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Sarah Coakley’s initial volume of her systematic theology, God,
Sexuality and the Self, is a muti-layered and deceptively complex
project in which contemplative prayer, sexual and gendered
relation and the Trinity are developed together to support the
underlying thesis that human sexual desire derives from, and is
therefore perpetually indexed to, divine desire. In Coakley’s
words, according to this thesis “Freud is turned on his head.
Instead of ‘God’ language ‘really’ being about sex, sex is really
about God” (316). Or in another definitive thesis, Coakley claims
that desire is primordial to both physical sex and gender.
Conceiving of Divine Trinitarian desire as antecedent to human
desire as such, which includes specifically sexual desire, allows
Coakley to construct a theological anthropology internal to the
doctrinal development of the trinity and the ecclesial practice
of contemplation. This account of the desiring self, I will
argue, is vital to understanding Coakley’s overall project in
this book as well as recognizing the promise her theology holds
for further development. More specifically, I want to suggest
that Coakley’s ressourcement of the ancient development of
Trinitarian doctrine provides a theologically constituted account
of the self as simultaneously ecstatic in its dynamic longing for
completion in God and ascetic in its submission to the perfecting
ordering of desire itself, sexual or otherwise. Should one judge
Coakley’s work within the framework that views agency in purely
repressive and thus liberative terms, namely as prioritizing the
autonomy of the self from oppression via the ecstatic nature of
human spirituality, then her theology will surely be
misunderstood. For her account of the contemplative self also
suggests that human desire is disordered and lacking in
completion, thus demanding perpetual re-ordering according to the
efficacy of the Spirit. Thinking with Coakley about the ecstatic-
ascetic dynamism of the self moves us toward the core of her
attempt to complexify a variety of modern oppositional constructs
—God and world, Father or Son and Spirit, Christianity and
Platonism, eros and agape, East and West, tradition and
experience, asceticism and eroticism, flourishing and sacrifice,
and perhaps suggestively, ecclesia and academia. It is Coakley’s
view that leading with the Spirit’s interruption of the self amid
its entrenchment within these modern oppositional constructs
performs a necessary therapy for theology’s complicity in parsing
out the twoness of the world. By attending to Coakley’s
development of a simultaneously ecstatic and ascetic self within
her interrupting and incorporating account of the Spirit, I hope
first to head off mis-readings of her work that depend upon the
oppositional logic she hopes to upend, and second, to briefly
suggest an extension of her theological vision into the modern
problematic differentiation between ecclesial and academic
sources of theological knowledge.
I. Contemplation and the Incorporative Trinity
I want to begin this section by quoting at length from an
important and suggestive passage from the prelude of the book
that gets at Coakley’s distinctive way of developing the self,
desire and the Trinity together, but here in a provocatively
ascetic mode.
“When one thinks rightly about God as Trinity, the Spirit
cannot bypass the person of the Son, or evade thereby his
divine engagement in Gethsemane and Golgotha; for that is a
fundamental implication of the principle of the unity of
Father, Son and Spirit (expressed creedally in the phrase
“of one substance”). Whatever is true divinely,
ontologically of the Son, is true also of Father and Spirit—
otherwise the persons are divided. The principle that the
Trinitarian persons are ‘indivisible ad extra’ is here given
pointed application. One might say then, of human engagement
with God at its most profound, that the Spirit progressively
‘breaks’ sinful desires, in and through the passion of Christ.
And hence, at the pastoral, practical level, what I shall
call the Spirit’s ‘protoerotic’ pressure, felt initially as
a propulsion towards divine union, must inexorably bring
also—as the Spirit of the Son—the chastening of the human
lust to possess, abuse, and control.” (14-15).
This rich set of claims highlights Coakley’s emphasis on
what she later calls the interruptive and purgative efficacy of
the Spirit’s work on the self through contemplative prayer. The
importance of this passage resides in her theological commitment
to viewing the agency of the Spirit as bearing with it the
cruciformity of Son, which in turn derives from the claim of the
unity of the persons ad extra. For Coakley, it is in the animating
effect of the Spirit that provides the theological attunement
between human desire, specifically sexual desire, and the desire
that God’s life enacts ‘between’ the persons. Through
contemplation, the pray-er finds herself enticed, so to speak, by
the erotic lure of God’s own inner-trinitarian life. And it is
through the work of the Holy Spirit that incorporates us, through
such deep prayer, into the life of God. However, should we stop
here, then a certain picture of the relationship between human
sexual desire and divine desire could possibly come to the fore
that would drastically skew the view Coakley hopes to explicate.
