Thematic and Expressive Rhythms: From Biophilia to Cosmophilia in the Philosophy of Nimi Wariboko

​              Image of Boston College in winter at the university's Facebook page

Abstract

A brief overview of the work of the philosopher, theologian and economist Nimi Wariboko in terms of his themes and expressive strategies, the text vivified by correlative painting, sculpture and photographic art accompanied by commentary.

The essay explicates this body of work to the general public and specialist readers in a way that highlights the significance of its themes and the adventurousness of its expressive styles, communicating these through conceptual power, beauty of expressive force and the evocative potency of striking images.

Contents

Thematic Spirals

Image and commentary : Victor Ekpuk’s Good Morning, Sunrise

Dynamic Expression

Image and commentary: Olu Amoda’s Corner Eye II

Biophilia, Cosmopophilia, Cosmophila and Awephilia

Image and commentary: Gasson Hall spires, Boston College

Image and commentary: Experiencing the Charismatic City

Intimate Advocacy

Living Thought Speaking to Live Human Experience

Image and commentary: Busy Boston Street by Toyin Falola

Thematic Spirals

I find exciting and illuminating the efforts of philosopher, theologian and economist Nimi Wariboko in wrestling with ideas. One of the reasons I delight in these ventures is his pervasive development of various themes across several books and essays in the manner of a musical polyphony. This strategy emerges in particular books as well as defines a good part of his total body of work. A unifying motif across Wariboko's texts is what may be described as a principle of transformation understood as constitutive of cosmic dynamism and of humanity's insertion within this transformative flow. Within this central theme, he develops others that reinforce and amplify it.

The Wikipedia essay on polyphony, a musical strategy in terms of which I describe Wariboko’s weaving of his thematic universe, defines it this way:

“In music, polyphony is one type of musical texture, where a texture is, generally speaking, the way that melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic aspects of a musical composition are combined to shape the overall sound and quality of the work. In particular, polyphony consists of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody, as opposed to a musical texture with just one voice, monophony, or a texture with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords, which is called homophony.”

Each book by Wariboko demonstrates a central theme. That primary focus is at times accompanied by the introduction of other ideas that enrich the dominant orientation of the work without being an intimate part of it. They may also be integral to the texts where they are presented as they help expand the fundamental thrust of those texts. In both cases, these ancillary conceptions achieve centrality in other books where they are fully developed.

A masterly depiction of Wariboko's relationship with nature, for example, framed in terms of an idyllic conception of scholarship facilitated by nature's beauty, is presented in the first paragraph of the acknowledgements pages of Nigerian Pentecostalism, but biophilia, identification with nature, as a central element of urban life, is discussed at some length, not in that work, but in The Charismatic City and the Public Resurgence of Religion: A Pentecostal Social Ethics of Cosmopolitan Urban Life.

A comprehensive grasp of Wariboko’s development of a principle of transformation as a central value of existence is reachable only by an understanding of the full scope of sources he marshals, across various texts, in developing this as a universalist conception emerging from but reaching beyond Pentecostalism. This expansionist cultivation is built through his engagement with a number of inspirational sources. These include Paul Tillich's characterization of the Catholic and Protestant principles, an abstraction and universalization of historical institutions and movements, as described in Wariboko's The Pentecostal Principle: Ethical Methodology in New Spirit.

This idea is also a development from his personal experience as a Pentecostal, as evident in that book. From these and other inspirational matrices Wariboko constructs what he names the Pentecostal principle. A conception sharing the same qualities as this principle is developed in various books, such as The Principles of Excellence: A Framework for Social Ethics, without its being identified with the Pentecostal principle, which itself is described as emerging from but as transcending Pentecostalism, a movement that, at best, approximates the essence of what is a cosmic principle manifest in individual human life and in history. Thus, one may see Wariboko as building a conception of transformation as a central theme of his thought.

His construction of an idea of creatively transformative potential in the intersection between the human being and the cosmos, "the womblike chaos of the creative process", as Wariboko describes his own creativity in The Pentecostal Principle, is a cosmological conception also evident in classical African thought, best known in terms of the Yoruba concept “ase”, and, exemplified in Wariboko’s oeuvre particularly by related ideations in Kalabari philosophy, which he discusses in detail in The Depth and Destiny of Work: : An African Theological Interpretation and Ethics and Time: Ethos of Temporal Orientation in Politics and Religion in the Niger Delta.

