No Werewolves in Theology? Final

Modern Theology 25:1 January 2009
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
NO WEREWOLVES IN THEOLOGY?
TRANSCENDENCE, IMMANENCE,
AND BECOMING-DIVINE IN
GILLES DELEUZE
JACOB HOLSINGER SHERMAN
The world is deep: deeper than day can comprehend. . . .

—Friedrich Nietzsche1
Is there a mysticism of the Event, and if so, what does it look like? Does such
a mysticism take us out of the world of bodies and politics, of relationships
and locales, or does it somehow give these things back to us? Surprisingly,
these questions have recently been raised by revisionist studies of the
thought of Gilles Deleuze. Radicalizing and improving upon the earlier
critiques of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, Peter Hallward argues that there
is a theophanic philosophy or spiritual theology waiting to be extracted from
Deleuze’s writings. For Hallward, this theological element contaminates and
cripples the political and social value of Deleuze’s work, transforming him
from a thinker of materiality, corporeality, and relation into a theorist of
“contemplative and immaterial abstraction,”2 a philosopher who “is most
appropriately read as a spiritual or subtractive thinker, a thinker preoccupied
with the mechanics of dis-embodiment and de-materialization.”3 Hallward
claims that the centre of Deleuze’s project is a process philosophy that
equates being simply with creativity and issues in a kind of philosophical
mysticism that dismantles the daylight world in order to find union with the
dark eternal flux of pure becoming, casting aside all our relations, bodies,
projects, and political aspirations.4
Hallward’s reading of Deleuze seems to demand a theological response. In
what follows, I first introduce Hallward’s critical reading of Deleuze, and then
Jacob Holsinger Sherman

Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, CB2 3AP, UK
jps68@cam.ac.uk
© 2008 The Author

Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
2 Jacob Holsinger Sherman
weigh it in light of Deleuze’s own writings, including Deleuze and Guattari’s

important ‘Plateau 10’ on becoming. My response to Hallward includes both
applause and critique. Hallward is to be congratulated both for showing
clearly the presence of a crypto-theological becoming-divine throughout
Deleuze’s texts, and for exposing the dualistic, anti-relational, and quietist
tendencies in these same writings. However, where Hallward reads these
latter invidious tendencies as a consequence of the former mystical elements,
I want us to be more discerning still. Deleuze intends his divine line of flight to
deliver the world from a reductive naturalism to a more robust, ecstatic, even
enchanted materialism. Ultimately, Deleuze fails at this project, but rather than
tracing Deleuze’s shortcomings to his flirtations with theology, as Hallward
does, I argue that these aporias stem from the peculiar theology of absolute
immanence that Deleuze develops. It is Deleuze’s immanentism and not his
theophanic mysticism that finally vitiates so much of his thought. We can,
therefore, preserve what is most valuable in Deleuze—his project of cosmo-
logical and metaphysical re-enchantment—not by expunging the theological
element in his thought, but by completing it in the direction of transcendence.
Drawing attention to a remarkable mid-century essay by Thomas Merton,
I argue that where Hallward faults Deleuze for his contemplative and
theophanic elements, Merton suggests that it is only by fully and adequately
engaging these through a recuperation of transcendence that the world of
bodies, polities, and relations can be saved. Hallward concludes his study by
dismissing his subject—“those of us who still seek to change our world and to
empower its inhabitants will need to look for our inspiration elsewhere,”—but
it may be that by laying bare the theophanic and contemplative Deleuze,
Hallward has instead pointed the way to his redemption.5
Transfiguring Deleuze
Peter Hallward wants us to think differently about Deleuze’s legacy and
importance. Deleuze is regularly regarded as the liberator of an anarchic
multiplicity of desires, a materialist champion of embodied minoritarian
politics, and an atheist of the most rigorous variety, but this view is increas-
ingly contested. Badiou began the trend in The Clamor of Being by calling into
question Deleuze’s commitment to multiplicity, arguing that Deleuze in fact
subordinates the Many to the One in a Parmenidean fashion: “Deleuze’s
fundamental problem is most certainly not to liberate the multiple but to
submit thinking to a renewed concept of the One.”6 Deleuze is thus rendered
a monistic, aristocratic, and even ascetic philosopher whose fundamental
political posture is a Stoic amor fati. Less cautious and still more contentious,
Žižek’s Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences repeats many of
Badiou’s arguments but suggests even more strongly that Deleuze is trapped
in a shuttle between idealism and materialism—between The Logic of Sense,
on the one hand, and Anti-Oedipus, on the other. Moreover, Žižek holds that
© 2008 The Author
Becoming-Night, Becoming-Divine 3
when Deleuze is at his most materialist he is also least revolutionary, even

