鈥淲e the people鈥濃�攖he utterance, the chant, the written line鈥攊s always missing some group of people it claims to represent.

鈥擩udith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly

The philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler famously coined the term gender performativity in her 1990 book Gender Trouble. There, she posited the theory of gender, or the body, as one that acts and performs according to the conventions of gender, conventions that are influenced, from the start, before one is even born. Now, in her book Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Butler uses gender performativity as a point of departure for discussing precarious populations and the assembly of bodies as protest. She interweaves her two theories of performativity and precarity with the works of Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, and Emmanuel Levinas as a way to critically assess and speak to Tahrir Square, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and other movements of dissent. In this interview, we consider her work in light of the recent events at Standing Rock and the 2016 presidential election. When so many in our society today exist at the limits of recognizability, Butler writes from the perspective that there is no I without first a we, pushing against the current operative boundaries and toward a politics of alliance, cohabitation, and interdependency.

The Other Journal (TOJ): In your recent book, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, you critically engage protest among the precarious as a sort of bodily performativity, making mention of the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements, as well as other mass demonstrations around the world. Can you elaborate on why it makes sense to use gender performativity as a point of departure for talking about precarious communities and the assembly of bodies as a performative enactment?

Judith Butler (JB): I am sure that there are many ways to approach this problem. I suppose I was offering an intellectual itinerary for those readers who ask, how is it that you worked on gender and now work on violence, public demonstrations, and precarity? I do think that at stake in both forms of embodied performativity is a notion of political expression. Our political views are made known through speech and writing but also through images, sounds, and a wide range of artistic expression. Performance art is one such artistic practice with political consequences. It shows up in demonstrations, but can we also think of demonstrations as embodied forms of expression, ways of making political demands, even when speech is absent or not the salient form of expression?

TOJ: In a critique of identity politics you explain that it 鈥渇ails to furnish a broader conception of what it means, politically, to live together, across differences, sometimes in modes of unchosen proximity, especially when living together, however difficult it may be, remains an ethical and political imperative.鈥�1 I am thinking here about our reaction to the impossible outcome of this year鈥檚 election and whether it has anything to do with the limitations of identity politics or the gap between discourse and practice. What does our shock tell us? In what ways have we missed the mark in our relations with the United States we thought we knew?

JB: That is a superb question that we will be asking for some time to come. Surely, the strong expressions of xenophobia and racism on the part of the Trump administration are signs that refugees and undocumented people鈥攎ainly figured as Syrians and Mexicans鈥攁re precisely not those with whom Trump and friends feel any obligation to live. In many ways, especially in its support of white supremacy, the Trump administration represents an attack on multiracial and multiethnic cohabitation. I think we have to ask how the partial popular support for closing the border with a wall, discriminating against nations with large Muslim populations, and enacting deportation plans for the undocumented are linked with an increased sense of economic precarity and new forms of virulent racism. It may well be that those who voted for Trump were not always forthcoming with pollsters, understanding that racism and misogyny were unacceptable public discourse. At the same time, these shameful expressions were also clearly exhilarating for some who supported him. At last, they could throw off the superegoic control of feminist and antiracist discourse! We may have to think more about how shame and the exhilarations of unbridled hatred are linked and what political forms they assume. And it is true that we need to respond with a left project that does not simply line up the various identities whose rights we want to be secure. We have to ask what links us and what can link us to those who were too demoralized to vote or to those who thought that voting for Trump was the only way to say no. Many of those who voted for Trump did not know to what project they were saying yes. Some notion of who we are and can become now seems paramount鈥攐n what conditions do we live together, and what kinds of obligations bind us to one another and to the polities in which we live?

TOJ: You define precarity as a 鈥減olitically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support more than others, and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.鈥� What is key here, and what you鈥檝e made clear throughout your text, is that precarity as a lived reality is not an individual condition. I am thinking here about the failures of religious institutions, specifically in their responsibility to protest on behalf of a whole host of persons鈥攚omen, gender and sexual minorities, persons of color, refugees, immigrants, the undocumented, and those dispossessed of land鈥攚hose safety and well-being are now at risk of being compromised. In a stream of questions you ask 鈥渨ho will fail to be protected,鈥� and I think that is precisely the question that religious institutions need to be asking of themselves: who are we failing to protect?2 An effort of solidarity demands a sharing in responsibility for the ways in which religious institutions have aided in keeping the precarious precarious. In light of its own genealogy of performative assemblages鈥攁nd taking into consideration that many readers of TOJ are academic theologians, practitioners in the church, or studying to become one of the two鈥攁re there any collective and institutional ways the church might begin to address this?

JB: I have found it quite important that the current pope calls attention to poverty in many of his public statements. I am less sure how strongly that has translated into more support for antipoverty programs and for the support of refugee communities, but these are tasks in which religious institutions and networks remain essential. I am sorry, though, that the pope has chosen to continue the demonization of the term gender and the important feminist and LGBTQ movements that find that term essential for realizing their visions of social transformation and justice.

What may be most important right now, however, is to communicate the dignity of the religion of Islam, and to do whatever can be done to include Islam in interfaith networks and mobilizations. We know that every religion has its fundamentalists and that every religion can be demonized, which means that the rights of religious minorities must be protected, and religious freedom should not be abused as a principle to support those who seek to discriminate against gay, lesbian, trans, and gender nonconforming peoples. I worry that when we speak about so-called Western values, we too often presuppose that those are Judeo-Christian, and that implies that a wide range of religions are relegated outside the core values of Western society and even of humanity itself. This cannot be right.

