Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality

"To speak of the sacred is to speak about a depth dimension that calls people into postures of gratitude that acknowledge the giftedness of life, and that inspires them to practices of care and nurture as the most fitting response to the gifts having been received" (139). The bold claim at the center of this evocative book is that our life, though wounded by horrific forces of degradation, remains unalterably suffused by the sacred. And yet Wirzba also acknowledges that this "depth dimension," however primordial and basic to our existence, is a reality about which humankind (to varying degrees) is either forgetful or confused. This book, like so many texts within the contemplative tradition, is a summons to become fully awake to the real. What makes This Sacred Life such a uniquely compelling addition to the ecotheological canon, in my view, is its articulation of a holistic narrative capable of guiding and sustaining the spiritual practices outlined in Wirzba's Agrarian Spirit (recently reviewed in Spiritus by Matt Boswell). Although the latter volume is more directly concerned with Christian spirituality as such, readers of this journal will appreciate This Sacred Life for its more systematic articulation (and celebration) of our being and vocation as creatures.

In chapter 1 ("Facing the Anthropocene"), Wirzba engages with some contemporary scholarship that has attempted to identify points of origin for the conditions [End Page 181] that mark our current geological epoch. While particular nineteenth-century European political, racial, and economic contexts are obviously culpable, Wirzba concurs with scholars (such as James C. Scott) who have argued that even many pre-ancient human societies were a landscape- and life-altering force, already exploitative and destructive. Wirzba (drawing from Wendell Berry, Amitav Ghosh, Bruno Latour, et al.) suggests that to really begin addressing the problem, we must now rethink fundamental aspects of our cultural imaginaries, "what people believe about what a human life is for." But where to begin? Wirzba argues that knowing who we are and how we should live are unthinkable apart from knowing where we are. To be a creature is to be "rooted in places and communities," "attuned to their limits and potential," to know the where of one's life. The kind of knowing Wirzba has in mind is a participative (rather than merely observative) knowing-as-cherishing. This gnoseological shift will depend, in large part, on whether we can learn the language of the land itself.

Chapter 2 ("The Transhumanist Urge") then delivers a forceful critique of those modern ideologies motivated by "a basic contempt for humanity's creaturely condition as marked by finitude, frailty, and need." Wirzba detects an analogous discontentment with human limits in Platonic philosophy's aspirations to "exceed creaturely finitude" and "live among the gods." Wirzba acknowledges the influence of Platonism on a range of spiritualities (including much Christian spirituality) but does not pursue the matter.

Chapters 3 ("Rooted Life"), 4 ("A Meshwork World"), and 5 ("Why Sacred Anything?") expound the embodied, symbiotic, communal character of all life: "the fundamental truth about any living body is that it is always already a community of beings" (74). As humans are "soil-birthed and soil-bound," we do well to apprentice ourselves to the wisdom of plants. Wirzba's sophisticated portrait of these nature teachers (which draws upon recent work by Robin Kimmerer and Emanuele Coccia) is deepened by his theological account of movement, staying put, and rest. Plants live by a process of "unselfing," nourishing themselves only by nurturing the places in which they grow—a paradigm for rethinking our human vocation. Wirzba, in dialogue with Tim Ingold's idea of "meshwork" (109–12), argues in favor of a relational "ontology of entanglements" in opposition to "substance ontology." Other prominent eco-philosophers, such as Timothy Morton (whom Wirzba does not cite but may have in view), have sought to combine Ingold's "meshwork" with a so-called object-oriented ontology in order to underscore...