going so far as to accuse the materialist Deleuze of being “the ideologist of
late capitalism.”7
Both Badiou and Žižek’s critiques require that they drive a wedge between
Deleuze’s early texts and the later co-authored material with Félix Guattari.
These latter writings are inevitably treated as some sort of contamination
(“guatarrization”) of the Deleuzean oeuvre, which is “not in any way directly
political.”8 Hallward’s study, by contrast, is far more powerful than either of
its predecessors because it pays much closer attention to the entirety of
Deleuze’s published material. Although ultimately his judgment is going to
be very negative, Hallward takes Deleuze seriously before dismissing him.
He carefully presents Deleuze in his own words and draws attention to the
novel concepts and philosophical creatings that are the heart of Deleuze’s
project. In doing so, Hallward finds a consistency throughout Deleuze’s
corpus that even Deleuzeans have previously found elusive.
For our purposes, the essence of Hallward’s account is discernible in three
themes. First, and most importantly, at the centre of Deleuze’s thought is the
claim that there is nothing but creativity. Being just is creativity. This is the
“main idea that informs virtually all of [Deleuze’s] work.”9 In other words,
Deleuze is fundamentally a process philosopher. His is a universe of verbs
and adverbs rather than nouns and adjectives, of the infinitive rather than the
indicative. Because “creativity is what there is and it creates all that there can
be,” Deleuze’s is also a philosophy of singular affirmation.10 Creativity pro-
duces difference and this difference is not merely the relative distinction of
one thing from another—this would collapse into a negative understanding
of difference, e.g., I am this rather than that—but is instead a positive power
of pure production. What is constant in the universe is only this continual
production of novelty.
Second, and closely allied to this overwhelming emphasis on process and
creativity, is the role Deleuze assigns to the twin concepts of actuality and
virtuality. Essentially, Hallward maps these terms to Spinoza’s natura naturata
and natura naturans. We mustn’t think virtual reality in the way that our
digital culture does, as a shadowy realm of fantasy, games, and escape.
Rather, the virtual, as Deleuze so often says, is “real without being actual,
ideal without being abstract.” For Deleuze, following Bergson, virtuality is
dynamic, open, and robust, where actuality is passive, determinate, and
ephemeral. The actual may be what is produced, but the virtual is what is
productive. The virtual secretes actuality as if it were a hair, a nail, or a web.
“In short, the actual is constituted, the virtual alone is constituent. This is the
key to Deleuze’s whole ontology of creation: the one is creative, the other created;
the one composes, the other is composed.”11 All of the many dualisms in
Deleuze’s thought—territorialized and deterritorialized, molar and molecu-
lar, movement image and time image, arboreal and rhizomatic—these all
name vectors that diverge inasmuch as they aim at either the virtual or the
© 2008 The Author
actual, the creating or the created.12 “It is only the creating that differs or
produces, and it is only the creating as such that can claim to be properly
new.” Hallward is emphatic. “This is perhaps the most important distinction
in the whole of Deleuze’s work.”13
Hallward demonstrates, thirdly, the way that Deleuze works the concepts
of creativity, virtuality, and actuality into a cosmological scheme of exitus and
reditus with neoplatonic and theophanic overtones. Hallward structures his
chapters according to this scheme of procession and return. Thus chapters
one through three describe the way that virtual creatings condense into the
static actuality of bodies, persons, and matters of fact [etats des choses], while
chapters four through six explore the counter-actualisation and creative sub-
traction that frees the virtual event confined within creatural actuality. It is in
the process of return—when the infinite distribution of creativity in the
crowned anarchy of all beings reaches its terminus and abruptly changes
direction—only then, when thought reaches this extremity, does the essen-
tially mystical or contemplative nature of Deleuze’s project become clear. So
Deleuze describes:
A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single
and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamor of Being for all beings: on
the condition that each being, each drop and each voice has reached the
state of excess—in other words, the difference which displaces and dis-
guises them and, in turning upon its mobile cusp, causes them to return.14
Trading heavily on comparisons with theophanic thinkers such as Al-
Ghazali, Meister Eckhart, and John Scotus Eriugena, and making the most of
Deleuze’s indebtedness to the likes of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Bergson, Hall-
ward argues that this aspiration towards union with the creative heart of the
cosmos animates and determines almost the entirety of Deleuze’s work. Thus
Hallward points to a continuation in Deleuze’s project of Bergson’s last work
in which he envisions the mystic as a guarantor of philosophy’s highest
aspirations and a carrier of the creative élan. As Deleuze describes it, “At the
limit, it is the mystic who plays with the whole of creation, who invents an
expression of it whose adequacy increases with its dynamism.”15
For Bergson, “the ultimate end of mysticism is the establishment of a
contact, consequently of a partial coincidence, with the creative effort which
life itself manifests. This effort is of God, if it is not God himself.”16 Deleuze,
however, on Hallward’s reading, will go even farther along this line than
Bergson, claiming that philosophy itself has a properly mystical vocation.17
For it is the philosopher, even more than the artist, who counter-effectuates
the virtual Event and so establishes an unmediated connection to the ‘divine
energy’ that sweeps through the universe.18
The language is clearly exalted but rather than amplifying our regard for
the world, Hallward argues that in connecting God and creation, Deleuze
elevates the former and voids the latter.19 For Hallward this is evident in the
© 2008 The Author
way that Deleuze establishes a relationship of nonreciprocal dependence

between the actual and the virtual, the upshot of which is that the actual
inevitably loses all significance. So, for example, when Deleuze contends that
the real task of creation is “always to extract an Event from things and
beings,” this extraction can only be understood, says Hallward, in terms of “a
process which will eventually require the evacuation of those same things.”20
The Event is freed from actuality becoming the flash of a sword or a smile
without a cat, as Deleuze often says, or it is like an episode from Plutarch’s
moralia: “A man plucked a nightingale and, finding but little to eat, said: ‘You
are just a voice and nothing more.’ ”21
We have already seen where Hallward’s understanding of this leads. “The
creatural qua creatural is unredeemable. . . . There is nothing properly cre-
ative to be salvaged from the actual or creatural per se, other than the energy
released by its own dissipation.”22 Because the actual must be dismantled in
order to release the virtual Event, Deleuze’s philosophy is nothing other than
a machine for “the dissipation of the actual, not the solidification of materials
but their dematerialization, not the preservation of embodiment but an inten-
sive disembodiment.”23
It is hard to know what to make of this coincidence of apotheosis and
virtual apocalypse that Hallward claims is a rigorous consequence of
Deleuze’s logic. Certainly, after Hallward, we cannot fail to recognize the
prevalence of religious, mystical, and contemplative themes throughout
the Deleuzean corpus, but I think it fair to say that Hallward exaggerates the
extent to which these particular themes necessarily lead Deleuze and his
readers in acosmic, apolitical, and incorporeal directions. Of course, Hall-
ward’s judgments are not without reason. If virtuality and actuality are as
starkly opposed in Deleuze as Hallward claims, then political strategies that
depend “on more resilient forms of cohesion, on more principled forms of
commitment, on more integrated forms of coordination, [or] on more resis-
tant forms of defence,”24 are admittedly difficult to envision and sustain. But
Hallward seems to overstate the stridency of this dualism. That is to say, while
Deleuze does at times pose his alternatives (including virtual and actual) in a
rigid manner, at other times he explicitly and irenically withdraws from this
absolutism. Hallward produces a kind of Deleuze-hobgoblin only by reading
a “foolish consistency” into a mind that was always sharp, but equally rest-
less, experimental, and revisable.25 For Deleuze, as for Whitehead, it is more
important for a proposition to be interesting than true (philosophy is a
toolkit) and one way to read Deleuze’s occasional extremism is to see it as a
machine for producing this interest.26
At least as often as he rhetorically divides them, Deleuze connects the
virtual and the actual at the level of ontology so that the one never appears
apart from its liaison with the other. As Deleuze writes, “The plane of imma-
nence includes both the virtual and its actualization simultaneously, without
there being any assignable limit between the two.”27 This seems to render
© 2008 The Author
virtual and actual as coexistent termini on a unified continuum, both ends of

