When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World

PREFACE

At one time, God was a bird. In ancient Egypt, Thoth was the long-billed, ibis-headed God of magic and wisdom. Winged divinities populated the pantheon of Greek antiquity: the half-bird-half-beast griffin built its nest in mountain redoubts to protect itself from bandits, while the phoenix was a firebird that, upon death, could reanimate itself though the ashes of its own burned body. According to old Norse legends, the principal father-god Odin was also the raven-god who could fly across the oceans and into the underworld with his two black-bird companions. In the theological hierarchy of the pre-Columbian Aztecs, Quetzalcoatl was the plumed serpent deity who cocreated the cosmos. Even today, Quetzalcoatl is still revered in the form of the resplendent quetzal—arguably the most beautiful bird of the Americas—whose green, blue, and red feathers perfectly match the spectacular plumage of its namesake divinity. In our time as well, the Yazidis, a long-suffering religious minority in Northern Iraq, pay obeisance to the Peacock Angel, the Supreme God’s primary emanation in the form of the peacock, which, like the resplendent quetzal, is the cosmogonic origin of all creation.

But in spite of—or better, to spite—this time-honored wealth of divine avifauna, the religions of the book, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, divorced God from the avian world in order to defend a pure form of monotheism uncorrupted by beaks and feathers. In the case of Christianity, biblical faith became synonymous with the destruction of the pre-Christian gods identified with all manner of animals. According to legend, when Saint Patrick went to Ireland, he became outraged at the cult of serpent worship among the Druid priests—and thereby drove the entirety of the island’s snake population into the Celtic Sea with his mighty staff. Similarly, Spanish missionaries inveighed against Native American reverence of the California condor as an airborne divinity in an effort to purge new converts of any traces of belief in God as a winged being.

Recently, I journeyed to see the Virgin of Montserrat (Catalan for serrated mountain) in Northern Spain. With my wife, Audrey, and our friends Steven and Adrienne, we wound our way up the jagged cliffs by funicular railcar to the historic pilgrimage site. At the mountain’s summit, we walked to the back of the monastery church and entered a high-ceilinged room limned with gold and precious stone. There we paid respect to an old statue of Mary blackened with age and candle smoke, holding Jesus in her lap—and sitting on an ornately carved chair with a magnificent iron-cast winged creature flying just over her head. In Christian iconography, this feathered being is the Holy Spirit. As the third member of the Godhead, the aerial Holy Spirit, along with the Father and the Son, constitutes the Trinity. Is it significant that from the time of the Bible to the present the central depiction of the Spirit of God is as a bird, specifically, a dove? Throughout the history of Christianity, the Holy Spirit, as in Montserrat, has soared through the air in churches worldwide—in gleaming plumage and airy flesh—in carved objects, wall paintings, colorful icons, pulpit ornaments, altarpieces, rood screens, roof bosses, and illuminated manuscripts. It is easy to dismiss such items as merely decorative. But I believe that these representations of God on the wing—in church art as well as the biblical texts—are traces of the historic Christian belief in God as a bird, in spite of conventional dismissals of such beliefs as not conforming with accepted dogma. As an exercise in theology, philosophy, nature writing, and personal anecdote, this book is a recovery of the lost veneration of the bird-God within Christian thought and culture. My hope is not only that this recovery will return biblical religion to its earthly origins but, moreover, that it will enflame the desire to love the Earth as God’s earthly nest—indeed, as the cherished site of God’s, and all beings’, daily habitation.

Mark I. Wallace

Crum Creek Watershed

Delaware River Bioregion

In honor of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Homeland

Easter 2018

Introduction

Crossing the Species Divide

The Animal God

In a time of rapid climate change and species extinction, what role have the world’s religions played in ameliorating, or causing, the crisis we now face? It appears that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, bears a disproportionate burden for creating humankind’s exploitative attitudes toward nature through otherworldly theologies that divorce human beings and their spiritual yearnings from their natural origins. In this regard, Christianity today is viewed as an unearthly religion with little to say about everyday life in the natural world. Because it has focused on the salvation of human souls, it has lost touch with the role the verdant world of animals and plants, land and water, plays in human well-being. In principle, Christian belief in the incarnation of God in the human Jesus renders biblical faith a fleshy, this-worldly belief system. In reality, however, Christianity is still best known for its war against the flesh by denigrating bodily impulses as a source of temptation and by dismissing the material world, while not fully corrupted, as contaminated by sin and inimical to humans’ destiny in a far-removed heaven of bodiless bliss. As Sean J. McGrath puts it, in traditional Christian thought, matter was no doubt good, but not that good, and in its tempting quality it posed a grave threat to the soul: best to have as little to do with it as possible.¹ My book argues that this picture of Christianity as hostile to the creaturely world, while accurate to a point, misses the supreme value biblical religion assigns to all of the denizens of God’s good creation, human and more-than-human alike.