Recurring across various books of Wariboko's is the understanding of Kalabari philosophy as providing a graphic cartography of relationships between human potential and its actualization within the framework of time and space, experienced in relation to an overarching divine plenitude of possibility, conceptions also imperative in the conception of the opening of ever unfolding creative possibility which Wariboko understands as the Pentecostal principle.

Using this polyphonic strategy, a unity of vision across multiple themes is developed. There emerges a unified complexity of perception demonstrating the simplicity and beauty of an eyeball, qualities enabled by an underlying, miraculous intricacy reaching deep into the evolutionary history of humanity that enabled such a wonderful organ of observation, qualities provoking questions about the implications of awareness and the developmental routes through which it has grown in its distinctive human form, enquiries that could be taken further in terms of investigations of how perception could further develop in the unfolding maturation of the human race, in a world in which the synthetic human, a combination of organic and inorganic forms, is described as a growing reality, as highlighted by scientific cosmologist Martin Rees.

Consonant with this depiction of the body of knowledge built by Wariboko’s work in terms of the intricate power of the primary human organ of perception, the eye, a conjunction evocative of the complex network of ideational roots related to this association, illuminating the intricacies of human development as a distinctive species, navigating the cognitive terrain defined by Wariboko’s polyphonic construction of themes, his enfolding and unfolding of ideations within dynamic networks, to adapt his self-description on his Amazon page, thus becomes a voyage of exploration in which new and previously discussed ideas emerge in spiral constellations.

The recurrent discovery of preceding ideas in a new light and new ideas presented in relation to previously elaborated conceptions is like J.R.R. Tolkien’s evocation of the delights of adventurous walking in The Lord of the Rings, in which “round the corner there may wait/A new road or a secret gate”, vistas delightfully opening into new themes in the context of recapitulation, in new perspectives, of themes encountered in other works.

The entire ideational ensemble takes on the form of a great river leading to a magnificent destination, a journey all the more sublime for having begun, for example, from a brief but profoundly evocative encounter with Wariboko’s visualisation of the inspirational convergence of natural beauty and scholarship through the image of himself working in the voluptuous naturescape of his home in Massachusetts, as in the beginning of Nigerian Pentecostalism, an expedition taking one through his foundational, transformative worship experience with the people of the displaced Maroko community in Lagos, as described in The Pentecostal Principle and The Split God, to engaging with loftily powerful ideas about creating beauty and the possibility of awe in urban planning in The Charismatic City to seeking a principle that unifies all creative possibility in The Pentecostal Principle and The Depth and Destiny of Work, to reflecting on the role and potential of money and the global economic mechanisms that sustain it in God and Money, the voyager constantly drinking of the sweet waters of the great river, as, from time to time, the enabling intelligence of that aquatic body gestures to the effect that the river is flowing towards a sea, the sea of infinity, in the spirit of Isaac Newton, discoverer of the law of universal gravitation and the laws of motion, co-creator of the mathematical field of calculus, a pioneer in optics, among other foundational achievements enabling modern science, one of, if not the greatest scientist in history, describing himself as like a child picking pebbles on the seashore, and from time to time finding one shinier than the others, “while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me”, a perspective, which, incidentally, Wariboko resonates with in The Charismatic City:

“Truth is ultimately about the existence of Absolute Infinity. All that a truth procedure … can do is to put us on a path between potential infinities and actual infinities as we approach the rationally unknowable, unconceivable Absolute Infinity.”

Image above

“Good Morning, Sunrise (detail)

Victor Ekpuk, b. 1964, Nigeria

Collection of the artist

2001

Acrylic on canvas

Victor Ekpuk's art is dedicated to manipulating scripts and graphic symbols. His drawings, paintings and digital images are abuzz with language. The artist employs invented script as well as signs from Nigeria's ideographic system nsibidi to create richly textured works. In this painting, the spiral is an nsibidi sign meaning journey, but it also suggests the sun and eternity. Ekpuk's strong palette of warm reds, deep blacks, cool blues and whites contributes to the overall sense of animation”.

Text and image source : “Nsibidi” at the website Inscribing Meaning : Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art by the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art .

The thematic landscape of Wariboko’s work constitutes a spiral, an enfolding and unfolding of ideas in pursuit of infinity, alive with a keen sensitivity to the joy of living and its transformative potential, a creative force dramatized in the dialogue between the human being and nature in its vibrant colours.