which always accompany singularities in their intensive adventures. The
virtual is the multiplicitous whole that always exceeds but never abandons
the actual. Moreover, there can be no dreams of pure virtual existence for we
cannot create concepts and Events while resting in virtuality, but must
instead rub up against the stubborn fact of actuality. The virtual that we
release by counter-effectuating the actual is no longer the aboriginal chaotic
virtual that preceded actualization but the chaoid Event that has drawn a
measure of consistency from its sojourn in the actual.28 Indeed, already in
Difference and Repetition it is only and always something in the world—a
fundamental encounter—that forces us to think, to form concepts, and thus
frees us to draw lines of flight.
The body is the irreducible vehicle for such encounters and this is why
Deleuze never renounces his project of transcendental empiricism. Again and
again, he says, “we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do,
in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into
composition with other affects, with the affects of another body.”29 Deleuze’s
entire project is bound up with this ideal of embodied experimental inquiry,
of philosophy as an integral way of life, but the key here is what Deleuze
means by life, body, and world. He writes:
We must believe in the body, but as in the germ of life, the seed which
splits open the paving stones, which has been preserved and lives on in
the holy shroud or the mummy’s bandages, and which bears witness to
life, in this world as it is. We need an ethic or a faith, which makes fools
laugh; it is not a need to believe in something else, but a need to believe
in this world, of which fools are a part.30
What Hallward sees as Deleuze’s flight out of this world is not a flight from
reality but a rejection of the way we habitually abstract ourselves, bodies, and
thoughts from the dynamic nonorganic life that is the essence of the cosmos.
If, in Deleuze’s writings, “the world” occasionally seems only fit to be evacu-
ated, it is in such cases only because that world is an abstraction of our own
making, as James, Bergson, and Whitehead all knew. We cannot understand
his apparent flight from the world unless we see it in the context of Deleuze
proposing an alternative process cosmology. What Deleuze wants to reject is
the misplaced concreteness to which the carelessness of custom and the
demands of survival have habituated us. In its place he would offer a robust,
immanent re-enchantment without supernaturalism. And yet, even here,
Deleuze cannot be finally successful. It is certainly true that, for Deleuze, the
virtual is not hierarchically above the actual in a neoplatonic manner but
exists as a penumbral presence around the surface of the actual like the Stoic
incorporeal or the smile of the Cheshire cat. However, precisely because this
virtual is entirely immanent it must finally unravel the actual with which it is
always hopelessly entangled. This aporetic relation of virtual to actual is thus
© 2008 The Author
not a result of Deleuze’s theophanic and contemplative interests, but rather

stems from the entirely immanent ways that theology and re-enchantment
are deployed his thought.
Becoming-Divine
Rather than continuing to move back and forth at will throughout Deleuze’s
many writings, let us consider this problematic in light of a single text. In
particular, I want to attend to Deleuze and Guattari’s important essay on
becoming, Plateau 10 in A Thousand Plateaus. This account of becoming is in
keeping with Deleuze’s radically processive view of the universe. It is becom-
ings, not beings, that interest Deleuze and Guattari, but here our English is a
little misleading. When they speak of a becoming, they do not employ a
gerund but instead nominalize the infinitive (un devenir) in a way unavailable
to Anglophones. For Deleuze and Guattari, this nominalization of the infini-
tive plays a very specific function. They explain, “the verb in the infinitive is
in no way indeterminate with respect to time; it expresses the floating non-
pulsed time proper to Aeon, in other words, the time of the pure event or of
becoming.”31 To speak of a becoming (un devenir), therefore, is to speak on the
virtual plane of sheer affirmation, movement, and intensity. These becomings
are verbal and dynamic: “The wolf is not fundamentally a characteristic or a
certain number of characteristics; it is a wolfing.”32 More than merely
dynamic, becoming always involves a block, a pack, a multiplicity. For
Deleuze, there is no agent of becoming behind the event of becoming. A wolf
stalking its prey at dusk should not be written merely as “an animal-stalking”
but must instead include an entire assemblage of becoming: “This should be
read without a pause: the animal-stalks-at-five-o’clock.”33
This ontology of the Event undergirds Deleuze and Guattari’s account of
how we ought to embark on our own adventures of becoming-animal,
-woman, -child, -molecular. These becomings seem impossible: how can a
human become-animal, especially if we refuse to speak in terms of metaphor,
resemblance, and imitation? Deleuze and Guattari are clear, however, that
such becomings are perfectly real. “But,” they ask, “which reality is at issue
here?”34 Becoming-animal does not mean “really” transforming the human
into an animal, certainly not into those animals already confined by the
categories genus and species, and the boundaries of filiation and descent. We
must switch ontological registers. “What is real is the becoming itself, the
block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which
becomes passes.”35 In a processive universe, becoming involves the inaugu-
ration of relationships that are not mediated through language and subjec-
tivity, relationships of intensity and symbiosis, proximity and alliance.
Becoming is relational, not representational; it establishes lines of force that
run between terms and beneath identifiable boundaries. And so we are
encouraged to act: “Schizoanalysis, or pragmatics, has no other meaning:
© 2008 The Author
Make a rhizome. But you don’t know what you can make a rhizome with,
you don’t know which subterranean stem is effectively going to make a
rhizome, or enter a becoming, people your desert. So experiment.”36
To establish these relations is always precarious, for whereas representation
occurs within the safe walls of an inviolate subjectivity, becoming only oper-
ates by risk, danger, the throw of the dice, and contagion. This is not mimesis
but methexis, not imitation but the event of participation. One becomes only
by sinking into the undulations of the plane of immanence. “The painter and
musician do not imitate the animal, they become-animal at the same time as
the animal becomes what they willed at the deepest level of their concord with
Nature.”37 Although becoming establishes relationships, these are not rela-
tionships of pity or sympathy or affection that can be entertained from within
subjectivity. We are dealing with relations of force. “It is within us that the
animal bares its teeth . . . or the flower opens its petals; but this is done by
corpuscular emission, by molecular proximity, and not by the imitation of a
subject or a proportionality of form.”38 Becoming violates subjectivity and
dissembles forms; it forces one to swallow the heart of the world and explode
with the beating of its cosmic tempo. When the rat bares its teeth in the poet
Hofmannsthal, this is not the animal acting upon the man, nor the man
feeling for the animal, but the Event of being itself jeopardizing, transform-
ing, and relating both rat and man.
It is a composition of speeds and affects involving entirely different

