Calvyn Clarence du Toit

This chapter explores Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and its philosophical foundations and implications for spirituality. Building on previous discussions of Latour and Meillassoux, the text examines how OOO provides an alternative to both onto-theology and onto-consciousness by placing objects at the center of metaphysics. The chapter begins by analyzing Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy as an important precursor, then explores Harman’s innovative reading of Heidegger’s tool analysis and its extension to all objects. Key concepts, including undermining, overmining, duomining, and justified (un)true belief, are examined to demonstrate how objects withdraw from complete access while manifesting themselves in various ways. The chapter culminates with Timothy Morton’s concept of hyper-objects—entities massively distributed in time and space that humans encounter only through their local manifestations—showing how this perspective generates both ethical and esthetic challenges. Throughout, the text demonstrates how OOO offers rich resources for reconceptualizing spirituality beyond traditional metaphysical frameworks, suggesting a “second naivete” that acknowledges both the reality of objects beyond human access and the mystery inherent in object-object relations.

Bernard Stiegler depicts technics as the human's tertiary memory retention generating a pharmakon with both curative and malignant potential. He additionally rues the posthuman epoch's depletion of a 'time of the question': revealed in the prevalent inaptitude for wisdom -scilicet long-term acuity. We offer Christian liturgy as an abeyant psychotechnique arcing the current pharmakon to cure through soliciting a 'time of the question'. Rejuvenating Christian liturgy as a psychotechnique can bolster a broader societal 'time of the question'. Firstly, we describe technic's du jour mise on scène. Secondly, we constrain Christian liturgies as complex systems incorporating malleability, temporality, and instability. Thirdly, we imagine Christian liturgy as empty tradition allowing amateur repetition of ancient art enticing a 'time of the question'.

Building on a previous contribution on “negative capability” as a non-directive but actively searching and highly influential style of leadership, this paper investigates aspects of the concept of simplicity and its relation to leadership. As management literature has recognised of late, simplicity as a spiritual orientation to life has deep historical roots and various dimensions. One predictable response to simplicity as orientation points to societies invariable complexity. Hence organisations, companies, and almost all human social systems defy attempts at effortless, simplistic illumination. However, niche building within complex systems allow leaders and managers influence. Such influence either aligns interdependent parts of a complex system or distorts the illusions of cheap harmony within it. Here, in these niches, insights and practices of simplicity cultivated in various spirituality traditions may fruitfully be employed. Such insights and practices might steer groups and entities, always awash in entropy, towards coherence, constrained action and consistence. Thus, neither social system’s complexity nor their entropy are denied or disingenuously reinterpreted. Rather, they are acknowledged and valued as key operational kernels giving structural stability, strategic progress and conceptual clarity to the whole. In this manner, simplicity contributes not only to the resilience organisations and companies but also to sense-making amongst people involved, namely as a dimension of experiencing fulfilment in life. Examples are provided, and spheres of applicability indicated.

This chapter proposes “Object Spirituality” as a framework that transcends both premodern onto-theology and modern onto-consciousness approaches to spiritual phenomena. The author traces their scholarly journey from initially conceptualizing spirituality as a public force through complexity theory to recognizing the limitations of anthropocentric models. Object Spirituality emerges as an alternative that acknowledges objects as fundamentally unknowable yet communicative through mediating “angels” or messengers that translate between entities. Neither returning to supernatural metaphysics nor remaining trapped in human projection, this approach understands spirituality as emerging through relations between objects rather than being imposed from above or projected from within. The framework is applied to contemporary challenges, including artificial general intelligence ethics and climate change, ultimately advocating for a “terrestrial” orientation that recognizes humans as “living rocks” already inscribing themselves into geological history. This perspective fosters a spirituality grounded in material reality while maintaining openness to mystery—one that replaces the pursuit of absolute truth with justified belief and careful accounting of our embeddedness in networks of objects that exceed our full comprehension.

The chapter plunges into the intricate waters of premodern metaphysics, exploring the contours and reverberations of onto-theology—a landscape suffused with divine omnipresence, yet paradoxically entrapped by its own expansive ambition. It traces how the divine saturated premodern existence, ordering reality into hierarchies of transcendence and immanence, creating an enveloping cosmos charged with spiritual significance. Yet, as the chapter unfolds, it also chronicles how this omnipresent divinity provoked reactions as diverse as they were profound—from nihilistic refrains echoing through existential voids to existentialist responses grappling with disorientation, seeking authenticity amidst the nausea of boundless freedom. By poetically invoking fonts and fjords as metaphors of spiritual search and dislocation, the chapter captures the yearning for incorruptible aspirations—transcendent quests reborn and repurposed amidst the ruins of metaphysical certainty. Ultimately, this richly layered exploration positions onto-theology as both fertile ground and contested territory, paving the way toward considering spirituality anew: no longer solely as metaphysical assertion nor human-centered rebellion, but as a dynamic relational intensity, setting the stage for object spirituality’s emergence from the very ruptures and paradoxes that define our spiritual landscapes.