TOJ: You encourage gender and sexual minorities to form links with other precarious communities, suggesting that precarity as a shared lived reality might operate as a site of alliance that joins people groups who otherwise have little in common. I am reminded here of the late anthropologist Victor Turner and his work on liminality and communitas. I think the concept of liminality may take this sort of relationality a bit further, as it cuts across even more categories, enabling alliances not only among the precarious but among the precarious and everyone else. If, as you鈥檝e written, shared exposure can become the basis for resistance, and 鈥渨e the people鈥� is always enacting, always an 鈥渁ssembly of bodies, plural, persisting, acting, and laying claim to a public sphere by which one has been abandoned,鈥� what are your thoughts on the alliances that have formed and are continuing to form around the world postelection? And would you say that it is precisely within such a liminal space that we can most accurately say 鈥渨e鈥�?3

JB: I do think that we have to ask about the reasons that 23 percent of the voting public voted for Trump and to consider what extent strong feelings of demoralization and an increased sense of precarity led them to turn to a reactionary populist. Groups on the left now must make connections with two different kinds of people. On the one hand, if we have a better account of why so many people have been plunged into precarity and fear, then we have to make the case in terms that are popular and persuasive. On the other hand, we now have a burgeoning resistance movement of civil servants, state officials, and police departments who are refusing to implement deportation plans and travel bans. Those are our new allies. So in the moment when we might want to retreat and find consolation among the like-minded, we need to reach out more effectively to persuade people that constitutional democracy and a common commitment to equality and freedom are goods worth fighting for and that cohabitation implies an affirmation of our ethnic and racial diversity as well as our religious diversity.

TOJ: That鈥檚 fascinating. I am struck by your calling us to recognize those resisting state officials and police persons as our new allies. What might a common commitment to constitutional democracy, equality, and freedom look like in conjunction with these new allies? Particularly if some of those broader structures have a long history of policing and ensuring the suppression of those values?

JB: I am just aware that we are watching to see who among the Republicans still cares about the constitution or what it says. Or who among those people rallying at town halls in anger in the Midwest are making claims that the loss of health care is inhumane? My sense is that most populists aren鈥檛 altogether clear about the source of their own anger, which means that it can be articulated in different political frames. In a sense, this is an opportunity.

TOJ: You make mention of the rise of the sans papiers or others within the 鈥渟hadowy domain of existence鈥� who, radically deprived of recognition, are beginning to enter into the sphere of appearance by way of mass demonstration, attempting to lay claim to space and demanding the right to appear, to say that their lives matter and that they exist. This brings to mind Maurice Merleau-Ponty鈥檚 work of the body as a 鈥済aping wound.鈥�4 In this sense, protest, as bodily enactment and bodily vulnerability in the street or in the square, is essentially a visible exclamation and reminder that all is not well in the world. How might this conception mesh with your own in terms of how we think about the visible appearance of bodies in the public sphere? And what鈥檚 made available to us or overlooked here as we seek language that may aid in the destigmatization of fear that is associated with a large group of bodies assembled and the misconstrual of protest as innately violent?

JB: I am sure that Merleau-Ponty is in the background of my thoughts, for he is the one who tells us that the limits of the body do not contain us but expose us to a world without which our living is not possible. Indeed, we are given over from the start, so to have a body is already to be in the care of the other or to be in need of such care. We cannot separate our idea of a persisting body from networks of care in this regard; when infrastructures fail and falter, so too do we.

I am open to a world that acts on me in ways that cannot be fully predicted or controlled in advance, and something about my openness is not, strictly speaking, under my control. That opening toward the world is not something that I can exactly will away. This social character of our persistence and our possible flourishing means that we have to take collective responsibility for overcoming conditions of induced precarity. Demonstrations that oppose evictions in Barcelona and demonstrations that oppose police brutality against black men and women in the United States are making claims of justice; they are documenting the failures of justice, and they are part of our political freedom and even our political hope. I see how often those demonstrations are called 鈥渞iots鈥� or 鈥渦nrest鈥� and how quickly they can be shut down for reasons of 鈥渟ecurity.鈥� But without the freedom of movement and assembly, we lose our very character as a democracy.

I was in a cab the other day in New York City passing a demonstration against Trump on West Fourth Street. I said to Oscar, the cab driver, 鈥淭hey will be there every week.鈥� He responded, 鈥淎nd then they will be there every day and every night,鈥� at which point I was reminded how revolutionary movements for social justice emerge.

TOJ: In processing the recent events at Standing Rock, I was struck by the words you share of the black American feminist Bernice Johnson Reagon, 鈥渢hat interdependency includes the threat of death.鈥�5 To what extent are interdependency, cohabitation, alliance, and the power of assembly being properly demonstrated with veterans joining the front lines on behalf of water protectors at Standing Rock, particularly in the joining of two different sets of 鈥渄isposable persons鈥�?

JB: The veterans arriving at Standing Rock is moving indeed. This kind of alliance is beautiful because the veterans were able to depart from a nationalist and militarist affiliation, and because the native peoples and their allies were able to welcome them. That the veterans now stand off against the militarized police force tasked with dispersing the demonstrators makes plain that there are fissures developing that may well make it more possible for police and members of the National Guard to refuse to implement orders to deport, detain, and disperse precarious peoples seeking to lay claim to land, freedom, equality, and belonging. That the Los Angeles Police Department also made clear it will not implement any deportation policy shows us that new alliances are possible, ones that are even more queer than those we have already known.

TOJ: You critically engage the work of Hannah Arendt in this text, specifically her book The Human Condition. Although there are several instances in which you depart from or expand upon her work, you agree with Arendt鈥檚 notion that freedom 鈥渄oes not come from me or from you; it can and does happen as a relation between us, or, indeed, among us鈥� and that together 鈥渨e bring the space of appearance into being.鈥�6 This idea of the between occurs so often throughout your text, and perhaps just as often, there are mentions of this sort of juxtaposition between being bound to the other and coming undone in the presence of the other. Can you explain your view of what occurs in the between of two subjects in relation, the boundedness and the coming undone, as well as the ways in which this becomes the space for freedom?

