Desire and Mental Health in Christianity and the Arts 9781032121840, 9781032130774, 9781003227540

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Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies

DESIRE AND MENTAL HEALTH IN CHRISTIANITY AND THE ARTS David Torevell

Desire and Mental Health in Christianity and the Arts

This book considers the connection between the world of mental health in the twenty-first century and the traditional concept of desire in Christianity and the Arts. It draws parallels between the desire for rest from anxiety among mental health sufferers with the longing for peace and happiness in Religion and the Arts. The author presents Biblical, philosophical and theological insights alongside artistic ones, arguing that desire for rest remains at the heart of spiritual living as well as mental health recovery. The chapters draw from historical and contemporary voices, including Plato, Augustine of Hippo, Julian of Norwich, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Simone Weil, Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Eric Varden and others. The study demonstrates why longing continues to fascinate and grip individuals, creative endeavour and society at large, not least in the development of the understanding of mental health. It is valuable for scholars and advanced students of Christian theology and those interested in spirituality and the arts in particular. David Torevell is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Liverpool Hope University, UK and Visiting Professor at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland.

Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies

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Desire and Mental Health in Christianity and the Arts

David Torevell

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 David Torevell The right of David Torevell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-12184-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-13077-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-22754-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003227540 Typeset in Sabon by MPS Limited, Dehradun

To the Benedictine Sisters at Stanbrook Abbey, North Yorkshire, UK

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

PART I

Contours and Obstacles

13

1

Contours of Desire

15

2

Obstacles of Desire

48

PART II

Voices of Desire

81

3

Ancient Greek and Biblical Voices

83

4

Modern Voices

97

PART III

The Arts and Desire

123

5

Theoretical Frameworks

125

6

Drama and Poetry: Samuel Beckett, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Tennessee Williams

144

viii

7

Contents

Film and Painting: Xavier Beauvois and Masaccio

178

Conclusion

206

Bibliography Index

210 223

Acknowledgements

This book would have not been possible without the personal and academic support of a host of people; writing was sustained and inspired by their company. These include Michael Ford, Richard Hooper, Patrice Haynes, Paul Rowan, Joy and Brendan Schmack, Michael Bennett, Aiveen Mullally, John Sullivan, Gerald Grace, Simon Lee, Sean Whittle, Matt Hoven, Brandon Schneeberger, Glyn Arnold, Ian Percy, Gordon Abbs, Michael Thompson, Michael and Susan Torevell, Andrew and Susan Eccles, Sarah Hoyle, Stephen and Carolyn Hoyle, Michael Stewart, Susan and David Mayoh, Nigel Ford and Margaret Ford. A special gratitude must also go to St Laurentia Johns OSB for the stimulating talks about metaphysical desire in Stanbrook Abbey and to Antonia Phinnemore for completing the proofreading with efficiency and good grace. I am indebted, too, to my friends and colleagues at Liverpool Hope University, UK for their encouragement and expertise and to Trish Kieran, Ian Hickey and Carleigh Garcia at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland for their friendship and good humour. And finally, a thank you must go to the editor of the special issue of Religions: Catholic Education in Detraditionalised Cultural Contexts for permission to include in Chapter 7 an adapted version of ‘The Naked Truth: Temptation and the Likely ‘Fall’ of Catholic Education’ (2021), 12(11), co-written with Michael Bennett.

Introduction

Without question, the West is undergoing a mental health crisis. Many find living in a fast-moving, technological, economically driven, smartphone society bewildering and confusing. The recent pandemic added to this sense of vulnerability and frustration as death became a feature of everyday life to a degree not witnessed by many who had not lived, like the older generation, during a time of war and destruction. Despite high levels of Western material consumption, humanity’s desire for happiness and fulfilment seems thwarted at every turn, as disappointment and anxiety take hold of peoples’ lives. Addictive behaviour is rampant; prisons are full; terrorism and tyranny are evident; churches are emptying; politicians are no longer trusted. Eliot’s The Waste Land is felt at a visceral level. George Orwell’s 1984 has gone and is here again raising its ugly head. This book is about one constituent of human life which might aid this cultural malaise and depressing scenario – understanding human desire. I will contend that longing and desire are core features of aspiring humanity, delineate what characterises their nature, fostering and dissolution, and will agree with Fukuyama’s contention that ‘The things which are most deeply aligned with our natural desires and ends are what make us happy …’ (2021, p. 134). I also position myself alongside the contemporary Cistercian monk Bishop Erik Varden (and numerous other monastics) who claims that since we are created in the image and likeness of God ‘upliftedness-of-soul is actually connatural to us’ even if we struggle with this lofty and ennobling thought due to the Fall (2022, pp. 149–150). I will attempt to make sense of the importance and insatiability of desire with particular reference to the Christian tradition and the Arts. Thus, the focus will be on metaphysical desire and inevitably, but not exclusively, on the ultimate ‘end’ to which humanity is destined. I will argue that human beings, as embodied agents of desire in response to a divine initiative, relentlessly stretch out for and aim dynamically for something outside their finite selves and are best thought of as creatures of intentional love (Smith, 2009, p. 50). If this stretching forth no longer takes place, the consequences can be severe.1 DOI: 10.4324/9781003227540-1

2 Introduction The Latin word intentio can be translated as ‘aim’ and this ‘aiming for’ of metaphysical desire is, I suggest, essentially non-cognitive and affective. Human beings feel and yearn their way around the world rather than think about it, with love being the major animating factor. This drives people on, moved and addressed constantly by an Infinite Loving Other who is beyond them and to whom they are madly attracted. Plato describes this as a longing to soar mightily on wings even if sometimes being prevented from doing so, of ‘being beside ourself’, a feeling of not really knowing what is going on but which always exhibits a sensation of ferment, excitement and restlessness (Pieper, 1995, p. 43). It is intertwined with an attraction towards beauty which impels the one who longs to escape all those things which normally negatively occupy and burden the mind. It reduces anxiety. It embeds ‘lack’ and its intimation in its folds. In his October 2022 General Audience, Pope Francis said that as an ingredient of discernment desire is ‘a form of searching, and searching always stems from something we lack, but somehow know’ (2022). It is a ‘nostalgia for fullness that never finds fulfilment, and is the sign of God’s presence within us. Part of its nature is struggle since there is a striving to reach for the Good that is woefully and painfully absent’ (2022). I shall contend that what we most deeply desire and love also determines who we might be transformed into. In the Christian tradition, desire exhibits an ontological and eschatological dimension since only a final goal of infinite rest (quies) can do justice to what is longed for, filling completely the void we feel, alleviating the sense of restlessness and frustration we experience as finite creatures. It is characterised by dynamism rather than stasis and includes the capturing of our imagination and the grace-assisted sustenance of our resolute efforts to seek what is true, good and beautiful. Metaphysical yearning thus envisages the fruitful quenching of a strong thirst for what is vastly superior to the finite and temporary despite obstacles. Athanasius reminds his readers that: If in your intense longing for God, you hear the reviling of your enemies, do not give way to fear but know that such longing bears an immortal fruit, and comfort your soul with hope in God. When you are uplifted by this, and earthly sorrow has been assuaged a little, say Psalm 42. (Quoted in Blaising and Hardin, 2008, p. 327) Cassiodorus also describes the goal of desire as the quenching of thirst ‘… we are rightly told to hasten to the waters of the sacred spring, where our longing could never experience thirst’ (Blaising and Hardin, 2008, p. 328). Gregory of Nyssa commenting upon verses 1 and 2 of this psalm pens that the person who has tasted virtue ‘has an excessive taste for what is superior … He thirsts for participation in God’ and ‘he who has received what he desired is full of what he desired’ (Blaising and Hardin, 2008, p. 329). It ‘transforms the one who has embraced it to itself and imparts to this person a portion of its own power’ (Blaising and Hardin, 2008, p. 329).

Introduction

3

Augustine came to believe decisively that this movement towards ultimate love pinpoints feelings of human restlessness and anxiety which spur us on to something better, more satisfying and reliable. Human beings desire transcendence because they know and feel the present is transitory and unsatisfactory. In Confessions, he wishes to look forward, not to what lies ahead of me in this life and will surely pass away, but to my eternal goal. I am intent upon this one purpose, not distracted by other aims, and with this goal in view I press on, eager for the prize, God’s heavenly summons. (1961, XI, 29) Merton puts it more bluntly: ‘The earthly desires men cherish are merely shadows. There is no true happiness in fulfilling them’ (1951, p. 17). The metaphysical poet George Herbert (1593–1633) is similarly realistic and hopeful when he writes in The Pulley that a person’s ‘weariness’ will ‘toss him’ to God’s ‘breast’. Another way of putting it in more Christological terms is to claim that earthly existence always has a natural orientation to the Absolute which includes our adaptation of existence to Christ. Or, to use Rahner’s phrase, there is within each person a ‘supernatural existential’, a fundamental constituent of existence which involves moments of transcendence beyond the tangible world to which we are attracted (Torevell, 2007, pp. 150–152). There is something inscribed in the verb to long itself which situates it alongside other words, suggesting a beckoning towards something external, an Infinite Being which entices things to Itself: ‘The myriad etymological roots of the word to long suggest a power outside them that exceeds them infinitely. Longing was an extension of the subject, the subject being stretched beyond itself, not the subject’s extension of itself’ (Dalton, 2009, pp. 13–14). St John puts the dynamic in terms of divine love – not our love for God, but God’s love for us (1 John 4:7–12). The Latin word – de-sidera – means ‘a lack of stars’. Navigators seek stars otherwise they remain in the dark without any direction to guide them and become lost as a result; longing is the universal attempt to seek a final direction or home of safety and rest. It responds to the need to fill an interior gap, to find a reference point which orients a person along a path of joy and fulfilment. Or as Maya Angelou poetically expresses it: ‘the caged bird sings’ of better times and places. Such experiences of longing are able to bring about meaning and purpose because they offer a horizon of ultimate significance, a sure foundation of hope from which happiness and fulfilment arise. Sartre’s negative claim that desire is a kind of useless passion is dismissed in my account, even if he did acknowledge that it was fundamental to humanity. Cottingham is nearer the mark with his anti-absurdist take on human sensibility: ‘A natural yearning, implanted deep within us, may of course be vain, or fruitless, or have no object that can satisfy it; but that would be a tragic or ironic – perhaps even an absurdist – account of the human predicament’ (2014, p. 15). He adds:

4 Introduction Intellectual integrity requires that we do not ignore our deepest sensibilities and impulses. Either they must be explained away as distortions or seductive illusions, or their authenticity as possible pointers to something real must be acknowledged. There is no ‘middle ground’. (2014, p. 16) The very structure of the story of Sisyphus, ‘the hero of the absurd and the naming of his plight as “absurd”, implies a deep yearning for something more’ (2014, p. 15). Human beings do not simply have desires, they are to some significant degree constituted by desire, and religious belief and practice offer a home for the sustenance of such aspirations necessarily involving an impulse of trust (Carlisle, 2019). The cultural, social and political context in which the myriad forms of desire now takes place is clearly startingly different to pre-modern times where religious and spiritual practices were deeply embedded within social norms and customs and were an indelible part of the fabric of cultural life. Not to be regarded as a Christian was to be ostracised from society at large which is why the accusation of ‘heretic’ was so devastating. The practice of religion/philosophy was seen as a way of social living, the sine non qua of leading a fulfilled life (Hadot, 1995). Early on in his Rule echoing an emphasis on the fullness of life, Benedict puts the words of Psalm 33 into the mouth of God: ‘Seeking his workmen in a multitude of people, the Lord calls out to him and lifts his voice saying “Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?”’ (Psalm 33:13. Prol. 15). The contemporary Benedictine Jeremy Driscoll, reflecting on these lines, suggests that the ‘multitude of people’ to which Benedict refers in his Rule are prevalent in Western culture today and they, too, are in need of help and healing (2018, p. 21). This ‘multitude’ is not well: ‘You see it in the faces of so many … Manners, clothing, gait, styles of driving, and hours upon hours spent in virtual worlds …’ (p. 22). He continues: ‘And in the midst of this stampede, this rush, this din, the quiet voice and question of God is gently posed “Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?”’ (p. 22). Fellow Benedictine Michael Casey writes that the way forward out of this dilemma consists in ‘a movement of our being beyond ourselves and beyond the world of which we are a part into transcendent reality that we cannot fully perceive, understand, or describe’ (2011, pp. 55–56). This entails a divine summons to each person to make a choice between life or death as the writer of Deuteronomy exclaims (Deut 30:15). The life offered here is never the ‘craving of the moment’ (Francis, 2022) nor the relentless wish for autonomous self-fulfilment allied to ‘the fleeting pleasures of this life’ (Driscoll, 2018, p. 22). Such ‘pleasures’ have been written about at length by Biblical writers, Christian theologians and contemplatives, cultural theorists and sociologists, and are seen as obstacles thwarting metaphysical desire, an issue I shall pursue in some depth in Chapter 2. Jesus posed a question to his disciples about this dilemma: ‘What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his self?’ (Matt 16:26). The Buddha went a step further and

Introduction

5

preached in his First Sermon that an erroneous craving for the wrong things was the root cause of all unhappiness and suffering becoming one of His Four Noble Truths about human existence (Harvey, 1995). Such barriers, however, do not cancel the universal yearning for a permanent home for which humanity longs but they do interrupt its fluent deliberation. One argumentative strand in this book is premised on the religious belief that human beings are not autonomous agents who achieve happiness and fulfilment by self-reliance. They are creatures loved and graced by their Creator and their well-being and development is enhanced by the experience of beloved creaturehood and dependency felt confidently in the heart. Varden concurs: ‘The religious person constructs his life on the certainty that he is not autonomous, and glories in it. Happiness, he knows, is a function of dependence’ (2022, p. 20). To be created in the image of God means to exist in a personal, loving, dependent relationship with the Creator. Every person’s flourishing depends on a power outside itself to which she desires to grow closer and more intimate. Goethe writes of intense human longing for higher things which involves impatience and sickness, a feeling of gut-aching loss which is felt deeply until the person reaches what she really longs for. In Selige Sehnsucht, he writes of ‘a troubled guest on a dark night’ who has ‘a desire for higher lovemaking’ which ‘sweeps you upward’ and whose ‘distance does not make you falter’ (quoted in Dalton, 2009, pp. 9–10). Such ardent desire (sehnsucht) ‘is one that seems to stretch beyond us, drawing us outside of ourselves, inspiring us, but, simultaneously, draining us of our vital energy such that we grow weak and sick in its train’ (Dalton, 2009, p. 10). A strand within the book is that religious and non-religious people alike sense the need to seek something more satisfying than the temporal and finite. This fuels their energy and zest to act wilfully against feelings of restlessness and unfulfilment. Zornberg advises that the animation of desire is created by a restless feeling of ‘not to have’ (1995, xv). She refers to the twentieth-century American poet Wallace Stevens who puts it like this in his Notes toward a Supreme Fiction: But the priest desires. The philosopher desires. And not to have is the beginning of desire. To have what is not is its ancient cycle. It is desire at the end of winter, when It observes the effortless weather turning blue And sees the myosotis on its bush. Being virile, it hears the calendar hymn. It knows that what it has is what is not And throws it away like a thing of another time, As morning throws off stale moonlight and shabby sleep. (Quoted in Zornberg, 1995, xv)

6 Introduction However, desire is not only an inalienable aspect of human effort. The belief that God wishes to make known his deepest desires for us and our well-being is central to what I am claiming. Desire is associated with discernment and recognising what God wishes for us, his will, not ours. Much Biblical and theological literature focuses on how humanity has responded – both positively and negatively – to this first, divine initiative and on how the incarnation plays a vital role in this. Although some of the imagery of desire employed in these texts hint at connotations of wanting to assimilate or possess, it is more accurately understood as capturing and communicating a feeling of mesmeric attraction and response towards the One who calls, being beckoned towards something more attractive, more good, more true and more beautiful which we are unable to resist. I partly wrote this book during the recent pandemic when it was not possible for Christians to attend church safely and when the receiving of the Eucharist did not occur. Instead, a prayer for spiritual communion was recited by numerous Christians online and the following words of longing to commune with God became part of the Church’s liturgy during a difficult time: ‘I desire to receive you into my heart’. An aching yearning for well-being, truth and meaning as a call to something better became prevalent and palpable. Augustine’s Exposition on Psalm 38 captures the dynamic of distance and nearness in relation to spiritual longing. He notes how the psalmist was no longer held captive by mere earthly things and resolved to be a person destined for the safety of home, even though it felt distant and unknown. The writer recognises that he is beginning, albeit with some struggle, to attain ‘true being’ by his intentional desire and determined search for his true home. The more he longs for what is distant, the more he groans until it arrives and the more he weeps. He acknowledges that he is a sojourner while on earth – ‘God’s lodger’ and had come to realise that his real resting place was always before him, the goal of true happiness. This feeling rests on his coming to know what he lacks and of recognising that the ‘answer’ to his lack constitutes something far greater and more solid than what he already possesses. A person’s growth depends on seeing this truth which involves the breathless desire to leap beyond the wavering exigencies of the troubled heart: ‘I pant with longing for the realities that are still and lasting’ (2015, p. 403). Augustine asks: from where does the psalmist get his teleological impetus? The answer is: From his desire to seek those things which last and to glimpse one’s immortal destiny: ‘The things which still preoccupy him under the sun wring groans from him; he scorns them and suffers pain, longing ardently for the things he truly desires’ (2015, p. 404). The psalmist ‘was looking forward with all the longing of his heart, with all the power of his mind, to that end which he had desired should be shown him when he prayed, make known to me my end, O Lord’ (2015, p. 416). He longed ‘to be, there where being is being at its supreme perfection’ (2015, p. 416). Comparing the locations of the temporary with the eternal and finding himself stuck between the two, he was always fearful he would slip back into

Introduction

7

the transient and mundane. Eventually, he understood that there was no legitimate alternative to the longed-for destination he sought, for he came to realise that the one who takes the ‘road away from Him who truly is necessarily goes toward non-being’ (2015, p. 416). The ‘object’ of desire within the Christian tradition is nebulous and never easily defined as the Song of Songs testifies. There is a strong element of the apophatic surrounding spiritual desire – the source and destination of human longing cannot be categorised with any conceptual or linguistic accuracy (Cook, 2013). In Confessions, Augustine echoes a Platonic influence when he names the object of desire, beauty. He notes that he has fallen in love with God’s beauty (1961, X, 27) and it is this which allures him and for which he longs. Transcendental beauty enraptures him ‘a beauty which flows through men’s minds into their skilful hands comes from that beauty which is above their souls and for which my soul sighs all day and night’ (1961, X, 34). He seeks God’s assistance in his quest: ‘O Lord, have mercy on me and grant what I desire. For … this longing does not come from a desire for earthly things, for gold and silver …’ (1961, XI, 2). He continues: ‘Listen, my God, as I will tell you of the cause of my longing. The wicked have told me of things that delight them, but not such things as your law has to tell’ (1961, XI, 2). He realises that he is not the instigator of his own longing since God’s law of love stirs his allconsuming desire and its yearning for satisfaction: ‘Give me what I love, for truly I love it and this love, too, was your gift’ (1961, XI, 2). He then records in Book X111 how he has found what he was looking for: ‘the Trinity, my God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the creator of all Creation’ (1961, X111, 5). The twentieth-century Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin offers a similar insight in Le Milieu Divin: To experience the attraction of God, to be sensible of the beauty, the consistency and final unity of being, is the height of our ‘growth’ and ‘God tends, by the logic of his creative effort, to make himself sought and perceived’. (1971, p. 130; Torevell, 2005) This is not a pursuit instigated by reason since the ‘perception of the divine omniscience is essentially a seeing, a taste, that is to say a sort of intuition bearing upon certain qualities in things’ (1971, p. 131). The Benedictine Sister Elisabeth-Paule Labat, although referring to Gregorian chant, makes a parallel observation. The desire for God is encapsulated in the sound of beckoning, sacred music which is part of the journey towards completion: The vibrancy of these melodies is a burning desire, the fruit of a “hope which does not deceive” (Rom 5:5)’ (2014, p. 99) and of a yearning for ineffable realities only dimly perceived here below. They give voice to the love of viatores (“wayfarers”) “on pilgrimage far from the Lord” (cf. Cor 5:6) yet pilgrimaging towards the Lord. (2014, p. 99)

8 Introduction It is a song of yearning and a song of joy, a form of love that is strained to intensity (Phil. 3.3). Varden too, relates how his listening to music – in his case Mahler’s Symphony no. 2 (Resurrection Symphony) – released a longing for God and a sense that there is an ultimate meaning to the world (2018). The word eros, often used in association with desire, suggests its ardent and passionate stretching forth and straining (Cadenhead, 2019). Not surprisingly, the inseparability of love and desire resulted in numerous ancient Greek, Biblical and mystical texts embedding it in erotic imagery. The Song of Songs – the most widely exegeted Biblical book in the Middle Ages – is a well-known example of this. The text endorses the view that it is spiritually beneficial to draw analogies between sexual and metaphysical desire, while simultaneously acknowledging that there exists an undeniable and marked difference between the two. The erotic language in classic spiritual texts is helpful because its use demonstrates the difference and similarity between human, sexual desire and the pure Eros of God. An author’s deployment of sexual imagery is a linguistic means to assist the reader to hold similarity and difference in creative tension (Turner, 1995). Turner quotes Pseudo-Dionysius that human sexuality is ‘a “partial, physical and divided yearning … is not true yearning but an empty image or, rather, a lapse from real yearning” (DN 709 B-C)’ (1995, p. 143). It is ‘a vastly “dissimilar similitude”, distanced ontologically from the reality it reflects and to that degree reflecting the divine eros in its empty character’ (Turner, 1995, p. 143). It is beneficial, however, since the use of erotic language demonstrates how human language collapses under the weight of communicating the things of God, simply signalling readers towards an Absolute Love, a linguistic method employed in the via negativa within Christian mysticism and monasticism. My discussion of metaphysical longing, besides outlining the differences and similarities between spiritual and sexual desire, highlights the ceaseless wrestling in the human heart for fulfilment. It takes seriously Rolhesier’s claim that: ‘Each of us is a bundle of untamed eros, of wild desire, of longing, of restlessness, of loneliness, of dissatisfaction, of sexuality, and of insatiability’ (2021, pp. ix–x). It is within the perennial whirlwind of sexual and pleasurable cravings that spiritual desire is situated and struggles for a place in the cauldron of human want and needs. At moments in the book I seek to set side by side the contours of each in the hope of increasing understanding of both. Referring to the re-forming of the body during modernity Mellor and Shillings rightly point to the ever present sensual corporeality of daily life. Modernity’s promotion of ‘cognitive apprehension cannot eliminate the passions and sensations of the bodies, however much it has tried to manage and repress them’ they contend (1997, p. 156; Palmer and Torevell, 2022). Unhelpful forms of pseudo-asceticism and puritanism which have sought to stifle such movements of the flesh and desire have resulted in feelings of alienation, cynicism, anomie and depression and give witness to the calamitous consequences of the enforced repressibility of embodied experience in

Introduction

9

living the spiritual life (Palmer and Torevell, 2022). Human beings are never passive recipients of social meaning and control and resist society’s attempts to impose and inscribe manipulative control over their bodies. Augustine complained that the penis is the only organ of the body that seems to have a will of its own. He was, in part, ‘referring to the involuntary nature of erection’ (Scruton, 2006, p. 66). Spiritual desire is never about an unhealthy repression of the body but co-exists with the fleshy self. It is not surprising that desire has frequently been referred to as the ‘fire’ within each person, the incandescent driving force of the human search for meaning, love and fulfilment, both human and divine. As T.S. Eliot in Little Gidding (IV lines 13–14), the last of the Four Quartets, warns, we can easily be ‘consumed’ by it: ‘We only live, only suspire … consumed by either fire or fire’ (quoted in Rolheiser, 2021, xi). Such eager thirst can result in positive and negative effects. There are three sections to this book. The first gives an outline of the contours and obstacles of desire. This is followed by a second section on ancient Greek, Biblical and modern theologians’ and philosophers’ insights into its constituency, operation and importance. I contextualise these authors within their unique social, cultural and historical contexts to show how they emerge from distinct provenances. The third section begins with a theoretical discussion of art and desire, followed by two chapters which focus on five illustrations from drama, poetry, film and fine art which represent longing and desire in creative ways. This book draws substantially from Biblical, theological, monastic, mystical and philosophical texts which entertain desire as their central focus. Note 1 In his November 2012 catechesis, Pope Benedict XVI warned of the dire consequences of what he calls the ‘horizontal’ dimension emerging during modernity: ‘Human beings, separated from God, are reduced to a simple dimension – the horizontal – and this reductionism itself is one of the fundamental causes of the various forms of totalitarianism that have had tragic consequences in the past century, as well as the crisis of values that we see in the current situation … The temptations Jesus faced in the wilderness before his public ministry vividly symbolise which “idols” entice human beings when they do not go beyond themselves’.

References Augustine. (1961). Confessions. London: Penguin. Augustine. (2015). Essential Expositions of the Psalms. New York: New City Press. Bernard of Clairvaux. (2014). Sermons on the Song of Songs. New York: Beloved Publishing. Blaising, C. and Hardin, C. (2008). Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. Old Testament VII. Psalms 1–50. Cadenhead, R. (2019). The Body and Desire: Gregory of Nyssa’s Ascetical Theology. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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Introduction

Carlisle, C. (2019). Spiritual Desire and Religious Practice. Religious Studies, 55(3), 429–446. Casey, M. (2011). The Road to Eternal Life. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. Cook, B. (2013). Pursuing Eudaimona. Re-appropriating the Greek Philosophical Foundations of the Greek Apophatic Tradition. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Cottingham, J. (2005). The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cottingham, J. (2014). Why Believe? London: Continuum. Dalton, D. (2009). Longing for the Other. Levinas and Metaphysical Desire. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. de Chardin, T. (1971). Le Milieu Divin. London: Collins Fontana Books. Driscoll, J. (2018). A Monastic Proposal for Happiness in Our Troubled Times. Monasticism Today (pp. 21–27). Buckfast: Buckfast Abbey Publication. Eliot, T.S. (1996). The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Penguin. Francis, P. (2022). General Audience. Fukuyama, F. (2021). After the End of History. M. Fasting (Ed.). Washington: Georgetown University Press. Harvey, P. (1995). An Introduction to Buddhism. Teachings, History and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a Way of Life. Oxford: Blackwell. Herbert, G. (2013). The Pulley. In The Complete Works of George Herbert. Overland Park, KS: Digireads. Labat, E-P. (2014). The Song That I Am. On the Mystery of Music. Ohio: Cistercian Publications. Mellor, P. and Shilling, C. (1997). Re-Forming the Body. Religion. Modernity and Community. London: Sage publications. Merton, T. (1951). The Ascent to Truth. London: Hollis & Carter. Orwell, G. (2000). Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin. Palmer, C. and Torevell, D. (2022). ’The Sweet Pain of Life’ – Dancing Metaphysical Longing: A Theological Reading Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. International Journal of Social Sciences, 8(2), 63–71. Pieper, J. (1995). “Divine Madness”: Plato’s Case against Secular Humanism. San Francisco:Ignatius Press. Rolheiser, R. (2021). The Fire Within. Desire, Sexuality, Longing and God. Orleans, MA: Paraclete Press. Scruton, R. (2006). Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation. London: Continuum. Shakespeare, W. (1995). Antony and Cleopatra. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury. Smith, J.K. (2009). Desiring the Kingdom. Worship, Worldview & Cultural Formation. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Turner, D. (1995). Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications. Torevell, D. (2007). Liturgy and the Beauty of the Unknown. Another Place. Aldershot: Ashgate. Torevell, D., Palmer, C., and Rowan, C. (Eds.) (2022). Training the Body. Religion, Physical Culture and Modernity. London: Sage.

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Varden, E. (2018). The Shattering of Loneliness. On Christian Remembrance. London: Bloomsbury. Varden, E. (2022). Entering the Twofold Mystery. On Christian Conversion. London: Bloomsbury. Zornberg, A. (1995). The Beginning of Desire. Reflections on Genesis. New York: Schocken Books.

Part I

Contours and Obstacles

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Contours of Desire

Ontology and Disposition I wish to argue that the yearning for transcendence entails a stretching of the boundaries of human nature and that getting in touch with our heartfelt desires is important because they affect the deep chords of our Being and our happiness. As Pope Francis writes: ‘… it is indeed desire that makes the difference between a successful, coherent and lasting project, and the thousands of wishes and good intentions with which, as they say, “hell is paved with”’ (2022). However, the distractions and bombardment of diverse choices an individual can make may prevent her from evaluating what they truly want in life, those things which really give them inner peace and rest (Torevell, 2019). Discernment is not easy. Longing is associated with re-finding what has been lost and in Platonic terms this entails chasing after an ideal form reserved for a person’s supernatural destiny (Pieper, 1998), in Christian language re-discovering the joy of Eden. It involves memory. As Pieper comments: ‘The primordial condition, Being at the same time the true goal and end of human existence, constitutes the object of man’s remembrance as well as his longing’ (1998, p. 42). To move towards this condition, it is essential to step outside the busyness of life and ‘the concerns of his workaday world’ and contemplate what he most fundamentally desires (1998, p. 42). Or as Pope John Paul II puts it in his encyclical Fides et Ratio, contemplation is necessary so that one might lift one’s eyes ‘to higher things and so courageously pursue the truth of existence’ (John Paul II, 1998, Para 95). The Byzantine theologian and monastic Maximus the Confessor (580–662) – whose tongue and right hand were cut off for refusing to assent to the heretical doctrine of one will in Christ – contributed significantly to a rich theology of longing allied to deification. Having been transformed in this life into ‘children of God’, human beings yearn for and anticipate a further transformation in the life to come. His idea of the ‘natural principle’, a distinctive feature of human life, refers to human nature being constituted and moulded as it was intended by God and has both protological and teleological aspects (Schneider, 2009, p. 271). God is related to each individual DOI: 10.4324/9781003227540-3

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as origin, middle (the one who sustains) and end. The ‘natural principle’ ensures the final and ultimate goal of a human being – deification. Thus, it belongs to human beings’ ontological nature to be moved and progress towards their final goal, the divine telos through a lifelong, innate and personal search for God (Torevell, 2007, p. 138). However, due to humanity’s postlapsarian state, Maximus claims that human beings will need to redirect their wayward desire for worthless things towards God, so that their lives correspond to this principle. His use of the word tropos – a modality which opens space for change – encompasses how a person may use this inclination towards God in either productive or non-productive ways. Movement towards God is only possible when deviant passions have been subdued and a purification of the heart has taken place: The one who has rendered his heart clean not only understands the meaning of things which are inferior to God but also after passing through all of them can look in some way on God himself, who is the ultimate good. (Maximus, 1985, p. 165) However, there is no dichotomy between nature and grace in Maximus. ‘Nature is always already shot through with grace and primordially designed to find completion and fulfilment in a perpetual striving and progress towards God …’, comments Schneider (2009, p. 272). The relationship between logos (the incarnation) and tropos ensures that human beings are assisted on their journey of re-directing their desire to the divine origin of their creation by the example of the God who became man. It is the liturgy and its symbols which best promotes this intention. Maximus believed that everything which is created already has some participation in God and no creature is free of passion and no-one is unmoved. The path towards completion is trod in the human heart. Even the prelapsarian Adam had a desire for God. Unlike Lacan’s notion of desire, Maximus’ is grounded in nature. What resists the transformation of the self and the world is not our own nature but evil itself which is ‘an irrational movement of the natural faculties toward something else other than their end …’ (Schneider, 2009, p. 276). Through grace, the human faculties of the rational, irascible and concupiscible can be gathered and united in love towards their proper destination; this constitutes living the Christian life. Maximus believes there is always ‘an Anknupfungspunkt for human desire to be lured (back) to its telos and the addressee of the divine call is always already in a position to respond’ (Schneider, 2009, p. 283). In summary, the desire for the Other can be expressed in Maximus as an innate predilection of the heart to respond to the Divine Law. What is required is to believe that the deepest part of oneself can be submitted to this law. There is then ‘no need for compensatory pleasure’ (Schneider, 2009, p. 281). The most effective way of accepting this challenge is to participate in the liturgically enacted self-sacrifice of Christ and what is required is the

Contours of Desire 17 formation of habitus or hexis – a stable disposition which contributes to the movement towards the telos assisting deification to take place according to sound judgement and ethical choices. Prayerful dependence on God is a primary means of encouraging particular habits, dispositions and virtues which result in a positive, life-giving orientation to the telos of human existence. This is best conceived as a radical, inner transformation. Any feeling of independence granted is grounded in, but never imposed, by God: ‘As long as the divine will remains something external and imposed on us we are not yet Christians’ (Schneider, 2009, p. 283). It is never about carrying out individual acts through divine summons, but forming a habitus which leads the one who longs naturally towards their rightful end. A person will receive the divine energies in proportion to her measure of faith and disposition of the soul (Schneider, 2009, p. 287) and this involves two kinds of receptivity. First, a creature’s preordained essential fitness, and second a ‘habitual fitness’. If someone moves towards God according to His divine design, it becomes fit to receive divine energy to a higher degree according to the logoi of ‘well-being’ and eternal well-being (Schneider, 2009, p. 288). The loving Other unceasingly places highly specific and personalised possibilities in the subject’s way, which, ‘if they are actively received and actualised, contribute to her flourishing and spiritual well-being’ (Schneider, 2009, pp. 285–286). Let me now turn to the seventeenth-century priest and spiritual writer St Francis de Sales (1567–1622) who became known for the spiritual direction he gave to the laity through his conversations, sermons, letters and treatises, a legacy which continues today through the Salesian Order founded in Turin in 1859 by John Bosco. He offers a parallel understanding of ontology to Maximus when he writes in Treatise on the Love of God (2015) that God has given all human beings a natural inclination towards the good which is the crook by which God draws humanity to Himself. Human beings oscillate precariously between different modes of angelic and beastly behaviour with the former allowing them to exist ‘truly out of themselves, that is, above the condition of their nature’ (de Sales, 2015, p. 55). Consequently, ‘by a blessed and desiring outgoing, by which entering into a more noble and eminent estate, they are as much angels by the operation of their soul …’ and such people are ‘ravished in God and other heavenly things’ (de Sales, 2015, p. 65, my italics) and withdraw from giving attention to any wrongly directed stirrings steering them, as far as possible, towards the good. Conversely, those who sink become victims of their own passions and hinder ‘the soul from returning to itself’. When this occurs, ‘it comes to pass oftentimes that the sense and faculties of the inferior part tend to union with which they are adapted to and which is their pasture …’ (de Sales, 2015, p. 66). In other words, they become conditioned to unsavoury surroundings and changed for the worst. Varden offers a parallel analysis to de Sales. He contends that ‘Men are stretched between what they are by nature and what they are called to

