SIX

OCEANIC EXTINCTIONS AND THE DREAD OF THE DEEP

KATE RIGBY

CURRENT EVOLUTIONARY THEORY TRACES THE remarkable emergence of life on this planet around 4.4 billion years ago to the primeval waters that began to pool on Earth’s surface some five hundred years previously. While many mythic traditions have revered Mother Earth deities, with Christian writers of the Middle Ages still deploying the metaphor of Terra Mater, it seems that we living beings actually owe our existence to the watery deep, our ancient Aqua Mater. Recalling this renders especially appalling the multiple threats to marine life that are now coming to light, including industrial overfishing, plastics pollution, agricultural effluent, overheating, and acidification: the depletion of the oceans and the escalation of marine extinctions are turning Earth’s ancient womb into an expanding death zone. Yet many of these adverse impacts have been escalating for some time, largely unseen—or at least unheeded—in a realm far from the lifeworld of landlubbing humans. While the movement to protect charismatic marine mammals and the efforts to safeguard commercial fisheries chalked up some early successes for conservation, it is only recently that the scale of problems threatening marine life has been brought to wider attention, not least through the prophetic witness of David Attenborough’s spectacularly successful 2017 television series, Blue Planet II. In the catastrophic horizon of an unfolding oceanic ecocide, then, this essay considers theological, scientific, and poetic resources for reimagining human relations with endangered marine others. For Christians specifically, I argue, responding to the cry of the oceans, in collaboration with those of other faiths and none, entails revisiting the theology of creation, affirming our creaturely kinship with beyond-human others, and considering what it might mean to practice neighborly love toward fellow creatures, whose mode, time, and space of existence are so radically different from our own.

THE VIEW FROM BATH: HEALING WATERS, WOUNDED SEAS

In approaching the question of religion and extinction with respect to oceanic ecologies, I am mindful that I currently live and work near a town that owes its fame, indeed its very existence, to a once-sacred spring. Over a million liters of steaming mineral-rich water still surge up daily from some four kilometers below the city of Bath. Prior to the Roman invasion of Britain, the Celtic deity who was honored at this site was called Sulis—a name that tropes the spring as Earth’s eye, an aperture where the land’s hidden depths rise up to meet its sunlit surface (súli in Old Irish means “eye” or “gap” and is possibly derived from the proto-Celtic sūli, “sky”), and a hint, perhaps, that Sulis, presiding over the interface between worlds at this place, possessed powers of wisdom (insight) and prophecy (foresight).¹

As was their wont, the Roman colonists assimilated this local deity to their own more urbane goddess Minerva, whose name had itself been swiped from the Etruscans and whose identity was modeled on that of the Greek Athena: a goddess of weaving and other crafts, music and poetry, wisdom and medicine, as well as commerce and military strategy. Whereas Sulis’s life-giving waters nurtured an exclusively agrarian world, Sulis Minerva drew the sacred spring she presided over into the cultural, commercial, and military flows of an urbanizing empire. Between 60 CE, when work began on her temple, and the collapse of Roman rule at the beginning of the fifth century, the spring waters were channeled into a bathing complex for the benefit of a Romano-Celtic elite, who took to tossing clay tablets bearing curses against those who had wronged them into one of the pools in hopes that Sulis Minerva would punish the offending parties. During the Christian Middle Ages, the curative qualities of the spring waters continued to be valued, notwithstanding the expulsion of the pagan deities with which they had formerly been associated. Subsequently, in the eighteenth century, the Roman baths rose to renewed fame as a locus of urbane sociality and hoped-for healing for the beneficiaries of a new imperial regime—one that, with the arrival of the First Fleet bearing convicts and their captors in Botany Bay in 1788, extended even to the remotest ends of the inhabited Earth.

Today, visitors to the spring, which has been reframed as a museum site, are swiftly warned off if they dare to put so much as a finger into the waters for fear of imbibing harmful bacteria: these formerly healing waters, it is said, can make you seriously sick. You can nonetheless take a sip from a throwaway paper cup bearing metallic-tasting water from a tap proffering a suitably sterilized specimen. Largely (but, as we will see, not wholly) stripped of all sacred significance, Sulis’s waters are now entering a very different world from the one they left behind when, falling as rain on the Mendip Hills some ten thousand years ago, they began their long sojourn below ground. Today, the waters that started their cycle early on in the Holocene are burbling back up into a profoundly anthropogenic world, overrun by the calamitous impacts of accelerating and still largely fossil-fueled industrialization. Today, it is the ocean into which they will eventually flow that is itself in need of healing.

The River Avon (from the Celtic afon, simply meaning “river”), into which the Roman drain still channels the spring waters once they leave the bathing complex, has long since been transformed from a series of braided streams, ebbing and flowing with the tides, pooling in ponds and swamps, into a navigable waterway. Its passage down to the sea, via a diversion leading to the Bristol harbor, is no longer guided into cleansing and modulating wetlands by industrious beavers but is instead interrupted by a series of weirs and locks engineered to prevent the river from spilling over into its ancient floodplains (not least those onto which the city of Bath now sprawls).² With the relocation of much manufacturing overseas, to countries with lower labor costs and environmental safeguards, the Avon is probably less polluted by industrial effluent than it was previously. But the runoff from the surrounding farmland is laden with excess nutrients and laced with toxic chemicals, and significant quantities of nonbiodegradable rubbish also end up in its waters. Like other rivers in the United Kingdom, the lifeworld of the Avon is afforded some protection, notably as one of the European Union’s Special Areas of Conservation, on account of several endangered species for which it provides habitat—the whorl snail, the sea lamprey and brook lamprey, the Atlantic salmon, and a fish known as the bullhead.³ Yet such local safeguards appear woefully insufficient when you recall that the waters of this river, like those of all Earth’s seabound waterways, are heading into an abysmal oceanic “world of wounds.”⁴

These wounds, inflicted with ever-greater intensity during the period of the Great Acceleration of global industrialization from the war-torn midpoint of the last century, are increasingly manifest in the lives of all sea creatures, from the greatest to the smallest. With respect to the former, while the heyday of whaling might lie in the past, many cetaceans, including some whose numbers have been recovering, are facing new threats. Six out of the thirteen great whale species are currently classified as endangered.⁵ The conservation status of many other marine mammal species is uncertain, and where there are clear signs of trouble, the causes are not fully understood. Between January and May of 2019, for example, thirty-one emaciated Pacific gray whales were found dead along the West Coast of North America between Baja California and Puget Sound. Dozens more seen making their way south to their summer breeding grounds were also clearly malnourished. While the cause of their plight remains uncertain, climate change appears to be a factor; the receding Arctic ice cap is forcing the whales further north to breed and feed, thereby lengthening their journey to the Baja.⁶ Some populations of orcas, too, appear to be in steep decline, but in their case, chemical toxins have been identified as the prime suspect—specifically, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), organic compounds formerly used in capacitators, oil paints, and coolants. Although PCBs have been banned in many countries and are being phased out worldwide, they persist in marine environments, interfering with orca reproduction, harming their immune systems and altering their behavior.⁷

At the other end of the scale, microscopic organisms known as phytoplankton also appear to be declining due to the warming temperature of the ocean,⁸ while the zooplankton who feed on them are threatened by increasing acidity levels arising from marine absorption of human carbon dioxide emissions, which interfere with the formation of their calcareous shells.⁹ Since their shells comprise something akin to a mobile home for these tiny creatures, their plight might be considered emblematic of the dedomiciling trajectory of the (so-called) Anthropocene—an era in which people in industrialized societies, embedded in socio-ecologically damaging systems of capitalist production and consumption, have come to make themselves at home in the world in ways that are unhousing others (both human and nonhuman), as discussed further in this volume by Stefan Skrimshire. With respect to other creatures, this epidemic of unhousing (otherwise known as habitat destruction) is a major driver of the precipitously declining abundance and diversity of free-living plants, animals, and fungi, propelling ever more species toward extinction as the interconnectivities that enable their existence unravel around them.