JB: I think that Arendt was right to criticize those forms of individualism that presume that freedom is always and only a matter of personal liberty. Of course, I am most glad to have my personal liberty, but I only have it to the extent that there is a sphere of freedom in which I can operate. That sphere is coproduced by people who live together or who have agreed to live in a world in which the relations between them make possible their individual sense of being free. So perhaps we might regard personal liberty as a cipher of social freedom. And social freedom cannot be understood apart from what arises between people, what happens when they make something in common or when, in fact, they seek to make or remake the world in common. I am struck by the way Arendt鈥檚 position echoes that of Martin Buber, whose cultural Zionism interested her a great deal in the 1930s. For Buber, the I only knows its world because there is a you who has consciousness of that world.7 The world is given to me because you are also there as one to whom it is given. The world is never given to me alone but always in your company. Without you, the world does not give itself. We are worldless without one another.

TOJ: The third chapter opens by asking 鈥渨hether any of us have the capacity or inclination to respond ethically to suffering at a distance, and what makes that ethical encounter possible when it does take place?鈥�8 I am wondering whether the question here is not between 鈥渃apacity or inclination鈥� (emphasis added); that is, not a matter of whether we all have the capacity to respond but that few of us are inclined to actually do so. It seems we have an operative, perhaps even subconscious, mentality that we have less of an ethical obligation to those from whom the distance from us is great. What is this seeming disconnect between our capacity to respond to the suffering other and our inclination to actually do so?

JB: I think you are probably right. What worries me is that many of us form our sense of obligation toward another on the basis of feelings of identification. If someone else is like us, and that likeness is readily recognizable, then we are more inclined to respond in the way that we would have others respond to us. The harder task is to maintain an obligation to those by whom we feel ourselves to have been injured, to those we fear, or to those whose difference from us seems to be quite severe. This is why I do not think that global obligations can rest on identification, even expanded or expanding identifications; they have to claim us quite regardless of whether or not we feel love or sympathy, for the simple reason that the world is given to us in common and that without each other the world is not given. If the self is the basis of sympathy, our sympathy will be restricted to those who are like us. The real challenge occurs when that extrapolation of the self is thwarted by alterity.

TOJ: It does seem that any way forward must include maintaining an obligation to those we perceive to have hurt us or to those whom we fear, but current conservative critiques of political correctness seem to pose such obligations or lines of connection to others as illusions. How do we foster obligation in a time such as this?

JB: That is a good question, and I am not sure I have the answer. But it does matter when one starts to realize that one鈥檚 own suffering is like that of the other鈥檚. That can lead to a structural understanding of exploitation or differential precarity. Some forms of identification or substitutability can begin forms of alliance that call into question the more entrenched versions of individualism. The idea that I am obligated to others follows, I think, from the more fundamental insight that one life is not living without the other and that this way of being bound up together is at once ontological and ethical.

TOJ: This brings to mind the Jewish and Christian notion of neighbor. We want a definable answer to the who implicit in the injunction to love our neighbor because already there are those whom we wish to exclude. Stepping outside of the general binaries through which we view our complex world, often to our own detriment, I鈥檓 thinking here about the theory of neighbor as a third term coupled with the idea of proximity, the root of which means nearest.9 Could it be suggested that the neighbor, as neither friend nor enemy, is perhaps always in proximity, always nearest, always present, but neither fully and finally friend or enemy, never arriving but always remaining something other? To be more specific, if we understand proximity to be the space within which interpersonal relations occur, the breeding ground for contempt, as well as the site for ethical obligation, could our conception of proximity be expanded, albeit metaphysically, to include our geographically distant neighbors, such that it could be suggested that we always have an obligation to the other, even at a distance?

JB: I like this idea, of course, but sometimes the greatest estrangement happens within relations that are most proximate. I am interested in the fact, for instance, that many people claim that they follow principles of nonviolence except that they would make exceptions if someone in their family were attacked or threatened. That suggests that those lives closest to us are most precious and that others are less so. Yet most violence takes place within domestic situations, suggesting that those closest to us also represent distinct sorts of threats. There seems to be no way around that paradox. We let others die because they are far away, but those closest to us are sometimes most imperiled by proximity. Violence works across proximity and distance, it seems.

TOJ: You advocate an ethics of cohabitation, bluntly reminding us that it is 鈥渘ot from a pervasive love for humanity or a pure desire for peace that we strive to live together. We live together because we have no choice.鈥� In fact, you point out that we don鈥檛 even get to choose with whom we cohabit and that interdependency does not mean social harmony.10 What are the implications for such given realities when the work we have before us necessitates the linking of bodies, the forming of alliances, and the performativity of assemblies?

JB: Very often those links we make are anonymous. We do not know the history or the face of the one with whom we are allied. This is part of what makes it a public demonstration rather than the local assertion of community bonds. Sometimes those two sorts of ties are mixed. There has to be a way of entering into a common world, especially for those who have not been part of that world, to ally with those who are at risk of not counting. This means that we do not demand a personal connection or even an alliance of affect but a passionate commitment to the everyone and the anyone. Maybe there are forms of love that can describe this, but they would be neither personal nor communitarian.

TOJ: In this recent text, you seem comfortable with a mode of public writing and speaking that does not directly or immediately lead to action; you even mention the urgency with which you write so that your work might first cause us to pause and reflect together on the very conditions of acting.11 What鈥檚 made available to us in such forms of reflection that we might otherwise miss when we become too preoccupied with immediate actionable steps?

JB: I see on my campus, for instance, that there are students who oppose racism by any means necessary. I want to oppose racism as well, but I do think it is worth pausing to ask by what means. If the means are violent, how are they justified? I would like to persuade people who are in righteous rage that the turn to violence is not what they finally want, since at stake is not just finding a way to react immediately and legibly but building a world together. We have to pause and ask about means if we want to build a world opposed to racism.

TOJ: In your acceptance speech for the Adorno award, which is included at the end of the book, you pick up Adorno鈥檚 question on the possibility of living a good life in a bad life. You argue that whatever hope we have for a good life in this troubled historical moment and context is bound up with interdependency and performative action. You write, 鈥淚f I am to lead a good life, it will be a life lived with others, a life that is no life without those others.鈥�12 I am struck by the ways in which you hold together the tensions involved in answering Adorno鈥檚 question鈥攂eing honest about our present moment while also remaining hopeful about our possibilities in collective action. What is it that gives you hope for us moving toward a good life in this moment?

