The conclusion makes the case for Faulkner as an anti-ideological thinker, an artist engaged in attempting to disentangle image-making from propaganda as a key ingredient of his larger Yoknapatawpha project. I interpret Faulkner’s Stockholm Nobel address in this context, as a humanistic counter to modern disenchantment, an affirmation of human interiority in the face of scaling social systems in the process of becoming all-encompassing.

This final chapter treats the Snopes trilogy as a clear-sighted affirmation of immanence and interiority that responds in a self-contained way to the whole of Faulkner’s study of complex systems as outlined in this book. In The Hamlet, the symbolism of the submerged woman offers Faulkner’s clearest portrayal of an immanent underlayer to our networked social systems, an underlayer that gives value and dignity to the individual life. Although there may be a chaotic quality to the expression of such individual forms of novelty, this does not mean that the larger networked process is blind. For Faulkner, individual experience serves as both a moral anchorage for the larger expression of the social body and an ever-present wellspring for social change. The Town and The Mansion continue to depict how such individual behavior can challenge vertical paradigms of top-down power, bestowing a mercurial quality to the New South and making it open to the possibilities of change.

The Introduction argues that Faulkner discovered an epistemology for networked systems in the creation of his own imagined landscape. I present two major stages in which Faulkner’s discovery took place: (1) an earlier vision portraying how networks scale, circulate information, centralize, and produce potentially tyrannical paradigms of top-down vertical power; and (2) another view of dynamical networks that are constantly adapting to produce novel forms of movement and behavior. The Faulkner that this study evokes is at once the modernist developing a spatial narrative practice describing the emergence of complex social networks and the Romantic for whom the immanent life was paramount and even sacrosanct. That these two trajectories of inquiry and spiritual belief are not easily reconcilable gives philosophical and moral weight to the landscape and characters that Faulkner invented. They also provide a striking meditation on what it means for human beings to find themselves in systems so vast and ubiquitous that they can no longer remember what it was like to live outside them and, thus, to think outside of their ideological dicta.

The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses present a striking response to the earliest cognitive cartography of the Sartoris plantation house. While ideology continues to be preserved and replicated within the principal nodes of social space, Faulkner turns his attention in these works to the disruptive and resistant activity of a hidden interiority within these systems. He employs a variety of images to evoke this emergent interior dimension – from the creek bottom to the burial mound, to the fiery hearth, to the symbolic motif, most importantly, of a submerged woman in the depths, a motif that begins with Eunice’s suicidal act of defiance in Go Down, Moses. Around this last image, Faulkner develops the possibility of alterity, of producing an alternative hub of information flow that is capable of resisting, challenging, and even upending the top-down vertical hegemony that defines the cognitive cartographies of the plantation system. In this chapter, I trace this paradigm as an emergent Faulknerian ethics that emphasizes, above all, the possibility of spontaneous and free movement in social space as well as the paramount value of immanence and interpersonal relationships.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the public political theology of the founding faces fundamental ideological challenges. Progressive politics is marked by a pre-Christian paganism that sees divinity as imanent in the world while conservative politics is increasingly influenced by resurgent forms of Christian, and particularly Catholic, integralism, which seeks to reintegrate elements of spiritual and temporal authority that were separated in the modern era. We consider what relevance the classical Christian natural-law tradition has as we consider the legacy of the American founding today.

This brief epilogue closes the circle. If the story opened with a solemn view of the Great Hall of Justice, it ends in the quiet of a living room on the other side of The Hague. Sophie and Norma get a final chance to chat about the events of the past three years. What was Sophie thinking when she joined the international judiciary? Where is the vision that was promised to her when she graduated from university? Norma does her best to cheer up her girlfriend. A 19th century novel, an orchestral piece by Ennio Morricone, and a glass of red wine do the trick.

The landscape of contemporary religious ecology is presented in this article as a variety of responses to disenchantment and what Lynn White identified as the theological roots of environmental ruin (Biblical divine transcendence and human exceptionality). The various positions are mapped in terms of those who deny divine transcendence and make nature, either as actually or only potentially infinite, the highest (pantheists); those who deny divine unicity and return to a pre-Christian, “enchanted” nature (neo-pagans); and those who defend in various ways the ecology of the Biblical account of creation (Jewish, Muslim, and Christian monotheists).