This unraveling is the bitter truth lurking beneath the term extinction, a word that strikes me as almost euphemistic in its bland technicality, referencing merely the disappearance of a taxonomic kind while effacing the untold suffering endured by living creatures as the conditions that enable their lifeways are fatally eroded. In addition to whatever misery we might (with difficulty) imagine these tiny organisms to be experiencing as their world grows ever more inhospitable, marine plankton are also crucial members of the wider oikos of Earth, forming the base of the oceanic food chain, as well as absorbing carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen—providing some 50 percent in the air we breathe—and helping to regulate the climate.¹⁰ In the interconnected living world of Earth’s oceans, moreover, a myriad of other wounds too are coming to light, manifesting in declining fish stocks, bleached coral reefs, islands of trash, dead zones, undersea blasting, oil drilling, commercial and military traffic, and the plastics that variously ensnare, are ingested, form toxin-laden microparticles, and have been found even in the deepest depths of the sea.¹¹

THE DREAD OF THE DEEP: BIBLICAL LEGACIES AND FAUSTIAN AMBITIONS

How has it come to this? As with all of the environmental—or, more accurately, socioecological—crises currently besetting our collective planetary home, the causes are complex and include an array of technoscientific, economic, political, and social factors. Underlying values, assumptions, and beliefs are also threaded through these material-discursive entanglements, and some of these have religious roots. While there is significant cultural variation in how different societies have historically construed human relations with the sea, Kimberley Patton has uncovered a widespread tendency, traceable across diverse religious traditions, to view oceans as “infinite and supremely cathartic, diluting and carrying off what is ritually impure in human religious systems and thus dangerous to human wellbeing.”¹² This transcultural tendency has an experiential foundation in the perception of the vastness and constancy of the oceanic world, its perpetual motion and propensity for carrying things away, together with the cleansing and preserving qualities of salt. Yet, in Patton’s analysis, the resulting sense of the unassailability of the sea and its infinite capacity to absorb all the contaminants we might cast upon its purifying waters has contributed to its treatment as a dumping ground, hindering our recognition of the finitude and fragility of oceanic ecologies.

While the narratives that Patton focuses on come from ancient Greek, Inuit, and Hindi religious traditions, she observes that the paradigm of the cathartic ocean also appears in the Hebrew Bible—for example, at the end of the book of Micah, where the prophet affirms his faith in a merciful God, who “will cast all our sins/into the depths of the sea” (Mic. 7:18–19). In fact, as Meric Srokosz and Rebecca Watson demonstrate in Blue Planet, Blue God, the sea appears in an array of different guises in the Bible: as a participant in the burgeoning of both aquatic and bird life on the fifth day of creation in Genesis 1 and as a vehicle for trade and imperial expansion; vast, yet potentially also vulnerable; sacred, yet sometimes also reviled.¹³ It is the latter view, arising from the association of the ocean with all that is chaotic, uncontained, and unconstrainable, that has been brought into focus by Catherine Keller in her diagnosis within Christianity of a certain dread and loathing of the watery deep that she dubs tehomophobia (from tehom in the Hebrew of Gen. 1). In her analysis, this dread of the deep lurks within the doctrine of God’s creation of the world out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo), as it rose to theological orthodoxy from the second century CE, in association with ideas of divine omnipotence and the hierarchical (and highly gendered) spirit-matter dualism of Greco-Roman ontology. Keller argues that this doctrine occluded the possibility afforded by the biblical creation narrative of recognizing divine creative agency as always already cocreativity, actualizing the generative potential of that mysterious something characterized in Genesis 1:1 as a chaotic watery abyss. Over time, the theological model of solitary sovereign creation out of nothing became aligned with the privileging of permanence over transience, stasis over flux, terra firma over aqua mater and the imposition of order from without as opposed to working with the given, in ways that often also worked to subtly endorse social relations of domination, notably along gendered, classist, racist, and heterosexist lines.¹⁴

As Keller acknowledges, the narrative of creatio ex nihilo, which also informed both Jewish and Islamic thought, can nonetheless be told in different ways and to varied political ends, including emancipatory and ecological ones.¹⁵ As Janet Soskice has shown, this doctrine, far from being an Hellenic import, can be traced back to far earlier Jewish texts, including some of the Psalms and the passages in Isaiah, the deuterocanonical books of Judith, and 1 and 2 Maccabees.¹⁶ In her analysis, it enabled the early Church Fathers of late Antiquity, including Athanasius, the Cappadocians, John Damascene, and Augustine, to “slip the chain” of the “destructive dualism prevalent in late antiquity where matter was bad and spirit was good.”¹⁷ It does not “close the border” between Creator and creation, in her analysis, for the God who lovingly summons all things into being was also understood to be “always already there—nearer and more intimate to us than our own breath.”¹⁸

It is not my purpose to enter the theological fray on this question. What concerns me here is the toxic cultural legacy of the unquestionably mixed messages regarding the briny deep that derive from biblical texts and traditions. At the same time, though, I think it is worth revisiting this ambivalent religious inheritance in search of potential sources of inspiration for Jewish, Christian, and interfaith practices of tehomophilic oceanic restoration in the perilous present as part of a wider movement to counter the growing extinction crisis.

My way into this discussion is not as a theologian or church historian but rather as an ecocritical scholar of literature and religion within the wider field of the environmental humanities, with particular expertise in European Romanticism. The cultural ferment of the decades around 1800, above all in Britain and the German region, erupted alongside, and in many ways in response to, the onset of that fossil-fueled process of industrialization, in conjunction with a new phase of colonial conquest, that has now delivered Earth into the era of the Anthropocene.¹⁹ Germanists refer to this period as the “time of Goethe” (Goethezeit), and it is to the prophetic witness of Wilhelm von Goethe’s remarkable two-part drama Faust that I now turn. In his Romantic rewriting of the Renaissance legend of Faust as a paradigmatic modern tragedy, the German author and polymath discloses the subterranean tehomophobia underlying the modern project of the technocratic mastery of nature in the historical course of what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would later diagnose as the “dialectic of enlightenment.”²⁰ Unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, however, he also charts an expressly tehomophilic alternative that opens the prospect of renewed collective flourishing.