Moreover, I argue that this picture, in particular, misses the startling portrayals of God as the beaked and feathered Holy Spirit, the third member of the Trinity who, alongside the Father and Son, is the animal God of historical Christian witness.² Appearing in the Christian scriptures as a winged creature at the time of Jesus’ baptism, the bird-God of the New Testament signals the deep grounding of archi-original biblical faith in the natural world. But due to the age-old bias in world-denying Christianity that God is divorced from mortal existence, this reality of God in creaturely manifestation—not only in the mode of the human Jesus but also in the form of the birdy Spirit—has been missed by most Christian thinkers and practitioners alike. This lost truth is a hidden pearl of great price. In When God Was a Bird, my aim is to correct this oversight in contemporary religious thought and pave the way for a new Earth-loving spirituality grounded in the ancient image of God as an avian life-form.

In the history of Christian thought, Trinitarian portrayals of the Spirit eloquently make this point: the Father and Son are depicted in human familial terms, while the Spirit is figured as the avian divinity who mediates the relationship of the other two members of the Godhead. My recovery of God’s animal body within biblical and Christian sources might be startling, even sacrilegious, for some readers at first. Even though the Bible speaks directly about God as Spirit becoming a winged creature (When Jesus was baptized, the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form as a dove; Luke 3:21–22), religion and biblical scholars alike have oftentimes dismissed the descriptions of God’s Spirit as a bird in the New Testament as a passing allusion or figure of speech. These critics do not regard this and similar texts as actual descriptions of the avifauna that God became and is becoming: testimonies to the Spirit’s enfleshment (or, better, enfeatherment) at the time of Jesus’ baptism. Nevertheless, I maintain here that the full realization of Christianity’s historical self-definition as a scriptural, incarnational, and Trinitarian belief system is animotheism³—the belief that all beings, including nonhuman animals, are imbued with divine presence. Buried deep within the subterranean strata of the Christian witness is a trove of vibrant bodily images for God in animal form (as well as in human and plant forms), including, and especially, the image of the avian body of the Holy Spirit. Woven into the core grammar of Christian faith, then, is the belief in the Spirit as the animal face of God, even as Jesus is the human face of God.

Though I will note in Chapter 1 one expression of the vegetal embodiment of God in the Exodus story of the burning bush, my overall focus in this book is on the premier animal form of divinity in the Bible and Christian thought, namely, the Holy Spirit, the bird-God of classical evangelical witness. But to focus on the Spirit as God’s animal modality is not to deny God’s many botanical incarnations within Christian scriptures and traditions. For the botanist Matthew Hall in Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany, Western religion is unreflexively zoocentric because it appears only to value certain sentient beings (human and nonhuman animals) over and against the numerous plants that populate our daily lives.⁴ But there are many scriptural counterpoints to Hall’s broadside. To take one, consider Jesus’ paean to the spectacular wildflowers that graced his pathways in biblical Israel/Palestine: Consider the lilies of the field, how they neither toil nor spin, and yet I say that Solomon in all of his glory was not clothed as beautifully as these lilies (Matthew 6:28–29). Modern biblical scholarship assumes Solomon in this instance is a metonym for the lavish tenth-century BCE Jerusalem Temple and Palace attributed to King Solomon. If this is the case, Jesus’ analogy is stunning: the beauty of commonplace lilies is a more fitting expression of God’s earthly habitation than the actual built tabernacle that housed Yahweh’s presence in biblical Israel. As the site of divinity, Jesus’ green religion valorized the vegetable world as much as the animal world. Hall’s posthumanist analysis of some forms of Earth-hostile religion is much needed. But his overall critique of biblical spirituality misses the point. Hidden in the bedrock of Christian theology is a grounding animist sensibility that construes all things—including the sentient and relational biomass that makes all life possible—as living enfleshments of divinity in the world.