JB: I suppose at this moment I am most grateful for the moments of surprise; the alliance between the veterans and the Standing Rock activists; the people who take to the street to oppose the travel ban; the law students who stay up all night helping to draft the rationale for denying that ban; the farmers, many of whom are Republicans, who do not want migrant workers deported or living in fear of a police raid. There are many of us coming together to ask our universities to become sanctuaries, which means we will in no way assist state authorities in their efforts to deport undocumented students. Many of these people I do not know. Many people meet each other for the first time. Many are surprised to find solidarity in a sector long regarded as culturally alien. So I am moved by the alliances and think that they can grow into a popular movement but only if we do not know in advance with whom we will be allying. We need that opening to a different alliance in the future to affirm hope. I see some discrete moments, vibrant and compelling, and hope to see the coming concatenation soon.

TOJ: It seems like this sort of surprise may necessarily stay hidden from view until we actually cast our lots into the movement to build a world together, as you say. Do actionable steps only become possible or imaginable in the wake of interconnection, of thinking alongside this other with whom I have nothing in common apart from our commitment to a sharable, equitable future?

JB: I suppose it is first important to honor the obligation to affirm the life of another even if I am overwhelmed with hostility. This is the basic precept of an ethics of nonviolence, in my view. So though we imagine that we throw our lot in with others, the fact is that others are impinging upon us all the time. We were thrown into a world of others way before we made any decisions whether or not to throw our lot in with others. Decision only happens in the context of a prior entanglement. That can be a tie of ambivalence, but it is a social tie or bond, one that is sometimes nearly impossible to fathom. And that we are all equally in that bind, as it were, implies a kind of equality from the start. We can rebel against it, but the truth of that sort of equality is larger than our rebellion. The point is to take that non-egological point of departure for what we call our agency and our decision. It means that action is always implicitly plural and reciprocal, even when that is not the case in existing circumstances. We have to foreground and work that incommensurability to produce a different future.

1. 叠耻迟濒别谤,听Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly聽(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 27.
2. Ibid., 33 and 34.
3. Ibid., 38 and 59. Also see Turner,聽The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure聽(New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction, 1995).
4. Ibid., 41 and 198; and Merleau-Ponty,聽Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), quoted in Mark C. Taylor,聽础濒迟补谤颈迟测听(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 69.
5. Johnson Reagon quoted in 叠耻迟濒别谤,听Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 152.
6. Arendt quoted in 叠耻迟濒别谤,听Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 89 (emphasis added).
7. See Buber,聽I and Thou聽(New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1971).
8. Ibid., 99.
9. See Kenneth Reinhard, 鈥淭oward a Political Theology of the Neighbor,鈥� in聽The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology聽(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 13.
10. Ibid., 122. Also see ibid., 121 and 151.
11. Ibid., 124.
12. Ibid., 218.

The post We Are Worldless Without One Another: An Interview with Judith Butler appeared first on 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology.

Join ecotheologian Mary DeJong (MA in ’17) for a cup of sage tea as she suggests that our gardens are the source of sacred visions of the divine. Mary is a contributor at The Other Journal. Housed within 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology, The Other Journal is a bi-annual print and digital journal that aims to create space for Christian interdisciplinary reflection, exploration, and expression at the intersection of theology and culture. This article was originally published on .

Fire of the Holy Spirit,

life of the life of every creature,

holy are you in giving life to forms.

Rivers spring forth from the waters

earth wears her green vigor.

鈥擧ildegard of Bingen

When spring arrives, my Pacific Northwest backyard becomes abloom with more than verdant greens and dazzling flowers. In addition to the stunning red rhododendron, the pollinator-calling pink of the flowering current, and the white-plated blooms of the dogwood, fairy houses built by children begin to appear. At the base of our birch trees my children spontaneously create colorful teas and soups out of herbs from our kitchen garden to heal imaginary ailments. Sage, thyme, oregano, chamomile, and parsley get stirred up; simmered upon blocks of wood, which are the children鈥檚 imaginary stove burners; and served to one another and a present parent in remnant cups upon mismatched saucers. These common herbs, also found in medieval monastic gardens, become the essence of play; they are foundational and inherent elements to the children鈥檚 way of knowing, understanding, and interacting with the natural world.

These seen and unseen worlds seem to go together. As many times as I have been served a 鈥渟age tea,鈥� my child鈥檚 head has been turned by an invisible presence, and wondrous stories of the otherworld are told.1 Theirs are the tales of whispers and wings and a wondrous curiosity about creeping and growing things. This 鈥渞egion of delight鈥� was also critical to the great visionary and mystic Hildegard of Bingen, who spent decades investigating natural science, agriculture, herbal remedies, and the sacred spaces of the earth.2 I propose that Hildegard鈥檚 intimate relationship with the natural world was a conduit for sacred revelations and that this relationship provided the very essence from which her ecstasies were shaped and formed.

Although Hildegard鈥檚 visions were no doubt of divine origin, curiosity鈥攁nd a deep sense of God鈥檚 interrelatedness with the more-than-human world鈥攑rompts me to wonder if Hildegard facilitated her visions through exchanges with entheogenic plants, not so unlike my children who come in from the garden often in a state of enthralled kinship with the life that exists beyond the back door.3 As the religious philosopher Huston Smith has shown, such plants have the potential to facilitate a deep and abiding sense of the sacred and ontological wonder, as well as a sacramental use in connecting more fully with the divine.4 Of course, seeing plants as portals isn鈥檛 to be confused with intentionally seeking psychedelic experiences through the use, for instance, of certain mushrooms. Rather, intimately living with and among the natural world invites an attunement to God through an interanimating relationship with the very plants that constitute our places.