It would be tempting, in such a scenario, to emphasize the Spirit
as a special locus of experience through which creatures find a
kind of spiritual ‘representation’ as such within the life of
God. Such a representative account could seek to ‘subjectivize’
the Spirit in order to authorize whatever giveness of identity is
thought to be available, a specific sexual identity for instance,
and thus imply the participation of human sexual desire as such
within the life of God without reference to the purgative aspect
of incorporation.
Contrarily, Coakley’s project depends deeply on the claim
that along with the ekstasis of the self through contemplation
comes an ascetic feature of the self, mapped doctrinally as
incorporation into the cruciform life of the Son. The Spirit as
of the Son provides the doctrinal basis for the further
development of her account of the contemplative self and its
specific mode of participation in God. For that mode of
participation involves explicating human spirituality along a
progressive process of conformation to the life of God that can,
more often than not, press the pray-er into “postures of
contemplative ‘effacement’ (23)—the courting of potentially
anxiety-ridden transformation of the self and an attending
insufficiency of the human intellect to grasp the mystery of God.
Coakley therefore dodges generalized appeals to human experience,
sexual or otherwise, as providing affirmative hooks, so to speak,
into the Holy Spirit and thus into God. This is not to say that
Coakley would reject outright, for instance, an association of
the agency of the Spirit with a liberating and equalizing account
of salvation and justice, but that such positive experiences of
self-affirmation cannot sidestep that specifically rooted
performance of prayer and the inevitable “noetic slippage and
intellectual vertigo” it produces. Contemplation is not a
grasping, much a less a posturing, of a stable identity or
agency, but rather a “being grasped”… This is not, she claims, an
example of projected psychological wish-fulfillments through
which the self is provided comfort and repose. On the contrary,
deep prayer in the Spirit exhibits a stretching of the self in
sometimes painful and troubling ways, for it involves the task of
forfeiting those very lusts of mastery that ground patriarchalism
itself.
Even here one begins to see in Coakley a way of returning to
the question of human experience of the divine through a
distinctively ascetic mode of contemplation, which acknowledges
the limitations of a theological anthropology that emphasizes
only the liberative or representative aspect of spiritual ekstasis
without acknowledging the ascesis involved in such postures. Thus
human ecstatic desire, developed in various ways through the
performance of ascetic response, recognizes the distinctive
interruption of the Spirit into the twonesses of our world. Her
picture of the ecstatic-ascetic dynamism of the self and its
incorporation into the Trinitarian desiring life upends a
specific mode of theological construction that presupposes that
Trinitarian relations are primarily meant to be imitated within
the human social sphere. This imitative trajectory, despite its
good intentions, actually plays into the hand of the same logic
that would deploy Trinitarian theology in specifically
masculinist and patriarchal ways. In Coakley’s words, “What is
being broken here [in her view] is the idea that a false
patriarchal hierarchy in the Trinity should be emulated by a
false patriarchal hierarchy in the church or world (that is the
anti-‘hierarchical’ battle that must ever be fought” (322). The
pressure to “cut God down to ontological size” in order to better
mesh and affirm a presupposed ‘givenness’ of human identity and
experience presumes that the way in which we participate in God
is by finding those marks of similarity between divine desiring
relations and human desiring relations. Such presumptions,
therefore, press Trinitarian theology into a construct of social
emulation that perpetuates, for instance, the opposition between
unity and difference in the Godhead, a “Western” psychological
and “Eastern” social account of the trinity, and a mascualinist
and feminist ontologizing of Trinitarian relations. Moreover,
such trajectories of social trinitarianism risks obscuring
contemplative prayer as the means of the self’s incorporation
into God, suggesting instead political egalitarianism and
procedural justice as those acts within which human beings find
“commonality” with God’s life.