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become by God’s promise’ (2018, p. 138). To be ‘created in God’s image is to carry in the depth of one’s being a longing to transcend the boundaries of human nature so as to have a share in divine life’ (Varden, 2018, p. 138, my italics). A healthy elasticity takes place through human yearning which carries humanity forward towards a life lived in relationship with the Other, with assurances of eternal life glimpsed in this life. An instinctual, base nature does not have the final word on who human beings are or meant to be. Flood, in his study of a religious philosophy of life, agrees: ‘There is a desire for vertical ascent attested throughout the history of religion’ (2019, p. 91, my italics). This is not to claim that obstacles which encourage a forgetfulness of this ontology and way of transcendence do not occur as I shall demonstrate in Chapter 2, but it does endorse an optimism about graceassisted human striving grounded in ongoing transformation and the quest for deification (theosis). According to the above writers, faith is the formation of a new ontology and spiritual way of being in the world based on Christ’s example and the fostering of a distinctive disposition towards creation, the self and God rooted in ceaseless longing. This process might be described as the forming of a distinctive attitude or leaning towards the world; it is not possible for it to be pinned down explicitly to particular actions or analysed definitely, nor is it characterised by the formal acceptance of creedal or doctrinal statements (Wynn, 2013). It flows from an intuitive awareness that there is more to life than the empirically verifiable and material and that each life has an ultimate meaning and purpose in relation to the eschaton. It offers a strong defence through grace, against assaults on its progress and has little to do with a Cartesian mindset which succumbs to a detached observation of the way things work and happen in the world (McGilchrist, 2012). It never attempts to delineate a clear systematisation and mapping of the world and the self and resists any looking down on things from a distance to construct a carefully plotted map of existence. It is at odds with a Newtonian and mechanistic view of the universe which claims knowledge is best sought and defined by utility and functionality. It is not content with the kind of bald truths which characterise scientific investigation. Any empirical method used to interpret the world and the self is at odds to the approach taken by those attempting to be changed by living a devout life rooted in desire (McHugh and Torevell, 2022). Carlisle notes that spiritual longing is inextricably associated with selfidentity and the formation of habits: ‘We do not simply have desires, but we are – at least in some sense, and to some extent – constituted by desire and our habits are formations of that desire: the shape they take as they are lived’ (2019, p. 433). Her examination of the spiritual life indicates that it is characterised by ‘infinite desire’ which consists in an open-ended aspiration or longing for something Other that cannot be fully specified. Spiritual practice is structured teleologically around this indeterminate gaol. It is reciprocal and is as much about God’s desire for us to live happily as it is

Contours of Desire 19 about our desire for God. The religious life primarily revolves around ongoing habits of desire. She draws on the wisdom of the French Catholic priest Fr Ravaisson to substantiate her claims. Desire is structured around a longing for the good and ultimately for God. This entails a neo-Platonic insistence that potentially all existence participates in God’s Being, in His Goodness. Consequently, sexual desire is good as it participates in God’s will when the motivation is pure and when unselfish individuals simultaneously participate in the divine life as human and divine desire are deeply entwined. The operation of spiritual desire in the formation of a distinctive disposition is more spherical than linear. It does not progress from one point to another systematically until it reaches its final destination (although there is certainly a teleology associated with its stance). Instead, it entails a journeying round interlocking, concentric circles of spiritual insight and waiting which intertwine and redouble on each other, each assisting the other in a natural movement of ascent. It is a complex, intricate and beautiful patterning of both change and harmony. Cottingham suggests this process goes towards the achievement of a distinctive ‘temperament’ which goes close to what I wish to suggest by the word ‘disposition’ (2005). One learns to be disposed to ways of behaving and thinking, a habitus, a way of acting and Being in the world which rests on a metaphysics of hope. One might call it a ‘sensibility’ formed in relation to a final rest. The spiritual senses help to form such a disposition though their sensitive attuning to revelation and their longing to receive the Truth. Heidegger uses the Greek word aletheia to describe this engagement with something precious and truthful previously hidden and concealed. Intentional desire assists in bringing the hidden into the open. Spiritual progress involves a changed attitude, a disposition and a sensibility towards the beauty of things directly formed by desire and yearning, rather than holding on to a doctrinal conceptualisation of what is to be believed. It includes an encounter with a personal ‘Thou’, to otherness which invites a reply to a loving call. von Balthasar in his discussion of theology and drama claims that Christian theology begins when a person listens to the one who addresses (1988). The person who is addressed is encouraged to go on and to name such infinite freedom as a personal ‘Thou’. The embodied, dramatic nature of human existence indicates that there is another world which is not as finite and transitory as the one experienced. Living is akin to acting in a drama where there is ‘a projection of human existence onto a stage, interpreting to itself that existence which is beyond itself’ (von Balthasar, 1988, p. 20). This sense of the beyond has the potential to be immensely freeing since it invites a person to realise that she is playing a vital and chosen role in a cosmic sacred drama, delivering her from any sense of permanent entrapment. Theatre delivers humanity from ‘the sense of being trapped and from the temptation to regard existence as something closed in on itself’ (von Balthasar, 1988, p. 20). Spiritual practices encourage a looking and

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seeking out beyond the confines of the limited and every day, a willingness to discover ‘meaning at a higher and less obvious level’ than the merely material and pragmatic (von Balthasar, 1988, p. 20). It entails a deep yearning for light whose eclipse dims the light of Being itself: ‘Will this light not necessarily die out where the very language of light has been forgotten and the mystery of Being is no longer allowed to express itself?’ asks von Balthasar (1989, p. 19). What remains is a mere ‘lump of existence …’ (1989, p. 19). The beauty and energy of life is dissipated and existence becomes flat and directionless; anxiety is then not far from the door. I refer to the developmental process of perceiving the world and the self in spiritual terms as ‘dispositional belief and trust’. Every human being behaves according to the beliefs they hold. If a person thinks consumerism is good and brings happiness, then they consequently develop an empirical and largely utilitarian attitude towards the world; in contrast, if a person believes the pursuit of material goods is ultimately empty, they are more likely to foster an attitude towards the world based on an acceptance of their own mortality and creatureliness. Wittgenstein held that religious belief is not grounded in empirical claims but characterised by a passionate way of living in response to an acquired perception of the world. In Culture and Value (1998), he contends that religious life is akin to learning to see the flowers in the forest which are first hidden but with training can be glimpsed. There is a concealment, a lack of obviousness, a need to penetrate beneath the surface of things if life is to be recognised as sacred and meaningful. This penetration to see below the surface of things is achieved partly through the discipline of desire which in turn occasions an ongoing dispositional transition and inner change. Revelation Your name, your memory are all my soul desires. At night my soul longs for you And my spirit in me seeks for you. (Isaiah 26:7–9) The innate human longing for something beyond the self to be revealed personally is associated with seeking and experiencing the source or origin of life which satisfies a profoundly felt lack and need. Mezei offers this account of revelation: ‘From the earliest times, human beings have experienced not only their own deep sense of need, but also the source by which their needs can be satisfied’ (2017, p. 8). Their ‘experience of poverty presupposes an underlying experience of richness, that is, existence of a source of satisfaction and fulfilment’ (2017, p. 9). Contemplative and active modes of spiritual practice become the means towards recognising this. Prior to the rise of Christianity, earlier Greek and Roman culture promulgated the importance

Contours of Desire 21 of these two components. Hadot has persuasively shown how ancient philosophers’ education entailed a training in desire for the good and beautiful which encouraged students to be both contemplatives and women and men of action and doing (Hadot, 1995). Pieper’s work on the Greek and Christian philosophers’ pursuit of wisdom and their concern for ‘higher knowledge’ endorses the later monastic and Cathedral schools’ position that classical understandings of philosophy as a way of life entailed a desire for the Truth – not through unaided reason – but by the heart’s receptive openness to divine revelation (Pieper, 1998). A balance needed to be kept between contemplative and active modes of living. What Pieper calls attention to is the kind of damaging, frenetic activity which prevents persons from receiving revelatory truths. The opposite of calm receptivity is ‘“absolute activity” … the hard quality of not-being-able-toreceive’ (Pieper, 1998, p. 14). In our present age of fast-moving and frenetic cultural disruption which unsettles the human heart and mind this rings true. The primary means of achieving a sense of well-being and happiness for the ancient Greeks was the quality of patient openness to revelation. For them ‘not-leisure’ was the word for servile work on a daily basis to earn money and the Greek language (ά-σχολία) like the Latin (neg-otium) only had negative words to describe it. In contrast, leisure in its fullest and most creative sense, was the most important ‘occupation’ in which human beings could engage, a time for humanity to investigate, consider and reflect on the meaning and goal of life. This pursuit was associated with learning to encounter something Other, an experience of ecstasis brought about largely through a passive and contemplative beholding of the ‘real’ which lies beyond the world of ordinary sense experience. Celebration accompanied this experience as a person was moved beyond herself. Festival (the opposite of sorrow) was its most natural expression as it affirmed the meaning of the world and our inclusion in it in an extraordinary way, markedly different from the experience of the everyday (Pieper, 1998, p. 34). Pieper adds that: ‘The very midstream of worship, and only from there, comes a supply that cannot be consumed by the world of work, a space of uncountable giving … it is festival-time’ (1998, p. 54). The deepest root from which leisure draws its meaning is worship because it is a non-profit-making, non-instrumental activity done for its own sake. In this sense, it is festive and playful. It involves silent attention which endorses the joy of being and living: ‘Leisure lives on affirmation’ (1998, p. 33). It is ‘like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness’ (1998, p. 31). The ancients used the word intellectus to refer to this silent, contemplative gaze and refer to glimpses of eternity in this world. The word ‘idleness’ meant something markedly different from today’s use. It meant an inability to be at leisure. Work was essentially a type of escapism from the true ‘work’ of leisure which promoted a contemplative approach towards the good and fulfilled life. Being idle was tantamount to giving up on our ability to live lives of contemplation, meaning, dignity and rest. Acedia describes this condition and refers to the ‘despair of weakness’. Pieper comments: ‘The metaphysical-

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theological concept of idleness means, then, that man finally does not agree with his own existence; that behind all his energetic activity, he is not at one with himself’ (1998, p. 28). Contemplation is the means towards realising there is something else, something more transcendent to be revealed which brings about happiness and a feeling of being at peace with oneself. It was associated with a sense of contentment and well-being involving a relationship with the source of life. The fruits of desire were eudaemonic (Cook, 2013). This receptive openness and desire for encounter with revelatory Being is addressed in Pope John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio (1998) an encyclical critical of modernity’s attempts to destroy the equilibrium between the active and contemplative. When the relationship between scientia (know-how) and sapientia (wisdom) becomes distorted and the contemplation of Being marginalised, things start to go out of kilter. Knowledge only seen as an instrumentalist, skills-based gaining of information is an unbalanced, onesided affair. Rather than being freeing and uplifting, it began to oppress and flatten the self and became transmuted into an oppressive ‘occupation’. The consequences were significant since the mind ‘weighed down by factual knowledge has instead turned back on itself, so that almost every day it becomes less able to lift its eyes to higher things and so courageously pursue the truth of existence’ (1998, Para 95). Instead of encouraging a desire for transcendence and ‘exalting the capacity given to man for recognizing the truth’, it has ‘preferred to accentuate his limits and conditions’ (Para 5) and to concentrate on the horizontal dimension of a person’s existence epitomised by the phrase homo economicus. This teaching is echoed in Pope Benedict XVI’s September 2008 address at the Collège des Bernadines in Paris in which he pointed out that monastic culture is exemplary since it is about the search and desire for what was ultimately valid and lasting. Monks have always embraced and fostered a receptive disposition open to revelation. Their contemplative search and heartfelt longing for the transcendent and the True act as a model for all to follow. A person’s contemplative approach to life is spurred on by glimpses of divine revelation while here on earth. The sensory experience of a ‘presence’ in the created order is the incentive for an appreciative and grateful approach to the giver of life. Humanity’s ‘engagement with the sensory world need be no “distraction” from the concerns proper to the spiritual life … the contemplative ideal of the spiritual life can be realised through our perception of the sensory world …’, writes Wynn (2013, p. 194). Hopkins’ poetry centred around this realisation as I shall demonstrate in Chapter 6. He celebrated God’s revelation in nature and a Christian temperament which is characterised by wonder, amazement and joy (Rowan, 2017). Heidegger’s belief about human beings’ astonishment before the world and Coleridge’s ‘awakening of the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us’ (quoted in McGilchrist, 2012, p. 173) echo this idea. It encapsulates an openness, receptive passivity and a spirit of trust which enables hidden things to show

Contours of Desire 23 themselves. It is not an effort of the will driving for certainty, fixity and clarity intent on discovering the instrumental purpose of things but a recognition that the world contains a distinctive presence which can be felt and is not left abandoned to its own devices. Hopkins was sad that many people were unable to recognise this hidden glory in creation. McGilchrist’s research on the demise of the use of the right hemisphere of the brain in Western culture is instructive on this matter. The richness of thought and living comes from the right hemisphere which is concerned with intuition, feeling and desire and ‘which is transferred across to the left hemisphere secondarily for translation into language’ (McGilchrist, 2012, p. 190). The left hemisphere is virtual and re-presentative. If this sphere dominates (as it has during (post)modernity) life will lead inevitably to feelings of ennui, boredom, alienation, detachment and anxiety. When the contribution of the right hemisphere to the world is lessened, the world loses meaning and purpose for individuals. The right hemisphere prioritises what it learns from experience, the left from systems and is always parasitic on the right which is the first call to knowledge (2012, p. 201). Rational pursuits based solely on left hand operations breed only their own downfall and elements arise within abstract systems that cannot be dealt with by such systems. In contrast, religious ‘knowledge’ or revelation emerges by being sought and attended to by right hemisphere subcortical activity. An experience of the hidden or concealed is unlikely to surface through empirical approaches. Coming to know what is true involves attention to Being which comes mainly through affectivity, imagination and the awakening of the spiritual senses allowing individuals to develop an intimate relationship with the Other and to be sensitive to disclosures of Truth as a consequence. They encourage a ‘feel-across’ intervening spaces and enable a move towards a higher realm of existence: ‘It situates us in the same world as the Other’ (McGilchrist, 2012, p. 183). Like someone observing a painting closely and with concentration, religious individuals begin to see the Truth and significance of the world by their attentive desire and waiting for revelation. It promotes a deeper understanding of the world helping the appreciation of new and surprising emphases and concerns. Human beings are then able to see the whole of life – its inherent unity. From the twelfth century onwards, there arose a way of conceiving theology and revelation as theologia mystica referred to as affective Dionysianism. A group of thirteenth-century theologians associated with the Abbey of Saint Denis in Paris took a particular interest in Pseudo-Dionysius’ writings and their ensuing works reflected this influence. The Cistercian Thomas Gallus’ (1200–1246) translation and commentary on the Dionysian corpus emphasised the affectus and the importance of the ‘ray of darkness’ as one of the most effective ways to God (Tyler, 2010, p. 61; Torevell, 2007, pp. 20–24). Feelings and emotions rather than cognitivism and intellectualism were emphasised. As Tyler notes, ‘Dionysius’s mystical union with God is now made through love (affectus) rather than intelligence’ (2010, p. 61). The Latin commentators on the PseudoDionysius corpus – Thomas Gallus and Robert Grosseteste (1170–1253) in

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particular – had a significant influence on monastic communities and countless Christian people outside monastic circles. Tyler argues that Jean Gerson (1363–1429), Chancellor of the University of Paris, asked the pertinent question whether it is better to have knowledge of God through a yearning, penitent affectus or an investigative intellectus. His answer resonated with Hugh of Balma’s definition of theologia mystica: ‘The desire of the soul in God through the desire of love’ (quoted in Tyler, 2010, p. 63). Gerson argued that the soul’s ascent to God was not brought about by cognition but by the purification of the affectus through virtue and asceticism. A scola amoris (school of love) is what matters and this is the most effective means of raising the soul to God. This had the democratic advantage of encouraging the unlearned and the learned alike in their quest and desire for knowledge of God. An increased straining for the Good comes about by being enfolded in the locus of revelation – worship and the Word. This takes place in response to God’s first, loving initiative. In the Divine Names, Pseudo-Dionysius claims that through His own erotic desire God makes known his Being to the whole of creation which he loves which causes Him to leave Himself: ‘… beguiled by goodness, by agape and by eros he is enticed away from his dwelling place and comes to abide within all things’ (1987, 4.13). Eros always involves an experience of affective knowing (pathein) in contrast to knowing by mental exertion (mathein) (Tyler, 2010, p. 67). Spiritual desire, therefore, relies heavily for its sustenance and strength gained by the experience of divine revelation emanating from the Word and created order. The seeker after Truth ponders its disclosures in the depths of the heart. Congar’s 1946 Dictionary extract on theology contends that desiring revelation may be done in two different ways – supernatural contemplation (contemplation surnaturelle) based on affective union with God and theological contemplation – accessing knowledge gained by rational and discursive methods. Contemplation refers to the manner in which the soul seeks God in his mystery by way of ‘vital connaturality’. He refers in The Meaning of Tradition to Newman’s (1801–1890) fifteenth University sermon which emphasises the indispensable, prolonged contemplation of the Word necessary for the seeking of Truth – a person must not only think about the Word, she must also ponder and dwell on it in their heart. In the drafting of the Vatican Council II document Dei Verbum Cardinal Suarez’s (1548–1617) influential but dryly abstract approach to revelation was challenged by the Conciliar Fathers. A more affective and intimate Thomist approach replaced its arid intellectualism. Benedict XVI argued in his habilitationschrift that Suarez’s account of revelation was a baroque invention. Certainly, the authors of the documents of Vatican Council II were ‘concerned with overcoming neo-scholastic intellectualism, for which revelation chiefly meant a store of mysterious supernatural teachings, which automatically reduces faith very much to an acceptance of these supernatural insights’ (quoted in Rowland, 2008, p. 51). In his biography Milestones, Benedict XVI refers to a personalist approach to revelation – where there is no one to perceive revelation, no re-vel-ation occurs, because no veil has been

Contours of Desire 25 removed. Revelation always requires ‘someone’ to apprehend it. These insights came to him through reading St Bonaventure and the Catholic Tubingen School of the nineteenth century which was strongly influenced by German romanticism. Benedict XVI became frustrated by those seminarians who did not see revelation as Truth needing to be absorbed into the pores of their bodies and the depth of their hearts. Their spiritual senses needed to be affected. Neoscholastic approaches did not encourage this: ‘… the whole affective side of their souls was not integrated with the intellectual’ (Rowland, 2008, p. 50). A consequence of this renewed thinking was that the final draft of Dei Verbum became influenced by the insights of theologians such as Newman, Blondel, Rahner, Ratzinger, Congar and de Lubac. Revelation was something to be received in the heart and entailed an act of affective judgement. Desire for and the reception of revelation was about the heart, not the intellect. Benedict XVI contends that despair rather than hope comes about through the denial of the heart’s knowledge as a receptor of desire, attentiveness and perception. Without re-awakening the yearning of the heart, spiritual growth is far less likely to occur and will have disappointing consequences. Depression and hopelessness result when people no longer perceive with their hearts ‘but merely with a knowledge that has lost its roots’ (Rowland, 2008, p. 80). Speaking of the Arch of Triumph of the basilica in Rome, he writes: the interaction of the arch of triumph and cave teaches us to pass from aesthetics to faith … It helps us to loosen faith from the strain of will and intellect and allow it to enter into the whole realm of our existence. (Quoted in Rowland, 2008, pp. 80–81) In Spe Salvi (2007), he offers that Christian living involves something being given now, a glimpse of the reality we are waiting and longing for. This ‘something’ or hypostasis (substance) is an objective reality known by faith and daily living consists of the possibility of being ‘touched’ by an eternal future, a touch which is from God. But it requires waiting, patience, perseverance, longing and constancy: ‘Knowing how to wait, while patiently enduring trials’ is necessary for the believer to be able to ‘receive what is promised’ (Para 10). The author of the Letter to the Hebrews encourages hypomone (endurance, patient waiting) (Para 10:36) rather than hypostole (shrinking back) (Para 10:39). Living in the hope of revelation means that humanity is not tempted to succumb to hypostole, a spirit of fear which leads to ‘destruction’. This is why straining ahead, courage and perseverance characterise hope, patience and desire. The process involves an expectant waiting for a divine call. It is an experience of loving Otherness which pierces the heart inviting a response in a manner which befits the nature of the call. It emerges from continuous hopeful desire and longing. As I have indicated, the growth of an intimate relationship with the Divine involves a ‘connatural’ operation – it is never at odds with our nature – and Newman believed this entailed not simply receiving wisdom but also seeking

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and pondering it prayerfully in the heart over time. Mary is the model for the learned and the unlearned. Newman’s Meditation on the Kingdom of God is an exhortation to receive revelation in this manner: Lord Jesus, teach me like Mary, to sit at your feet, and to hear your word. Give me that true wisdom, which seeks your will by prayer and meditation, by direct intercourse with you, more than by reading or reasoning. (Velez, 2012) Mary ‘treasured these things in her heart’ (Luke 2:19, 51) by her continuous acts of reflection and prayerful desire to understand more fully what had been disclosed to her. Such an approach to revelation substantiates a ‘real’ rather than simply a ‘notional’ assent to Truth. If the haemorrhaging of baptised Christians is to stop, then this kind of real, affective assent is crucial; otherwise more ‘persuasive’, counter ‘rational’ accounts will conquer. The final section of Dei Verbum encourages this intimate and affective absorption of revelation. The knowledge of the heart is aided by the knowledge received by the spiritual senses. The Christian tradition insists that spiritual seeing, hearing, tasting, touching and smelling offers a route to Truth. There is ‘something akin to a spiritual sensorium in the human person, a capacity to perceive a spiritual reality in a sense-like way, discovered by analysis of the powers and actions of the human soul, natural and graced …’ (Coakley & Gavrilyuk, 2011, p. 160). The spiritual senses can become attuned and openly receptive to divine disclosures. St Bonaventure (1217–1274) writes about them in relation to his doctrine of grace and Divine Wisdom. He asks us to consider the delights, which our souls find hidden in our spiritual senses, which must seek with desire: … our spiritual senses must seek with longing, find with joy, and time and again experience the beautiful, the harmonious, the fragrant, the sweet, or the delightful to the touch. Behold how the Divine Wisdom lies hidden in sense perception and how wonderful is the contemplation of the five spiritual senses in the light of their conformity to the senses of the body. (Quoted in LaNave, 2011, p. 160, my italics) In The Journey of the Mind to God, Bonaventure writes that when a person recovers his spiritual senses he clasps the sovereign sweetness against his breast under the aspect of the incarnate Word dwelling in us in the flesh and allowing us to touch, embrace, hug (reddentis se nobis palpabile, osculabile, amplexabile) through the ardent charity that makes our mind pass from this world to the next, through ecstasy and transport …’. (1993, pp. 129–130) The engagement of the spiritual senses enables practitioners to transit into God through ecstatic love. Wisdom perfects the intellect as it is extended to

Contours of Desire 27 the affectus. LaNave comments that the ‘affectivity of theological wisdom is contrasted with critical, philosophical reasoning and involves the Holy Spirit’s gift of Himself. Wisdom becomes a form of tasted knowledge, a more intimate experience’ (2011, pp. 164–165). For example, Bonaventure believed that the olfactory sense is associated with hope and touch is connected to a move towards the other. St John of the Cross (1542–1591), too, writes that metaphysical desire entails the development of a taste for the divine. He quotes the ancient maxim Gustato spiritu, desipit omnis caro (once the spirit is tasted, carnal things are insipid) (quoted in Tyler, 2010, p. 104). In Ascent to Mount Carmel, he argues that those things to which the senses are drawn may act as ladders to the divine pointing the person to their ultimate purpose: ‘The senses can then be used because the sensorial objects serve the purpose for which God created them: that He be more known and loved through them’ (1991, A. 3. 24. 5). Influenced by the Desert Fathers’ analysis of demonic forces working against metaphysical longing, John reiterates their teaching. In Dark Night, he records how the soul contains both spiritual and sensory dimensions. Each receives delight according to its own nature and properties. The spirit, the superior part of the soul, experiences renewal and satisfaction in God; and the sense, the lower part, feels sensory gratification and delight because it is ignorant of how it can get anything else, and hence takes whatever is nearest, which is the impure sensory experience. (1991, DN 1.4.2) The movement of ascent takes place when a process of ‘purgation of the dark night’ takes place and when the soul becomes free from ‘sensual rebellions, movements, and acts in the senses, not without its own great displeasure’ (1991, DN, 1.4.2). This involves a slow, laborious trek ‘Because in the initial stages of the spiritual life, and even more advanced ones, the sensory part of the soul is imperfect …’ (1991, DN, 1.4.2). In The Living Flame of Love, he speaks of touch as the highest of the spiritual senses since it is a foretaste of eternal life – God’s substance touching our soul’s substance. It is the Word, the incarnate Christ who touches us and it does so without any form or image. The Heart Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Ps. 37: 4) It is in the heart where longing and desire are located. Pascal postulates essentially two different modes of knowledge. First, that which derives from reason and second, that which comes about through the heart, a specific kind of knowledge he names as ‘first principles’. By ‘first principles’ he means those Truths felt and discovered by instinct, which he likens to coming to knowledge

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of ‘space, time and motion’ (Pascal, 1995, Fragment 110). This is of a different order from the kind of understanding sought by reason through propositional proof. He comments: ‘principles are felt, propositions are proved and both with certainty but by different means’ (Pascal, 1995, Fragment 110). This ‘natural feeling’ towards ‘first principles’ is an involuntary leaning and yearning towards divine things and is one of the primary ways through which we come to know God. We feel ‘first principles’ and find ourselves either drawn to them or believing in them instinctively. This interconnection between the feeling, the intuitive heart and knowledge is an important one for it points not only to an alternative epistemological source and foundation for coming to know the Truth of things but also emphasises the unstoppable human attraction towards those things which are felt by the heart, as in human love. This deeply felt and personal coming to knowledge of Truth signals that the heart is able to know things which reason – due to its limited nature – can never know. Pascal notes that we know theTruth, not only through our reason (raison), but also through our heart (coeur). This knowledge is no less certain from the one produced by reason, for it tells us ‘we know we are not dreaming’, even if reason, which has nothing to do with this, vainly tries to refute our knowledge of ‘first principles’ (Pascal, 1995, Fragment 110). Pascal adds that reason can neither prove nor disprove this acknowledgement of the heart, for it is inadequate to do so; therein lies its limitations. Reason must humbly come to accept this Truth. If it refuses, a corrective humbling of reason will inevitably come about each time it attempts to over-reach itself, exposing itself by its own impotence. As Pascal wryly exclaims: ‘As if reason could be the only way in which we can learn!’ What reason must do, therefore, is ‘to recognize that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely impotent if it cannot get as far as to realize this’ (Pascal, 1995, Fragment 188). However, this important realisation is not always forthcoming, he notes. The traditional arguments for the existence of God are too discursively complex and have little impact on faith compared to the longings for Truth instigated by the heart. Even when such arguments do substantially influence ways of thinking, they are invariably short-lived and within a brief amount of time many would be afraid that they had deceived themselves. Pascal quotes from Augustine to clinch his point: ‘What they gained by curiosity they lost through pride’ (1995, Fragment 190). As Peters points out, ‘What Augustine rejects … is not the goodness of reason per se, but the proud refusal to see the limits of reason. Reason cannot heal a selfish will’ (2009, p. 86). Only God can do this working through the heart. The heart, too, can act as an antidote to reason’s pride and selfishness. As Fragment 131 advises, Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your own true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God. (Pascal, 1995)

Contours of Desire 29 In Fragment 424, Pascal (1995) insists ‘It is the heart which perceives God and not reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart not by the reason’. Rationally derived empirical conclusions are never more certain than those principles of natural faith which stem from the heart. The Augustinian influence is apparent throughout much of Pascal’s writings. However, epistemology is not a matter of rejecting reason entirely, but of discerning its parameters and limitations. The best way forward is to acknowledge the heart as one reliable form of knowledge, especially in relation to its intuition of the Divine. In Fragment 183, he argues there are: ‘Two excesses: to exclude reason and to admit nothing but reason’. The key is to recognise that reason and the heart work interdependently. Once the limitations of reason are known, then the epistemological function of the heart can be shown. Both bring knowledge but in different ways. The heart is a combination of both cognition and will and makes possible self-knowledge and knowledge of the divine as we assent to the claims it makes on us. Reason lacks the crucial ingredient of love when coming to knowledge of God. The dispassionate role reason adopts, especially in the classical proofs for the existence of God, fails to engage with love. Following Augustine, he believes love has to be the basis of any full and true knowledge of God. Both writers understand philosophy as a way of life in relation to the divine entailing the pursuit of eudaemonism; this seeking of self-knowledge by love leads to a better moral life and to happiness. Reason, by contrast, is too easily separated from love; only the heart steers a middle path between Cartesian certainty and Pyrrhonist scepticism. In Augustine’s On the Trinity, there is an emphasis on the importance of love as the means towards the transformation of the self (McHugh and Torevell, 2022). We only become united to Christ by the Holy Spirit who brings us the charity (caritas) in which the Father and the Son are united in the Trinity and which forms the foundation for divine knowledge. This search for God must be modelled on Christ who was shorn of all pride. Such love allows the Holy Spirit which is poured into our hearts to become the basis of our contemplation, and therefore knowledge of God. von Balthasar, in assessing Pascal’s theology, adds that one of his key insights is his recognition that it is only though love that we are able to discover God. The incarnation and the sacrament of the Eucharist are testimony to this for it is only by such kenotic love that humanity encounters the hiddenness of God. He refers to Pascal’s ironic words on this kind of incarnational hiddenness: ‘… and when he had to appear he still more hid himself by concealing himself in humanity. He was much more recognisable when he was invisible than when he made himself visible’ (1989, quoted on p. 219). God hid Himself in ‘the strangest of Eucharist and most obscure secret of all, the Eucharistic forms of bread and wine … the last secret place where he can be’ (1989, quoted on p. 219). Augustine’s reflections on Psalm 119 (Pascal’s most fundamental influence, continually cited in his corpus) concerns his estimation of the heart (coeur). Verse 36 reminds readers to ‘Incline their heart’ so that it may be ordered to

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God and that, eventually, by this return of the heart, God may be sensed. This is not achieved by our efforts alone, for it is God who turns the heart of humankind towards Himself. God alone can give the necessary caritas which enables each person to love God. Without this reciprocal love, as von Balthasar points out, selfishness as a type of narcissism will occur: ‘If the heart does not love God, then it loves itself and relates all its values to selflove, cupiditas’ (1989, p. 184). Pascal’s theology, therefore, is always a confessio, a ‘conversation with God as the gracious Thou, who before all else gives with love the true knowledge of the Thou’ (1989, p. 184). Augustine sees the heart as paramount in one of the primary tasks of the Church – to invite members of the one body to share in the affections and in particular, the suffering and lament of Christ Himself, a theme echoed in Julian of Norwich’s writings. This calls for humble affectivity. Augustine’s Expositions of the Psalms emphasises that what is lamentable is the loss of a human longing for an affective attachment to Christ. It is only through the heart’s response to God primarily in scripture and worship which can change this. Humanity’s hearts are capable of being lifted up so that they can remain centred on heavenly realities. When this is achieved, God hears the voice of Christ’s entire body saying ‘I have cried to you all day long’. The temptations of the temporal delights of earthly existence will then be kept in check and the heart begin again to beat in alignment with Christ’s heart. It is in the psalter that participating in the affections of Christ becomes apparent – the most effective method by which humanity is changed. Augustine writes that ‘By listening, understanding and groaning with the Psalms let us be changed’ (quoted in Brock, 2009, p. 194). The words of the psalter set believers’ affections and longings on the heavenly Christ. They serve, as Brock comments: to transmit Christ’s passion in order that it can transform believers’ suffering by claiming humans for Christ’s suffering pilgrimage through the world … We truly remember it by joining Christ’s lament in his passion, letting it claim and reconfigure our desiring love. … bringing human perception and affections into alignment with Christ, giving cause for the confidence … . (2009, p. 194) As believers pray the psalms of lament, they are invited to join the prayer of the Son to the Father. In listening to the things Christ laments, as learned from the psalter, faith discovers its proper form and the will is trained. By joining Christ’s laments and allowing them to claim and reconfigure the worshipper’s desiring love new insights are imparted. This has a pedagogical intent: ‘We must be taught to lament: faith must undergo the pedagogy of lament. This is Augustine’s epistemology of lament, in which glimpses of the beauty of virtue heightens faith’s attachment of eschatological reality rather than illusions’ (Brock, 2009, p. 191). The remembrance of the Lord’s passion is also something that must be performed in order to transform. The lament of Christ in human frailty is the Church’s lament. As practitioners join their

