Mary-Jane Rubenstein

So, my biggest issue with this book might be that it's already somewhat dated. Published in 2022, it was probably basically finished in 2021, meaning that this is before one of Rubenstein's main subjects, Elon Musk, had not yet totally gone off the rails and made clear by his behavior his unalloyed authoritarianism. This is not to mention it's become even more clear that the so-called "Libertarianism" of the "Tech Boys" is just more of the same old authoritarian will to power, simply allied with a fascination with "shiny" technological toys and the usual get-rich-quick blind spot towards "externalities" displayed by the huckster mentality.

That said, Rubenstein's connection of the crusading spirit of Imperial Christianity as a foundation of various modern versions of "Manifest Destiny" is a useful point. Less good is Rubenstein's evocation of a new "pantheism" as a potential way forward. Even if I'm given serious pause by modern industrial culture's headlong rush to disaster, and find myself disgusted by the waste of it all, I remain unconvinced that the cultural solutions that worked for small, basically rural societies, are all that relevant to mass urban society. Still, ask me that question again after the looming great power war and the long emergency of surviving climate change. The best estimate now is that the warming ocean currents of the "Atlantic Conveyor" are likely to collapse from an overload of heat in the next few years, leading to the onset of a new ice age; good times (not)!… (more)

I enjoyed this book immensely for the way it catapults pantheism into a sensible middle way between theism and atheism, with delightful digs against both of the latter. But it does not quite crystallize the expectations laid in its introduction. Maybe that is asking too much, or the wrong thing.

What I wanted after the introduction was a more systematic, and more critical, examination of the way that Western metaphysics “opposes mind to body, human to animal, male to female, the unchanging to the changing, the rational to the irrational, the spiritual to the material, perfection to imperfection, light to darkness, activity to passivity,” and the ways that table of dualities has been coded as “anthropomorphic, unchanging, rational, and masculine” versus “animal-vegetal, changeable, irrational, and feminine.” (Pages 2–3.) Instead most of the book reads like a selective but evocative annotated bibliography strung together by a skilled and witty scholar. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. But if we are to enact the ethic prompted by the book, to transcend (or even smash) the pervasively gendered metaphysic that can “most definitely kill us” (page 187, quoting Hortense Spillers), then something more thorough and critical than this slim tome would be helpful. I am left with the sense that this would be possible, and the hope that someone will carry it out.

But, again, perhaps that is more than deserves to be demanded of this book. This might be the brief that unleashes a torrent of pantheology, the better to build the bridge we need between the two great problems of our age: the nature of reality, and the source of morality (and the shadowy problem between them the might be even greater, namely whether they are in fact the same problem). I hope so. We are in dire need of some constructive and clarifying transgression these days.

In the meantime, I look forward to reading further from this book’s bibliography, which includes a great number of women whose work had not previously come to my attention. I just wish the ideas here were more digested, more developed, more of the author’s, and less a collection of others’.… (more)

Rubenstein investigates the historical entanglement of science and religion in European culture by looking at the evolution of the cosmological idea of many-worlds, from the ancient Greeks to modern physics. The Atomist philosophers of the 5th c. BCE were earliest to posit a plurality of worlds, introducing the principles of infinity and accident as substitutes for an intelligent cosmic designer. Given infinite time, infinite substance, and infinite space, any and all material configurations are bound to arise at some point. Plato & Aristotle tried to argue in favor of something less haphazard. Plato’s Timaeus seemed to privilege order over chaos, stasis over change, the intelligible over the sensible and the singular over the plural, but his philosophy always returned to the idea of a mixed world—the indivisible and unchanging (the Forms) along with the divisible and changing (the physical world). As Rubenstein notes, the Oneness of Plato’s world repeatedly collides with plurality—the world as a unity of layers and compounds. In De caelo, Aristotle described the cosmos not as a product of elemental mixing as in Timaeus, but as the effect of ‘natural motion,’ with each element ascending or descending to a separate realm, making for a unified, spatially-limited world (consolidated in the 2nd c. by Ptolemy as the geocentric model of the universe). In the Metaphysics, though, plurality breaks out, as Aristotle wonders if each planet and star might have its own ‘mover’. Both Plato and Aristotle thus favored a single complete (and permanent) world, but ran up against irreducible multiplicity.