For my children, this kind of approach, as illustrated by their extensive play in the garden and fringe forest of our backyard, produces a mysterious paradox of headiness and rootedness. To understand the natural world through this entheogenic lens is to take a step away from religion鈥檚 anthropocentric tendencies and to engage the realms of pneumatology鈥攖he doctrine of the Spirit. Such experiences create conscious connections between humanity and the natural environment within a sacred, scientific cosmology. Hildegard鈥檚 intimacy with her environs thus models how a deep interrelationship with the natural world in our contemporary time can usher in rapturous states of divine wonder, awe, and religious understanding, which can then facilitate change on behalf of the common good.

Hildegard of Bingen was a remarkable female figure in tumultuous twelfth-century Germany whose work as an abbess, visionary, prophet, herbalist, and composer had great impact in her time. Her ethereal experiences, described today as mystical, clairvoyant, or paranormal, are recorded in her Scivias and Book of Divine Works. These mystical impressions began for Hildegard at the young age of three and continued throughout her eighty-one years of life. Hildegard confided in Jutta von Spanheim, her mentor, 鈥淲hen I was three years old, I saw an immense light that shook my soul; but, because of my youth, I could not externalize it.鈥�5 These early visions are believed to have panicked her parents, so she was tucked away into the safekeeping of an anchorage, an enclosed dwelling under the care of her anchoress and mentor, where she had only limited encounters with religious and communities.6

This forced exile by her parents reflected a common fear of that era, specifically the fear of a child鈥檚 unusual visionary gifts. It was an age when healing powers and direct access to God were questioned, especially when embodied by a young female. The role of wise women, midwives, and healers, who practiced plant medicine and perceived the sacred in all of nature, was condemned by church authorities, and there was an emerging conclusion that the mystical and visionary experiences of women in monastic institutions perpetuated the medieval magic of a pre-Christian past.

In spite of these cultural concerns, Hildegard literally dug into the earth. Even her sleep was characterized by proximity to the land, as legends of her life claim that her particular anchorage was cut into a hillside. Living within and tending to the earth produced a heightened sensorial attunement to and a unique understanding of the other-than-human world. This embodied experience of the interrelatedness of the whole of creation gave her insight into nature鈥檚 immanent creativity and rhythms. Nature鈥檚 creative forms, made evident through the biodiversity of Hildegard鈥檚 medieval Germany, were capable of bringing forth a display of magnificence that endlessly provoked her wonder. Forested landscapes, pastures, moors, and countryside monasteries provided the environs for a multiplicity of meaning with wild places and animals, prompting Hildegard to develop a posture of openness and a desire to see the sacred within all of creation.7

This wild landscape and rural lifestyle meant that older practices, such as cultivating plant medicine, survived despite the growth of Christendom, and Hildegard joined in that thousand-year legacy of growing herbs.8 As abbess, Hildegard was responsible for tending to the neighboring sick at the monastery, and in this role, she became intimately acquainted with the healing properties of trees and plants. Hildegard鈥檚 Physica, the first German herbal treatise, and Materia Medica, in which she catalogs the properties of plants, trees, birds, fish, and stones, attest to her knowledge, competence, and concern for the physical world. Her Causae et Curae echoes this conscious awareness wherein she discusses the physical processes for the human body and its interrelatedness to the natural world. Moreover, her holistic healing abilities allow us to conjecture that she likely practiced a Middle Age version of biodynamic farming, an approach to agriculture in which the esoteric value of plants is considered within agricultural practices to create a diversified and balanced regenerative ecosystem; this practice most likely also encompassed planetary and spiritual components of horticulture.9

For Hildegard, herbs often had powers beyond the symptomatic relief of irritations. Take lavender, for example: 鈥淲hoever cooks lavender with wine, or if the person has no wine, with honey and water, and drinks it often lukewarm, it will alleviate the pain in the liver and in the lungs and the steam in his chest. Lavender wine will provide the person with pure knowledge and a clear understanding.鈥�10 This integrative approach demonstrates Hildegard鈥檚 principle of viriditas, translated as 鈥済reenness鈥� or 鈥済reening power鈥� and interpreted as meaningful growth or life. This greening power is similar to what we now call photosynthesis. That is, Hildegard saw that there was a readiness in plants to receive the sun and to transform it into energy and life, and she recognized this as the inherent connection between the physical world and the divine presence.

The inherent greening energy of viriditas was foundational to Hildegard鈥檚 understanding of the Holy Spirit, the vivifying breath that animates all living things (Gen. 1:2, Ps. 104:29鈥�30). She fostered a nature-centered pneumatology that allowed for a vibrant and immanent earthly Spirit, enfleshed, embodied, and encountered in forest, field, and flower. The garden and the whole of the great, green earth was understood to be the place where God鈥檚 Spirit and our spirit meet to produce fecundity: holistic wellness for the person and a profound mutual relationship with the natural world.

An understanding of the sacred interconnectedness within the natural world has existed for millennia within indigenous cultures that have developed a deep respect for plants, regarding many of them as sacred couriers of well-being, health, and wisdom. Indeed, a deep love and mutuality for plants, animals, and fish both grounds and elevates the inherent web of relationships that are seen as mirrored throughout the cosmos. Hildegard鈥檚 medicinal understanding of the plant world reflected these cosmic connections, and her practice with plants was made more palpable to the Germanic population of the time through her spiritualization of the proposed cure, as rational, scientific explanations were more enduring for ordinary people if offered with a heavy dose of faith.

One example of Hildegard鈥檚 magical blend of the rational mind with Christian cosmology is found in her belief concerning the mandrake root, which she identified as composed of the earth from which Adam was created. A sad man might obtain a mandrake root that had been purified in a fountain for a day and night immediately after being dug from the earth. He would take the root to bed with him, warm it next to his body, and recite these words: 鈥淕od, who madest man from the dust of the earth without grief, I now place next to me that earth which has never transgressed in order that my clay may feel that peace just as Thou didst create it.鈥�11 This particular plant, and indeed the whole of the natural world, becomes both metaphor and milieu for how the sacred manifests itself. Anna Minore argues that Hildegard recognizes that the connection between the 鈥渄ivine and its earthly hierophanies . . . plunges one into the necessity of the symbol for accessing the divine, and thus the realm where the ecological preservation of the trees and mountains has something to do with spirituality.鈥�12 Like the cultural understandings of indigenous tribal healers, this responsive respect cultivates a posture of care and concern for the other, a much needed expression that fosters an interrelated sense of health and well-being.