Contours of Desire 31 hearts’ desires with Christ’s, they learn to follow His ways. This is a difficult journey at times to take. The dynamics of the heart, oscillating between estrangement (fall) and image/likeness, make the unfolding of a person’s life a dramatic struggle between residing in the earthly and residing in the heavenly kingdom. For Augustine and Pascal, as sojourners in this world we experience a perplexed, dis-unified self, coupled with the heart’s yearning to transcend this division. The cause of any perpetual inner agony of the heart is the refusal in pride to acknowledge we need anything outside the self to satisfy the self. Individuals hide this Truth from themselves. However, the experience of suffering in humility may cause them to realise their mortal nature. The beginnings of our knowledge of God is the startling awareness that humanity possesses both greatness (since we are born in God’s image) and wretchedness (since we are fallen). It is through the heart that a person acknowledges their plight and need for divine healing. We do not acquire our knowledge of God through a process of deductive or inductive reasoning. Instead, knowledge of God is a starting point, a fundamental first principle, that we must grasp intuitively as a response to our own desperate, dual state of greatness and wretchedness. (Peters, 2009, pp. 178–179) This deep Augustinian legacy in Pascal is related to his understanding of ‘wretchedness’. This is not a popular nor a contemporary word. It might be better to translate it now as humanity’s ‘brokenness’ or ‘fragility’. It involves the recognition that human beings cannot achieve everything by themselves and is related to Augustine’s and Pascal’s theology of grace. For both theologians the way towards faith is through the heart’s recognition that a person is dependent upon something greater than themselves in order to be healed. Human beings are not independent creatures able to conquer the world or master the self. Faith, therefore, is a loving response to God which emanates from the heart’s teaching about the need for healing. In Fragment 192, Pascal (1995) gives this theme a Christological emphasis: Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes a balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness. Augustine ultimately rejected Platonism because it was not founded on the humility necessary for human reason to gauge its own limitations. The power of the intellect is not the best path to the divine. What is needed is the acknowledgement that humanity contains both aspirations and longings for goodness and happiness and the humility to accept that she cannot achieve these alone. Before his conversion, Augustine admits, in Confessions, he ‘was full of selfesteem … I ought to have deplored my state … For was I not without charity

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which builds its edifice on the firm foundation of humility, that is, on Jesus Christ’ (1961, VII. 20). The Platonic texts which he had read before his conversion did not lead him to acknowledge his own weaknesses as the scriptures did. This is not to say they did not serve any purpose; what they did achieve was the recognition that there is a huge difference between the ‘presumption’ that humanity can come to know things on their own undertakings and the ‘confession’ that leads with God’s grace to the country of blessedness both here and more fully beyond, a place in which humanity is meant to dwell. Pascal, too, knew the importance of humility. Peters articulates Pascal’s paradoxical understanding of human nature: The greatness of human nature lies in our self-consciousness and in our capacity to project the perfect ideals of goodness, knowledge and true happiness. But while our nature bears these marks of greatness, it utterly fails on its own to carry us to their fulfilment. Ironically, our wretchedness is the natural shadow of our greatness; we suffer only because we are great enough to become wretched. (2009, p. 84) The Christian life consists in having a constant interior dialogue with the Divine. Other communications should be kept to a reasonable level since they are potentially harmful and may corrupt good manners (1 Cor. 15: 33). Following a Socratic lead, Pascal believes the purpose of philosophy is to achieve self-knowledge and to live wisely between rational hubris and sceptical nonchalance. But, as we have seen, to be wise is to recognise how reason serves within a much larger complex of desires and passions; reason must serve desires and passions, never marginalising them. This notion is not unrelated to Pascal’s famous account of humanity’s experience of the vastness of the universe in which they dwell. When humankind experiences this greatness and feels overwhelmed by its power, it can lead to a sense of dread and foreboding. He writes in Fragment 201 that ‘le silence éternal de ces espaces infinies m’effraie’ (‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me’). This overwhelming feeling can only be assuaged by the knowledge that consolation and reassurance come from God’s grace and that we are not alone. The Biblical and Christian monastic traditions have made plain that it is imperative to protect the sacred space of the heart. Fitzpatrick comments: The heart of the monastic purified by asceticism becomes the space where all creation enters into the silence of God and the solitude of adoration. The real cloister or enclosure is the heart of one dedicated to undivided love of God, not the enclosed space of the cloister. (2006, p. 151) As the heart starts a process of metanoia, it learns to desire more and adore the One who resides there. Such an inclusive, metaphysical space unites the whole of

Contours of Desire 33 creation within its enclosure, especially those who suffer, as monastics develop a mystical solidarity with all humanity and learn to feel the injustices of the world. Here the monastic habitus is formed. Although there are boundaries secured by asceticism surrounding the outer and inner enclosures, these never serve as barriers but as openings up to those outside the necessary restraints: ‘I have never experienced them as barriers or something imprisoning. Instead I have felt a deep union with people outside the enclosure, especially those who are suffering’, writes Fitzpatrick (2006, p. 152). The heart is such a vast interior space where symbols and images of the Real reverberate it is judicious to call it the ‘deep heart’ (Howe, 2005, p. 73). Any schooling which goes on in the monastery is primarily directed to the heart, such that its telos is the creation of a pure heart eager to long for the divine encounter, not the acquisition of power. This gradual purification of the desirous heart is central to spiritual growth – ‘The pure in heart shall see God’, says Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5–7). Spiritual seeing is dependent upon practices of purification. If this is the space where God communicates His presence and where God is felt and heard, then any obstacles which prevent revelation from taking place, holiness from being lived and desire from being fulfilled is to be resisted. The silent attention of the heart results in a new orientation of the person towards infinity, an experience of ‘another order’ which entails a changed way of being in the world. Having set herself apart from the world, the monastic mystically prepares herself to embrace inwardly all things. The return of the heart (reditus ad cor), the ‘life of the heart’ and ‘finding the place of the heart’ (Howe, 2005, p. 5) become central spiritual activities and foci. The real covenant, as the prophet Jeremiah noted, is always ‘written on the heart’ (Jeremiah 1:31–34). Contemplation aids the ‘awakened heart’ which is ‘attuned to being’ (Howe, 2005, p. 5) and is fuelled to desire more consistently the things of heaven rather than the things of earth. This way of looking at inner sacred space as the arena for spiritual desire reflects de Lubac’s insistence on the impact the liturgy has on participants’ hearts and feelings. Drawing from the Christian ascetic practices of the training of the heart (askésis), contemplatives emphasise the cultivation of the desiring heart which entails an active listening. During a recent interview with Dame Andrea, then Abbess of Stanbrook Abbey, she emphasised that her community was there primarily to seek God through disciplined listening. Referring to the Rule of St Benedict which entirely governed her community’s way of life she said: ‘The most important word is listen. And if you don’t have silence you can’t listen’. Indeed, the opening words of the Prologue to the Rule (2008) encourage monks to ‘listen’ and to incline ‘the ear’ of the ‘heart’ so that what is heard might bring about an inner transformation and a longing to seek more the things of heaven. Desire which leads to transformation is measured in terms of the expanding heart as it becomes formed (rather than informed) through longing and careful listening to the Word. Such encouragement to listen reflects a dispositional significance to the practice, a disciplined pursuit which hones a certain readiness of character for moments of revelatory insight and Truth. The Trappist monk Merton (1915–1968) writes: ‘Contemplation is an awakening to the Real within

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all that is real’ (quoted in Shannon, Bochen and O’Connell, 2002, p. 83). Through a patient mode of receptive openness, the context of silence encourages the listening of the heart as it is interwoven and changed with something outside itself. The monastic strand within Christianity has always encouraged this search for God through silent contemplation. Watten’s analysis of this phenomenon in the Rule of St. Benedict hints that the practice encourages a most ‘serious’ pursuit – the contemplation of God. Listening in silence encourages a receptive mode of being and the gravitas needed for God’s revelatory communication with His creation to take place: ‘To keep silent for the sake of silence really means to keep silence because of the gravity and seriousness of monastic life …’ (1973, p. 30). Such gravitas is allied to ‘considering’ (the Latin word considerare means ‘to lift up one’s eyes’ or to ‘get one’s bearing from the stars’) which consists in a yearning for and orientating oneself towards something higher and beyond the self (Torevell, 2006, p. 33). Rather than being weighed down by the drudgery of endlessly doing and saying, contemplation raises a person beyond the quotidian and is the primary method of sustaining the desire for transcendence and the kingdom of God. The contemporary Benedictine monk David Foster suggests that ‘… we are not properly in tune with our heart’ (2007, p. 118); ‘they need to be re-created’ (p. 119). The ‘fall’ of humanity consists of being out of tune with the call of the divine and consequently with ourselves and the world, as it shies away from the source of life which ceaselessly beckons it to His waiting presence. The Biblical premise of this is seen in the prophet Ezekiel – the need to change a heart of stone into a heart of flesh. Monks’ lives are dedicated to ‘working the soil of the heart’ (Foster, 2007, p. 95) involving tears of self-recognition (lacrima) which begin to soften and water the heart in order that new life might spring forth and blossom. Reflection on sacred scripture fosters desire. Contemplatives cogitate the spiritual meaning of texts with two things dominating their responsiveness to them. First, silence attentiveness and second, the practical living out of the text in everyday life. The first is narrated in the story of two young novices who led a life of silence rooted in scripture. When Abba Macarius visited them he observed that they lived a life of complete silence. On that night, although they had battled strenuously with their demons, the following morning as they sang psalms, a column of fire came forth and ascended to heaven. In other words, scriptures once absorbed into an open heart are able to create an enormous impact with silence being central to this reception allowing the Word to penetrate more deeply into the heart. Second, putting into daily practice the Word through acts of charity is an equally essential part of the maintaining of a monastic culture. The process of embedding the Word completely into one’s being and acting in accordance with it in acts of selfless love are characteristics of contemplative and ascetical living (Ware, 1998). This became associated with the attainment of humility and the recognition that every person is equal and shares the same human lot. There was a reluctance to engage in a disproportionate analytical study of the meaning of scriptural texts therefore. What was required was a desire and

Contours of Desire 35 willingness to put the texts into practice. As Burton-Christie indicates, such pragmatism was a rejection of speculation in favour of practice (BurtonChristie, 1993, p. 157). It is better to deal with the ‘passions of the soul’ and how they might erect a barrier to revelation rather than wrestling with the textual and philological intricacies of scripture. Wisdom comes from defeating the unruly passions and fostering an ability to see the Truths scripture holds and how one might live them out effectively in the world. The gaol sought by the contemplative is apatheia, a resolute stillness freed from the unguarded and unbalanced attacks of the wayward emotions and passions, often understood in early monasticism as external, demonic attacks to be confronted and overcome (Brakke, 2006; Evagrius, 2006). Desire always needs to be re-directed towards the Divine. The spiritual practice which encourages a receptive openness and eagerness of the heart to the transcendent is the practice of lectio divina (divine reading) which entails a slow, meditative rumination on a short text, sometimes scriptural, sometimes early or modern Christian, sometimes accounts of the lives of holy and inspiring women and men. It entails four things: reading (lectio), meditation (meditatio), prayer with words (oratio) and contemplation (contemplatio). Their classical expression is given by the twelfth century prior of the Grand Chartreuse, Guigo II. The first three are markedly different from the fourth since they are concerned with our doing and our initiative. The fourth contemplatio, is something God brings about in us, taking us out of our realm of doing things allowing us to be in the presence of God. It is a gift which comes to us when we are prepared to receive it. This kind of reading does not encourage the consumption of information. It is a reflective exercise so that the heart may be set on fire for God, a contemplative pursuit to change the self morally and spiritually. The sacred space of the listening heart becomes attuned to the words and images reflected upon and an interior purifying of the heart begins. Spiritual texts have always fulfilled this aim of allowing the words and images to transform the inner depths of a person and make her ready for acts of virtue and renewed yearning. Reading thus becomes an inwardly transformative act. In light of the above, the spiritual life may be seen as the acceptance of a simple reality: a grateful state of being, engaged in a continuous process of desire and transformation towards the goal of real and permanent happiness. It entails the discovery of the existence of another Being for whom ones yearns. Howe comments that the external landscape of any particular monastic community with its distinctive charism must be transmuted into a personal venture (2005, p. 77). Spiritual living within monastic cultures governed by a particular Religious Order (in Howe’s case, Cistercian) encourages a journey within a journey – a unique quest within a common quest – which she names ‘soulscape’ (Howe, 2005, p. 69). By moving within the Church’s or the Cistercian charism, ‘we make it our own, and a more subjective synthesis occurs’ (Howe, 2005, p. 70). She adds:

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This interrelationship between the landscape and the soulscape is a creative one: ‘All this is merely a manner of transposing the principle of inculturation to a more personal level’ and is a ‘mysterious union of landscape and soulscape, which far from attenuating the Cistercian experience, enhances and intensifies it’ (2005, p. 71). Howe calls attention to this erotic space of the ‘deep heart’, a heart set on fire with desire. The monk John Cassian (365–435) too, writes that ‘Everything we do, our every objective, must be undertaken for the sake of the purity of heart’ (1985, p. 41). A monastic community needs an environment which promotes and protects not simply a geographical distance from society but also a cultural space for such a distinctive way of being, a space which allows the heart to desire, receive and breathe. All monastic communities are an extension of the experience of the Desert Fathers and Mothers who sought places where purer forms of living could be lived, outside cities and villages. St Aelred of Rievaulx (110–1167) in his advice to his sister on becoming an anchoress reflects on an incarnational element of desire when he said that the monks of old chose to live as solitaries for several reasons with one being greater freedom to express their ardent longing for Christ’s embrace. These were places of purification involving an intense fighting of demons which beset all Christians, a battle accentuated in the desert where they might be known more plainly and then defeated. As Brakke highlights, ‘Only in the desert could the monk practice quietness, “see the adversary” and “overcome him with divine assistance”’ (2006, p. 15). Once the war started to be waged and signs of victory became apparent, revelatory moments began to occur. Living in the space of the desert produced a thousandfold, as the struggle between good and evil became more pronounced and God’s strength and revelation experienced. With this came moments of ‘illumination, insight, or wisdom’ (Howe, 2005, p. 10). By entering into the desert, not only were monks attentive to the Word which emerged out of God’s eternal silence giving power to all those who listened, but they too learnt to speak out of silence for the good of the world (Nouwen, 1999, p. 57). In the desert environment of silence and solitude, ‘monks and nuns pursue the ultimate goal for them and for all Christians: to attain purity of heart and thus to see God’ (Fitzpatrick, 2006, p. 148). There is a symbiotic relationship between silence and desire. St Benedict calls for a restraint of speech in his Rule out of ‘esteem for silence’ so that longing may be made fruitful. The contemporary Benedictine monk Christopher Jamison calls attention to St Anthony of Egypt’s (251–356) admittance: ‘The one who sits in silence and quiet has escaped from three wars: hearing, speaking and seeing; yet against one thing shall he continually

Contours of Desire 37 battle: that is, his own heart’ (Jamison, 2010, p. 41). St John in the Prologue to his gospel insists on the co-eternity of the Logos, a Logos which includes and expresses itself through silence. The silence of Holy Week in the Church’s liturgy is never threatening but sombre enhancing the dramatic action of God for the redemption of the world. The ritualised, silent body of the participant becomes the means of attuning to a new way of being and seeing. It allows a space to open up within the heart so that one may begin to know how to feel. Aristotle maintained that the morally educated person was the one who knew how to feel to the right degree. Through learning to feel appropriately though silence monastics develop the habit of right motivation and virtuous action. When these habits are strong monks become beings of happiness and fulfilment, a state of being described by Aristotle as eudaimonia. Silence also prevented monastics from becoming too entangled in world. The Desert Fathers and Mothers and all who followed in their footsteps knew that every conversation tended to make them interested in this world and to become ‘tangled in and polluted by the world’ and thus their desire for God thwarted (Nouwen, 1999, p. 51). A new way of being ‘in’ the world was not released by speaking, but by allowing the purified heart to be the dwelling place of the entire world through a life of spiritual desire centred around prayer and contemplation. Slanderous words pollute rather than cleanse the heart – they are harmful to others and the self. Hyperchius compares idle talk to the whisperings of the serpent to Eve: It was through whispering that the serpent drove Eve out of paradise … he who speaks against his neighbour … will be like the serpent, for he corrupts the soul of him who listens to him and he does not save his own soul. (Quoted in Burton-Christie, 1993, p. 141) Like Iago’s evil whispering into the ears of Othello, the result is devastating. In contrast, a pure heart increases honest speaking: ‘Only by cultivating a pure heart could one express oneself with integrity and authority’ (Burton-Christie, 1993, p. 145; Torevell, 2019). Job in the Old Testament was someone esteemed worthy of combining purity of heart with speech. Learning to speak with integrity was one of the goals of the monastic life, but this would not emerge without spiritual practices rooted in the silent and still body: ‘It is very hard to teach with the mouth what one does not practice with the body’ (Burton-Christie, 1993, p. 145). Silence was essential to maintaining an aura of the sacred and the holy within monastic culture. Even today, on visiting a monastery one becomes immediately aware of how quiet things are. This ethos does not just happen, but is cultivated by the regulation of the day and the disciplined attention to time which is set within an eschatological framework. Freedom from the distorting effects of noise is the aim of this and silence becomes the crucial entry point into this freedom. For example, the abbey at Cluny, established in 909,

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regarded the spiritual practice and performance of regular silence as absolutely crucial to self-transformation. By developing a heightened ascetic ideal around its strict observation, it sought to take the monk–angel analogy to a different level. The monk is assisted in becoming angelic by his avoidance of words since speech always carries the danger of falling into slander. This is in contrast with the only Word that matters, the Revealed Word and the Word made flesh. Although medieval monks were often compared to bees in their busyness of prayer and praise to God, it was widely recognised that words might drag their thoughts down to the earth rather than raise them to heaven. Silence lifts humanity towards the silence of heaven and becomes a foreshadowing of the monks’ lives in the world to come, the home they yearn for. The celestial silence of the angels was to be mirrored in the monks’ silence on earth, thereby narrowing the distance between the two realms of existence. Describing the monastery at Cluny, Bruce opines that silence played a ‘vital role in reifying the great Burgundian abbey as an image of the world to come’ (2007, p. 15). This same notion has been echoed in Gregory the Great’s Exposition on the Book of Job where he taught that God could not communicate His divine majesty apart from the voices of apostles and preachers due to the limitations and frailty of human nature, but that after the resurrection at the end of time there would be no need for God to communicate with words because His Word would fill everyone with the power of its divine light (Bruce, 2007, p. 28). The heavenly choir will sing in eternity but their voices will always be surrounded by silence and no other sound. It was commonly acknowledged in monastic communities that silence developed a heightening of the presence of God through the engagement of the spiritual senses. God could be ‘felt’ and experienced more acutely in wordlessness. Besides encouraging spiritual discernment, one who is silent is able to become more receptive to God’s revelation within one’s sensory nature. It was not simply in the formal Liturgy of the Hours that God was encountered, but within the distinctive enveloping ethos of the monastery where quies (rest) could be discovered and enjoyed. Silence was also associated with the development of the virtues of humility and obedience. Cassian in De Coenobiorum Institutes indicated how pride interfered with discernment and desire and was often related to the misuse of the tongue – proud monks engaged in idle conversation, often at the expense of others. Slander itself was regarded as a heinous sin: ‘It is better to eat meat and drink wine, than to eat the flesh of the brothers in slander’ (Bruce, 2007, p. 35). Murmuring, too, was an offence against silence and was an act of disobedience. To this day a ‘Great Silence’ is observed in monastic communities during the night after the office of final Office of compline. As a consequence of its unique elevating of the practice of silence, Cluny developed an elaborate sign language to replace verbal communication. Signs were often used for mundane practical things, attempting to avoid the pitfalls of verbal utterance. Such performances of signing had to avoid the very dangers to which the spoken word itself lent. Indeed, Cluny devised a system of signs for single nominal concepts, primarily nouns, but they did not

Contours of Desire 39 express higher thoughts. The development of such a sign language strengthened the community around an ascetic ideal, freeing them from the concerns of the material world. Bruce summarises this well: … the shared knowledge of this exclusive language forged a strong sense of solidarity among the brethren. In a large and linguistically heterogeneous community like Cluny, where rustic forms of Latin were spoken side by side with foreign vernaculars, the silent language of the Cluniacs provided a shared medium of discourse that prevented misunderstandings that could arise from linguistic differences and thereby preserved the angelic decorum so valued in the community. Like the practice of celibacy and the cultivation of unearthly silence, the sign language … set them apart from their contemporaries, lending strength to their communal purpose as they abandoned the world to embrace a celestial life realised on earth. (2007, p. 97) Silence also trained monastics not to retaliate to the insults of others but to learn how to disarm those who attacked them. Evagrius of Pontus exhorts his monks to ‘put a curb on your mouth … For if you remain silent, you will not be eaten up by the offence, but the other person is all the more bitten by your silence …’ (2006, p. 32). Due to its environment and its aura of contemplative silence and solitude, monastic living became naturally allied to the apophatic. Silence more than language was regarded as being far more attuned to the receptivity of the Divine and it was believed that within silent spaces, both external and internal, the attentive beholding of images and symbols would operate more easily (Carruthers, 2000). These were designed to support the monks’ search and desire for God and to allow a more sensitive absorption of revelation into the pores of their bodies. Silent images of divine things consequently became an important means towards personal transformation out of respect for the ineffable nature of God. They were contemplatively ‘painted’ on the heart and mind, in order that they might become a meditative icon of ascent and a further spur to longing for the things which last (Torevell, 2007, p. 40). The Russian Orthodox writer Pavel Florensky saw this kind of contemplative asceticism as inextricably interwoven with beauty: ‘Asceticism produces not a good person but a beautiful personality’ he wrote (quoted in Ware, 1998, p. 3) and it reflects the beauty of the One sought whom monastics sought relentlessly. As in the human realm, beauty stirs desire. von Balthasar’s theology emphasises the Christological formation or deification of the person through her yearning for and attraction towards the beauty of God and the Created Order. He regrets the loss of empathy for beauty which happened during modernity. Once this occurred, Being itself started to become under threat since its Light was in danger of being snuffed out and its mystery no longer able to express itself as it had during pre-modernity. His The Glory of the Lord proclaims the inestimable importance of beauty and its demise. Throughout the text, he sets forth a detailed analysis of ‘theologians of beauty’, but at the start of the work he refers to

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the banishment of beauty from society in incisive terms. The transcendental beauty used to be interwoven inseparably with its siblings Goodness and Truth and offered the possibility of a contemplative vision and understanding of the world which the stirrings of secular modernity started to erode. Desire for the transcendentals began to wane since beauty was no longer recognised. It became obstructed. The previous vision of the world spoken about by Aquinas in terms of the ‘sure light’ of Being in his discussion of creation (von Balthasar, 1989, p. 19) became under threat. Without the desire for and consequent revelatory glimpses of beauty, many were tempted to see life as little more than a ‘lump of existence’ (von Balthasar, 1989, p. 19). Since its siblings were Goodness and Truth, dangerous questions started to be asked: ‘Why should we pursue goodness rather than its opposite, evil?’ von Balthasar argues that the last thing the intellect dares approach is beauty (1989, p. 18). Aware of beauty’s greatness and attraction, the intellect recoils in fear, knowing its own limited capacities. Traditional arguments for the existence of God built around cognitive analysis and appeal are like rotary presses and computers which simply ‘spew out an exact number of answers without any recourse to aesthetic considerations’ (1989, p. 19). By contrast, it was the ancients and theologians of the past who knew and appreciated the importance of beauty. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) expresses this quality in the memorable first lines of his poem God’s Grandeur: The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; In some mysterious manner, this ‘shining’ of God’s beauty in the world results in their being swallowing up in its attraction and taking hold of them without their knowing why. There is no rationally motivated movement here but rather a humble acquiescence and longing of the self to be transported into God’s splendour. Individuals carry on being attracted to God’s glory because its power and appeal are never exhausted. Like great art, there are no limits to its attraction. Human beings consequently desire to live in its presence and to be transformed by its rays. Once this movement into beauty occurs humanity is nudged towards the contemplation of the world itself and begins to behold its significance to the point of adoration. All creation is then seen as sacred (Pope Francis, 2015) and the desire for and experience of beauty results in seeing the world as a gift (Torevell, 2007). The contemporary Catholic philosopher Marion refers to the ‘saturated phenomenon’ of creation which points to the excess of glory revealed in the material world producing amazement and wonder at what has been given. Such experiences direct us to the question of Being itself. He alludes to Caravaggio’s painting The Call of St Matthew to elucidate his point. The saturated gift of phenomena entails a call and response relayed to selfidentity. The one who is gifted is defined entirely in terms of givenness

Contours of Desire 41 because she is completely changed as soon as she surrenders unconditionally to what gives itself, especially to the saturated phenomenon that calls her (2013, pp. 79–198). The gifted must be understood in a double sense as she bears the ‘burst of the given’ and does not ‘deny the undeniable’. The painter shows the call of Christ’s gaze as a weight that weighs on Matthew’s own gaze and holds him captive. He can do no other but respond. Liturgy Liturgy is the supreme arena for the celebration and preservation of desire and inspires a different form of being in the world. Lacoste calls attention to important aspects of the performance of ‘liturgical living’ associated with the desire for a radical, differently-oriented life after baptism. It entails living in a ‘non-place’, never seeking any hold over the Absolute nor manipulating Him into existence. Such performativity of Being is also ‘violent’ because it comes about as humanity wrenches and places itself outside its own self-obsessed framework and begins to see that the limits of existence are not the limits of humanity – a straining and wrenching occurs: ‘Only a certain violence enables man to exist before God. Man liturgically exceeds what he is initially; the limits of the existential are not the limits of his humanity’ (Lacoste, 2004, p. 105). What living liturgically does is ‘to make our present tremble’ (en inquietant notre present); consequently, ‘the Absolute enables us to effectively infringe on the laws governing worldly temporalization’ (2004, p. 85). Liturgy contextualises a longing for another place and another world radically different to the one we normally encounter (Torevell, 2007). Lacoste acknowledges that although this experience might at times be characterised by boredom and restlessness, a definitive peace begins to reign. The feeling is one of dispossession: ‘Nothing they could have in their possession contributes to the expression of their identity, and they are offered nothing they can take possession of’ (2004, p. 174). Such a person ‘leaves many things behind him, starting with the profanity of the world … he also takes leave of every relation with the real in which appropriation is an essential moment’ (2004, p. 174). The liturgy ‘acts as the negation and the adoption of a position: it denies that the logic of inherence unveils all that we are, and it affirms our desire to exist before God’ (2004, p. 44, my italics). The world ceases to envelop us and we begin to acknowledge that it holds no definitive promise as we lose interest in it in favour of another (2004, p. 44). We start to exist before He who is to come (2004, p. 44). Living liturgically is living with the ‘expectation or desire for Parousia in the certitude of the nonparousiacal presence of God’ (2004, p. 45, my italics). However, the world keeps God and his nonparousiacal presence veiled over (dans l’inévidence) (2004, p. 46). This is the twofaced nature of liturgy which enhances the desire for the divine as practitioners wait eagerly but patiently for the definitive unveiling of the hidden Absolute (2004, p. 46). St Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022) expresses in one of his hymns

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the centrality of desire. What is hidden, inapprehensible and uncontainable ‘is most desired above the whole world’ (2010, p. 92, my italics). The individual is wounded by divine love because she cannot see clearly what she most earnestly longs. She groans and ‘melts away’ in her senses and inwardly burns ‘seeking here and there’. However, when she feels like one in despair, she ‘is seen by me, and he looks at me’ (2010, p. 92) She becomes ravished by his ‘beauty’ and ‘strange glory’ (2010, p. 92). She asks herself how she might be lifted up towards him, to the ‘immeasurable heights’. When she considers this she realises He was in her heart and very close all the time – ‘flashing forth within my wretched heart’ and ‘shining all his ‘members with his rays’ (2010, p. 92). He enfolded Himself all around her and ‘tenderly kissed’ all of her. He gave his whole self to her and she was filled with his love and beauty. The performance of the Church’s liturgy is a dramatic story of desire, silence and the Word. These are the three central means by which humanity is drawn into an enactment of redemption. They encourage our own fittingness and reciprocal movement towards a divine call and encounter. The Light sought is intimately intertwined with an experience of silence, a wordless practice of attention before the Word. The chance to ‘fall under’ and, at the same time, to be awakened by splendour is the path to the highest fulfilment of what it is to be human. Such open receptivity forms the basis of happiness and is the fruit of the vita contempliva. Classical understandings of God claim that His Being is omnipresent but more intensely within liturgical arenas. However, the liturgy never endorses a selfish or controlling manipulation of the God it seeks to adore, love and serve. The initiative is with God in worship not with humanity who desires our worship in order to enhance our relationship with Him. Our responsibility lies in our answer. Pope Benedict XVI sees the contemplative constituent of liturgy as one of the primary means of a re-education in inwardness – the Innerlichkeit of the German mystics. Stillness is vital for such inner change. He understands the liturgical space as primarily a contemplative one (Rowland, 2008, p. 139) and this is why he interprets the recommendation of Sacrosanctum Concilium to increase ‘active participation’ by means of an interior dynamic rather than an external involvement of the laity. Article 30 of the document should be received as the congregation’s entering into the mass through contemplative stillness. He prefers the canon of the mass to be a silent recitation and believes that the Eucharistic prayer need not be said aloud, especially if the congregation has been introduced to some kind of liturgical education beforehand. One possible method to achieve this would be for the priest to say aloud the first words of each paragraph and for them to follow such a lead in their missals silently. The experience of such quiet would help in securing an encounter with the mystery being celebrated. The bodily posture of kneeling is also crucial to Pope Benedict XVI’s understanding of liturgy as an act of contemplative humility. This humble act has a Biblical precedent; the word proskynein is repeated 24 times in the Book of

Contours of Desire 43 Revelation (Rowland, 2008, p. 138). Such aids to contemplation allow spiritual desire to flourish and be sustained. In liturgy, the Church is summoned as an assembled body by the Word itself to hear the message of redemption. Hearing the sacred texts increases desire for God and ensures hearts are receptive to his call. Like the “Qahal Yahweh” of the Old Testament, the Church is called to listen to the Word so that ‘our hearts might not be hardened (Psalm 95:7–8)’ (Fodor, 2004, pp. 141–142). The sound and communication of the Word appeals directly to the heart allowing participants to be attuned to its rhythms and cadences. The specific performative means to enhance participants’ yearning to form a deeper relationship with God. For example, the kissing and incensing of the sacred book, its elevation from the position within an ambo, its solemn carrying in procession. When the gospel is read there is a requirement for the congregation to stand and to make the sign the cross on the head, lips and heart and then for the celebrant to mimic this on the page of the holy text itself, in awe and reverence of the Word so that it might promote internalisation by such solemn gestures. As Jungmann comments: For the word which Christ brought and which is set down in this book we are willing to stand up with a mind that is open: we are ready to confess it with our mouth: and above all we are determined to safeguard it faithfully in our hearts. (Quoted in Fodor, 2004, p. 143) In the Middle Ages, the metaphor of the heart as a book was well known. Clergy were instructed to let their inner scribe copy commands onto the pages of their heart and ordinary Christians prayed that Christ might write the memory of His passion in their heart book (Jaker, 2000). The liturgical space is the arena for the breaking forth of God which means that worshippers learn to be attentive to a revelatory encounter which is often dulled (but nevertheless discoverable) outside such spaces. The performance of the saving acts of God is also fostered by participants’ attentive performance of their own bodies and the seeing of the celebrant’s, without which revelation is made more difficult. Praying is always a kind of hearing, not speaking. Our liturgical words allow us to hear divine words: ‘… praying is a kind of hearing – not a mere opening of the ears, but a trained attentiveness in a habit acquired over years, even decades; a directedness towards in a particular manner’ (Hemming, 2008, p. 1). This ‘trained attentiveness’ is a lifelong endeavour and offers a reliable way to experience the divine as it desires another place to be, a more secure homeland than the one presently experienced. Worship speaks of something beyond and ahead of ourselves and prevents us from becoming what we might otherwise have become: ‘Only from beyond and ahead of ourselves, from entirely without, can we be freed from what we would otherwise simply become’ (Hemming, 2008, p. 155). The self is not dismantled through worship but formed anew in Christ.

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From the first performance in baptism, the transformative dramas of repeated liturgies go on until death and change ontologically those present. The Holy Spirit is called down to enter the arena set aside for holy descent and liturgies present the congregation for radical, lifechanging experiences. Here the ego is invited to collapse in favour of a disposition made receptive and open to divine secrets from the beginning of time. Worshippers allow themselves to be broken open to such divine encounters. Never-ceasing revelation emerges from a Godhead which is hidden and worship takes on the task of enabling an experience of the mysterious presence of the Trinity within each person present. It offers a space and time where they are encouraged to desire the things of God more than anything else and to be attentive to His ongoing revelation in their lives. It is the arena by which they become sensitised to a distinct type of spiritual hearing, a hearing of the heart: ‘To listen to God in the relevant sense of the word means a new kind of listening; we have to tune into our hearts, at the centre of our being. … This is where we discover the creativity of prayer – where God is at work in our hearts, more deeply than in our consciousness’ writes Foster (2007, pp. 61–62). The contemporary Benedictine monk Denis Huerre comments that liturgy enhances desire but is never a matter of sudden impulse. It grows slowly and is always in a state of becoming. It has a special significance in the lives of monks because it is right at the center of what it is that we are, that each monk tries to evolve into what it is that a human being should be. The human feelings of need, lack and craving illustrate the truth that human beings are not contentedly at rest most of the time and seek those things which brings them wholeness. They require the acceptance of a gift which allows them to discover what ‘it means to be a created human being, a being in the process of becoming’. (1994, p. 105) Monastic life is centred on longing in response to God’s yearning for us. Christ’s desire to do the will of capital for father was unique because it was not tainted by self-seeking nor self-cherishing pro eis sancifico meipsum. St Benedict teaches that: ‘we are not meant to stand here gazing up in admiration after Christ. We are to participate in the uniqueness of his unique desire’ and ‘His desire to eat the Passover with his disciples’ (Huerre, 1994, p. 106). The one overriding desire each person should have is to share His passion and resurrection. His desire and ours may then converge. By not ‘confining our desires to the corporeal and the transitory’ (Huerre, 1994, p. 106), the meeting of God’s living desire with humanity’s desire becomes possible and is the means by which the Holy Spirit comes to each person – ‘to encounter one is always to encounter the other and this rules out all possibility of illusory desire’ (Huerre, 1994, p. 107). If individuals find ‘it impossible to desire more than there actually is’, then ‘that is idolatry, and it spells the death to any desire for the infinite’ (1994, p. 108).