The Atomist cosmology was preserved and elaborated most fully in Lucretius’ De rerum natura, which replaced the demiurge of Timaeus with a cosmogonic cloud-chaos moving through infinite space (thereby removing divine sovereignty from the universe). For their part, the Stoics rejected the Atomists’ idea of a smallest unit of matter, insisting with Aristotle that matter is continuous, hence infinitely divisible. Ours is the only world in the universe, taught Zeno; there are no ideal Forms regulating the universe, no First Mover setting it in motion, and no empty space that contains it. The Stoics’ cosmic cycle, wherein the universe is repeatedly consumed then regenerated by fire, provides a model of temporal multiplicity. Augustine and the early Church fathers sided with Plato & Aristotle and rejected both the atomist/Epicurean and the Stoic versions of the multiverse, based on the Pauline principles of the uniqueness of Christ and the immortality of the human soul.

The question of “one or many worlds?” returned in the 12th c. as a consequence of the rediscovery of Aristotle (De caelo was translated from Arabic to Latin in 1170). Aquinas thought that an infinity of worlds challenged the infinity of God’s power and so turned to Plato and Aristotle as authorities against cosmic multiplicity. Aquinas’ embrace of Aristotle triggered a reaction against Christianized Greek thought, though, and in 1274 the Bishop of Paris issued a list of 219 heresies of Aristotle. Rubenstein writes that such ecclesiastical prohibitions ironically created a space for intellectual freedom, as Scholastics divided among a “voluntarist” tendency which held to Aristotelian physics while arguing that an omnipotent God could override the laws of nature if He wanted (though He probably wouldn’t), and “naturalist” authors who rejected Aristotle but insisted that other worlds could exist in full accordance with the laws of nature. There followed 500 years of rich and fruitful debate on the nature of the cosmos as natural philosophy and theology became more and more intertwined. The Aristotelian cosmology held on, mostly because to turn away from Aristotle meant a reconsideration of the singularity of God and the singularity of the cosmos, with its hierarchical arrangement. It is all the more striking, then, writes Rubenstein, that the initial departure from Aristotelian cosmology came from within the Christian theological tradition, and not from Copernicus, who put the sun at the center of the universe in 1543, but from (Bishop, then Cardinal) Nicholas of Cusa, who a hundred years earlier declared that the universe had no center at all.

Rubenstein writes that Nicholas’ cosmology was “protomodern” in many respects, with a mobile earth, noncircular orbits, and the relativity of motion. The unbounded Cusan universe had neither center nor circumference. Each cosmic body (stars and planets) occupied the center of its own ‘world,’ and these worlds not only interacted with one another but composed one another. There was no void or any clear separation between worlds, but an overlapping set of them. The cosmic elements inhabited many different worlds at the same time. From the perspective of any world, there are many worlds; from the perspective of God, the world is one. That Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for espousing what was essentially a pseudo-Cusan cosmology (while Nicholas had ascended to the Curia) Rubenstein attributes to the Church’s reactionary intolerance for heterodoxy in the aftermath of the Protestant challenge. (What got Bruno in trouble was his insistence that there was no irreducible difference between the universe and God—“the infinite God conferred on the universe everything He has, which is everything He is”—which the inquisitors took as a denial of Christ’s vital mediating role.)

