Nimi Wariboko's Journey into Infinity

Vision, Strategy and Language

in the Work of a Pentecostal Philosopher

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

Imagistic Summation

Chika Aneke's painting above is employed here in suggesting central values

of Nimi Wariboko's experiential and cognitive quest, unifying the faith
based orientation of spirituality and the intellectual groundedness of
philosophy.

The majestic elephant, splendid in the white of purity of being, approaches,

after a long journey, the orb of life, pulsating with the red of blood, above
which stands the spiral of being and becoming, above which is poised a
geometric form the stylization of which evokes the balance of order and
change, of stability and transformation, these forms understood here as
visual dramatizations of central themes in Wariboko's life and work.
1
The entire ensemble is alive with symbols fed by Aneke's immersion in Igbo
Uli and Cross River Nsibidi expressive systems, evoking aesthetic force and
arcane power.
Questing for the Infinite Tthrough Thought and Expression

The work of Pentecostal philosopher, theologian, and economist Nimi

Wariboko is marked by thematic unity in variety, stylistic multiplicity and
resonance between diverse cultural domains as expressed at various points in
space and time.

These qualities are developed in the course of his life and work as a quest for
the infinite understood as the progressive unfolding of human possibility
within a cosmic matrix.

He portrays this quest as deriving from a principle of transformation rooted

in the essence of being. This essence is depicted in his work as
transcendent, beyond full human grasp, and as immanent, in constituting the
human impulse, in all aspects of endeavor, to reach beyond human finitude to
the infinite.

This conception is intimately related to the adventurousness of his expressive

styles, his rich conceptualizations, his recurrent creation of new terms to
communicate these ideas amidst the disciplined exuberance of his expositions.

These expressive strategies may be seen as a dramatization of his

understanding of the world as a zone of transformation, his writing
expressing a keen sensitivity to language as a union of thought and
expression in responding to and participating in transformations of reality.

Wariboko is an imaginative as well as a critical 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 value as generated through the creative activity of
people rather than being a given of reality.

He is remarkable for the depth and scope of his cognitions dramatized in

terms of an amazing interdisciplinary universe, expressed in a forest of texts
deftly invoked and masterfully navigated, for the imaginative flight and
conceptual rigor of his constructions, the sheer power of his sonorous

2
articulations, at times lyrical, at other times bristling with conceptual
muscularity, his language always radiant as his mind flies from steeple to
steeple of thought, in search of convergences between the absolute and the
contingent, the timeless and the temporal.

Wariboko's potencies create an arch of unity out of the matrix of disciplines,

weaving nets of variegated windows of perception unified in the distance into
which thought is thereby stretched by these navigations. He achieves this
through the scope of his ideations, restlessly seeking epistemic zones to feed a
voracious cognitive appetite, projecting this dynamism through the magic and
power of his expressive style within the unique nature of his critical,
speculative and spiritual genius.

His galaxy of ideations created through years of relentless thought, study and
expression are a monument of scholarly possibility, demonstrating discipline
and consistency, interdisciplinary cross-fertilization, and striving after
perfection of expression.

As I read Wariboko’s work, I increasingly see myself inside it. I encounter

sudden trees and standing stones, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s words, that none have
seen but me alone,1 the recurrent discovery of preceding ideas in a new light
and new ideas presented in relation to previously elaborated conceptions, as
in Tolkien’s evocation of the delights of adventurous walking 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 motifs encountered in other works, 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

Wariboko’s 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
1
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings. Vol. 1: The Fellowship of the Ring (. London: Unwin,
1979),. 112.
3
through contact with his powerfully mature formulations, like a child putting
on weight and height through eating wholesome food.

A Scholar at the Nexus of Disciplines

Wariboko describes himself as “a scholar on the boundary” working at “the

uncomfortable intersectionality of disciplines,” at

the boundaries of economics and ethics, economics and religion,

economics and philosophy, ethics and theology, philosophy and
theology, social history and ethics, social sciences and theology, and
present and not-yet-present knowledges. My thinking always
functions at an interstitial site, wrestling in a contact zone of
disciplines that is neither/ nor.

This is a site that opposes binary opposition, oscillating between

spheres of knowledge. It is the fragile, fleeting, and slippery para-site
of erotic, new, refreshing insights and lights. I am talking of the
uncanny non-place that promises to birth the underivably new in
history.

My soul finds deep peace at this frontier, the edge of knowledge that
is always approaching and withdrawing approach.

… I thank you, the reader, for your forbearance in walking and

working with me in this unhomely space.2

Questing for the Infinite through Action and Synthesis

The preceding summations try to map the thematic and expressive

configurations of Wariboko's work, developing a synchronic description of his
productivity as may be perceived at the present time, as different from a

2
Nimi Wariboko, The Split God (. Albany: SUNY Press, 2018),. x.
4
diachronic overview, a historical account of how the trajectory of his thought
has developed.

How may this ideational map be correlated with his biographical progression?

He is a thinker on subjects of the most intimate significance to human beings.

He navigates the intersection between the need for survival and thriving in
the material context represented by social order in the forms of economics,
human habitation and politics, as well as the hunger for meaning beyond
material existence, a hunger dramatized by the sense of the sacred. This
thematic scope is exemplified by such works as The Depth and Destiny of
Work, Economics in Spirit and Truth, God and Money, The Pentecostal Principle,
The Charismatic City and Ethics and Society in Nigeria. 3

What has led him to his dynamic positioning at this intersection?

Why not simply remain in economics, the discipline in which he gained a First
Class at the University of Port Harcourt? Having, through a combination of
serious work and good fortune, found himself at the global financial center
Wall Street, why not remain there or in similar contexts, as one of the world’s
economic mandarins, netting for oneself an increasing share of the financial
flows represented by that economic nexus?

3
Nimi Wariboko, The Depth and Destiny of Work: An African Theological Interpretation (.
Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2008);, Economics in Spirit and Truth: A Moral Philosophy
of Finance (. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014);, God and Money: A Theology of Money in
a Globalizing World (. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008);, The Pentecostal Principle: Ethical
Methodology in New Spirit (. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2011);, The
Charismatic City and the Public Resurgence of Religion: A Pentecostal Social Ethics of
Cosmopolitan Urban Life (. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014);, Ethics and Society in
Nigeria Identity, History, Political Theory (. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press,
2019);. Methods of Ethical Analysis: Between Theology, History, and Literature (. Eugene,
OR.: Wipf & Stock, 2013)..

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Why venture into the challenges of scholarship, and scholarship in theology,
the worlds of money and the worlds of God understood by many, even by
Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity, as being difficult to reconcile? 4 Why
take the economic universe with you as you leave the world of commerce?

A Pentecostal who is a scholar on Pentecostalism and also engaged in the

study of African philosophies and religions? Would such a thinker break out of
the myopic orientation towards classical African spiritualities that is prevalent
among Pentecostals in his native Nigeria, seeing classical African spiritualities
as the pristine example of the work of the devil?

How did a Nigerian Pentecostal pastor, Wariboko having been a pastor in the
Redeemed Christian Church of God,5 a Pentecostal church originating and
headquartered in Nigeria, become so accommodating, so ecumenical in spirit,
so catholic-all- embracing, in orientation, the philosophies of his native
Kalabari becoming integral to his conception of human development within
the cosmic template?

Such reconciliations are at the core of Wariboko's work. His scholarship is a

participation in the never-ending struggle to understand and manage the
unity of diversities that defines existence, a unity impossible to fail to
recognize but challenging to adequately understand and direct.

Thematic and Expressive Rhythms and Intercultural Resonances

4
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of God.” Mark 10:24-27 and Luke 18:24-27. The Holy Bible.

5
Personal communication and Mark R. Gornik and Andrew Walls, Word Made Global:
Stories of African Christianity in New York City . (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans
Publishing, 2011),. 61-64.

6
 Thematic Spirals

Wariboko’s wrestling with ideas is exciting in his pervasive development of

various themes across several books and essays in the manner of a musical
homophony, a musical “texture in which a primary part is supported by one or
more additional strands that flesh out the harmony and often provide
rhythmic contrast..”6

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.

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.

Apart from being thematic centers of particular monographs, these themes

also emerge in other works of his as complementary rhythms, generating the
unity in a variety of his cognitive and expressive tapestry, examining various
aspects of human possibility in a constantly unfolding journey of writing and
publication;, each book foregrounding one strand of his vision in harmony
with other strands, integrating theology and philosophy, economics and
spirituality, among other disciplines.

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., Bbut 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.
6
“Homophony.” Wikipedia. Accessed 7/25/2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophony Accessed 7/25/2019.
7
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. This
conception is also imperative in the conception of ever- unfolding creative
possibility which Wariboko understands as the Pentecostal Principle.

Through this homophonic strategy, a unity of vision across multiple themes is

developed. There emerges a unified complexity of perception in navigating the
cognitive terrain defined by Wariboko’s thematic constructions. His enfolding
and unfolding of ideations within dynamic networks, to adapt his self-
description on his Boston University page, 7 thus becomes a voyage of
exploration in which new and previously discussed ideas emerge in spiral
constellations.

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 existence in its
vibrant colors.

Intercultural Resonances
Beyond his explicit thematic directions, Wariboko is able to develop
sophisticated readings of Pentecostal conceptions and practices that are
readily observed, but not readily reflected upon at such depth and within such
a conceptual range, suggesting their consonance with the ground of possibility
actualized by ages of spiritual struggle on Earth.

The ideational contexts in which he works beyond Pentecostalism also

mediate for him some of the most profound insights that run across spiritual
and philosophical traditions in general. His dramatization of these
conceptions, developing, polishing and applying them in his own way, makes
his work strategic for better understanding of these ideas as they have
emerged across time and space.
7
“Nimi Wariboko Profile,” Boston University. Accessed 8/29/2019.
https://www.bu.edu/sth/profile/nimi-wariboko/ Accessed 8/29/2019.
8
This breadth of intercultural resonance, parallels between his ideas and
various spiritualities and philosophies, is striking, powerful though implicit
rather than explicit, since Wariboko does not address such convergences
beyond his unification of the philosophy of his native Kalabari, Christian and
particularly Protestant and Pentecostal theology and Continental philosophy,
and other fields, in creating a synthesis enabling the mutual illumination of
these systems as he crafts his own understanding of reality.

Wariboko's perceptions may be positioned in relation to the intercultural

resonances of his thought, thereby highlighting both his consonance with
these associations of his work and the distinctiveness of his own
constructions in relation to these other ideations.

He develops an idea of creatively transformative potential in the intersection

between the human being and the cosmos. He characterizes this, in describing
his own creativity in The Pentecostal Principle, as "the womblike chaos of the
creative process,"8 a potent integration of three evocatively pregnant
universes of discourse represented by the womb, chaos and creativity. He thus
cultivates a cosmicizsing and humanizing orientation, also evident in classical
African thought, as exemplified by the Yoruba concept ase 9 and the Igbo ike10
and, in Wariboko’s oeuvre, particularly by the related Kalabari concept Teme,
a concept he discusses in detail in The Depth and Destiny of Work and Ethics
and Time: Ethos of Temporal Orientation in Politics and Religion in the Niger
Delta.11

8
The Pentecostal Principle,. 41.
9
As presented in John Drewal, H. J., J. Pemberton, and R. Abiodun,. Yoruba: Nine Centuries of
African Art and Thought (. New York: The Center for African Art in association with Harry
N. Abrams Publishers, 1989).

As described by Chinua Achebe in “The Igbo World and its Art” in African Philosophy: An
10

Anthology, ed. Emmanuel Eze, ed. African Philosophy: An Anthology. (Cambridge, Mass.:
Blackwell, 1997).

Ethics and Time: Ethos of Temporal Orientation in Politics and Religion in the Niger Delta (.
11

Lanham :Lexington Books, 2010).

9
His penetratingly sensitive development of dialogue between Kalabari
thought, Pentecostalism, Continental philosophy and other ideas he calls upon
vibrate in relation to the depths of the human quest across space and time for
ultimate meaning and practical direction in life’s journey, thus generating an
inadvertent resonance of his formulations with philosophical and religious
cultures worldwide beyond those referenced by himself.

Principles of Creative Transformation

His life journey, and specifically, his educational, work and spiritual history,
may be correlated with his writings, outlining a unifying metaphysical
principle demonstrated by his publications. His theological and philosophical
vision could be understood as a distillation from his own history, roots of
mind and roots of life intertwining, culminating in a summation of principles
he has extracted from that experiential and reflective engagement,
conceptions summed up by his development of what he names the Pentecostal
Principle.

