The Wild God

A Pneumatology

By the wording of the sacred mantra His shape arose in its meter, and the vision took form in the rhythm of the words of this raudra brahman, this wild, fierce hymn of the god whose name it hides while he is seen as he arises in his unfathomable nature and paradoxical shape as guardian of sacred order, lord of vastu.—Stella Kramrisch, The Presence of Shiva (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 4-5.

Essentialism can inhibit the way we think as scholars about religion as a human phenomenon, but it can also inhibit the way we think as philosophers and theologians about reality at large. There are basically two ways to try and think synthetically about the character of reality, bringing interdisciplinary learning to bear on questions of ultimate meaning and metaphysical truth, questions about self, world, and God. One is to seek to create systems from the top down: taxonomies of being that allow for a controlled account of what there is and can be in the kosmos, of what is possible or impossible or probable or improbable or plausible or implausible, of how the universe—and God—ought to behave. Methodologically, this is the kind of thinking that the natural and social sciences, by virtue of what they are and what they are trying to do, have to engage in to some extent, and provided that one does not think that this kind of critical, Aristotelian categorical thinking is capable of bridging the gap between our knowledge and a comprehensive grasp of reality, it is a very necessary pedagogy to engaging with reality as it is, and not simply how we would like it to be. But the investigative method is designed not to lead us to ultimate truth—it cannot, for our powers of sensation and derivative, abstracting intellection are limited both in resources and scope, conditioned by our location in time, space, and matter and always by their inertia, at least in our fallen experience of the kosmos—but to the aporia of ignorance, of standing before the mysterious irreducibility of existence in its transcendence and immanence, and especially as the two are directly available to us, as it were, in the Self.

But the other way to do philosophy and theology (only artificially separate disciplines) is to begin from an interior emptiness (sunyata), renouncing our categorical assumptions and the harm they can do, and beginning from reality as it appears, accepting it as it is, however it may assist or deconstruct our systems (which are always as much in need of breakdown as they are of construction). I might call this doing theology through wuwei (无为): a willingness to be useless, a comfort with the humility of impotence to describe or, really, do anything in particular in response to the profligate goodness and beauty, as well as the raw terror and destructive power, of the world. The binary of kindness and ferocity that we encounter in all things, the dualism of settled and liminal space that launches heroes’ journeys—all of these radical experiences of division and the energy they inspire have their place. They are essential, more often than not, to experiencing, both externally and internally, the divine presence in the desert that transmutes into the energy to establish an ordered world (again, literally or metaphorically). From one vantage, the categories, the separations, the divisions, the naming, the restraint of darkness and the sea, the battle with cosmic forces of chaos and darkness, the planting of the lovely Garden in the East where no rain had yet fallen, the calling of Israel to be a goy kadosh, the sanctification of Land and City and Temple as a beachhead for the divine presence in the world—all of this that is so essential to the narrative of Jewish and Christian Scripture (for it is all simply recapitulated in the apostolic kerygma of Christ)—is intrinsic to the Christian metanarrative; but from another and higher point of view, indeed, an eschatological view, all such dualisms are resolved when God is “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). And that must imply—as John Behr, David Bentley Hart, Kallistos Ware, and many others have written on—that at some level, they always already are resolved in an original and ultimate monism, of God as the whole content of all things and all things subsisting in the peaceable Kingdom in God. Such an apocalyptic metaphysics points to wisdom as the graduation from heroism (Eccl 9:16).¹ And epistemically, that wisdom encourages us to forget what we think we know about the world, and, like the eponymous dialectician of Plato’s Timaeus, to be continually ready to begin again, so to speak, with ever new, increasingly kaleidoscopic accounts of self, world, and God in their perichoresis. A kind of theological essentialism is important when one is beginning to come up with an account of God; but if one never reaches the point where all such language breaks down, then one will have missed the real point of the lesson that theology provides.