Contours of Desire 45 References Augustine. (1961). Confessions. London: Penguin. Augustine. (2015). Essential Expositions of the Psalms. New York: New City Press. Benedict XVI. (2007). Spe Salvi. Saved in Hope: Encyclical Letter of the Supreme Pontiff Benedict. Dublin: Veritas Publications. Bonaventure. (1993). The Journey of the Mind to God. New York: Hackett Publishing Company. Brakke, D. (2006). Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brock, B. (2009). Augustine’s Incitement to Lament in the Enarrationes in Psalmos. In B. Brock (Ed.), Evoking Lament (pp. 183–203). London: T&T Clark. Bruce, S. (2007). Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism. The Cluniac Tradition, c900–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burton-Christie, D. (1993). The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carlisle, C. (2019). Spiritual Desire and Religious Practice. Religious Studies, 55(3), 429–446. Carruthers, M. (2000). The Craft of Thought. Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cassian, J. (1985). Conferences. New York: Paulist Press. Coakley, S. and Gavrilyuk, P. (2011). The Spiritual Senses. Perceiving God in Western Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Congar, Y. (2004). The Meaning of Tradition. New York: Ignatius Press. Cook, B. (2013). Pursuing Eudaimonia. Re-appropriating the Greek Philosophical Foundations of the Christian Apophatic Tradition. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars publishing. Cottingham, J. (2005). The Spiritual Dimension. Religion, Philosophy and Human Value. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Sales (2015). Treatise on the Love of God. London: Aeterna Press. Evagrius. (2006). Evagrius of Pontus. The Greek Ascetic Corpus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fitzpatrick, G. (2006). Enclosure: The Heart of the Matter. In P. Hart (Ed.), A Monastic Vision for the 21st Century (pp. 187–205). Michigan: Cistercian Publications. Fodor, J. (2004). Reading Scriptures, Rehearsing Identity, Practicing Character. In S. Hauweras and S. Wells (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (pp. 141–155). Oxford: Blackwell. Flood, G. (2019). Religion and the Philosophy of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foster, D. (2007). Deep Calls to Deep. Going Further in Prayer. London: Continuum. Francis, P. (2015). Laudato Si’. On Care for Our Common Home. London: Catholic Truth Society. Francis, P. (2022). General Audience. Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Hart, P. (2006). A Monastic Vision for the Twenty-First Century. Where Do We Go From Here? (pp. 145–164). Cistercian publications.

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Hemming, L. (2008). Worship as a Revelation. The Past, Present and Future of Catholic Liturgy. Tunbridge Wells: Burns and Oates. Howe, J-M. (2005). Secret of the Heart: Spiritual Being. Michigan: Cistercian Publications. Huerre, D. (1994). Letters to My Brothers and Sisters. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press. Jaker, E. (2000). The Book of the Heart. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jamison, C. (2010). Finding Sanctuary. Monastic Steps for Everyday Life. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. John of the Cross. (1991). The Collected Works of St John of the Cross. Washington: ICS Publications. John Paul II. (1998). Faith and Reason. The Encyclical Letter: Fides et Ratio. London: Pauline Books and Media. Lacoste, J.-Y. (2004). Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man. Fordham: Fordham University Press. LaNave, G.F. (2011). Bonaventure. In P. Gavrilyuk and S. Coakley (Eds.), The Spiritual Senses. Perceiving God in Western Christianity (pp. 159–173). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marion, J-L. (2013). The Essential Writings. K. Hart (Ed.). New York: Fordham University Press. Maximus Confessor. (1985). Selected Writings. New York: Paulist Press. McGilchrist, I. (2012). The Master and His Emissary. The Divided Brain in the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press. Mezei, B. (2017). Radical Revelation. London: T&T Clark. McHugh, M. and Torevell, D. (2022). The Power of Love. The Spiritual Foundations of Chaplaincy in Catholic Universities. A Framework for Discussion. In International Journal of Christianity and Education, 26(3), 315–335. Nouwen, H. (1999). The Way of the Heart: Desert Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry. New York: HarperSanFrancisco. Pascal. B. (1995). Pensees. London: Penguin Books. Peters, J. (2009). Logic of the Heart. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Pieper, J. (1998). Leisure. The Basis of Culture. New York: St Augustine’s Press. Pseudo-Dionysius. (1987). Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works. New York: Paulist Press. Rowan, P. (2017). The Scrappy Evangelist: Chesterton and a New Apologetics for Today. New York: Saint Benedict Press. Rowland, T. (2008). Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schneider, C. (2009). The Transformation of Eros: Reflections on Desire in Jacques Lacan. In A. Pabst and C. Schneider (Eds.), Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy. Transfiguring the World Through the Word (pp. 271–289). London: Routledge. Shannon, W., Bochen, C. and O’Connor, P. (2002). A Thomas Merton Encyclopedia. New York: Orbis Books. St Benedict. (2008). The Rule of Benedict. London: Penguin. Symeon. (2010). Divine Eros. Hymns of Saint Symeon the New Theologian. New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Contours of Desire 47 Torevell, D. (2006). Circles of Meaning: The Christian Dynamic of Contemplation, Meaning and Purpose. Journal of Christian Education, 49(3), 33–42. Torevell, D. (2007). Liturgy and the Beauty of the Unknown. Another Place. Aldershot: Ashgate. Torevell, D. (2019). Distractions, Illusions and the Need for a Contemplative Spirituality: A Critique of Thomas Merton’s Advice. Journal for the Study of Spirituality, 9(2), 152–162. Tyler, P. (2010). St John of the Cross. London: Continuum. Varden, E. (2018). The Shattering of Loneliness. On Christian Remembrance. London: Bloomsbury. Velez, J. (2012). Newman on the Kingdom of God. https://www.cardinaljohnhenry newman.com/cardinal-newman-on-the-kingdom-of-god/ (Accessed 1.12.22). von Balthasar, H.U. (1988). TheoDrama. Theological Dramatic Theory. 1: Prologomena. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. von Balthasar, H.U. (1989). The Glory of the Lord. 1: Seeing the Form. Edinburgh: T& T Clark. Ware, K. (1998). The Way of the Ascetic. In V. Wimbush and R. Valantasis (Eds.), Asceticism (pp. 3–4). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Watten, A. (1973). The Meaning of Silence in the Rule of St. Benedict. Michigan: Cistercian Publications. Wittgenstein, L. (1998). Culture and Value. Oxford: Blackwell. Wynn, M. (2013). Renewing the Senses. A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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The Limited Horizon of the Distracted and Autonomous Self I begin with the issue of the self and its transmutation during (post)modernity. Essentially, personhood became no longer tied to a universe that exhibited a clearly defined moral order and strong sense of teleology in relation to the Good whereby human beings found their place, meaning, purpose and flourishing. The truth and ambitions about oneself began to be largely selfdiscovered rather than in dialogue and discernment with a loving Creator. Belief and identity rooted in the imago dei started to collapse. Identity was no longer metaphysically understood or sought. Belief in a God who desired humanity’s welfare and trust in an eventual, permanent home in which human beings would rest everlastingly started to erode. Each person started to find their own orientation and co-ordinates to make sense of life and attempted to relish their uniqueness by securing confidence in the worth of their own personal and tribal identity. Grateful acknowledgement of the gift of human dignity given by God was replaced by a self-determined search for ‘authenticity’ and consisted, to a large extent, in being true to oneself. Wolfe claims this was an ‘alluring’ idea during (post)modernity since it freed the person to attain who they believed they truly were and to offer solid resistance to anything which prevented this realisation (2022). Kierkegaard and Heidegger in particular were deeply interested in this question of authenticity and wrestled with it substantially throughout their philosophical writings. However, this groping for self-realisation was simultaneously challenged by theories which claimed that external forces were increasingly and significantly responsible for the construction of the self. These besieged the notion that the self was totally free to choose what it most wanted – authenticity – and it became clear that personal desires were never absolutely freely chosen but to some significant degree, genetically, socially and politically constructed and controlled. As a result, the self became less sure of its own internal resources for self-actualisation. Self-determination became more difficult to secure and not as simple an operation as it might first have appeared. A number of recent writers have identified the dynamics of cultural change in light of this existential shift. The French literary critic and philosopher DOI: 10.4324/9781003227540-4

Obstacles of Desire 49 René Girard (1923–2015) claims that we desire what we witness others desiring. Our desires are underdetermined and largely socially educated. Once a youngster catches sight of what older children value and desire, she comes to value and desire the same things herself, setting off at first emulation but later the likelihood of rivalrous competition, which rises to everhigher levels until at its extreme, violence, breaks out. According to Girard, this is the origin of culture in every proto-human society and still persists (2005; Kirwan, 2004). Kirwan argues that two philosophical themes are important as background to understanding Girard’s insights about mimetic desire: Kojève’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, notably the desire for recognition and the master–slave dialectic and Max Scheler’s account of ressentiment (Kirwan, 2004, p. 15). His conviction was clarified while working on his first book Deceit, Desire and the Novel in 1961 (translated to English 1966) which delineates the collapse of the autonomous self in five novelists: Cervantes, Flaubert, Stendhal, Proust and Dostoevsky. Kirwan argues forcibly that Girard was reacting against the ‘Romantic lie’ about the self which informs us the cause of any conflict is located outside the self. But, as Kirwan writes: ‘The self is, rather, “an unstable, constantly changing, evanescent structure” brought into existence by desire’ (2004, p. 19). He adds: ‘The fact is people do not know what they want – therefore they imitate the desires of others’ (2004, p. 19). The only hominids who survived rivalrous violence are those who discovered the ‘scapegoating’ mechanism whereby this violence – which otherwise leads to a ‘war of all against all’ and threatens to destroy the group – comes to be directed towards a marginal figure who is somehow odd or different and who can thus be held accountable for the unrest and disturbance. The execution and elimination of the scapegoat allows the group to return to peace. At this point, the individual who was at first accused of being a villain and the cause of trouble is now exalted as a saviour who by his death has overcome violence and reconciled the group. He is worshipped as a god, and his self-sacrifice and subsequent apotheosis are repeated in a regular ritual whenever a mimetic disturbance threatens to break out again. This is the origin of the religious cult. The American social theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) convincingly argues that much modern philosophy dangerously and exclusively concerns itself with the exploration of the self, ignoring the traditional inclusion of the soul and by implication a divine, Creator (1998, p. 254). If there were to be any ‘salvation’ for human existence during modernity, it seemed it had to emerge from humanity itself, and after Descartes, this entailed a strategy of intense doubting to arrive at some socalled ‘secure’ base for knowledge. This inevitably led even to the doubting of the goodness of God Himself (Dieu trompeur), a philosophical repetition of the striking occurrence in Genesis chapter three’s account of the Fall when Adam blames God for ‘the woman whom you gave to be with me …’ (Gen 3:12). The preferred ‘solution’ during modernity was to move the

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Archimedean point to wo(man) her/himself (1998, p. 284). Arendt contends this was not really a solution at all, since ‘inspired by a deep mistrust of the world … it withdrew from worldly involvement into the security of an inward realm in which the self is exposed to nothing but itself’ (1998, p. 309). Once the gaze was no longer fixed on God, it inevitably turned inwards to scrutinise the inner self for answers. Merton warned of this same tendency when he wrote about the wrong-headedness of the individualist whose ‘interior life … is precisely the kind of life that closes in on itself … and rests in itself with more or less permanent satisfaction’. It ‘resists the summons to communal witness and collective human response to God’ (2019, p. 140). This is radically different from Augustine’s now famous discovery of God within his own heart when he implores in Confessions that God is the strength of his soul (Torevell, 2007, pp. 48–49). The modern turn inwards had nothing to do with the search for the divine. For Arendt, this shift naturally led to an emphasis on the discovery of truth and knowledge fixed by action, productivity and scrutiny (symbolised by the invention of the telescope), all of which would move humanity’s focus away from the contemplative and towards an insistent, self-willed determination of truth, primarily through science and technology. This is plainly witnessed in the ‘enterprise culture’ which has invaded education to an alarming degree (Furlong, 2013, pp. 109–123) and continues to dominate governmental, educational policy today. Earlier pre-modern, meditative approaches to the truth-offering ‘given’ of the universe, gave way to a neurotic, violent search for uncovering certainty ‘… which forced the universe’, in the words of Arendt ‘… to yield its secrets’ (1998, p. 284, my italics). What ensued was a suspicion towards ‘man’s truth-receiving capacities’ and a ‘mistrust of the given’ which had previously been the content and source of contemplation, whereby humanity found its home and resting place (1998, p. 298). What receded, contends Arendt, was the Heideggerian thaumazein, the shock of speechless wonder at the miracle of Being (1998, p. 302). For Marion, too, this mistrust of and separation from life resulted in indifference to the world. The contrary experience of the ‘givenness’ of the world is characterised by amazement, stupor, bedazzlement, which alone allows the silent ‘voice’ of Being to make itself heard and has to do with the acceptance that being is given (2002). Arendt’s ‘mistrust’ became for Marion an experience of boredom, disengagement and withdrawal from everything, from any sense that Being is given. Consequently, nothing any longer made a difference, including ontological difference and everyday life withdrawing from Being and its stakes, just as one withdraws from an affair (2002). This is another way of saying that self-possession took over from God and the created order as the definitive arena for the discovery of truth. Once this occurred, the ego expanded enfolding pride and dominion within its clutches, replacing a humble and appreciative receptivity towards that which had been given. The contemporary Jesuit Madigan points to the rise of the (post) modern cult of ‘expressive individualism’ in his critique of modern thinking and

Obstacles of Desire 51 living as nothing more than the promotion of the ego and traces this back to the cult of the artist in Romanticism and further back to Milton’s portrayal of Lucifer in Paradise Lost (Madigan, 2013). Because there is no allegiance to anything higher than the self, just as Lucifer claimed he was not begotten by the Father, so modern ‘expressions’ become nothing more than a series of sensations to be experienced. It fosters a notion that we are ‘self-begot’. At a time when adolescents are trying out these sensations as part of their emerging adulthood, one wonders, he asks, how their individualism is related to a higher order if at all. This is not about the suppression of creative expression, but of warning against artistic endeavour becoming nothing more than proud individualism. If Madigan is right that ‘expressive individualism’ is the default position of our time into which many people fall, then any sense of the importance of metaphysical desire is likely to be eroded. However, as I have suggested, humanity during (post)modernity had to admit to herself that she was not as stable as she might first have thought. Any retreating into a secure inner self seemed doomed since there was no stable foundation to be discovered in a ‘liquid modern world’ (Bauman, 2011) which shifted constantly over time from mood to mood, from experiences of ‘highs’ and ‘lows’ and everything in between, in rapid succession. Poor mental health is evidently a feature of (post)modern living (Torevell, 2019a). Hamlet falls into this pit by his ceaseless introspection about what he sees to be his own failed self – ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’ (Act 2.2. l. 485) and later he adds, ‘Yet I, / A dull and muddymettled rascal, peak / Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause / And can say nothing’ ( Act 2.2. l. 501–504, my italics), eventually capitulating to the question, ‘Am I a coward? (Act 2.2. l. 506). Perhaps the audience can forgive him all this, since they sense throughout the play that his valiant efforts are in the cause of justice. Merton insists that without a contemplative approach to the world in relation to the eschaton, people ‘reproduce the fancied torments which Greek mythology displays in Hades … Sisyphus rolling his boulder uphill though he knows it must escape him and roll down to the bottom again, just as he is reaching the summit’ (1989, p. 381). This becomes apparent in Hamlet (Bevington, 2008, pp. 147–154). The more he tries, the more he fails. Then, once he becomes self-obsessed, he no longer trusts the social world of which he is a part (since the ghost has told him his uncle has killed his father). He also becomes victim to and exposes a deeply jaundiced approach to that world. His soliloquy about the flatness of the world beginning with the famous prayerful, agonising plea ‘O God, O God, / How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world!’ (Act 1.2. ll. 132–134) leads him to a more generalised, grossly exaggerated condemnation of world itself, sometimes expressed in gender terms – ‘Frailty, thy name is Woman’ (Act 1.2. l. 146). It expresses the belief that the world no longer has any significance or honesty or direction attached to it, that the woman he once loved is no longer to be trusted and that there is something ‘rotten’ in the entire state of Denmark. Ophelia is right to say that

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‘a noble mind is here o’erthrown!’ (Act 3.1. l. 149). Hamlet has lost his mind, or at least the mind he once had which could envisage the world in spiritual terms as good and created.1 It eventually leads him to doubt whether it is worth staying around this corrupt world at all – it might be better to not be, than to be (Act 3.1. 55). No amount of persuading by his mother to ‘throw to earth / This unprevailing woe …’ (Act 1.2. ll. 106–107) will deter him from taking this stance towards the world, for she herself is caught up in the very conditions which make Hamlet believe as he does. Wynn refers to William James who noted that people who suffer from what he called ‘religious melancholy’ tend to see the world as flat and not having any salience. Persons seem to move like shadows, a thick veil alters the hue and surface of everything. The things they see are not real things. They have no colour. He writes: ‘Strikingly, the condition which is reported in these remarks seems to involve some sense of the insubstantiality of the sensory world’ (Wynn, 2013, pp. 17–18). The highly erotic description of his mother’s relationship with Claudius reflects his belief that lustful sex (‘In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed / Stewed in corruption …’ (Act 3.4. l. 90–91) rather than love now constitutes the way of the world. Is the ghost real asks Hamlet to himself? But he also asks the more dangerous question – is the world ‘real’, ‘true’, ‘trustworthy’ anymore? And the only way he can answer this is by doubting and being suspicious towards any divinely created universe. Like the ghost, the world itself becomes insubstantial – nothing has any real substance anymore and he even wishes that his own ‘solid flesh would melt, / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew’ (Act 1. 2. 1l.129–130); he even wants to become insubstantial himself, just like the world he no longer trusts. He can no longer differentiate between what is true and what is false, what is empty of meaning and what is full. He wishes to become a mirror image of the no-longer-to-be trusted world. Notice how he can no longer rely on himself anymore – not even to kill a foul murderer. Why not? Has he lost confidence in himself and in the world as created by a divine act of goodness which he once had? Has his ascent to truth become too difficult for him to climb? Or has Hamlet, like many of his postmodern heirs, decided that there is no longer any truth to be reached? Or has he simply given up trying to find it in the murky world in which he finds himself? My examination of Tennessee Williams’ characters’ retreat into their own illusory, self-constructed worlds, their own fragile ‘glass menageries’, exhibit this tendency as I will demonstrate in Chapter 6. The mental health crisis in the West is partly a reflection of this bifurcation between the self we wish to be and construct and the contradictory and warring parties which tear it apart. It is also deeply entwined with the frail contingency of the self’s inner core once metaphysical belief collapses and a person begins to exist alone in a world bereft of religious support. Premodern self-identity and sustenance was always associated with the ecstasis of the self in relation to a divine Being and the afterlife. Once religion and the Other became redundant in the construction of the self, inevitably attention

Obstacles of Desire 53 turned not towards God but the restless self to an obsessional degree as the desperate need to secure self-worth outside metaphysical frameworks began to unfold. Identity politics is caught up in this need (Torevell, 2020). Note, too, the vast array of books published on self-help and counselling over the last 50 years. This kind of self-construction was a lonely path to tread, bereft of any divine support and unaided by grace. The sky became emptied (Berger, 1990; Torevell, 2000). Contemplatives’ first psalmist prayer of the morning is: ‘Lord, come to my aid, O Lord, make haste to help me’. This human plea for asssistance was replaced by self-help strategies and secular ‘gurus’ who taught a needy and gullible audience how to find happiness; secular counsellors started to replace religious confessors. Personal confessions of celebrities started to fill bookstores and the Internet; they told their stories to the world and made money from them. Metaphysical desire was replaced by a longing to be healthy and happy in this world. There was no eschaton to which one looked forward. The world was negotiated without any reference to the afterlife. Grace did not exist. Attention to spiritual ascent tied to religious traditions reaching back centuries in the West was largely fast eroding. Mental health deteriorated drastically in the West and shows no signs of abatement. It is undeniable that the identification by monastics of acedia, the noonday devil, has gripped many people’s self-understandings. No longer able to recognise their own nobility and dignity as sons and daughters of God they have opted, like Hamlet, for a diminution of their own being, coupled with a contentment with mediocrity and self-satisfaction leading to states of ennui, boredom, anxiety and depression. The greatest temptation of this condition is nihilism, what Nault refers to as ‘a genuine hatred of being … man’s departure from his dwelling’ (2015, p. 109). For nihilists, the past is dead and the future leads to death. The Thomistic insight on this state of affairs offers that any orientation to the final end is then abandoned – longing is over, desire redundant. Emmanuelli adds we might have power ‘but we have lost meaning. Our society [which] is oozing in anxiety … is going to disappear’ (quoted in Nault, 2015, p. 110). Ironically, despite contemporary mirages of power, this kind of existence results in faint-heartedness, the opposite of magnanimity – greatness of soul. Benedict XVI warns that ‘metaphysical inertia would on this account be identical with false humility that has become so common today: man does not want to believe that God is concerned about him, loves him, is close to him (quoted in Nault, 2015, p. 118). Whereas Adam and Eve were tempted by presumption and pride, now we witness the opposite temptation – faintheartedness. This amounts to denying the possibility of our own deification, of being content with what is within our reach, a refusal to go beyond the finite. Aquinas denounced this as the ‘subtle temptation to lower the object of one’s desire and to be content with a “bestial happiness”’ (Nault, 2015, p. 121). As Nault comments: ‘… presumption and pusillanimity are precisely

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the two vices Saint Thomas opposes to magnanimity, one by excess, the other by defect’ (2015, p. 119). Sarah argues acedia in contemporary Western society has three major consequences: torpor, bitterness and agitated flight (2019, p. 124). The first is witnessed in ‘a form of slow paralysis. As though life is refused to thrive and flourish’ (2019, p. 124). The second is characterised by ‘bitterness toward the good that one has refused to desire’ (2019, p. 124). And the third is ‘flight into disorderly agitation’ (2019, p. 129), a certain restlessness with life and its prospects. However, the social roles individuals choose to play in life may offer a moral and spiritual space for some movement and meaning in the contemporary world. They might assist humanity in understanding themselves better since they take those involved out of ourselves to occupy a space which is more expansive than simply the ‘I’. Wolfe refers to Shakespearean characters who assume a role helping to clarify the roles the audience might have to play in their own lives. Nevertheless, they also reflect back on them the fragile nature of such roles exhibiting the pitfalls, gaps and tensions which arise when personal and public roles break down or are no longer sustainable (Wolfe, 2022). King Lear on the barren heath has to face the truth that his roles as king and father have been crushed and people are starting to say ‘no’ to him for the first time in his adult life. He becomes every bit like Edgar, a ‘poor beggar’. Hamlet does not know how his various roles – revenger, lover, prince, loyal son, student – might be reconciled with each other and falls between the crevices which open up before him as he finds himself hurtling down into an enraged depression. Authenticity The rise of the bolstering of ‘authenticity’ is in sync with the (post)modern urge to construct an autonomous self. If I am able to live with ‘authenticity’, I need to secure my own individual autonomy for then I am more freed from restraint and shall no longer allow external forces (sometimes highly unjust) to determine who I am and what I should do. The raising of self-esteem and inner confidence is necessary to this quest. The contemporary Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor’s examination of modernity’s ‘secular age’ focuses on this slippage away from transcendence and a sense of the sacred towards this horizontal plain of an ‘authenticity’ culture. He writes that ‘a trend which is now centuries old and that places the centre of gravity of the good life not in some higher sphere but in what I want to call “ordinary Life”, that is, the life of production and the family, of work and love’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 45) has increased during the modern era. Understandings of ‘authenticity’ severed from their religious roots have morphed into anthropocentrism by abolishing what he refers to as ‘all horizons of significance’ (1992, p. 68). The world became much flatter as a result. The modern ideal to be sought was ‘self-determining freedom’ which became highly attractive. When this occurs ‘our major remaining value is choice itself’ (1992, p. 69) Taylor avers. Alongside this

Obstacles of Desire 55 (post)modern notion of freedom, autonomy and ‘authenticity’ was a wish to put renewed emphasis on our unique identities. This required in turn that ‘we discover and articulate our own identity’ (1992, p. 81) including now our own gender identity. Self-determination, self-esteem, self-actualisation and choice became necessary in the quest for identity and in the discovery of who the ‘I’ really was. The contemporary political scientist Francis Fukuyama has to some degree focused on the question of freedom and self-worth within the political order, arguing that there is a moral standard embedded in this quest: ‘To truly esteem oneself means that one must be capable of feeling shame or self-disgust when one does not live up to a certain standard’ (2012, p. 303). It is not possible to esteem acts of unkindness. But who does the esteeming, he enquires? In a celebrity culture where social media advises whom we are to look up to, judgement is often based on glamour, good looks, money or idiosyncratic personality. Moral considerations rarely enter into such estimations. Fukuyama is also interested in the question of what might satisfy humanity’s deepest longings by addressing issues of autonomy, self-esteem and identity in liberal democracies (2003, 2012, 2018). He discusses three key words megalothymia, isothymia and thymos and the significance they hold during modernity. The former signifies the desire to be recognised as superior to others which may be manifest in extremes like Putin-like tyrants who invade and enslave neighbouring sovereign lands in order to force them to recognise their authority. But this might equally refer to the desire of a concert pianist to be the best in the world (2012, p. 182). Isothymia, on the other hand, is the desire to be recognised as equal to others. He suggests these two manifestations of desire characterise the (post)modern era and are interconnected with a universal foundational principle – thymos – the desire for recognition. This is associated with placing value on things – himself in the first instance, but on the people, actions, or things around him as well. It is part of the personality which is the fundamental source of the emotions of pride, anger, and shame – and is not reducible to desire, on the one hand and reason on the other. … It is not surprising that so many political philosophers have seen the central problem of politics as one of taming or harnessing the desire for recognition in a way that would serve the political community as a whole. (2012, p. 163, my italics) Nietzsche thought that freedom could only arise out of megalothymia: ‘If one simply wishes to be like everyone else then there would be no striving after greater things’ and this goes alongside a sense of inner struggle for ‘one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star’ (quoted in Fukuyama, 2012, p. 304). He hoped for the birth of a new ‘morality’ that would favour the strong over the weak and produce ‘real men’ who would be recognised and admired by others. The modern tragedy is that everyone wants the same and becomes the same; there is no striving after excellence. Thymos cannot be

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satisfied by simply equating oneself with others, it involves a sense of superiority to others. The struggle and longing to achieve are natural constituents of a person’s life and their desire for personal excellence is attractive (Fukuyama, 2012, p. 313). Human beings rebel at the idea of being undifferentiated and members of a homogeneous group. ‘America first’, exclaimed Trump. However, serious moral questions arise from this claim. Liberal democracies will be subverted by an excess of megalothymia or isothymia: ‘A civilization that indulges in unbridled isothymia, that fanatically seeks to eliminate every manifestation of unequal recognition, will quickly run into limits imposed by nature itself’ claims Fukuyama (2012, p. 314). In his chapter entitled ‘Empires of Resentment, Empires of Deference’, Fukuyama postulates that the need for recognition morphed into the desire for absolute equality from different ‘cultures’ and sub-groups based on their sense of affronted dignity due to their colour, race, class, gender or sexuality: Desire for the recognition of the dignity of this separate culture by the educational system, by employers, and by the state itself has for many blacks replaced the desire for recognition of their undifferentiated human dignity, for example the Christian dignity of man as a moral agent referred to by Martin Luther King. (2012, p. 237) His later book Identity (2018) traces the origins of this new development in modern politics with particular reference to ‘identity politics’. The maintenance of liberal democracy is a noble ideal to be held on to, but in the West it does run the risk of a diminution in the striving for excellence and being content with consumerist self-preservation related to comfortable standards of living. Its citizens might become adept at finding ways to satisfy petty wants allied to a narcissistic lifestyle of self-satisfaction. Secular (post) modernity, in negating a metaphysical horizon of meaning and fulfilment associated with universal values and beliefs rooted in religious traditions, encouraged a self-contentment with monetary and individual gain. Has the death of God brought about the death of man too? Individuals were prone to disbelieve there was any absolute objective values because history taught them of its errors and they fell into a far greater error – lack of conviction. As Fukuyama comments, the ‘last man at the end of history knows better than to risk his life for a cause because he recognises that history was full of pitiless battles …’ (2012, p. 307). He adds: ‘Men with modern educations are content to sit at home, congratulating themselves on their broadmindedness and lack of fanaticism’ (2012, p. 307). ‘When Zarathustra told the crowd about the last man they shouted “Give us this last man”’ (2012, p. 312). But Zarathustra says of them disparagingly: “For thus you speak ‘Real are we entirely, and without belief or superstition’. Thus you stick out your chests – but alas, they are hollow!” (2012, quoted on p. 307). ‘This man’ has proved to be unfulfilled and dissatisfied. His life might be one of material plenty,

Obstacles of Desire 57 what modern Western political leaders are fond of telling the electorate they will deliver but s/he is not without considerable unrest and anxiety. In the last analysis, the life of rational consumption is deadly boring, uninspiring and unfulfilling (2012, p. 314). The present mental health crisis suggests that many are not satisfied with the ‘fruits’ of liberal democracies and the promise of the attainment of economic prosperity. For example, athletes undertake extreme risks of endurance and strength to attain a new record in their chosen field; many people continue to strive for something higher and morenoble than consumerism. They wish to live within a horizon which gives them something noble for which to strive. They want to choose a commitment to values deeper than neo-liberalism, those promulgated by the great religions of the world (2012, p. 307). However, once the religious metanarrative became redundant and metaphysical desire aimed at an ultimate telos was obsolete, it was difficult for many to feel the confidence of Abraham journeying towards an ‘unknown land’ of promise and plenty. Harmful consequences followed. Sachs terms it the shift from the ‘we’ to the ‘I’ culture (2021). Kojève claimed that a widespread interest in great art, philosophy and wisdom started to wane alongside the ‘last man’ of liberal democracy (Fukuyama, 2012, p. 310). In The Shattering of Loneliness, Varden’s thesis is that self-determination was as disastrous as the Biblical narrative of Adam and Eve warned. They were brought back to dust, to nothingness when they usurped the ground of their own innate, divine personhood. They had to be reminded that it was dust from which they came ‘and to dust you shall return’ (Gen. 3:19). A Pelagian heresy took hold as individuals began to rely too heavily on their own resources. Response to a divine call was crushed and so too was its sibling spiritual desire. The result was a tendency towards proud autonomy and a self-aggrandising refusal of God. Consequent upon humanity’s growing dismissal of imago dei Pelagian wo (men) lost their orientation towards the Divine and a stable Order; their eyes started to look downwards instead of upwards. A desire for autonomy led naturally towards the forgetting of God and the straining for absolute independence followed. Augustine taught that when love becomes redirected from God towards the self, a dangerous amor sui (self-love) occurs (O’Donovan, 2020; Torevell, 2019b, pp. 12–13). Lasch describes the characteristics of this kind of narcissism in everyday life as ‘dependence on the vicarious warmth provided by others combined with a fear of dependence, a sense of inner emptiness, boundless repressed rage, and unsatisfied oral craving’ (2018, p. 45). Longing was replaced by suspicion and fear. The etymological roots of the word ‘longing’ indicates what is being lost here. The noun ‘longing’ is derived from the adjective ‘long’, indicating distance. Where ‘longing is concerned, “I” (in old English as in Greek) stands as an indirect object, patient of impulses from elsewhere’ and ‘indicates receiving something from elsewhere, receptive of God’s calling out to its image in me’ (Varden, 2018, p. 146).