individuals, a symbiosis; it makes the rat become a thought, a feverish
thought in the man, at the same time as the man becomes a rat gnashing its
teeth in its death throes. The rat and the man are in no way the same thing,
but Being expresses them both in a single meaning in a language that is no
longer that of words, in a matter that is no longer that of forms, in an
affectability that is no longer that of subjects. Unnatural participation.”39
We can already discern a vector to these becomings, like a great wave that
sweeps us up in endless transformations until it crashes with the force
of Nature itself. Becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-animal,
-vegetable, or –mineral, becomings-molecular, becomings-particles. . . .
“What are they all rushing toward? Without a doubt, toward becoming-
imperceptible. The imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming, its
cosmic formula.”40 In becoming-imperceptible, one unites with the cosmos
itself. This is the plane of consistency, the intersection of all concrete forms,
where “all becomings are written like sorcerers’ drawings on this plane of
consistency, which is the ultimate Door providing a way out for them.”41 The
plane of consistency saves becoming-imperceptible from becoming-nothing.
It does not abandon relationships, but paradoxically renders the impercep-
tible perceptible by radicalizing relations through the working of what
Deleuze and Guattari, following Whitehead, call prehension. Perception is no
© 2008 The Author
longer mediated but just is the relations of force that traverse the plane of
consistency and initiate novel becomings.
[Perception on the plane of consistency] will no longer reside in the
relation between a subject and an object, but rather in the movement
serving as the limit of that relation, in the period associated with the
subject and the object. Perception will confront its own limit; it will be in
the midst of things . . . as the presence of one haecceity in another, the
prehension of one by the other or the passage from one to the other: Look
only at the movements.42
Here all things open into everything else in a fullness of innumerable dimen-
sions. It is this fullness alone that, for Deleuze and Guattari, keeps all things
from either “bogging down, or veering into the void.” Although Deleuze
rarely uses the word, we have a name for this fullness that upholds and
creates all things and it is thus clear that becoming-imperceptible is also
becoming-divine. In becoming imperceptible, one becomes the whole world,
everybody and everything. Deleuze and Guattari write about this in a lan-
guage that is implicitly theological, creational, and divinizing. “Becoming
everybody/everything (tout le monde) is to world ( faire monde), to make a
world ( faire un monde).”43
But what kind of God is this? The virtual telos of becoming-imperceptible
is at the same time a becoming-divine, but for Deleuze and Guattari the God
one unites with is a very specific sort of divinity. The immanent divine energy
that creates and undoes all things with an infinite speed lies beneath form
and subjectivity—it knows and will know nothing of the transcendence
associated with classical theologies. Deleuze and Guattari everywhere make
it seem as if transcendence is simply another name for the cessation of
movement that stultifies life and they never genuinely consider that it could
be otherwise. Nevertheless, there is a lingering tension in their rejection of
transcendence, as if even the attempt to construct a world of pure immanence
could only succeed through a series of gestures in the direction of a mystery
that exceeds immanence itself. For instance, when they rightly celebrate the
music of Messiaen at the end of Plateau 10 and even more so in Plateau 11 on
the refrain, they do so because he returns music to a cosmic register; but
Messiaen’s Catholic cosmos is wider than theirs. His music gives expression
to the cosmic time of rock, and the biological time of birds, but he also brings
in the rhythms of human memory, the eternal periods of angelic remaining,
the silence of contemplation, and the hope of eschatological fulfilment.44
Messiaen’s own understanding of his music certainly involves a dialogue
with the likes of Bergson, but also with Thomists such as Etienne Gilson and
Jacques Maritain for whom transcendence is the superlative form of imma-
nence, and not its rival. There is in Messiaen, then, not only an affirmation of
immanence but of cosmic transcendence, and yet Deleuze and Guattari
remain deaf to these rhythms. (A similar argument could be made for the
© 2008 The Author
way they neglect the “entheogenic” side of drug culture, preferring to focus
solely on the side of immanence and transgression—it is always Burroughs in
Tangiers, never James on nitrous, or Huxley’s mescalin.)
Deleuze and Guattari reserve the name ‘theology’ for all ways of being and
speaking that make an appeal to transcendence. For them, the theological is
always at odds with the movements of infinite becoming that they seek to
open. As they write, “Theology is very strict on the following point: there are
no werewolves, human beings cannot become animal. That is because there is
no transformation of essential forms; they are inalienable and only entertain
relations of analogy.”45 They offer no citation for this view—for them, it is
theology de jure as the discourse of transcendence that prohibits becomings.
But is this true? Are there really no werewolves in theology? Perhaps not
at first glance, but the more one searches beyond theological manuals into the
tradition itself, the more one finds becomings-animal even within theology.
Angelology is especially suggestive, with its monstrous combinations of
human and animal affects, proliferations of eyes and wings, its unnatural and
varied velocities, its synaesthesia. In angelic proximities, humans become
angel but also, just as often, they become animal, as in the visions of 1 Enoch
or even Christ’s story of the sheep and the goats. Apparently, for the apoca-
lyptic writers, the proper way to speak about humans in the presence of
angels is to speak about animals. Angels it seems, no less than the daemons
of Deleuze and Guattari’s sorcerers, are threshold creatures that initiate
strange and precarious becomings; next to the angel, Balaam’s ass becomes a
voice alone.
If angelology is still too discursive, hierarchical, and aristocratic, consider
the phenomenology of religious enthusiasm, the Great Awakenings, and
revivalism. This populist strand of Christian practice engages in precisely the
sort of becomings-animal that interest Deleuze in the case of Little Hans or
Hofmannsthal’s becoming-rat. The most dramatic recent account of this
stems from the events, beginning in January, 1994, at a charismatic church in
Toronto, which brought hundreds of thousands of people to a warehouse
where many underwent their own becomings-animal: barking, roaring,
stalking, chirping, and swooning.46 Whatever else we make of these strange
accounts, we have to admit that here, if nowhere else, theology has to deal
with the question of werewolves.
But perhaps Deleuze would say that even if it technically occurs in the
church, there is still no theological account for these becomings-animal—
more to the point, wouldn’t theology like to prohibit these diagonals and
stick to its manageable axes? Can theology consider these to be anything
more than local transports, crossing neither the barriers of essential forms
nor the thresholds of subjects and substances? Admittedly, many theologies
have sought to quell such becomings, but such prohibitions are not a priori
requirements for theology itself. In other words, a discourse of transcendence
does not, by itself, prohibit a robust vision of real becomings. Indeed,
© 2008 The Author
transcendence can and sometimes does open our language to otherwise

