ABSTRACT
Creature is such, that the same cannot be merely one single Thing, in case it ought to act or do something, and so enjoy that Goodness which is prepared for it by its Creator.”10 The participation of the creature in the divine requires of us, in other words, our participation in each other. This idea, that the creature cannot be “merely singular” if it is to actualize its gifts, remains almost as obscure as Conway herself. When, for example, Jean-Luc Nancy declares, splendidly, that “a single being is a contradiction in terms,”11 the thought is fresh. Like Whitehead’s “mutual immanence,” her nourishing connectivity resists the root substance metaphysics of Western common sense, of its identities religious and political. The root morphs into a rhizome. “Each multiplicity is symbiotic,” write Deleuze and Guattari. “Its becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a whole galaxy.”12 Such a symbiosis suggests the togetherness of life, the bios of co-existence, disclosed in the recent theory of symbiogenesis.13 Indeed the buzzing life of this multiplicity belies even the boundary between the organic and the inorganic. “The plant sings of the glory of God, and while being filled all the more with itself it contemplates and intensely contracts the elements whence it proceeds. It feels in this prehension the self-enjoyment of its own becoming.”14