I will call this new but ancient vision of the world Christian animism in order to signal the continuity of biblical religion with the beliefs of Indigenous and non-Western communities that God or Spirit enfleshes itself within everything that grows, walks, flies, and swims in and over the great gift of creation.⁵ I hope to revitalize Christian theology with a blood transfusion from within its own body of beliefs and also from global religious communities whose members encounter divinity in all things. I suggest that this blood transfusion is a genetic match with the deep cellular structure of Christianity because it is a product of that structure itself—as well as being borrowed from other compatible religious traditions. Is it possible to restore Christianity’s primordial experience of the world as the enfleshment of sacred power? Can God be seen as ensouling every life-form with deific presence, rendering all things consecrated family members of interrelated ecosystems? This Janus-faced effort recovers the once-lost and now-found essence of the Christian religion. So my question is, is my ad fontes effort consistent with Christianity’s historical self-understanding, even though the religion today has largely forgotten its primordial beginnings and thereby its originary vision of the world as sacred place, as holy ground, as the body of God?

In Christianity’s practiced forgetfulness of its earthbound origins, it has recast itself as a footnote to Greek philosophy. As a vassal to Plato and Aristotle, it has operated within a graded hierarchy of Being in which plants and animals, rocks and rivers, are denigrated as soulless matter, while human beings are elevated as godlike, intelligent creatures—mired in the muck of corporeal existence, to be sure, but still able to shake off the mortal coil that binds them to the lower life-forms and realize their true imago Dei natures and destinies. Today, Western Christianity continues to function within this anthropocentric universe and has become a pale and distant echo of its biblical-animist origins. It is for this reason that Christianity has endured, and continues to endure, a centuries-long Babylonian captivity⁶ to ossified contemptus mundi philosophical categories and divisions. This captivity has consistently led Christian thinkers into a Neoplatonic cul-de-sac in which the world is maligned as a dead and fallen place wherein the human soul, divorced from its body, strives to transcend its physical drives and passions and, in so doing, return to the disembodied Source from which it originated. But Christian animism interacts with the world differently—not as a sinkhole of corporeal lust and confusion to be battled against and overcome but as the privileged site of God’s daily habitation. In short, Earth is God’s natural home. Or as the theologian Shawn Sanford Beck puts it, "Christian animism, then, is simply what happens when a committed Christian engages the world and each creature as alive, sentient, and related, rather than soul-less and ontologically inferior."⁷

But labeling Christianity as an animist belief system—the conviction that all things, including so-called inanimate objects, are alive with sacred power and worthy of human beings’ love and protection—is a misnomer for Christian believers and religious scholars alike who regard biblical religion at odds with, and distinct from, the pagan religions of primordial people. In spite of Christianity’s animist origins—or perhaps to spite its vernacular beginnings—Christianity viewed itself as a divinely inspired religion of the book that is categorically different from the commonplace forms of religion that showed special regard for sacred animals, tree spirits, revered landscapes, and hallowed seasons of the year. In this telling, Christianity replaced the old gods of pre-Christian animism with the new revealed religion of Jesus, the saints, and the Bible. Correspondingly, it saw itself as a type of pure monotheism vis-à-vis alternative forms of so-called primitive or polytheistic religions that were based in fertility rituals and nature worship. Then and now, Christianity regards itself as an otherworldly faith that superseded heathen superstition insofar as its focus was on an exalted and unseen Deity who is not captive to the vicissitudes of mortal life on Earth.⁸

Challenging the conventional wisdom that Christianity and animism are contradictory traditions, I make reference here to the religious turn within contemporary Continental philosophy as a background resource in new studies about God’s animal body within biblical sources.⁹ As well, the related fields of posthumanism (the antispeciest disavowal of human chauvinism) and new materialism (the analysis of the agential subjectivity of nonhuman material realities) are also sotto voce dialogue sources in my return to animism.¹⁰ The suggestion that the nonhuman animal is the face of divinity within the plurality of God’s many corporeal expressions is characteristic of this religious turn in modern philosophy and related fields of study. The suggestion begins with everyday animals—in particular, cats and dogs—as hints of divine presence in the world. Martin Buber’s I and Thou sets forth a relational ontology wherein Buber looks into the eyes of a house cat and catches the breath of eternal life wafting about him, because in every You we address the eternal You.¹¹ Similarly, Emmanuel Levinas asks whether the faces of all others—including all animal others—are intimations of divinity in the world: One cannot entirely refuse the face of an animal, … for example, a dog.… But it also has a face.… It is as if God spoke through the face.¹² And echoing Buber’s encounter with a house cat, Jacques Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am marks his own vertiginous elision of a cat’s discriminating stare and the penetrating gaze of God. Derrida says that standing naked in front of a cat, he hears the cat—that is, he hears God—address him at the core of his personhood: "I often wonder whether this vertigo … deep in the eyes of God is not the same as that which takes hold of me when I feel so naked in front of a cat, facing it, and when, meeting its gaze, I hear the cat or God ask itself, ask me: Is he going to call me, is he going to address me?"¹³ What ties these philosophical ruminations together is the phenomenon of being addressed by other-than-human beings whose yearnings for relatedness is consistent across different orders of being—that is, relatedness among animal others themselves, between animal others and ourselves, and between animal others, ourselves, and the divine Other. These philosophical reflections about the eyes or the faces of animals as mediums of the sacred has informed my attempts to place into conversation Christianity and Indigenous traditions’ celebration of signs of the anima mundi within all things.¹⁴