Unlike his legendary and literary predecessors, Goethe’s Faust does not seek wealth, fame, and power but aspires rather to a perpetual process of self-realization powered by a sense of permanent dissatisfaction with the present. Accordingly, his bargain with Mephistopheles entails this pledge: “If ever to the moment I shall say: / Beautiful moment, do not pass away! / Then you may forge your chains to bind me, / Then I will put my life behind me” (I, sc. 7, 1699–1702).²¹

In Part One, it is the pretty village girl, Gretchen, who pays the price for Faust’s classically modernist project of ceaseless self-development.²² Having been left to deal with an illegitimate pregnancy alone, she is driven to the desperate solution of infanticide (not insignificantly, in view of Faust’s later hostility toward the sea, by drowning) and dies in prison awaiting execution. Scandalously, the play ends with her redemption by an unconventional deus ex machina, a God of forgiveness rather than punishment who mercifully foils Mephistopheles’s bid to claim Gretchen’s soul. Having recovered from his feelings of grief and guilt about the death of Gretchen, the Faust of Part Two, the much later sequel to Part One, sets his sights on a higher quest, namely for the love of the legendary epitome of female beauty, Helen of Troy. In the play’s third act, the union between Helen and Faust is eventually achieved, and they have a child, Euphorion. When their son, Ikarus-like, flies too close to the sun and falls to his death, however, Helen too returns to the Underworld. Distraught by their loss, Faust externalizes his urge for self-transformation into a quest to remake the world around him, eliminating in the process all traces of the premodern oikos, to which his first love, Gretchen, had belonged, and setting his sights on the mastery of the briny deep.

Act Four opens with a now aging and embittered Faust looking out upon the “high sea”:

It surged and swelled, mounted up more and more,

Then checked, and spilt its waves tempestuously,

Venting its rage upon the flat, wide shore

And this displeased me

[. . .]

Landward it streams, and countless inlets fill;

Barren itself, it spreads its barren will;

It swells and swirls, its rolling waves expand

Over the dreary waste of dismal sand;

Breaker on breaker, all their power upheaved

And then withdrawn, and not a thing achieved!

I watch dismayed, almost despairingly,

This useless elemental energy!

And so my spirit dares new wings to span:

This I would fight, and conquer if I can.

(IV, sc. 14, 10198–10202; 10212–10221)²³

Here, the ocean confronts Earth’s self-proclaimed sovereign subject, in whom the religious inheritance of God-given dominion has been secularized into an anthropocentric aspiration to technocratic domination, as a primeval chaos monster that must be brought to heel.

Assuming an agro-industrial standard of productivity, moreover, Faust disregards the other-than-human life that flourishes in the liminal zone of the shoreline and reviles the coastal wetlands in terms that had long since become embedded in Western culture, namely as irksomely abject.²⁴ Determined to defy the waves by reclaiming the littoral zone for his own purposes, Faust also blinds himself to the cost entailed in the Mephistophelian realization of his new project to “ban the lordly sea” and “curb its force” (10229). In the dialogue between a shipwrecked Wanderer and his kind hosts, the shore-dwelling Philemon and Baucis, which opens act 5, it becomes apparent that this cost was borne not only by the more-than-human life of these coastal wetlands but also by those forced to perform the labor of turning them into a “garden” (V, sc. 17, 11085): “All night long we heard the cries / A canal was built by morning” (11129–11130). Behind the diabolical means that created what is, for Faust, a “paradisal scene” (11086) stand the historical realities of land reclamation and commodification at home, along with slavery and colonial conquest abroad—the “undivided trinity / Of war and trade and piracy” applauded by Mephistopheles as Faust’s ships return to harbor laden with plunder from overseas (11187–11189).

Faust is dismayed when he learns that his appropriation of Philemon’s and Baucis’s dwelling place in order to create a viewing platform to admire his achievements cost them their lives. He nonetheless remains committed to his Promethean project, to which he now gives a utopian spin: Goethe’s tragic hero dies dreaming of an expanded living space, created through his ambitious dyke, dam, and drainage scheme, for a manly breed of battlers against the elements. Scandalously, Mephistopheles fails to make off with his soul, having been lustfully distracted by the alluring boy angels, whose ministry helps to facilitate Faust’s unorthodox redemption. This is not granted by the conventionally masculine deity of the Prologue in Heaven at the start of Faust, Part One, who agrees with Mephistopheles that the titular hero should be tempted, Job-like, to betray his soul to the devil. Rather, it is effected by the force of cosmic love, transcending the dualism of Eros and Agape, desire and compassion, which is personified in the closing words of the drama as “eternal Womanhood” (V, sc. 23, 12110). Meanwhile, in keeping with his self-designation in Part One as the “spirit of perpetual negation” (V, sc. 6, 1338), Mephistopheles has already foreshadowed the eventual ruination of Faust’s earthly endeavors:

And yet it’s us you’re working for

With all your foolish dams and dikes;

Neptune, the water-devil, likes

To think of the great feast there’ll be

When they collapse.

(V, sc. 21, 11544–11548).

According to one reading, Faust’s hastily built canals are already collapsing, a phenomenon that was well known to Goethe and referred to at the time as “hydrological terrorism.”²⁵ If so, the ending is profoundly ironic, as the “putrid puddle” (V, sc. 21, 11559–11560) that the dying Faust is set on draining is not a remnant of the original coastal wetlands but an unintended consequence of his attempted mastery of this aqueous terrain. Reread in the era of rising sea levels driven by anthropogenic planetary heating, the irony of Mephistopheles’s chilling prediction only deepens.

The figure of Faust might have emancipated himself from the doctrines of the church; yet his tehomophobia bears the trace of a biblical inheritance, which, as Goethe shows, remains an undercurrent within modernity. In Psalm 74, for example, the hope for divine deliverance is tied to a recollection of YHWH’s sovereignty over the ocean: “You divided the sea by your might;

You broke the heads of the dragons in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan” (Ps. 74:13–14).²⁶ The anti-imperialist author of Revelation, otherwise known as the Apocalypse of St. John, goes one step further, imaging the longed-for coming of the Kingdom of God in terms of a “new earth” in which “the sea was no more” (Rev. 21:1).²⁷

Not unlike the contrasting paradigm of the cathartic ocean, fear and loathing of the briny deep also have an experiential dimension. For all who breathe air, even a small quantity of water, relative to their size, carries the risk of drowning, and seas are not always placid neighbors. In conjunction with other elements, such as cyclonic storms or submarine earthquakes, oceans can wreak death and destruction on a massive scale. It was perhaps the story of one such extreme event, passed down through oral tradition from generation to generation, that informed the world flood narrative that found its way into the Bible. Framed as an act of redemptive violence in which “all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened” (Gen. 7:11), this great flood can also be seen to conform to the paradigm of the cathartic ocean in that it ends up enabling a new beginning under a new covenant—one that is made not only with humans but with “every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth” (Gen. 9:16).