unimaginable becomings. The paradigmatic case of this for theology is the
lavish account of becoming in Eucharistic transfiguration. Eucharistic trans-
figuration is nothing if not a becoming that involves the affects of bread,
wine, congregation, voices, divinity, and the explicit crossing of substantial
boundaries while leaving accidents intact. This is perhaps the most audacious
assertion of becoming that humanity has ever uttered; Deleuze’s werewolves
positively pale in comparison. And it is only the logic of transcendence that
allows for this kind of alchemy.
Let me add one more voice to this chrestomathy of theological becomings.
Wasn’t Pico of Mirandola at his most theological when he celebrated the
capacity for infinite becoming that defines human nature precisely inasmuch
as it is imago dei? Not only does Pico’s protean theological anthropology give
the lie to Deleuze’s caricature of theology as incapable of thinking were-
wolves, but it raises questions about Deleuze’s own handling of becoming.
For Deleuze every genuine becoming is an unnatural participation because it
dismantles the settled order of essences, genera, species, and lines of descent.
But what if, as Pico thought, there is a creature whose nature it is to be capax
universi and so capable of infinite transformation? On this account, there
simply are no unnatural participations for the human being—though, of
course, there remain unnatural ways of participating—because the human
being is properly a becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, becoming-
imperceptible, and also a becoming-heavenly, becoming-divine.
Indeed, for Christian theology at least as much as for Deleuze, the trajec-
tory of becoming aims at nothing less than becoming-divine, theosis, or
deification. In deference to Deleuze’s habit of culling resources from the
margins, I have mostly called upon minoritarian counter-examples (Messi-
aen, angelology, the phenomena of charismatic awakenings, and Pico) as
rejoinders to Deleuze’s caricature of theology as unable to think becoming.
With deification, however, we step away from marginal discourses into one of
the central theological loci of the church catholic. Although it was once
fashionable to consider the doctrine of theosis as belonging properly only to
the Eastern Christian traditions, a wave of recent studies have shown how
important deification is not only for the Orthodox but also for the Roman
Catholic and Protestant churches, as well.47 The doctrine is not shy about the
extent of the transformation involved: it is a theopoiesis as Justin Martyr first
called it, a becoming-God. Already in the second century, Irenaeus stated
programmatically that, through his love, the Word of God “became what we
are in order to make us what He is Himself.”48 Following Irenaeus, Athana-
sius adopted the formula and employed it in his fourth-century contest with
the Arians. “The Son of God became human in order that we might become
God.”49 In the Latin west, Augustine called his church to attend to the infinite
reciprocity involved in this most extreme metamorphosis, “In order to make
gods of those who were merely human . . . one who was God made himself
© 2008 The Author
human.”50 This daring embrace of becoming at its most extreme continued

after the fall of Rome. In the seventh century, Maximus the Confessor writes,
“We lay hold of the divine to the same degree as the Logos of God . . . became
truly human.”51 Thomas Aquinas inherits the same tradition and writes in the
thirteenth century, “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us
sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might
make men gods.”52 Thomas goes further, saying in his commentary on John’s
gospel, “We are gods by participation under the effect of grace.”53 Later still,
for Teresa of Avila, the end of contemplation is divinization, when “the soul,
or rather, the spirit of the soul, is made one with God.”54 And Teresa’s “little
Seneca”, John of the Cross, breathlessly declares, “Everything can be
expressed in this statement: the soul becomes God from God through par-
ticipation in him and in his attributes.”55
Long before Deleuze, then, theology, far from prohibiting becoming,
opened infinite lines of flight by inscribing a becoming-divine within the
very heart of the human being. This becoming-divine is only possible
because of the Protean expansiveness of the human whose transformation
goes even beyond the boundaries of immanent virtuality, becoming by grace
that which exceeds his or her own grasp. This theosis, however, is not
Deleuze’s apotheosis, precisely because theology is able to envision a becom-
ing so radical that it involves the preservation and not simply the diremption
of the subject. For the subject is never so self-possessed that its becoming
necessarily entails dispossession; rather, we always discover our very selves
as continually given from and tending towards a transcendent source with
whom, therefore, we are never in competition and whom we can never
possess. As imago dei, the human capacity for transformation is thereby
unbounded and thrusts us into the most intimate of relations not only with
God but also with the diverse beings of creation in all of its plenitude.
Already, for Thomas Aquinas, the infinite capacity in the human soul—the
capax universii, which is a corollary of the imago dei—meant that in knowing
a thing we do not so much mirror its form as we realise and develop this
form in the milieu of our minds.56 Thus, for example, in knowing a rose,
there is both a becoming-rose on the part of the knowing soul and a
becoming-soul on the part of the rose. Such becomings, especially as they
approach the upper limits of becoming-divine, may exceed our power to
enact, but not our capacity to receive, which is another way of saying that the
human is constituted by a natural desire for the supernatural, as de Lubac
reads Aquinas.57 The point is that a theology open to transcendence can
imagine an infinite becoming that does not dissemble forms but both opens
and realizes them in a more profound manner.58 Because our self-possession
is simply our transformation in the direction of the God who gives us to be,
theology is able to think infinite becoming without indulging in that Bataille-
styled Nietzscheanism that can only celebrate what it simultaneously labels
transgressive.
© 2008 The Author
Deleuze and Guattari admit that every molecular becoming is tied to a

molar form, but equally they insist that no becoming-molecular is possible
without tearing apart other molarities. Becoming is, for them, essentially
violent, its combinations “are neither genetic nor structural; they are inter-
kingdoms, unnatural participations. That is the only way Nature operates—
against itself. . . .”59 In order to become, one has no choice but to tear down
the stabilities of identity, agency, and subjectivity. In their becomings, the
world, the horse, and the child, “cease to be subjects to become events, in
assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an
air, a life.”60 All of this has the appealing air of radicalism about it, but I
wonder if Deleuze isn’t much more conventional here than he seems. To my
ear, this insistence that becoming is something utterly monstrous sounds
tellingly like the reactionary voice that opens Marie de France’s twelfth-
century werewolf (or “Garwaf”) lais, “Bisclavret.”61
I don’t want to forget Bisclavret;
. . . the Normans call it Garwaf
In the old days, people used to say
And it often actually happened
That some men turned into werewolves
And lived in the woods.
A werewolf is a savage beast;
While his fury is on him
He eats men, does much harm,
Goes deep in the forest to live.
In Deleuze’s bestial account of becoming do we not hear echoes of these
opening lines? And yet Marie refuses to stop with this savage notion of what
becoming means, for she immediately continues her fable: “But that’s enough
of this for now: I want to tell you about the Bisclavret.” She quickly shifts the
reader’s attention from the reactionary description of a generic monstrosity
to an individual, that is to say, to a being capable of sustaining identity and
preserving relationships throughout the most extreme metamorphoses. The
real monster in her story is not the lycanthrope, but the destruction of relation
that leads to injustice. In a strange twist of fate, then, it seems that the
twelfth-century Marie de France—even with her inherited assumptions of a
patriarchal status quo—is able to conceive of transformation in a more radical
way than the twentieth-century philosophical radical, precisely because she
is able to preserve identity through the adventure of becoming, rather than
opposing the two as if identity were always at war with metamorphosis. If
there is no identity, then there is never any transformation, but only the
banality of eternal replacement. If there are no wolves, then there are perforce
no werewolves.
Deleuze is right that transcendence and identity are irrevocably conjoined
and so he tries to eradicate both from his “chaosmos.” Deleuze’s Absolute, a
© 2008 The Author
wholly immanent divine force of creativity, is at war with itself, trapped in an

