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.