Hildegard was also revered for her contemplative visions. She related that these visions did not come to her in dreams, ecstasies, or through exterior senses. Rather, by opening herself up to the will of God, she received her impressions in full consciousness with her interior senses. This was Hildegard鈥檚 epistemology, a way of knowing that involved integrating the soul and soil in such a way that her perceptions were finely attuned to the symbolic spheres of divinity and humanity. The earth became the medium by which she encountered and understood God. This way of Hildegard鈥檚 hearing is both ancient and universal鈥攖he sacred has often been presented through complex symbols, stories, and dreams, most of which can be found in basic patterns across a vast array of traditions.13

Moreover, the landscape of the soul has been revealed through a variety of rites and rituals, many of which utilized plants to heighten the experience of the holy.14 These kinds of practices are examples of what Lynn Hume calls 鈥渟ensory syntactics,鈥� practices that provide a somatic stimulus to access heightened awareness and divine realities beyond the physical body via some sort of portal or passage that leads to a significant spiritual encounter (e.g., mandalas, olfactory stimuli, and oral consumption). Apart from the wine used in Christian Communion services, the instances closest to us in time and space are the sacramental role of peyote within the Native American Church and the Mazatec people鈥檚 two-thousand-year-old tradition of using mushrooms in ancient rituals.15 These plants were sacramental and treated with respect due to their potent medicine and relation to mysterious theophanies.16 Thus, like the wise elders of many other traditions, Hildegard cultivated a sacramental understanding of landscape, particularly plant life; entheogenic plants were expressive and sentient, and they provided a constructive, life-giving addition to ceremonies and the soul-discovery process.

Ecophilosopher David Abram believes that the primeval functions of a traditional healer acted as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field, ensuring a mutuality between the provisions offered from the landscape to the human, and also from the human community back to the earth. He states that 鈥渂y the [healer鈥檚] constant rituals, trances, ecstasies, and 鈥榡ourneys,鈥� [s]he ensures that the relation between human society and the larger society of beings is balanced and reciprocal, and that the village never takes more from the living land than it returns to it鈥攏ot just materially but with prayers, propitiations, and praise.鈥�17 Likewise, Hildegard鈥檚 notion of viriditas placed her in relationship with the plant community and tapped her into an ancient wisdom that bolstered her divine visions and ecstasies and promoted a prophetic call for ecological social reform.

Population growth and increasingly destructive agricultural practices were causing the deforestation of Hildegard鈥檚 homeland. As trees were relentlessly felled, she had an intuitive sense of the environmental impact these human-centered behaviors would have on the whole of the natural world. Her intimate practice with plants provided her with a prescient voice that told of an immanent God that was present within all of creation; this divine presence required mutual care and cultivation of the natural world that was strikingly different than theologies that imagined a transcendent God who was no longer concerned with the minutiae of planetary life.

In Hildegard鈥檚 expansive range of knowing, there exists a profound connection to and affinity with biodiversity, a life-way that ceases disconnection and disease. In her interrelational understanding of life, separation is erased between the seer and the seen. Hildegard says of the Spirit, 鈥淵ou are the mighty way in which every / thing that is in the heavens, / on the earth, / and under the earth, / is penetrated with connectedness, / penetrated with relatedness.鈥�18 Her contemplative visions uphold a truly Trinitarian universe, with all things spiraling toward one another, interanimating one another very much like a mandala.

However, unlike the spiraling form of the transcendent mandala, which has no perceptible starting place for the viewer, Hildegard鈥檚 rich visionary experience was in part a response to her particular position and station in life, a revelatory reaction to being rooted and of a place. Indeed, depth psychologist Bill Plotkin鈥檚 extensive research on human development leads him to propose that we each are meant to occupy one particular place on this planet, a place in which our relationship with the greater community of life, including plants, successfully accesses the soul and its connection to the divine by serving as a personal doorway to the world of the unseen.19 A unique and authentic relationship with our particular place within our bioregion thus becomes a portal by which the soul communes with God. At home and closely connected with the land, the soul and the soil become nearly indistinguishable. Hildegard exemplifies the power that exists in a deep knowing of one鈥檚 place through her intimate relationship with her homescape and the sense of belonging it instilled.

Similarly, David Abram tells us that 鈥渨e are situated in the land in much the same way that characters are situated in a story . . . along with the other animals, plants, stones, trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters on a huge stage that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.鈥�20 He finds that the natural world that most Europeans regard as merely a pleasant backdrop to more pressing everyday concerns consists of 鈥渄eeply mysterious powers and entities with whom the healer enters into rapport.鈥� Abram affirms that there are 鈥渕ultiple nonhuman sensibilities that animate the landscape,鈥� powers in the land that avail themselves to us if only we remember that our human consciousness is one form of awareness among many.21 If we can bespeak the wisdom of the more-than-human world, engaging the plant life, forests, and wind as mysterious powers and entities, we can achieve an intimacy with nonhuman nature that can take us back to what has been lost: ancestral reciprocity with the animate earth that cultivates a culture of belonging.