aporetic shuttle between creation and destruction.62 Precisely because this
divinity is not transcendent, it can only continue its cascade of life by chal-
lenging and devouring the creatures to which it gives rise. It is this necessary
evacuation of subjectivity and more complex enduring forms of being that
troubles Hallward so much. And he is right to warn that, for Deleuze, “the
renewal of creation always requires the paralysis and dissolution of the crea-
ture per se. The notion of a constrained or situated freedom, the notion that
a subject’s own decisions might have genuine consequences—the whole
notion, in short, of strategy—is thoroughly foreign to Deleuze’s conception of
thought.”63
This is a problem that seems endemic to any process philosophy, but it can
be overcome. Those influenced by Whitehead, for example, have long con-
tended with the criticism that Whitehead’s atomistic dipolar account of “con-
crescence” cannot do justice to our sense of enduring macro-identity and the
ineluctable sense of responsibility we feel for our past actions and future
decisions. If what I really am is a momentary drop of experience that perishes
almost immediately into “objective immortality” but does not endure in its
subjectivity, then what binds me to the decisions of the untold occasions of
experience that preceded me? Why should I be punished or praised for
achievements of the past if at this moment I am an entirely new actual entity?
This conundrum is solved in various ways by process philosophers such as
Nancy Frankenberry, Judith Jones, Joseph Bracken, and Brian Henning, but
all argue that subjectivity and agency must be extended beyond the sheer
moment of becoming. Such holistic models involve restoring creative power
to the past and redistributing value to macrolevel agencies that are wider
than any singularity, actual occasion, or haecceity. Of course, this also
involves them, either explicitly or implicitly, in some affirmation of transcen-
dence, but such an affirmation is the cost of preserving relationships, agen-
cies, and strategies. If one wants fresh air and relief from the dark, one must
open a window to the sky. Only the recuperation of transcendence allows the
rehabilitation of the subject. This is true for process thinkers such as White-
head and it is especially true for thinkers like Deleuze, for Deleuze’s antihu-
manist polemics against the subject are explicitly tied to his Nietzschean
understanding of subjectivity as the internalization of transcendent authority
(the name for this is Oedipus, and to this extent Deleuze agrees with Lacan’s
diagnosis of western subjectivity, even if his schizoanlaysis balks at Lacan’s
prescriptions). It is clear that, for Deleuze, there is no subject without tran-
scendence. But can we admit transcendence without eclipsing immanence?
July 4, 1952: Fire-Watch

Abba Lot came to Abba Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able,
I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and
© 2008 The Author
contemplative silence; and, according as I am able, I strive to cleanse my

heart of thoughts: now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply
and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten
lamps of fire. He said: Why not be changed into fire?64
We have been considering the themes of becoming, theophany, re-

enchantment, and divinization, in the philosophy Gilles Deleuze, and have
found a fundamental ambiguity in his treatment of these, an ambiguity that I
suggest stems from his axiomatic disallowal of transcendence. I want to bring
this essay to a close by considering a different iteration of our themes in a short
work by Thomas Merton, the remarkable “Fire Watch: July 4, 1952” with which
The Sign of Jonas closes. Although Merton has often been tamed and Oedipal-
ized by being cast (rather perversely) as a devotional writer and what the
Germans used to call a beautiful soul, he is in fact a profound writer, monastic
theologian, and cultural critic, and “Fire Watch” is one of the most perfectly
realized of his early works. The essay is his account of making the rounds as the
“firewatcher” for his monastery during a very dark, very hot summer night,
but the real concern of Merton’s essay is to explore the twin movements of
descent and ascent in the contemplative life. This is what makes it so interest-
ing when read alongside Deleuze as a sort of counternarrative, for Merton is
able to include in his account of descent the infinite becomings, the strange
alliances, and the cosmic planes that animate Deleuze’s own project, but for
Merton this immanent becoming-night is night as traversed by a transcendent
line that reinstates non-Oedipalized subjects, redemptive relationships of
responsibility and care, community, open traditions, living memory and hope.
In Merton’s essay, the daylight world occupies the place of Deleuze’s molarity
or territoriality, while Merton’s journey into night is so akin to Deleuze’s
becoming-molecular or imperceptible that, as writers, they seem to be drawing
from the same rhythms and semantic fields: we encounter monstrous becom-
ings, geological strata, swarms, packs, invisibilities, contagions, fierce desires,
meteorological events, desubjectivizations, hauntings, collapse, madness.
Nevertheless, despite these similarities, in Merton, neither the nocturnal nor
the diurnal is absolutized, as they always threaten to be for Deleuze. In Merton,
by contrast, sun and moon alike are suspended by the Mystery that alone gives
them the power to be and the gift of relationality, one with the other. The task,
then, is not to counter-effectuate molarity or to territorialize molecularity, but
to redeem both the molecular and the molar through a yet more eventful
transfiguration.
The essay begins, as Deleuze would have wanted, with dismantling day-
light structures. The monks are “packed in the belly of the great heat” before
the night angelus “unlocks the church and sets them free. The holy monster
which is The Community divides itself into segments and disperses through
airless cloisters where yellow lamps do not attract the bugs.”65 This dispersal
initiates Merton’s becoming-night. No single creature rises to the fore in this
© 2008 The Author
becoming; the night is an event that thrusts Merton into proximity with
living forces, voices, presences, disturbances. The entire journey commences
with silence, but this human silence is merely preparatory.
Then I begin to hear the eloquent night, the night of wet trees, with
moonlight sliding over the shoulder of the church in a haze of dampness
and subsiding heat. The world of this night resounds from heaven to hell
with animal eloquence, with the savage innocence of a million unknown
creatures. While the earth eases and cools off like a huge wet living thing,
the enormous vitality of their music pounds and rings and throbs until it
gets into everything, and swamps the whole world in its neutral madness
which never becomes an orgy because all things are innocent, all things
are pure.66
As he makes the rounds through the monastery at Gethsemane, the swelling
night leads him further and further away from the cares and conventions of
daylight aspirations. The night builds and initiates a crisis. Confronted by the
immensity of this immanent inhuman life, Merton stares into the void, faced
with the brutal sober knowledge that the entirety of his articulate life and
even the structures to which he is bound might all come to naught. “I feel as
if everything had been unreal. It is as if the past had never existed.”67 Merton
searches his memory for scraps of meaning. What endures? He remembers a
man, almost a bumpkin, who used to walk by the back road every summer
morning singing his own ritornello, interrupting the novice’s communion.
And he remembers as well, “the heat in the beanfield the first June I was here,
and I get the same sense of a mysterious, unsuspected value that struck me
after Father Alberic’s funeral.”68 Merton approaches the nadir of his descent
as the night threatens to swallow the huge but fragile artefacts of day. In the
midst of the night, the whole world seems to be made out of paper, ready to
crumble, tear, and blow away.
How much more so this monastery which everybody believes in and
which has perhaps already ceased to exist! O God, my God, the night has
values that day has never dreamed of. All things stir by night, waking or
sleeping, conscious of the nearness of their ruin. Only man makes
himself illuminations he conceives to be solid and eternal. . . . The tall
towers are undermined by ants, the walls crack and cave in, and the
holiest buildings burn to ashes while the watchman is composing a
theory of duration. . . . The living things sing terribly that only the present
is eternal and that all things having a past and a future are doomed to
pass away!69
However, this point of radical dissipation, so similar to Deleuze’s virtual
apotheosis, is not Merton’s divinization but is precisely the place from which
Merton rouses himself to meet God. Theosis needs this becoming-animal,
-molecular, and—imperceptible, but it is not exhausted in these becomings.
© 2008 The Author
As Merton’s journey moves upwards towards the monastery tower, his

