors of both molecularity and molarity.
Thus, in his ascent, Merton leaves even the religious city behind. The
essay climbs the monastery tower until Merton nds himself high above the
treetops, and as he moves higher still, the building becomes more subtle and
unsubstantial.
And now the hollowness that rings under my feet measures some sixty
feet to the oor of the church . . . my whole being breathes the wind
which moves through the belfry, and my hand is on the door through
which I see the heavens. The door swings out upon a vast sea of darkness
and of prayer.
70
This, at last, is Mertons trembling anticipation of theosis, a deication in
which all things are included. Rising to meet him are the preorganic beings
of mist, heat, rivers and moonlight; the life-world joins him, the huge chorus
of living beings . . . singing in the waterways, throbbing in the creeks and the
elds and the trees; and the cosmic being of the sky above, the heavens
wherein angels dwell. All things are brought together in this divinization:
Eternity is in the present. Eternity is in the palm of the hand. Eternity is a
seed of re, whose sudden roots break barriers that keep my heart frombeing
an abyss. The things of time are in connivance with eternity.
71
Deleuzes account of becoming can be read as both a becoming-divine and
a becoming-night. Merton raises these same questions but addresses them
with different tools, theological tools that Deleuze refuses to use. The night, as
Merton makes clear, descends upon us as a question that can be in answered
in at least three ways: is it an erasure, the night of the world, a night that gnaws
into daytime only to undo its pretensions to endurance, relationality, and
importance? Or is the night a time of perversion, a sinister time for indiscre-
tion, the dark stage for a Walpurgis Nacht? Or, at the end, does the night open
innite distances to charity and send our soul to play beyond the stars?
72
When Deleuze afrms that to think is always to follow the witchs ight,
73
I
suspect that what he wants is in fact to open these innite amorous distances,
and that his witches would have angry words for the callousness of Faust and
his Devil. Both Merton and Deleuze know in their own way that creation as
such is good, kindness desirable, and justice undeconstructible, but by daring
to afrmeven transcendence Merton is able to open vaster skies than Deleuze
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and to sustain these openings without aporia. Mertons counternarrative
unleashes a becoming-divine that is not only concerned with creating new
relationships, but also with tending and renewing relations long since estab-
lished. Beyond the liberation of desire, there is a delity of desire that obscurely
anticipates the beloved community promised in our deepest aspirations and
most important struggles. This belovedcommunity is not the enemy of cosmic
vitalismbut its consummation, for life andcommunityalike onlyare inasmuch
as they participate in a God whose transcendence is the superlative mode of
immanence, and whose being is eternal reciprocity.
You, Who sleep in my breast, are not met with words, but in the emer-
gence of life within life and of wisdom within wisdom. You are found in
communion: Thou in me and I in Thee and Thou in them and they in me:
dispossession within dispossession, dispassion within dispassion, emp-
tiness within emptiness, freedom within freedom. . . . There are drops of
dew that show like sapphires in the grass as soon as the great sun
appears, and leaves stir behind the hushed ight of an escaping dove.
74
NOTES
1 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans.
R. J Hollingdale, Reprint edition with new introduction, Penguin Classics (New York, NY:
Penguin Books, 1969), IV.6, p. 292.
2 Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Verso,
2006), p. 7.
3 Ibid., p. 3.
4 Cf. Michel Foucaults understanding of mysticism in The Thought of the Outside: The
characteristic movement of mysticism is to attempt to joineven if it means crossing the
nightthe positivity of an existence by opening a difcult line of communication with it . . .
. Michel Foucault and James D. Faubion, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, vol. II,
Essential Works of Foucault, 19541988 (New York, NY: New Press, 1998), p. 150.
5 Hallward, Out of This World, p. 164.
6 Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis, MN: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 10.
7 Slavoj iek, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New York, NY: Routledge,
2004), p. 184.
8 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., p. 37, emphasis mine.
12 Ibid., p. 82.
13 Ibid., p. 28.
14 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p.
304.
15 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (New York, NY: Zone
Books, 1991), p. 112.
16 Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloud-
esley Brereton (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), pp. 220221.
18 Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 13.
2008 The Author
20 Ibid., 91. Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 1994), p. 33.
21 Plutarch, Moralia: Sayings of Spartans [Apophthegmata Laconica] 233a. Quoted in Mladen
Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, Short Circuits (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 3.
23 Ibid., p. 90.
24 Ibid., p. 162.
25 As Emerson says in Self-Reliance: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosopher and divines. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson:
Essays and Lectures (New York, NY: The Library of America, 1983), p. 265.
26 On true versus interesting propositions, see Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed.
David Ray Grifn and Donald W. Sherburne, corrected edition (New York, NY: Free Press,
1978), p. 259. The importance of truth, Whitehead continues, is that it adds to interest.
27 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues 2, trans. Eliot Ross Albert (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 149. I owe this reference to the insightful engagement
with Hallward in Anthony Paul Smith, review of Out of this World: Deleuze and the
Philosophy of Creation, Angelaki 12/1 (2007), pp. 151156.