It is therefore vital to Coakley’s work that the specific
ascetic context provide the constitutive elements of her
Trinitarian reflections, not only for the sake of grasping the
nuanced dynamism of her account of the self, but in order to
recognize theological development within the range of ascetic,
and thus, ecclesial, performance. And it is from this point of
view that her ancient retrieval of Trinitarian doctrine can best
be seen.
II. Historical Contexts for the Incorporative Trinity
In Chapter 3, Coakley begins her ancient exploration of
Trinitarian development by addressing the skeptical challenge
against the unique authority of creedal statements as providing
the necessary justification for hypostatizing the Spirit as a
person of the Trinity. Why, the skeptic asks (here in the voice
of Maurice Wiles), was the Spirit hypostatized at all? Would not
Binitarianism have been more logical in the long run? In
answering this question Coakley resources her attention to
contemplative prayer as the site of ecstatic incorporation into
God to reveal two orthodox positions that remain in complicated
theological and political tension throughout the first four
centuries. The first sort views orthodoxy as a “transformative
spiritual process” that always courts charges of unorthodoxy and
thus remains at the edges of institutional ecclesiology. The
second sort “associates doctrinal rectitude with creedal assent…
[and] runs the risk of effective subordination or taming of the
Spirit” despite the eventual creedal claims to the contrary. The
first “Spirit-leading” sort has numerous advantages. For Coakley,
it specifically responds to an environment of skepticism against
the authority of creedal statements by linking Trinitarian
thought directly to “the matrix of prayer and worship”—a link
that supports her development of an ecstatic-ascetic self in
prayer. Moreover, the distinct development of Trinitarian
doctrine can be said to have arisen precisely through the context
of contemplation and not, strictly, through ratiocination.
The crux of her ancient retrieval highlights Romans 8 as the
pivotal biblical witness to the kind of “incorporative” or
“reflexive” elements of the self and the Trinity she wants to
attend to. This Spirit-leading incorporative model contrasts with
a more linear model, which presses the paradox of affirming the
unity and equality of the Trinitarian persons while also giving
primacy to the Father-Son relation to which the Spirit is always,
apparently, the late addition. Following Paul who acknowledges
the experiential priority of the Spirit in the act of prayer,
Coakley suggests that in contemplation, one can recognize a
divine “reflexivity” at work prior to the act of the pray-er.
This suggests, not merely a dialog between humans and God, but
the inclusion into a communication already reflexively at work—a
relation one is allowed to be involved in. The intercession of the
Spirit, as Paul says, assists us in such involvement, providing
the spiritual context within which the ecstatic and ascetic
dynamism of the pray-er can recognize a divine desire irreducible
to the outreaching of the Father. Recognizing the Spirit as
hypostasis then, is fundamentally linked to contemplative prayer
itself—to human desire itself-- and thus reinforces not only the
inter-dependence of asceticism and the erotic, but both as the
proper context for approaching the Trinity. What occurs here is
Coakley’s subtle return to the question of experience by
circumscribing the posture of prayer as that specifically
spiritual and ecclesial context within which experience of God is
uniquely and properly revelatory. In short, contemplation is
constitutive of knowledge of God—a knowledge that for Coakley is
always a process of purgative and apophatic unmastery of the
self.
While it would be impossible and verging on redundant to trace
all of Coakley’s patristic arguments here (I don’t want to give
you an excuse not to read the book), it will help to reference an
example or two in order to get a better sense of what is at stake
in her foray into the ancient sources. Part of Coakley’s
development of a prayer-based model of the Trinity involves an
attention to ecstatic experience as the locus of divine human
interaction. Yet often in Church history, because the Spirit
cannot be forestalled from authorizing female voices,
prioritizing ecstatic experience produces a fear that such
participation courts a loss of rational or sexual control. Thus,
female ecstatic experience is often thought to incite male lust
and therefore requires, for instance in Tertullian’s Montanist
phase, a circumscription of such authority to older (read-non-
sexually active) members of the community. So already in the
early centuries, the Spirit, prayer and eroticism are closely
linked together.