He pursues his quest for the infinite through a harmony of academic,

professional, spiritual and family affiliations directed at maximizing his own
potential and that of others. His biographical journey has taken him from
Abonnema, in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, to the University of Port Harcourt, where
he gained his academic foundations;, to working as a journalist in Lagos;, to
Nigeria's then poverty- stricken Maroko;, to the global economic centre Wall
Street;, to elite universities of global stature and eventually to a prestigious
academic placement in Boston, a global centre of learning.12

The Pentecostal Principle emerged from his being bBorn- aAgain in 1993, a
transformative experience of Pentecostal Christian initiation inspired by his
religious fellowship with the displaced people of Maroko in Nigeria’s
commercial capital, Lagos, leading to insights expanded through dialogue with
various Christian and secular philosophies and Kalabari thought—, insights

12
Personal communication and Amos Yong’s foreword to Nigerian Pentecostalism. (Hope
Avenue, Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014),. ix-xii. xi.
10
emerging into a conception of a principle of transformation as shaping human
existence.13

“What is [ a] principle?” Wariboko asks. “A principle,” he responds, “is the

power and logic of history — an expression of humankind’s essential being as
historical reality — that has been grasped and formulated as a practical
(existential) idea and thus stands in judgment of all spheres and aspects of
historical reality.”14

This bold summation represents a sublime effort, in Wariboko’s work, to view

history as a totality ensconced within infinity. To what degree is this possible?
To the degree that it may be attempted and has been variously attempted,
from St. Augustine of Hippo’s The City of God15 to G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy of
mind16 and history,17 and across various spiritual systems, how valid can the
effort be?
The value of the effort transcends any answer that may be given to that
question. In such attempts at a synoptic grasp of the direction of human
13
Personal communication and The Pentecostal Principle, 208-226.
14
The Pentecostal Principle, 20.
15
Originally published as De Civitate Dei Contra Pagano (413-426). A 20th century
translation, by Marcus Dodds, is The City of God (. New York: Random House, 1978).
16
First published 1807. A recent translation is G. W. F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit, .
transTr. Peter Fuss and John Dobbins. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019).
Tthe book is lucidly described on its publisher’s site as “Hegel’s remarkable philosophical
text that examines the dynamics of human experience from its simplest beginnings in
consciousness through its development into ever more complex and self-conscious forms.
The work explores the inner discovery of reason and its progressive expansion into spirit, a
world of intercommunicating and interacting minds reconceiving and re-creating
themselves and their reality.” Accessed 8/29/2019.
https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268103514/the-phenomenology-of-spirit/ Accessed
8/29/2019.

17
First published 1837. A recent translation is Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
Lectures on the Philosophy of World History., trans. Translated by Hugh Barr Nisbet.
(Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2012).
11
existence, the enquiring individual becomes representative of the human race
in the drive to understand the significance of the journey undertaken by homo
sapiens, a journey within which people find themselves without any idea of
where they may be coming from or where they are going, although
surrounded by many differing efforts to answer these questions, answers
constituting the Earth’s spiritualities and philosophies, answers convincing to
their adherents but not to everyone.

Wariboko’s principal ideational sources are Protestant and Pentecostal

theology, Continental philosophy, the philosophies of his native Kalabari
culture and economics. These fundamental orientations are complemented by
discourses on urban dynamics18 and politics19 and his own distinctively
created complex of ideational formulations.

A critical influence on his reflections is Protestant theologian Paul Tillich's

work on the Protestant Principle, an interpretation of the once bloody conflict
between Protestantism and Catholicism, central in defining Western history. 20
Tillich goes beyond the previously understood identities of Protestantism and
Catholicism as sharply distinctive ideological and historical movements,

18
As demonstrated in The Charismatic City.
19
As evident in Ethics and Society in Nigeria.
20
Tillich describes the Protestant Principle this way : “Protestantism has a principle that
stands beyond all its realizations. It is the critical and dynamic source of all protestant
realizations, but it is not identical with any of them. It cannot be confined by a definition. It
is not exhausted by any historical religion; it is not identical with the structure of the
Reformation or early Christianity or even with a religious form at all. It transcends them as
it transcends any cultural form. On the other hand, it can appear in all of them; it is a living,
moving, restless power in them…The protestant principle… a quality of all beings and
objects, the quality of pointing beyond themselves and their finite existence to the infinite,
inexhaustible, and unapproachable depth of their being and meaning.” Paul Tillich, The
Protestant Era, trans. J. L. Adams (.London: Nisbet, 1951),. 239-40. Laura J. Thelander,
further clarifies the concept, “the Protestant Principle expresses a deep reverence for the
Holy Other, the transcendent God who is Being-Itself, and for that reason alone judges all
attempts to domesticate this God,” in “Retrieving Paul Tillich’s Ecclesiology for the Church
Today, ” Theology Today 69, no. (2 (YEAR2012):) 141–155,. 150.

12
interpreting them in terms of mutually implicating possibilities of response to
reality.21

Inspired by this abstraction of history, Wariboko’s Pentecostal Principle is an

interpretation of the aspiration to a transformative encounter with God
represented by the Biblical image of divine presence transforming the
disciples of Jesus on the day that has become known as the Pentecost, an event
at the core of Pentecostalism.22

The Pentecostal Principle is a perception of human existence as driven by the

aspiration animating the Pentecostal movement. This is a vision of the human
capacity for recreation under the impetus of divine grace, a fire that reshapes
the existent in terms of the possible, facilitating the actualization of
possibilities otherwise dimly glimpsed and difficult or impossible to actualize.
Pentecostalism is ultimately shaped by a drive, as Wariboko puts it, to “seek
after the ultimate mystery and impenetrable core of reality or creation.” 23

21
Tillich depicts the Catholic Substance as “the concrete embodiment of the Spiritual
Presence,” Systematic Theology . Vol.3 (. Disgwell Place: James Nizbet and Co., 1964): .260.
By “concrete,” he refers to the forms within which spirituality is expressed. Frederick J.
Parrella provides an explanation of these concepts which I find particularly lucid and
insightful across religions. He describes the Catholic Substance in terms of the emphasis on
“ the reality of the presence of God in certain places” understood in terms of all physical,
creedal, processes and institutional forms of embodying spirituality. He depicts the
Protestant Principle as demonstrated in the rejection of all representations and refusal of
all localizations of God, insisting on the transcendence of God beyond any structures,
physical, creedal or conceptual. He sums up these tendencies: “On the one hand, there is an
insistence on the substantial presence of God in certain places and, on the other, an
affirmation that God is to be found beyond all we can touch, imagine, or think.” “Paul
Tillich’s Life and Spirituality: Some Reflections,.” Keynote Address for the Meeting of the
Brazilian Paul Tillich Society (10º Seminá rio em Diá logo o pesamento de Paul Tillich), Sao
Paulo, Brazil, (6 May 2004),. 16-17. Accessed 8/10/2019.

http://www.metodista.br/ppc/correlatio/correlatio06/paul-tillich-s-life-and-spirituality-
some-reflections. Accessed 8/10/2019.

22
The Pentecostal Principle, 16.
13
Wariboko expounds on this drive as innate to human existence,
Pentecostalism being one expression of this fundamental human orientation.
Indicating this impetus as suffusing but transcending Pentecostalism, he
describes Pentecostalism as not having fully actualized this immanent
possibility of humanity.24

Thus, Wariboko is able to recognize dramatizations of this orientation in

cultural or ideational contexts beyond the Pentecostal. He explores it in
Kalabari thought,25 in Yoruba philosophy and spirituality,26 in possibilities in
economic thought and action27 and in urban planning and execution. 28 Each of
these unifications of idea and example constitute thematic cores of his various
texts.

Between the Transcendent and the Immanent

23
Split God, 46.
24
The Pentecostal Principle, 29.

A unifying motif of his work, elaborated at particular length in The Depth and Destiny of
25

Work.
26
I am referring to his discussion of the Yoruba origin system of knowledge Ifa in his review
of Jacob Olupona and Rowland Abiodun's edited Ifá Divination: Knowledge, Power, and
Performance in the journal Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft. Vol 13,. nNo. 3 (. Summer
2018):. 307-309. “I understand his essay on Ifa as representing his own understanding of
cognitive quest at its best, a perception that permeates his work,” as I state in my essay
“Invoking Truth at the Intersection of Possibilities by a Philosopher at the Edge
of Knowledge : Adapting the Luminous Writings of Nimi Wariboko,.” USAAfrica Dialogues
Series. Google group:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/usaafricadialogue/_6clIpjHxj0/yiSZgQ1TCAAJ.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/notes/oluwatoyin-vincent-adepoju/invoking-truth-
at-the-intersection-of-possibilities-at-the-edge-of-knowledgeadap/10156514533849103/
All links accessed 8/11/2019.

27
In The Depth and Destiny of Work, Economics in Spirit and Truth and God and Money.
28
In The Charismatic City.
14
 The dynamism of humanity within the context of a principle understood as
animating existence, a principle which people strive to relate with but which
is elusive to full understanding and expression by humans, suggests a tension
between the transcendent and the immanent, a tension central to Wariboko’s
philosophy as he weaves a dialogue between classical Kalabari thought,
Christian theology—, particularly Protestant and Pentecostal theology—, and
Western philosophy.

The transcendent is that which is above existence as accessible to human

beings. The immanent is what constitutes existence as it may be experienced
by humanity.

These ideas are correlative, though not always directly, with the Kalabari
concept of unified aspects of ultimate possibility, Teme-órú and So. Teme-órú
— as elucidated through a combination of anthropological, historical and
speculative explorations across Wariboko’s oeuvre, approached from various
perspectives in interaction with a foundational idea and developed at
particular length in such works as The Depth and Destiny of Work—, may be
understood as the creative possibility enabling existence:

Though the Kalabari did not have a monotheistic religion, they had
the concept of a god who is higher than the rest [a] primus inter
pares, first among the equals. This god is conceived as a composite
force, a combination of creative-destructive force and destiny, and a
combination of person and directing concept. It is both Teme-órú
and So.

Teme-órú … is regarded as the …creative modality. So is the directive

modality, the aspect of divinity that orders the created outcome…the
Teme-órú part of God is concerned with creation, existence,
destruction (wrath). So is concerned with destiny and behavior of
people, groups, animals, and institutions.29
….

29
Depth and Destiny of Work, 39-40.
15
 Every individual has a teme and teme is a hard concept to decipher.
Teme could be translated as Spirit, the ground of consciousness,
creative self-positing being. But the teme, meaning the spirit of an
individual, is the Spirit which comes to expression as an individual
consciousness.30

So is the expression of this universal radiation in terms of the choices

available to humans in the course of their lives. As further developed by
Wariboko from the classical foundations, uppercase So refers to the total
cosmos of possibilities, accessible and inaccessible, to humanity. 31

Lowercase so consists in those possibilities available to humanity in terms of

social groups and individuals at various points in time and space. 32

It is possible to expand lower case so by drawing upon the resources of

uppercase So:

Since every individual so is a subset of the universal So, a person

bears an image of Divinity; in a sense, then, working out one’s
fiyeteboye [life course] means deliberately seeking out the universal
in the particular. Bringing forth the particular to the universal or
seeing the particular in the universal involves several tensions:
between conscious and unconscious, finite and infinite, freedom and
necessity.33

Wariboko’s total body of work, across several books and some of his essays,
may be understood as the exploration of So and so and the traffic between
them, correlating the finite and the infinite.

30
Ethics and Time, 77.
31
Depth and Destiny of Work, 43-49;. Split God, 49-50.
32
Ibid.
33
Ethics and Time: Ethos of Temporal Orientation in Politics and Religion in the Niger Delta.
(Lanham :Lexington Books, 2010), 70.
16
Wariboko’s Epistemology

Knowledge as Erotic Creativity

The concept of eros is central to Wariboko’s celebration of the human being as

a creative force, an understanding of erotic drive critical to various ideas of
the transformative potency of the human person in intersection with the
cosmos.

The word nimi from the Kalabari of Nigeria’s Niger Delta means to “know,”
states Wariboko, explaining the significance of his first name as understood in
his native tongue. “Nimi,” he continues, meaning “knowledge, wisdom,
recognition, or awareness, is used to also refer to sexual intercourse, just as
the word yada does in Hebrew.”34

Wariboko’s philosophy emphasizes pleasure, the pleasure of enjoying the

world revealed through the senses and the pleasure of expository, analytical,
configurative and abstract thought, unfolding and enfolding ideas,
constructing new worlds of possibility through dialogue with various
universes of knowledge, at home in the delights of nature and the thrill of
exalted conceptions, the analysis of the challenges represented by global
financial systems and contemplative responses to the yearnings of people
seeking guidance from the invisible.

He outlines this vision in Economics in Spirit and Truth :

Like the ones that came before it, I wrote this book to give you, the
reader, pleasure and excitement. On reading my work I want you to
have the ecstatic joy of the life of the mind. I want you to read a
sentence and hear it twice, that is, give each sentence a double
hearing.

This is exactly what I do when I read good books. I pay the kind of
sensitive and devout attention relevant to each book, and in
moments of excitement I will usually exclaim “Mmanwu,” “Oyibo,” “I
tite” (meaning, Awesome! Man! “You have played well!”).
34
The Split God, 52-53.
17
 When I read I listen to the sentences, hearing them as a musical
score that makes the most inaudible movements of thinking audible.

Next I will thank my God for giving me another day to come into the
intimate presence of a great mind.

I will conclude by chastising myself for not writing “with the ease of
Mozart and the fury of Beethoven,” as the London Economist will put
it.

Besides, I also do feel that my best efforts seem inadequate. 35

Muscles of the mind rippling as the thinker soars from earth to cosmos, from
matter to the totality encapsulating and transcending space and time.

The term "erotic" is conventionally used to refer to sexual attraction, the sense
of excitement and heightened vitality, the glint in the eye when a person
engages, even if only mentally, with another person in relation to whom they
experience an amorous spark, the recognition of a potential bond of desire
and its emotional flame as capable of traversing bridges of consciousness.

Wariboko quotes36 Jü rgen Moltmann on

an “'eroticizing energy”'... the force which holds the world together

and keeps it alive, anthropologically and cosmologically; the power
of attraction which unites, and the individual weight which
simultaneously distinguishes. The rhythm of attraction and distance,
affection and respect is the power of eros.,'37

Economics in Spirit and Truth : A Moral Philosophy of Finance (. New York: Palgrave
35

Macmillan, 2014),. xx.

36
The Pentecostal Principle, 26-27.

Jü rgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation (. Minneapolis: Fortress,

37

1992), . 278-82, 196.

18
Wariboko describes Nigerian Pentecostalism as an "erotic model of
epistemology,"38 evident in the "desire… to capture the operation of the senses
—sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell—and redirect or reengineer them
toward God.”39

Penetrative and Associative Vision

Kalabari and Pentecostal

This erotic epistemology ranges from what may be described as penetrative to

an associative vision. Penetrative vision involves using the senses to perceive
realities beyond material form, a penetrative intimacy in which the seeker
attempts to enter into the “inner dimensions, functions, and processes” 40 of
what is explored. Associative perception involves the construction of meaning
through the associational powers of the mind, developing correlations
between phenomena. Wariboko cultivates these ideas from Pentecostalism
and Kalabari thought, building them into a synthesis.

To adequately understand phenomena, one needs to penetrate from their

physical, material aspect to their spiritual, immaterial character, as
understood in Kalabari philosophy,41 a belief he also claims for
Pentecostalism.42

One needs to move from knowledge gained through “common sense or

physical laws” to knowing according to “spiritual (metaphysical) laws,” as he
terms these epistemic categories.43

38
Nigerian Pentecostalism, 41.
39
Ibid., 88.
40
Split God, 52.
41
Split God,. 52-53.
42
Nigerian Pentecostalism, 47, 96, 192, 259.
43
Split God, 52.
19
To achieve this transposition from the obvious, the physical, to the concealed,
the spiritual,:

one needs certain (meta)-physical, apparatuses such as “seeing

eyes,” “hearing ears,” or other sensory organs that can penetrate the
object or pattern of events, just as scientific instruments penetrate
objects to reveal their inner contents. While the scientist reaches
deep down into the physical domain, the spiritual tool penetrates
the ontological level [ the essence of a phenomenon].44

Wariboko describes the erotic dimension of this style of knowing. I have

isolated each point into a separate paragraph to emphasize the links between
the ideas:

The immaterial penetration is principally not intended as invasive

or violent but moves toward intimacy. The knower engages the
object (his or her partner in the unveiling of truth) with care and
affection.

Sometimes, this involves knowing the needs, logic, and dynamics of

the partner and taking care of them. The production of esoteric
knowledge requires penetrative and receptive intimacy as in sexual
intercourse.

This intimacy is penetrative because the seeker attempts to enter

into the inner dimensions, functions, and processes of the object to
ferret out wisdom.

This can also involve the knower penetrating him or herself through
interior intuitive means.

The intimacy is said to be receptive when the being or object being

investigated “possesses” the seeker or knower and reveals its inner
workings through him or her.

44
Ibid.
20
 The affinity between the penetrative and receptive intimacy of
knowledge production that evokes sexual intimacy is suggested by
the Kalabari word nimi, “to know.” Nimi, which also means
knowledge, wisdom, recognition, or awareness, is used to also refer
to sexual intercourse, just as the word yada does in Hebrew.45

Yoruba

This idea resonates with and amplifies an epistemological perspective from

the culturally cognate Yoruba people as described by Babatunde Lawal:

[In Yoruba thought] the eyes (oju) [are constituted by] eyin oju, a
refractive "egg" empowered by ase (mediated by Esu [deity of
correlation between possibilities of being]) enabling an individual to
see (riran). …The eyeball is thought to have two aspects, an outer
layer called oju ode (literally, external eye) or oju lasan (literally,
naked eye), which has to do with normal, quotidian vision, and an
inner one called oju inu (literally, internal eye) or oju okan (literally,
mind's eye).

The latter is associated with memory, intention, intuition, insight,

thinking, imagination, critical analysis, visual cognition, dreams,
trances, prophecy, hypnotism, empathy, telepathy, divination,
healing, benevolence, malevolence, extrasensory perception, and
witchcraft, among others…these two layers of the eye combine to
determine iworan, the specular gaze of an individual.46

Hindu Srividya

45
Ibid., 52-53.

Babatunde Lawal, “À worá n: Representing the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba
46

Art,” The Art Bulletin Vol. 83, nNo. 3 (, 2001):. 498-526,. 516.

21
The epistemology of the Hindu school of Srividya incidentally subsumes the
Kalabari, Pentecostal and Yoruba conceptions, giving greater imaginative
specificity to these sensately- centered epistemic orientations. It achieves
this through vivid personification of the idea of the senses as stimulants of
both pleasure and insight into the ground of reality that enables the panorama
of existence.

This personification is realized in the image of the Goddess Tripurasundari,

the “Most Beautiful Embodiment of the Cosmos” holding the “sugarcane bow
of the mind which likes the sweet things of life,” “the noose of the attractive
power of love, the elephant goad that controls evil and wayward sensory
desires and the five flowery arrows of Kama,”; pleasure, flowers representing
the sense of sound, exemplified by beautiful music, the sense of touch, evoking
eros, the sense of taste associated with sweetness and the sense of smell and
its relation to pleasant fragrances., Aall these are subsumed in senstivity to
form and its projection of beauty, 47 as well as holding, in one of her five hands,
“a garland of letters describing the explosion of the cosmos from a single
point.”48

Though present in all the cosmos [as] “the wheel of all bliss,” she is also “the
transcendental secret yogini,”49 a female yogi, a seeker of union with the
Absolute.

These depictions suggest both sensual delight and penetrative insight into the
ultimate reality the senses point to, the reality represented by
Tripurasundari as subsuming and transcending these sensory enjoyments,
“Mistress of the Cosmos in Indestructible Seed Form,” “Mistress of the Infinite

47
Texts from the Shakti Sadhana Group, the Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram: A Practice Text.
(2004-2006), © 2004-2006 by the Shakti Sadhana Group. 28. Accessed 8/19/2019.
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Shakti_Sadhana/files/Khadgamala_SS.pdf?
guccounter=1 Accessed 8/19/2019.

48
Ibid., 24.

49
Ibid., 27.
22
Cosmic Wealth Beyond the Seed Form,” 50 the cosmos metaphorically depicted
as growing from a seed representing its causative principle, the Goddess
depicted as embodying both this originating core and the multiplicity
emerging from this gestative centre, a cosmos, as represented by the Goddess,
that is both embodied and transcendent.

As depicted in the Soundaryalahari, The Flood of Beauty, “the worlds in their

entirety” are fashioned from “the tiniest speck of dust from [her] lotus
feet.,”51 Yyet, embodying ultimate erotic power, the line of abdominal hair
issuing from her navel, and framed by her slender waist, is likened to a tiny
ripple on the Yamuna river, a ripple suggesting the wide sky, squeezed thin,
“caught between your jarlike breasts as they rub against each other…entering
your cavernous navel.”52

Wariboko’s corresponding mysticism of the material universe is evoked by

the following sequence of questions constructed from his works:

How do we encounter the divine …through external (beautiful)

objects that inspire awe or a sense of the numinous?53

How do we capture the operation of the senses—sight, sound, touch,

taste, and smell—redirecting or reengineering them towards God? 54

How may the senses open for us a window out of the objective
universe?55

50
Ibid., 26.
51
The Saundaryalahari; or, Flood of Beauty, edited and translated by W. Norman Brown (.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P, 1958),. Stanza 2, 48.
https://archive.org/details/TheSaundaryaLahariORFloodOfBeautyW.NormanBrown
Stanza 2. 48.
52
Ibid., Stanza 77, . 78.
53
Quoting Charismatic City, xii.
54
Quoting a line from Nigerian Pentecostalism, 88, adapting its original affirmative
form as a question.
55
Adapting a line from Nigerian Pentecostalism, 47.
23
 How may we move from what we ordinarily see, touch, hear and
smell to the depths of life that encapsulate and go beyond the
senses?

How may we attune the senses to go past the explicit and

conventional to the sensory depths of existence?56

Associative Vision

Wariboko also constructs ideas of associative vision through Kalabari thought,

in dialogue with the ideas of Catherine Keller.57 He thus complements his
depictions of penetrative vision which pierces to the essence of particular
phenomena. He does this by portraying a form of insight that grasps the
relationships between existents, generating a synoptic vision of reality:

To create is to see connections and relatedness between apparently

disassociated matters, ideas or phenomena. It is to make visible the
tightly interwoven threads of the cosmic tapestry in ways that
enable the visibility gained to both transform and advance overall
connectivity.58

He clarifies this mode of perception:

… A part of knowing a person or object is to place her or it in her or

its webs of social, symbolic, cosmic, and temporal relationships, and
… possibilities (so in Kalabari).59

Wariboko suggests the process through which this expansive understanding

of significance is achieved:

56
Quoting a line from Nigerian Pentecostalism, 47, adapting its original affirmative
form as a question.

Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (. Boston: Beacon Press,
57

1986), . 157-160.
58
The Depth and Destiny of Work , 9.
59
Split God, 50-53.
24
 The quest of thinking…is for meaning, transcending the limitation of
…the sensorily given.60 Imagination is the existential act of straining
beyond ordinary experience ... to [its ] significance61 ... the capability
to see through worlds or objects and to comprehend things or
powers beyond them [ supplying] hints of infinity, immortality, the
deep interconnectedness of being, and its inexpressible significance
[converting] every object or experience into symbols or potential
symbols [perceiving] the universal in the particular, the timeless in
the temporal [ in a] the longing for the infinite.62

Matsuo Basho and Wariboko

Japanese haiku poet Matsuo Basho incidentally represents particularly

powerfully Wariboko’s depiction of creativity as imaginative connectivity,
placing phenomena in their “webs of social, symbolic, cosmic, and temporal
relationships.”63 This is exemplified most strikingly by Basho’s famous haiku, a
Japanese originated poetic genre of exceptional brevity and associative force,
of a frog jumping into a pond, 64 in which, through the most mundane of
images, in an elegantly subliminal and yet powerfully resonant form, he is able
to evoke some of the most profound insights emerging from Asian

60
Ethics and Time, 20.
61
Ibid., 77.
62
Ibid.,64-65.
63
Split God, 53.
64
The original of the famous poem and 30 translations and a commentary on it are at The
Bureau of Public Secrets, Accessed 8/23/2019,
http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/basho-frog.htm Accessed 8/23/2019.
Among other collections of Basho’s poetry, Nobuyuki Yuasa renders the poem in his
translation of Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North and other Travel Sketches (.
London: Penguin, 1967), 9.
25
conceptions of relationships between mind and cosmos, in ways that resonate
with similar insights everywhere.

This poem is very different from the conception of visionary penetration into
the essence of being through admiring the beauty of nature in the
representative poem of English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, “Lines
Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” 65 a view unifying one strand of
Wariboko’s engagement with the senses in Pentecostalism and classical
African—, and particularly Kalabari— thought, the idea of penetrative vision
through enhanced sensory perception, vision that integrates the particular
and the universal.

Rather than the direct connectivity of expanded visual perception

demonstrated by Wordsworth, in which the poet describes himself as
penetrating into “the life of things” through visual perception and his
recollection of those sights, Basho’s is built on associative power which
achieves, in a different way, a goal similar to the Wordsworthian vision but
closer to the imaginative weaving of correspondences in order to grasp the
cosmological context of a phenomenon, as depicted by Wariboko.

Erotic Bliss as a Cognitive Imperative

Jouissance, erotic bliss,66 is central to Wariboko’s work. He describes

“jouissance as access to the direct experience of the Real… intrinsically tied to
pleasure” in Pentecostal thought.67

65
The anthologizing of William Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern
Abbey,” in Literature of the Western World, Vol. 2 : Neoclassicism through the Modern Period,
. eds. Brian Wilkie and James Hurt (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1992), 625-628, edited by
Brian Wilkie and James Hurt, has the advantage of powerful commentary on Romanticism,
in general, and Wordsworth and the poem itself, in particular, within the same text—, a
discussion that addresses Romantic theories of imagination, theories that may be fruitfully
compared with those of Wariboko in such texts as The Depth and Destiny of Work, Nigerian
Pentecostalism and the Principle of Excellence.
66
Split God, 159.
67
Nigerian Pentecostalism, 51.
26
“The Pentecostal dream” he states, “is that of … a full jouissance … founded on
the desire to reach to some kind of epistemological paradise [a] connection
between unencumbered enjoyment and levels of knowing [also demonstrated
in] the history of philosophy.”

“The high point of Pentecostal spirituality” he concludes, “ is to develop and

perfect the techniques of the self on the self so as to be able to dwell at the
intersection of God, self, and reality (phenomenality [ the material world])
where one can experience the uninhibited jouissance of miracles, the
invisible.68

Between Spirituality and Economics

Cosmic Force and Work

Within the nexus of possibilities represented by his life as a scholar and

priest, a thinker at the intersection of economics and the priestly identity once
affirmed by his work as a Pentecostal pastor, Wariboko seeks the convergence
of his immersion in the worlds of commerce and the quest for identification
with the ultimate, his writings illuminating the human struggle at the nexus of
material existence and the pull of the transcendence of materiality.

His work dramatizes this tension as suffusing the spatio-temporal constitution

of human life. He describes these contexts as illuminated by privileged
insights into the presence of the infinite in the finite. He depicts the harmony
of the transcendental, beyond materiality, and the immanent, pervading
materiality, a conjunction of contraries he terms "transimmanence." 69

68
Ibid., 191.
69
This term is defined precisely in Charismatic City, 29, “The Spirit is involved in the gritty
materiality of human sociality, animating and reanimating it…” and examined in concise
depth in the section “The Notion of Transimmanence” in The Pentecostal Principle, 55-56,
where Wariboko experiments with the modificatory term “ immantrance,” to suggest a
more intimate relationship between the finite and the infinite, cosmos and spirit, matter
and divinity than he understands “transimmanence” to suggest.

27
He explores the challenge of work, that necessity for earning an income which
also raises intractable issues of tension between material sustenance and
psychological well-being, between the compulsions of an economic
environment and human fulfillment.

Hs analysis is partly based on a perspective earlier described by John Mbiti 70

as unifying classical African cosmologies, but mediated for Wariboko by
Okechukwu Ogbonnaya,71 the perception of the cosmos as permeated by a
force enabling being and becoming, a force emanating from the creator of the
universe.

Such a force permeating existence would certainly facilitate the organization

of human life in relation to itself, and it is the question of how human beings
may take advantage of this possibility that Wariboko’s The Depth and Destiny
of Work addresses in relation to the Kalabari conceptions of Teme-órú and So,
ultimate possibility and its existential realization, as these ideas may be
described.

The task represented by this book and others of his at the intersection of
economics and the sacred brings Wariboko into the circle of thinkers who
have grappled with this central challenge in human life, from the religious
orientations of such Christian theologians as Reinhold Niebuhr to the secular
thought of Karl Marx, the latter making prominent the reality of work as the
point of convergence between social order, political organization and
individual orientation.

Reinhold Niebuhr and Nimi Wariboko on Work

Wariboko’s ethical challenges may be correlated with those of Niebuhr,

comparing and contrasting Niebuhr’s struggle with capitalism in relation to
the US industry with Wariboko’s relationship with global capitalism in the
context of global inequality.

70
John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (. London: Heinemann, 1976),. 16.

A. Okechukwu Ogbonnaya, On Communitarian Divinity: An African Interpretation of the

71

Trinity (. St. Paul: Paragon House, 1998) as discussed in Depth and Destiny of Work, 49-62.

28
John Bennett describes the roots of Niebuhr’s thought on social justice:

..… his experience in Detroit and especially his exposure to the

American automobile industry [Detroit was then a centre center of
the US auto industry] before labour was protected by unions and by
social legislation—caused him to become a radical critic of
capitalism and an advocate of socialism.72

Caleb Lauer analyses this experience, quoting from Niebuhr’s declaration in

his Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic:

Of what good was a comfortable, morally-edifying sermon on

compassion, tailored to the sensitivities of a middle-class
congregation, to workers in Detroit’s car plants and foundries,
where “manual labour is a drudgery and toil is slavery ... Their sweat
and their dull pain….part of the price paid for the fine cars we all
run”?”

Lauer further analyses those lines:

The gap was a failure of the church. Niebuhr left the intellectual
problem aside and began to devote his energies to developing the
ethical problem, that is, we want what the factory produces, but
“none of us is sensitive enough to care how much in human values
the efficiency of the modern factory costs.” 73

Wariboko cries out in The Pentecostal Principle:

John C. Bennett, “Reinhold Niebuhr” in The Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed

72

8/11/2019. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Reinhold-Niebuhr . Accessed

8/11/2019

Caleb Lauer, “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Major Works on Religion and Politics Shows the Moral
73

Compass of Barack Obama’s Favourite Philosopher,” accessed 8/11/2019. at

https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/book-review-reinhold-niebuhr-s-major-works-
on-religion-and-politics-shows-the-moral-compass-of-barack-obama-s-favourite-
philosopher-1.86065 Accessed 8/11/2019. The essay reviews Elisabeth Sifton’s Reinhold
Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics (. New York: Penguin Random House, 2015).
29
 Those of us from Africa to whom the world has said there is no hope
owe it to ourselves, and the rest of the world, to pursue the un-
foreclosed and un-foreclosable option of existence. We owe it to our
children and grandchildren to imagine what is beyond the horizon in
our current phase of life and economic development.

We have to think in terms of possibility — in possibilities only! For

this reason, I am persuaded that Pentecostal theology or philosophy
should not be limited to the theology of the Holy Spirit.

It should be broadened to include the pneumatological imagination,

pneumatic existence, the pneumatological dynamics of existence,
and the possibilities of human flourishing in theonomous
relationship with the Spirit of God.74

Nimi Wariboko and Karl Marx on Work

Karl Marx’s work and that of Wariboko’s converge in an examination of

human development within economic systems. A particular conjunction in
this regard is their focus on work. “Self-realization through creative work is
the essence of Marx's communism," notes Jon Elster. 75 This interpretation
resonates with Mark’s summation of the movement from alienating to
fulfilling work in a creative progression of society:

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving

subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and
therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has
vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's
prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the
all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-
operative wealth flow more abundantly— -- only then can the
narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and

74
Pentecostal Principle, 226.
75
Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985),. 521.
30
 society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to
each according to his needs!76

Wariboko’s corresponding formulation of a vision about creative work within

social transformation may be represented by the following collage of
quotations from The Pentecostal Principle and The Depth and Destiny of
Work:77 :

I call all that I write theology of possibility. It asks and responds to

this basic question: Is there a creative alternative to current forms of
sociality that can better serve the goals of justice, equity,
participation, and communality?78
Is it possible for human creativity to participate in divine creativity,
contributing to human well being and facilitating personal meaning,
enjoyment, and satisfaction for the individual?79

Is ultimate reality knowable without human expression?80

Can work be actualized as the unfurling of humanity towards a

whole, the groundless ground of human existence, an ultimate
reality, a divine creativity in which all selves are inextricably

Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme. Die Neue Zeit , Bd. 1, nNo. 18, (1890-91).
76

English translation: Marx/Engels Selected Works, Volume Three. (Moscow : Progress

Publishers, 1970),. 13- – 30.

From my “A Journey to the Edge of Time: Adapting the Luminous Writings of Nimi
77

Wariboko.”
78
From The Pentecostal Principle, 224.
79
Inspired by Wariboko’s thesis in The Depth and Destiny of Work. Partly quoting from page
1.
80
Ibid., aAdapting a line from page 2.
31
 connected,81 a participatory depth in which each form of human
creativity represents a face of the sacred?82

A means of linking immanence, divine presence in the world, and

transcendence, the source of existence beyond space and time? 83
How can we enable work as creativity that sees connections and
relatedness between apparently disassociated matters, ideas or
phenomena, making visible the tightly interwoven threads of the
cosmic tapestry?84
How may we penetrate through the organizational and collaborative
use of time, talents, and treasures for the production, reproduction,
and control of life and the distribution of the rewards thereof 85 that
is work into that luminous darkness, the brilliant dark 86 of the
ultimate, as the potter connects clay, water, human expertise, spirit
and heat to create the pot?87
Hegel and Wariboko on Cosmic Force

Marx’s supremely influential formulations are themselves significantly

influenced by Georg Hegel’s reworking,88 of the German conception Geist in
81
Ibid., aAdapting lines from pages x and 4.
82
Ibid., aAdapting a line from page 9.
83
Ibid., aAdapting a line from page 5.
84
Ibid., aAdapting a line from page 9.
85
Ibid., 2
86
Ibid., 4
87
Ibid., 5.
88
This reworking is achieved through a combination of the Germanic concept of Geist and
the Christian idea of the Holy Spirit, the presence of God as creative principle active in the
cosmos. T. Malcolm Knox lucidly and succinctly clarifies Hegel’s cognitive development
leading to this climatic point in his “Hegel and Hegelianism,” Encyclopaedia Britannica
Vol.20. (1992.): 487-497. M.H. Abrams’ Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution
in Romantic Literature (. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1973), 225-237, demonstrates
32
developing an understanding of the ultimate orientation of human experience.
This is a very rich concept, incidentally unifying the various directionalities
associated with similar ideas in other cultures, being evocative of both “mind”
and “cosmic force,”89 an idea in the family of global conceptions of cosmic
force to which the African construct of cosmic creativity, and therefore, the
Kalabari idea of Teme-órú, belongs.

Hegel develops the idea of Geist into a principle for explaining cognitive,
historical and cosmic processes. Marx adapts the Hegelian deployment of this
concept in exploring social structure and development. Wariboko builds the
conceptions of Teme-oru and So, in relation to Pentecostalism, into an
interpretation of human potential for understanding and transforming reality.
Within these contexts, these thinkers explore the relationship between human
creativity and the contexts of that creativity. In the case of Marx and
Wariboko, the world of work, the means of transformation of reality through
which people earn a living, is central.

In exploring the implications of a similar idea as derived from African thought,

Wariboko works out another facet of this perspective that resonates across
many, if not all cultures, as in the Indian concept of Shakti, 90 his efforts being
one of the most recent in the African context since the earlier initiatives of

Hegel’s reshaping of these ideas as part of a movement in Western thought of transposing

religious ideas into secular forms.
89
The Wikipedia article on Geist describes its general etymological background and its use
as made famous by Hegel. R. C. Solomon’s "Hegel's Concept of ‘Geist’" in The Review of
Metaphysics , Vol. 23, nNo. 4 (, June., 1970):, 642-661, is a fantastic effort to work out the
meaning of the term as used by Hegel, an effort illuminating the ambiguities of Hegel’s
philosophical method within the context of his place in world philosophy and Christianity,
particularly in relation to Hegel’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries,
representing the speculative and critical ambitiousness that define Germany’s place in
philosophy.

90
On Shakti, the general reader could see the Wikipedia essay on the subject, which defines
Shakti as “Shakti…Śakti; (lit. ‘"power, ability, strength, effort, energy, capability’") is the
primordial cosmic energy and represents the dynamic forces that are thought to move
through the entire universe in Hinduism, and especially the major tradition of
Hinduism, Shaktism.
33
Leopold Sedar Senghor91 and other Negritude thinkers and the influence in
their work of Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy,92 as well as of the thought of
Henri Bergson on vital force, 93 down to more recent work on African Vitalogy
explored within an intersection of African thought and Christian philosophy. 94

Wariboko’s shaping of metaphysical ideas, conceptions of the foundations and

character of existence, in building a view on the concrete reality of human
experience, as enabled by classical African thought, demonstrates the value of
abstract ideas from African philosophies for the material reality of human life.

Shakti is the concept or personification of divine feminine creative power, sometimes

referred to as ‘The Great Divine Mother’ in Hinduism.” Accessed 8/11/2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakti . Accessed 8/11/2019.
For a detailed study, discussing the development of the concept in the context of various
views on its meaning, an insightful source is Pandit Rajmani Tigunait’s Sakti (Shakti) : The
Power In Tantra ,: A Scholarly Approach. (Honesdale, Pennsylvania: The Himalayan Institute
Press, 2015).

91
My primary source for Negritude thought is the work of Abiola Irele, who is very astute in
depicting its sublimities. In The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (. London:
Heinemman, 1981), 76, Irele translates Senghor’s lines from Liberte 1: Negritude et
Humanisme (. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964), 212-15, lines that suggest an idea of cosmic
dynamism. Irele also describes Sylvia Washington Ba’s The Concept of Négritude in the
Poetry of Leopold Sedar Senghor (. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973), 44-73 as presenting an
extensive discussion of Sengor’s understanding of vital force as a unifying conception in
classical African ontologies. Donna Jones’ The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy:
Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity. (New York : Columbia UP, 2010), is a more recent
exploration of the same theme.

92
Original title, La Philosophie Bantoue, (1945). Stephen O. Okafor’s " ‘Bantu
Philosophy’: Placide Tempels Revisited,”, Journal of Religion in Africa , Vol. 13, Fasc. 2
(.1982):. 83-100, is one of various analyses of Tempel’s work.

93
This idea is particularly elaborately developed in Bergson’s L'Évolution Créatrice (, 1907),
translated by Arthur Mitchell as Creative Evolution (. New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1913).
94
As demonstrated by Martin Nkafu Nkemnkia in African Vitalogy: A Step Forward in
African Thinking (. Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 1999).
34
 The “Luminous Darkness, the Brilliant Dark”
Wariboko develops a social and existential mysticism, an aspiration to a depth
of ultimate human and divine unity, constructed in the midst of working in the
world. He projects an image of work that not only satisfies human financial
aspirations but provides a level of psychological, social and spiritual
fulfillment that enables people to penetrate “that luminous darkness, the
brilliant dark” of ultimate human possibility, as he puts it in The Depth and
Destiny of Work:
The depth which I am talking about is not the darkness that shuts
out the light of inquiry but the luminous darkness, the brilliant dark.

..…, the very depth of relation, connection, and interdependence …

luring us to increasing cooperativeness, complexity, creativity, and
actualization…the wholeness in which all selves and others are
inextricably connected [where] human work [responds] to the lure
of… divine creativity.95

Wariboko describes his vision as one of going down “to the wholeness in
which all selves and others are inextricably connected,” “the very depth of
relation, connection, and interdependence,” a “relational density that is
enfolding (complicatio) and unfolding (explicatio).”96 He thus depicts a
process that brings people into harmony.
It is an enfolding dynamic, complicatio, demonstrating complex unity. It also
dramatises explicatio, a working out of possibility from potential, unfolding
the possibilities enfolded into the complex whole. Individuality and unity are
thus conjoined in a dynamic process.
This integration and expression of human unity, however, is experienced in
terms of a paradoxical depth of existence, in which darkness and light conjoin.
His thought may be described as a social mysticism as different from the more
conventional individualistic mysticism. His vision dramatizes the sense of a
journey within the material and social constitution of human life, penetrating
95
Depth and Destiny of Work, 4.
96
Ibid.
35
into a foundation of human existence enabling or constituted by human social
relations as actualized in work.
This foundation is “dark” perhaps because it is beyond conventional
appreciation. It is luminous possibly because of its force of attraction,
facilitating or deriving from its inherent character demonstrated in the
fulfillment human beings gain from each other’s company.
Wariboko is keen to differentiate what one may call his mysticism of sociation
from the mysticism of transcendence conventionally associated with the
metaphors he is using. His paradoxical conjunction of luminosity and
darkness, of brilliance and opacity, however, gathers associative momentum
in its resonance with correlative understandings in Christianity and other
religions and philosophies, and may be better appreciated through
comparison with these older ideational constructs.
These conjunctive ideas involve an understanding of an aspect of being that is
both compelling and other-than-human, radiant and yet beyond complete
penetration by the human person.
This paradoxical juxtaposition is particularly powerfully formulated by the
Christian mystic St. John of the Cross’ in terms of “the darkness that
illuminates the night,” the “knowledge that annihilates itself.” 97 Another iconic
expression of the same idea is Western magician Aleister Crowley’s account of
an ultimate contemplative achievement, the Indian yogic conception
of atmardarsana samadhi, as akin to a supreme blaze of light that is yet
darkness.98
These accounts refer to the idea of the cognitive transcendence of categories
of existence as understood by humans. Since it involves cancelling out all that
is known by human beings, it is often depicted in terms of the absence of light.

97
These are my own renderings from reading various translations of the poem often
translated as “Verses Written after an Ecstasy of High Exaltation.” My favouritefavorite
translation is by Roy Campbell, Poems of St. John of the Cross (. Glasgow: Collins, 1951), .31-
33.
98
Aleister Crowley, Magick: Liber Aba:Book Four (. Boston: Weiser, 2002),. 41.
36
Hence it is described as darkness. This darkness, however, is paradoxically
understood as bestowing understanding, depicted in terms of illumination.
This kind of mystical thought, represented by John and Crowley,
unlike Wariboko’s mysticism of human social relations actualized by work,
involves transcendence of everything terrestrial, and is often developed in the
context of withdrawal from the world and even in terms of withdrawal from
one’s mental activity, as with the monk St. John of the Cross and the
meditations of classical Yoga described by Crowley.
Wariboko's thought, on the other hand, may be understood as a form of
Karma Yoga, the Yoga of Action, as it is called, as explained in the Indian
Bhagavad Gita.99— a focus on ultimate reality through action within human
relationships.
Wariboko’s vision is thus a mysticism of action and of contemplation,
mysticism understood as the theory and practice of intimate encounter with
ultimate reality. He emphasizes human dynamism, human creative capacity
and people’s interactions with each other in relation to aesthetic stimuli and
spiritual discipline and sensitivity in enabling encounters with the ultimate.

In the midst of a world where methods of exchange for goods and services are
critical, procedures around which are built vast economic structures covering
the globe and implying challenging issues of unequal access to the resources
represented by these systems, a world within which also burns aspirations to
values that transcend these socially constructed frames, Wariboko is
compelled to ask how best to construct and sustain bridges between these
worlds.

Time

Time is fundamental to the human experience of the internal universe as well

as of the external world. Time shapes the external universe through the

99
An ancient, foundational text of Indian literature, philosophies and spiritualities. A
relatively recent translation is The Bhagavadgita in the Mahabharata,. Tr.trans. J. A. B. van
Buitenen (. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1981).

37
motions of the celestial bodies; through the reconfigurations of the structure
of the cosmos by such phenomena as cosmic expansion; through changes in
such terrestrial formations as geological forms; through the progression of
human life in the developments of biological systems from the womb to old
age and beyond. Time, along with matter and its spatial implications, is thus
foundational to the material structure within which terrestrial existence is
conducted.

Time may be experienced as liberating or as constrictive. How may one escape

the sense of being trapped by the inexorable character of time, its relentless
progression independent of human will? How may one distill from this extra-
personal inexorable a sense of maximizing one’s potential even within the grip
of such a seemingly absolute force?

This question may be seen as the central challenge of religion and philosophy,
strategies representing perspectives of maximizing the value of time as it
escapes human grasp as each moment moves onto the next, never to be
recovered as the experience of temporality progresses towards extinction at
the inevitable cessation of a person’s material life.

Wariboko’s Ethics and Time engages with this challenge, employing

conceptions of time from Kalabari thought in dialogue with other, particularly
Western, thinkers.

He concludes that, even in the face of the seeming inexorability of time, it can
be experienced in terms of spaces of possibility that facilitate a break from the
pre-determinations that may be demonstrated by the conventional perception
of temporal motion from the past to the present and the future.

He describes these spaces of possibility as “time gaps,” zones of experience

between two unavoidable occurrences, but which enable freedom of response
to the various possibilities that emerge within these blocks of unchangeable
reality.

The possibilities of freedom of response represented by human existence

between the inexorable realities of birth and death, is itself the central time

38
gap defining human life, as Melissa Browning sums up in her review of Ethics
and Time.100

In describing his theory of the time gap in terms of a “kairos event,”

Wariboko’s terminology evokes an orientation to Christian theology,
particularly its depiction of the incarnation of Jesus as a rupture in the bonds
of time, enabling human freedom from the prison created by material
conditions and human inadequacy.

In describing the exercise of relative free will enabled by freedom of response

in the face of the unchangeable realities of birth and death, this idea also
resonates with philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade’s conception of
hierophany as the irruption of the sacred into material existence in such
works as his Patterns in Comparative Religion, consummating his explorations
from such earlier texts such as the eloquently titled Myth of the Eternal Return
or Cosmos and History.101

Wariboko depicts human existence between life and death as itself a

revelatory experience. He may thus be seen as incidentally evoking such
conceptions as Catholic theologian Karl Rahner’s understanding of the human
person as naturally directed towards the ultimate mystery represented by the
source of existence, the human being’s every action demonstrative of the
possibility of orientation towards infinity.102

This kind of understanding reaches back to Christian theologian Thomas

Aquinas describing God in relation to the cosmos as “the end, agent and
exemplar and the source of the activity called freedom,” as an Aquinas scholar

100
Melissa Browning’s review of Ethics and Time: Ethos of Temporal Orientation in Politics
and Religion in the Niger Delta. (Lanham :Lexington Books, 2010);: Nimi Wariboko “Ethos
of Temporal Orientation in Politics and Religion of the Niger Delta,” by Nimi Wariboko in
the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics Vol. 32, nNo. 2 (. Fall / Winter 2012):. 213-214.
101
Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (, New York: New
American Library, 1958); Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos and History,. trans. Willard
R. Trask, (New York: Princeton UP, 1965).

102
As Rahner elaborates in Belief Today. (London: Sheed and Ward, 1973).
39
sums up his thought,103 a perspective later elaborated in his own distinctive
way by Teilhard de Chardin’s understanding of the cosmos as moving towards
a consummation in Christ.104

Wariboko’s focus, however, is not on the inevitability of cosmic progression,

but on human freedom of choice, human subjectivity, within temporal
processes. His thinking resonates with T.S. Eliot’s evocations, in his poetic
cycle Four Quartets,105 of revelatory moments of time that illuminate
possibilities freeing one from the grasp of “before and after,” cracks in the wall
of time, adapting an image from Awo Falokun Fatunmbi’s translation of a
poem from Yoruba Orisa cosmology.106

Wariboko reaches a distinctive achievement in the ancient quest to free

human beings from subjugation to time. He does this by reclaiming the
creative possibilities of human consciousness in relation to temporality. In
addressing this task, he takes forward, in his own way, and in dialogue with
Western thought in the process of achieving an intercultural synthesis, the
centralization of time as a structuring motif in African thought made famous
by John Mbiti.107

Biophilia, Cosmopophilia, Cosmophilia and Awephilia

In addition to the emergence of a principle of transformation at the

conjunction of cosmic and human reality, other themes emerging from the

“Thomas Aquinas, St.” in Encyclopedia Britannica, . Vol. 2. 1971 ed. I have not been able to
103

get the other details of this text. This formulation is an effort to understand the human
being and the cosmos as subsumed by the drive of the divine, in the spirit of the Biblical
Pauline summation, “In Him we live and move and have our being,” as stated in the King
James Version of Acts 17: 28.
104
In Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man. Collins (: London: Collins, 1959).

T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets” in Collected Poems : 1909-1962. (London: Faber and Faber,
105

1986), .189-223.

“Near the crack in the wall where the elders meet/Peace ascended to Heaven and did not
106

return.” Awo Falokun Fatunmbi, “Oríkì Ò rú nmìlà : Praising the Spirit of Destiny,” 22.
107
John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy. (London: Heinemann,1976), .15-28.
40
musical rhythm of Wariboko’s thematic patterning and resonating with a
trans-spatial and trans-temporal current of ideas are biophilia, cosmopophilia,
cosmophilia and awephilia.

Biophilia is love of nature. Cosmopophilia, my own coinage, is identification

with the extensive demographic, cultural, economic and technological
concentrations and networks represented by the cosmopolis. Cosmophilia is
love of the totality of being, understood in a cosmic context. Awephilia, a term
developed by Wariboko, sums up his understanding of an ideal in urban
design, the creation of environments that inspire awe at the miracle of being.

These concepts are particularly prominent in The Charismatic City, but they
resonate, at various levels of intensity, across Wariboko’s works.

Biophilia

Biophilia is a term popularized by the work of biologist Edward Wilson,

whose focus was on living forms.108 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 centredcentered in the
organic, or on systems that support life.

Examples of these are such sublime demonstrations of biophilia as the use of

sand and rocks in creating a sense of numinous peace in Japanese gardening.,
such as the garden of Ryō an-ji,, in which “rock formations arranged amidst a
sweep of smooth pebbles [are] raked into linear patterns that facilitate
meditation,”109; 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”110; and the garden of Ginkaku-ji, which

108
Edward Wilson, Biophilia. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984).
109
“Ryō an-ji.” Wikipedia. Accessed 8/22/2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryoan-ji
Accessed 8/22/2019.

“Daisen-in.” Wikipedia. Accessed 8/22/2019.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisen-in

110

Accessed 8/22/2019.
41
“features a replica of Mount Fuji [ the most famous mountain in Japan] made
of gravel, in a gravel sea.”111

Biophilia is central to Wariboko’s thought, as demonstrated by his accounts of

his intimate experiences with nature in the magnificent opening of the
acknowledgements pages of Nigerian Pentecostalism112 and the
acknowledgements pages of Charismatic City,113 as well as his extensive
development of this theme as a central value of urban design in the latter
book.

Biophilic and Cognitive Ecstasies in Nigerian Pentecostalism

The splendid opening section of the acknowledgements pages of Nigerian

Pentecostalism conjoins biophilia, love of nature and philosophia, love of
wisdom:

Writing and reading is a scented existence. Writing is like

sojourning in a paradisiacal garden, blooming with thousands of
fragrant flowers, and selecting and bonding some of them into a
synthesis with a time-release mechanism.

The goal of this art of perfumery is to ensure that when the reader
picks up the text in which multiple fragrances are embodied, she will
be transported into the store of the legendary Arabian perfume
merchant for a voluptuous jouissance. Each stimulation of her
olfactory nerves will bring her closer and closer to rapture, to a
place where only the spring birds of Westwood sing all day.

This is the place where I write, in the background of the Blue Hill of
Massachusetts, where nature, thinking, and divine ecstasy of
learning are in voluptuous embrace.

“Ginkaku-ji.” Wikipedia. Accessed 8/22/2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginkaku-ji

111

Accessed 8/22/2019.
112
Nigerian Pentecostalism, Rochester, NY : University of Rochester Press, 2014. xvii.
113
Charismatic City,. xxXX.
42
 This is an enchanted existence—and I invite you to experience it if
you are willing. I invite you to enable me to see clearly what I have
described to you. I saw in part and I wrote in part. When you, the
reader who is perfect, engages this volume, then that which is in part
shall be complete.114

This passage can be seen in terms of contradictory unities that delight the
mind without satisfying it, stimulating and titillating without consummating,
tantalizing without fulfilling.

Within an evocation of the luxuriance of nature, the passage demonstrates

exquisite mental flight vivified for the reader in language arresting in its
imagistic range and lyrical force. It evokes questions of conjunction between
sensual and abstract knowledge, between limitation and perfection in
knowing. It projects ideas of space as inspirational matrix, of the gap between
achievement and unfolding possibilities, and suggests the question of the
enabling factors of work as creative fulfillment as opposed to work as
uninspiring compulsion, themes of Wariboko’s Pentecostal Principle,
Charismatic City, Principle of Excellence115 and Depth and Destiny of Work,
making the passage an incidental resonating chamber of motifs emerging in
other books of Wariboko’s, evoking the central dynamisms of his thought.

Wariboko’s unity of biophilia and philosophia resonates with Hindu

Tantric depictions of related possibilities. The bliss of knowledge is what the
Tantrika seeks, a bliss reached through the delights of the senses, with the
Tantric thinker Abhinavagupta, declaring in a similar but more intense spirit
of ecstatic scholarship:

I have cleansed myself first by bathing fully in grammar, I

have collected the flowers of discerning wisdom that grow in
that wish granting creeper of insightful imagination which
grows out of the roots of good reasoning, and worshipped the

114
Nigerian Pentecostalism,. XVIIxvii.
115
The Principle of Excellence: A Framework for Social Ethics (. Lanham: Lexington, 2009).
43
 Lord of my heart with them; I have enjoyed the benefits of
such beautiful great literature and poetry as can be
compared with liquor made out of the essence of ambrosia;
and now, in the company of my beloved lady; discourse on
divine non-duality [ the underlying unity of
existence visualized as a woman], I am going to repose. 116

Animistic Delight in The Charismatic City

In the acknowledgements pages of The Charismatic City, Wariboko further

dramatizes a rapturous engagement with nature in relation to his life as a
scholar:

I thank the birds of spring and summer of Westwood for their

singing, chirping, and acrobatic displays as I read, thought, and
wrote. I also thank the trees, their flowers, and their dancing in the
wind for adding splendid color, fragrance, and fillip to my
imagination and sight. In all, nature, creation, is at the heart of the
Charismatic City.117

These lines are beautiful in bringing vividly before the mental eye the playful
vitality of nature as it inspired the writer at his work. In addressing these
natural forms directly in his imagination, these aspects of nature are
transformed from a conventional perception of them as non-human elements
operating in a different cosmos from humanity, admired but fundamentally
different, into partners, into agents, into entities demonstrating their own
rationale for existence, different from those of humans and independent of the
human being but intersecting with the distinctiveness of human existence in
ways that suggest a form of indirect communication between diverse modes
of being.

Abhinavagupta in “Ishvara Pratyabhijna Vivriti Vimarsini,” as translated bytrans.

116

Arindam Chakrabarti in Samarasya : Studies in Indian Arts, Philosophy and Interreligious

Dialogue in Honour of Bettina Baumer,. eEds. Das and Furlinger (, 2005), 27.
117
Charismatic City, . xXx.
44
The lines are lovely for the serenity they evoke, a serenity emerging from the
play on the senses and thus on the psyche by the differing vitality of nature in
its animate and inanimate forms. They are also delightful in the writer’s
evocation of the projection of this vitality as a mode of existence with its own
unique authenticity, its own integrity that goes beyond primarily human
needs. The writer suggests the grounding of animate and inanimate nature in
a rationale for being that is independent of but may serve human needs when
humans are sensitive to that possibility in humble cooperation.

A relationship is thus dramatized as capable of emerging when humans

recognize these other aspects of nature in terms of their own unique qualities.
These natural forms may lack the greater complexity of humanity’s distinctive
powers of mind and body, but they may be appreciated by humanity in terms
of their own characteristic beauty and power; t. They may be identified with
as brethren, as co-creators, co- travellerstravelers on the earth.

The writer thus moves from sensitivity to nature as an enchanting other in the
earlier quote from Nigerian Pentecostalism to a filiation with nature as brother
and sister in the lines from The Charismatic City. He cultivates an affiliation
with nature as an interlocutor with which contact at the level of indirect
communication has been established beyond the eloquent beauty but still vast
distance of being between the natural forms, human and non-human, of
Nigerian Pentecostalism. In other words, he has moved from a largely
admiring perspective on nature to the more expansive, participatory
orientation represented by an animistic mentality.

Cosmopophilia

Cosmopophilia is the love of cosmopolitan environments, environments

described by Wikipedia on the cosmopolis as an urban community "where
people of various ethnic, cultural and/or religious backgrounds live in
proximity and interact with each other."118 This love is demonstrated in

118
From “Cosmopolitanism.” Wikipedia. Accessed 8/22/2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmopolitanism Accessed 8/22/2019.
45
identification with the qualities that define cosmopolitan existence as a
distinctive development of humanity.

Cosmopophilia is dramatized by Wariboko’s The Charismatic City, his

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
God119 and resonating in relation to Harvey Cox’s 20th century The Secular
City,120 the latter work having influenced Wariboko, his own 21st century book
being a counterpoint to that by Cox.

From his history as an economist who has worked in the global financial
centrecenter, 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,121 doing a lot of his writing in airports and in
flight between cities where he gives lectures, 122 Wariboko has developed a
rich affinity for the implications of these demographic aggregations as
demonstrations of human potential through their large concentrations of

119
Originally published as De Civitate Dei Contra Pagano (413-426). A 20th century
translation, by Marcus Dodds, is The City of God (. New York: Random House, 1978).

Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (.
120

New York: Collier, 1990).

121
Wariboko discuss his history in relation to his work in a number of instances in his
books. He does so in Pentecostal Principle, 220, in the context of his religious conversion: “
I became born again after obtaining my MBA in finance and accounting from Columbia
University, New York, after working on Wall Street as an investment banker, and while
doing corporate finance work for a local commercial bank in Lagos.” The information in
this essay about his life before his MBA comes from personal communication with him.

“I also need to thank the global public spaces. As I travel often, I do a great deal of my
122

work in the public: writing in trains, automobiles, airplanes, at airports, train stations, and
hotel rooms and lobbies. I do this in multiple cities. The writing of this book is no different.
I wrote parts of it in the United States … the United Kingdom [and] Nigeria . Nimi
Wariboko. Nigerian Pentecostalism, xvii. iXVIII.

46
creatively busy people, their maximization of the division of labourlabor 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 these 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.

The conception of the Charismatic CCity 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. These possibilities are enhanced by the city’s
infrastructural shaping through striving after economic justice by those who
run it. Such social engineering facilitates human self-development and
enablement, enhancing the initial capacities of the individuals and groups that
constitute its community, thereby opening people to new experiences, new
possibilities of fulfillment and of self-actualization.

Such an environment is enhanced by the cultivation of inspiring natural

spaces that facilitate relaxation, promoting interaction by providing
convenient and stimulating places for people to meet, facilitating deep
sensitivity to the beauty and power of existence.

Cosmophilia

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

47
international networks.123 Along similar lines, Wariboko's cosmopophilia
expands into cosmophilia, which Duane Elgin describes this way:

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.124

Wariboko’s imagistic summation of the character of the city in The

Charismatic City suggests this cosmicizsing 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. 125

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 Wariboko's.

The central point of conjunction between these diverse but correlative

expressions is the idea of convergence represented by the intersection of

Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (. London: Penguin,

123

2006),. xiv.

Duane Elgin, “Cosmophilia,” at Gritfish.com: Materials to Create a Sustainable Future

124

Accessed 8/22/2019. http://www.gritfish.com/index.php/deep-ecology/principles-of-

deep-ecology/2196-cosmophilia Accessed 8/22/2019.

217,. nNote 42, referencing Robert S. Lopez, “The Crossroads within the Wall,” in The
125

Historian and the City , ed. Oscar Handlin and John Burchard (. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press and Harvard University Press, 1963), 27-–43.
48
horizontal and vertical lines, an intersection that may represent various
orders of reality.

These ontological mappings may range from the material and mental
dimensions highlighted by Wariboko to the convergence of matter and spirit
evident in Benin Olokun cosmography,126 in Yoruba Ifa iconography,127 and the
classical cosmologies of Dahomey and of the dDiaspora African religion
Voodoo,128 to the symbolism of the Christian cross and the Native American
mMedicine wWheel.

In these examples, the circle bounding the intersecting lines is suggestive of

the zone of enablement of the possibilities represented by the convergent
lines. This symbol thus evokes 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 cosmological symbol and functional Ifa artifact, the opon Ifa. 129

Cosmophilia thus emphasizes the conjunction of myriads of seemingly

accidental factors in enabling the fact of existence. It is sensitive to the
expression of these conjunctions in consciousness. It highlights the grounding
of these possibilities within the materiality represented by space, time,
embodiment and the orientation towards aspects of existence that transcend

126
As described by Norma Rosen in “Chalk Iconography in Olokun Worship,” in
African Arts , Vol. 22, nNo. 3 (, 1989): , 44-53, +88.
127
As presented in John Drewal, H. J., J. Pemberton, and R. Abiodun,. Yoruba: Nine Centuries
of African Art and Thought. (New York: The Center for African Art in association with Harry
N. Abrams Publishers, 1989).

As discussed in Leslie Desmangles’ “African Interpretations of the Christian Cross in

128

Vodun,” in Sociological Analysis (, 1977), 38, 1:13-24.

129
Ifalaloa Sanchez, “Discourse on Meaning and Symbology in the Ifa Divination System,.” in
Ifa Today, Ifa Yesterday, Ifa Tomorrow. Accessed 8/31/2019..

http://ifalola.blogspot.com/2007/11/discourse-on-meaning-and-symbology-in.html
Accessed 8/31/2019.

49
these categorizations, a dynamism giving birth to the creative restlessness
that defines humanity.

Awephilia

In The Charismatic City Wariboko projects the significance of environments

that facilitate deep sensitivity to the beauty and power of existence.

These are natural, architectural and artistic forms that provoke a sense of the
potent force of human and cosmic creativity, perhaps even evoking a sense of
the numinous, which, at its most intense, is “an invisible but majestic
presence that inspires both dread and fascination and constitutes the non-
rational element of vital religion.”130

Wariboko’s conception of awephilia characterizes my experience of Nigeria’s

Benin-City, as represented by my encounter with its culture of natural, tree
shrines and human- made shrines, structures deriving from ancient practices
and distributed across the city, in harmony with its busy modernity.

These sacred locations are revered for either their spiritual significance or for
both their historical and spiritual value, commemorating strategic incidents in
Benin history as well as believed to act as embodiments of intelligences and as
enablers of movement between physical and non-physical dimensions.

Three locations embodied for me the Benin understanding of sacred trees as

spiritual centers on account of the sheer density of the atmosphere that
surrounded them. One was the shrine on top of a hill at Ikpoba slope, a thickly
wooded grove of trees, with an awe- inspiring aura reminiscent more of the
stillness and vegetative density of a primeval forest rather than a location on
an elevated spot in a busy commercial and residential centrecenter.

130
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (, 1966), in the
spirit of the elaboration of this idea by Rudolph Otto in The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into
the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, trans. . tr.
John Harvey (. Oxford : Oxford UP, 1923).
50
Another was a smaller spot of thickly wooded trees at Uselu, so thick that one
could not see inside it, even when standing a few feet outside it, and again
projecting the aura of an isolated spot in the centre of a thick tropical forest,
even though it was in the midst of a residential area and people’s homes were
only a few feet from the shrine.

The most fascinating of these natural shrines was the Ogba forest, a wonder of
nature a few feet from the busy Ekewan Road, the forest being a space where
one can see the water of the Ogba river bubbling up from the earth as well as
emerging in a flood from within the thickly massed trees of the vegetative
space.

Along with these wonderful natural qualities—, which included fascinating

wildlife such as antelopes, scorpions, water and land snakes—, was its
fantastic atmosphere, mysterious and inescapable, projecting an awesome
impression of sanctity, compelling my fascination but repelling me at the
same time, on account of its awesome otherness;, an atmosphere that became
even more dense, more palpable, more otherworldly, more remote from
known categories, more strange and more unmistakable, thickening in a
condensation of the sense of the uncanny and the sublime., Aas one passed a
particular point in the river, going deeper towards the spot from where the
river emerges from the forest, one encounters a the condensation of an aura
so potent that for years I could only remain outside the forest and gape in awe
at this wonder of nature, not because I was afraid of danger but because it
was like entering into something inspiring but distant from one’s accustomed
experience of being.

People described this uncanny atmosphere as the expression of the presence

of an invisible entity, the spirit of the river, such a spirit understood in Benin
cosmology as present at the source of every river.

Wariboko’s summation of the cosmophilic potential of awephila is rhapsodic

and exhilarating, a majestic statement on being and becoming:

The truth of a city is the working out of possibilities that forever

cannot arrive at the ultimate possibility, the possibility of all

51
 possibilities, the ultimate truth. The city is a place to quest for the
truth of human existence. … partial truths that satisfy the truth of
the Absolute Infinity…as we approach the rationally unknowable,
unconceivable Absolute Infinity.131

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.

The Mirror and the Reflection

Among Wariboko’s rich contributions to the development of motifs resonant
across religious and philosophical thought is his reflection on mirrors in The
Split God,132 a theme evident across various Western esoteric and Asian
schools of thought.

“Our relationship with mirrors, whether physical or supernatural, is a

complicated one” he states, proceeding to an examination of this relationship
in terms of the link between one’s physical image in a mirror and the
unviewable seeable reality of one’s self.133

May the mirror image evoke the concealment of reality from the mind, a
protection against truth one can cope with only if exposed to it in small doses,
as Moshe Halbertal sums up one perspective on cognitive concealment and
revelation?134

Abhinavagupta, a Hindu sage, depicts the human mind in meditation as a

mirror within which the God Shiva, the unseen source of existence, may
131
Charismatic City,. 115.
132
“Spiritual Discernment: Bathroom Mirror as Metaphor,.” Split God,. 45-64.

133
Split God, .46.

Moshe Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and its
134

Philosophical Implications, .trans. Jackie Feldman (. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007).

52
manifest himself. Yet, paradoxically, that mind within which Shiva manifests
is Shiva’s own consciousness. 135

“Just as [(there is no difference between]) the fire's [(capacity]) to burn and

cook [(and the fire itself]), similarly what difference is there in reality between
the various aspects of God [(and God himself]) conceived by the sentient
subject?,” this conception asserts.136

“In reality, what difference is there in the various forms of divinity that are
imagined by conscious subjects? Fire is the same, whether it is cooking or
burning” another translation of the same lines clarifies.137

"God is (both) formless and omniform, just like water or a mirror (and the
images reflected in them). He pervades all things both moving and immobile
(and he assumes their form)," this sequence of thought concludes, quoting
another text, the Kāmikāgama.138

Shiva is thus depicted as the ultimate ground of awareness, “the light of

consciousness that shines everywhere…the One Light [that] is the
manifestation of all things.”139

Indian philosopher Ramana Maharshi describes self consciousness as a

mirror, the expression of something deeper, where the individual self and the
self at the heart of the cosmos are conjoined.140

Tantraloka, Light on the Tantras, trans. Mark Dyczkowski,. Sloka 73, page 17. Accessed
135

8/18/2019. http://www.anuttaratrikakula.org/tantraloka-chapter-1-lesson-1-overview/
Accessed 8/18/2019.
136
Ibid., Sloka 70, page 16.
137
Tantraloka, Light on the Tantras, trans. Roger-Orphé Jeanty,. Sloka 70, page 16.
138
Tantraloka, Light on the Tantras, trans. Mark Dyczkowski,. Sloka 66, page 16.
139
Ibid., Sloka 54, page 13.
53
“Show the face you had before you were born,” as the Zen Buddhist expression
puts this idea of perceiving the essence of the self.141

Another Zen perspective refers to polishing the mirror of the mind through
meditation to better see what it reflects. Another Zen view questions how one
can polish something which has no surface to polish, arguing that the mind as
we experience it is the very essence that is sought.142

This ideational sequence is incidentally conjoined in Wariboko’s shock at

failing to encounter his accustomed image in the bathroom mirror as he tries
to brush his teeth. He encounters a blank space in place of the image of his
face. The mirror had broken the night before and his wife removed the shards
without informing him. This experience takes his mind to questions about the
distinction between the façade of the self represented by the accustomed
image of his face in the mirror and the reality of his self, conventionally
invisible to sight, a hidden identity evoked by the blank space where the
mirror reflecting his face should have been.

The Void
The void, the no-thing-ness, the silence is the place where the artist,
the painter, the scholar, the dancer, the musician, the priest, the
scientist can touch the prima materia ...primal energy, spirit, and
creativity...the place beyond mere knowing…The divine spot where
As described by Paul Brunton in A Search in Secret India (.London: Rider, 2003),. 144-
140

145, 157-160, 302-310.

This is the Zen Buddhist concept of the “original face,” “the primal face,” discussed within
141

and beyond its originating Buddhist context in the Wikipedia article on the subject:
Accessed 8/18/2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_face (Accessed 8/18/2019 ).
Koun Yamada’s translated The Gateless Gate: The Classic Book of Zen Koans (. Boston:
Wisdom Publications, 2004), 111-117, harmonisesharmonizes the story of contrastive
perspectives on the idea of the mind as a mirror to be polished to better reflect reality and
that of the question of the character of the mind when it is not thinking in terms of
opposites, a state indicative of its essential nature.
142
These perspectives are contrasted in Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1976), in the story of Hui-neng, 112-116, of Huai-jang, 117, and the explorations
of the ideas of Huang-po and Bankei, 161-162.
54
 the person gets out of [themself] entering into the place of
ontological knowing [where the deeper meanings of things hits
home] momentarily entering the zone of the spirit that grounds
existence as the pulsating flow of primal energy in him or her
crackles the silence.143

Thus states Wariboko in his explanation of a concept from Kalabari

philosophy in The Principles of Excellence. He thereby foregrounds ideas
about what may be described as the ontological moment, the moment when,
the silence in which, all other considerations are replaced by or subsumed in
the question of the rationale of one's existence, as Stephan Kö rner frames his
discussion of Immanuel Kant in his book on him,144 and as George Steiner
introduces Martin Heidegger’s thought in his own book on that other German
philosopher.145

In developing this idea of a creative void, Wariboko resonates with related

conceptions, across various schools of thought, of a mysterious but deeply
potent, transformative but hidden dimension of reality, directing the activity
of those initiated into it even when they are unaware of it, and yet constituting
a reality, that, as Wariboko puts it, “is not in a far off place” 146 though “it is
hidden from sight.”147

Every moment of human life may be seen as constituting possibilities beyond

the full understanding of most people, perhaps even everyone. That
practically infinite range may be understood in terms of Wariboko’s
conception of the void. Void because it cannot be completely plumbed. “An

143
From The Principle of Excellence,. 94-95.
144
Stephan Kö rner, Kant (. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977),. 12.
145
George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Introduced in 34-44.
146
From The Principle of Excellence, 29.
147
Ibid.
55
abyss, an inexhaustible ocean of possibilities,” 148 as he puts it in Excellence.
This void emerges from capacities buried in the person, thus it is close, not far.
But because it is beyond full appreciation, it is hidden;, ideas resonating with
the universally recurrent image of the human being as often like a person
carrying a jewel in their pocket thinking it iss either a stone or an imitation.

The image of voidness, of dark depths, is Wariboko’s own magnificent

addition to the literature of voidness, the visualization of ultimate possibility
in terms of emptiness, empty because it cannot be subsumed in terms of any
already extant identity.

This image is also one of Wariboko’s means of linking central themes of his
work, such as conceptions from his native Kalabari culture of dialectal
relationship between history and possibility, the actual and the potential, the
human and the divine and Pentecostal understanding of correlation between
the possible and the impossible as mediated by the transformative power of
divine grace.

The Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Resonance of Wariboko’s

Image of the Void

Among the richest dramatizations of the idea of dynamic emptiness Wariboko

is evoking is the use of empty space in the visual arts and architecture. These
arts give sensuous expression to those abstractions of creative emptiness in
religion and science represented by the Void of Buddhism, the Cloud of
Unknowing of Christianity, the Unmanifest of Kabbalah and the Quantum
Nothing of scientific cosmology, among other related formulations.

Wariboko’s Void and the Void of Buddhism

Tibetan Buddhism develops the image of emptiness and the void with
particular force. It does this in terms of a conception of ultimate possibility as
an unchanging ground, transcendent of human conception, hence it is known
as void. It underlies the inevitability of change represented by the cosmos, an
148
From The Principle of Excellence, 5.
56
inconstancy indicating lack of permanence, hence demonstrating a form of
emptiness. This ultimate possibility, both unchanged and transcendent, and
yet the source of change, is described as constituting the foundations of
consciousness. It is visualized in terms of the breadth, depth and luminous
beauty of the sky.149

Like the void of Wariboko and the Nothingness of Kabbalah discussed below,
the Buddhist void is “hidden” as Wariboko describes his own conception, yet
it “is not in a far off place”150 as he affirms. Simmer-Brown describes the
Tibetan Buddhist void as “the fathomless-awareness space that undergirds
and permeates all experience and phenomena,”151 only requiring “penetrating
insight” to cognize.152

Wariboko’s Void and the Cloud of Unknowing of Christianity

A. C. Spearing begins his translation of the 14 th century anonymously authored

collection of English texts The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works,153 with a
prayer opening one of the texts, summing up the vision central to the Cloud as
well as evoking its ideational lineage in Christian thought.

The focus of the prayer is on the:

transcendently unknown and transcendently shining height of your

dark, inspired utterances, where all the secret matters of theology
are concealed and hidden under the transcendently shining
darkness of wisest silence, making that which is transcendently

Ideas particularly richly expounded by Judith Simmer-Brown in Dakini’s Warm Breath:

149

The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism (. Boston: Shambhala, 2001),. 102-109.

150
From The Principle of Excellence, 29.
151
Dakini’s Warm Breath, 107.
152
Ibid., 105-6.

The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works,. Trtrans. A. C. Spearing (. London: Penguin,
153

2001),. 1.
57
 bright shine transcendently in the secrecy of the greatest
darkness…154

It is titled “The Prayer of St. Denis,” introducing The Mystical Theology of St.
Denis, referencing Pseudo-Dionysius, whose The Mystical Theology155 is a
fountainhead of Christian apophatic theology, the approach to God in terms of
divine transcendence of all human conception, even the most exalted.

Amazing as the paradoxical projection of passion is in those lines, generating

affirmation through negation, Wariboko’s vision of human possibility may be
seen as complementary, in aspirational force and expressive luminosity, to
those other lines resonant across time:

Excellence… “is” the infinite longing of humans to actualize their

potentialities, to access the fecund void. … deep calling unto deep; an
irruptive, disruptive “convocation of the void.”... the constant
yearning of humans to realize their potentials so that they can
express the infinity that is in their being, become what they
fundamentally are… absorbing the finite …within the infinite.

…excellence is … penetrating into the old to come out into the new,
penetrating into the void to come out in plenora… pulsating desire
to … transverse one’s separateness, one’s isolation and to edge
closer to the divine being in whom we move, live, and have our
being.

…standing …at the edge of the void, the luminous darkness, the not-
yet… The excellent self is aroused by the deep desire (natural and
sacred vitality) to go across the chasm (the between) that separates
the familiar and the novum and produce a new portrait for
humanity.

154
Ibid., 1.

Collected in Colm Luibheid et al’s Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (. New Jersey:
155

Paulist Press, 1987).

58
 The excellence-aroused life lives between fullness and emptiness.
On one hand, there is a fullness of achievement (accomplishment,
tradition, and order) that resists any risk of leaping into the abyss.

On the other, the emptiness of the abyss is the inexhaustible depth of

the novum, new opportunities, the never-before-noticed, new
possibilities.

Every fullness is always beckoned by this emptiness to experience

the eros of new connection and enjoy the yearning of being to go
beyond itself.

If the invitation is accepted, the person (the inventor, the artist)

experiences the between as not emptiness, but fullness.

At the margin there is fullness of ideas and presences to be born if

only we can imitate what we perceive.

Wariboko’s formulations, like those of the Kabbalist Rabi Joseph ben Shalom
described below, adapts the language of voidness often used for similar ideas
in Christianity and Buddhism to a style of describing the co-inherence of
ultimate depth and ultimate potentiality within human existence.156

Wariboko gives procedural clarity to these ideas:

The zeal and act of accessing the void is often propelled by a small
set of questions:

How can that which makes a break with the status quo come
into the world?
How can the event which is entirely new find a place in the
world?

Betinna Baumer and John Dupuche’s edited Void and Fullness in the Buddhist, Hindu and
156

Christian Traditions (. New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2005), provides a rich background for
such comparisons through its scope of exploration of ideas of emptiness and fullness as
metaphors of divine possibility in the three regions it addresses.

59
 How can every individual be a site for the production of this
kind of new?

Such a new can only come into the world “through a process that
breaks decisively with all established criteria for judging (or
interpreting) the validity (or profundity) of opinions (or
understandings).”157
…
… excellence is … an infinite longing of human beings, using human
capabilities to struggle “against the limits that constrain human
life158…the working out of possibilities that forever cannot arrive at
the ultimate possibility, the possibility of all possibilities, the
ultimate truth. …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.159

Wariboko’s Void and the Nothing of Kabbalah

The term “Unmanifest” in relation to Kabbalah derives from the Western

esotericist Dion Fortune, in a text I can’t recall now, who employs it to indicate
the metaphysical and epistemological significance of the idea as indicating a
referent which does not exist in a sense understood by humans, a potential, as
it were, continuously expressed in terms of what is cognizable by humans
without that potential being exhausted, like an infinitely flowing sea feeding
various rivers.160

157
The Principle of Excellence,. 157-158. Quoting Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth
(. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003),. xxiii.

158
Ibid., 207.
159
Ibid., 208.

She expands on this idea in terms of the notion of “negative existence” in The Mystical
160

Qabalah (. Maine: Weiser, 1997), . 29-36.

60
An ultimate dramatization of the Kabbalistic concept of the ineffable
generating existence is demonstrated by the foundational Kabbalistic text, the
Zohar, rich with images of transcendence, such as impenetrable darkness, yet
out flowing in nourishing streams of cosmic generation.161

Gershon Scholem discusesdiscusses the same Kabbalistic concept in terms of

the idea of the “mystical Nothing” in a manner that resonates, incidentally,
with Wariboko’s dynamic conception of the idea of voidness as evoking the
depth of hidden but ever- present potential that the human being may plumb
to create new realities.

Scholem depicts “…the abyss which becomes visible in the gaps of existence,”
referencing Kabbalists such as Rabbi Joseph ben Shalom of Barcelona, who
maintains that “…in every transformation of reality, in every change of form,
or every time the status of a thing is altered, the abyss of nothingness [which
births the cosmos] is crossed and for a fleeting mystical moment becomes
visible.”162

Wariboko’s Void and the Quantum Nothing of Scientific

Cosmology

A particularly powerful exploration of this subject, strictly within the contexts

of philosophy of science but resonating with the treatment of the idea in
religion and metaphysics, is Tian Yu Cao’s “Ontology and Scientific
Explanation.”163
161
As demonstrated in The Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts, translated and
edited by Isaiah Tishby and translated into English by David Goldstein (. Oxford: Littman
Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002),. 229-443.

Gershon Scholem in Major Trends of Jewish Mysticism (. New York: Schocken, 1974), .
162

217-220, .217.
163
Tian Yu Cao, “Ontology and Scientific Explanation” in John Cornwell’s edited
Explanations: Styles of Explanation in Science (. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004),. 173-195. I
demonstrate conjunctions between Cao’s ideas and examples from religious thought in
“Iro Eweka : The Human Face, the Human Mind and the Possibility of a Mysticism Inspired
by Benin Olokun Symbolism.” Accessed 8/30/2019.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/oluwatoyin-vincent-adepoju/iro-eweka-the-human-
face-the-human-mind-and-the-possibility-of-a-mysticism-inspi/10150641932014103/
61
Cao’s and Wariboko’s conceptions are correlative in focusing on relationships
between possibility and expression in terms of the idea of fecund emptiness.
Wariboko’s work is centered on the distillation of value in the finite from the
infinite. Cao explores the question of how the cosmos could have emerged
from a prior state of which nothing is known. Roughly resonant with
Wariboko’s description of possibilities beyond human reach is Cao’s
summation: “Since whatever is physically imaginable is physically connected
with our observed universe, (namely all possible events that are compatible
with the observational evidences that we have obtained hitherto), then
nothing which is physically imaginable could be responsible for the genesis of
the universe.”164
Wariboko’s Void and the Visual Arts

The British artist Henry Moore uses holes in relation to sculptures of the
human form, thereby suggesting cave- like depths where human beings and
nature converge. “Moore created work based upon the relationship the human
body shares with the larger natural world. His sculptures express the ideas
that humanity is part of nature and that through our senses we can become
connected to something timeless and universal.”165

“Chinese painting and Japanese gardening are unique in their depiction of

space as a primordial stillness. In Chinese and Japanese aesthetics, empty or
negative and positive or occupied space and their evocative possibilities are
correlated with cosmological and mentalistic values at the intersection of

Accessed 8/30/2019.

