A Logos without Organs

A Logos without OrgansCosmologies of Transformation in Origen and Deleuze-Guattari Luke B. Higgins (bio) The plane of consistency of Nature is like an immense Abstract Machine, abstract yet real and individual; its pieces are the various assemblages and individuals, each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or less interconnected relations. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 254 Now God is altogether one and simple, but our Savior, for many reasons, since God set Him forth a propitiation and a first fruits of the whole creation, is made of many things, or perhaps all these things; the whole creation, so far as capable of redemption, stands in need of Him. Origen of Alexandria, Commentary on John, 1:22 The post-human philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, especially in conjunction with Felix Guattari, brings a fresh approach to problems of multiplicity, relationality and becoming that can be of great benefit to theologies attempting to move beyond static, anthropocentric conceptions of the cosmos. As I have argued elsewhere, their cosmologically situated account of creative becoming informed by a virtual "plane of consistency" can help theologians conceive of an ultimate, divine sphere of ecological connection that isn't bound within a static or analogical logic of "the same."1 A theology conceived along these lines would identify the divine not with some ontologically definitive "blueprint" for creation's structures, but as the inspirator of transformative "lines of flight," enabling novel, creative alliances between human and non-human entities (or assemblages) in the cosmos. I will build here on this larger project by offering a Deleuze-Guattarian reading of the ancient Christian Logos--a central figure in the early development of a uniquely Christian approach to theological cosmology. Of particular interest will be the role of the Logos in the thought of Origen of Alexandria, a third-century "Mid-Platonic" Christian theologian and exegete, known for his philosophically creative interpretations of scripture that often delved into the topics of creation and cosmology. This attempt to offer a postmodern constructive reading of the divine Logos may be met with an initial skepticism; if the Logos refers to God's spoken "word" of creation--a "word" that is then conflated with both a living person (Jesus [End Page 141] Christ) and the direct "presence" of a unitary Christian "Truth"--does it not represent the very quintessence of what Jacques Derrida would call a "transcendental signifier"? However, this assumption may be challenged ---or at least complicated--by a more nuanced look at how the Logos, a strange hybrid of Hebraic and Hellenistic thought, actually functions in ancient Christian cosmological systems. Particularly in Pre-Nicene theologies--including that of Origen--we find the Logos occupying a strangely ambivalent mediatory position between the original, eternal unity of the divine and the dynamically plural, material multiplicity of creation, such that--in the opinion of Christian scholar Virginia Burrus--it may be better identified with a link in Derrida's chain of non-synonymous substitutions than with any straightforward logocentrism (Burrus, 145–146). On one hand, Origen's Logos clearly does represent the single, perfect image of God, which, in typical Middle Platonic fashion, sets up a hierarchy in creation according to how well or badly the world's creatures are able to achieve "likeness" to this image--the seeming epitome of everything in the Western philosophical/theological tradition most highly problematized by Deleuze-Guattari. However, Origen's understanding of the embodied soul's journey as divine pedagogy allows him to be far more optimistic about the transient, "nomadic" wandering of the soul than we would expect in a Middle Platonic figure. In Origen's thought, the Logos is far more than a simple, salvific "truth content"--it constitutes a unique architectural topology mapped out by "virtual" pathways of the soul's transformative becoming. Origen's approach to scriptural exegesis and the reader's movement through literal, "psychic" and "spiritual" meanings of the text is perhaps his most pervasive analogy for spiritual transformation. As scholars Patricia Cox-Miller and David Dawson have lucidly pointed out in different ways, ascending from one level of interpretation to another--or from one "dwelling place" of the

Aesthetics · Anthropocentrism · Deleuze and Guattari · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Infinity · Logos Bible Software · Theology · Mathematics · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics

• Introduction

  J Bialecki, Eric Hoenes Del Pinal•Anthropological Quarterly•2011

  Add to list

• A thousand plateaus

  Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze•A thousand plateaus•1987

  Add to list