Early modern empirically-based science evolved from the medieval association of theology and natural philosophy. Once Copernicus’ mathematically-derived heliocentric model was confirmed by Galileo, proto-scientists began to formulate alternatives to Aristotelian natural philosophy. The priest Pierre Gassendi set out to reconcile Epicureanism with Christianity but rejected the Atomist doctrine of a plurality of worlds as incompatible with scripture and beyond the reach of observational verification. (He did, however, suggest that other planets in our solar system are most likely inhabited, revealing a recurring fuzziness in the definition of world. In the 17th c., writes Rubenstein, “worlds” became the specific bodies that could be seen through a telescope—a technological development that both extended and narrowed the cosmological vision of earthlings.) Johannes Kepler, rejecting the infinity of Bruno and the boundlessness of Cusa as contrary to observation and common sense, borrowed from the Stoics the idea of a singular, bounded whole in the midst of a giant void (with the sun, stars, and the space between them corresponding to the 3 elements of the Christian trinity). Descartes posited a single expanse fully occupied by innumerable interacting vortices, each representing a solar system with planets orbiting a central star. Isaac Newton synthesized Galileo’s physics and Kepler’s orbital laws into his Law of Universal Gravitation, shooting down Descartes’ vortex theory and reinstating the distinction between space and matter that Descartes had abolished (but, Newton counted on periodic interventions by God to keep the universe from collapsing in on itself because of gravitational attraction).

Cosmology never really did abandon God, in Rubenstein’s telling. It just renamed Him. Albert Einstein’s general relativity transformed space and time from the passive background that Newton had assumed into a dynamic ‘space-time’ that can grow, shrink, bend, and warp in relation to matter and energy. Einstein’s cosmological constant played the role that God had played for Descartes and Newton by providing an equal and opposite push to gravity’s pull. After Edwin Hubble in 1924 discovered thousands of what he called ‘island universes’ (and which turned out to be billions of other galaxies), the size of the known universe and the worlds within it increased by a factor of half a million. Spurred by Hubble’s discovery, the Belgian scientist-priest Georges Lemaître posited an expanding universe based on Einstein’s equations and concluded that the universe seems to have burst forth from one tiny ball of nuclear fluid, which he called the “Primeval Atom.” As Rubenstein points out, the big bang hypothesis presents an “uncanny recapitulation of Christian creation theology.” Just as the church has taught, the universe had a temporal beginning, was born in a sudden flash of light, and the whole thing seems to have come out of nothing. Rubenstein writes that many 20th c. scientists, wishing not to “aid and abet” religion (and ignorant of the evolution of cosmology), expended much effort in trying to get rid of the godlike singularity that began the universe. They never did, because, as Rubenstein notes, the biggest problem with the Big Bang theory is philosophical, or perhaps theological—what was there before the bang? What banged? Why? Physics cannot untangle from metaphysics.

Theories of the multiverse emerged in the late 20th c. as an attempt to overcome the “fine-tuning problem” (the realization that life on earth would not have been possible if values for the cosmological constant and the critical density of matter and energy were to vary even slightly) without calling upon a Creator. In the second half of Worlds Without End, Rubenstein provides an excellent review of how inflationary cosmology, dark matter, string theory, and quantum mechanics have produced numerous versions of the multiverse, with each new theory formulated to overcome the shortcomings of previous models. There are neo-Atomist, neo-Platonist, and neo-Stoic multiverses. Inevitable, writes Rubenstein, each theory of the multiverse “collid[es] with invisible divinities and realms in the very gesture of trying to avoid them.” Is the actual existence of an infinite number of worlds eternally generated yet forever inaccessible to us any less baffling than an anthropomorphic, extracosmic deity? Key scientific axioms—cosmic infinity and cosmic homogeneity (that the universe is uniform on the largest scale)—have to be taken on faith. One can believe in a multiverse, but that belief cannot be validated by direct observation. Science becomes like religion, says Rubenstein, when it purports to be in pursuit of an objective, singular truth. She sides with Nietzsche in acknowledging cosmic indeterminism (though it drove him mad); what is most interesting is not so much the answers, but the processes that produce and undo them. We will just have to be satisfied with an order “constituted, dismantled, and renewed by ever-roiling chaos,” and a truth “that remains provisional, multiple, and perspectival.”… (more)