As Keller observes, however, within the polylogical and polydoxical weave of biblical writing, it is possible to discern an ocean-loving, or tehomophilic, view of the briny deep, beginning, not least, with Genesis 1. In the version of the Hebrew creation narrative with which the Bible opens, in the beginning was not the Word, as Christians read at the start of John’s Gospel—that only came later—but the waters; and the waters were tehom (deeps). Here it is in Keller’s translation, with key Hebrew terms left in the original: ‘When in the beginning Elohim created heaven and earth, the earth was tohu va bohu, darkness was on the face of tehom, and the ruach elohim vibrating on the face of the waters.”²⁸

Now, this first creation narrative was actually composed far later than the more conventionally mythic account of Adam and Eve that follows in Genesis 2, which imagines a solitary deity, YHWH, rather than the divine plurality, or heavenly collective, referenced in the plural term Elohim, pottering about in a primeval garden, fashioning the first human out of clay. This tale, almost certainly derived from oral traditions of unknown antiquity, has been dated by biblical scholars to the ninth or possibly even tenth century BCE, although this dating is by no means universally accepted. What is known with more confidence is that the poetically highly wrought text of Genesis 1 was composed considerably more recently, namely following the conquest of the Kingdom of Judah by the Babylonian empire in the sixth century BCE, and probably penned by a group of Jewish priests who were, or had been, held captive in Babylon.

Composed in the shadow of exile, this text can be seen to effect a subtly subversive form of decolonization in its transformative appropriation of the Babylonians’ own creation myth—for the tehom of the Hebrew text (a feminine noun that, in the absence of a definite article, functions like a proper noun) is a cognate of the Akkadian tamtu and Ugaritic t-h-m, both related to the earlier Sumerian Tiamat, and this was the name given to the great mother of all the younger gods in Babylonian polytheism. A deity of the briny deep, ambivalently linked with both cosmogenesis and primordial chaos, Tiamat ghosts the Hebrew tohu va bohu.²⁹ In the Sumerian creation narrative, she is murdered by her own grandson, the warrior god Marduk, who fashions the separated spheres of sky and earth out of her dismembered body. Countering this distinctly misogynistic Bronze Age vision of creation through conquest, the Priestly authors of Genesis 1 instead imagine a magisterial—but nonetheless emphatically nonviolent—summoning forth from out of the formless (tohu va bohu) matter/mater of the abyssal tehom, of distinct entities and diverse kinds, by means of the divine “breath” or “spirit.” The Hebrew ruach was itself understood as something earthily material, for biblical Hebrew is innocent of the Greek matter-spirit dualism that infected Christian theology, as well as Hellenized Jewish thought, from at least the second century CE. Initially figured as “vibrating on the face of the waters,” this divine breath then lends itself to that famous sequence of performative speech acts through which the created order is invited into being and becoming: “Then Elohim said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And Elohim saw that the light was good; and Elohim separated the light from the darkness. Elohim called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day” (Gen. 1:3–5).

And following day and night, there was sky and sea, then sea and land; and on the land, and in the sea, and winging through the skies, multitudes of living beings were “let be,” and all were invited to multiply and fill their respective realms; and finally, there were human beings also, made “in the image” of the transgender divine collective—that is to say, made to be in communion with the Creator/Creatrix, as was Elohim with the abyssal aqua mater, and thereby called to the service of ongoing creation in the role of regents:

So Elohim created humankind in His image,

in the image of Elohim He created them;

male and female He created them.

Elohim blessed them, and Elohim said to them,

Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it;

and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air

and over every living thing that moves upon the earth

(Gen. 1:27–28)

The decolonizing impetus of this radical recasting of the tale of Tiamat and Marduk continues in the Priestly authors’ construction of every single man and woman as “made in the image” of God, for according to the politico-religious orthodoxy of their imperial overlords, only kings could be construed as gods. And yet, as has frequently been remarked, this passage, as it was inherited within Christianity, nonetheless laid the groundwork for another colonial venture: namely, the colonization of Earth and its diverse other-than-human denizens, along with peoples of many places with differing ontologies and spiritualities, by the dominant classes of those Western nations who mistook the Bible to authorize their hegemonic rule. First composed from a place of radical disempowerment, the vision of human dominion within creation began to be widely interpreted with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century as licensing a project of human domination over nature in the Christian West. In the context of the growth of mercantile capitalism and colonial expansion, creation, traditionally understood as inherently good, albeit tarnished by the Fall, gets recast as Nature, conceived as so much mindless matter, a storehouse of resources for exclusively human benefit.³⁰

Other biblical passages nonetheless not only reaffirm the originary and abiding goodness of the oceanic lifeworld summoned forth out of the primal waters, they also acknowledge the limits of human comprehension and control. One such passage surfaces, for example, in Psalm 104, in which praise for creation encompasses delight in the sporting of the archetypal chaos monster of the briny depths:

O YHWH, how manifold are your works!

In wisdom you have made them all:

the earth is full of your creatures.

Yonder is the sea, great and wide.

Creeping things innumerable are there

living things both small and great.

There go the ships,

and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.

(Ps. 104:24–26).

This reaffirmation of the manifest goodness of the multiplicitous creatures of the deep, as announced in Genesis 1:21, recurs in another book belonging to the ensemble of writings scattered through the Hebrew Bible known as the Wisdom tradition. In the book of Job, commonly dated to between the seventh and second century BCE, the divine voice that erupts from the whirlwind rebukes the beleaguered titular hero for his all-too-human assumption that the world was ordered for his benefit and that his virtue would inevitably be rewarded with good fortune. This voice exhorts Job to look up from his merely personal woes, grievous and undeserved as they were, in order to behold the vastly more-than-human world that bore everywhere the trace of its ever-attentive Creator. This is disclosed as a world in which myriad wild creatures—the lion and the raven, mountain goat and deer, wild ass and oxen, ostrich and eagle—were busy going about their own lives, facing their own challenges, independently from human interests and oversight (Job 38:39–39:18); a world where even domesticated animals, such as the undaunted horse, retain their own agency and seek their own satisfaction (39:19–25); a world in which the Lord causes it to rain in the “desert, which is empty of human life” (38:26), extending provision to all creatures equally and taking particular delight in those that elude human control—the Behemoth, hailed as “the first of the great acts of God” (Job 40:19), and the Leviathan, whose breaching and crashing cause even the gods to take fright (Job 41:25):

Will it make a covenant with you to be taken as your servant forever?

Will you play with it as with a bird,

or will you put it on leash for your girls?

Will traders bargain over it?

Will they divide it up among the merchants?

Can you fill its skin with harpoons . . .?

(Job 41:4–7)

It makes the deep boil like a pot;

it makes the sea like a pot of ointment.

It leaves a shining wake behind it;

one would think the deep to be white-haired.

On earth it has no equal,

a creature without fear.

It surveys everything that is lofty;

it is king over all that are proud.