This reciprocity for Hildegard is her vision of the universe as God鈥檚 body. 鈥淚 flame above the beauty of the fields,鈥� she hears God declare, 鈥淚 shine in the waters; in the sun, the moon and the stars, I burn.鈥� She experiences the 鈥渁iry wind鈥� flourishing in all 鈥渋ts green power and its blossoming.鈥� For Hildegard, God thunderously emanates from it all: 鈥淚, the fiery power, lie hidden in these things and they blaze from me.鈥�22 What Hildegard describes as God, divine spirits, or angelic messengers, Abram would suggest to be modes of intelligence or awareness that simply do not possess a human form, and he would presumably echo Hildegard鈥檚 insight that if one observes these natural, nonhuman existents, one opens oneself to 鈥渁 world all alive, awake, and aware.鈥�23 German theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart says something of the same: 鈥淚f humankind could have known God without the world, God would never have created the world.鈥�24

Creation is not a scenic backdrop designed only so humans can take the stage. Creation is in fact a full participant in human transformation, as the outer world is absolutely needed to mirror the true inner world; the world itself is a sacrament. Thomas Berry believes that 鈥渙ur most urgent need at the present time is for a reorientation of the human venture toward an intimate experience of the world around us.鈥�25 Berry and Hildegard were prophetic healers, voices calling us to our collective, numinous relationship with nature. The land models mutuality and sustainability, but to come to know these values, one must be in renewed communication with other species鈥攁n occurrence inherent to inter-being in the natural world.

Hildegard as healer and mystic poses a challenge for us today. We have much to learn from the wisdom expressed in her visionary theology, which makes ecology a spiritual and social task. Hildegard lived in a right relationship with the natural world. She embodied a mutual meant-for-ness, and as a result of her sense of belonging to a place, she became a channel: the imminent sacred and the transcendent communicated to and through her. We each have this potentiality. If we could recover her ancient ways and methods of communing with the divine through our local lands, perhaps we too could develop a stronger prophetic voice and political agency to confront the destructive forces operating in our world today. If we could return to our childhood responses to the natural world鈥攖he wonder at hearing a robin sing, the calming effect of breathing in the sweet scent of lavender, the heightened perception following a drink of 鈥渟age tea鈥濃�攚e would recognize that our immediate response to any of these experiences is one that establishes deep contemplation, intimate connection to the land to which one belongs, and openness to Spirit. By going into the backyards of our lives to intentionally engage鈥攅ven play!鈥攚ith the soil, sage, and songbirds, we open ourselves up to numinous encounters. Herein is wonderment, awe, and a deep knowing of mystery and magic that allows us to rekindle and remember a vast terrain to our own existence: the greening power of God runs in and through us all, affirming the interconnections between all members of the biosphere. In the wake of such modes of engagement we might be able to receive Hildegard鈥檚 prescription for physical and spiritual health and well-being: live in mutual exchange with what is the other, and then we will begin to heal ourselves and live holistically as intended with our partnered places and planet.

1. Derived from the Latin salvere (鈥渢o save鈥�), Hildegard of Bingen described of sage, 鈥淚 save and I heal.鈥� She had a sage tea that she recommended to members of her order and surrounding countryside to be useful against all ill humors. Salvia divinorum, or 鈥渄iviner鈥檚 sage,鈥� is possibly the most psychedelic plant when ingested as smoke or tea. See Deirdre Larkin, 鈥淪alvia, Save Us,鈥� The Medieval Garden Enclosed, September 7, 2010, http://blog.metmuseum.org/cloistersgardens/2010/09/07/salvia-save-us/.
   See Thomas Berry, foreword to Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen, by Gabrielle Uhlein (Santa Fe, NM: Bear and Company, 1983), 14.
2. The term entheogenic describes psychic effects similar to those related by the terms hallucinogenic or psychedelic, but it has a different emphasis: whereas psychedelic means 鈥渕ind-(psyche) manifesting (delic),鈥� entheogenic means 鈥渆ngendering (genic) god (theo) within (en).鈥�
3. Smith, Cleansing the Doors to Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals (New York, NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2000).
4. Hildegard of Bingen quoted in Carolyn Worman Sur, The Feminine Images of God in the Visions of Saint Hildegard of Bingen鈥檚 Scivias (New York, NY: Mellen, 1993), 26.
5. Ranate Craine, Hildegard: Prophet of the Cosmic Christ (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1998), 23.
6. Jame Schaefer, Theological Foundations for Environmental Ethics: Reconstructing Patristic and Medieval Concepts (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009), 149.
7. Plants and herbs have been used for culinary, medicinal, and religious purposes. See Frances Hutchison, ed., Garden Herbs (New York, NY: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003), 12.
8. The nineteenth-century philosopher Rudolf Steiner, founder of the biodynamic approach, brought forth both a unique and ancient integrated understanding of soil, plant, animal, and human health that recognized the importance of the healthy interplay of cosmic and earthly influences. See Hilmar Moore, 鈥淩udolf Steiner: A Biographical Introduction for Farmers,鈥� Biodynamics 214 (November/December 1997): 29鈥�32.
9. Wighard Strehlow and Gottfried Hertzka, Hildegard of Bingen鈥檚 Medicine (Santa Fe, NM: Bear and Company, 1987), 72.
10. Joyce Suellentrop, 鈥淗ildegard of Bingen: Medieval Healer of the Rhine: How Healers Used Herbal Remedies during Medieval Times,鈥� Mother Earth Living (June/July 1995), http://www.motherearthliving.com/health-and-wellness/hildegard-of-bingen.aspx?PageId=3#ArticleContent.
11. Anna Minore, 鈥淗ildegard of Bingen: Symbols of Creation,鈥� American Benedictine Review 64, no. 1 (March 2013): 24.
12. 鈥淢any of Hildegard鈥檚 visionary images were given to us in mandala form. Mandalas function as patterns of order and as centering symbols that transform the confusion of the individual psyche into part of a larger order鈥�; Craine, Hildegard, 42.
13. Crystal Addey looks at the divination practices of the ancient Near East, which utilized plants, animals, and aromatic substances as means to connect to their godlike counterpart; see Divination and Theurgy in Neoplatonism: Oracles of the Gods (Burlington, UK: Routledge, 2014).
14. Richard J. Miller, 鈥淩eligion as a Product of Psychotropic Drug Use: How Much of Religious History Was Influenced by Mind-altering Substances?鈥� Atlantic, December 27, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/religion-as-a-product-of-psychotropic-drug-use/282484/.
15. Of important note here is the ontological difference between entheogenic plants and psychedelic pathogens. Features of experiences with the latter degrade into antisocial, political, communal behaviors whereas entheogenic experiences have a sustaining impact on religious practice and lead to pro-social, political, and communal engagement. More on these studied comparisons can be found in Smith, Cleansing the Doors of Perception.
16. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York, NY: Vintage, 1996), 7.
17. Hildegard as translated in Uhlein, Meditations, 41.
18. Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2008), 339.
19. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 167, also quoted in Plotkin鈥檚 Nature and the Human Soul, 339.
20. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 9.
21. Hildegard, The Book of Divine Works, in Hildegard of Bingen: Mystical Writings, ed. Fiona Bower and
22. Oliver Davies (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1992), 91鈥�92.
23. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 19.
24. Eckhart, 鈥淪ermon Fifty-Seven,鈥� in The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, ed. Maurice O鈥機onnell Walshe, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: Crossroad, 2009), 275.
25. Berry, The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-First Century (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2009), 132.