One of Coakley’s most important pre-Nicene examples of this
phenomenon comes from Origen’s de oratione, which pays close
attention to Romans 8’s incorporative form of the Trinity while
also referencing themes of sex and gender. For Origen, there
resides a danger in ecstatic prayer because, in forfeiting
rational mastery before God, a potential confusion is liable to
take place between “the loss of control to that Spirit and the
loss of sexual control” (127). However, Origen’s way of
recognizing this problematic in spiritual prayer enables his
adoption of the notion of eros to subtly deploy erotic language
in the human relation to God (and vice versa) while acknowledging
what he takes to be problematic, namely, the confusion of
spiritual and physical eroticism—between the metaphorical and
physiological force of sexual and procreative themes. In both de
oratione and the commentary and homilies on Song of Songs, Origen
appears more willing to introduce an ascetical-erotic discourse,
for instance, in order to map the soul’s entrance into Christ’s
bridegroom chamber. Nevertheless, the tension remains between the
necessity of sexual imagery and its dangers for those who are not
sufficiently advanced along the path to spiritual perfection. But
the upshot for Coakley is Origen’s willingness to introduce the
relationship between asceticism, eroticism and God in such a way
that interestingly forces the renegotiation of gender. For in the
purgative ceding of the self in contemplative prayer, men “take
on an implicitly ‘feminine’ role spiritually” and women, who
stereotypically must forfeit a primordial sexual womanhood, are
also reordered as ‘feminine’ in relation to the Word. So while we
would certainly balk at Origen’s residual gender stereotyping, it
is his willingness to exhibit gender as spiritually negotiable in
the wake of a more primordial and prayer-based relation to God
that is of special note here.
According to Coakley, Origen’s Spirit-leading account of
prayer later provides interesting political impetus for
Theophilus to sideline Origenist monks in the late fourth
century, exhibiting the tension at work between “episcopal
authority under its new imperial protection, on the one hand, and
an impressive monastic spiritual elitism with sectarian
potential, on the other…” (141). In terms of the Troeltchian
categories Coakley employs, the monastic perpetuity of Origen’s
incorporative prayer-based account of the Trinity into the late
forth century created a tension between mystic-type and church-
type institutions—a tension that bears out in complicated ways
the hesitancy as well as the hope of harnessing and domesticating
such asceticism within institutional ecclesiology without
nevertheless pitting one against the other.
My purpose in revisiting these historical instances in
Coakley’s work is 1) to emphasize how the development of ancient
Trinitarian reflection involved a specifically ascetic context
for its animation and ordering and 2) how such asceticism,
exhibited for instance in Origen’s later work, bore out its own
tensions concerning erotic ecstasis and spiritual ascesis. Such
tensions not only forced the renegotiation of gender within
contexts that upheld social stereotypical norms for gender
performance, but also interestingly emphasized an enveloping of
the self in contemplation with an unmastering epistemic radiance,
a blindness to one’s own capacities for self-completion and self-
control. No doubt, Coakley herself can compare the apophasis of
contemplation with the goals of psychoanalytic feminism and its
attention to the semiotic and the unconscious. For both attend to
those realms overlooked by theology in its purely intellectualist
modes. The ecstatic ascent of desire, effected by contemplative
asceticism, produces the context for thinking about the self, its
gendered relations and its incorporation into the Trinity, all of
which arise within a potentially rich ecclesial setting—and this
despite the diversity and tensions within different ecclesial
contexts.
III. Ecstatic-Ascetic Church
It may now be possible to say something in light of this final
remark that ascetic-contemplative apophaticism, comparable to the
feminine semiotic, gives the lie to purely intellectualist modes
of theological discourse. This is the case not only because such
asceticism begins with the dynamism of the desiring self and ends
in the “bright darkness” of infinite divine desire, but also
because contemplation takes place within a context that is
epistemically indexed to ecclesial prayer and worship. Coakley’s
contemplative self, with its constant ecstatic-ascetic dynamism,
insinuates an experiential source for knowledge of God that is
not reducible to academic methodological sequestration (i.e. it
cannot remain purely academic and still know itself). But neither
can the return to experience suffice as a return to subjectivity
alone, lest the concerns of feminist theology mire itself again
in a politics of identity. Coakley’s willingness to risk thinking
through the ways human desire, sexual or otherwise, is
constituted by God’s desiring Trinitarian life and is worked out
in purgative and transformative reordering suggest a theological
anthropology and an attending theological epistemology that
invites academic disciplines into the church without allowing
them to determine the reasons for the gathering of the church.