Expanding our description of liturgy as an organisation of technics structuring desire, we describe the accompanying myth as a technic of knowing. Drawing on transdisciplinary theology, developed from the work of Wentzel van Huyssteen, Paul Cilliers and Alfonso Montuori, we engage the cross-disciplinary construction of scientific myth by Big Historians. We argue that myth, as a transversal technic of knowing, is abundant in many spheres of our lives and bridges what Bernard Stiegler calls the persistent minimal gap between humanity and technics. Can Big Historians offer such a bridge and what does it mean when scientists use technicities developed by religious practitioners?

This chapter introduces Object Spirituality as a novel theoretical framework that moves beyond both premodern metaphysics and modern anthropocentrism. Drawing on Speculative Realism, Object-Oriented Ontology, and Quentin Meillassoux’s concept of “divine inexistence,” the chapter proposes that spirituality emerges not from human consciousness or transcendent realities, but through the communication and intensification of relations between objects themselves. It distinguishes between “things” and “objects,” suggesting that spirituality arises as things become objects through relational intensifications. Using the Christian maxim lex orandi, lex credendi as an analytical scaffold, the chapter critiques the limitations of premodern, modern, and postmodern spiritual paradigms. It then outlines a methodology informed by phenomenology, hermeneutics, and speculative materialism, culminating in a preview of the book’s structure—a critical genealogy of spirituality discourse, theoretical foundations of Object Spirituality, its core elements, and its practical implications. This framework reconceptualizes spirituality as an emergent property of object relationships within a contingent reality that remains open to the radical possibility of divine emergence—the God who may be.

Object Spirituality critically examines the implications of the emerging philosophical movement of Speculative Realism for the study of spirituality and theology. This work challenges the traditional theo-centric and anthropocentric models of spirituality—viewed respectively as pre-modern and post-modern—and argues for a shift toward an object-oriented approach. By constraining spirituality to a quantitative, object-focused framework, this book redefines the relationship between humans, objects, and the divine, proposing a new way to understand spiritual experience in the context of contemporary philosophical thought. This text offers a provocative and timely contribution to the fields of spirituality and theology.

This chapter examines Bruno Latour’s significant contributions to understanding objects and their spirituality through his critique of modernity and the development of flat ontology. It explores how Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and his concept of modes of existence challenge the modern bifurcation between nature and society, revealing how all entities—human and nonhuman—exist as actants within networks of relations. The chapter analyzes Latour’s innovative approach to transcendence, which rejects super-transcendence in favor of recognizing the small “jumps” or micro-transcendences that occur in all modes of existence. It also examines Latour’s later work on climate change and terrestrial politics, which reframes political divisions along an axis of reality/unreality rather than progressive/conservative. The chapter concludes by evaluating Latour’s potential contribution to a concept of “Object Spirituality,” suggesting that his approach offers a way to understand spirituality as emerging through relations between objects rather than imposed from above (onto-theology) or projected from within (onto-consciousness). This terrestrial spirituality acknowledges both the agency of objects and the necessary mediations through which we engage with them, providing essential resources for addressing contemporary ecological and political challenges.

This chapter offers a genealogical examination of spirituality across three paradigms—premodern, modern, and postmodern—analyzing their underlying structures through the lens of lex orandi, lex credendi. It begins by exploring premodern spirituality, characterized by metaphysical transcendence, porous selfhood, and hierarchical time, where divine realities shape human experience. The chapter then shifts to modern spirituality, which centers human consciousness as the primary arbiter of meaning, producing a buffered self within the immanent frame. Finally, it examines postmodern spirituality, which deconstructs both premodern metaphysical certainty and modern anthropocentric correlationism, emphasizing absence, rupture, and différance as sites of spiritual possibility. Using a cinematic metaphor to illustrate these differing spiritual imaginaries, the chapter critiques their limitations and sets the stage for Object Spirituality—a paradigm that moves beyond these frameworks by recognizing spirituality as an emergent property of object relations rather than a function of either divine hierarchy or human subjectivity.

This chapter examines Quentin Meillassoux’s philosophical contributions, particularly his critique of “correlationism”—the dominant post-Kantian view that we can only access the correlation between thought and being, never either term independently. Meillassoux challenges this stance by developing a position called “speculative materialism,” which asserts that the absolute contingency of reality (what he terms “hyper-chaos”) is knowable through rational demonstration. The chapter traces how Meillassoux inverts traditional metaphysics by arguing that contingency itself is necessary, thereby providing access to knowledge beyond human finitude while rejecting sufficient reason. His concept of “divine inexistence” posits not that God doesn’t exist, but that God doesn’t yet exist—opening the possibility for justice even for those who have died. By developing a “factual symbol” that binds being and value through recognition of absolute contingency, Meillassoux offers a fourth position beyond traditional theism, atheism, and correlationism, creating a robust framework for a nondogmatic hope that preserves religious aspirations within a materialist ontology while avoiding both naive Realism and correlational skepticism.