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Contemporary educationalists argue the trajectory of self-willed autonomy is seen most starkly in utilitarian philosophies of education which exhibit a lack of overall coherence. Bloom argues forcefully that ‘the crisis of liberal education is a reflection of the crisis at the peaks of learning, an incoherence and incompatibility among the first principles with which we interpret the world …’ (Bloom, 2012, p. 346). It ‘flourished when it prepared the way for the discussion of a unified view of nature and man’s place in it … It decayed when what lay beyond it were only specialities, the premises of which do not lead to any such vision’ (1987, pp. 346–347). His contention is that humanity may live more truly and fully now by reading Plato and Shakespeare than at any other time because they ‘are participating in essential being and are forgetting their accidental lives’ (1987, p. 380). Human nature still faces the same problems ‘if in different guises’ (1987, p. 380). His book is ‘a meditation on the state of our souls’ (1987, p. 19) at the present time from the perspective of a teacher. What replaced the ‘enchantment’ of the universe sustained by God’s spirit to which humanity responded with reciprocal love, gratitude and purpose, was a leaning on the preferred self-constructed goal of individual freedom and personal autonomy. As I have indicated, a feature of this move away from any sense of the Divine is witnessed in the pursuit of self-realisation and independence ‘freed from the moral constraints of an inherited religious tradition’ (Pring, 2018, p. 72). Freedom and subjectivity became synonyms for God, but as Eagleton asks: ‘subjectivity, like the divinity whose place it is stealthily usurping, is an unfathomable abyss – a thought which is as alarming as it is exhilarating. In what sense can an abyss serve as a foundation?’ (Eagleton, 2016, p. 52). Secular autonomy and the drive towards self-fulfilment are reflected in an education system which disparages any notion of the creaturehood and becomes complicit in reductionism encouraging humanity to ‘go it alone’. McGilchrist sees the problem partly in terms of a (post)modern reflexivity allied to an insular and mechanical understanding of the world and the self. This is a misguided estimation since, ‘Happiness and fulfilment are byproducts of other things, of a focus elsewhere – not the narrow focus of getting and using, but a broader empathetic attention’ (2012, p. 436). The dominance of the left hemisphere of the brain in (post)modernity has created immense problems. The analytic, empirical and detached aspects of the individual have dominated over the empathetic, emotional and unverifiable. The right hemisphere’s disposition is tentative, always reaching painfully (with care) towards something which it knows is beyond itself’ (2012, p. 427). The left hemisphere is the knowing ‘superiority’ of reductionism. Its model is simple and it has been prevalent in popular culture and constitutes the ‘philosophy’ of our age: ‘Within that culture it has a corrosive effect on higher values, inducing a sort of easy cynicism, and encouraging a mechanistic view of the human’ (2012, p. 424). Philosophy itself has fallen into this trap and is ‘guilty of making explicit what does not lend itself to such

Obstacles of Desire 59 devices, especially language. Concepts are forever slipping away from philosophical analysis, which in ordinary life do not seem to trouble us’ (2012, p. 89). The right hemisphere is the primary mediator of experience from which the conceptualised re-presented world of the left hemisphere derives, and on which it depends. He advises ‘… the left hemisphere does not appear to have life, such life as it appears to have coming from the body, emotion and experience through the right hemisphere’ (2012, p. 227). The left believes that it gets things done with its rational system-building and acts by pushing a dead mouse across the floor to see it more carefully but it does not have the power to give life (2012, p. 230). Nothing in us, actively or positively, makes things live – all we can do is permit or not permit life, which already exists. Is it possible to break out of the imprisoning hall of mirrors that the left hemisphere has constructed McGilchrist asks? (2012, p. 230). The attack for dominance from the left is not just a passive inevitability, but willed and with this goes a full-bloodied attack on the sacred body, religion, art and nature – the main drivers of social harmony. According to Heidegger, the Apollonian and Dionysian modes of our experiencing the world have been dangerously skewed in favour of the Apollonian with dire consequences. Wittgenstein’s warning that modern philosophy is in danger of stopping still the energy of the world and of reducing real participation in the world as it morphs into a static detached analysis of the real is timely. Research over the last half century has shown that it is not wealth nor even health but, to a significant degree, the breadth and depth of our social connections which brings about some noticeable measure of happiness. Friendship and loneliness are two sides of the same coin; having friends has dramatic effects on our health, well-being and how long we live (Dunbar, 2021, p. 3). The isolation caused by the recent pandemic endorses this position. Putnam considered the malaise of American culture in Bowling Alone (2000) arguing that urbanisation, globalisation and the destruction of local communities have been the driving points of depression and mental illness in the developing world. Divertissements Distraction, anxiety and restlessness characterise the (post)modern individual. In a section entitled ‘Human Relationships’ from Foundations of the Monastic Life, the fourth-century Christian monk Evagrius of Pontus exhorts his listeners to be aware of those who cannot achieve stillness, those who are ‘distracted’ and move others away from ‘the science of stillness’ and an accompanying desire for God (Sinkewicz, 2006, p. 8). ‘Distracted’ people are prone to drag others into their deceits and unable to bring about the stillness required for the attentive longing for truth, revelation and transcendence. Vigilance is required. The strategy of living in ‘voluntary exile’ separate from the world is one method of protecting the stillness required for moral growth – location is important. He advises:

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The need to withdraw, if only for a brief time, to a quiet place is an essential requirement in attaining the stillness. The goal to be sought is apatheia, a resolute stillness freed from the unguarded and harmful attacks of the emotions and the passions, regarded in early monasticism as external demonic attacks to be confronted and overcome (Brakke, 2006). The demons produce passions such as gluttony, fornication, avarice, anger and resentment. These ‘thicken’ the mind which stop persons from praying as they ought to and move them away from seeking the Word of God (Sinkewicz, 2006, p. 198). This is not an exercise in marginalising or repressing the emotional life, but of bringing it into order and equilibrium so that the sensuous life might be re-aligned with and integrated into one’s true nature. It is an exercise in harmonious, expectant Christian living. Evagrius called disturbances ‘thoughts’ (logismoi) rather than emotions. A little more about this important distinction; the achievement and regulation of stillness for Evagrius is in direct proportion to a person’s ability to deal with what he refers to as ‘thoughts’. These arise disturbingly in the mind and heart, are associated with demons and need to be dealt with in a disciplined and systematic way. The virtuous life is always intimately associated with this struggle and consists in doing battle with the ‘thoughts’: ‘The heart that does not have experience of warfare is deprived of the state of virtue, for “virtue” (arete), is the name of the action that comes from the word “deeds of valour” (aristeia)’ (Sinkewicz, 2006, p. 31). Virtue, therefore, is the name for engaging in those much needed battles with the ‘thoughts’. Training in this way of valour is crucial, for one ‘caught without training’ is easily dragged down as one ‘unprepared for an assault’ (Sinkewicz, 2006, p. 30, Torevell, Palmer and Rowan, 2022). However, like a determined and strong athlete who has trained well, the monk is the one who ‘runs towards the beauteous and noble trophies of the practice of stillness‘. For how ‘beauteous and noble is the ascesis that leads to stillness, how truly beauteous and noble!’ (Sinkewicz, 2006, p. 5). It is only through ‘ascetic labours’ that one is made resolute and these constitute the ‘honour’ of the monk (Sinkewicz, 2006, p. 31) as he yearns for the kingdom. ‘Thoughts’ are associated with the old or false self which must be struggled against if a new self in Christ is to be formed. Our contact with the material world inevitably means we will be affected by it, sometimes in negative and destructive ways. One clear symptom of this contact is the arousal of unrest and lack of stillness. Yet such weakness should not be

Obstacles of Desire 61 regarded as sin, but as the emergence of an unhelpful thought due in large part to human vulnerability. However, once a person begins to watch the ‘thoughts’ arise, she can observe them and in time with increasing calm, they will disappear. The spiritual battle is not an easy one to win. A lack of stillness prolongs inner struggles: ‘he who does not preserve stillness brings warfare to his soul … the person who loves stillness guards the senses and makes war on thoughts’ (Sinkewicz, 2006, p. 40). This pugnacious language of war on ‘thoughts’ reflects Evagrius’ firm conviction that one of the most debilitating states humans have to endure is the invasion of the heart with distractions. Without the pursuit and achievement of stillness there is very little chance that human flourishing and moral growth will occur. The ‘thoughts’ of the fragile self which arise are understood as symptoms of human fragility and vulnerability, almost involuntary eruptions brought about by living without shield and protection in the world. Evagrius did not believe that ‘thoughts’ were sins, but symptoms of the fragility of human living in the world. Tilby reminds us that having such thoughts is not culpable in itself. They might become sin if surrendered to, but they are not the same thing: ‘Evagrius is clear that the thoughts are not themselves sins’ (2009, p. 59). This is notably different from Augustine’s understanding of human nature which tends to conflate ‘thoughts’ directly with sin, or at least temptation with sin which may result in a view that having a wicked thought is the same as having a wicked heart: in other words, encouraging the identity of thoughts with the sinful self, rather than acknowledging their provisional aspect, which allows for the freeing and detachment of oneself from their grip. Believing that the ‘thoughts’ are external to the self, it might be argued that Evagrius taught a more positive view of human nature than Augustine, even if he knew through his own experience of living the monastic life, that the self was fragile and vulnerable and that outer temptations emanating from the material world could easily lead one away from the contemplation of God. Tilby comments: ‘The point is that Evagrius expects logismoi to occur, but because once he puts their origin outside the self he enables his followers to resist them without necessarily identifying with them or indulging them’ (2009, pp. 59–60). What is required is an attentive awareness and intimate knowledge of the ‘thoughts’ or vulnerabilities and a humility to acknowledge how they affect the stillness of the heart. Evagrius exhorts his monks to note carefully the complexity of the ‘thoughts’, their periodicity, the demons which cause them, the order of their succession and the nature of their associations. Then let him ask Christ for help with these ‘thoughts’ (Tilby, 2009, p. 59). Evagrius was influenced by the Stoics in his understanding of the distinction and relationship between ‘thoughts’ and emotions, since they distinguished between a full-blown passion, for which the rational person is responsible and an involuntary preliminary motion (propatheia), which can lead to a unhelpful passion (Brakke, 2006, p. 54). Evagrius named ‘thoughts’ ‘protopassions’ which, if left unguarded, may change into negative emotions. At times ‘thoughts’ can mutate into obsessive ‘fantasies’ and here Evagrius

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rehearses some of the language of modern psychotic disorders which lead to self-destructive patterns of behaviour, although it might be dangerous to read post-Darwinian understandings back into Evagrius’ theology too easily. Evagrius sees ‘thoughts’ as ‘first movements’ (Sorabji, 2003, p. 359); it is common to find oneself being affected by them. It is up to each person whether they persist and stir up negative emotions and actions. Those scriptural passages which referred to Jesus’ emotions like anger or distress were considered to be ‘protopassions’ by Origen. In summary, ‘thoughts’ might be best described as preliminary temptations which if succumbed to, turn into sins of which one is culpable. It was Evagrius’ disciple John Cassian (360–430) who made known to the Western Church through his Institutes and Conferences the eight ‘thoughts’ which were transmuted into a system of numbered vices. However, DeYoung suggests that Evagrius was ‘more interested in describing the guises of the demons and how to fight them than setting down a comprehensive list’ (2009, p. 27). By the time of Pope Gregory the Great (540–604) ‘thoughts’ started to be registered as ‘capital’ or ‘principal’ vices and had been paired down to seven by collapsing sloth into sadness, adding envy and making pride the root of them all. It was Aquinas who was to extend commentary on the vices with an important section on the issue in his Summa Theologiae which became widely used after his death. But what was more significant about all these developments was the way in which ‘thoughts’ became sins. Gregory the Great made this link explicit by writing that ‘For a monk sin is assent to the forbidden pleasure of the thought’ (quoted in Sorabji, 2003, p. 360); his formulation of ‘seven principal vices’ which emerged from pride was to change the way Christians understood sin; during the medieval period the language of the seven principal sins, accompanied by a raft of ecclesial laws and punishments, strongly affected the manner in which clergy and laity viewed notions of temptation, offences against God and individual salvation. By the thirteenth century, many lay people were well aware of the vices, not only theologians and clerics, for their naming was to underpin much penitential practice. Although DeYoung reminds us that during the Middle Ages the vices ‘had become primarily a practical and pastoral tool not a theoretical construct’ (2009, p. 30) the labelling of the seven as ‘capital vices’ was to undergo another change not envisaged by Aquinas when they became referred to later by the Catholic Church as ‘deadly sins’ to remind people of their seriousness and their association with mortal sin (which severed any relationship with God) rather than venial sin which was less drastic. This was a long way from the involuntary arising of ‘thought’ as conceived by Evagrius and relates an interesting ecclesiastical history. A further consequence of these historical developments was that notions of sin became inseparable from human identity. The shift of Evagrian ‘thoughts’ into sins reflected an understanding of what kind of beings we are and was a considerable leap to make since it implied existential repercussions concerning what constituted human nature (Tilby, 2009, p. 24). Tilby

Obstacles of Desire 63 suggests that after Augustine sin was no longer thought of as the result of outer demonic attack but as a defining feature of our human nature – fallen: ‘Sin is not just what we do but what we are’ (Tilby, 2009, p. 22). Christ is the only human being without sin. Moral failings became translated into a codified list of sins, but originally their appearance was a spur to ask questions of them and to then subdue them. Instead of learning from them and asking Christ what they meant, the Christian Church changed them into sins of which we were guilty. However, for Evagrius, the arising of such disquieting ‘thoughts’ ought not to be identified with permanent constituents of the self, but as temporary aberrations, which if watched can be dealt with and diagnosed as temporary and fleeting conditionings. Evagrius’ emphasis on the recognition and controlling of ‘thoughts’ was significant since the practice of metaphysical desire was hindered by such attacks. The state of being which is devoid of the passions is the beginning of a life formed by desire for Christ, for obstacles are removed to allow the flourishing of the yearning self. The attainment of apatheia combines the cessation of wrong doing and the attainment of inner serenity which may then blossom into agape – unconditional love. But if desire and its fruits are to be realised then an ascetic practitioner must be practically engaged in the task of recognising the demonic attacks to which she is prone. Coupled with this constant watchful warfare Evagrius believed that it was possible to find peace of soul or heart by means of ‘labours of asceticism’ which included fasting, manual labour, lack of possessions and prayer. The armoury of true prayer allows a person to turn away from mental representations tied to the passions and is ‘an impassible habit, which by means of a supreme love carries off to the intelligible height the spiritual mind beloved of wisdom’ (Sinkewicz, 2006, p. 198). The aim of such disciplined practices of desire was to gain ‘true knowledge of the things which exist’ and of the Trinity. Influenced by Origen, Evagrius showed how despite humanity’s frequent falling away from God, it is possible to return to an original unity with the Divine. Such teaching was partly based on Evagrius’ own spiritual struggles. According to the Coptic version of Palladius’ Life of Evagrius he would regularly lead all-night discussions on Saturday evenings in which monks would reveal their troubling thoughts and discuss methods of dealing with them (Brakke, 2006, pp. 50–51). Evagrius lists eight ‘thoughts’ – gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, sloth, vainglory and pride – arguing that ‘All the generic types of thoughts fall into eight categories in which every sort of thought is included’ (Sinkewicz, 2006, p. 97). Three of the eight are more damaging than the rest – gluttony, love of money and vainglory – and were formulated from Evagrius’ own life experience and Biblical stories, particularly the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness. This naming of the ‘thoughts’ is part of the winning of the battle, since to identify them is to have control and mastery over them. ‘Thoughts’ emanate from the perception of and involvement in the sensible world, clouding the mind and heart whose most natural state is contemplation, awareness, delight of and desire for the Divine.

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According to Evagrius, human beings, like angels and demons, had originated as pure intellects in contemplation of God, a state from which they had fallen. Demons are full of anger and twisted with ignorance, their central aim being to attack the goodness of human beings which they observed with precision and envy. Human beings can slip into demonic ways of behaving since it is easy to become the very thing we rail and fight against and it took humility to accept this. Like Platonists, Evagrius believed the soul is not fully rational. It has two irrational parts – a concupiscent or desiring part and an irascible or aggressive part. Since some of the ‘thoughts’ originate from these parts and because of the soul’s distinctive make-up, a monk cannot simply eliminate the energies they produce (Brakke, 2006, p. 53). Instead, they must be re-directed ‘according to nature’ into positive virtues: ‘The goal of practical knowledge is to heal these irrational parts of the soul, so that they produce not negative emotions but the positive virtues’ (Brakke, 2006, p. 53). The intellect is the rational part of the person, but this also is susceptible to vainglory and pride; however, once purified it produces its own virtues – prudence, understanding and wisdom (2006, p. 53). The attainment of apatheia entailed freedom not from psychic energy itself (which is a constituent of our human nature) but from the mis-direction of such energies into negative emotions via ‘thoughts’ which prevented the longing for God. Demons are embedded in the stuff of creation and the cosmos and the battle going on inside the monk’s heart was part of a much wider cosmic battle taking place in everyday life – in communities, households and creation more generally. Strategies were needed for dealing with and outmanoeuvring demons’ subversive wiles. Evagrius believed the monk’s task was to return creation back to God by holding it in unity within his own heart. But first the heart needs to be cleansed of those things which disturb its natural state of calm. This is a contemplative goal – to erase the disturbances of the heart so that it might yearn freely for heaven. Spiritual practice was about dispelling evil from the heart – praktike – followed by engagement in natural contemplation – theoria physike. The heart is both the location and judge for it is able to discern thoughts which arise: ‘Judge the thoughts in the tribunal of the heart’ commands Evagrius (Sinkewicz, 2006, p. 38). This overcoming of the ‘thoughts’ does not entail repression of the emotional life, but a gradual becoming aware and distancing from them. Ignatius of Antioch used the word apatheia to refer to his calm acceptance of Christ’s suffering and for Clement of Alexandria, this stillness echoed the calmness and freedom of God himself. To be still is to have the freedom and joy God possesses. It is characterised by a selfless love which allows the person to be unconditioned by anxieties and worries which tie down and imprison the self. A well-planned war, therefore, was indispensable and had to be fought with a sophisticated knowledge of one’s enemy, otherwise stillness and the longing for God could not be maintained. Knowing the enemy was a step towards defeating him. As Brakke comments,

Obstacles of Desire 65 For the Evagarian monk knowledge was power. By gaining increasingly precise knowledge of the demons – their identities, their characteristic strategies, their interrelationships, their origin and nature, – the monk gained mastery over them and over his responses to them. (2006, p. 52) Peace of mind and heart did not come easily and involved a rigorous training which encouraged a stable and contemplative approach to the world once the passions had been assuaged and a renewed enthusiasm for searching for God restored. Distraction emerges as a key theme in Merton’s analysis of the (post) modern condition (Torevell, 2019b). In The Ascent to Truth, Merton claims that the contemplation of nature – what the Greek Fathers and Mothers called theoria physike – is an illuminating recognition of God’s presence in the world: ‘… He is manifested in the essences (logia) of all things’ (McDonnell, 1989, p. 384; Ford, 2009). This is not an empirical approach to truth, but an intuitive recognition borne of ‘… a habit of religious awareness’ (McDonnell, 1989, p. 384). It is therefore likely to be enhanced over time through meditation and prayer (Finley, 1978). Merton claims that this awareness comes about through ‘ascetic detachment’, one of the key practices necessary for contemplative living. There is also a negative side to this awareness (equally instinctive) which recognises the illusory and insubstantial nature of things when they are wrenched from their right ordering without reference to their Creator. Contemplation invites us to ‘see’ the truth of creation when it is understood as ‘created’ while simultaneously recognising illusion when this same creation is understood as unconnected to its source and its true purpose. St Gregory of Nyssa’s (335–395) commentary on Ecclesiastes is a treatise on these two aspects of nature – vanity (when it is wrenched away from its source) and symbol (when it is appreciated as God-given (Merton, 1989, p. 384). Contemplation encourages the gift of discernment and detachment (krisis and apatheia) which allows this recognition to take place and these are the signs of a mature Christian soul (1989, p. 384). Merton’s Biblical and Pascal-ian claim is that because ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ (Eccles. 1:9) scores of generations waste their time in endless pursuit of empty things, restlessly wanting new things, what he refers to as ‘novelties’ (1989, p. 380) rather than accepting with appreciation what is given. Filling time thus becomes an endless search and desire for things which are empty and have no real substance – they quickly become nonexistent, because they have no real existence in God. A far superior way to understand time is to see it in relation to Christ who entered the created domain and consecrated it to Himself thereby saving it from being ‘… an endless circle of frustrations’ (Merton, 1989, p. 380). Contemporary (wo) men exhaust themselves ‘in the pursuit of mirages that ever fade and are renewed as fast as they have faded, drawing him further and further into the wilderness where he must die of thirst’ (1989, p. 380). Riddled by guilt

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because of their lack of time given over to contemplation, they feel a deep alienation from creation. If the very reason for humanity’s existence is contemplation of the Father through Christ in the natural order, then when a person finds s/he is unable or unwilling to do this, s/he goes in search of ‘… oblivion in exterior motion or desire’ (1989, p. 382). Merton draws from Pascal’s notion of divertissement (distraction) to defend his point: ‘We cannot find true happiness unless we deprive ourselves of the ersatz happiness of empty diversion’ (1989, p. 382). Because we do not contemplate the world as we ought to, we fill our time with distractions which never ease our pain because they are empty and give no real comfort to our guilt. In fact, they increase the pain because they trick us into thinking they are real when in fact they are illusory; they tell us a lie which we are duped into believing is the truth. This is akin to the Buddha’s second Noble Truth of which Merton would have been well aware. The craving for empty things brings about suffering, eventually leading to an experience of a dead end. Merton extends this thinking in his last publication in 1968, recently published as Where Prayer Flourishes (2018) before he set out on his last trip outside the monastery in 1968, which is documented in The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (1975; Torevell, 2012). He tells us that even if we do remember to contemplate, things can easily go wrong. When life becomes an insistent and constant reflection on the self, it is nothing more than narcissism and falls easily into idolatry. By studying themselves obsessively, practitioners can find this so ‘delightful’ that they lose interest in ‘… the invisible and unpredictable action of grace’ (2018, p. 35). Contemplation is not about establishing oneself ‘… in unassailable narcissistic security’ (2018, p. 9). Rather it confronts us ‘… with the sham and indignity of the false self that seeks to live for itself alone and to enjoy the “consolation of prayer” for its own sake’ (2018, p. 9). This ‘false self’ is pure illusion and she who lives by it will soon find she ends either ‘in disgust or in madness’ (Merton, 1989, p. 9). (Post)modern thinking promotes this narcissistic and illusory living. The banishing of Adam and Eve from the garden resulted in humanity’s being lost and disengagement from the real world (Gen. 3:24). Since humanity lives with a sense of alienation, insecurity and ‘dread’ due to his/her inevitable, ceaseless self-questioning, the social realm tries to make it bearable when it offers ‘… a multitude of distractions and escapes’ (1989, p. 9). Distractions ease the feelings of alienation in a God-forgotten world. This was a theme Merton spoke eloquently on. During a conference talk given in Alaska in September 1968 on technological advances, he warned they had the potential to confuse and turn against humanity’s own good by their false promises rather than lead to real progress (1989, pp. 71–80). Futile attempts to assuage feelings of loneliness and alienation are revealed in those forms of modern addiction (social ills) which confront us daily. The advice is not to seek ‘answers’ by divertissement but to contemplate the truths given by God in the created order. The way forward is Noverim te, noverim me (may I know you, that I may know myself), as Augustine taught claims Merton. This is what brings a person peace and rest in the social order.

Obstacles of Desire 67 Merton makes significant demands upon those who contemplate. Instead of agreeing to the Stoics’ answer to painful events by learning to accept them as unflinchingly as possible, allow yourselves to ‘… be brought naked and defenceless into the centre of that dread where we stand alone before God in our nothingness, without explanations, without theories, completely dependent on his providential care’ (2018, p. 80). He believed that the modern autonomous self is an illusion and will crack in time under its own misapprehensions. (Post)modernity’s insistence that individuals can secure a happiness for themselves by their own efforts, desires and motivations is the greatest lie. Consequently, ‘… all our meditation should begin with the realization of our nothingness and helplessness in the presence of God’ (2018, p. 81). What is required is a disposition of humility, attention to reality, receptivity and pliability (2018, p. 83). Since God is invisibly present to the ground of our being, he remains hidden from the ‘… arrogant gaze of our investigating mind’ (2018, p. 100). Merton re-iterates the Christian teaching about reciprocal love as the way out of this difficulty: ‘… to be loved by him as our Creator and Redeemer, and to love him in return’ (2018, p. 102). This does not mean separating oneself off from the material and the natural order, but of seeing its inherent potentiality and limitations so that they do not become idols. Hoff’s critique of the (post)modern condition rests on one of the greatest temptations and distractions of our time – to allow oneself to become enslaved by a smart phone culture (what he calls ‘techno-fascism’). This is an extension of Newton’s evaluation of the world as a machine. Our obsession with mobile phones is particularly dangerous since the latest inventions tap into our senses and take on a quasi-sacramentality of their own. Note the launch, he says, of Steve Job’s iPhone in 2007 – it can sing to us, we can touch its ‘holy’ screen and it looks suave and sophisticated – and what’s more, we can carry round this indispensable item in our pockets (Hoff, 2018, p. 254). They are very close to us; they mean a lot to us; they even define our identity. They are like someone else’s flesh next to ours – alive, consolatory, helpful, sexy – yet utterly, absolutely, different. Such modern machines (and that is all they are) have replaced our bodily absorption and attuning to the natural world. They are another divertissement wrenching us away from contemplation as a necessary path to the eschaton. Hoff argues persons are cut off from one another in a new way, although the ‘new’ technology (we want the latest design, which is better and quicker and more efficient than the last) claims to make us more in touch with one another: ‘Poorly designed technologies pollute our gift to be attuned to our never fully penetrable social and natural environment’ (2018, p. 252). Wise and prudent persons must never leave the task of finding the meaning and order of the world to software agents (2018, p. 259). Hoff claims that there persists a (post)modern tendency to act as ‘… spectators, who hide behind a window or a surveillance camera, in order to observe analytically objectifiable “neutral facts” or more elementary

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“information units”’ (2018, p. 267). The felt connection with the created order and its teleology disappear. Note, for example, the debate about the use of video assistant referees (VAR) in football at the present time. Video screens are now consulted to determine the ‘truth’ of what happens in the spontaneous human vitality of a sporting match, one of the most bodily exercises known to humanity, where the ball swerves unreliably between flesh and other opponents’ flesh. The unexpected thrill of the game and human decisions made by the referee are now replaced by the detached watching of a video machine. But this fails since the human intervention of the referee has to interpret what the screen tells him. Machines can never tell the truth – at most they can nudge us in the right direction; even then we have to be careful. We live in an age of sophisticated machines, which will increase as artificial intelligence takes over. Machines are on the march and there appears to be no stopping them. But they are ultimately divertissement and empty of real substance. Understanding the individual as homo economicus drove much of the political discourse during (post)modernity (Fukuyama, 2018). This is an erroneous foundation since it rests on a reductionist view of human motivation, ignoring dimensions of human dignity and self-worth. Shakespeare exposes the dangers involved in this construction of identity in King Lear. The tragic hero evaluates his daughter’s love in cash terms when he attempts to share out his land at the beginning of the play and later when he wishes to get many of his knights to stay with him. He says to Goneril who has offered twice more than Regan, ‘I’ll go with thee; / Thy fifty yet doth double five and twenty, / And thou art twice her love’ (Act 2.4. ll. 447–449). But he quickly comes to realise that love and real human need cannot be quantified. He angrily replies to his daughters on this matter: ‘O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous; Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life is cheap as beast’s’ (Act 2.4. ll. 453–456). In other words, if you calculate and measure things according to biological need rather than love, you will treat people as low as animals. This demonstrates some growth in his understanding of what love might actually be and entail. Does any loving parent evaluate the worth of their children in cash terms? Lear also comes to realise that bodily need (he says to Regan, ‘Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st’ (Act 2.4. l. 458) is far less important than spiritual need – the ability to endure suffering with patience – ‘But for true need–/ You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!’ (Act 2.2. ll. 459–460). This prayerful cry for patience has Pauline connotations (Rom. 5:3–4), from which Shakespeare probably drew. When his other daughter, Cordelia (the moral centre of the play), refuses to see the world in financial terms, she is cast out and rejected. The world cannot see any sense in someone who says ‘Nothing’ (Act 1.1. l. 89) when money is at stake. The consequences are tragic for Lear as a result of his initial equivalence of love with money. He has to undergo a re-constitution of the self (as searing as any contemplative’s) by intense suffering and to

Obstacles of Desire 69 learn how to say ‘nothing’: ‘No, I will be the pattern of all patience, / I will say nothing’ (Act 3.2. ll. 37–38). Saying nothing carries far more moral weight than saying things which are untrue. Lear is taught by suffering not to lie to himself anymore by the calculating logic of monetary exchange. He learns who he really is: ‘A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man’ (Act 3.2. l. 20). By such self-recognition taught on the heath and by sharing his common humanity with the fool and Edgar, Lear comes nearer the truth than he was ever able to do before. We might say in Merton’s terms that he has grown through spiritual advancement to experience a more accurate and truthful understanding of the self and of nature, far removed from his earlier estimation of the world. Jesus frequently warns that an emphasis on money can result in despair and self-destruction. The rich young man made sense of himself, to a considerable degree, by the money he possessed and that is why he went away from Jesus anxious and ‘grieving’ – he was unable to give up what so clearly defined him (Matt. 19:22). Merton claims that the reverse of a contemplative attuning to the natural order is seen in a suspicious, proud attitude to the world, a ‘vanity of vanities’, where all meaning is eventually dissipated since no amount of endless craving for financial success is able to fulfil and satisfy the heart. In his references to Gregory of Nyssa’s commentary on Ecclesiastes, he suggests that contemporary (wo)man exhausts her/himself in the pursuit of mirages that ever fade, drawing her/him into a world which cannot be relied upon and where the dividing line between what is substantial and real and what is insubstantial and false become blurred. The person immersed in matter and in sense becomes conflicted, since those things which s/he holds to be real turn out to be nothing more than phantasms. The consequent falling into a dangerously sceptical (albeit inevitable) approach towards the world based on deluded, anxious thoughts is likely (1989). Merton contends that the spirit of rebellious refusal to acknowledge one’s dependence on a Creator and the preparation for the afterlife leads to (2018, p. 122) ‘dread’ and results in being estranged from the created order and oneself (what better description is there of Hamlet’s state of being than this?). The self is set in warlike opposition to the truth of one’s own contingency, dependency and ultimate longing (2018, p. 123). If only Hamlet had realised this, then there would not have been so much blood. The realisation of the contingent self also prevents humanity from saying too many harsh things about itself; the self is fragile and fails. It also stops the plunge into isolation, to which Hamlet refers: ‘Now I am alone’ (Act 2.2. l. 484). The experience of ‘dread’ and ‘night’ at the heart of humanity is then the awareness of not submitting to the truth of a created life (Merton, 2018, p. 124). It reflects a deep lying to the self and is an awareness of infidelity as unrepented and, without grace, as unrepentable (2018, p. 124). Merton claims that such a feeling of self-imposed meaninglessness will not be easily relieved ex opera operato by the reception of the sacraments. These will not suffice while the person continues to cling to the empty illusion of a separate self and inclined to resist God and the created order to which s/he belongs. Nor will it allay a sense of alienation, felt most acutely when left alone without

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divertissement. Even if s/he is able to recognise the dread which comes about without recourse to God, s/he invariably loses the conviction that God is or can be a refuge out of this state. Meditation then becomes nothing more than an agonia, a wrestling with emptiness and doubt. Arrogance will not assist either. Merton’s advice is to listen to the wisdom of the Desert Father Ammonas who discerns the fruits of resisting ever present temptation: ‘If God did not love you he would not bring temptation upon you … For the faithful, temptation is necessary for all those who are free of temptation are not among the elect’ (2018, p. 129). This condition is positively described as a ‘hell of mercy and not of wrath’ (2018, p. 131). Waging a War Merton advised his brethren on the fruits of reading Cassian and Evagrius: ‘According to Evagrius (Or, 49) the chief purpose of the battle waged by devils against monks is to prevent or to frustrate interior prayer. The devils tempt us to those vices most contrary to prayer, especially lust and anger’ (2005, p. 95). As I have noted, Evagrius has much to say about prayer and its ability to rebuff the taunts of the devil: ‘All warfare that is waged between us and the impure demons concerns nothing other than spiritual prayer, for this is extremely offensive and odious to them, but salvific and very pleasant to us’ (Sinkewicz, 2006, pp. 197–198). Humans’ distorted desires or ‘passions’ or what we might nowadays refer to as anxiety prevent praying happening naturally (Torevell, 2010, pp. 171–184). But ‘Why do the demons want to produce in us gluttony, fornication, avarice, anger, and resentment and the other passions? So that the mind becomes thickened by them and unable to long and pray as it ought’ (Sinkewicz, 2006, p. 198). Prayer is never an easy counter-attack since insidious and duplicitous means are harnessed cunningly by the enemy, akin to Iago’s clever use of syllogism in Othello to tempt Roderigo into believing that lust, rather than love, governs the human condition (Bevington, 2008, pp. 163–165). He persuades him that Desdemona cannot be loyal to her husband because it is a self-evident fact that women like sexual partners of their own age: ‘She must change for youth; when she is sated with his body she will find the error of her choice’ (Act 1.3. ll. 350–351). Women desire partners of their own kind and age – Othello is an older man and a Moor, ergo she will betray him. As Evagrius writes: ‘Demons are jealous of the person of prayer and use every trick to frustrate his purpose’ (Sinkewicz, 2006, p. 198). Shakespeare reminds his audience that Desdemona was a person of prayer. Othello knows this because before he murders her he asks’, Have you said your prayers to-night? and she answers’, Ay, my lord’ (Act 5.2. l. 24). And earlier Roderigo admits that she is ‘full of most blest condition’ (Act 2, 1. l. 247). The Desert Fathers and Mothers sought and desired a place where they could be become acutely aware of the temptations of the demons which encouraged material craving. What they wanted was a progressive

Obstacles of Desire 71 understanding of their insidious machinations in the wild location of the desert in order to overcome them. One cannot defeat the enemy one does not know. Spiritual desire is thwarted if this does not occur. The world falls frequently into this trap according to Merton. He writes that Cassian was ‘very eager to get to Scete, the “home of all perfect living”’. The location was a twin mountain range west of the Nile, near the coast, with two big desert valleys (Merton, 2005, pp. 123–124) the home of the most celebrated (tested) ‘fathers of monasticism probatissimi patris’ (Cassian, 1985, p. 37). Their wish was to gain ‘peace, liberty of spirit, purity of heart, freedom from all desires …’ (Merton, 2005, p. 125). By this he means debilitating desires. Quoting Mahieu, he writes that they lived ‘without any more cares than a bird in the heavens … persevering in nakedness and cold, or scorched by the fires of the sun …’ (2005, p. 125). ‘When the Desert fathers met one another, their greeting was “sotheries” – “mayst thou be saved”’ (2005, p. 124). Such locations were not free from suffering, but ones where: ‘The hunger of fasts does not weary us. The tiredness of keeping vigil is a delight to us … . The unfinished toil, the nakedness, the compete deprivation, the fear that goes with this enormous loneliness, do not frighten us off’ (Cassian, 1985, p. 38). Many sought these places: ‘you travelled through so many countries in search of men like us, ignorant backwoodsmen who live the rough life of this desert’ (1985, p. 38). By withstanding the attacks of demons in remote places, they desired a clarity, strengthening and sustenance of their identity in Christ. Their toil was not without rewards for there was ‘an unwavering purpose in mind’ and like the farmer there was a calming experience of what was to come in the future: ‘… the restful ease towards which he is striving … foretaste of what he hopes to actually enjoy one day’ (Cassian, 1985, p. 39). Holiness is the foretaste: ‘As a reward you have your sanctification and your goal is eternal life (Rom. 6:22)’ (1985, p. 40). The danger was grasping for trivial things ‘… they still hold on to their old heart – longings for things that do not matter, things for whose sake they grow angry’ (1985, p. 41). The heart must be freed and not ‘puffed up’ so that it becomes a ‘… continuous offering … that is perfect and truly pure, a heart kept free of all distractions’ (1985, p. 41). Cassian exhorts them to hold ‘hearts free from the harm of every dangerous passion and in order to rise up step by step to the high point of love’ (1985, p. 41) Referring to the New Testament passage about Mary and Martha he adds, ‘In saying this the Lord locates the primary good not in activity, however praiseworthy, … but in the truly simple and unified contemplation of Himself’ (1985, p. 43). However, this is tempered with the view that ‘As long as this inequality rages in the world, these good works will be necessary and valuable to anyone …’ (1985, p. 43). But ‘… all this will cease in time … when equality shall reign … everyone shall pass over to the love of God and to the contemplation of things divine … devote their energies to this’ (1985, p. 43). The ascetic life, however difficult, offers freedom from the wayward passions and desires (primarily those of anger and lust) encouraging a