Dynamic Expression

Another quality of Wariboko’s work I find inspiring is the fact that it operates in terms of different but complementary expressive registers, at times combining the celebratory and playful with the sublime. His philosophy often demonstrates the prose, and, at times, the poetic version of John Milton’s depiction of the poet “soaring in the high regions of his [creations] with his garlands and singing robes about him”.

His writings operate at times in terms of an imagistically robust exuberance of language and often in an elevated purity of expression bristling with luminous ideas projected through muscularity of logic, as if seeking to develop, at the apex of the mind, a version of the divine intelligence that is the core of his vocation and his life, vocation understood as “The orientation of a person’s life and work in terms of their ultimate sense of mission” as defined by Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language.

As I immerse myself within the river generated by his grappling with powerful ideas, there emerge flashes of lightning illuminating the magnificent conceptual landscape, chains of ideation stretching into a distance where they disappear into the depths of the horizon even as they illuminate connections between large masses of cerebration, facilitating the development of even more expansive structures through the reconfiguring illumination, cognitive constructs stretching into the joining together of massive land masses, integrating those I have been carrying with me for years with the shapes generated by the thinker who has travelled from Abonnema, in Nigeria's Niger Delta, to reside in Massachusetts, in the United States.

Wariboko's writing can be powerfully imagistic, celebrating the beauty of nature in vivid images strikingly appealing to the senses. His expression can also be richly conceptual, but often without immersion in language so specialized it is beyond the non-specialist. In engaging with his writing in that tenor, close attention enables attunement with the rhythm of his exposition and the topography of the conceptual world in which he is operating in and contributing to. In trying to explain what one finds appealing about such a writer, then, one has to be careful not to substitute an opaque sophistication for an effort to bring closer to one's readers the ideas one is dealing with.

Wariboko's writing can be playful and sublime at the same time. Rich in the use of paradox which yet proves deeply stimulating of understanding when one appreciates his style of thinking and expression. A lot of the time he delights in creatively playing with ideas. His joy, his food, is in engaging with ideations, teasing out their possibilities, wrestling with them, matching mental strength for mental strength in dialogue with the cognitive currents represented by conceptions others have created as well as the sheer joy in constructing and expressing his own mental engineering in superbly crafted sentences often rich with twisting ideational roots emerging from a monstrosity of reading demonstrated by dynamically busy footnotes or end-notes.

I used the expression “monstrosity of reading”, indicating something significantly or far outside the pale of the conventional, such as encountering a 10 foot tall person in the street. I ask myself where and how is he finding all these books to read? How does one get to be so learned?

Nimi Wariboko's galaxy of ideations created through years of relentless thought, study and expression are a monument of scholarly possibility, a pointer to the discipline and consistency, the interdisciplinary cross-fertilization, and the striving after perfection of expression, vital to great scholarship.

Image above

Olu Amoda’s amazing Corner Eye II made in 2016 of repurposed welded nails, 200-x-200-x-25-cm. Its inclusion in this essay is inspired by the sculpture’s intricate meshing of thousands of metal fibres in reflecting the complexity of the human eye in the latter’s ordering of thousands of nerves activating the effectiveness of the three concentric circles, the pupil, the iris and the cornea, that make up the eye.

The intricacy of the eye and the elaborate processes through which it interprets light signals are paralleled by the ideational systems constructed by thinkers through interaction with phenomena, demonstrating what they have learnt and the procedures through which they hope to gain more knowledge.

The dense mesh of wires constructed by Olu Amoda may be understood in relation to Wariboko’s adventurous navigation amongst richly intricate webs of ideas, fashioning something unique out of diverse materials, as Amoda has created an image of a central organ of perception through refashioning nails, a parable of perception as physical and imaginative, the physical eye visualised in terms of an imaginative construct.

Wariboko is an imaginative thinker, a person who strives to construct knowledge through the integration and distillation of diverse bodies of thought filtered through a dense network of scholarly interlocutors, in the understanding of knowledge as generated through the creative activity of people rather than being a given of reality.

Amoda’s constellation of perception hangs in space, wires running from centre to circumference and from circumference to centre in a demonstration of the ubiquity of concentric circles in nature and symbolic expression, these referential conjunctions in this instance evocative of the expansion and contraction of awareness that enables the rhythm of being as understood in some schools of Hinduism, such as the thought of Abhinavagupta on the Twelve Kalis, exploring how the permutations of the Goddess Kali dramatize the various phases of cosmic being and becoming, discussed in my “Unifying Empirical and Mythic Thought: Human Consciousness and the Twelve Kalis in Hinduism”.

Religious and philosophical thought is at times an effort to peer into the self-consciousness of an ultimate divine identity. Is success in such an initiative possible? The effort of the time bound human mind to perceive eternity with the eye of God, Michael Knowles remarks of the limitations of an aspect of St. Augustine of Hippo’s conception of human/divine relations in an Encyclopaedia Britannica article on Augustine.

May the divine intelligence see itself through the creative work of a Wariboko? To what degree can the human effort represented by such an oeuvre integrate the scope of divine intelligence? Are such efforts no more than grass beside the reality of the transcendent Other they seek to probe, as is stated of Thomas Aquinas’ final vision, upon which he left his monumental Summa Theologica, Summation of Theology, unfinished?

The human being is directed towards that which cannot be controlled in knowledge, the consummation of knowing that comes to itself when it is with the unknowable One, declares Karl Rahner on being asked what is "the centre of your theology?”, concluding, “the true system of thought...is the system of what cannot be systematized”, in S.J.Donovan’s interview “Living into Mystery: Karl Rahner’s Reflections at Seventy-five.”

“Truth is ultimately about the existence of Absolute Infinity. All that a truth procedure … can do is to put us on a path between potential infinities and actual infinities as we approach the rationally unknowable, unconceivable Absolute Infinity. But … we can only find partial truths that satisfy the truth of the Absolute Infinity”-Nimi Wariboko. The Charismatic City.

The great writer Giambattista Marino in Jorge Louis Borges’ “The Yellow Rose”, looking at a rose as he lay on his deathbed:

“saw the rose , as Adam had seen it in Paradise, and he realized that it lay within its own eternity, not within his words, and that we might speak about the rose, allude to it, but never truly express it, and that the tall, haughty volumes that made a golden dimness in the corner of his room were not (as his vanity had dreamed them) a mirror of the world, but just another thing added to the world’s contents.

Marino achieved that epiphany on the eve of his death, and Homer and Dante may have achieved it as well”.

Homer and Dante, two of the greatest writers in the Western tradition, are referenced here in terms that suggest their works, Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey and Dante’s Divine Comedy, as individualistic dramatizations of a comprehensive vision of the world as perceived in their societies, the ancient Greece of Homer and the medieval Europe of Dante.

Themes within themes, unfolding, refolding, enfolding and energizing, as Wariboko describes his exploratory strategy in his late 2017 CV.

Image above

Gasson Hall spires, Boston College in Massachusetts, Wariboko's home, photographed by Caitlin Mann, in majestic balance with the radiance of the sky aflame with the fires of the setting sun. Biophilia, sensitivity to the beauty of nature, is central to the philosophy of Nimi Wariboko, as demonstrated by his accounts of his intimate experiences with nature in the magnificent first paragraph of the acknowledgements pages of his book Nigerian Pentecostalism and the acknowledgements pages of The Split God and in his extensive development of this theme as a central value of urban design in The Charismatic City.

His manner of demonstrating this orientation suggests affinities with the Christocentric nature spirituality of St. Francis of Assisi, as represented by his "Canticle of Creatures", where he salutes all primary elements of existence, from the sun to death, as brothers and sisters, to the depiction of delight in the senses as portals for entry into the source of existence by the Hindu school of Trika Shaivism exemplified by Ksemaraja and Abhinavagupta to Western nature spirituality, from the Neoplatonism of Plotinus to the theology of St. Bonaventura in his Journey of the Mind to God and Western Romantic and Symbolist movements, to the animistic spiritualities represented by modern Western Paganism and classical African, Native and South American thought, among others. Wariboko's understandings may be positioned in relation to these differing but correlative approaches to nature sensitivity, thereby highlighting the distinctiveness of his own awareness in relation to these biophilic brethren.