This is the value of the apophaticism of Greek theology—that we can know that God is, and who God is, but not what God is in some sort of comprehensive statement of his nature. This is why, Christologically speaking, Herbert McCabe was correct to insist that the Chalcedonian Definition—that Jesus Christ, in one substantive reality (hypostasis) and one face (prosopon) unites everything that it is to be God and everything that it is to be human, without change, confusion, separation, or division—should not be understood to say anything positive or affirmative.² That is, Chalcedon does not tell us that Jesus Christ describes for us what God is as a content, anymore than he tells us what humanity is; Chalcedon points us, irrevocably, towards the concrete reality, the event, the person of Jesus Christ as the thing that matters, for it is in that person that what it is to be God—whatever that is—and what it is to be human—whatever that is—are mutually revealed in an ineffable mystery. The phenomenology of Christ—the experience of Jesus, whether “according to the flesh” or “according to the spirit” (2 Cor 5:16), in the waters of baptism, in the imposition of hands, in the eucharistic liturgy, in the healing of confession and unction, in the vocation of singleness, marriage, and orders, in the life of repentance and askesis, in the pluralism of the human and natural worlds—is itself the true dogma of Christ: Christology is not meant to exhaustively describe who Jesus is, but to give us a form of words that allow us to make conscious the divinity that we unconsciously partake of. But this is not a quantification—McCabe’s point is that traditional Christology actively resists that kind of taxonomical approach, which would both reduce God to the status of being a mere god and undermine the cosmic dimensions of divine incarnation, that in Jesus humanity’s deification is simultaneously God’s own humanization, and therefore the revelation of humanity’s role in God’s wider play. And insofar as Christians take Jesus to be the Logos of God made flesh (Jn 1:14), such that Jesus Christ is God’s own eternal paradigm, his own manifestation in human form, microcosmically containing the macrocosm that comes into being, well-being, and eternal well-being through him (Col 1:15-20), Christians should know that once they have renounced their divine essentialism they will have joined God himself, who only knows himself in and through his Son, whose incarnation as Jesus is simply the epicenter of an embodiment that encompasses all of reality (Maximus, Ambigua 7.22). When God gazes upon himself in eternity, what he sees is the totus Christus, with Jesus at the center and head of the sophianic universe where God, through Jesus, is “all in all.” This is how God knows himself; not in some kind of abstract definition of “what it is to be God,” but as manifest in the infinite reality that God gives rise to, in which he is enfleshed as Jesus and, through Jesus, both in all those who know and love Jesus as well as embodied in all things.

This involves not the rejection of the scriptural narrative but taking one step back to view it not from within but from without, the way one would look at a Byzantine icon or a medieval tapestry. If one does what every good historian of texts should do and begins from the beginning in order to progress towards the end, taking note of divergent developments along the way in Jewish and Christian Scripture, and the way that processes of redaction and compilation, conditioned by intra- and intercommunal tensions, crises, and polemics, have constructed from these texts a canon, and then proceeds as a good biblical theologian to articulate that grander story in its details and meaning, then one will learn first to read the Bible as a larger story, gradually unfolding God’s character and purposes in the saga of Israel, Christ, and the Church. This is of course where to start with the Bible, but it is not necessarily where to end. This kind of reading corresponds to what C.S. Lewis would have called looking along the beam—the knowledge that comes through enjoyment of a thing, through participation in it. (In this case, the ideal way to enjoy the Bible is at the Liturgy, for it is there that our reading of Scripture and our direct participation in Christ are joined together as a single enterprise.)

But there is another kind of exercise—what Lewis called looking at the beam—which is contemplative in character. It is to step back, not simply to consider the bigger story of the Bible with a complete knowledge of its contents, but to consider the story of the Bible within a wider apocalyptic frame of reference of what Christians have come to know about God in following Christ and reading Scripture at his instruction. This is what theology really is—and it is why, for the record, good theology is never simply Bible study, nor ever simply patristic study, because such misunderstands what theology, Bible, and Fathers are all collectively for. This is also why theology and Christology both are unavoidably, in their final iterations, apophatic: what can be known of God is not exclusively available in a text; God must be experienced in Christ, who must also be experienced, and the experience of the personal other is never a comprehensive horizon, but an infinite, epektatic journey (as St. Gregory Nyssen so compellingly argued). And it is for just that reason that when, in the inner life of God, God comes to know himself in Christ and the world that comes into being in and through Christ, it is not in the Father and the Son that this act of reciprocal self-knowledge is completed, but in the dynamic outpouring of the hypostatic Spirit as the personal eros of Father and Son.

All classical words for Spirit—ruach, pneuma, spiritus—mean “wind” and also for that reason “breath.” Each of these words is connected to words with similar lexical meaning even if they have distinct etymologies. In Hebrew, ruach exists in a constellation of words for wind or breath that perionymically come to refer, in later stages of the language and of Early Judaism, to some kind of extracorporeal personal entity or principle, like neshamah, the breath of life that God inbreathes into Adam in Genesis 2:7, and nephesh, the “soul” of both the inbreathed man in that verse as well as of the animals created twelve verses later. Pneuma shares lexical space with words like atma which are in turn closely related to farther afield Indo-European words like the Sanskrit atman. Ruach is keyed in the Hebrew Bible primarily to divine activities of destruction and creation in the cosmos: it is the ruach Elohim that sweeps across the waters of creation (Gen 1:2); God’s ruach is what indwells Betsalel and enables his artistic genius with the Desert Tabernacle; it is God’s ruach that inspires acts of both profound violence in the Judges and that comes to rest on David, that inspires the Latter Prophets, and that the later biblical authors take to be ubiquitous in the cosmos, inescapably filling and animating it from top to bottom (Ps 139). The ruach YHWH is a kind of ecstatic force or an enthusiastic experience of divine power to act in the face of cosmic and human chaos: it rushes in to peel back the forces that prevent God’s good harmony in the world, or to disrupt the corrupt hegemonies that stymie God’s own creative freedom. It is one and the same spirit from God that vivifies both the human and the animal (Eccl 3:19), and that returns to God at death. It is the same spirit that both withdraws from living creatures in the world and returns to raise them from the dust (Ps 104:27-32).

If the Spirit is, in the words of the Creed, the zoopoion, the Creator of Life, then it must be admitted that in the universe of our fallen experience, just as the Son’s kenosis to the Father takes the nadir of death on the cross and descent to the underworld, so, too, the Spirit’s life-creating power takes on also a sort of dualism as the power of destruction which leads to new creation in the world. There is something refining, humanizing, and illumining about the Spirit but there is also something ferocious and wild about it; something mild and gentle in the conception from Mary and powerful in the raising of Jesus and tempestuous in the descent at Pentecost. It is one and the same Spirit that does these things and is also the metaphysical ground of the World Soul and the individual souls of the living world: if it is the Son, the Logos in whom the archetypes of both divine animality and divine humanity subsist, it is the Spirit breathed by God the Father upon the Son in eternity that electrifies those logoi into life and activity as spiritual, psychic, and corporeal beings. In the resultant kosmos, that life of the Spirit may well result in that which is somewhat removed from the life of God himself. It is the Spirit that stirs the divine idea of the cheetah, into the soul of every actual cheetah from inertial matter, that urges it with each respiration faster across the savannah for its prey, just as it is the Spirit prancing in the fleeing antelope. Across those plains as well the Spirit once drove the distant ancestors of Homo sapiens in bands of women and men, chasing the game that fed and clothed them and scattering them across the earth like so much seed in a field. True: it is also the Spirit that summons Christ’s assembly to the renunciation of the flesh and its works (Gal 5:17); it is also the Spirit whose ultimate work is to create the ahimsa of the peaceable Kingdom where wolf and lamb recline together (Isa 11:6). But the path to these transcendent ends in the divine oikonomia has, self-evidently, involved first the evocation of the psychic from the nothingness of matter, and then its transmutation into spirit (1 Cor 15:46), implying the Spirit’s condescension to the apocalyptic violence of the fallen kosmos and its evolutionary history—from the spectacular death of countless stars to the entropic engine of suffering that drives universal change—to bring about the true one. Sure, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Traditions also adduce a variety of intermediary figures responsible for this bifurcation of the created world into good and evil: monsters, fallen gods, sons of God and gods, demigods, Watchers, daimonia, Satans, jinn, and the like. But their existence and agency, fully permitted by God, does not quite resolve the matter, since they, too, depend on the Spirit for their moment-by-moment existence. It is the contingency of all things that means that at some level God is willing, however temporarily, to tolerate and even animate the world in its fallenness; this is the ultimate “mystery of iniquity,” not of God’s iniquity, but of how or why the Spirit that is God’s own light and fire should elect to vivify such a brutal world as ours, why the Spirit of Life is the ultimate cause of so much death.

As I often find to be the case, a useful partner in dialogue on this question is Hinduism, in this case the tradition not of Advaita Vedanta—which has much to offer here, all the same—but of Shaivism, particularly in its esoteric, philosophical, Kashmiri iteration.³ The primary bhaktic divinity of this tradition is of course Shiva, whose name means “kindness,” but who also has another name, reflective of another nature: rudra, “wildness,” “ferocity.” Between these two poles there arise a variety of identities to Shiva: he is Lord of the Beasts (prajapati, though of course nearly every post-Vedic divinity gets this title at some point); and therefore, also, Lord of the Hunt; Adiyogi, the original, perfect yogi and teacher of yoga; paradoxically, also the ideal householder (as given above, the protector of vastu, and by extension the household of the kosmos, the oikoumene itself); destroyer and patronal benefactor, bringer of death and dealer of blessing; and, for the reason of all of these paradoxes in his iconography and mythography, he is Nataraja, “Lord of the Dance,” that is, the cosmic dance of destruction and creation that is always, in ever greater cycles and encirclements, going on. In a more eclectic Hinduism, one might pair this image of Shiva as nataraja, stomping the world out in the Tandava and summoning the fallow universe back to fecundity again by it as well, with that of Vishnu reclining on the ocean of milk, dreaming the infinite worlds forth or else exhaling them in a moment of creation and inhaling them back again in a moment of destruction, only for the whole thing to repeat over again.

Is this image so dissimilar from that of the biblical God breathing forth his Spirit into the world to create life, withdrawing it to the death and destruction of that life, and sending it forth again, in seemingly eternal lila? Certainly not. And its esoteric interpretation in Pratyabhijñã, the philosophical tradition of Kashmiri Shaivism, also accords fairly well with a variety of traditional Abrahamic metaphysics of creation. In Pratyabhijñã, “Recognition,” Shiva names citt, the infinite, nondual consciousness which is God. This infinite, ultimate awareness (samvit) is as though a clear, still well or a mirror in which all creation subsists as abhasa, “slight manifestation” of Shiva, but by svatantrya, Shiva’s own intentional power of will, rather than by mere incident. The infinite God desires infinite manifestations in finite forms. Unlike in Advaita, where there is some ambiguity about the origin of the world’s ignorance (avidya) about the unity of atman and brahman due to the illusory quality of brahman’s creative power (maya)—here I take Rambachan’s view that avidya is privative rather than substantive—Pratyabhijñã is unambiguous that maya is an intentional power of creation and that the parceling out of the infinite Spirit as the delimited and finite soul is fully purposive. The jivatman’s illusory limitations, which condition the cyclical death and rebirth of samsara, are pedagogical in character, meant to lead the tantrist to the necessity of divine grace to recover the original unity of infinite consciousness, in which the significance of the particular existence of each such being is not dissolved but consummated in the nondual awareness of the whole. The destruction of avidya and the soul’s impurities therefore mirrors, on a smaller scale, Shiva’s own administration of death and life at the infinite scale: the exitus of the finite jiva from the infinite raudra brahman and its reditus thereto is not a meaningless exercise in futility but requires an experience of privation in order that God may truly become in and as the individual soul. Hence all the dualistic paradox of the god’s onomastic mythography: Lord of Beasts, Lord of the Hunt, Hound of Heaven and, yet, Hunted; Sacrificer and universal Sacrifice; Lord of Yogis and Great Lover, Husband, and Householder; etc. In true fashion, as the eternal come into the world, he deigns to “be what [he] will be” (cf. Exod 3:14), for the coincidentia oppositorum that he is beyond the world permits him an infinite variety of apparently contradictory manifestations within the world for the ultimate liberation (moksa) of beings.

My take, such as it is, is that Pratyabhijñã offers us a nondualism especially keyed to the hypostasis of the Spirit, one that might hold together what theologia and oikonomia respectively say about the Spirit in Christian Tradition, and one that might allow us to cultivate an interior receptivity to the infinite manifestations of the Spirit in the world without prejudice. That is to say, just as Christians needed Neoplatonism to work out their philosophical theology and their Christology, and, as Hart has argued, may well need Advaita Vedanta to fully articulate their understanding of Christ and the deification he offers,⁴ so too we may well need Pratyabhijñã to help us understand and articulate the pneumatic effulsion of Father and Son as it manifests in those things which, by the Father’s act of creation and the Son’s consenting, kenotic act of co-creation, come to be as the Spirit pours forth upon the Son: the nested mysterious infinities of kosmos, anthropos, ekklesia, and eschaton, which the Spirit in spiraling epicycles of change brings ever further back through the Son to the Father. To know the Spirit as both rudra, the Wild God, and as shiva, the “Kind One,” or, if you prefer, parakletos, “Comforter,” “Helper”—Life itself, which in our vale of tears so often comes as a force of purifying ruination and seemingly reckless natural violence, the erotic zest which erupts from within and can manifest in both creation and destruction (dependent on our psychological stability, as well as on our own ritualization of the energies that flow through us), which pulsates in every galaxy and burning star and world, thunders in every oncoming storm, presides in every mountain and reclines in leisure in every grove, breathes in all growing and winding and swimming and flying and creeping things, and says in each of us, “I am”—takes us away from our desire to kataphatically, authoritatively state what God is and get on to the important task of simply experiencing God as he is present in the world, even in, through, and to those things that are alien to his own nature as far as we are able to know it. Christians ought to celebrate the natural world, the botanical and animal worlds, as well as their own humanity, as nothing less than the Spirit’s Tandava.