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reversal of the flow of the body, which is also an attempt to invert the flow of time. Flood contends it involves a ‘range of habits or bodily regimes designed to restrict or reverse the instinctual impulses of the body and an ideology that maintains that in so doing a greater good or happiness can be achieved’ (2004, p. 4). The body’s suspension of destructive carnal tendencies and desires partly brought about by an absorption into eschatological time enables it to fend off those harmful thoughts and inclinations which invade the tranquillity of the mind and heart and to see things in a broader (and calmer) metaphysical perspective. Within religious frameworks this is largely done by shifting any constructed self-identity into an eschatological framework of tradition and sacred scripture which teaches them a new horizon over time. The self is trained through the performance of memory and text. Pain and vulnerability willingly accepted rather than avoided, become the method for the body’s transcendence. What results within ascetical practices is a distinctive character, a habitus which responds spontaneously to the good and resists the bad, constituting a stability un-swayed by the conflictual demands of daily, consumerist living. The subjectivity formed here is at odds with modern notions of individuality. Once the Christian medieval notion of the self (made sense of in a divinely created cosmos) collapsed, individual attempts to make meaning out of an ‘emptied out’ universe produced an expanded (proud) subjectivity. As Flood rightly contends, ‘Self-assertion and self-conscious autonomy are key features of modernity … modern inquiry moves from a theological absolute to a meaning-making subjectivity … and an inquiry into an indifferent, objective order through science’ (2004, p. 240). Since God is dead, who else, except myself, will give meaning to myself and to the universe? Conversely, the ascetic self is neither autonomous, being subject to the rule of tradition, sacred texts and the Absolute, nor self-fulfilled in the modern sense of the satisfaction of sensual experience. It was geared towards a return to an original, undifferentiated unity. The demons, by contrast, represented the tendency towards separation, division and individuality (Flood, 2004, p. 21). Monastic identity largely consisted in re-establishing a lost spiritual unity. Anthony of Egypt (251–356) claimed that demons promoted difference on two levels: first, by encouraging vice and a movement away from the invisible unity of spiritual bonding (we are all the same and equal under God) and, second, through interpersonal strife – the demons incited division within the social unity of the Church. Any monk’s existence as a separate individual implies the demonic pull of division (Flood, 2004, pp. 19–22). Paradoxically, the multiplicity of individual selves that made up the monastic community became the context for the transcendence of that individuality. Thus, the ascetic self became radically distinguished from individuality; it sought the opposite of self-assertion. The latter privileges autonomous agency over the vulnerable agency of the ascetic self, formed by the history and value system of tradition. What the ascetic body had the potential to realise was a glorified state. Gradually freed from disturbances by the

Obstacles of Desire 73 disciplining of the body, it was able to assume, as far as possible on earth, a resurrected body; just as in the Hindu tradition, the body formed by austerity through yoga – tapas – creates a perfection of the body, characterised by gracefulness, beauty and strength (Flood, 2004, pp. 79–80). Those who are unable to realise the reversals of the flow of the body find it difficult to conceive of the body resurrected and glorified in themselves and in others. Their aspirations become finite. Jasper suggests, however, that all too often, asceticism is seen merely as either deprivation or imposition rather than transfiguration (2009, p. 20). Note Athanasius’ account of the transfigured beauty and vigour of Anthony of Egypt’s body after he emerges from his cell where he had lived for many years. Florensky argues that asceticism produces not only a good, but a beautiful person and let us not forget how Symeon the Stylite was deemed beautiful although his foot was gangrenous’ (Ware, 1998, pp. 3–4). All this relates to the Christian notion that the body is the location for the soul. Logically, therefore, sanctifying of the body through regularised, prayerful discipline is simultaneously the making holy of the soul. Aquinas knew – as did Aristotle before and Wittgenstein after him – that the soul is the ‘form’ of the body and its animating principle (Torevell, 2022). As Eagleton wryly comments, ‘One of the greatest of all Christian theologians, then, turns out to be in some respects a full-blooded materialist’ (2016, p. 47). The denial of the body also prepares it ‘in anticipation’ for the life to come – the new resurrected body is not entirely new therefore. It also dwells in dispossession through hardship and prayer, finding its freedom in its deep encounters with the Absolute. The body begins to dwell in ongoing, kenotic aspirational joy. Spiritual practices never encourage a running away from the perils of the world. In the Christian tradition, any escape from the world is counter-balanced by a returning and giving back to that world. Ware rightly reminds us that asceticism has a double edge to it – it is both anachoresis (withdrawal) and the return to help others, summed up in St Seraphim’s exhortation: ‘Acquire the spirit of peace, and then thousands around you will be saved’ (quoted in Ware, 1998, p. 8). John of the Cross is another of Merton’s confidantes. When things appear dark and sinister in the world and when prayer is arid and dry, like dried wood without kindle, be glad for God desires that you will be led towards Him: when God takes your hand and guides you in the darkness, as though you were blind, to an end and by a way which you know not nor could ever hope to travel with the aid of your own eyes and feet, howsoever good you may be as a walker. (Quoted in Merton, 2018, p. 145; Cook, 2013) If Hamlet had continued to believe this, then most of his suffering would have been erased and his self-doubt assuaged, since he would have been guided by the very thing he purports to put his trust in: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your

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philosophy’ (Act 1. 5.1l. 165–166). It is clear that Horatio would have found St John’s words far more difficult than Hamlet. Horatio fears that the ghost would tempt his friend ‘toward the flood, my lord, / Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff’ and there encounter a ‘horrible form/Which deprive you of your reason / And draw you into madness’ (Act 1. 4. ll. 69–70). His empiricist Stoic philosophy is rejected by the Christian Hamlet because he believes in the immortal soul and therefore he does not fear – ‘I do not set my life at a pin’s fee. / And for my soul- what can it do to that, / Being a thing immortal as itself?’ (Act 1.4. ll. 65–67). The real tragedy of the play is that Hamlet gives up believing his own religious philosophy. The trappings and distractions of the false world have vanquished him. He can no longer love himself nor find a place in the world. The Desert Fathers and Mothers in escaping from such temptations did not seek any kind of public, clan recognition and were thus freed from the tendency towards pride and the valorisation of individualisation. Problems arise in the ‘city’ when individual experience and autonomy are held in greater esteem than shared human experience. When a commonly held moral horizon based on religion collapses, individuals are likely to fall back on selfhood and identity formation based on distinct and fixed categories – wealth, nationhood, gender, sexual orientation, race, disability, ethnic origin and so on. This forms the sine qua non of their existence and they may find themselves becoming claustrophobically defined by it. Lasch (2018) argues that narcissists rely on others to consolidate their self-esteem with the result that they tend to ignore the needs of others who exist outside that self. This in turn leads to an increasing depoliticisation of society, in which the shared fights for social justice are invariably reduced to personal struggles. This dichotomy is reflected in the use of the German words Erfahrung which refers to common human experiences and the word Erlebris which refers to subjective perceptions which resist being shared. It is also witnessed in the contemporary therapeutic and counselling culture which gives precedence to individual ‘hurt’. One recent Cambridge undergraduate tantalisingly asked his fellow students if they had seen the College’s notice which ask: ‘Have you been offended to-day’? In medieval society, identity was inseparable from the social realm, so the question ‘Who am I, really? never arose. A person was defined by the social roles s/he undertook which were governed by the Church and their orientation towards death and the afterlife. One only felt lost and confused about one’s ‘identity’ if one had been excommunicated by the Church due to grave sin. Christianity has a markedly different understanding of desire and longing from the personal quest for autonomy. Psalm 55:6 uses the poetic image of a bird flying in its description of desiring and finding refuge: ‘And I say, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest”’ ‫שֹֽׁכָּנה׃‬ ְ ‫ְוֶא‬ (wə·’eš·kō·nāh). This verse most likely refers to a rock pigeon who selects for its resting place high cliffs and deep ravines, far from the bustling noise of the world. The psalmist admits that his heart is in anguish and that fear and

Obstacles of Desire 75 trembling has come upon him. This is echoed in Jeremiah 9:2: ‘O that I had in the desert / a traveller’s lodge / that I might leave my people and go away from them!’. Jeremiah wishes to flee from those who are adulterers and traitors and who abandon truth for falsehood. It seems, at first blush, to contradict Psalm 11:1 ‘In the Lord I take refuge; how / can you say to me / “Flee like a bird to the mountains”’, the Hebrew word flee ‫( ֗֝נוִּדי‬nū·ḏî) reflecting the idea of trepidation characterised by the hurried flap of birds’ wings. But, in fact, they are complementary, since both are locations of rest and refuge found away from the destructive torrents of the world where God can be and the yearning for the Truth and God increased and assisted – it is simply that Psalm 11 explicitly mentions ‘the Lord’. These ideas are repeated in Psalms 2:12; 64:10; 141:8 and all are associated with the notion of trust in the Divine. The New Testament, too, takes up this theme of safety and rest. In Luke 13.31 even the Pharisees advise Jesus to ‘“Get away from here …”’ for he is in danger of being hunted and killed. He replies that He has offered rest to others by being willing to unite them to Himself ‘as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing’ (Luke 13:34). The most well-known verse on this matter is in St Matthew 11:28: ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest ἀναπαύσω (anapausō)’. He is the location, the place where humankind will find peace in the midst of stress, anxiety and depression. The Buddhist religion has a parallel teaching. Buddhists are advised to seek refuge in three designations – the Buddha, the dhamma and the sangha. The taking of refuge is not primarily associated with a place in which to hide, but with focusing the mind on those things which result in the purification, uplifting and the strengthening of the heart to desire more fervently individuals’ imitation of the Buddha. As Harvey writes, ‘Orientation towards these three guides to a better way of living is experienced as a joyful haven of calm, a firm ‘island amidst a flood’ in contrast to the troubles of life’ (2012, pp. 176–177). They are also known as the Ti-ratana or ‘three jewels’, spiritual treasures of great worth. As in Christianity, this teaching features as a central goal of spiritual practice, resulting in the transformation of the self. It is associated with establishing hesychia – contemplation/rest within the restless heart by means of prayer and/or meditation, often in a harsh location of temptation. The Benedictine monk David Foster writes that ‘Prayer comes to mean giving the wordy labour of our minds a rest so that we have a chance to attend to God without worrying about what to say …’ (2007, p. 67). All the above religious understandings suggest that rest and security within the self is found by journeying outside the self and not in an obsessive turning into oneself. Monastic writings have been particularly helpful in delineating a set of ‘vices’ which assault the stillness of the self thereby halting spiritual ascent and these are contrasted with the ‘virtues’. In telling ways the desert experience of monastics is a microcosm of each person’s attempt to live a disciplined life of spiritual growth and offers a rich account of how human beings might live a virtuous life in tandem with their longing for the Divine.

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Due to its rigorous demands and self-sacrificial nature monastic life clarifies the challenges and obstructions to Christian discipleship. It never divorced itself from sharing those human trials to which each person is subject – namely, those thoughts and feelings which invade the human heart on a regular basis and take us away from living an integrated life rooted in virtue and longing for goodness, truth and beauty. The monastic tradition elucidates those inner, personal attacks to which each person is susceptible – whether in cities, towns or hamlets – and offers them guidance in overcoming such weaknesses – in particular, anger, lust, envy, gluttony, greed, vanity or sadness (acedie). Which human being – of whatever age – is not open to such disturbances? Who has never felt their unsettling invasion and presence? How often do we hear of celebrities in the fields of sport and entertainment who have to cope with their own inner ‘demons’? All this is urgently contemporary. It prevents the route to God and thwarts desire for transcendence. It was Aristotle who taught that to be really happy consists in living a life of virtue and the word he used for this was eudaimonia. Within popular culture and the present educational system, much debate centres around notions of happiness and how we might find it through a variety of means. Advertisements and slogans reflect this trend. The Christian tradition has a rich heritage about finding happiness and self-fulfilment and avoiding restlessness. Its contemplative strand has identified one way forward by outlining those things which prevent joy, self-growth and fulfilment. Evagrius and Cassian to whom I have referred and the authors of the Philokalia (a set of Eastern monastic texts by fathers of the Eastern Church spanning the fourth to the fifteenth century) all attempted to delineate obstacles to spiritual development. Other non-monastic figures like St Gregory the Great and Aquinas re-configured and spelt out their significance. A contemplative approach to living a fulfilled life consists in eradicating the ‘passions’ in order that the positive fruits of the virtues may start to appear and blossom. Recognising and observing these inner forces is the start of moral and spiritual change as part of their longing for revelation and fulfilment. ‘Thoughts’ and passions have invariably been represented by the arts in creative and imaginative ways and highlighted their devastating consequences on personal and social lives. There is, without question, something seductively ‘attractive’ or to use DeYoung’s Word ‘glittering’ about the vices and this is one reason why they have captured the imagination of so many. The extent to which human beings are able to withstand this ‘attractiveness’ is the extent to which they are able to become less likely to be diverted from the spiritual path undertaken and to increase their moral character and aspiration to journey further in the spiritual life. For example, the vice of anger when fought and defeated gives way to the virtue of gentleness, the vice of pride to the virtue of humility, of lust to love. The ‘beauty’ of a person (as the Eastern monastics taught) comes about when the passions are confronted and controlled. One might theorise it with close reference to ‘virtue ethics’ and character

Obstacles of Desire 77 formation as the basis for spiritual growth, but it is also inextricably associated with how the desire for God might become less impeded. In summary, the shrinkage of the sacred in a highly secular Western culture aligned to a drastic waning in religious belief and practice have resulted in a colossal interest in the self with a corresponding sequestration of death and the loss of any striving for eternity. Since the belief in another homeland is waning for many (post)modern individuals, death becomes problematic and therefore largely avoided and ignored. Once the move took place during (post)modernity away from God to the self not surprisingly there has been a radical increase in thinking about self-identity to an obsessional degree. A sense of the self is now constructed through the re-ordering of self-narratives (Giddens, 1991) and the notion of a stable ontological core to personhood made strong through divine assistance is replaced by what Mellor and Shilling refer to in their sociological analysis of death as a privatisation of meaning … which has served both to massively reduce the scope of the sacred and to leave increasing numbers of individuals with the task of establishing and maintaining values to guide them and make sense out of their daily lives. (1993, p. 413) The presence of death becomes particularly disturbing for the construction of the self in a world bereft of religious beliefs, myths, symbols and teleology (Berger, 1990). Continuous attempts to construct meaningful selfidentity result in feelings of horror at the prospect of the self ceasing to exist. Notice the terror people felt during the recent pandemic. One of the characteristics of secular modernity is that people plan their futures with care. In contrast to the past-oriented bias of tradition, (post)modernity has characteristically future-oriented preoccupations. Since there is no future beyond death, death is ignored. Due to the strength of the commitment to the self in modernity, the tendency to ignore death as the abolition of the self is evident in the dissatisfaction with many traditional forms of religious practice (Mellor and Shilling, 1993, p. 420). Collective, religious, public rituals about death lose significance since these are always related to a dependent self and the eschaton (Torevell, 2000; Bloom, 2012). The self alone is everything and any desire to think about this phenomenon in relation to a final rest beyond death remains problematic and inconceivable. Note 1 Andrew Scott’s brilliant portrayal of the protagonist in the 2018 British production directed by Robert Icke dramatised this radical disengagement and pathological suspicion towards the world. The play was deliberately contextualised within terms of contemporary mental illness and was one of the driving forces influencing this interpretation of the play.

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References Arendt, H. (1998). The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Augustine. (1961). Confessions. London: Penguin. Bauman, Z. (2011). Culture in a Liquid Modern World. London: Polity. Berger, P. (1990). The Sacred Canopy. Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Anchor Books. Bevington, D. (2008). Shakespeare’s Ideas. More Things in Heaven and Earth. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Bloom, A. (2012). The Closing of the American Mind. How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. New York: Simon and Schuster. Brakke, D. (2006). Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cassian, J. (1985). Conferences. Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press. Cook, B. (2013). Pursuing Eudaimonia. Re-appropriating the Greek Philosophical Foundations of the Christian Apophatic Tradition. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars publishing. DeYoung, R. (2009). Glittering Vices. A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press. Dunbar, R. (2021). Friends. Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships. London: Little, Brown. Eagleton, T. (2016). Culture. New Haven, MA: Yale University Press. Finley, J. (1978). Merton’s Palace of Nowhere. Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press. Flood, G. (2004). The Ascetic Self: Subjectivity, Memory and Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ford, M. 2009. Spiritual Masters for All Seasons. New Jersey: Hidden Springs. Foster, D. (2007). Deep Calls to Deep. Going Further in prayer. London: Continuum. Francis, P. (2022). General Audience. Desire is the compass to discern our direction at: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2022-10/pope-catechesis-desire-discernmentgeneral-audience.html (Accessed 20.01.23). Fukuyama, F. (2003). Our Posthuman Future. London: Profile Books. Fukuyama, F. (2012). The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin. Fukuyama, F. (2018). Identity. Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition. London: Profile Books. Furlong, J. (2013). Education – An Anatomy of the Discipline. Rescuing the university project? London: Routledge. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Girard, R. (1966). Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins Press. Girard, R. (2005). Violence and the Sacred. London: Continuum. Harvey, P. (2012). An Introduction to Buddhism. Teachings, History, Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoff, J. (2018). The Eclipse of Sacramental Realism in the Age of Reform: Rethinking Luther’s Gutenberg Galaxy in a Post-Digital Age. New Blackfriars, 99(1080), 248–270. Jasper, D. (2009). The Sacred Body. Asceticism in Religion, Literature, Art and Culture. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press. Kirwan, M. (2004). Discovering Girard. London: Darton, Longman and Todd.

Obstacles of Desire 79 Lasch, C. (2018). The Culture of Narcissism. American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. London: W. W. Norton Company. Madigan, J. (2013). Expressive Individualism, the Cult of the Artist as Genius and Milton’s Lucifer. Heythrop Journal, 54(6), 992–998. Marion, J-L. (2002). In Excess of Saturated Phenomena. Fordham: Fordham University Press. McDonnell, P. (1989). A Thomas Merton Reader. New York: Image Books. McGilchrist, I. (2012). The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. Mellor, P. and Shilling, C. (1993). Modernity, Self-Identity and the Sequestration of Death. Sociology, 29(3), 411–431. Merton, T. (1975). The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. New York: New Directions Books. Merton, T. (1989). A Thomas Merton Reader. P. McDonnell (Ed.). New York: Image Books. Merton, T. (2005). Cassian and the Fathers. Initiation into the Monastic Tradition. Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press. Merton, T. (2018). Where Prayer Flourishes. Canterbury: Canterbury Press. Nault, J-C. (2015). The Noonday Devil. Acedia, The Unnamed Evil of Our Times. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. O’ Donovan, O. (2020). The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers. Pring, R. (2018). The Future of Publicly Funded Faith Schools. A Critical Perspective. London: Routledge. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling Alone. The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Sarah, R. (2019). The Day Is Now Far Spent. With N. Diat. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Shakespeare, W. (2013). King Lear. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury. Shakespeare, W. (2018). Hamlet. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury. Sinkewicz, R. (2006). Evagrius of Pontus. The Greek Ascetic Corpus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sorabji, R. (2003). Emotion and Peace of Mind. From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, C. (1992). Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. The Biblical references are taken from Holy Bible. New Revised Standard Version. (1989). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tilby, A. (2009). The Seven Deadly Sins. Their Origin in the Teaching of Evagrius the Hermit. London: SPCK. Torevell, D. (2000). Losing the Sacred. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Torevell, D. (2007). Liturgy and the Beauty of the Unknown: Another Place. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Torevell, D. (2010). “Like a Jar of Wine Left in its Place for a While … Clear, Settled and Perfumed”: Evagrius of Pontus and the Purifying Engagement of Stillness. In J. Schmack, M. Thompson and D. Torevell with C. Cole (Eds.), Engaging Religious Education (pp. 171–184). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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Torevell, D. (2012). “What We Have to Be Is What We Are”: Re-Discovering an Ontology of Unity in the Asian Journey of Thomas Merton. Asian Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities, 2(1), 39–56. Torevell, D. (2019a). A Catholic Approach to Youth Depression – Implications for Those Working in Catholic Schools, Colleges and Universities. International Studies in Catholic Education, 11(2), 233–246. Torevell, D. (2019b). Distractions, Illusion and the Need for a Contemplative Spirituality: A Critique of Thomas Merton’s Advice. Studies in Spirituality, 9(2), 152–162. Torevell, D. (2020). Self-Assertion, ‘Ignorant Backwoodsmen’ and the Experience of (Un)Safe Spaces. Irish Theological Quarterly, 85(3), 230–246. Torevell, D., Palmer, C. and Rowan, P. (Eds.) (2022). Training the Body. Religion, Physical Culture and Sport. London: Routledge. Varden, E. (2018). The Shattering of Loneliness. On Christian Remembrance. London: Bloomsbury. Ware, K. (1998). The Way of the Ascetic. In V. Wimbush and R. Valantasis (Eds.), Asceticism (pp. 3–4). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolfe, J. (2022). Professorial Inaugural Lecture. St Andrews: St. Andrews University. Wynn, M. (2013). Renewing the Senses. A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part II

Voices of Desire

3

Ancient Greek and Biblical Voices

Plato (428/9–347 BCE) Throughout history, philosophers, theologians and literary figures have focused their attention on the phenomenon of longing and desire. Plato expounds his understanding in the Symposium (2008) through the figure of Eros who, symbolising the nature of love, is forever in pursuit of fulfilment and happiness. Never proudly self-possessed the endeavour is driven by the desire for something outside and beyond the limitations of the finite self. This ‘need’ acts ‘as a constant companion’ (Plato, 2008, 203d) and is characterised by ‘going after things of beauty and value’ (203d) and is sought with ‘ingenuity’ (203d). His description of Eros encapsulates a dynamic movement of longing from one state of being to another, higher state and includes the traversing from the mundane and uninspiring to the lofty and transformational, encompassing an experience of goodness and beauty and finally divinely fulfilled happiness. Dalton comments on this dynamic: ‘… Diotima accounts for Eros as anything but a placid and peaceful middle ground. … It is the very principle of movement, of movement away from the ugly, the base and temporal and towards the beautiful, the good and the divine’ (2009, p. 32). Sometimes felt sensuously through its visible and physical form in this world, this insurgent attraction towards beauty is the unstoppable human response to another person’s immortal soul. Benedict XVI argues in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est that the ancient Greeks considered Eros a kind of intoxication involving the overpowering of reason by ‘divine madness’ which tears a person away from her limited existence. It is neither planned nor willed and somehow imposes itself upon a human being (2005, paras 3 and 4). This undeniable, ever-present movement of love towards the beautiful and final union reflects the truth that Eros is somehow rooted in humanity’s being and nature. Plato emphasises beauty above all else in this quest. In Phaedrus, we read that at that time, we, for our part, followed in this band of Zeus … and beheld that blissful sight and spectacle, and were initiated into that mystery, DOI: 10.4324/9781003227540-6

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Voices of Desire which by eternal right is pronounced the most blessed of all mysteries … beauty, beheld at that time in its shining splendour. (Quoted in Pieper, 1995, p. 46)

‘At that time’ denotes the past, including the primordial past, as well as the future, the eschaton. Even on the level of physical beauty nothing compares to this mysterious attraction to splendour. However, Plato is well aware that beauty might awaken a selfish and lustful desire. The key is to realise that beauty is able to prompt the soul to sprout wings again, to soar to the dwelling of the gods from where the soul originated. Beauty enables a promise to be felt if our disposition is right and to experience an expectation; we become oriented towards something not-yet-here. (Pieper, 1995, p. 48) Eros ‘entices our inner existential space to reach for some infinite fulfilment not available here and now except by way of yearning and remembrance’ (1995, pp. 48–49). The one who contemplates earthly beauty remembers the one true beauty and is transported into communion with the gods. Thus, individuals have the capacity and possibility to experience through erotic emotion made pure, a promise of fulfilment more satisfying than sensual experience. Plato speaks of eros as ‘loving yearning, self-giving, and non-calculating rapture’ (quoted in Pieper, 1995, p. 51). Pieper adds that it may be surprising for some to accept that the ability to ‘remember’ and ‘… the wing-giving capacity of Eros leading back to the gods – should reside in such closeness to what is physical, sensual even biological’ (1995, p. 53) but this is the case. We find here a close parallel with Christian understandings and this governs much of my argument about sensual and metaphysical desire in the book. For example, Aquinas was adamant that ‘spiritual’ love cannot take place without passio amoris which claims that the soul cannot be moved without sensory experience: that which is in the mind/soul is first in the senses. Caritas when split off from the passio amoris will not emerge as a human action nor last in living expression. This is supported by postFreudian psychological claims that any blockage and suppression of a person’s emotional life (including sexual attraction) makes love impossible and suffocates caritas. A person cannot free herself from her incarnate, fleshy being (even if she wishes to) and if she foolishly attempts to try this dire consequences will ensue (Mellor and Shilling, 1997). Benedict XVI comments that in Plato’s Phaedrus the contemplation of the encounter with beauty is ‘the salutary emotional shock that makes man leave his shell and sparks his “enthusiasm” by attracting him to what is other than himself’ (quoted in Torevell, 2013, p. 939). Since he has lost his original perfection he ‘is now perennially searching for a healing primitive form. Nostalgia and longing impel him to pursue the quest; beauty prevents him

Ancient Greek and Biblical Voices 85 from being content with mundane, daily life. It causes him to suffer’. He adds: ‘In a Platonic sense we could say that the arrow of nostalgia pierces man, wounds him and in this way gives him wings, lifts him upwards towards the transcendent’ (quoted in Torevell, 2013, p. 939). He quotes the fourteenthcentury Byzantine theologian Nicholas Cabasilas about the inevitable wounding of love. The transcendent bridegroom smittens humankind with an irresistible longing: ‘It is he who has set a ray of his beauty into their eyes. The greatness of the wound already shows the arrow which has stuck home, the longing indicates who has inflicted the wound’ (quoted in Torevell, 2013, p. 939). Longing for unparalleled beauty is a God-given constituent feature of being human, an observation I shall return to later. The lover of beauty longs for and goes in search of the beloved, like the bride in the Song of Songs, wandering the streets of the city, desperate to find the one she loves. Eros is thus the crossing, the traversing movement from one pole of experience to another and Plato describes this journey as one from homelessness and alienation to happiness and contentment. However, this does not involve a return to that which has been lost – a return to a feeling of being at home – but more explicitly the pursuit of something wholly different to what has been experienced before. It may, however, be associated with a feeling of being at home once again. Thus, the transitional state always involves a wrenching apart from the familiar and comforting. This is attested to in Phaedrus when Socrates argues that the soul is borne aloft towards the Divine on the back of Eros. But not everyone flew upwards to join the transcendent path. Hestia, the goddess of home and the hearth, whose being is tied to the essence of things, did not participate in this cosmic cycle at all and stayed where she was. Therefore, it is possible to conclude that the soul cannot transcend adequately by the comforting path of the homely. Ironically, to erase feelings of estrangement in this world, it is necessary to feel the pull of alienation and dislocation from the familiar and secure. As Dalton writes ‘… no soul can erotically transcend without becoming alienated from the homely, without diverging from the paths familiar to it … paths which carries us elsewhere’ (2009, p. 35). In order to make this transition possible, ‘There are a great many different kinds of spirits, then, and one of them is Love’ says Diotima (Plato, 2008, 203a) when explaining that ‘Divinity and humanity cannot meet directly; the gods only ever communicate … with men … by means of spirits’ (2008, 203a). Eros is personalised as a daemon, a messenger between the mortal and the divine, exhibiting a presence (Dalton, 2009, p. 32). It continually strives after and longs for wisdom and beauty which will bring about the fullness of life. Plato believed that for the blossoming of erotic love to take place (as opposed to self-regarding, sexual craving which is animal-like) egotistical desire must be discarded, so that pure love may exist. This striving for a mode of purified love (comparable to the practice of philosophy itself) is a connection with a transcendent reality, one step on the way to spiritual fulfilment which occurs only ‘with the final release of the soul into that world of Ideas from which it

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descended and in which it has its eternal home’ (Scruton, 2001, pp. 1–2). A final and definitive consummation of self-fulfilment is never realised in this world because even in moments of transcendence when the ego is diminished and disparaged, they remain finite and temporary. The legitimate starting point for this transition is the perception and pursuit of beauty in this world. A novella about this kind of longing for beauty which may lead to spiritual transcendence is Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1988). As Aschenbach longs for a glimpse of Tadzio, an epitome of physical and spiritual beauty, his half-awake state conjures up a picture of Socrates advising Phaedrus about the inseparability of beauty, physicality and divinity. In the Phaedrus, Socrates declares that only beauty is at one and the same time divine and visible and thus it is the sensuous lover’s path and the artist’s path to the spirit. He then asks whether this path has pitfalls: ‘Or do you think rather (I leave it to you to decide) that this is a path of dangerous charm, very much an errant and sinful path which must of necessity lead us astray?’ (2009, p. 264). This danger and tension will be illuminated in Part III, Chapters 6 and 7 during my discussion of the Arts which examines longing as their overarching theme. The notion of longing for wholeness and happiness is further expounded in the Symposium through Plato’s myth about pride and arrogance. He narrates how Zeus split in two every member of the human race (2008, 190e), due to their ill-acquired ‘strength and power’ and because ‘they were also highly ambitious’ (2008, 190e). Consequently, they began to die out. Zeus then took pity on them and with the rest of the gods decided that sexual desire and love would be the means by which their original nature would be drawn back together. This is how longing began, a desire for the other half, striving with all one’s heart to be united with that which has been split asunder due to pride, a desire to regain integrity and wholeness (2008, 192a). The heart’s desire according to this story is eagerly awaiting to be united and fused with the one it loves, to be one in union, instead of two: ‘“Love” is just the name we give to the desire for and pursuit of wholeness’ (2008, 192c). Such integration is crucial to living a fulfilled life. Platonic longing, therefore, is inextricably tied to Love and it is this virtue which should be encouraged and sustained. It is a vital dynamic of our nature that we long for the perfection of love, the ideal, hinted at in personal, human experiences of love. Aristophanes ends his speech by proclaiming: We human beings will never attain happiness unless we find perfect love, unless we each come across the love of our life and thereby recover our original nature. In the context of this ideal, it necessarily follows that in our present circumstances the best thing is to get as close to the ideal as possible, and one can do this by finding the person who is his heart’s delight. (2008, 193c) The notion of the ‘heart’s delight’ both human and divine underpins much of my argument.

Ancient Greek and Biblical Voices 87 The Song of Songs: ‘Driven by Nature’ The definitive Jewish and Christian exposition of the analogy of metaphysical and sexual longing is contained in the Song of Songs, the most widely read Biblical book in the Middle Ages and it takes up several of the themes Plato rehearsed. It emphasises that the intrinsic nature of a wo(man) is to seek wholeness in union with a ‘delightful’ other. Without this, as Benedict XVI writes in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est ‘… man is somehow incomplete’, since he is always ‘driven by nature to seek in another the part that can make him whole’ (2005, para 11, my italics). Human and divine love integrates the self holistically if pursued selflessly. In Genesis Adam is a seeker, a person of longing, one who desires and yearns to be with another who will make him the complete person he is meant to be, but he ruins this possibility by his pride and disobedience of God’s laws (Bennett and Torevell, 2021). The author of Genesis states that it was not good that the man was alone; therefore, ‘a helper as his partner’ was created (Gen. 2:18). Human desire seeks the ‘object’ of its desire: ‘Longing … is rarely separated from the object of longing – the Other is my longing, it is an experience of the one who is desired and is propelled by his/her embodiment’ observes Scruton (2001, p. 85). It is fitting, therefore, that ‘a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh’ (Gen. 2:24), the object of his love, sexual union with another involves flesh touching flesh, an action of haptic intimacy, echoing how deep the need for cleaving and integration is. Any unwanted disruption of this longing for wholesome touching and union is bound to be painful since human beings are destined, for their own happiness, to cleave to an(other) through a one-to one-erotic embracing (Griffiths, 2018, p. 60). Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is the most dramatic exposure of this strife when they are separated from each other due to circumstances beyond their control. Romeo tells the friar he would rather die than be banished from Juliet. Originally written for Jewish wedding feasts the Song of Songs endorses this legitimate longing for human companionship to create wholeness. It has invited numerous allegorical interpretations of this relationship. One suggests that the highly eroticised description of the lovers figures the love of God for Israel, His church and for every individual (S. of S. 1:5–2:7). Elliott adds an incarnational interpretation and contends that although the Song of Songs did not actually drive Christology, it suggests the inherent attractiveness of Christ and had a subtle influence on the doctrine by being given a Christological hermeneutic in places. The Groom is clearly the Word in his incarnate state, seeking out, attracting and making himself available to humanity, while the Bride is the humanity, attracted, gathered in, and rejoicing. (2011, p. 13)

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He also contends that for ‘… many Jewish commentators the Song was related to God’s self-revelation in his deeds. For them it was a song recounting God’s leading and instructing of Israel … even the manifestation of his very self at the Red Sea …’ (2011, p. 4) However, as Exum sensibly advises, the original intention of the book’s author was not bound up with allegory (2005). The text celebrates the beauty and dignity of sexual longing and union and is essentially a sacred celebration of erotic intimacy. She argues that although the text has been allegorised in many different ways throughout history, a non-allegorical reading is most likely what the authors intended. Wright Knust, in a similar vein, contends the Song is essentially about desire: ‘… both the poem’s beauty and its force depend upon sensual arousal and the awakening of erotic sentiments. And, interestingly enough, once awakened, desire – not marriage or childbearing – remains the focus’ (2011, p. 27). This, more than any other book in the Bible, refuses to be limited by common notions of family values and ‘celebrates pleasure for pleasure’s sake’ (2011, p. 25). The lovers pursue their love urgently, without consulting the wishes of others: Sexually forthcoming and erotically charged, the poem experiments with both language and bodies in ways which remain provocative and fertile to generations of readers, whether they prefer to read the poem literally, as a frank description of sexual longing, or spiritually, as an extended metaphor expressive of the love between humanity and God. (Wright Knust, 2011, p. 33) For Plato as well as for the Jewish and the Christian traditions as I have alluded to, the experience of love recounted in the Song involves a kind of ‘divine madness’ (theia mania) which, by overpowering the restrictive tendency of reason, enables wo(man) to experience supreme happiness. The beloved in the Song is ‘madly in love’, a condition which is known through intense feeling and sensation. Romeo berates Friar Lawrence after his banishment because ‘Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel’ (3. 3. l. 64). From Greek, Jewish and Christian perspectives, once the experience of being in love becomes apparent, a far greater Reality than the finite experience is felt. Spiritual ascent occurs even if it carries within its folds wounds and disappointments. The descent of love into lust is base and ugly and is its opposite. That is why prostitution is a devastating and dehumanising (if at times a financially necessary) experience for those involved. The theological and spiritual intention of the Song is to encourage readers to believe that human beings, as they begin to form intimate, sexual relationships of ‘divine madness’ move analogically into another place, into God’s sphere, a ‘primordial aspiration’ Benedict XVI claims. It allows them to ‘… enter into union with God … a unity which entails simultaneously, that they both remain themselves and yet are fully one’ (2005, para 10). Identity is enhanced, never negated by loving union with another and the Divine.

Ancient Greek and Biblical Voices 89 The longing for human intimacy is also prefaced on a more ancient divine longing and covenantal relationship with humanity – God’s desire for us and our reciprocal response. Benedict XVI alludes to this occurrence as God’s bonding to humanity and humanity’s bonding to God. It gives attention to the never-adulterous, loyal, unconditional exemplar of Biblical divine love, an inspiration and aspiration for human beings to follow. Commenting on 2:8–17 of the Song, St Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) writes that it ‘sets out for us matters that evoke a desire for contemplation of transcendent goods’ (2012, p. 151). This desire encapsulates a staged movement of ascent. The hearing of the ‘voice’ of the object of desire, the One yearned for, never gives absolute ‘conviction about the nature of the One sought’. Longing does not bring about absolute assurance but ‘plausible conviction about the identity of the One who speaks’ (2012, p. 151). It is elusive for the alluring sound of the one desired/longed for is heard, but the seeker ‘does not seem to have laid hold of what she seeks’ (2012, p. 151). At first, it is literally out of the seeker’s grasp and echoes of the Beloved remain incomprehensible and unknowable to rational thinking and grasping. The lover who seeks becomes aware that (s)he will only ever discover it in shadow and darkness, never in conceptual clarity: ‘I am seeking what is hidden in the darkness – but the object of my love has flown from the net of my thought’ movingly writes Gregory (2012, p. 193). However, the mystery involved in the encounter does not dissipate and if accepted trustingly becomes a sign of increasing personal maturity towards integration. Elements of darkness need to be cleansed in order for the human/divine call to be heard and its presence felt (2012, p. 201). The best way of answering the call of desire is by walking the paths of self-control, diligence and virtuous living which allow the divine/human thirst to become embedded in the hearts of those who seek union: ‘The chamber of the heart’ is naturally receptive to the divine within’ comments Gregory (2012, p. 195). However, the desire for union is ultimately God’s work within his creation and is recognised through infused feelings of lack and insufficiency within the human heart. St Gregory points this out by alluding to Psalm 62:2: ‘being dry and desolate, and unwatered’ she ‘took the divine thirst into itself’ (2012, p. 201). What becomes apparent in these stirrings of reciprocal longing are the brief snatches of fleeting beauty which sustain the person towards the final goal: ‘That is why she says Behold, he is coming – not stopping or abiding, so as to be made known to an observer by standing still but snatching himself out of sight before he is perfectly known’ (2012, p. 153). There is inevitably some despair or wound in this fleeting experience because not acquiring a precise, stable encounter with the One desired necessarily brings about an abiding absence as well as presence (2012, p. 183). Nevertheless, what is initially vaguely heard and felt gradually over time becomes more definitively experienced, heard, beheld and looked upon. First comes the invisible voice, ‘The voice of my beloved’ Songs of Songs 2: 8); then the voice presses towards visibility, witnessed most definitely in the incarnation: ‘Look, there he

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stands’ (Songs of Songs 2: 9). The oral beckoning becomes manifest in the incarnation as the Beloved, the Word made flesh and visible, the Christ, the One prefaced by the oral, prophetic utterings of the Old Testament. The Beloved can never get enough of this life changing experience of expectant love and so moves on eagerly to the next stage which enfolds even more passionate longing and loving. Gregory explains that desire increases in proportion to her progress towards the Light which eternally shines out and towards good things which are always beyond. The bold exhortation to ‘Rise up’ becomes a definitive encouragement to ascend with confidence to the Divine and ‘… there will never be any wanting of an up-rising to end’ nor ‘for one who runs to the Lord will opportunity for the divine be used up’ (2012, p. 171). She must confidently ‘yearn for the Lord’s caress’ (2012, p. 183). The movement is endlessly transformative for the lover becomes ‘whatever it determines upon’ and ‘… undergoes alteration in accord with what it seeks’ (2012, p. 113). Glory is received and celebrated (2 Cor. 3:16). The ongoing intensity of the lovers’ experience of yearning is one of ceaseless, staged movement and change, a journey of illuminating growth through, powerful, unceasing longing. Gregory writes, ‘the soul was always being changed for the better by comparison with each current stage of growth and so never stopping at the good she had already grasped’ (2012, p. 187). The ‘beautiful one, conceived as Light, mingles with the nature of wo(man)’ (2012, p. 159). However, ‘the mirror that is human nature does not become beautiful (fair) until it has drawn close to the Beautiful and been formed by the image of divine Beauty’ (2012, p. 163). That is why the Song uses the word ‘close’ twice. Proximity is crucial; separation a disadvantage. Nevertheless, a patient and gradual approach to the beautiful is encouraged – a too hasty touch is unadvisable and fails to bring about the wished for effect. Each step exhibits a more refined and intense espousal of the Beloved and the seeker is profoundly changed as (s)he makes the journey, a gradual moving along the path towards consummation. Gregory is aware of the paradox the scripture offers. On the one hand, it uses images of erotic desire to describe the soul’s burning passion (empathes) for God while on the other, it advocates the quelling of the indulgently fleshly aspects of sexual desire (Cadenhead, 2018, p. 128). Cadenhead contends this analogical use of erotic and fleshy language is intentional and helpful for Gregory hopes the soul will love God ‘as much as the body has a bent for what is akin to it’ (quoted in Cadenhead, 2018, p. 128). Gregory is hopeful his commentary on the Song will bring about spiritual change and that the text’s ‘compelling description of erotic love for Christ will quell carnal desires and lead its readers to the discovery of an ascetically inflected vision of transformation’ (Cadenhead, 2018, p. 129). He trusts the reader will discover what the love of God entails by first reflecting on sexual desire. St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) offers another helpful contribution on this dynamic by tracing the incremental metaphysical ascent from the material and somatic to the spiritual and the Absolute, never denying the

Ancient Greek and Biblical Voices 91 importance of the former. He argues that a natural and gradual movement of ascent is able to occur through reflection on the incarnation which bridges the gap between these two poles. God’s becoming man in Christ served a pastoral intent since it allowed Christians to dwell on human physicality first and then ascend gradually to the non-material. Christ wanted to recapture the affections of humanity by first drawing them to the salutary love for his own humanity and then gradually they could raise themselves to a more invisible love (Bernard of Clairvaux, 2014). Many of Bernard’s sermons on the Song emphasise some of the connections between physical and spiritual love. For examples, he uses the image of kissing the Lord’s feet, hands and mouth as a creative analogy for staged spiritual growth supported by grace: ‘I do not wish to be suddenly on the heights, my desire is to advance by degrees’ (2014, pp. 13–14). It is not possible to be consumed by materialism one day and on the next to see the glory of God’s face. You must pass from the feet, to the hand and then finally to the mouth gradually. The ‘hand’ symbolises the repentance and asceticism necessary for spiritual growth and is a consequence of God ‘giving you the grace to aspire’ (2014, p. 14). This involves the ‘beauty of temperance’ and the ‘fruits that befit repentance’ (2014, p. 14). Grace strengthens the endeavour and encourages individuals to knock on the door of entry more consistently and resolutely. He concludes by describing the operation of the spiritual senses with: And finally, when we have obtained these favours through many prayers and tears, we humbly dare to raise our eyes to his mouth, so divinely beautiful, not merely to gaze upon it, but I say it with fear and trembling – to receive its kiss. (2014, p. 14) He who is ‘joined to him in a holy kiss becomes through his good pleasure, one spirit with him’ (2014, p. 14). The incarnation – which he describes as the ‘kiss’ of God made man – is the means by which the human–divine union occurs: ‘The mouth that kisses signifies the Word who assumes human nature’ (2014, p. 7). He continues: ‘Normally the touch of the lip on lip is the sign of the loving embrace of hearts, but this conjoining of natures brings together the human and divine, shows the reconciling “to himself all things, whether on earth or heaven”’. This was ‘the kiss for which just men yearned under the old dispensation, foreseeing as they did that in him they would “find happiness and a crown of rejoicing”’ (2014, pp. 7–8). The refrain ‘My beloved’ occurs 36 times in the Song and is followed once by the evocative phrase ‘is mine and I am his’ (Songs of Songs 2:16–17) suggesting an exclusive, intimate communion to the relationship. As Griffiths comments, such words express ‘confidence in an ineradicable intimacy coupled with a deep note of purpose’; the beloved is ‘for him’, ‘as gift and end’ and he is ‘for me’ as ‘gift and end’ (2011, p. 72). He continues: ‘This formula, here spoken by her, is repeated verbatim by him at 4:6. Repetitions of this kind ‘when spoken by both

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partners, are a strong indication of symmetrical reciprocity between the two’ (2011, p. 73). The closest scriptural echo is expressed in the covenant relationship in Jeremiah 32: 37: ‘And they will be a people for me and I will be their God’. In 6:1 of the Song of Songs after praising her lover’s body, she is asked by the daughters of Jerusalem where he is for he seems to have disappeared and gone away. Presence and absence are strongly revealed here – they sit side by side, like God’s appearance and disappearance; inevitably, when he is absent, she wants him back, as indicated in the lament (1:16). Just as the Song’s lover speaks and is gone, so the Lord speaks and then speaks no more, a characteristic echoed in Romeo and Juliet’s exchanges after their first night together: Juliet asks: ‘Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day / It was the nightingale, and not the lark’ to which Romeo answers, ‘I must be gone and live, or stay and die’ (3. 5. 1.2, 11). Similarly, the dancers in Swan Lake meet and then depart sorrowfully from each other, with the anticipation of the audience wishing them to return on stage and to be with each other once again. The first mention of a bed – the symbol of lovemaking – occurs in 1.17. It is called a ‘flowerful bed’ and recalls desire and fertility. It is in a house whose beams are of cedar and whose ceiling is cypress, decorations mentioned in the description of Solomon’s Temple (1Kgs). Thus, it implies that the lovers’ bed is in the Lord’s house (Griffiths, 2011, p. 48). Allegorically, this place for making love figures humanity’s adoration and embracing of the Divine. Human love participates in Israel’s and the church’s worship of God. The bed also suggests a mingling of the human race with the Divine, the erotic venue for enjoyment, where the senses are fully and creatively engaged by the desire for union (2011, p. 51). They delight in the Lord, just as human lovemaking does: ‘We want to taste our love as well as see and touch and smell and hear them’ writes Griffiths (2011, p. 83). In the Eucharist especially, Christians ‘lick and suck and ingest the Lord and find his taste good’ (2011, p. 83). The author of the Song was no gnostic hater of the body. Griffiths advises that the ‘kiss’ and the ‘mouth’ of the opening verses of the Song signify the Word’s power ‘by which he enlightens the mind and, as by some word of love addressed to her … It is of this happening that the kiss, which we give to one another in church at the holy mysteries, is a figure’ (2011, p. 9). As you come to see the beloved as a figure for the Lord’s IsraelChurch and yourself as a member of that Body, so her desires come to figure yours, whatever your sex and gender …’ (2011, p. 9). Of all the books of the Bible, the opening verses describe the acts of love in erotically sensual terms and are referred to in gustatory, tactile and olfactory ways. They are ‘better than wine’ and ‘fragrant with your best ointment’. This embodied sensorium is the way chosen to describe the deeply pleasurable and intimate nature of the divine–human encounter or embrace. Wine serves as an explicit simile and an implicit metaphor for lovemaking, and always as a suggestion of the intoxicating pleasures of that activity (2011, p. 10). Ointment’s fragrance becomes a symbol of erotic delight. You might rub it on your lover’s body. Human lovemaking engages all the senses. We want to taste our lovers, as

Ancient Greek and Biblical Voices 93 well as see and touch and smell and hear them: ‘Sustain me with raisin cakes / fill me with apples / for I languish with love’ (Songs of Songs 2:5). Analogically, the sexual desire and yearning figure both the Lord’s love for us and ours for Him, as well as indicating that our love for one another is what it is because it participates in His for us. The Wound of Love As indicated earlier, the experience of the bride is not without feelings of pain, nostalgia and loss. In Song of Songs 2: 10, she is told to ‘Get up, O my beloved …’ implying she must not remain alone and frustrated but seek the company of the one she loves. Such exhortation implies sadness and the possibility of failure, since she might never find her lover wandering in the streets of the city. The experience of ascent and transfiguration is always accompanied by the woundedness of love. Gregory of Nyssa recalls the Biblical imagery of archery and arrow to express this idea. It is God’s chosen arrow’ (Is. 49.2) to the elect, dipping the triple point at its tip in the Spirit of Life. … As the soul is raised up by these divine elevations, she sees within herself the sweet dart of love that wounded her, and she glories in the wound: I am wounded with love. Indeed, it is a good wound and a sweet pain by which life penetrates the soul; for by the tearing of the arrow she opens, as it were, a door, an entrance into herself. For no sooner does she receive the dart of love, than the image of the archery is transformed into a scene of nuptial love. (Gregory, 1962, pp. 178–179). Laird comments that ‘Not only does the arrow tip of faith mediate union with and the indwelling presence of the bridegroom, it also causes the bride’s desire for the Beloved to expand’ (2007, p. 96). One might recall here Bernini’s sculpture of St Teresa’s ecstasy – an image both eroticised and divine to communicate the intensity of the one pierced by transcendent love. There is a substantial feeling of languidness in the Song of Songs, the inherent possibility of non-reciprocal, unrequited love. Human love differs from divine love, since the former may be affected by false claims, promising what it cannot ever deliver – an eternal, unbroken bliss. Unlike God’s love in which adulterous liaisons are impossible due to His nature, finite relationships are always open to betrayal and disloyalty. For human lovers, sexual restlessness is rife and the only possibility of finding unquestioned, monogamous rest is in God (Griffiths, 2011, p. 75). The Song of Songs indicates that human love can be transfigured and can share in the constant, unceasing love and knowledge of the Divine. But although the interpenetration of divine desire with corporeal desire is maintained throughout the Song of Songs there is evidence of opposition and difference (Gregory, 2012, p. 205). As Gregory insists, ‘divine beauty evokes love because it is fearsome’ and ‘it

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reveals itself as coming from elsewhere than corporeal beauty’ (2012, p. 203) residing in a location not contained within the material world, but beyond it. That is why human lovers need to be strengthened by divine love since it is characterised by its unremitting, loyal, never-to-be-broken promises. Other Biblical Texts Besides the Song of Songs, other Biblical texts offer insights into the intensity of metaphysical longing and desire. The psalmist offers that ‘As a hart longs for flowing streams / So longs my soul for Thee’ (Ps. 42: 1). He languishes because he does not see the face of God and his tears have flowed night and day because of this absence. He is taunted by others who ask him – where is your God? But the psalm offers hope; his soul has no need of ‘disquiet’ for he remembers the things God has done from the ‘land of Jordan and of Hermon’, how ‘deep calls to deep’ (v 7) and how he will praise Him again, the God who is his help (v 11). Athanasius exhorts others to say this psalm ‘if in the intense longing for God, you hear the reviling of your enemies and also to ‘not give way to fear but know that such longing bears an immortal fruit, and comfort your soul with hope in God’ (quoted in Blaising and Hardin, 2008, p. 327). Augustine, too, gives encouragement by this psalm to thirst for ‘the fountain of life’ and although one may be thirsty and parched on my pilgrimage ‘I will be totally satisfied when I arrive’ (2008, pp. 328–320). He tells how from God’s home he is looked down on and ‘from there he arouses me, calls me, guides me and leads me on, and from there he will lead me to journey’s end’ (2008, p. 329). Such desire for God is associated with the inner depth of a human being who ‘calls on another depth when he proclaims to another some part of the faith, some part of the truth, with a view to eternal life’ adds Augustine (2008, p. 329). Gregory of Nyssa’s exegesis likewise draws on the metaphor of thirst – he who thirsts for participation in God ‘draws in as much water as the abundance of his desire draws off’ and he ‘who has received what he desired in himself is full of what he desired’; it ‘transforms the one who has embraced it to itself and imparts to this person a portion of its own power’ (2008, pp. 328–329). The description of longing as thirst is taken up again in psalm 63: 1: ‘my soul thirsts for thee; my flesh faints for thee / as in a dry and weary land where no water is’. Psalm 83/84 exhibits a longing for God’s dwelling place, a resting place, a home. Ambrose pens of verses 1 and 2: I long for some place to dwell, a nest for my soul and my body. The birds that fly about to and fro with no restraint, nevertheless, after their flight, have a place and a nest in which to dwell. (Wesselschmidt, 2007, pp. 151–152) This ambition is contrasted with those who desire ‘worthless things’ (Ps. 24:4) and are unable to find rest. Psalm 73 takes up the connection between feelings of

Ancient Greek and Biblical Voices 95 bitterness and ignorance and God’s abiding help during such times. The psalmist becomes convinced that the things of earth hold no real attraction for there is nothing upon earth that he desires more than God. He is confident that when his flesh and heart fail him, God never will. Ambrose writes of verse 25: This means: You are my portion, you are abundant to me for all things … I have desired none of the wealth and enticing pleasures of this world. I have no want, for I have been taken up by You and there is nothing further for me to seek … . (Wesselschmidt, 2007, p. 110) Psalm 40 reflects the inseparability between waiting patiently, trusting receptivity, the heart and desire. God draws from the pit the one who with patience cries out putting a new song of praise in his mouth. God does not desire sacrifice and offering but ‘an open ear’ (verse 6). The psalmist’s delight is to do God’s will and to be assured that His law is in his own heart. He pleads that those who desire to do him hurt may be dishonoured and brought to shame. Isaiah 26:8–9 takes up the distinctly Weil-ian theme of patient waiting and desire: ‘In the path of thy judgements, / O Lord, we wait for Thee; / Thy memorial name, is the desire of our soul / My soul yearns for Thee in the night, / my spirit within me earnestly seeks thee’. Gregory the Great interprets ‘night’ as this present life for here we experience a ‘mist of uncertain imaginings’ but in the midst of this uncertainty and obscurity the psalmist longs to behold Him. When a person reaches out for the Truth she is set on fire with love. He records how David thirsted for the living God and asked when he would appear before the face of God; he encourages us too to seek His face continually. Gregory then makes reference to the Song of Songs: ‘I have been wounded with love’ (McKinion, 2004, p. 172). He argues that it is fitting that the soul after bearing in its heart a wound of love brought on by its burning desire should reach out for healing at the sight of the doctor. He goes on to warn of the dangers of insularity and self-possession: ‘The heart of a person who does not seek the face of his Creator is hardened by his wickedness, because in itself it remains cold’ (2004, p. 172). However, if he burns with a desire of following him whom the heart loves ‘it runs since the fire of love has melted it’ (2004, p. 172). In fact, desire makes the person anxious because everything that used to please him in this world becomes worthless and it finds nothing agreeable outside of its Creator … Nothing brings it consolation in its sadness as long as the one it desires is not beheld’ (2004, p. 172). References Benedict XVI. (2005). God Is Love. Deus Caritas Est. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Bennett, M. and Torevell, D. (2021). The Naked Truth: Temptation and the Likely ‘Fall’ of Catholic Education. Religions, 12(11), 2–16.

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Bernard of Clairvaux. (2014). Sermons on the Song of Songs. New York: Beloved Publications. Bishops of England and Wales. (2022). Seeking Our Hearts’ Desire. A Reflection from the Bishops of England and Wales Following the Compilation of the Synodal National Synthesis Document. https://www.cbcew.org.uk/bishops-reflectionsynodal-national-synthesis/ (Accessed 10.12.2022). Blaising, C. and Hardin, C. (2008). Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. Old Testament. Psalms 1–50. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Cadenhead, R. (2018). The Body and Desire. Gregory of Nyssa’s Ascetical Theology. Oakland: University of California Press. Dalton, P. (2009). Longing for the Other: Levinas and Metaphysical Desire. Duquesne: Duquesne University Press. Elliott, M. (2011). The Song of Songs and Christology in the Early Church, 381–451. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. Exum, C. (2005). Song of Songs: A Commentary. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Gregory of Nyssa. (1962). From Glory to Glory. Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s Mystical Writings. H. Musurillo (Ed., trans.) London: John Murray. Gregory of Nyssa. (2012). Homilies on the Song of Songs. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. Griffiths, P. (2011). Song of Songs. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press. Griffiths, P. (2018). Christian Flesh. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Laird, M. (2007). Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith. Union, Knowledge and Divine Presence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mann, T. (1988). Death in Venice and Other Stories. London: Vintage Books. McKinion, S. (2004). Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. Old Testament. Isaiah 1–29. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Mellor, P. and Shilling, C. (1997). Re-forming the Body. Religion, Community and Modernity. London: Sage publications. Pieper, J. (1995). “Divine Madness”: Plato’s Case Against Secular Humanism. San Francisco: St. Ignatius Press. Pieper, J. (1998). Leisure the Basis of Culture. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press. Plato. (2008). Symposium. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plato. (2009). Phaedrus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scruton, R. (2001). Sexual Desire. A Philosophical Investigation. London: Phoenix Press. Shakespeare, W. (2012). Romeo and Juliet. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury. Torevell, D. (2013). “Wounded by the Arrow of Beauty”’: The Silent Call of Art in. The Heythrop Journal, 54(6), 932–941. Wesselschmidt, Q. (Ed.) (2007). Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. Old Testament. Psalms 51–150. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Wright Knust, J. (2011). Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire. San Francisco, California : HarperOne.

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The Twentieth Century Simone Weil (1909–1943)

I now turn to significant (post)modern writers who have embraced desire as one of their central concerns. I begin with the French philosopher Simone Weil. Her influential time spent at the Benedictine monastery of Solemnes, France during her short life gave her the opportunity to experience a monastic ethos which would inform much of her writings on beauty, longing, attention, waiting and silence. In an essay called Human Personality completed during the last year of her life 1942–1943 she writes: ‘Beauty is the supreme mystery of the world … it stimulates hunger but has no nourishment for the part of the soul which looks to this world for sustenance. It feeds only the part of the soul which gazes’ (2005, p. 92). Weil combines the agonising desire for beauty and love with the necessity of attention: ‘If one does not seek to evade the exquisite anguish it inflicts, then desire is gradually transformed into love; and one begins to acquire the faculty of pure and disinterested attention’ (2005, p. 92). Johns comments that its original meaning, derived from the Latin, attendere, ‘was “to stretch out something” “towards something or someone” so the word implies an object or a relationship’ (2019, p. 32). And for Weil every act of attention aids prayer. Her understanding of beauty is interlaced with the experience of stillness and ‘non-perception’. In Waiting on God she writes that because beauty is a miracle something extraordinary occurs and ‘ … the miracle is raised to a second degree when the soul receives an impression of beauty which, while it is beyond all sense perception is no abstraction, but real and direct as the impression caused by a song at the moment it reaches our ears’ (1978, p. 165). She adds: ‘God is pure beauty. This is incomprehensible since beauty because of its attraction has to do with the senses. To speak of an imperceptible beauty must seem a misuse of language to anyone who has any sense of exactitude’ (1978, p. 164). However, this ‘beyond all sense perception’ is a type of bodily ‘sensing’ since we become ‘impressed’ by the silent beauty of God and of the world. Everything happens as though, by a miraculous favour, our very senses themselves had been made aware that silence is not the absence of words, but DOI: 10.4324/9781003227540-7

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something infinitely more real than sounds, and the centre of a harmony more perfect than anything which a combination of sounds can produce (1978, p. 161). Weil acknowledges that the difference between the silence of this world and the silence of God: ‘There is a silence in the beauty of the universe which is like a noise when compared with the silence of God’ (1978, p. 165). Once we have waited on and then experienced God in the centre of the soul, all physical realities are given their true significance: ‘Our neighbour, our friends, religious ceremonies, and the beauty of the world, do not fall to the level of unrealities after the soul has had direct contact with God. On the contrary, it is only then that these things become real’ (1978, p. 166) which in turn produces a deeper love of our afflicted neighbour, friends, spiritual practices and physical beauty: He who has passed through this adventure has a deeper love than ever for those who suffer affliction and for those who help him in his own, for his friends, for religious practices and for the beauty of the world. (1978, p. 161) Weil believes individual souls have a natural God-ward direction (1978, p. 165). We are, of course, free not to respond to this orientation and are able to exercise a misplaced rule over the universe, ourselves and God Himself, because at times ‘we do not know how to use his name aright’ (1978, p. 166). She writes of the spiritual quest: ‘The effort which brings a soul to salvation is like the effort of looking or listening; it is the kind of effort by which a fiancée accepts her lover. It is an act of attention and consent, whereas what language designates as will is something suggestive of muscular will’ (1978, p. 146). Nevertheless, longing brings about that which is longed for: ‘In the eternal darkness, the crow, unable to find any food, longed for light, and the earth was illuminated’ (1978, p. 68). The worst lie or falsehood is to persuade oneself that one is not hungry: ‘The soul only knows for certain that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. A child does not stop crying if we suggest to it that perhaps there is no bread. It goes on crying just the same’ (1978, p. 162). She adds: ‘The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry’ (1978, p. 162). Weil is sure that most people come to realise that there is no permanent good to be had in this world. Their own experience tells them this is the case and so longing for infinite goodness is ever present. In Forms of the Implicit Love of God (2005) she writes that hunger for God is a Truth which can easily be snatched away or made dim. Intelligence, too, can only be led by desire since willpower has practically no place in study. It only grows and bears fruit in joy for the ‘joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running’ (2005, p. 71).

Modern Voices 99 This Truth often becomes covered up by lies and denials which inflict a pain and which may result in a kind of morbidity. But for those who live with facing the Truth for any length of time, a spiritual death in the person naturally occurs: ‘Such knowledge strikes more surely than a sword. … After a time it kills everything within us which constitutes our ego’ (1978, p. 162). In order to live with this experience we have to love Truth more than life itself. Weil claims that once we have experienced this kind of death, God directs us but not with any obvious beckoning. What is required on the part of the one who waits is motionlessness, the non-aversion of the eyes and ceaseless listening which ensures deafness to those things which attempt to shock or disturb us. If the soul does not wait attentively for a fleeting glimpse of God’s presence to appear, it can become easily taken over with those things which are idolatrous or it might become content with a form of belief which is little more than abstraction or verbalisation. She draws from one of her favourite saints – John of the Cross – to emphasise her point about waiting. It might include a period of a ‘dark night’. When the ‘unbeliever loves God’ she still ‘cries out because (s)he is hungry’ (1978, p. 163). We see her dissatisfaction here with any easily formulated belief or easily defended ‘dogma’ which is the idolatrous result of paying little attention to the spiritual senses through careful waiting and desire. The senses may deceive but faith is strong in a person to whom the divine has been revealed: ‘In what concerns divine things, belief is not fitting. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God’ (1978, p. 161). Such surety comes from fleeting moments of recognition, often after long periods of waiting: ‘If after a long period of waiting God allows them to have an indistinct intuition of his light or reveals himself in person, it is only for an instant. Once more they have to remain still, attentive, inactive’ (1978, p. 163). Weil tells us that it is ‘treason’ to question that God alone is worthy of our love. This amounts to ‘turning away our eyes’, to stopping, waiting and listening; it is as if we have put our spiritual senses on hold. Love must characterise looking and waiting: ‘ … love is the soul’s looking’ (1978, p. 164). In summary, Weil suggests that desire consists of being attuned to the divine by the cultivation of an aura of attentive waiting. Although this might, on one level, be construed as passive rather than active, it is a form of ‘action’ which takes considerable energy and willpower to ensure the waiting is not simply an experience of futile boredom but characterised by alertness and expectancy. It is not an active seeking, but a judicious hope that the waiting will be rewarded. Drawing from Greek drama which she loved, she refers to Electra’s waiting for Orestes. Even at the very moment, she believed he might no longer arrive and that his existence might be in doubt, she continued to stay focused on him rather than succumbing to ‘former associates’. She ‘did not want wealth and consideration unless they came through Orestes’ (1978, p. 164). She preferred his absence more than their empty presence: ‘Electra did not seek Orestes, she waited for him. When she was convinced he no longer existed … she did not on that account return to her former associates. She drew back from them … . She preferred the

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absence of Orestes to the presence of anyone else’ (1978, p. 164). The alluring power of competitive, superficial forms of power, prestige and comfort had no hold on her: ‘ … never for an instant did she dream of employing another method which could obtain a luxurious and honoured life for her; the method of reconciliation with those in power’ (1978, p. 164). Once Orestes saw this loyal waiting of Electra, he could no longer remain absent from her and he declared himself. Weil here uses the word ‘proof’ to suggest the utter reality of the encounter with the divine. Waiting reveals a certainty which convinces the person who waits that their Saviour exists: ‘At that moment Orestes could hold out no longer. … Electra saw him, she heard him, she touched him’ (1978, p. 164). In Gravity and Grace, she adds: ‘Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence’ (1972, p. 15). The soul has this capacity to see, hear and touch the divine presence. This understanding underpins all of Weil’s accounts of human love, what she terms ‘indirect loves’, the pale reflections of the one and only Love. Of Gravity and Grace

Weil recognises attention to divine things are at its highest point in prayerful attention (1972, p. 105). Prayer is not about a willed tightening of the muscles but a drawing back: ‘By pulling at the bunch, we make all the grapes fall to the ground’ (1972, p. 106). Full attention is necessary for the ‘I’ to disappear involving a reversal of the self’s pride. She must give up all notions of the ego in order to pay attention to that which in fact cannot be conceived (1972, p. 107). The downward weight of gravity producing an existence located on the earth and susceptible to evil can then be replaced by an upward, spiritual movement of grace. Besides the law of gravity which causes the soul to sink into evil, there is another force which leads it to God. In summary, two forces rule the universe: light and gravity. The trick of spiritual living is to desire the pull of the light over the pull of gravity. Seamus Heaney in his lecture The Redress of Poetry (1995) refers to Weil’s Gravity and Grace which is informed by ‘ … the idea of counterweighting, of balancing out the forces, of redress – tilting the scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium’ (quoted in Weil, 2005, pp. xi–xii) as he seeks to address an overriding aim of poetry. He also notes George Herbert’s poems The Pulley and Love to strengthen his point. Weil was particularly influenced by the latter. Training is paramount. She exhorts individuals to train their attention and prepare themselves to receive the object of desire. She writes: ‘Attention is bound up with desire. Not with the will but with desire – or more exactly, consent’ (1972, p. 107). Drawing from the monastic and ascetical ideal of akcesis she is aware that any glimmer of the divine comes as a result of a disciplined routine of spiritual exercises involving the will, love and knowledge. Pride, as in a conventional list of the vices, is the main reason why delay in progression along the spiritual path occurs. Weil has a remedy for it: ‘Every

Modern Voices 101 time we catch ourselves involuntarily indulging in a proud thought, we must for a few seconds turn the full gaze of our attention upon the memory of some humiliation in our past life, choosing the most bitter, the most intolerable we can think of’ (1972, p. 112). The attraction of illusory things must be resisted at all times. Plato’s account of the cave is a warning about being imprisoned by false values: ‘It is also in relation to good that we are chained down like captives (attachment). We accept false values which appear to us and when we think we are acting we are in reality motionless, for we are still confined in the same system of values’ (Weil, 1972, p. 45). The physical senses can easily draw us into a world of illusion. What is required is to recognise what she terms the necessity enshrined in these sensations: ‘Why these things and not others? Because that is how it is’ (1972, p. 46). Weil’s account of ‘decreation’ is central to her thinking. God’s love for each person ‘is love for himself through us. Thus, he who gives us our being loves in us the acceptance of not being’ (1972, p. 28). ‘Necessity is the screen set between God and us so that we can be. It is for us to pierce through the screen set between God and us so that we can be. It is for us to pierce through the screen so that we cease to be’ (1972, p. 28). Philippians 2:7 is the text she uses to show the importance of abasement. Just as he emptied Himself of his divinity ‘so we must empty ourselves of the false divinity with which we were born’ (1972, p. 30). Her prayer is that she becomes nothing: ‘May God grant me to become nothing. In so far as I become nothing, God loves himself through me’ (1972, p. 30). This notion is not unrelated to that of affliction and Weil makes the bold claim that only ‘unconsoled affliction’ can secure the attainment of total detachment from the things of the world (1972, p. 12). Referring to Buddhism’s teaching about the extinction of false desire and the notion of amor fati (acceptance of one’s destiny), Weil takes a radical view of how life ought to be lived. The spiritual sense of ‘touch’ only becomes real once we detach our desire (even from good things) and simply wait. Her own personal experience has taught her that this kind of selfless waiting is eventually satisfied. It is a radically different kind of desire to sensuous desire and involves an act not of the will but an act of love which consents to the absolute good. The satisfaction of waiting is the touching of the absolute good (1972, p. 13). It is important that individuals fix their will on the void, but this void is potentially plenitude and God fills it. It is never an intellectual process which prepares the ground for this experience. The good brought about might seem like nothingness but this nothingness is not unreal since ‘compared with it everything in existence is unreal’ (1972, p. 13). She claims that an independent reality can only become perceptible by detachment. A ‘test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure’ (1972, p. 47). She adds: ‘God and the supernatural are hidden and formless in the universe. … Otherwise there would run the risk of having something imaginary under the name of God’ (1972, p. 50). Michael Raposa claims in Boredom and the Religious Imagination (1999) that waiting comes from watching and is a supreme exercise of attention:

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‘Take heed, watch, for you do not know when the time will come’. It is also an act of interpretation since: ‘This attention will take the form of a looking for signs that the person I am waiting for has arrived. So it is simultaneously an exercise in interpretation’ (1999, p. 170). In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot discussed further in Chapter 6, Estragon says, ‘Look – the leaves on the tree’. His attentive waiting is a desire for meaning, ‘a waiting on meaning’. This kind of waiting involves a special reward suggests Weil: ‘ … joy is the sweetness of contact with the love of God, that affliction is the wound of this same contact when it is painful, and that only the contact matters, not the manner of it’ (1972, p. 53). But ‘It is not in our power to travel in a vertical direction. If however, we look heavenwards for a long time, God comes and takes us up. He raises us easily’ (Weil, 1978, p. 147). It is ultimately desire which saves us, not the will. Unlike Stoicism’s emphasis on the muscular will, Christianity does not require this: ‘He should make no muscular effort except in order not to be shaken by evil’ (1978, p. 149). She adds: ‘The right use of the will is a condition of salvation, necessary no doubt but remote, inferior, very subordinate and purely negative. … only sun and water can make the corn grow’ (1978, p. 146). We ‘must be ready to die of hunger or exhaustion rather than change this attitude’ (1978, p. 149). ‘Even if he is told that the master is dead, and even if he believes it, he will not move’ (1978, p. 149). Rather ‘it is desire, piety, and love. It is full of humility’ (1978, p. 148). The attitude of attentiveness which brings salvation is not like other forms of activity. The ‘Greek word is hypomene – waiting and attentiveness and is a form of watchful faithful immobility which lasts indefinitely and cannot be shaken’ (1978, p. 149). Thus, attention animated by patient desire is the foundation of religious practice and growth for Weil. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955)

The French geologist Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin adds a fresh cosmic dimension to the theology of desire. The personal yearning for Truth is always in relation to the unfolding of the cosmos intertwined with the self. In Le Milieu Divin (1962) he writes that human beings naturally seek God and are infused with His grace to do this. To experience the attraction of God, to be sensible of the beauty, the consistency and final unity of being, is the highest and at the same time the most complete of our ‘passivities’ of growth: God tends, by the logic of his creative effort, to make himself sought and perceived by us; Posuit homines … si forte attrectent eum. His prevenient grace is therefore always on the alert to excite our first look and out first prayer. But in the end, the initiative, the awakening always comes from him, and whatever the further developments of our mystical faculties, no progress is achieved in this domain except as the new response to a new gift. (1962, pp. 131–132)

Modern Voices 103 There is a mystical oneness to be recognised between us and the universe: ‘To desire the Parousia, all we have to do is to let the very heart of the earth, as we christianise it, beat within us’ (1962, p. 154). Human and cosmic development is geared towards the Omega point, the ultimate end of confluence and ‘Love must be the driving force towards the Omega. Loving action must unite with all other labourers who surround him’ (1962, p. 141). Pantheism is not the answer to an individual’s quest because it will only end by plunging us back into super-matter unless it leads us towards someone. That someone is Christ: ‘It is in him and him alone that the reckless vow of all love is realised: to lose oneself in what one loves, to sink oneself in it more and more’ (1962, p. 132). An energised, human spirit is the action alone which can bring about the great metamorphosis that God’s creation yearns. The work is for the Omega point which is both the end of the evolutionary process and Christ Himself for all things must come to rest in Him. In Le Milieu Divin he argues love must be the driving force towards the Omega. The only subject ultimately capable of mystical transfiguration is the whole group of mankind forming a single body and a single soul in love. In The Phenomenon of Man, he comments: ‘To perceive cosmic energy ‘at the fount’ we must, if there is a within of things, go down into the internal or radical zone of spiritual attractions’ (1965, p. 291). But it is love alone which is ‘capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfil them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in them’. It is akin to ‘ … lovers in most complete possession of themselves … when lost in each other?’ (1965, p. 292). The ultimate point brings rest. He puts it in terms of physics: ‘ … two realities which seek each other; the severed particle which trembles at the approach of “the rest”’ (1965, p. 293). Fundamental to all of de Chardin’s writings was his desire to find an outcome, way out, an opening or solution (the French word is issue) to the brutality and apparent meaninglessness of the universe. Even after witnessing in the First World War (he was called up for military service in French medical corps) the destruction that fire could pour down on the innocent he used the symbol of fire to express his deep conviction, Hopkins-like, that the word is charged with an unfailing goodness: ‘During every moment that I have lived, the world has gradually been taking on light and fire for me, until it has come to envelop me in one mass of luminosity, glowing from within … ’ (quoted in Braybrooke, 1965, p. 9). He argues that a person’s own evolution lies in her energetic ‘taste for life’ and that the enemy is teadium vitae, feelings of boredom and indifference. Movement towards the Omega will only be sustained by a lively desire and spiritual energy and religion has a vital part to play in this (Torevell, 2007 p. 310). de Chardin’s vision of life is based on the ongoing spiritual transformation of the world to which each person of faith is linked. The Christian with desire, effort and faith is able to find herself more and more identified with a rising and progressive reconciliation of all things due to a universal, divine Presence in creation and the self which is both unifying and immortalising.