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Amidst this season of celebration and transition, we look ahead with great expectation as we continue to live out our mission of training people to be competent in the study of text, soul, and culture in order to serve God and neighbor through transforming relationships.

Voices from the Community

天美视频 community recently gathered for the decommissioning and sending of Dr. Keith Anderson. During his time as president, Keith fathered us well as we matured in years of adolescence, helping us find our footing along the way. He shared the following about this season for the school:

Twenty years is considered a milestone in organizational life. It means you have achieved some level of maturity, organizational acumen, and financial agility. A little more than twenty years ago a bold group who called themselves 鈥渢he guild鈥� left Colorado with a dream for rigorous and creative theological education. 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology is the twenty year version of their dream. But this organization is more like a person on their way to young adulthood as often marked at one鈥檚 21st birthday. We like that image because it continues to anticipate the future with a clear mission, bold strategies, and a new band of intrepid dreamers who today make up 鈥渢he new guild.鈥�

Rachael Clinton聽(MDiv ’10), Assistant Director of Program Development & Admissions at , shared the following thoughts with faculty and staff who gathered together at the beginning of school year:

The dream of 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology began around a kitchen table, but throughout these past twenty years that dream has been held by a large and ever shifting collective of board members, leaders, faculty, staff, students, alumni, spouses, and families. In our mundane and extraordinary work we are all part of a larger whole, a holy mission, a labor of love. And it is our unapologetic declaration that in the midst of these mundane and extraordinary liturgies and rhythms, especially in seasons of transition, we are held together by a God who loves. As we face a significant transition in the year ahead, we will take time to honor the past, to celebrate the present, and to anticipate the future with faith, hope, and love.

, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Academic Dean, will serve as Interim President as we anticipate the full the full welcoming of a new president in January. He noted the following about our 20th year and transitions:

I feel energized in this liminal space between what was and what will be. The 鈥渃oming of age鈥� analogy has made the most sense to me when it comes to this transition. Adolescents begin foreclosing on options and asking, What is my service to the world? As a school, we are asking this same question. What is our call to service? In the context of the larger social disruption in our nation, we need to be fully aware of what we have learned in our own disruption.

The birth of 天美视频 was a response to rigid postures and ways of seeing. Integration has been a focus for jarring that rigidity. We have taught for disruption, breaking up the hard earth. Now as a society in fragmentation, what is proving to be critical is formation and holding, not just transformation. Our formation is continual and can serve a fragmented society. We hold not tightly but with open hands the woundedness of our shared narrative.

The questions must be asked: How can we be salt? How can we still believe the purpose and mission of Jesus Christ without simply trying to squish things back together? How can we be unified in complexity? Specifically, can we really be a multiethnic nation? Can we as students, faculty, and staff cross boundaries for the sake of connecting? We start here, in the microcosm of this school.

A Few Fun Facts

• 4 names
• 3 locations
• 20 cohorts of students
• 19 graduating classes
• 1,160 alumni
• 877.5 pounds of Red Hot Tamales consumed
• 405 pounds of coffee brewed

Annual Report

When 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology started just about twenty years ago in the living rooms, kitchens, classrooms, and offices of people whose vision was pointed to the future. Did they imagine the legacy of more than 1,160 alumni? Of pastors, therapists, artists and leaders whose lives have been formed by classes, curriculum, mentoring, and the drama of learning? Did they believe their decisions made in 1997 would start a graduate school, a center for trauma and abuse, and, truthfully, a movement?

Our is a reminder of God鈥檚 presence in our story and the impact of 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology, , , and the Forum. This is our report on all those ordinary, repetitious, faithful, wise, flawed, surprising, failed, and impact things we鈥檝e been doing for the past year.

We hope you鈥檒l read, feel inspired, and join this movement of transforming relationships as we persist into the future.

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Tom is joined by:

• Drs. Chelle & Dave Stearns. is Associate Professor of Theology at 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology, and a member of the editorial advisory board at The Other Journal. is is a Senior Lecturer in the Information School at the University of Washington and Chelle鈥檚 husband.
• Dr. Mark Hearn. is Director of Contextual Education and Assistant Clinical Professor of Contextual Education and Ministry at Seattle University.
• Dr. Natalie Martinez. is a poet and activist, and teaches composition and rhetoric at Bellevue College.
• Drs. Christine & Tom Sine. and are the founders of and regularly collaborate with 天美视频.

Highlights:

Dr. Christine Sine: “As people started to get their hands in the dirt, they started to connect to the God who is very much present in the dirt.”

Dr. Chelle Stearns: “One of the primary relationships the Holy Spirit has, especially in the Old Testament, is with the land.”

https://vimeo.com/233746700

Housed within 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology, The Other Journal is a twice-yearly print and digital journal that aims to create space for Christian interdisciplinary reflection, exploration, and expression at the intersection of theology and culture. Attempting to remain a step or two more popular than the typical scholarly journal and a step or two more scholarly than the typical popular magazine, TOJ collaborates with contributors around the globe to provide readers with provocative, challenging and insightful Christian commentary on current social issues, political events, cultural trends, and pop phenomena.

The post Discourse over Dinner: Theology and the Environment, Part 1 appeared first on 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology.