Timothy Morton, Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology

Abstract

In Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, Timothy Morton takes the question of our future coexistence with each other and with nonhumans into the “absolute contingency of a genuinely future future” (lii). A self-professed “dark ecologist” who grew up in the 1980s on a combination of acid house, Star Wars, Monty Python, and William Blake, they bring the counterepistemological sensibility of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Songs of Innocence and of Experience to bear on our situation. It is high time. Blake has often been celebrated as an inimitable poet and painter whose vision of “a Heaven in a Wild Flower” (E 490) expands as much out of quantum-tangled indeterminacy as enraptured beauty, but Hell is perhaps the first book to apply that vision to the climate emergency, inviting us to see beyond the iron jaws of the future closing around us.