The Trika Shaivite confluence is particularly relevant because it resonates with Wariboko's work at the double levels represented, first, by a shared biophilia. The second is an incidental conjunction between both cognitive schemes in terms of forms of recognition of concealed possibilities of reality. Trika Shaivism describes biophilia, among other sensory perceptions, as a means of realizing the goal of the school's philosophy of Pratyabhijna, the Doctrine of Recognition of the human self and the Self at the heart of being as a unified identity. Wariboko adapts, in the biophilic opening of the acknowledgments pages of Nigerian Pentecostalism, Paul's development of a hermeneutic of recognition between the human and the divine self in his Biblical "Letter to the Corinthians". I shall examine these correlations in a later essay, an expanded form of the forthcoming shorter version named "Imaginative Thought and Expression in the Philosophy of Nimi Wariboko : The Garden of Transformation".

Biophilia, Cosmopophilia, Cosmophilia, Awephilia

In addition to the emergence of a principle of transformation at the conjunction of cosmic and human reality, four other themes I find particularly engaging emerging from the musical rhythm of Wariboko’s thematic patterning are biophilia, love of nature, what I name cosmopophilia, identification with the extensive demographic, cultural economic and technological concentrations and networks represented by the cosmopolis, cosmophilia, love of the totality of being, understood in a cosmic context, and awephilia, a term developed by Wariboko summing up his understanding of an ideal in urban design, the creation of environments that inspire awe at the miracle of being, the conjunction of myriads of seemingly accidental factors in enabling the fact of existence and its expression in consciousness within the materiality represented by space, time, embodiment and the orientation towards aspects of being that transcend these categorizations, a dynamism giving birth to the creative restlessness that defines humanity.

These concepts are particularly prominent in The Charismatic City, but they resonate, at various levels of intensity, across his work. This metropolitan thematic is Wariboko’s contribution to the motif of the human density and social dynamism of the city as evocative of the unity and development of the human species, an idea introduced to Western thought by Augustine of Hippo’s 5th century The City of God and resonating in relation to Harvey Cox’s 20th century The Secular City, the latter work having influenced Wariboko, his own 21st century book being a counterpoint to that by Cox.

Biophilia was popularized by the work of biologist Edward Wilson, whose focus was on living forms. It seems to have been expanded to refer to human identification with nature in general, and rightly so, since organic existence is impossible without the inorganic and some of humanity's greatest expressions of identification with nature are not centred in the organic, or on systems that support life, such as the centrality of sand and rocks in creating a sense of numinous peace in Japanese rock gardening, even when organic forms, such as plants or life supporting systems, such as water, may also feature in the composition, key examples of this being the garden of Ryōan-ji, in which “rock formations arranged amidst a sweep of smooth pebbles [are] raked into linear patterns that facilitate meditation”, the garden of Daisen-in in which a “river” of gravel flowing into an “ocean" constituted by a sequence of white gravel “takes visitors on a metaphorical journey through life” and the garden of Ginkaku-ji which “features a replica of Mount Fuji [ the most famous in Japan] made of gravel, in a gravel sea”, as stated at the Wikipedia essays on these subjects hyperlinked above.

Cosmopophilia is the love of cosmopolitan environments, environments described by Wikipedia on the cosmopolitanism as an urban community "where people of various ethnic, cultural and/or religious backgrounds live in proximity and interact with each other". This love is demonstrated in identification with the qualities that define cosmopolitan existence as a distinctive development of humanity.

From his history as an economist who has worked in the global financial centre, New York’s Wall Street, and in the financial nexus of Lagos, the commercial hub of the most highly populated African country and one of the most dynamic African economies, as well as being educated and working across international contexts in the cosmopolitan cities of Port Harcourt, New York, Princeton and Boston, doing a lot of his writing in airports and in flight between cities where he gives lectures, Wariboko has developed a rich affinity for the implications of these demographic aggregations as demonstrations of human potential through their large concentrations of creatively busy people, their maximization of division of labour and the high level development of commercial and cultural activity in such locations. He engages in depth with the characteristics of consciousness exemplified by the cosmopolis particularly as this relates to globalization and the correlation between the dynamism suggested by the cosmopolis and the dynamism manifest in the cosmos, a human/nature/divine conjunction of which the human being is a focus, perspectives evident in his oeuvre from The Charismatic City to God and Money.