(Job 42:31–34)

While acknowledging the potential, indeed propensity, for dominological readings of Job as ultimately affirming divine omnipotence, Keller counters by noting that the biblical “chaos monster does not seek vengeance but respect for its domain.”³¹ She concludes that, not unlike the author of Moby Dick in far more recent times, the “windy vortex mocks the powers of global commercialization; it puts into question the assumption of the exploitability of the wild life of the world—the ‘subdue and have dominion’ project.” Yet, as Keller ruefully observes, the author of Job “could not have imagined the current human capacity to annihilate the whales altogether, or to turn the sea into a sewer.”

GOING WITH THE FLOW: CREATIO EX PROFUNDIS AND OCEANIC COBECOMING

Against the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, Keller advances a theology of nova creatio ex profundis. This is a theology of continuous cocreation “from the deep,” in which Elohim figures as a “strange attractor,” luring “self-organizing systems out of the fluctuating possibilities,”³² delighting in their self-actualization, sorrowing in their stymieing, and calling those made in the divine image to act creatively, compassionately, and justly to help sustain the potential for continued cobecoming: “The nova creatio ex profundis requires our entire participation. In the beginning: a plurisingularity of universe, earth echoing chaos, dark deep vibrating with spirit, creates.”³³

Keller’s theology of continuous cocreation is informed by contemporary science (especially the science of complex dissipative systems, popularized as chaos theory), poststructuralist thought, and a range of nonmainstream theologies (including older traditions of the via negativa, or “negative theology,” which foregrounds the ungraspability of the divine, as well as current liberation, feminist, ecological, queer, and African American theologies). As a variant of process theology, it is premised on the “intuition that the universe itself is not most fundamentally a static being or the product of a static Being—but an immeasurable becoming. . . . The God of a universe in process may in powerful ways turn out to be a God in process: that is, in open-ended interactivity with each of the gazillions of us creatures.”³⁴ While the death of individuals and the extinction of species are inherent to this process, human actions that precipitate the unraveling of those connectivities that make biodiverse life on this planet a going concern surely contradict our calling to be, and become, “in the image” of the Creator. This theology of continuous cocreation is indebted to the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, crucial precursors of which can be found in those Romantic-era natural philosophies of interactive, evolutionary cobecoming that find poetic form in Goethe’s Faust.³⁵

From the perspective of modern evolutionary theory, the tehom of process theology, the metaphysical matrix of potentiality out of which the actual is forever being drawn into being—or rather, cobecoming—finds a material counterpart in Earth’s ancient oceans. The premise of oceanic origins of life is also prefigured in Faust, Part Two. Here, Goethe signals the dubiousness of his tragic hero’s tehomophobic project in a quirkily humorous yet philosophically profound subplot, which gets played out in the “Classical Walpurgis Night” scene of act 2. Across the Germanic cultures of Northern Europe, Walpurgis Night is celebrated on May 30, on the eve of the saint’s day of the eighth-century Abbess Walpurga, famed for providing protection against witchcraft, but traditionally associated with the annual gathering of witches on the Brocken in the Harz Mountains: the Hexennacht. While a folkloric Hexennacht on the Brocken features in Faust, Part One, the Classical Walpurgis Night of Part Two draws back the veil on an Ancient Greek Underworld. Here, Goethe stages a debate between two of the earliest philosophers in the Western tradition regarding the formation of the Earth. While Anaxagoris (c. 500–428 BCE) celebrates the fiery volcanic forces that had raised the mountains, his pre-Socratic predecessor Thales (c. 624–545 BCE) professes a preference for the creative element of water: “In moisture all that lives originated” (II, sc. 10, 7856). This debate is interrupted when Mephistopheles appears with a half-formed test-tube baby, the fruit of a failed alchemical experiment by Faust’s former student, Wagner, who holds the oldfangled sexual process of reproduction to be beneath human dignity. Thales proceeds to put his theory to the test by consulting the sea-god Nereus as to how Wagner’s disembodied brainchild might acquire a corporeal existence. Nereus duly instructs him to take the hermaphroditic Homunculus, who appears only as a pulsing light, to Proteus. Manifesting intermittently as a dolphin—with some coaxing from Thales, who is not keen on talking to an entity that he cannot locate—Proteus declares that the Homunculus must be entrusted to the creative agency of the ocean if he wishes to become a man (while remarking misanthropically that things would be all downhill from there). Thales, giving a proto-evolutionary spin to Proteus’s words, accordingly exhorts Homunculus to “seek the beginnings of creation” in the watery deep, in order to “move onward by eternal norms / Through many thousand thousand forms / And reach at last the human state” (II, sc. 10, 8322–8326).

For Goethe’s Thales, then, if not for today’s genetic engineers, including those critiqued by Lisa Sideris in this volume, for whom the answer to biodiversity loss is the techno-fix of de-extinction, there was no bypassing the generative processes of life and death that originated in, and were sustained by, Earth’s life-giving oceans:

In water all things began to thrive!

By water all things are kept alive!

Grant us your bounty for ever, great ocean:

Send us clouds, for if you did not,

Abundant streams, for if you did not,

And rivers in meandering motion,

And great waterways—for if you did not,

Where would the mountains, the plains, and the world be then?

By you fresh life lives and is sustained again.

(II, sc. 10, 8435–43).

Ultimately, however, it is not Thales’s wise words but the sex appeal of the sea-nymph Galatea who appears Venus-like in a seashell chariot that draws Homunculus into the waves. As s/he bursts orgasmically out of the confines of the test tube and flame and water are conjoined, the scene culminates with a chorus of Sirens singing the praises of Eros, to which “all” respond with adulation for the elements:

Hail to the mild and gentle breeze!

Hail, caverns rich with mysteries!

Fire, water, air, and air as well:

You elements all four, all hail!

(II, sc. 10, 8484–8487).

In the wake of Charles Darwin’s postulate of “natural selection” as the primary driver of adaptation and speciation (albeit now qualified by recent findings in the field of epigenetics), most modern evolutionary biologists would doubtless reject Goethe’s talk of “eternal norms” as smacking of natural theology. There is nonetheless general agreement today that Earth’s first living cells did indeed emerge in the ocean, as Thales had postulated and as the early evolutionary thinkers of the Romantic period, Goethe among them, concurred. Among them was Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who set his version of this theory to verse in his Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society of 1803 (a work that is inclined to make one glad that scientists generally no longer try to share their findings in poetic form):

Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves

Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves;

First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,

Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;

These, as successive generations bloom,

New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;

Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,

And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.³⁶

While the natural philosophers of the Romantic period thought they had found material evidence for Thales’s postulate in the microscopic organisms that they mistakenly held to form spontaneously in standing water, the idea that life originated in the sea has considerably more ancient antecedents in the mythic creation stories of many cultures. These include the “earth diver” narratives of several Native American, Central Asian, and Finno-Urgic peoples, in which a divine being generally sends an animal of some kind into the primeval waters to find mud or sand with which to form dry land, thereby rendering Earth habitable for the emergence of terrestrial lifeforms.³⁷ In the biblical six days of creation, plant life and terrestrial animals are said to have burgeoned forth directly from the Earth in response to the divine summons. Yet here, too, the primeval seas come to cooperate with the Creator in birthing creatures of both air and water.

