Imaginative Writing and Thought in the Philosophy of Nimi Wariboko:The Garden of Transformation
Collage composed of pictures showing Nimi Wariboko inside his Westwood home and an image of the surrounding grounds. Pictures from Toyin Falola's Flickr album commemorating Wariboko's assumption of the Walter G. Muelder Professorship of Social Ethics, Boston University School of Theology.
"I live in a one-acre plot with manicured lawns and trees. The house and its grounds are at the foot of the Blue Hill near Boston. Birds and wild animals often come by my house. I have recordings of birds singing in the spring at my property. The house is in the suburbs of Boston, about 10 miles from Boston. When we moved from New York to this place in July 2007 my 13-year old daughter then commented about the town of Westwood: “This is Central Park with few houses.” As you know Central Park in NYC is vast heavily forested park. My daughter was used to the concrete jungle of New York City and the park was the green oasis in the midst of this jungle. In her mind, New York was a concrete jungle with few trees. On seeing Westwood, she revised the description.
Yes, the comments in the acknowledgements of the books were inspired by this house and its grounds. I write in a room where I have a wide view of portions of the grounds with their natural beauty and visiting birds and animals. Now as I write this email I can see much of the ground covered with pristine snow".
Nimi Wariboko. 2018 email.
Abstract
An introduction to biophilia, love of nature and philosophia, love of wisdom, in dialogue in the philosophy of Nimi Wariboko
Some writers are able to create particularly rich offerings in the way they lead their readers into their books, through prefaces, acknowledgements and introductions, entry points that assume a force that makes their impression on the mind inseparable from that of the books into which they are portals. One such writer is the philosopher, theologian and economist Nimi Wariboko, as represented by his acknowledgements pages in Nigerian Pentecostalism and The Split God : Pentecostalism and Critical Theory.
Biophilic and Cognitive Ecstasies in Wariboko's Nigerian Pentecostalism
Biophilic and Cognitive Ecstasies in Wariboko's Nigerian Pentecostalism
Here is the first paragraph of the acknowledgements pages of Nigerian Pentecostalism, my focus in this essay. The division of the paragraph into two is introduced by me to aid reading in the online medium in which this essay is presented:
Writing and reading is a scented existence. Writing is like sojourning in a paradisiacal garden, blooming with thousands of fragrant flowers, and selecting and bonding some of them into a synthesis with a time-release mechanism. The goal of this art of perfumery is to ensure that when the reader picks up the text in which multiple fragrances are embodied, she will be transported into the store of the legendary Arabian perfume merchant for a voluptuous jouissance. Each stimulation of her olfactory nerves will bring her closer and closer to rapture, to a place where only the spring birds of Westwood sing all day.
This is the place where I write, in the background of the Blue Hill of Massachusetts, where nature, thinking, and divine ecstasy of learning are in voluptuous embrace. This is an enchanted existence—and I invite you to experience it if you are willing. I invite you to enable me to see clearly what I have described to you. I saw in part and I wrote in part. When you, the reader who is perfect, engages this volume, then that which is in part shall be complete.
I have read these lines again and again, reflecting on them from various angles, but every time I come to them, they thrill me afresh, setting in motion a new train of associations taking me into various streams of knowledge.
What is this master writer doing here that makes this passage so enchanting? That question can be answered in different ways. One approach to this is to see the passage in terms of contradictory unities that delight the mind without satisfying it, stimulating and titillating without consummating, tantalising without fulfilling.
The passage, demonstrating exquisite mental flight vivified for the reader in language arresting in its imagistic range and lyrical force, evokes questions of conjunction between sensual and abstract knowledge, between limitation and perfection in knowing, projects ideas of space as inspirational matrix, of the gap between achievement and unfolding possibilities and suggests the question of the enabling factors of work as creative fulfillment as opposed to work as uninspiring compulsion, themes of Wariboko’s Pentecostal Principle, Charismatic City, Principles of Excellence and Depth and Destiny of Work, making the passage an incidental resonating chamber of themes emerging in other books of Wariboko’s, evoking the central dynamisms of his thought.