Animism

In philosophy and theology, innovative attempts at forging connections between biblical religion and primordial belief systems marks a sea change away from earlier comparativist studies of revealed religions such as Christianity vis-à-vis preliterate religious cultures. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century and continuing into the present, a profound shift has taken place toward a critical understanding of the centrality of animal bodies and subjectivities in the formation of all of the world’s religions, including Christianity. This shift moves away from the hoary opposition between pure monotheism and nature- and animal-based religion—an opposition that is bedrock to all of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British anthropology of religion, including E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture, William Robertson Smith’s The Religion of the Semites, and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and The Worship of Nature. At the heart of this opposition between the modern and the primitive in early Victorian studies of religion, the notion of animism was deployed as a proxy for the benighted epistemologies of first peoples who envisioned the cosmos as an intersubjective communion of living beings, including animal beings, with shared intelligence, personhood, and communication skills. As John Grim writes, During the late nineteenth century colonial period interpretive studies described communication with animals among indigenous peoples as a failed epistemology. The assumption that only humans know, or a least that only humans report on their knowing, resulted in the long-standing critique of indigenous ways of knowing coded in the term animism. As a means of actually knowing the world, animism was dismissed as simply a delusion, or a projection of a deluded human subjectivity.¹⁵

Sharing resonances with the Latin word animus, which means soul or spirit, the idea of animism was significantly advanced in the modern West by Tylor’s analysis of how first people attributed life or soul or spirit to all things, animate and inanimate. In Primitive Culture, Tylor writes, quoting another theorist, that in animism every land, mountain, rock, river, brook, spring, tree, or whatsoever it may be, has a spirit for an inhabitant; the spirits of the trees and stones, of the lakes and brooks, hear with pleasure … man’s pious prayers and accepts his offerings.¹⁶ Tylor’s study of animism emerged out of an evolutionary, Occidental mind-set that described, at least for Victorian readers, the unusual panspiritist beliefs and practices of first peoples—the ancient sensibility that all things are bearers of spirit. Operating from a settler-colonialist mind-set, Tylor denigrated animism as the superstitious worldview of childlike tribes whose beliefs eventually gave way, in his thinking, to the march of reason and science in civilized societies. He writes, Animism characterizes tribes very low in the scale of humanity, and thence ascends, deeply modified in its transmission, but from first to last preserving an unbroken continuity, into the midst of high modern culture.¹⁷ For Tylor, while animism was characteristic of low precivilized cultures, its influence slowly weakened over time as high cultures became more literate and scientific.

While the term is tainted by Tylor’s colonial elitism (animism is characteristic of low humanity rather than high culture), the concept of animism is being recovered today based on its analytical capacity to illuminate how traditional people, then and now, envision nonhuman nature as ensouled or inspirited with living, sacred power. An excellent example of this rethinking is the analysis of the sacred personhood of trees in ancient and contemporary India by the Hinduism scholar David L. Haberman. In People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India, Haberman redeploys the idea of animism in order to efface the hierarchical boundary lines between human and nonhuman and thereby to position South Asian tree worship as a meaningful exercise in cultivating a holistic relationship with the nonhuman world. For Haberman, Tylor and his ilk’s dismissal of animism as childish superstition has bequeathed to modernity the debilitating idea that we now live in a dead world that is truly animated only by human beings.¹⁸ But Haberman notes that many contemporary social scientists are undermining this in/animate binary by reversing the relegation of animism to primitive ignorance and the elevation of materialism as the agreed-on worldview of enlightened, Western societies. By assigning humanlike capacities to other-than-human life-forms, the natural world now becomes a living field of complicated relationships rather than a dead world of lifeless objects. For Haberman et al., animism trumps empiricism as a superior way of knowing and experiencing the totality of existence. Haberman writes,