In Cosmopolitanism, Anthony Appiah recalls the origin of the term “cosmopolitan” in the notion of “cosmos”, in which “cosmopolitan” meant “a citizen of the cosmos”, in contrast to the current narrowing of the term to indicate the expansive but earth bound conception of intercultural and international networks. Along similar lines, Wariboko's cosmopophilia expands into cosmophilia, which Duane Elgin describes this way at Gritfish.com: Materials to Create a Sustainable Future:

“We can expand the feeling of connection and appreciation of life (biophilia) to the entire cosmos—a word that was first used by the Greek philosopher Pythagoras to describe our universe as a living embodiment of nature’s order, harmony, and beauty. Building on the concept of biophilia, we can create the word cosmophilia. Cosmophilia describes the kinship and affiliation we feel with the totality of nature and our experience of felt connection with the harmony and beauty of our universe”.

Wariboko’s imagistic summation of the character of the city in The Charismatic City suggests this cosmicising impetus:

“…the hieroglyphic symbol for the city is a cross within a circle. The cross represents flows and convergences of people, ideas, products, and roads. The circle represents the borders/boundaries within which human lives can flourish. Together they represent communication and togetherness, as Robert S. Lopez interprets the symbol.”

Placing this image within a global map of symbols, it may be seen as mobilizing Christian and non-Christian contexts where the same visual form occurs, deployed to serve symbolic ends similar to those of Wariboko's. The central point of conjunction between these diverse but correlative expressions is the idea of convergence represented by the intersection of horizontal and vertical lines, an intersection that may represent various orders of reality, from the material and mental dimensions highlighted by Wariboko to the convergence of matter and spirit evident in Benin Olokun cosmography as described by Norma Rosen in “Chalk Iconography in Olokun Worship”, Ifa iconography as presented in John Pemberton et al’s Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, and the classical cosmologies of Dahomey and of the Diaspora African religion Voodoo as discussed in Leslie Desmangles’ “African Interpretations of theChristian Cross in Vodun ”, to the symbolism of the Christian cross and the native American Medicine Wheel, the circle bounding the intersecting lines suggestive of the zone of enablement of the possibilities represented by the lines, a ground of possibility ranging from Lopez’ descriptions of borders as referenced by Wariboko to a cosmic and eternal context, as described, for example, by Ifalaloa Sanchez on the symbolism of the Yoruba origin cognitive system, Ifa, at his blog Ifa Today, Ifa Yesterday, Ifa Tomorrow.

​The conception of the Charismatic City developed by Wariboko is a creation inspired by cosmopophilia, integrating biophilia, awephilia, and cosmophilia. This understanding privileges the potential of the demographic density of the city as a place to meet new people and form friendships, ideally across economic borders, even as the city, through striving after economic justice by those who run it, facilitates human self-development and enablement regardless of the initial capacity of the individuals and groups that constitute its community, thereby opening one to new experiences, new possibilities of fulfilment and self-actualisation.

Such an environment is enhanced by the cultivation of inspiring natural spaces that facilitate relaxation, promote interaction by providing convenient and stimulating places for people to meet and stimulate deep sensitivity to the beauty and power of existence. The natural and social connectedness facilitated by the structuring of these spaces could be amplified through architectural and artistic forms that provoke a sense of the potent force of human creativity, perhaps even evoking a sense of the numinous, a very rich concept, defined by Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, in the spirit of the elaboration of this idea by Rudolph Otto in The Idea of the Holy, as “ an invisible but majestic presence that inspires both dread and fascination and constitutes the non-rational element of vital religion”.

Wariboko’s summation of the cosmophilic potential of this ideal in The Charismatic City is rhapsodic and exhilarating, a majestic statement on being and becoming:

“The truth of a city is the working out of possibilities [the link between potentialities and actuality, Wariboko states] that forever cannot arrive at the ultimate possibility, the possibility of all possibilities, the ultimate truth.

….

Truth is ultimately about the existence of Absolute Infinity. All that a truth procedure…can do is to put us on a path … as we approach the rationally unknowable, unconceivable Absolute Infinity. But … we can only find partial truths that satisfy the truth of the Absolute Infinity. The city is a place to quest for the truth of human existence.”

Many cities demonstrate some of the qualities highlighted by Wariboko. When the pursuit of these goals in their totality across all sectors of the city becomes the central motive force of urban planning, we are moving towards the actualization of the Charismatic City, that space through which the spirit that enables existence may be more keenly felt, an ideal that may be transposed across all human communities, even beyond the urban.

