Science, Religion, and the Human Experience

modernity and the mystical 67

24. On the resonance of Eriugena et al. inFinnegans Wake, see my essay “And
    Maker Mates with Made: World- and Self-Creation in Eriugena and Joyce,” inSecular
    Theology: American Radical Theological Thought, ed. Clayton Crockett (New York: Rout-
    ledge, 2001).


25. Stafford,Devices, 114.


26. Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in
    the Shadow of September,”Harper’s, December 2001, 37.


27. For a fine discussion of divine self-creation in Eriugena, see Don Duclow,
    “Divine Nothingness and Self-Creation in John Scotus Eriugena,” inJournal of Reli-
    gion57.2 (April 1977).


28. Whether in the unexpectedly modern vision of a medieval mystic like Eri-
    ugena or in the strikingly mystical vision of a late-modern like James Joyce, in both
    directions we might locate a quasi-Hegelian conception of world and history as the
    self-embodiment and self-education of rational Spirit—but a conception that also fun-
    damentally unsettles the secure self-grounding and the final self-comprehension of
    the rationality that fully recollects or comprehends itself in Hegel’s Absolute Knowing
    (see, e.g.,Phenomenology of Spirit, sect. 808).


29. Mark C. Taylor,Hiding(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 273.


30. Ibid., 325.


31. Mark C. Taylor,The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture(Chi-
    cago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 231.


32. Taylor,Moment, 230.


33. Taylor,Moment, 230. In a fairly unexpected way, Taylor’s understanding of
    mind in terms of distribution can seem, from a technophilic perspective, to resemble
    the conception of mind that Wendell Berry elaborates from a more technophobic per-
    spective. See, for example, Berry’sLife Is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Supersti-
    tion(Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000), 48–49: “To have one mind you have
    got to have at least two (and undoubtedly many more) and a world. We could call this
    the Adam and Eve theory of the mind. The correct formula, in fact, is more like this:
    mind
    brainbodyworldlocal dwelling placecommunityhistory....
    Mind in this definition has become hard to locate in an organ, organism, or place. It
    has become an immaterial presence or possibility that is capable of being embodied
    and placed.”


34. Taylor,Moment, 230.


35. Taylor,Moment, 230.


36. Taylor,Moment, 230–231.


37. Taylor,Moment, 231.


38. In this direction, both Taylor and Hayles can be seen to extend the insights
    that Donna Haraway brings to her much discussed analysis of the “cyborg.” See espe-
    cially “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
    Twentieth Century,” in Haraway,Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Na-
    ture(New York: Routledge, 1991).


39. N. Katherine Hayles,How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernet-
    ics, Literature, and Informatics(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 288.


40. Hayles,Posthuman, 288.


41. Hayles,Posthuman, 288.