By way of reassurance, this is hardly a simplistic attribution of evil and suffering to God as God’s active or final will for the kosmos, still less is it the denial of agency to creatures who participate in the world’s dissolution more frequently than in its creation. It is if anything the pneumatological resolution of the antinomy in Scripture between God as the one “who is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 Jn 1:5) and who is yet shrouded round about with dark storm clouds (Ps 18:11; 1 Kgs 8:12), who declares that he is the origin of light and darkness, good and evil (Isa 45:7). This paradox stands at the heart of every classically theistic tradition: on the one hand, God is the Good himself, and so evil cannot have a final metaphysical reality; yet we experience it, and God seemingly permits it (Job 1-2), implying either that he wills it, does not understand it, or is simply impotent to handle it by the terms of the traditionally stated “problem of evil.” The traditional Jewish and Christian responsum—that God permits evil out of respect for creaturely freedom and pedagogical intent, but will eventually annihilate it from the kosmos and, according to the reading that I think has the most intellectual weight, will redeem every creature from it—offers a hope that is better supported through the kind of metaphysical clarification that comes from consulting with other traditions that have sat with the problem longer. Maya as a power of creation that also, in the contingent realm, functions as a power of illusory concealment of the ultimate truth of things; the apocalyptic space opened up by the emergence of the finite from the infinite as a conditional realm where the divine attributes do not manifest in their fully integral and simple form as they do in God’s inner life; the divine desire to consummate union with finite beings through their liberation, requiring the destruction of their illusions in ways that we might find morally problematic or even sensibly outrageous: these are as useful to constructing a Christian account of self, world, and God as they are to Hindu philosophy.

These resources also offer—paradoxically, given maya’s illusory character—something of a realism about the natural world that a purely privative account of evil can miss. It is, and can only be, the case that if God as Christianity understands God is the Good, that evil does not have an independent metaphysical existence, that it is not finally or ultimately real; but unless we should come to conclude that the manifold pathology of the kosmos is an illusion in the sense of being circumstantially unreal, and not rather eschatologically unreal, we will have to squarely face the world’s violence and ask how it can be or why it is the case that the Spirit of Life inbreathes so many creatures that exert their breath, maliciously or not, only in the service of death. The problem of evil can be addressed to each hypostasis of the Trinity, in a sense: it is the Spirit’s activity in the world which is most easily taken for complicity, and therefore in the greatest need of apologia. And the answer must be some form of the following: that in the positively infinite wildness of the Trinitarian perichoresis, in which the Spirit romps back and forth between Father and Son, by which the infinite worlds which the Father contemplates in the Son are brought out of nothing into being and thence into well-being and eternal well-being, just as God does not begrudge the wicked his sun or his rain (Matt 5:45), neither does he begrudge the life-creating Spirit, “everywhere present and filling all things,” to those entities and tendencies which might well look back on the abyss and desire thither to return, and to drag all that beautiful diversity with them. But just as the psychic must come first, and then the pneumatic, so too here: what appears from our cosmic vantage as a kind of divine lethargy about evil is simply the destructive angle of the Spirit’s dance in and through the natural world, shot through with the binary peace of yogic rest in those moments of genuine bliss and inaction afforded in this world. But the dance ends in that world which is both rest and movement, in that world, in other words, where God’s own eternal union of rest and movement are fully manifest in and as all things.

1. See Gregory Mobley, The Empty Men: The Heroic Tradition in Ancient Israel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

2. For an introduction to McCabe, see Herbert McCabe, God Matters (RI: Mowbray, 2020).

3. For a broad overview of some themes and ideas in Hinduism, I commend Wendy Doniger, On Hinduism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

4. Most recently in David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature (South Bend, IN: UND Press, 2022).