Experiencing the Charismatic City

Image above: Joseph Ohomina, my Benin teacher of the Yoruba cognitive system, Ifa and his wife, against the background of St. Benet’s church, Cambridge, England.

“The Charismatic City…is not one city, it is a thousand or more cities…scattered across the world from London to Buenos Aires, from New York to New Delhi, and Rome to Lagos.

It is a merging of … individuals, their activities, life patterns, and networks…across territories, encompassing, transcending, and linking countries into deterritorialized, transnational communities. Religious force fields that span borders, connecting nations, transcommunities, and home and abroad”-Nimi Wariboko, The Charismatic City.

My experience of the Charismatic City emerges from living in Nigeria’s Benin-City and in Cambridge, England. Benin introduced me to the experience of awephilia through the culture of keeping ancient sacred trees and groves intact at various points of the city. My initiation into aspects of being accessible only to an unconventional deepening of vision was made possible through the stimulation from the unique form of energy concentrated at such locations, a force that might have led them to their being designated sacred in the first place. I later encountered the same form of power in Cambridge, particularly in the oldest church in that city, St. Benet’s where prayer has been said every morning and evening for centuries, perhaps contributing to or generating that force that has such a sense of the quietly numinous on the human mind.

Cambridge and Benin proved providential for the making of strategic friendships enabled by the distinctive qualities of those cities. Cambridge through its superlative culture of public lectures, Benin through its immense development of its classical religions.

Both cities also enabled ease of access to those qualities which I found most inspiring about them, Benin’s classical religions and the University of Cambridge’s public lectures being readily accessible to the public. Both cities, in their own ways, provided a nexus for books of various kinds, Benin bookshops introducing me to knowledge cultures fundamental to shaping my cognitive universe and the magnificent scholarly book culture of Cambridge enabling cognitive expansions that would not be possible in other contexts.

Intimate Advocacy

Living Thought Speaking to Live Human Experience

Beyond these large themes executed at the scale of the cosmopolis and the cosmos, Wariboko’s formulations can speak in intimate ways to the human heart and mind.

In The Split God: Pentecostalism and Critical Theory, he introduces this more intimate and personalistic aspect of his philosophical aspirations:

“I was once part of a Pentecostal church in Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria, that had neither roof nor walls—and we were exposed to the tropical sunshine or rain as we worshiped Jesus as Lord. Real, useable theologies issued from the tongues, bodies, cries and moans, and testimonies and celebrations of the hard-bitten followers of Christ in that place.

How do we capture or retrieve the theologies in such small places? … chapter 7 offers a brief discussion on what I call microtheology. Microtheology is an interpretative analysis of everyday embodied theological interactions and agency at the individual, face-to-face level. It is a study of everyday social interactions of individuals or small groups that demonstrate the linkages between spirituality (practices and affections) and embodied theological ideas (beliefs).”

Further on in the text, he continues:

“Microtheology’s focus on the small, beautiful, and ugly mundane actions enables the scholar to observe how life interpreted at the deepest level percolates up as subtle acts of everyday existence. Microtheology reveals how humans’ concern with the ultimate works its ways into concrete acts. The tiny, minute acts become a window into an embodied interpretation of ultimate concern, existential questions, or theological apparatuses.

Microtheology seeks to create a space within theology…by identifying the subtle ways, the motility of small acts, disparities, and the small errors that give birth to the practices and reflection we call the everyday form of theology. It opposes itself to the search for definite contours that mark shifting or final boundaries of theological discourse. Microtheology originates in the present and speaks into the present.”

Lines from J. R. R. Tolkien’s poem on inspiring walking in The Lord of the Rings may serve our purpose here. Having entered on the road from one’s front door that symbolises all roads, all possibilities of existence understood as paths of action and perception:

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began

Now far ahead the road has gone

And I must follow it if I can

…

But not yet weary are our feet

Still round the corner we may meet

A sudden tree or standing stone

That none have seen but we alone.

As I read Wariboko’s work, I increasingly see myself inside it. I encounter sudden trees and standing stones that none have seen but me alone, ideas open to everyone but whose significance reveal themselves to me in relation to my uniquely intimate experience. Conceptions tentatively gestating in my mind for years are nourished by his own bold constructions that share some affinity with abstractions resting in my consciousness, half buried in soil, and, like a plant exposed to sustaining sunlight, my own tentatively growing mentations gather strength, like a child putting on weight and height through wholesome food.