Although the mysteries of biogenesis have not yet been fully revealed (with seeding from the aerial depths of outer space remaining in contention), the scenario that is currently favored by evolutionary biologists gives a leading role to those thermal vents through which elements from the hot, steamy, and seething tohu va bohu beneath Earth’s crust come into contact with salty waters, creating a warm, mineral-rich soup in which that as-yet-mysterious chemical reaction appears to have occurred, producing the building blocks of life. Yet contemporary science suggests that the sea not only birthed those first “forms minute unseen by spheric glass” (which is to say, long, long before the late appearance of humankind and the even more recent invention of microscopes); those briny deeps also created, and continue to sustain, conditions conducive to the burgeoning of terrestrial life. For it is the molecular structure of the waters covering some 71 percent of Earth’s surface that makes our precious planet warmer and more hospitable to life as we know it than it would otherwise be, given its distance from the Sun. Meanwhile, the great ocean conveyor belt, in distributing heat north and south from the equator, plays a crucial role in transporting some of the immense warmth that the seas absorb toward the poles. Without our great Aqua Mater, then, Earth would be as inhospitable as Venus or Mars, and any organisms who came into being in the ocean would have been unlikely to have taken the momentous step that brought some of them, beginning with adventurous plants in partnership with their fungal friends, onto land. Life might have started, as it almost certainly has elsewhere; but it could not have got going in the gloriously biodiverse way that it has on our predominantly blue planet.

The processes of ancient oceanic cobecoming—as of today’s rising tide of extinction—disclosed by science afford new perspectives on the earlier religious and literary texts and traditions discussed here. As I indicate in the concluding section of this essay, however, I do not believe that scientific accounts should supplant all others. For stories such as the biblical creation narrative and its refraction in Goethe’s Faustian mythos of modernity are primarily concerned with questions that go beyond the brief of science per se—questions of meaning, value, and purpose that might inform how we conceive and conduct our relations with other creatures in the perilous present.³⁸

SULIS RETURNS: HEALING THE SEAS, BEFRIENDING ALIENS

It is a peculiarly tragic irony that we should be enlarging our understanding of all that we owe to the seas, as well as witnessing some of the wonders of today’s beleaguered ocean deeps on our TV screens, by virtue of the very technoscientific advances that have also enabled biodiversity-depleting industrial whaling, overfishing, and deep sea oil extraction, with its associated oil spills and plastics plague, along with greenhouse gas–driven oceanic overheating and acidification.³⁹ The perpetuation of these destructive practices, among many other planetary assaults, is being powered by a complex of actors and factors, including socioeconomic systems and political dynamics that demand to be tackled in the context of a wider agenda of ecopolitical change, as demanded by activists involved in movements such as Extinction Rebellion, as well as by Indigenous peoples seeking to resist the industrial ravaging of their traditional lands. This project nonetheless requires a corresponding cultural shift.⁴⁰ While “theism might be dispensable for ecological thought and practices,” as Virginia Burrus posits, I share her view that “some form of piety or cultivated reverence is not.”⁴¹ In this needed transformation of cultural vision, values, and perceptions, religion and spirituality could play a key role, namely in the recovery, across and among diverse cultural traditions, of a sense of the inherent holiness of the living Earth in all of its domains, including its vast yet vulnerable oceans.

One instance of this ecoreligious insurgency is the US-based Interfaith Oceans campaign, which, as they state on their website, “encourages religious and spiritual communities to join with scientists to appreciate the gifts of the ocean systems, species, and coastal communities—and work together to protect and restore them . . . in responsibility to our Creator, the poor, our children, our brother and sister species, and future generations.”⁴² This organization originally grew out of the Jewish and Christian National Religious Coalition on Creation Care but now provides a venue for Jews and Christians to also make common ground, so to speak, with Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, Confucians, Hindus, and Indigenous faith groups in seeking to advocate and undertake faith-inspired, scientifically informed, and ecosocially transformative works of ocean care.⁴³ Among the partners of Interfaith Oceans are secular environmental advocacy organizations and research institutions, such as the Ocean Conservancy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and their website provides a wealth of both scientific and religious resources. One of the cofounders of Interfaith Oceans is Jewish scholar and environmental activist David Krantz, whose “Psalm of the Sea” (Tehillat HaYam in Hebrew) echoes Psalm 104 but in a new key, indicating that we are now called not only to marvel at the oceans’ “living things both small and great” but to actively “befriend” them:

Our fate rests with the sea:

With every breath

We breathe air from the sea.

Yet,

Listen to the sea:

It cries from overfishing—greed and gluttony.

It cries from pollution—avarice and wastefulness.

It cries from heat—carbon consumption and apathy.

May we return to days of old:

Let the sea and all within it thrive.

Befriend the plankton and the minnow,

The coral and the turtle,

The seal and the shark,

The dolphin and the whale;

Like us, they are part of Creation.

May the waves lap the shore

As a mother cradles her child.

Let the sea once again be filled with fish

As stars fill the sky.

Listen to the sea.⁴⁴

Back in Bath, meanwhile, Sulis is once again being revered, namely by contemporary pagans, for some of whom ecospiritual experience is necessarily interlinked with ecopolitical praxis, connecting the quest for personal healing from her waters with collective responsibility for healing the watery ecologies into which they flow. Thanks to the efforts of Margaret Marion Stewart, a devotee of Celtic goddess spirituality who founded the Springs Foundation in 1991, one of the three main geothermal springs in Bath, the Cross Bath, has been officially recognized as a Sacred Site as part of the Sacred Land Project. Although the water in the bathing pool is treated, the natural spring waters now rise into “a shallow circular steel bowl, bearing around its rim Ted Hughes’s description of water as ‘the ultimate life—the divine influx.’”⁴⁵

The medieval abbey that sits alongside the main Roman Baths, moreover, is also being allied with the waters of Sulis, albeit in a manner more pragmatic than spiritual, yet also ethical—namely, by means of an eco-friendly underfloor heating project encompassing both the abbey and the Baths, with the potential to be extended to other inner-city buildings. By contrast with the macho anthroparchal logic of domination driving the Faustian ambition to conquer the waves and drain the noisome swamp, this scheme embodies what socialist utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch (himself an inheritor of the Spinozan-inflected process thinking advanced by the likes of Goethe) termed a technology of “alliance” rather than “violation,” entailing a creative collaboration with the tehomic energies manifest in the unstoppable upwelling of water from the earthen depths.⁴⁶ This project is part of a commitment on the part of the Church of England to shrink its carbon footprint to net zero by 2030. On the abbey’s website, it is framed conservatively in terms of being “more responsible stewards of our planet’s resources.” In the Diocese of Bath and Wells Lenten Reflections for 2019, however, a more radical socioecological revisioning of Christian ethics made an appearance—namely, in the encouragement to consider the “neighbor” to whom we are beholden, following Luke 10:25–29, as including “our global neighbours, our future neighbours (grandchildren and beyond), and our non-human neighbours” (my italics).⁴⁷ From this perspective, to honor the gift of Sulis’s largesse by enabling her warm waters to reduce the abbey’s greenhouse gas emissions is to practice neighbor love toward all those whose lives are already, or potentially, placed at risk by climate change—and that includes those strange strangers, the oceanic microbiota, whom we are unlikely ever to encounter in the flesh and whose place and mode of becoming-with-others are unimaginably different from our own but whose future, along with that of all those, great and small, who are dependent on them, is now to a significant degree in human hands.

