One of the most influential environmental philosophers of the past two decades has found Jesus. Timothy Morton, who trained as a scholar of Romantic poetry, first came to prominence as a theorist of hyperobjects, a critic of the concept of “nature,” and a collaborator with the Icelandic experimental-music superstar Björk. Now, in Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, Morton argues that contemporary environmental movements lack the feel of the sacred. Many of us know what needs to be done (stop emitting carbon—and fast), but environmentalism is without an underlying “pizzazz or charisma” that could sufficiently motivate action. Morton thinks the solution may lie in Christianity. After struggling for decades through their own personal hell (abuse suffered at the hands of their father), in 2023 Morton had a born-again experience—and now thinks a “deconstructed” Christianity could help us stop the Earth from becoming a different kind of hell. Citing Martin Luther King Jr., Morton insists that environmentalism is in need of its own “I have a dream” moment: a spiritual awakening that opens us to the future, to new ways of relating to our fellow human beings and the earth. This unusual book does contain an argument—concerning the divinity of the biosphere—but it’s primarily concerned with evoking that “I have a dream” vibe.
The frantically intense Morton has something to say about everything under the sun: William Blake, The Cloud of Unkowning, Derrida, Acid House music, Pirates of the Caribbean, psychoanalysis, Star Wars, an antiracism seminar they once attended, Morton’s own opera (yes, they wrote an opera), and so very much more. Hell contains real wisdom, especially in its reflections on finding peace in the long shadow of abuse. It also features the banal (“Hate is not the opposite of love”) and the baffling (“Sure, we have plenty of notions. They used to be called sensibility, now they’re called Facebook and Twitter”). But it’s difficult to grasp the effect of Morton’s wild-eyed prose without an extended sample. Following a lengthy riff on The Chronicles of Narnia and the theology of the subjunctive mood, Morton speculates:
Maybe that’s what Jesus eats: the mango-like juiciness of the subjunctive: “All I really need is to know that you believe” (Prince, “I Would Die 4 U”). Might that be true, might it? The empty tomb of the subjunctive, the question mark quality symbolized by an empty crucifix on one’s neck, has that “geddit?” quality that is the precondition for an idea or a joke. A joke or an idea joins something unknown (unconscious) with something known via the gateway of this “might,” this subjunctivity.
Reading this book, I confess I sometimes struggled to “geddit.” Morton writes in a prophetic mode, but they are a prophet of ambiguity. “Conceptual rigidity is the enemy.” The Christianity that Morton preaches is one that has been cleansed of “toxic binaries”: white and Black, master and slave, subject and object, even immanence and transcendence. Working as a “deconstructor,” as Morton described themselves in a recent interview, their task is to extract the “goodies” from Christianity, disposing of the baggage so that “it won’t hurt people anymore.”
But what, exactly, is this Mortonian Christianity—and why is it such a promising resource for ecological politics? We should start with Hell’s most developed positive argument: that we are in need of a revolution in how we conceive the biosphere and our own mode of life. The biosphere, Morton argues, ought not to be understood as a realm of ruthless competition, comprehensively oriented around the survival of the fittest. “That’s called capitalism,” Morton writes, “and it gets projected onto the biosphere to justify capitalism’s ‘natural’ continuance.” Because the living world is not mechanical, it cannot be predicted. Certain chemical processes, of course, do follow a cyclical, deterministic logic, wherein chemicals are transformed and then return to their original states. But the remarkable thing about life is that it escapes this cyclical pattern, which Morton analogizes to logics of trauma and revenge:
Life at its most basic is randomly mutating replicators such as RNA and DNA, random, that is to say, fundamentally different from the past, and replicating, that is to say, not destroyed by the revenge cycles of chemistry. Life, children, the future, contingency, accidents, beauty: these terms all overlap. Here’s another word in that series: Jesus.