Ancient Greek philosophy has often been dismissed as irrelevant to contemporary environmental thought or part of the problem in environmental terms because of its apparent dualism and anthropocentrism; Plato is often seen as emblematic of this philosophical stance. Following the research of Timothy Mahoney, this chapter calls into question this characterisation of Plato’s philosophy. Additionally, it examines the environmental perspectives of several philosophers within the later Platonic tradition, whose philosophy was closely connected with ancient Mediterranean religions and has been largely marginalised and excluded from the canon of western philosophy. This chapter argues that there is an important strand in ancient philosophy which is participatory, relational and ecocentric, depicting the philosopher as rooted in place and landscape, and necessitating the philosopher’s recognition of the interconnectedness and sacredness of the natural world and the kinship and ensouled nature of all beings and natural entities. As such, this chapter suggests that ecocentric environmental perspectives can be discerned within Platonism (especially within late antique theurgy) and that, consequently, this strand of ancient philosophy has a great deal to offer to environmental ethics and contemporary environmental thinking on nature and the natural world.

As it transitioned from its late medieval into its early modern forms, the Christian just war tradition did more than shape colonialization, law, and the nation-state; it significantly shaped modernity itself. Its emphases on four big modern ideas – autonomy, immanence, instrumentalism, and universalizability – manifest throughout the modern social imaginary, including in the way both religion/theology and the nonhuman natural world are removed from view in the political realm. Viewing this transition through explicitly theological lenses helps make sense of modernity’s preoccupation with (state) violence, its struggles to negotiate ambiguity, and its commitment to a myth of progress that conceals the ironies, disjunctions, and ambivalences of history. It also helps to explain why modern political thought ignores the nonhuman natural world at a time when the costs of such ignorance are growing exponentially.

Inherited discussions of ‘science and religion’ too much assume an interaction between two historically constant phenomena in terms of stories of ‘progress’ and ‘conflict’. Instead, it is better to recognise long-term and varying modes of tension between three different approaches to nature, pivoted about attitudes to ‘enchantment’ and to transcendence versus immanence. Within such a perspective, it appears that the dominant model of science as ‘disenchanted transcendence’ is a Newtonian one that historically quickly proved inadequate. Alternative and earlier traditions of ‘natural magic’ later returned under new guises and are closer to the essence of the ‘ergetic’ or experimental attitude that lies at the real core of ‘science’. The Newtonian model also implausibly suppressed the realities of motion, time, change, substantial form and secondary qualities. But contemporary physics points towards their restoration and to nature as a vital habit and form-shaping process, as well as to the ‘magical’ character of powers and causes. Magic, rightly understood, is a necessary mediator between religion as theory and science as practice and is a crucial aspect of an ergetic understanding of ‘enchanted transcendence’ which is the most promising perspective for today.

In a detailed study of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Stephen Barton examines the character of God in each narrative. He shows that controversial claims about God are implied at every point in the gospel stories of Jesus, shaped as they are by an apocalyptic worldview and by the parting of the ways between the synagogue and the church.

This chapter explores Wallace Stevens’s understanding of the secular condition and the terms he cultivated to describe it. Familiar words from Stevens’s lexicon—“reality,” “imagination,” “the earth,” “repetition”—are linked to his vision of secularity. Mutter argues that this vision of the secular is highly dramatic: though Stevens viewed secularity as a condition of both deprivation and liberation, he transforms loss into a tragic theater in which the self is thrown into hostile territory and must depend on its own resources. The chapter suggests that while Stevens was enticed by the secular model of the real as a domain of neutral, impersonal fact, as his career progressed he increasingly recognized that secular reality was itself an imaginative construal. This recognition is linked to Stevens’s effort to rehabilitate, for his secular anthropology, the imaginative human capacities that historically generated religious ideas. Finally, the chapter elaborates Stevens’s understanding of play as a central mode of his secularism. Play reconciles the secular values of freedom and sensuousness with the discordant necessity of the world. Mutter concludes by observing an ongoing tension in Stevens’s view of desire between the good of immanence and the need for transcendence.

The Introduction lays out the book’s main argument about the uses to which accounts of the Bible’s origins were put in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It sketches the historical context for this phenomenon, discussing how the period was characterized by heightened attention on the Bible’s ultimate divine origin, transcendent of all historical contexts, and at the same time by a new focus on the human and historical mediations shaping Scripture’s extant forms. The Introduction proceeds to a critical analysis of how modern scholars have understood these modes of biblical reception according to theories of secularization and modernity, with some arguing that the early modern Bible’s transcendence, and some its immanence, played important roles in the development of secularity, disenchantment, and modernity. Through engaging this scholarship, the Introduction develops arguments that challenge contemporary thinking about secularity. Following a discussion of the scholarly field of political theology and the present book’s relationship to it, the Introduction ends with an overview of the book's chapters.