reflections move outwards to the concerns of the community: to his respon-
sibility for those brothers under his care; to the world that looks at him as a
stranger, an outcast, a celebrity, a model; even to the flags of a compromised
state and the condemned books of a church too comfortable in its power. In
this section of the essay, Merton moves through Gethsemane as through a
“religious city,” and it seems as if there is a molar becoming-polis that is as
creative and ambiguous as the molecular becomings of night. Becoming-
divine, however, is neither of these, but a diagonal that traverses and exceeds
the vectors of both molecularity and molarity.
Thus, in his ascent, Merton leaves even the “religious city” behind. The
essay climbs the monastery tower until Merton finds himself high above the
treetops, and as he moves higher still, the building becomes more subtle and
unsubstantial.
And now the hollowness that rings under my feet measures some sixty
feet to the floor of the church . . . my whole being breathes the wind
which moves through the belfry, and my hand is on the door through
which I see the heavens. The door swings out upon a vast sea of darkness
and of prayer.70
This, at last, is Merton’s trembling anticipation of theosis, a deification in
which all things are included. Rising to meet him are the preorganic beings
of mist, heat, rivers and moonlight; the life-world joins him, the “huge chorus
of living beings . . . singing in the waterways, throbbing in the creeks and the
fields and the trees”; and the cosmic being of the sky above, the heavens
wherein angels dwell. All things are brought together in this divinization:
“Eternity is in the present. Eternity is in the palm of the hand. Eternity is a
seed of fire, whose sudden roots break barriers that keep my heart from being
an abyss. The things of time are in connivance with eternity.”71
Deleuze’s account of becoming can be read as both a becoming-divine and
a becoming-night. Merton raises these same questions but addresses them
with different tools, theological tools that Deleuze refuses to use. The night, as
Merton makes clear, descends upon us as a question that can be in answered
in at least three ways: is it an erasure, the night of the world, a night that gnaws
into daytime only to undo its pretensions to endurance, relationality, and
importance? Or is the night a time of perversion, a sinister time for indiscre-
tion, the dark stage for a Walpurgis Nacht? Or, at the end, does the night “open
infinite distances to charity” and send our soul to play beyond the stars?72
When Deleuze affirms that “to think is always to follow the witch’s flight,”73 I
suspect that what he wants is in fact to open these infinite amorous distances,
and that his witches would have angry words for the callousness of Faust and
his Devil. Both Merton and Deleuze know in their own way that creation as
such is good, kindness desirable, and justice undeconstructible, but by daring
to affirm even transcendence Merton is able to open vaster skies than Deleuze
© 2008 The Author
and to sustain these openings without aporia. Merton’s counternarrative

unleashes a becoming-divine that is not only concerned with creating new
relationships, but also with tending and renewing relations long since estab-
lished. Beyond the liberation of desire, there is a fidelity of desire that obscurely
anticipates the beloved community promised in our deepest aspirations and
most important struggles. This beloved community is not the enemy of cosmic
vitalism but its consummation, for life and community alike only are inasmuch
as they participate in a God whose transcendence is the superlative mode of
immanence, and whose being is eternal reciprocity.
You, Who sleep in my breast, are not met with words, but in the emer-
gence of life within life and of wisdom within wisdom. You are found in
communion: Thou in me and I in Thee and Thou in them and they in me:
dispossession within dispossession, dispassion within dispassion, emp-
tiness within emptiness, freedom within freedom. . . . There are drops of
dew that show like sapphires in the grass as soon as the great sun
appears, and leaves stir behind the hushed flight of an escaping dove.74
NOTES
1 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans.
R. J Hollingdale, Reprint edition with new introduction, Penguin Classics (New York, NY:
Penguin Books, 1969), IV.6, p. 292.
2 Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Verso,
2006), p. 7.
3 Ibid., p. 3.
4 Cf. Michel Foucault’s understanding of mysticism in ‘The Thought of the Outside’: “The
characteristic movement of mysticism is to attempt to join—even if it means crossing the
night—the positivity of an existence by opening a difficult line of communication with it . . .
.” Michel Foucault and James D. Faubion, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, vol. II,
Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1988 (New York, NY: New Press, 1998), p. 150.
5 Hallward, Out of This World, p. 164.
6 Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis, MN: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 10.
7 Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New York, NY: Routledge,
2004), p. 184.
8 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., p. 37, emphasis mine.
12 Ibid., p. 82.
13 Ibid., p. 28.
14 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p.
304.
15 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (New York, NY: Zone
Books, 1991), p. 112.
16 Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloud-
esley Brereton (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), pp. 220–221.
18 Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 13.
© 2008 The Author

