Abstract
A pigeon or a dove? Eyes down, weight borne on spread wings and slowly settling toward two men in a river. Should we imagine neck and shoulders of iridescent purples and greens, a gray body with shining eyes, or the snowy whiteness that our iconography ubiquitously depicts? In historical context, speaking of a peristera descending upon Jesus at his baptism was far more likely to signify a common rock pigeon than a sanctimoniously symbolic dove (either translation is valid). While the book’s argument ranges much further, this shift of image from dove to pigeon perhaps most characteristically encapsulates Mark I. Wallace’s When God was a Bird.
W.’s major claim is that Christianity is an animist religion, or rather, it would be if it fully lived out its biblical, incarnational, and trinitarian commitments. W. rejects the presupposition, rarely articulated, that animism lies beneath the dignity of rigorous Christian theology. Mainstream religious studies scholarship has abandoned the evolutionary-teleological model of religious development in which primitive animist cultures mature into polytheistic cultures, eventually ripening into enlightened monotheism. This prejudicial scheme lives on implicitly, however, in Christian theology. Against such bias, W. marshals evidence from Scripture and tradition alike—from the creative spirit hovering over the waters, to the burning bush, to Job’s whirlwind, to Jesus’s relationship to the birds of the air, and centrally, to the Spirit’s descent as a pigeon—vibrantly linking divinity and creation’s animacy. Perhaps most provocatively, W. argues that God is promiscuously incarnate beyond Jesus of Nazareth. The Spirit descends less as an apparition of a pigeon than bodily (sо̄matikо̄ according to Luke) as a pigeon in the flesh. Misrecognizing Christianity as a religion of transcendence produces disastrous disregard for creation’s well-being. Recovering the animist impulse within the Christian heritage, W. posits, could reorient Christians toward awe-filled responsibility in relation to creation. Animism, in other words, answers narcissistic anthropocentrism.
A great strength of W.’s ornitheological work is its creative conversation with diverse contemporary interlocutors: the indigenous theology of George Tinker, the eco-theology of Elizabeth Johnson, Denis Edwards, and Paul Santmire, the eco-political process apophaticism of Catherine Keller, the “new animist” eco-philosophy of Val Plumwood and Tim Ingold, and the “new materialism” of Jane Bennett, William Connolly, and Tim Morton.
W.’s introduction summarizes reasons for overcoming any theological antipathy between animality and divinity. Chapter 1 presents W.’s most thorough argument for the bodily presence of the Spirit as an avian incarnation, divinity in pigeon flesh (25–31). The second chapter addresses degenerative human relations to our ecosystems, paying special attention to Jesus’s sacramental use of abject substances such as mud and saliva as corporeal-cosmical modes of healing. Here, W. sharply critiques the “anti-animist” Rene Girard (69), whose account of Christianity casts nature as the site of violence (72), ecosystems from which humans escape in assimilation to a sky-God. Chapter 3 uses Paul Santmire’s distinction between spiritualities of ascent and fecundity to frame a discussion of worship. Drawing on Augustine, Hildegard, twentieth-century Quakers, and the Gospels, W. describes an earth-rooted worship of a God whose sacredness saturates creation. Chapter 4 presents John Muir as an exemplar of Christian animism, while rightly rejecting Muir’s racist, anti-indigenous support for driving the Miwok from Yosemite. Chapter 5 interposes W.’s pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago with James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s Gaia hypothesis, using the themes of suffering, loss, responsibility, and transformation. If, amidst the anthropogenic horror of the sixth major extinction event, we think of the earth as a living system, a vast self-regulating organismic assemblage, then the earth now appears cruciform and suffering. As God suffers in and with the beloved earth, fully perceiving the divine entails resisting this slow grinding industrial execution.
W.’s book presents a compelling argument in an accessible style. I have already used the text in an undergraduate course in ecological theologies, where it generated vibrant conversation. The strengths of the book lie in constructive work on the mode of God’s presence in creation and the expansive sense of the embodied responses to God’s presence available in the Christian tradition. While W. offers an attractive account of Christian fidelity, his theology presses forward along the lines of conceptual creativity and ethical commitment rather than strict loyalty to dogmatic tradition. Historiographically, some of W.’s claims remain imprecise. For example, the argument that Augustine rescues Christianity from absorption into Neoplatonism (97) fails to adequately reckon with the legacy of Augustine’s platonic attachments. More seriously, it obscures creative resistance to Neoplatonism in other late-antique figures, even those as immersed in it as Pseudo-Dionysius. Overall, this excellent book will be of interest to anyone working at the intersection of Christianity with animal studies, animism, or new materialism. It is a suitable text for courses in ecological theology or religion and ecology at any level.