The aesthetic significance of the very word becoming has often been missed: In English the verb has an odd transitive form, related to the adjective comely. We say, That shirt becomes you -- as though beauty results from something becoming part of another, from some participatory genesis. (The shirt is so right for you, that shirt is you!) In other words, if theopoiesis means the human becoming divine through the divine becoming human: God *becomes* us. That God is comely, becoming, in us -- clothes us in beauty. It is in becoming that we become divine. Beautiful -- were we able to notice, to play along. All the more so, as we recognize what a multitude of creaturely becomings, humans and mostly not human, make each of us up (and all our shirts) at any given moment. Attention to this crowd of clamoring others pushes us into the cloud of our unknowing -- where new knowledge tempered to the multitude, the ecosocial manifold, has its chance. The ecology of multiplicity demands a new planetary justice, polydox and political, barely possible. Our evolving theopoetic viewpoint cannot guarantee a harmony of the good, the true, and the beautiful. It will require us to produce our own counterpoints and polyphonies. The scales may be too close or too distant. But they reveal a convivial cosmos sponsoring beauty not as a mere means to various greedy ends but as the festivity of all becomings. (Catherine Keller, Theopoiesis and the Pluriverse)
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 02:24:52 +0000
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