Connolly at 80

That there is room in this conversation for a theologian testifies to the generocity of William Connolly's "deep pluralism." It is, as with certain trees much older than 80, a depth of immense width. At this depth the binary of root and rhizome, of depth and surface, disintegrates. The depth, however vertiginous, does not come down to verticality. It does suggest mystery, both as epistemic incertitude and ontological indeterminacy. It echoes James's pluralism, yet is preoccupied not with religious plurality but with the plurality, indeed the pli of multiplicities—the foldings, the interstitial relations of difference, that at once complicate identity and implicate democracy in urgent self-examination.

The difference between his own nontheism and various theisms does however test and exemplify his "ethos of engagement."¹ It expresses what he has called an "Augustinian artistry of the self."² His critique of Augustine's amor dei, as it funded a unifying ortho-hierarchy of world-transcendent obedience, does not cancel his appreciation for how that love of God inspired an art of self-cultivation. When his Augustinian art manifests in Why I am Not a Secularist it melds with a Nietzschean "spiritualization of enmity" without which an "ethos of engagement" lacks vibrancy.³ In other words Connolly takes from his explicitly Augustinian practice "not obedience,…[but] the cultivation of political virtues such as critical responsiveness [and] agonistic respect…"⁴ Connolly's spiritually charged figure of the seer brings alternative modes of perception to bear upon a political situation that also requires the fortitude that modes of "self-cultivation," like ancient contemplative practices, foster.⁵ So this artistry lends historical depth to Connolly's wide cultivation of "lines of connection across difference."⁶ All of his writings perform that art without cleansing it of religious residues. His depth of breadth sources his agonistic respect toward theology itself. Wendy Brown is right that Connolly's nontheism is theological.⁷ Unlike me, she doesn't mean it as a compliment.

I am however repressing my temptation to shriek—why would self-cultivation/ethos matter, now? As we warm unbecomingly toward ecosocial doom? But theologians must avoid apocalyptic rants. So I probe instead the fold between Connolly's political philosophy and a certain theology, hoping to strengthen the chance of what he means by a multifacted and more social democracy. I suspect no...