The voice that speaks from the tohu va bohu of the whirlwind in Job calls upon the decentered human subject to respect the independent agency and irreducible alterity of a plethora of free-living creatures, including those mighty denizens of the oceans who are presumed to be beyond human ken and control. On an anthropogenic planet, however, in an era of escalating extinctions, it seems that Christians are beginning (somewhat belatedly and still only patchily) to respond to what Pope Francis (echoing the Hebrew prophets) calls the “cry of the earth”—one that is issuing also from the deepest oceans.⁴⁸ Whether they, in consort with people of other faiths and none, will be able to respond in ways that are sufficiently transformative to disable the drivers of mass extinction remains to be seen.⁴⁹ In the process, however, they might just discover what it means to belong to a vastly more-than-human communion of creatures, rejoining the flow, however turbulent, fraught with risk, and tinged with anguish, of erotic-agapic cobecoming on this watery Earth.

KATE RIGBY is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Cologne, where she leads the research hub for Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities. Her research lies at the intersection of environmental literary, historical, philosophical, and religious studies, and her books include Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism, Dancing with Disaster: Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times, and Meditations on Creation in an Era of Extinction. She was the founding President of the Australia–New Zealand Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture, and the inaugural convenor of the Australian Forum on Religion and Ecology.

NOTES

1. Marion Bowman notes that the word sul is “usually translated as ‘gap, opening or orifice,’ the interface between this world and the underworld, whence the extraordinary hot waters emerge.” See Bowman, “Belief, Legends and Perceptions of the Sacred in Contemporary Bath,” Folklore 109 (1998): 25.

2. Many thanks to Marybeth Lorbiecki for the reminder of the importance of beavers to aquatic ecologies. See Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers, and Why They Matter (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2018). I am also grateful to Marybeth for the extensive editorial suggestions on a draft of this chapter. Any remaining errors and infelicities of expression are entirely my own.

3. UK Government, Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Special Areas of Conservation, River Avon, accessed May 14, 2019, http://jncc.defra.gov.uk/protectedsites/sacselection/sac.asp?EUCode=UK0013016.

4. The reference is to Aldo Leopold’s much-quoted observation that “one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” See Leopold, Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold, ed. Luna B. Leopold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 119. In the revised edition of her biography of Leopold, Lorbiecki extends his concept of the “land ethic” to our relations with the oceans. Lorbiecki, A Fierce Green Fire: Aldo Leopold’s Life and Legacy, 2nd ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

5. “Whale,” World Wildlife Fund, accessed May 14, 2019, https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/whale.

6. A report in Oceanography from June 2019 indicates that endangered Atlantic right whales are also being adversely affected by warming oceans in the Gulf of Maine, where ecosystem change is driving the whales to alter their foraging behavior and bringing them into waters where they are at greater risk from ship strikes and gear entanglement. Nicholas R. Record et al., “Rapid Climate-Driven Circulation Changes Threaten Conservation of Threatened Atlantic Right Whales,” Oceanography (June 2019): 163–169. In July 2020, the International Union for Conservation of Nature accordingly moved this species into the “critically endangered” category. “Almost a Third of Lemurs and North Atlantic Right Whale now Critically Endangered—IUCN Red List,” IUCN, July 9, 2020, https://www.iucn.org/news/species/202007/almost-a-third-lemurs-and-north-atlantic-right-whale-now-critically-endangered-iucn-red-list.

7. Jean-Pierre Desforges et al., “Predicting Global Killer Whale Population Collapse from PCB Pollution,” Science 361, no. 6409 (2018): 1373–1376, https://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6409/1373. All parties to the United Nations Environment Programme’s Stockholm Convention have been required to cease production of PCBs, but equipment contaminated by them can still be used up until 2025. “Overview,” Stockholm Convention, accessed December 12, 2020, http://chm.pops.int/implementation/industrialpops/pcbs/overview/tabid/273/default.aspx.

8. John A. Gittings et al., “Impacts of Warming on Phytoplankton Abundance and Phenology in a Typical Marine Ecosystem,” Scientific Reports 8, no. 2240 (2018), https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-20560-5.

9. N. Bednarsek et al., “Extensive Dissolution of Live Pterapods in the Southern Ocean,” Nature Geoscience 5 (2012): 881–885, https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1635. I was first alerted to the hidden plight of Earth’s zooplankton through an article by ecophilosopher Freya Mathews highlighting the problem of what counts as newsworthy: “When the Media Won’t Report the Environment, It’s Time to Rethink the News,” The Conversation, August 19, 2012, https://theconversation.com/when-the-media-wont-report-the-environment-its-time-to-rethink-news-8862.

10. John Roach, “Source of Half the World’s Oxygen Gets Little Credit,” National Geographic June 7, 2004, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/6/source-of-half-earth-s-oxygen-gets-little-credit/.

11. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Global Assessment report released in May 2019 estimates that one-third of fish species are overexploited by industrial fishing, which now takes place in over half of the Earth’s oceans; plastic waste affects 86 percent of marine turtles, 44 percent of seabirds, and 43 percent of marine mammals; and there are some four hundred “dead zones” caused by fertilizer runoff, affecting an area the size of the United Kingdom. Sandra Díaz et al., “Summary for Policymakers of the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services,” IPBES (May 2019), accessed May 21, 2019, https://www.ipbes.net/news/ipbes-global-assessment-summary-policymakers-pdf. The discovery of microplastics in the Mariana Trench was reported in December 2018: Damian Carrington, “Plastic Pollution Discovered at Deepest Point of Ocean,” The Guardian, December 20, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/20/plastic-pollution-mariana-trench-deepest-point-ocean?.

12. Kimberley Patton, The Sea Can Wash Away All Evils: Modern Marine Pollution and the Ancient Cathartic Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 9.

13. Meric Skrokosz and Rebecca S. Watson, Blue Planet, Blue God: The Bible and the Sea (London: SCM, 2017).

14. Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003). On the historical emergence of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, see 43–64.

15. Keller, Face of the Deep, 17–24.

16. For example, Janet Soskice cites Judith 16:14: “Let all your creatures serve you / for you spoke, and they were made.” Soskice, “Why Creatio ex nihilo Today?,” in Creation ex nihilo: Origin, Development, Contemporary Challenges, ed. Gary Anderson and Marcus Bockmuehl (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 48.

17. Soskice, “Why Creatio ex nihilo Today?,” 49. See also Soskice, “Creation and the Glory of Creatures,” in Being-in-Creation: Human Responsibility in an Endangered World, eds. Brian Treanor, Bruce Ellis Benson, and Norman Wirzba, 143–158 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). In her more speculative exploration of “ancient Christian ecopoetics,” Virginia Burrus revisits various formulations of creatio ex nihilo in Jewish and Christian thought of late antiquity in relation to the reception and reworking of Plato’s concept of the khora, locating within this doctrine itself the lineaments of what she calls an “ecochorology.” Burrus, Ancient Christian Ecopoetics: Cosmologies, Saints, Things (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2019).