This elliptical passage is Hell in miniature. Biology is, in essence, the study of wonderfully random creativity, of pure, overflowing contingency. And life’s randomness discloses a truth: we need not be chained to the past. Something new can happen. Human beings seem to grasp the truth of life with a special acuity, because “lifeforms apart from humans seem more Hell-bent on repeating the past.” Yes, human beings are made of carbon, but we are not bound by chemical “revenge cycles” for the simple reason that we are alive. We can forget, forgive, have mercy. The mode of life itself is sacred and merciful, Morton argues. The miracle of life is “the universe having mercy on itself.” Likewise, the central truth of Christianity, Morton thinks, is that Jesus liberated us from vengeance. He came, Morton writes, to “take revenge on revenge.” In short, the Gospel recapitulates biology: the Cross and the Resurrection disclose “the possibility of the future encoded in the very structure of life as such.”
Morton’s basic aim in Hell is to get us to see the world as a divinely immanent realm of mercy, accident, and possibility. And they think a number of ethical and spiritual practices ought to follow from this. In the ethical realm, we ought to adopt an abiding commitment to mercy and forgiveness. Human beings, along with the entire biosphere, are radically contingent. We are not transparent to ourselves, and we are, essentially, sinful. We should admit our sinful nature, Morton suggests, with a “gentle smile,” because being flawed is “a structural, irreducible property of…being a lifeform in a biosphere.” And responding mercifully to our essential sinfulness is a way of honoring what human beings know best about the mode of the biosphere. Spiritually, we ought to sync ourselves to the basic vibe of “life, its dancing, funky state.” Drawing from Christian and Buddhist contemplative traditions, Morton envisions a spirituality of stillness, of “spiritual sleep” (to quote The Cloud of Unkowing), where our minds are “simply quivering, palpitating” with their own life, alongside the entire living world.
Notice that we’ve drifted somewhat from the practical world of environmental politics? Morton begins with Martin Luther King Jr. and the need for an “I have a dream” moment that could motivate a transformative environmental politics. But as we approach the end of the book, we are reassured that “being alive, just alive, alive without a plan” is the vibe. (It would, of course, be difficult to describe King as someone whose practical mode was the embrace of life “without a plan”). Fundamentally, what Morton has given us in Hell is a re-enchantment narrative. The authors of such narratives, which have recently proliferated in both religious and secular circles, argue that a “disenchanted” way of perceiving the world lies at the root of environmental disregard. They then turn to ontology, pitching a high-level account—whether it be Jane Bennett’s “new materialism,” Eugene McCarraher’s “sacramental ecology,” or Morton's own heterodox bio-Christianity—about the vital nature of the cosmos.
Such re-enchantment narratives often provide valuable insights, but it isn’t always clear how they bear on the ethical and spiritual lives of those engaged in political struggle. “We know what to do,” Morton said in a recent interview about Hell. “We know to stop oil. But we’re not feeling it yet.” Morton is missing—or leaving out—something important here: we haven’t the faintest idea how to stop Big Oil. Taking on the interests opposed to environmental justice will require the development of collective powers that do not yet exist. It will require individuals who are prepared to make profoundly risky commitments, display radical forms of solidarity, and endure in the face of failure. What might prevent despair and disorientation among such political actors?
King himself offers a good model. He presented a sweeping vision of social flourishing in the form of “beloved community,” but he also pressed for particular institutional reforms (a federal prohibition on race discrimination in hiring, for example), and developed a theory of political and social transformation that promoted particular tactics (most obviously, nonviolent resistance). King’s genius was in recognizing that this grubby tactical world of struggle and agitation had its own spirituality: it made a spiritual appeal to the white majority by attempting to evoke emotions of horror and shame; and it aimed to model, within the ranks of activists and protesters, precisely the ethics that ought to animate a “beloved community.”
Morton is right that environmental politics needs something of the spirit of King. But King’s own example orients us toward something that Hell largely neglects: a spirituality that could sustain and guide climate strikers, pipeline disruptors, and radical parliamentarians. “Being alive, just alive” is good, but if we’re going to save the Earth, we’ll need more than “spiritual sleep”; we’ll need a plan.
Hell
In Search of a Christian Ecology
Timothy Morton
Columbia University Press
$26.95 | 312 pp.