A detailed but concise treatment of the scientific perspectives on the subject is by Frank
Close,’ Nothing: A Very Short Introduction (. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009). Earlier published as
The Void, 2007.
164
Tian Yu Cao, “Ontology and Scientific Explanation,” 190-191.

165
“Moore created work based upon the relationship the human body shares with the
larger natural world. His sculptures express the ideas that humanity is part of nature and
that through our senses we can become connected to something timeless and universal.”
fromFrom “The Full and the Empty in Henry Moore Sculptures.” Accessed 8/30/2019.
https://www.ideelart.com/magazine/henry-moore-sculptures Accessed 8/30/2019.
62
contemplation and action [in art]” I state in a quote from a forthcoming
essay.166

Dramatizing this idea in a manner correlative with Wariboko’s depiction of

voidness as metaphoric for the depth of potential that may be unleashed in
action, is the following perspective:

Pine trees are like people of high principles whose manner reveals
an inner power. They resemble young dragons coiled in deep
gorges; they have an attractive and graceful air, yet one trembles to
approach them, awed by the hidden power ready to spring
forth….The association of the pine with the dragon, a primary
symbol of power, made the pine also a symbol of the yang force and
vitalizing spirit ( ch’i) of Heaven. By analogy it also represents the
inner resources of man. The image of a young dragon coiled in the
deep valley suggests the potential in man and the stillness before the
manifestation of spiritual power.”167

Also evocative of Wariboko’s explorations of human creativity in terms of the

image of the void, an image evocative of his pervasive motif of the unity of
transcendence and immanence, is Eugene Herrigel’s observation on the
influence of Zen Buddhism on painting, as evident in Japan and China.:

Space in Zen painting is…formless and empty and yet the source of
all forms [evoking] an undancing dance animating all existence,
pervading and dancing through all things [dramatizing space, not
as] the skin lying around things, but their core, their deepest
essence..168

166
“Uli Philosophy and Mysticism 2: Inspirational Sources and Creative Processes.”

167
Mai-mai Sze, The Way of Chinese Painting (. New York: Random House, 1959), . 177.
168
Eugene Herrigel, The Method of Zen (. New York: Random House, 1974), . 69-70.
63
Ada Udechukwu, articulating a similar aesthetic at the intersection of Igbo Uli
and Chinese art, dramatizes the expression of such sensitivities in more
specific terms:

The dominant characteristics of uli [including] balance between

positive shape and negative space –are at the core of communicating
experience in my poetry and visual art where economy of word and
economy of line work to create the unspoken, the open spaces that
speak in my work.

My art, literary and visual, is essentially a means of giving voice to

the silences in my life, to those intimate areas that shape me as an
individual … giving form to the fluidity of [human] contact,
separation, distance [exploring] emotional experience as I search for
what lingers after the words, after the images.169

“ Eloquent economy of concrete delineations harmonizes with eloquently

actualized emptiness, so that they pulsate in relation to each other, the visual
void palpitating in the sky’s evocation of transcendence while the outlining of
concrete forms against its immensity evokes a sense of immanence, the entire
space sweeping in its scope, suggesting a balance of stillness and dynamic
presence. ”

These artistic forms evoke creative emptiness through stillness. Absence of

motion. The focus is on arresting motion in contemplative calm, that being the
most conventional way of suggesting ideas of emptiness as a creative value,
even in writing. The landscapes these visualizations evoke are still and
contemplatively powerful, the focus being on contemplative idealizations.

Wariboko’s human/nature correlations, however, are dynamic rather than

still. What makes his ideas stand out in relation to the range of visual efforts to
dramatize ideas of emptiness is his emphasis on the dynamic. He paints a
picture of the experience of limitless depths of possibility in terms of active
human experience amplified by human communal interaction.

In Simon Ottenberg, . Ed.The Nsukka Artists and Nigerian Contemporary Art .(

169

Washington: Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 2002),. 59.

64
Thus, a correlative demonstration in visual art of Wariboko’s contributions to
conceptions of creative emptiness is Dutch-French artist Vincent van Gogh’s
painting Road with Cypress and Star, in its relationship between space and
dynamism, between emptiness and motion and between these and active
human presence.170

Road with Cypress and Star is defined by a resonating expanse, a sky alive with
lines both forceful and lyrical, powerfully luminous with the sun and a
crescent moon shaped by rings of concentric radiance, the entire landscape
alive with a dynamism as if ablaze;, a force running across and unifying earth,
sky, the road, the human beings walking on it and the horse, the horse- drawn
buggy and the human beings riding in it, a cypress vibrating in the centre
center of it all like a green flame.

The painting is shaped by thick, forceful, brush strokes which yet create a
musical rhythm, generating a sense of dynamism that suffuses the landscape
and the humans within it. This sense of pervasive dynamism is incidentally
evocative of Wariboko’s characterization of the Kalabari concept Teme as an
enabler of human dynamism, a cosmic force correlating humanity and
divinity, similar to Wariboko’s development of a related idea of the
convergence of cosmic and human possibility in The Pentecostal Principle.

Road with Cypress and Star is thus correlative with Wariboko’s work at a
cosmological scale, evoking space in relation to creativity. In also depicting
people in action within the landscape, with the people walking on the road
suggested as coming from work, with one carrying a shovel and in the near
distance a horse- drawn buggy suggesting the presence of a driver and
possibly passengers, the painting is resonant with Wariboko’s reflections on
work, on global social networks and intimate levels of human experience.

Summative Response to Intercultural Convergences of Wariboko’s

Work

170
Painted 1890. “Road with Cypress and Star.” Accessed 9/2/2019.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_with_Cypress_and_Star Accessed 9/2/2019.

65
Through such intercultural convergences as demonstrated by Wariboko’s
explorations, one is enabled to unify the scope of one’s cognitive quest across
various domains. One is taken further along on one’s own correlation of mind
and cosmos. These convergences facilitate the harmonizing of one’s mental
universe represented by what one is able to learn as a participant in the
cognitive adventure of homo sapiens and one’s sensitivities as a beneficiary of
the munificence of existence, the natural world constantly filtered through
human consciousness.

Intimate Advocacy in Living Thought Speaking to Live Human

Experience

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

In The Split God, he presents this more intimate and personalistic aspect of his
theological and 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

66
 (practices and affections) and embodied theological ideas
(beliefs).171

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.172

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.173

I am 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 Principle of Excellence, for
example, includes such delights as this:, “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.”174

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

171
The Split God,. 20.
172
The Split God, 156.
173
Ibid., 156.
174
The Principles of Excellence, .153.
67
and body in relating with fellow humans. Some relationships, as Wariboko
suggests, 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 and the poison of negativity
and embrace the more wholesome possibilities glowing ahead?

That 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."175

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 realizations of grand dreams, rather than walking
in the lowlands of possibility, bogged down by circumstance? 176

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 favoursfavors the
prepared mind?

175
The Pentecostal Principle,. 2.
176
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar. Act 4. Scene 3 (. New York: Dover, 1991),. 63.
68
Another inspiring quote from The Principle of Excellence is:

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.177

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, facilitating a familiarity with human vulnerability complemented
by his becoming bBorn-a 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;, life experiences and related perceptions
described in various books of his and in Mark Gornik’s Word Made Global:
Stories of African Christianity in New York,178 Wariboko being one of the
pastors discussed in the book.179

He picks up again the Maroko story in his Ethics and Society in Nigeria,
examining the disaster through the lens of Chris Abani’s novel, GraceLand. The
treatment of the residents of Maroko becomes a metaphor to interpret what is
wrong with Nigeria and to critique the country.180

177
The Principles of Excellence,. 153.

Mark Gornik, Word Made Global: Stories of African Christianity in New York City (. Grand
178

Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011).

179
Ibid., 61-63.
180
Ethics and Society in Nigeria, 73-78.
69
He is an economist keenly sensitive to the marginalization of some
populations within globalization while empowering others, making the
struggle of people weakened by the levers of socio-economic systems live in
his consciousness, insights evident in his work.

Another striking formulation from The Principle of Excellence:, “We need…

[grace, a force that transforms existence in ways beyond unaided human
capacity] 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.”181

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.

Dynamic Expression

An inspirational quality of Wariboko’s work 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.”182

Wariboko’s 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

181
The Principle of Excellence,. 153.
182
John Milton, The Reason of Church-Government. Book 2. Accessed 8/23/2019. 1642.
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/reason/book_2/text.shtml Accessed
8/23/2019. 1642.
70
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.” 183

Stylistic Unity in Diversity

There is the mellifluously poetic and imagistically uplifting Wariboko of the

opening story of The Charismatic City and his books’ acknowledgement pages,
the latter being a convention which Wariboko has elevated to a sublime art.
Some of his acknowledgements are among the best writing I have ever
encountered, simple yet luminous, learned yet musical, personal yet
universalistic in value, prophetic yet grounded in the love of scholarly rigor;
the , works of a consummate lover of wisdom in the search for knowledge.

The Wariboko of the acknowledgements pages complements the

Wariboko who opens The Charismatic City with a powerful story framing the
book's expositions:, Aa narrative visualizing the experience of urbanization
across various continents and cities in terms of the experiences of two
characters.

That literary Wariboko gives a poetic, sensuous, personalized voice to a more

abstract Wariboko, the journeyer in the jungle of rugged concepts and words
bristling with condensed power, seeking to encompass existence through
thought and yet pierce into the specificities of human experience;,
the Wariboko who postulates a transformative principle at work throughout
history yet explores its activity in the flesh and bone of human experience;,
the Wariboko who investigates how human beings can maximize their
potential, doing this through startling images of possibility visualized as a void
from which people draw creativity even as the void can never be fully
traversed;, the Wariboko who invokes the philosophies of his native Kalabari
culture in dialogue with Western philosophy and Christian thought in
concretizing ideas of human potential;, the Wariboko running through The
Depth and Destiny of Work to Ethics and Time to The Pentecostal

183
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language,. Vol 2 (. 1966).
71
Principle to The Split God, these being among particularly strategic texts in his
oeuvre.

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 and
contributing to.

Wariboko also uses metaphoric imagery for imaginative stimulation, titillating

the mind through disruptive contradiction, planting a seed which is then
watered through exposition as the ideas encapsulated in the paradoxical
image are unfolded.

In harmonizing the playful and the sublime, his expressive style is 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 is in engaging with ideations,
teasing out their possibilities, wrestling with them, matching mental strength
with mental strength.

He does this 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 rich references evident within the bodies of the texts and in
dynamically busy footnotes or end-notes.

Wariboko’s River of Being and Becoming

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
visualization of the inspirational convergence of natural beauty and

72
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
and Economics in Spirit and Truth, . Tthe 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, perhaps 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,” 184 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.185

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

Quoted on page 58 of an 1846 edition of Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural

184

Philosophy, translated by Andrew Motte, as shown in a Wikipedia image of the page

where the quote is placed. Accessed 9/2/2019.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Newton%27s_Principia_(1846).djvu/66 Accessed
9/2/2019.
185
The Charismatic City, 115.
73
the eye of God, John Burnaby remarks of the limitations of an aspect of St.
Augustine of Hippo’s conception of human/divine relations. 186

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 is said to have left his
monumental Summa Theologica, Summation of Theology, unfinished in
recognition of its inadequacy?187

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
center of your theology?”,; concluding, “the true system of thought...is the
system of what cannot be systematized.”188

Homer and Dante, two of the greatest writers in the Western tradition, are
referenced by Jorge Louis Borges’ story “The Yellow Rose” in terms that
suggest their works—, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Dante’s Divine Comedy
—, as individualistic dramatizations of a comprehensive vision of the
universe as perceived in their societies: , the ancient Greece of Homer and the
medieval Europe of Dante. Borges depicts the great writer Giambattista
Marino as achieving an epiphany on the eve of his death, an epiphany that
Homer and Dante may have achieved as well. As he lies on his deathbed, he
looks at a rose by his beside, at which point, he

186
John Burnaby, “Augustine” in Encyclopaedia Britannica,. vVol. 14 (. 1992), 397-401,. 400.
187
“Thomas Aquinas, St.” in Encyclopedia Britannica, . vVol. 2 (. 1971 ed.).

Donovan, Leo Donovan, “Living into Mystery: Karl Rahner’s Reflections on his 75th
188

Birthday,”, America: The Jesuit Review. (January 02, 2018) Accessed 11/6/2018. .
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2018/01/02/living-mystery-karl-rahners-
reflections-his-75thbirthday?
fbclid=IwAR0DW4OQju7ECEX_2l9Pq1oSo0diXI2N923M1_Uoks2a2gsBrC0uCthUOoU
Accessed 11/6/2018.
74
 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. 189

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