18. Soskice, “Why Creatio ex nihilo Today?,” 50.

19. I explore these conjunctions and their legacies further in Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

20. T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cunningham (1944; repr., London: Verso, 1979).

21. Goethe, Faust, Part One, trans. David Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 52.

22. See Marshall Berman’s interpretation of Faust as a “tragedy of development” in All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1988). My comments on Faust in this essay draw on a prior reading of this text in relation to Romantic views of aquatic environments in Kate Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 202–214. See also Rigby, “Of Mice and Men and Surging Seas: Discerning Distributed Agency in Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter,” in ecocritical special issue of New German Critique 128 (2016): 153–176, eds. Heather Sullivan and Bernhard Malkmus.

23. Goethe, Faust, Part Two, trans. David Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

24. Rod Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996).

25. Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred, 213.

26. Unless otherwise indicated, all biblical quotes are taken from The New Oxford Annotated Bible (NRSV), augmented 3rd ed., ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

27. It is hard not to read this image as consistent with the tehomophobia traced by Keller, but Celia Deane-Drummond has suggested that the disappearance of the sea in Revelation 21:1, in recalling the dawn of creation, reinforces the hope of the renewal of creation. Deane-Drummond, Eco-Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2008). For a recent review of divergent readings of Revelation in the context of climate change, see Stefan Skrimshire, “Climate Change and Apocalyptic Faith,” WIREs Climate Change (2013). See also Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2004); and Keller, Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and other Last Chances (New York: Orbis, 2021).

28. Keller, Face of the Deep, xv. In the NRSV translation of the New Oxford Annotated Bible, these verses read: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters” (Gen. 1:1–2).

29. As Keller notes, the proposition that the Hebrew creation narrative is a demythologized version of the Babylonian epic was first put forward by biblical scholar Hermann Gunkel in Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (1895). Keller, Face of the Deep, 106. See Gunkel, Creation and Chaos in the Primeval Era and the Eschaton: A Religio-historical Study of Genesis 1 and Revelation, trans. K. William Whitney Jr. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007).

30. On the historical linkages between the interests of mercantile capitalism and the ways in which the project of scientific investigation and technological development were framed in the seventeenth century, not least in relation to earlier religious texts and traditions, see Carolyn Merchant’s landmark ecofeminist history of science, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980).

31. Keller, Face of the Deep, 138.

32. Merchant, The Death of Nature, 195.

33. Merchant, The Death of Nature, 238.

34. Keller, On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), xii. Keller’s process theology is also in conversation with contemporary “new materialisms” that share an onto-epistemology of interactive cobecoming. See, for example, Keller and Mary-Jane Rubenstein, eds., Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).

35. See, for example, Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Dalia Nassar, The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romanticism: 1795–1804 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014).

36. Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society, Canto 1, “The Production of Life,” lines 295–302 (London: T. Bentley, 1803). Produced for Project Gutenberg by Stephen Gibbs and Christine P. Travers, October 9, 2008, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26861/26861-h/26861-h.htm.

37. David Adams and Margaret Adams Leeming, A Dictionary of Creation Myths (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 79–80.

38. As exemplified by Rachel Carson’s influential celebration of the life of the oceans in The Sea Around Us, first published by Oxford University Press in 1951, however, the genre of nature writing has emerged as a site where science is brought into conversation with affect, aesthetics, and ethics.

39. On the potential of visual media to enhance public appreciation of both the wonder and woundedness of Earth’s undersea worlds, see Linda Williams, “Deep Time and Myriad Ecosystems: Urban Imaginaries and Unstable Planetary Aesthetics,” in The Aesthetics of the Undersea, eds. Margaret Cohen and Killian Quigley, 167–179 (London: Routledge, 2019).

40. This appears to be acknowledged in the new IPBES report, which refers to the important role of the worldviews in either motivating or impeding biodiversity conservation. Díaz et al., “Summary for Policymakers.”

41. Burrus, Ancient Christian Ecopoetics, 214. In their beautiful theologically informed meditation on our imperiled oceans, Jan Morgan and Graeme Garrett nonetheless incorporate an affirmative (albeit not unquestioning) discussion of Jean-Luc Nancy’s emphatically atheistic Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II, trans. John McDeane (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). See Morgan and Garrett, On the Edge: A-Way with the Ocean (Reservoir: Morning Star, 2018), 187–195.

42. “About Us,” Interfaith Oceans, accessed May 22, 2018, https://www.interfaithoceans.org/about-us.

43. As Lorbiecki explained in a private communication on August 30, 2019, “Interfaith Oceans began as an exploratory retreat [of the NRCCC] in Hawaii in 2012 to write a religious statement about the oceans . . . and was originally called the Interfaith Ocean Ethics Campaign.” I am very grateful to Marybeth for alerting me to this initiative back in 2016 and for ongoing conversation about it.

44. David Krantz, “Tehillat HaYam: A Psalm of the Sea,” AYTZIM: Ecological Judaism, Resources, accessed September 13, 2019, https://www.interfaithoceans.org/jewish. I am very grateful to David for directing me to these and other resources related to Jewish care for the oceans and for permission to cite his “Psalm of the Sea.” On Jewish ocean care, see also Hillel Eckerd College’s delightfully named Scubi Jew program, accessed October 2, 2019, https://www.eckerdhillel.org/scubi-jew.

45. Bowman, “A Tale of Two Celticities: Sacred Springs, Legendary Landscapes and Celtic Revival in Bath,” Journal for the Academic Study of Religion 20, no. 1 (2007): 107.

46. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 2, trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice, and P. Knight (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 686–690.

47. “How Do I Love My Neighbour?,” Diocese of Bath and Wells Lenten Reflections—Living Well in God’s Earth, April 3, 2019. I have written previously on the extension of the ethic of neighbor love to nonhuman (especially animal) others in Rigby, “Animal Calls,” in Divinanimality: Animal Theory, Creaturely Theology, ed. Stephen D. Moore, 116–133 (New York: Fordham, 2014), especially 122–128.

48. Francis I, Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home (Vatican City: Vatican Publications, 2015). Pope Francis’s prayer intention for the month of September 2019 highlighted the threat to Earth’s oceans and invited the faithful to pray that “politicians, scientists and economists work together to protect the world’s seas and oceans.” See “Pope’s September Prayer Intention: For Protecting the Oceans,” Vatican News, August 31, 2019, https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2019-08/pope-francis-september-2019-prayer-intention-oceans.html.

49. For a critical overview of the claims for the “greening of religion,” see Bron Taylor, Gretel Van Wieren, and Bernard Daly Zaleha, “The Greening of Religion Hypothesis (Part Two): Assessing the Data from Lynn White, Jr., to Pope Francis,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 10, no. 3 (2016): 306–378.