The Light of the Leaf: A Theological Critique of Timothy Morton’s ‘Dark Ecology’

Ryan Haecker

doi:10.3390/rel12090755

Abstract

The plant has recently emerged as a battleground of conflicting ecocriticisms. ‘Dark Ecology’ is, in the works of Timothy Morton, an ecocritical hermeneutic, in which the world can be subtracted into the parts of objects, of the plant, and of any leaf that exceeds the totality of abstract ‘Nature’. In dividing the whole into the parts, and combining the parts into an imminently subtracted whole, he has recommended a negative dialectic of virtual objects that can be collected into a ‘hyperobject’. This dialectic can, however, be argued to dissolve any whole into parts, and render the hyperobject internally fissured. We can, from the ‘darkness’ of this fissure, begin to read Nature according to the ‘via plantare’, that is, a mystical way of desiring an other as plant so as to know and love the visible light of the invisible God. ‘Vegetal difference’, the difference of the plant from the animal, should, I argue, be read for theology as a finite reflection of the divine difference of the Holy Trinity in a Trinitarian Ontology, in which the originary difference of the Son from the Father is related through the Holy Spirit, and given again in accelerating gratuity—like the light of the leaf that shines forth from any flower.

Highlights

Is, in the works of Timothy Morton, an ecocritical hermeneutic, in which the world can be subtracted into the parts of objects, of the plant, and of any leaf that exceeds the totality of abstract ‘Nature’
‘Vegetal difference’, the difference of the plant from the animal, should, I argue, be read for theology as a finite reflection of the divine difference of the Holy Trinity in a Trinitarian Ontology, in which the originary difference of the Son from the Father is related through the Holy Spirit, and given again in accelerating gratuity—like the light of the leaf that shines forth from any flower
Every leaf opens to receive the light, as each blossom explodes again in many colours. It can be read in this light to carry the trace of a wilder path that leads to the summit of mystical theology

Summary

Vegetal Difference

The plant is stranger than we know. It comes before animal life, both in the scale of evolution, and in the chain of nutrition. It has been rendered as the abject other, planted beneath the feet of animal life, at a subaltern remove from human reason In this pivotal ambiguity, the plant has threatened to topple the scale to which it had once been subordinated. He has rendered ‘vegetal difference’, the difference of the plant from the animal, as an originary supplement that threatens to subvert the metaphysical foundations of the scala naturae Once rooted in the unity of Nature, as in the simplicity of God, the form of difference has, since Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze, been transcribed by Marder and Morton across the virtual folds of objects, organisms, and plants The plant can, in this way, be read for a Christian ecotheology, to shimmer with a wilder reflection of a ‘Trinitarian Ontology’, where ‘heliotropism’ is a vegetal expression of ‘henosis’, all leaves turn their faces in silent adoration to the visible light of invisible divinity, and the glory of God radiates like the light of the leaf exploding from every flower. (Hemmerle 2020)

Dark Ecology

The ‘via Plantare’