28 Counter-effectuation releases a virtual that is distinct from the actual, but a virtual that
has . . . become consistent or real on the plane of immanence that wrests it from chaosit is
a virtual that is real without being actual, ideal without being abstract. Deleuze and
Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 156.
29 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Min-
neapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 257.
30 Gilles Deleuze, The Time-Image (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p.
173.
31 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Con-
tinuum Impacts (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 290.
32 Ibid., p. 264.
33 Ibid., p. 290.
34 [D]o not look for a resemblance or analogy to the animal, for this is becoming-animal in
action, the production of the molecular animal (whereas the real animal is trapped in its
molar form and subjectivity). Ibid., p. 303.
35 Ibid., p. 262.
36 Ibid., p. 277.
37 Ibid., p. 336, emphasis mine.
38 Ibid., p. 303.
39 Ibid., p. 285.
40 Ibid., p. 308.
41 Ibid., p. 277.
42 Ibid., p. 311.
43 Ibid., p. 308.
44 On which, see Catherine Pickstock, Messiaen and Deleuze: The Musico-Theological Cri-
tique of Modernism and Postmodernism in Musical Theology, ed. Jeremy Begbie (Grand
Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, forthcoming).
45 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 278.
46 On which, see Margaret M. Poloma, The Toronto Blessing: Charisma, Institutionalization,
and Revival, Journal for the Scientic Study of Religion 36/2 (1997), pp. 257271. Robert E.
Bartholomew and Julian D. ODea, Religious Devoutness Construed as Pathology: The
Myth of Religious Mania, International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 8/1 (1998), pp.
116.
47 Onthe Patristic notionof deication, see especially NormanRussell, The Doctrine of Deication
in the Greek Patristic Tradition, Oxford Early Christian Studies, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004). For a broad overview of the ecumenical importance of deication see Michael J.
ChristensenandJefferyA. Wittung, Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development
of Deication in the Christian Traditions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008); Stephen
Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov, eds., Theosis: Deication in Christian Theology, Princeton
Theological Monograph Series (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2006); Veli-Matti Kark-
kainen, One with God: Salvation as Deication and Justication, Unitas Books (Collegeville, MN:
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Liturgical Press, 2004). On deication in Aquinas, see A. N. Williams, The Ground of Union:
Deication in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). For recent works
defending the importance of deication in Luther, Calvin, and Wesley, see J. Todd Billings,
Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ, Changing
Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007);
Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of
Luther (Grand Rapids, MI.: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998); S. T. Kimbrough,
Orthodox and Wesleyan Spirituality (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 2002).
48 Against Heresies, 3, 191; 4, 33, 4.
49 On the Incarnation, 54.
50 Sermon 192.
51 On the Lords Prayer, 90:877a.
52 Opsuculum, 57.14.
53 In Joannem, 15.2.1.
54 Interior Castle, 7.2.
55 Living Flame of Love, 3.58.
56 See John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, Radical Orthodoxy Series
(London; New York: Routledge, 2001).
57 See Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York, NY:
Crossroad Publishing Company, 1967); see also John Milbank, The Suspended Middle : Henri
De Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural (Grand Rapids, MI.: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 2005).
58 Deleuze was perhaps the most cultured philosopher of the late twentieth century, comment-
ing upon and making use of a staggering array of literary, philosophic, scientic, and
popular materials spanning nearly the entire history of human thought. Why is he content
then with such a shallow account of theology? Part of this failure is no doubt due to the
dismal state of so much theology in late modernity, not least in France during the middle of
the last century. Exciting developments were afoot, but during Deleuzes formative period
immediately after World War II, bold new theological voices such M. D. Chenu, Maurice
Blondel, Teilhard de Chardin, and Henri de Lubac were regularly under ofcial censure and
more or less unavailable to non-specialists. Inasmuch as Deleuzes encounter with theology
was shaped by either the neo-Kantianism of the theological left, or the manual Thomism of
the right, his rejection of transcendence is understandable. More to the point, however, once
Deleuze made the decision to enthrone Spinoza as the Christ of the philosophers, then
theology as such could only present itself as a formal challenge to the entire Deleuzean
system, and so it is only an already censured theology that ever appears in Deleuzes works,
a parodic transcendence that serves to reinforce the Deleuzean program of absolute imma-
nence.
59 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 267.
60 Ibid., p. 289.
61 Marie de France, The Lais of Marie De France, trans. Robert W. Hanning and Joan M. Ferrante,
rst edition (Grand Rapids, MI.: Baker Academic, 1995).
62 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester and C. Stivale (London: Athlone Press,
1990), p. 310.
64 Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert; Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century
(New York, NY: New Directions, 1961), p. 50.
65 Fire Watch: July 4, 1952, in Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (New York, NY: Harvest
Books, 1981), p. 108.
66 Ibid., p. 350.
67 Ibid., p. 353.
68 Ibid., p. 112.
69 Ibid., p. 355356.
70 Ibid. p. 359.
71 Ibid., p. 361.
72 Ibid.
73 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 41.
74 Merton, Fire Watch: July 4, 1952, pp. 361362.
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