But even more so it invites scholars to position their motivation
to intellectual work within that dynamism of the desiring self
before God, seeing reason as, in Coakley’s words “stretched and
changed beyond its normal, secular reach” (25).
Perhaps attention to contemplation within the otherwise
intellectualist environments of academia could find the modern
twoness of ecclesial and academic theological work interrupted by
the Spirit’s involvement, and thus willingly take on Coakley
novel reconceptualization of asceticism as a truly energizing
posture of ecclesial and, therefore, intellectual ecstasis. Could not
such ascetic attention, leading as it does to the re-ording and
enciting of human desire in all its forms not, for the
theologian, be the primordial source of intellectual motivation?
And would it not also imply that the polyphony of academic
discourses require for themselves re-ordering lest the search for
universal representation so often pursued in the humanities
stultify the force of their methods of critique? How would, for
instance, the claim that human desire find its source and climax
in God’s desire change that way academic work motivates itself,
not to mention the way feminist and gender theory motivates
itself? For in Coakley’s construal, gender is defined as a
“differentiated, embodied relationship—first and foremost to God,
but also to others” (53). The God-creation relationship, and thus
the pray-er-Spirit relationship are gendered (that is, they are
differentiated embodied relations) all the way down, which
suggests that the primary medium of that relationship—
contemplation, worship, ecclesial performance, even ecstatic
experience etc.—constitutes the self as it is and provides the
initiation into academic life itself.
No doubt, the suggestion that prayer, a deeply ecclesial
and, at any rate, purgative form of vulnerability should
contribute to the intellectual force and energy, not to mention
the veracity, of academia is perhaps one that only theologians
working in the academy can dare to make. Yet Coakley’s own
ancient retrieval of a prayer-based model of the trinity
acknowledges that, should intellectual agendas alone determine
the course of theological development, much of the force and
authority of doctrinal conclusions may be lost. This is, I
imagine, one way to diagnose the present compartmentalization of
theological disciplines along methodological lines. (It may do to
remind ourselves that one of the problems of theological
integralism was that it obtained doctrinal veracity, but at the
expense of motivating adherence. No doubt other purely rational
theological movements found within various scholasticisms of
Christian history have produced reactionary versions of the
‘montanist’ tendency, and therefore, perpetuated the division
between doctrine and life that Coakley is attempting to
overcome).
In a more critical voice, the division between ‘practical’,
‘pastoral’ modes and ‘systematic’, ‘philosophical’ modes of
theology, along with the multiplicity of theological method and
critical theory itself, perhaps exposes theology’s self-conscious
anxiety over not being a true member of the humanities, needing
to promote representative theoretical discourses in order to
motivate theological work. If Coakley is right, then the sources
of such motivation are a false ecstasis. For true ecstasis—true
intellectual eroticism—is found only through the purgative
exercises of a deeply spiritual asceticism. True identity,
specifically gendered identity, and the intellectual powers
needed to explicate it is located for the theologian in that
erotic incorporative encounter with God through contemplation,
and thus through that ecclesial purgation where theology finds
its true source. It should not be surprising therefore that the
way forward in theological development may require returning to
that posture of contemplative epistemic effacement, in which the
infinity of God cures us of all lusts for mastery, and performs
the apophatic maneuver of noetic slippage through which,
paradoxically, theological work finds its life. In the final
lines of Stanley Cavell’s magnum opus The Claim of Reason, he
criticizes philosophy’s banishment of poetry from the republic
and the resulting state of philosophy’s relationship to
literature by raising this question: “Can philosophy become
literature and still know itself?” In light of Coakley’s work,
perhaps we can reword this poignant question. “Can theology
become prayer and still know itself?” The answer to that question
will no doubt tell us how far theology has drifted in exile from
its home, and thus how important Coakley’s work is in reminding
theology how to get back.
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