Why does the writer expect the reader to complete the writer’s own imperfect vision? Those lines about the reader, who is perfect, completing the writer’s imperfect perception, are clearly an adaptation of the Kings James version of Paul’s Biblical "First Letter to the Corinthians", chapter 13 verse 12:
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
Paul may be understood as referring to the difference between human and divine vision, that of the human person being inadequate in contrast to the clarity of divine perception. The divine identity and the human person are aware of each other but the human person’s awareness is dimmed because the individual is perceiving the divine through a medium, a “glass”, that obstructs or “darkens” vision. Paul describes his human perception as seeing through “a glass darkly” but anticipates a situation in which he shall see clearly, knowing even as he is known.
In the Wariboko passage, who is the person who knows partially, like the human being in Paul’s picture, while the other knows fully, as God does in Paul’s lines?
Wariboko is stating the person who knows fully in his own formulation in his opening paragraph in Nigerian Pentecostalism is the reader, not he, the creator of the text.
Puzzling?
Is the writer, the dweller in the inspirational garden into which he invites the reader, the garden that enables a “divine ecstasy of learning”, in which “nature and thinking are in voluptuous embrace”, a garden evocative of the perfection of the Biblical Garden of Eden, the first home of humanity, not the one who ought to be seen as embodying plenitude of vision into which the reader should be invited to engage with and unravel the depth of awareness reached through that inspirational nexus?
May Wariboko’s lines not be seen as inverting Paul’s distinction between the one who sees through a medium that darkens perception while the other knows clearly the nature of the perceiver beyond the obstructing medium, a difference that shall be erased under the right conditions so that the human being shall see clearly and know God even as God knows the human person?
In Wariboko’s lines, the intelligence creating the cognitive scenario represented by the text he has written is the one whose knowledge is incomplete, while that of the reader is the perfect one that shall consummate the writer’s imperfect understanding.
Intriguing.
How is that possible?
Why is Wariboko inverting the traditional picture? Why is the reader described as perfect, a perfection completing the inadequacies of the understanding of the author? Is such perfection possible, on account of the limitations of human cognitive processes?
A response to this question may be suggested by considering Wariboko’s related engagement with the bond between reader and writer in another memorable acknowledgement, from The Split God: Pentecostalism and Critical Theory, forthcoming in 2018, five years after the 2014 Nigerian Pentecostalism, and which will be discussed in an expansion of this essay.
Picture from Nimi Wariboko showing his son in the grounds
of their Westwood house
Animistic Delight in The Charismatic City
In the acknowledgements pages of The Charismatic City and the Public Resurgence of Religion: A Pentecostal Social Ethics of Cosmopolitan Urban Life, published, like Nigerian Pentecostalism, in 2014, Wariboko expands the terms of his rapturous engagement with nature:
I thank the birds of spring and summer of Westwood for their singing, chirping, and acrobatic displays as I read, thought, and wrote. I also thank the trees, their flowers, and their dancing in the wind for adding splendid color, fragrance, and fillip to my imagination and sight. In all, nature, creation, is at the heart of the Charismatic City.
These lines are beautiful in bringing vividly before the mental eye the playful vitality of nature as it inspired the writer at his work. In addressing these natural forms directly in his imagination, these aspects of nature are transformed from a conventional perception of them as non-human elements operating in a different cosmos from humanity, admired but fundamentally different, into partners, into agents, into entities demonstrating their own rationale for existence, different from those of humans and independent of the human being but intersecting with the distinctiveness of human existence in ways that suggest a form of indirect communication between differing modes of being.
These lines are lovely, not only for the serenity they evoke, a serenity emerging from the play on the senses and thus on the psyche by the differing vitality of nature in its animate and inanimate forms, but also in the writer’s evocation of the projection of this vitality as a mode of existence with its own unique authenticity, its own integrity that goes beyond primarily human needs, its own grounding in reality that constitutes a rationale for being that is independent of but may serve human needs when humans are sensitive to that possibility in humble cooperation, in other words, when humans recognise these other aspects of nature, lacking the greater complexity of humanity’s distinctive powers of mind and body but appreciable by humanity in terms of their own characteristic beauty and power, as brethren, as co-creators, co- travellers on the earth.
The writer moves from a relationship to nature as an enchanting other in the earlier quote from Nigerian Pentecostalism to a sensitivity to nature as brother and sister, an interlocutor with which contact at the level of indirect communication has been established beyond the eloquent beauty but still vast distance of being between the natural forms, human and non-human, of Nigerian Pentecostalism. In other words, he has moved from a largely admiring perspective on nature to the more expansive, participatory orientation represented by an animistic mentality.
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