20 Ibid., 91. Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 1994), p. 33.
21 Plutarch, Moralia: Sayings of Spartans [Apophthegmata Laconica] 233a. Quoted in Mladen
Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, Short Circuits (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 3.
23 Ibid., p. 90.
24 Ibid., p. 162.
25 As Emerson says in ‘Self-Reliance’: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosopher and divines.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson:
Essays and Lectures (New York, NY: The Library of America, 1983), p. 265.
26 On true versus interesting propositions, see Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed.
David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, corrected edition (New York, NY: Free Press,
1978), p. 259. “The importance of truth,” Whitehead continues, “is that it adds to interest.”
27 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues 2, trans. Eliot Ross Albert (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 149. I owe this reference to the insightful engagement
with Hallward in Anthony Paul Smith, review of “Out of this World: Deleuze and the
Philosophy of Creation,” Angelaki 12/1 (2007), pp. 151–156.
28 Counter-effectuation releases a “virtual that is distinct from the actual, but a virtual that
has . . . become consistent or real on the plane of immanence that wrests it from chaos—it is
a virtual that is real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.” Deleuze and
Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 156.
29 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Min-
neapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 257.
30 Gilles Deleuze, The Time-Image (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p.
173.
31 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Con-
tinuum Impacts (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 290.
32 Ibid., p. 264.
33 Ibid., p. 290.
34 “[D]o not look for a resemblance or analogy to the animal, for this is becoming-animal in
action, the production of the molecular animal (whereas the “real” animal is trapped in its
molar form and subjectivity).” Ibid., p. 303.
35 Ibid., p. 262.
36 Ibid., p. 277.
37 Ibid., p. 336, emphasis mine.
38 Ibid., p. 303.
39 Ibid., p. 285.
40 Ibid., p. 308.
41 Ibid., p. 277.
42 Ibid., p. 311.
43 Ibid., p. 308.
44 On which, see Catherine Pickstock, “Messiaen and Deleuze: The Musico-Theological Cri-
tique of Modernism and Postmodernism” in Musical Theology, ed. Jeremy Begbie (Grand
Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, forthcoming).
45 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 278.
46 On which, see Margaret M. Poloma, “The ‘Toronto Blessing’: Charisma, Institutionalization,
and Revival,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36/2 (1997), pp. 257–271. Robert E.
Bartholomew and Julian D. O’Dea, “Religious Devoutness Construed as Pathology: The
Myth of ‘Religious Mania’,” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 8/1 (1998), pp.
1–16.
47 On the Patristic notion of deification, see especially Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification
in the Greek Patristic Tradition, Oxford Early Christian Studies, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004). For a broad overview of the ecumenical importance of deification see Michael J.
Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung, Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development
of Deification in the Christian Traditions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008); Stephen
Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov, eds., Theosis: Deification in Christian Theology, Princeton
Theological Monograph Series (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2006); Veli-Matti Kark-
kainen, One with God: Salvation as Deification and Justification, Unitas Books (Collegeville, MN:
© 2008 The Author

Liturgical Press, 2004). On deification in Aquinas, see A. N. Williams, The Ground of Union:
Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). For recent works
defending the importance of deification in Luther, Calvin, and Wesley, see J. Todd Billings,
Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ, Changing
Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007);
Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of
Luther (Grand Rapids, MI.: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998); S. T. Kimbrough,
Orthodox and Wesleyan Spirituality (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002).
48 Against Heresies, 3, 191; 4, 33, 4.
49 On the Incarnation, 54.
50 Sermon 192.
51 On the Lord’s Prayer, 90:877a.
52 Opsuculum, 57.1–4.
53 In Joannem, 15.2.1.
54 Interior Castle, 7.2.
55 Living Flame of Love, 3.5–8.
56 See John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, Radical Orthodoxy Series
(London; New York: Routledge, 2001).
57 See Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York, NY:
Crossroad Publishing Company, 1967); see also John Milbank, The Suspended Middle : Henri
De Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural (Grand Rapids, MI.: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 2005).
58 Deleuze was perhaps the most cultured philosopher of the late twentieth century, comment-
ing upon and making use of a staggering array of literary, philosophic, scientific, and
popular materials spanning nearly the entire history of human thought. Why is he content
then with such a shallow account of theology? Part of this failure is no doubt due to the
dismal state of so much theology in late modernity, not least in France during the middle of
the last century. Exciting developments were afoot, but during Deleuze’s formative period
immediately after World War II, bold new theological voices such M. D. Chenu, Maurice
Blondel, Teilhard de Chardin, and Henri de Lubac were regularly under official censure and
more or less unavailable to non-specialists. Inasmuch as Deleuze’s encounter with theology
was shaped by either the neo-Kantianism of the theological left, or the manual Thomism of
the right, his rejection of transcendence is understandable. More to the point, however, once
Deleuze made the decision to enthrone Spinoza as the Christ of the philosophers, then
theology as such could only present itself as a formal challenge to the entire Deleuzean
system, and so it is only an already censured theology that ever appears in Deleuze’s works,
a parodic transcendence that serves to reinforce the Deleuzean program of absolute imma-
nence.
59 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 267.
60 Ibid., p. 289.
61 Marie de France, The Lais of Marie De France, trans. Robert W. Hanning and Joan M. Ferrante,
first edition (Grand Rapids, MI.: Baker Academic, 1995).
62 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester and C. Stivale (London: Athlone Press,
1990), p. 310.
64 Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert; Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century
(New York, NY: New Directions, 1961), p. 50.
65 “Fire Watch: July 4, 1952,” in Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (New York, NY: Harvest
Books, 1981), p. 108.
66 Ibid., p. 350.
67 Ibid., p. 353.
68 Ibid., p. 112.
69 Ibid., p. 355–356.
70 Ibid. p. 359.
71 Ibid., p. 361.
72 Ibid.
73 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 41.
74 Merton, “Fire Watch: July 4, 1952,” pp. 361–362.
© 2008 The Author


No Werewolves in Theology? Final

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Modern Theology 25:1 January 2009

ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

JACOB HOLSINGER SHERMAN

The world is deep: deeper than day can comprehend. . . .

Jacob Holsinger Sherman

© 2008 The Author

weigh it in light of Deleuze’s own writings, including Deleuze and Guattari’s

when Deleuze is at his most materialist he is also least revolutionary, even

way that Deleuze establishes a relationship of nonreciprocal dependence

virtual and actual as coexistent termini on a unified continuum, both ends of

not a result of Deleuze’s theophanic and contemplative interests, but rather

It is a composition of speeds and affects involving entirely different

transcendence can and sometimes does open our language to otherwise

human.”50 This daring embrace of becoming at its most extreme continued

Deleuze and Guattari admit that every molecular becoming is tied to a

wholly immanent divine force of creativity, is at war with itself, trapped in an

July 4, 1952: Fire-Watch

contemplative silence; and, according as I am able, I strive to cleanse my

We have been considering the themes of becoming, theophany, re-

As Merton’s journey moves upwards towards the monastery tower, his

and to sustain these openings without aporia. Merton’s counternarrative

© 2008 The Author

© 2008 The Author

© 2008 The Author

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