I am also progressively able to appreciate how the cognitions he expounds, shining like diamonds or like stars in elevated glory above the earth, relate even to my intimate experiences and observations of life. The Principles of Excellence includes these delights:

“Grace could supply the impulse to keep an existing relationship open, to touch and re-feel the jagged threads of a broken relationship and to transcend them and take them along to an ever bigger encompassing whole”.

I find this moving, not only because of its musical rhythm, its poetic cadence, but because of my experience of the challenges of harmonizing mind, heart and body in relating with fellow humans. Such relationships may, in some strategic situations, require more to nourish them than a human being can provide by themselves, so one might need to wait in expectation for a factor beyond their powers to help repair or save the situation or show the way forward.

Negative perceptions may have been developed, injuring the health of the relationship, wounding expressions may have been used that are difficult to move beyond, yet, beyond the confusion and pain some hope might still shine. How does one step over the shards of hurt, the poison of negativity and embrace the more wholesome possibilities glowing ahead?

Apologies for using metaphors instead of expressing myself plainly since I am trying to explain how an idea is real for me as life experience. In the absence of divulging one's intimate experiences in public, one could use metaphors as I am doing.

The earlier quote is complemented by this one from The Pentecostal Principle : "Grace expresses the hidden potentials of a situation, existence, or life as well as transcends them".

Don’t people often hope to see beyond the circumstances in which they are encased at particular moments? To grasp possibilities beyond their conventional awareness, to make a leap of consciousness opening vistas of value that can reshape their lives so they may walk high on mountains, looking down on the panorama of living as they direct their affairs in a manner expressive of self-actualization or cooperate with creative flows evocative of Shakespeare’s description of the tides of fortune that boost a person’s efforts leading to realisations of grand dreams, rather than walking in the lowlands of possibility, bogged down by circumstance?

That aspiration is a cry for grace of the kind described in Wariboko’s lines about sensitivity to the hidden potentials of a situation as well as to the transcendence of that situation.

How may a person achieve this, how could one open oneself to it? Prayer, work, preparation, in the spirit of the saying that fortune favours the prepared mind?

Another inspiring quote from The Principles of Excellence:

“The rhythms of grace that individuals take as their sources of existences and progress through life can make them say, 'the law and order is made for humans and not humans for law and order' and thus produce a fitting response in a moment of acute uncertainty and harsh fear. In our daily encounters with the other we may need this kind of grace so that as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, we would not devote our gaze and energy to order rather than to justice”.

This reminds me of the painful experiences of immigrants in Europe where I have lived. Hoping against hope to defeat ever tightening immigration laws. Those lines also resonate with Wariboko's experience as a pastor in a Pentecostal church in New York significantly populated by African immigrants. He was Born Again, a Pentecostal initiation into Christianity, at a church among the displaced members of Nigeria's Maroko community engaged in constant battle for their rights with the Nigerian government who had brutally displaced them. He is an economist keenly sensitive to the marginalization of some populations within globalization while empowering others, life experiences and related perceptions described in his Nigerian Pentecostalism and Split God, in Mark Gornik’s Word Made Global: Stories of African Christianity in New York, Wariboko being one of the pastors extensively discussed in the book, and insights evident in his work on economics and social justice, so the struggle of populations weakened by the levers of state power are live in his consciousness.

Another striking formulation from the same book:

“We need it so that moral (or is it immoral?) human in immoral society will not prefer a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

This is the story everywhere people are challenged to struggle for a better society. Does one concentrate on one's limited existence, challenging as that is, rather than try to move beyond it to address inadequacies in society? Why not enjoy the peace you have and leave disturbing social issues to others? These are questions that shape many minds and lifestyles, whether consciously or subconsciously.

Image above

Wariboko is a philosopher of the cosmopolis, exploring its human and financial flows, its dynamisms of power and inequality, its reflection of the configurations that define global society, as he projects perspectives on how human aggregations within space and time but ultimately grounded in eternity may be best developed to promote human well-being.

The picture directly above is of a busy Boston street incidentally evoking the human dynamism and its suggestion of cosmic dynamism central to Wariboko's work, from Toyin Falola's Flickr album commemorating Wariboko's assumption of the Walter G. Muelder Professorship of Social Ethics, Boston University School of Theology.