Ecologies of Ecstasy: Mysticism, Philosophy, and Vegetal Life

What might religious practice learn from plants? Recent years have seen the emergence of critical plant studies, and philosophers have found a radical mode of thought in vegetal life. Ecologies of Ecstasy recasts religious contemplation as a form of vegetal being, arguing that spiritual practice is rooted in the generation of life on earth. Simone Kotva explores the role of vegetal life in the history of Christian mysticism and the practice of contemplation, demonstrating its significance to the concept of mystical union, which rests on the loss of distinction between self and world. She shows that plants, animals, and other creatures were once understood to exist by virtue of contemplation and examines how religious orthodoxies suppressed this idea. Ecologies of Ecstasy provides fresh readings of texts by figures such as Plotinus, Evagrius of Pontus, Hildegard of Bingen, Marguerite of Porete, the Helfta mystics, and Jeanne Guyon in light of contemporary philosophies of vegetal life and critical plant studies. It brings together feminist, queer, and ecocritical readings of Christian mysticism with continental philosophy and the works of Michael Marder, Emanuele Coccia, and Luce Irigaray. Entwining Christian contemplation with philosophies of vegetal life, this book offers new ways to understand mysticism and spiritual practice.

About the Author :
Simone Kotva is senior lecturer in the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion at the University of Gothenburg. She is the author of Effort and Grace: On the Spiritual Exercise of Philosophy (2020).

Review :
Up from the earthy ground of Simone Kotva’s contemplative ecology grows an enlivening entanglement of plant theory and mystical practice. Tapping such unlikely roots as Plotinus, Kotva does not just trace a deep, startlingly earthy theological history of vegetal contemplation but also grows a vibrant green hybrid of Christian mysticism and the plant life of our planet. May this via vegativa open fresh vistas of ecological healing. This is a brave and wonderful book, a return to the ancient understanding of philosophy as spiritual exercises that blossoms, almost literally, into an understanding of our spiritual unity with all creaturely life. Richly resourced and imaginatively conceived, this book shows us how much we can learn, as did our predecessors in spiritual direction, by attending to all living and growing things—and especially to plants. More and more thinkers are coming to the conclusion that our whole approach to thinking itself needs a radical reconstruction—one that foregrounds our connection with the rest of the material world and recovers the centrality of contemplative rather than instrumentalizing habits of seeing. Simone Kotva's beautiful and ambitious book offers a luminous vision of how we might address this. In Ecologies of Ecstasy, Simone Kotva opens a space where mysticism and vegetal being converge. This is a work of rare sensitivity and philosophical courage, one that lets contemplation take root in the soil of shared plant life through thinking that breathes, grows, and blossoms beyond the limits of the self. A book to dwell with and to let germinate in one’s own practice of attention.