As these anthropologists demonstrate, any earnest consideration of the personhood and consciousness of nonhuman beings leads to a reconsideration of animism, once rejected as illusory primitivism. Without the judgmental and cultural evolutionary perspective of Tylor, which disparages (embodied) animism with the pejorative label primitive … we find many cultures that treat natural phenomena as proper persons, [and] the sharp divide between human and nonhuman beings cannot be taken for granted. It also cannot be assumed as universal; other possibilities clearly exist. Nor can it be regarded as part of superior civilized culture, unless we wish to maintain the colonial cultural evolutionary perspective of Tylor.¹⁹

Arguably, no contemporary thinker has done more to rehabilitate the nomenclature of animism than the comparative religions scholar Graham Harvey. Like Haberman’s recovery of animism in the South Asian context, Harvey writes that animism "is typically applied to religions that engage with a wide community of living beings with whom humans share this world or particular locations within it. It might be summed up by the phrase ‘all that exists lives’ and, sometimes, the additional understanding that ‘all that lives is holy.’ As such the term animism is sometimes applied to particular indigenous religions in comparison to Christianity or Islam, for example."²⁰ In Harvey’s formulation of animism, nature is never dull and inert but inherently alive with the infusion of Spirit or spirits into all things. Here there is no distinction between living and nonliving, between animate and inanimate. Harvey’s use of the phrase all that exists lives means that nature is not brute matter but always full of life and animated by its movement, weight, color, voice, light, texture—as well as its relational powers and spiritual presence. Nature’s capacity for relatedness, its proclivity to encounter us, as we encounter it, in constantly new and ever-changing patterns of self-maintenance and skillful comportment, is the ground tone of its vibrant and buoyant energy. As the philosopher David Abram similarly argues, nature or matter is not a dead and lesser thing that stands in a lower relationship to animate spirit but a self-organizing field of living, dynamic relationships: "Yet as soon as we question the assumed distinction between spirit and matter, then this neatly ordered hierarchy begins to tremble and disintegrate. If we allow that matter is not inert, but is rather animate (or self-organizing) from the get-go, then the hierarchy collapses, and we are left with a diversely differentiated field of animate beings, each of which has its own gifts relative to the others. And we find ourselves not above, but in the very midst of this living field, our own sentience part and parcel of the sensuous landscape."²¹

Abram and others analyze how Indigenous peoples celebrated, and continue to celebrate, relations with other-than-human communities of beings that are alive with spirit, emotion, desire, and personhood. This ascription of personhood to all things locates human beings in a wider fraternity of relationships that includes bear persons and rock persons along with human persons.²² At first glance, this is an odd way to think, since Western ontologies generally divide the world between human persons, other animals, and plants as living things, on the one hand, and entities such as earthen landscapes, bodies of water, and the airy atmosphere as nonsentient elements, on the other. But the Native American religions scholar George Tink Tinker argues that even rocks talk and have what we must call consciousness, and then continues, The Western world, long rooted in the evidential objectivity of science, distinguishes at least popularly between things that are alive and things that are inert, between the animate and the inanimate. Among those things that are alive, in turn, there is a consistent distinction between plants and animals and between human consciousness and the rest of existence in the world. To the contrary, American Indian peoples understand that all life forms not only have consciousness, but also have qualities that are either poorly developed or entirely lacking in humans.²³ Glossing scholars such as Harvey, Abram, and Tinker, I am suggesting that animism flattens commonplace ontological distinctions between living/nonliving or animate/inert along a continuum of multiple intelligences: now everything that is is alive with personhood and relationality, even sentience, according to its own capacities for being in relationship with others. As Harvey says, Animists are people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is lived in relationship with others.²⁴ All things are persons, only some of whom are human, because all beings are part of a community of relationships, only some of whom are recognizable as living beings by us.

In general, however, most scholars of religion regard animism as far removed from Christianity, both culturally and theologically. In Graham Harvey’s definition of animism, recall his assumption that monotheistic traditions such as Christianity are categorically distinct from animism: "the term animism is sometimes applied to particular indigenous religions in comparison to Christianity."²⁵ Likewise, the comparative religions scholar Bron Taylor writes that in spite of attempts to bring together animism, which he calls dark green religion, and the major world religions, such as Christianity, these traditions have different origins, share different worldviews, and cannot genuinely cross-pollinate with one another in new paradigms of Christian animism such as mine. He writes, For the most part, in spite of occasional efforts to hybridize religious traditions, most of the world’s major religions have worldviews that are antithetical to and compete with the worldviews and ethics found in dark green religion.²⁶

This book, however, will argue the contrary, namely, that while the Christian religion largely evolved into a sky-God tradition forgetful of its animist origins, its carnal identity is paradigmatically set forth in canonical stories about the human embodiment of the historical Jesus, on the one hand, and, provocatively, the animal embodiment of the avian Spirit, on the