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He encourages his fellow human beings ‘to throw themselves into the thick of human effort and endeavour with no stopping for breath’ (1966; Torevell, 2007). His vision of completion is based squarely on an incarnational theology. In April 1916 he writes that: ‘The Incarnation is a making new, a restoration, of all the universe’s forces and powers; Christ is the Instrument, the Centre, the End, of the whole of animate and material creation; through Him everything is created, sanctified, and vivified’ (de Chardin, 1968, p. 58). Much of de Chardin’s writings is centred on the moment when the Parousia will occur, which refers to the ultimate consequence of the incarnation when at the end of time the world will come to God. All good living is a desire to move towards God with joy and energy but the path towards this final point is not an easy one. It involves a complete turning about or reversal of our usual way and thinking and acting, what he refers to as an excentration (1966, p. 31). By this, he means a rejection of what appears to be the progression of an individual and the world in favour of a phase of diminution for which no noticeable compensation will be given. In a letter from Peking dated September 1929, he writes that through the incarnation the whole of the cosmos is filled with the presence of Christ, what he terms pleroma. De Lubac comments that ‘In order to achieve this Christ had to ‘break his circle and so admit and sublimate our imperfections … On our side, we too have to make a similar effort if we are to be enclosed in the higher circle that draws us: this is our death and mortification’ (De Lubac, 1967, p. 61). The universal ‘diaphany’ of Christ which means the vibrant energy, love and radiance which lies at the heart of the universe has only been made possible by the historical death and resurrection of Christ; this needs to be accompanied by our own kenosis. With Christ’s death demands that we travel over a similar terrain and threshold, a critical traversing from where we see and do everything in a new light with a renewed purpose. It entails acknowledging the light of the cross: Towards the peaks, shrouded in mist from our progress human eyes, whither the cross beckons us, we rise by a path which is the way of universal progress … At first sight the bleeding body may seem funereal to us. Is it not from the night that that is shines forth? But if we go nearer we shall recognise the flaming Seraph of Alvernus whose passion and compassion are incendium mentis. The Christian is not asked to swoon in the shadow, but to climb in the light, of the cross. (de Chardin, 1962, pp. 103–104) Moving closer towards old age and death is a positive ‘straining forward’, involving a longing for the Omega–Christ point, the end of cosmogenesis, the culmination of the process of hominisation or spiritualisation, where the personal and universal converge at the centre, a climatic place of love where God is.

Modern Voices 105 The universe, although exhibiting ‘harsh matter’, is blessed. In Hymn to Matter, he praises ‘perilous matter’, ‘barren soil’ and violent sea’ since they contain within them a divine milieu in which people can encounter the Spirit, sometimes most tellingly felt in the midst of chaos and disaster, not dissimilar to his fellow Jesuit Hopkins’ account of terror in The Wreck of the Deutschland. In ‘Fire Over the Earth’ in de Chardin’s Mass on the World, he implores the fire of love to descend and breathe a new spirit into the fragile film of matter. He prays his words ‘This is my Body’ may reinvigorate every living thing to ripen and flower and that ‘This is my Blood’ be spoken over every death force. Each individual act of effort and work in making a better world is immensely valuable and constitutes to the whole. As de Lubac comments: ‘His line of argument proceeds in fact from the desire to avoids empiricism’ (1967, p. 178). He recognises that he has introduced a postulate which is the universe ‘by structural necessity, cannot disappoint the consciousness it produces’ (de Lubac, 1967, p. 178). It is contrary to reason to reject the intelligibility of the universe. A ‘thinking universe’ would have to live with a contradiction – to accept that the intelligibility it had grown into was to be wasted on the absurdity of a meaningless and nonsensical end. Christian living entails longing for this transformational end. In The Phenomenon of Man de Chardin argues that the evolutionary change from animals to human beings brings about a revolutionary metamorphosis. Humans are able to exercise their own consciousness and at a crucial moment know that they know. This process he calls hominisation and the human brings to desire and prepares for the end, the Parousia. This is nothing other than a Christ-centred orientation, what de Chardin terms a Christogenesis. This development results in a universal web of thought called the noosphere. It is the unity of love extended between individuals. When this occurs, self-serving profit and greed recede. However, this does require a huge sense of responsibility for each person to accept and to forego rivalries and competition. There is an irresistible instinct in our hearts which leads us towards unity whenever and in what direction our passions are stirred. It comes about by acknowledging there is a divine presence at the centre of the universe and the self. This ‘perception of the divine omnipresence is essentially a seeing, a taste, that is to say a sort of intuition bearing upon certain superior qualities in things. … It cannot … be attained through any process of reasoning nor by any human artifice. … It is a gift like life itself … ’ (1965, p. 131). In Le Milieu Divin he comments, Weil-like, ‘ … instead of the force of gravity which drags us down to the abyss of self-indulgence … we shall feel a salutary “component” emerge from created things which … enlarge our horizons … and impel us imperiously towards a widening vision … towards the desire for ever more spiritual beauty’ (1962, pp. 108–109). Karl Rahner (1904–1984)

Karl Rahner bases his theology of desire on an understanding of the mystery of the deus absconditus, the hiddeness of God which:

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is the source of truth for man, which is freely bestowed on him, and determines his identity. Man always stands before the deus absconditus even when he tries to look away and refuses to accept the truth that clear knowledge of the reality of the world, comes from the deus absconditus. Knowledge is primarily the experience of the overwhelming mystery of the world. (Rahner, 1985, p.53) Longing consists in acknowledging that there is an excessus involved in a person’s encounter with the world, a sense that there is something more to life than meets the eye. The horizon or goal to which this experience point is never grasped directly in this world, but points to an Other sensed in our daily lives. He writes: ‘The Whither of transcendence is there in its proper place of aloofness and absence. It bestows itself upon us by refusing itself, by keeping silence, by staying afar’ (1966, p. 52). As I have written elsewhere: ‘This horizon allows endless possibilities to open up leading to new interpretations and insights about God, the world and the self’ (Torevell, 2007, p. 149). For Rahner grace is God’s gratuitous gift and self-communication which enables a person to reach beyond the mundane and transitory. He beckons and lures us towards a transcendent realm which allows a process of elevation (elevans) to take place which is more than simply healing. In Hearer of the Word Rahner emphasises that a person responds to a first call by God and is subject to an address by Him to which she is able to respond by grace. In Spirit in the World, he acknowledges that experience of this world consists in a pre-apprehension or pre-grasp (Vorgriff) of God’s overwhelming love. Spiritual living involves a natural movement towards ‘absolute mystery’: … knowledge, in the apprehension of its individual object, always experiences itself as already and always moving out beyond it, insofar as it knows the object in the horizon of its possible objects in such a way that the pre-apprehension reveals itself in the movement out towards the totality of the objects. (1968, p. 145) Human beings by their very nature are oriented towards this mystery of Being. Knowledge of God is ‘a transcendental knowledge because man’s basic and original orientation is towards absolute mystery, which constitutes his fundamental experience of God, is a permanent existential of man as a spiritual being’ (Rahner, 1978, p. 52). One drawback is that a person may suppress this aspect of her nature. God’s mystery is both ‘present and yet even distant’ (1978, p. 54). Spiritual living is about realising that there is something deeper to be lived within ‘ordinary’ experience. In his prayer God of My Life he tells of the narrowness and superficiality of his own existence if he were not to ‘feel the pain of longing, nor even deliberately resign myself to being content with this world, had not my mind again and again soared over

Modern Voices 107 its own limitations into the hushed reaches which are filled by You alone, the Silent Infinite’ (1989, p. 11). This ‘Silent Mystery’ is understood in apophatic terms since it cannot be linguistically captured or measured: ‘The ultimate measure cannot be measured; the boundary which delimits all things, cannot itself be bounded by a still more distant limit … Such an all-embracing immensity cannot itself be encompassed’ (1966, p. 50). Divine knowledge entails a conversion to the ‘phantasm’ which means acknowledging the inseparability of sense-based and spiritual knowledge. Human intelligibility without sense intuition is flawed. This is why he engages with St Thomas Aquinas’ theology of knowledge. As Viladesau points out: ‘The entirety of Rahner’s Spirit in the World is an explanation of the text from St Thomas’s Summa Theologiae 1, q,84.a.7 on the question “Whether the intellect can actually know anything through the intelligible species that it has, without turning itself to sensible images (phantasmata)”’ (1999, p. 77). Matter and spirit are not separate things and therefore it is right to describe the former as ‘frozen spirit whose only meaning is to render real spirit possible’ (1969, p. 177). An encounter with mystery is an encounter with Truth: ‘the essence of knowledge lies in the mystery which is the object of primary experience and is alone self-evident’ (1985, p. 51). That to which we are lured encompasses a ceaseless movement towards transcendence, an infinite horizon. This is best visualised in Anthony Gormley’s sculpture Another Place on Crosby beach. God is sought in the ‘excess’ of human experience, not unlike Marion’s notion of the saturated phenomena. Revelation is personal and relational rather than propositional, which invites us into an untiring movement of longing towards transcendence opening up new horizons of understanding and depth. The existential questionings which form an inevitable dimension of daily living allow an entry into God’s presence, a process of discovery which is also an operation of grace. Rahner calls this uplifting gift of desire a ‘supernatural existential’ – supernatural because it involves God’s gratuitous self-communication and existential because it is present to everyone everywhere. Transcendence ‘is not the static condition of divine sonship given through baptism, but the dynamic movement of all humanity in and towards the God who beckons and lures’ (2007, p. 150). He comments that all of humanity possess an infinite longing for God, not simply a potentia oboedientialis or non-repugnance to grace, as characterised by scholasticism. Grace is intrinsic to a person’s ontological makeup. He writes: ‘God is the unexpressed but real “Whither” of the dynamism of all spiritual and moral life in the realm of spiritual existence which is in fact founded, that is supernaturally elevated by God’ (1966, p. 180). Our capacity to hear the revealed Word is part of our human existential, natural make-up which has a pre-grasp (Vorgriff) of the excess of God’s overwhelming love. Humanity is ‘spirit in the world’ because it has a thrusting elevation towards an infinite horizon. Humanity ‘is spirit because he finds himself situated before being in its totality which is infinite’ (1968, p. 186). Influenced by Rousselot and

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Marechal, Rahner became convinced that a person was not a passive recipient of external stimuli but a dynamic spirit ‘involving a self-presence desiring and opening itself out to an unlimited horizon’ (Torevell, 2007, p. 152). The formal liturgy of the Church is ‘the symbolic presentation of the salvation event which is occurring always and everywhere in the world’ (Rahner, 1984, p. 146). Ecclesial worship makes present and explicit what the world is – a place of trust, hope and love. It presents the ‘liturgy of the world’ in spatio-temporal terms and communicates an explicit enactment of salvation already in the world. If the church’s liturgy is to be defended then a formalised access to the depths of existence must be performed. Worship becomes the ‘explicit celebration of the divine depths of their ordinary life’ (1984, p. 149). The Politics of Desire

For liberation theologians of the twentieth century, it was not possible to separate desire for God from desire for liberation from oppression and injustice. Searching for God entailed the seeking of equal and fair societies through the denouncing of unjust power structures and political autocracy. Yearning for God was a political as well as prayerful act. The longing to know Christ entailed a wish to identify unreservedly with the marginalised and the poor, for in such groups God was found. Finding the Divine within the dispossessed was at the core of their theology. Benedict XVI wrote in 1984 that: ‘The powerful and almost irresistible aspiration that people have for “liberation” constitutes one of the principal “signs of the times” which the Church has to examine and interpret in the light of the gospel’ (1984, para 1, 1). However, historically, and with some insistence, most theological notions of freedom and liberation have been couched primarily in terms of release from individual sin and closely associated with the necessity of grace to overcome temptation and the propensity to do evil. It was assumed by many European theologians that this emphasis on personal culpability must always be the starting point: once individual sin is eradicated or at least reduced, then unjust structures will themselves begin to collapse or at least be badly dented. Everything starts with the existential condition of fallen human nature, a neo-Augustinian theological anthropology which underpinned much theology and still does today (Mahoney, 1989).1 Indeed, up until the twentieth century, sin was rarely thought of in terms of structurally embedded evil within morally skewed or corrupt social organisations and institutions. For some, the Brazilian brothers and Franciscan priests, Leonardo and Clodovis Boff offered a refreshing and major shift in emphasis from personal to structural sin in their ‘dialectical’ diagnosis of the US economy in the 1960s as part of their own interpretation of liberation. They note that functionalist analysis assumes a healthy organism, identifying poverty and unemployment as instances of dysfunctionality. It sees the eradication of any

Modern Voices 109 blips as working towards one continuous line of progress and flourishing as primary. Dialectical analysis, on the other hand, sees conflicts as a direct result of unjust demarcations of race, class and gender. Spiritual and material poverty, claim the Boffs, are the result of deeply ingrained unjust structures; this is what must be tackled; this is what sin is (Boff and Boff, 1987; Wells and Quash, 2010, pp. 150–151). Previous Christian challenges to pervasive and oppressive social structures which bore down heavily on human flourishing were unlikely to be contextualised within discourses about sin. It was not until liberation theology and the emergence of politically active movements – like black, feminist, Hispanic, gay and lesbian – that some theologians started to identify more carefully how sin, soteriology and liberation might be better understood within a much wider political and social remit and within deeply embedded structures. Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928–) famously offered a tripartite understanding of the word ‘liberation’, with personal sin as simply one side of the triangle. As Nickoloff comments, he offered: ‘three reciprocally interpenetrating levels of meaning of the term liberation: liberation from oppressive socio-economic structures, emancipation from oppressed consciousness and redemption from sinful self-centredness’ (1996, p. 184). These three components were inter-related and ought never to be separated, claimed Gutiérrez. What is also required is a radical listening to oppressed groups themselves (not a value-free analysis of the difficulties) which enables a plan for structural change to take place and overcome the difficulties identified. It is not true that the Christian theology of the past was unconcerned with oppression. Indeed, it often pointed to the fact that it was sacred scripture itself which offered revelatory insight into many people’s struggles for justice and referred to Jesus Himself who epitomised authentic political courage when he criticised those who misused power within both religious and nonreligious circles. However, liberation theologians claimed such earlier ‘European’ theologies lacked rigorous examination of social structures (Segundo, 1976; Sobrino, 1978; Nickoloff, 1996; Boff, 1990). Although previous theologians’ work might have drawn directly from the Biblical narratives (especially the Exodus story) of freedom and oppression to highlight the centrality of the problem for the Christian faith, they rarely addressed the institutional and structural dimensions of sin. Liberation theologians wished to emphasise the centrality of freedom from oppression and the causes of unjust economic systems. They had the Biblical witness to assist and encourage them in their striking condemnations of such evil. At the very heart of the Old and New Testaments, they claimed, is a God who acts in history and who takes sides with the poor and oppressed, guiding and leading them into refreshingly new realms of existence, both spiritual and material. What characterised the new theological movements of liberation was a radical political stridency rooted in social scientific analysis which refused to

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give pride of place to individual culpability and sin and its intrinsic association with grace (invariably connected to an emphasis on the afterlife when all would be resolved by God’s judgment). Rather than assisting any process of liberation, such emphases sometimes hindered it. What was needed was a firmer prophetic recognition that the Christian God does not wish his adopted sons and daughters to live in oppression and any perpetuation of this state due to structural and institutional circumstances was an offence against the dignity of the human person created in the imago dei. Gutiérrez was adamant that the Latin American Church must make a prophetic denunciation of every dehumanising situation, which is contrary to the spirit of community, justice and liberty (Kee, 1990, p. 180). This recognition of a more comprehensive, socially and politically rooted view about liberation, was closely aligned to the articulation of oppression from the oppressors themselves. The ‘worth’ of any theology would be partly measured against its ability to make sense of the lived experience and voices of the marginalised, the oppressed and the poor. Otherwise, theology was simply part of the problem, weighing down on an existing underclass, adding to the debilitating structure itself, rather than breaking it open, encouraging new levels of freedom and dignity. Allied to this was Freire’s educational programme of conscientisation undertaken in Brazil and Chile which helped the poor to recognise for themselves how the unjust structures under which they lived had stifled their own creative potential and that it was not the will of God that this should go on and remain unchallenged (Freire, 2000). The contemporary Carmelite sister Fitzgerald pairs John of the Cross theology of desire with liberation theology. She suggests that if the desire which constitutes our being is to reach fulfilment, the time will come when God’s light will invade our lives and ‘show us everything we have avoided seeing’ (Cassidy and Copland, 2021, p. 165). She contends that this involves for the poor and oppressed the beginnings of liberation as they become conscious of the desire for freedom so long denied them. The mystical and contemplative traditions throw light not simply on our inner lives, but on social and economic development. Contemplation enables an unrelenting wish for a new life and new vision to occur, as clearly witnessed ‘ … in the Havels and the Chinese students of Tiananmen Square, … in the energy of the poor who suffer the dark night of hunger, deprivation and abandonment … ’ (2021, p. 167). Contemplatives will hear more acutely the ‘world’s cry of desire’ (2021, p. 168) and begin to interpret the Beloved of the Spiritual Canticle as everything – the mountains, the valleys, the islands, the rivers, the breezes: ‘The contemplative person stands … with the Creator of the Universe who awaits us in the future and calls us to completion by the desire, the dream, implanted not only within human being, but also within the earth and all its species as an organic whole’ (2012, p. 170). I now delineate the shifting changes which took place in the 1960s and beyond under the umbrella term ‘liberation theology’ and scrutinise further the writings of Gutiérrez whose influence cannot be overestimated. I start

Modern Voices 111 with his reflections on the twentieth-century theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer which first appeared in 1979 as Les limites de la teologia moderna: un texto de Bonhoeffer – ‘The Limitations of Modern Theology’ (Nickoloff, 1996, pp. 235–242). Here he criticises much modern, liberal Protestant theology of the second half of the nineteenth century for its endorsement of, and being at ease with, the ‘modern, bourgeois world’, a misplaced accommodation which had been promulgated by three earlier giants of ‘modern’ philosophy: Kant, Hegel and Schleiermacher. He claimed that much modern theology capitulated to the ‘easy terms of peace that the world dictated’ and rather than challenging the pre-suppositions of the Enlightenment, succumbed to them. He starkly comments: ‘For. … no-one ever vanquished the modern, bourgeois mentality while remaining at its heart’ (Nickoloff, 1996, p. 36). Gutiérrez explains how Dietrich Bonhoeffer was different since he criticised much modern theology, including writers like Barth, Bultmann and Tillich because they failed to deal with the unjust economic and political ideologies underpinning their positions and of which they were a part. Gutiérrez admires Bonhoeffer’s courage to align his theology with his politically informed pastoral ministry. His avowal of the famous phrase ‘world come of age’ is a reference to a passage in Immanuel Kant which refers to the new historical situation occurring in the eighteenth century. The real question now, in relation to this new world, is to ask directly: ‘Who is Christ for us today?’ and it is only possible to answer this question by confronting the world as it is. What Gutiérrez particularly admires about Bonhoeffer is his acknowledgement that theology must take cognisance of the poor and the oppressed, and re-situate itself in relation to ‘the underside of history’. Indeed, it was the Biblical witness of the God who suffers which led Bonhoeffer to a new appreciation of one of the motifs of liberation theology: the ‘preferential option for the poor’. The Bible encourages all to live life to the full and anything that prevents this happening must be resisted. Gutiérrez acknowledges his appreciation of and debt to Bonhoeffer: ‘Once more in the history of thought a profound sense of God has led someone to a new sensitivity to the plight of the poor. Their deprivations, and even the particular expressions of their faith in God, now become the object of Bonhoeffer’s attention’ (Nickoloff, 1996, p. 41). He identifies how Bonhoeffer endorses the view that a bourgeois modern world cannot be overcome simply by ideological abstractions, but only when a sense of dialectical opposition to the mentality which has created injustice in the first place takes place. This can never happen within the confines of the bourgeois world itself, but only outside it as it confronts it head-on from within the social milieu of poverty aligned to an authentic identification with the oppressed. This new method of doing theology was to become one of the central strands within liberation theology and it is to Bonhoeffer that Gutiérrez pays particular tribute in his own formulation of this idea. However, while agreeing wholeheartedly with Bonhoeffer’s central question, Gutiérrez, maintains he omitted a central strand from his criticism of modern theology’s failed attempts to address the condition of the world: he

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left untouched the point that the new ‘social class had wrested economic and political power from the grasp of more traditional sectors and inaugurated a mode of production that is generating new forms of exploitation and new social classes’ (Nickoloff, 1996, p. 38). However, Gutierrez’s sensitive appraisal of Bonhoeffer’s theology, especially his insistence on a suffering God in Christ through with whom we are able to share His weakness, leads him to acclaim a related aspect of his theology: the overriding need to appreciate ‘the great events of the history of the world from beneath: from the viewpoint of the useless, the suspect, the abused, the powerless, the despised – in a word, from the viewpoint of those who suffer’ (Nickoloff, 1996, p. 40). As aspect of Bonhoeffer’s work was to become a hallmark of Gutiérrez’s and indeed many liberation theologians’ thinking. Gutiérrez adopts a rigorous use of the social sciences to extend his argument that much European theology has failed to use methodologies worthy of the gospel message of freedom and love. If the ‘underside of history’ is to form the starting point for a new theological method, then strategies for understanding that underside must be in place. In the ten years following the publication of his seminal Theology of Liberation, he spelt out at length what he considered to be the proper relation between theology and the social sciences. He points to the ‘irruption of the poor’ in contemporary society and in the Church and to those racial and cultural minorities, including women, all of whom have ‘been absent from history’ and need the insights of the socials sciences to shed light on their plight (Nickoloff, 1996, p. 43). Recourse to the social sciences is crucial in this new methodology for they highlight society as it really is, not as we imagine it to be. Gutiérrez advises ‘ … the goal – which ought to be made clear at the outset – is to examine social reality so as to then understand better – thanks to the light which comes from faith – the challenges and possibilities this reality presents to the church in its work of evangelization’ (Nickoloff, 1996, p. 44). He makes a strong plea that without understanding the way things actually are (which the social sciences can illuminate for us), very little progress concerning the gospel message of liberation can take place. This is a matter of realidad, (reality) which entails not only a reflection on the actual circumstances in which people live, especially the poor, but an analysis of the historical causes of that situation. Although Gutiérrez believed that Marxist analysis had contributed greatly to the social sciences, it was not his only ally in coming to understand social reality. He makes clear that liberation theologians’ adoption of some of the tools of Marxist analysis never implies an acceptance of an atheistic position. Nor is there any aligning with a totalitarian view of history which ignores the freedom of the human person. Gutiérrez re-iterates the intention of liberation in Liberation Theology: ‘This book is an attempt at reflection based on the gospel and the experiences of men and women committed to the process of liberation in the exploited and oppressed land of America – in the light, therefore, of the gospel, and in a world of poverty and hope’ (Nickoloff, 1996, p. 47).

Modern Voices 113 Throughout his writings, Gutiérrez offered a detailed exposition of his thinking about the relationship between orthopraxis and orthodoxy, between knowing and doing the Truth, between faith and culture. Biblical Truth is always associated with God’s promise and fulfilment and His desire to save the world. This takes place within historical and social processes and is witnessed most concretely in the mission of Jesus. Even before the conference in Medellin in July 1968, Gutiérrez had proposed a new theology of liberation to a group of priests at the National Office in Chimbote, Peru. The content of theology is informed by the encounter of human consciousness with its immediate historical experience – ‘Primum vivere, deinde philosophare – first you must live, and then philosophize’, which in some measure, echoed his method of critical reflection on praxis in the light of faith: ‘When Jesus says, “I am the truth” (John 14:6), he is saying: in me the Father’s promise is fulfilled’ (Nickoloff, 1996, p. 55). Jesus calls Himself Truth but also the way and the life. His words and actions are a course to be followed; we must put His Truth into practice. None of this belittles the contemplative dimension of Christianity which must be preserved at all costs. Nevertheless, for Gutiérrez, faith must be translated into action; faith without deeds is a dead faith (James 2:17). It is necessary to ‘do the truth’, a saving Truth acts in history and gives life. Praxis ‘implies a transformative activity which is illuminated by love’ (Nickoloff, 1996, p. 56). His chapter on historical praxis in Theology of Liberation sets forth his argument about its prominence in the tradition of the Church, indicating how the Church must be attuned to this praxis of love and, in particular, the action of identifying and sharing with those who suffer. This has been lost in modern theology, he argues, and so a return to a far stronger ecclesiology on this matter is required. One phrase which has become deeply associated with liberation theology is ‘the preferential option for the poor’. Twenty-seven years after his first attempt to outline a theology of liberation in Chimbote, Peru, in July 1968 Gutiérrez was still articulating what this might mean for the life of the Church. It is a strong, moving and compassionate account which begins with making associations between poverty and death (Nickoloff, 1996, p. 144). In the final analysis, poverty means death, unfair death, unjust death, the premature death of the poor. But besides physical death, there is also cultural death; when people are neglected or despised, their death occurs. Again he goes back to his favourite theme – life, which, of course, is the opposite of death. This is why Latin American Christians talk about the ‘God of Life’ whom they love and worship. Poverty is related to this concept of the denial of life. Those who live in poverty become non-persons, the insignificant, those who do not count in society: ‘In sum the poor are found in the statistics but they do not appear there with their own names’ (Nickoloff, 1996, p. 145). But God gives preference to the poor. Gutiérrez refuses attempts to discard the word preference since it would undermine the notion that although God has a universal love for everyone, the poor come first. Holding the two concepts of universality and preference together is not easy to do and

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is a challenge. The God who is good, prefers the forgotten, the oppressed, the abandoned (Nickoloff, 1996, p. 146; Vaughan, 1972). This stems from the gratuitous love of God, a central gospel message. This recognition cannot be divorced from a life of prayer and contemplation. John of the Cross’ mystical insights inform his thinking. The Christian life is about contemplative prayer allied to solidarity with the poor – our yearning for God includes both: ‘Without contemplation, without prayer, we cannot conceive of Christian life. But without solidarity with [the] poor we cannot conceive of Christian life’ (Nickoloff, 1996, p. 146). In Theology of Liberation Gutiérrez expounds on the scriptural basis of his theology. In the Old Testament, it is clear that he who insults or sneers at the poor insults God Himself (Prov. 17:5). Inversely, to love and yearn for Yahweh is to do justice to the poor and oppressed. He takes Jeremiah’s teaching on justice in 22: 13–16. To do justice to the poor is to come to know God; the two are indivisible. Where justice no longer prevails, Yahweh no longer becomes revealed: ‘Where this social justice does not exist there will we find the rejection of the peace of the Lord, and a rejection of the Lord Himself’ (Nickoloff, 1996, p. 151). This is connected to right worship. Drawing on the prophet Isaiah he endorses the inseparability of sacrifice and doing justice. Sacrifices are nothing to Yahweh if not accompanied with a championing of the oppressed. Hosea also emphasised inter-human justice. In the New Testament St Matthew’s classic text on judgment 25:31–45 receives considerable attention. Gutiérrez stresses three aspects concerning the need for communion and fellowship as the ultimate meaning of human life: first, the focus on a love which is centred on concrete actions; second, doing being favoured over knowing; third, the importance of the claim that love for God is expressed through one’s love for one’s neighbour. This is why Yves Congar speaks of ‘the sacrament of our neighbour’. This does not entail using our neighbour as an instrument for becoming closer to God, but centres on positive action towards the Other, which is at the same time, an action towards God (Nickoloff, 1996, p. 155). Leonardo Boff’s (1938–) political writings identify some of the things which went wrong with the exercise of power before Vatican Council II. He suggests that in order to safeguard the evangelical nature of power, recognition of its limits must be sought, otherwise it will yield to the temptation of becoming absolute with the likelihood of the oppression of others. He shows how the ecclesia discens (the listening Church) is made up of all the faithful. The entire Church (communitas fidelium), lay and ordained, is the ecclesia discens, that body of the faithful who constantly listen to God and who act in accordance to what they have heard, ecclesia docens (1990, pp. 138–143). Boff argues that Vatican Council II brought back a much needed mutual relationship between the hierarchy of the Church and the laity. The Church is the entire people of God. Boff thus demonstrates how both open dialogue and mutual criticism are necessary

Modern Voices 115 foundations of a healthy ecclesia. A liberating Church must operate from a foundation of freedom within the body itself. The work of the Holy Spirit is crucial to Boff’s understanding of legitimate power: ‘If there is repression by one individual over another through the exercise of power, then a “human” spirit is at work instead of the Spirit of Christ. The freedom to which Christ called us (Gal 5:1 ff.) is stifled’ (1990, p. 160). Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed became a classic text for its trenchant criticism of how the poor and oppressed themselves can operate in an educative process of self-renewal that leads to liberation. ‘The new “hermeneutic” inherent in the “theologies of liberation” leads to an essentially “political” re-reading of the Scriptures’ (1984, X, 5). Liberation theologians insist their theology is based upon a prayerful reception of the scriptures. Martin Luther King’s (1929–1968) desire for God was also inseparable from his desire for a socially inclusive and just society. His steering of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was ground-breaking. It was partly a quasi-ecclesial and partly a civic association reacting against racism and injustice. Like the liberation theologians of Latin America, King believed the American churches had failed to put into practice the Biblical mandate to prophesy deliverance to the oppressed; his political views were never wrenched from his loving desire for God. Certainly in his early career he believed the movement would inaugurate a new society where, famously, he said, people would be judged ‘by the strength of their character rather than the colour of their skin’. There were three dominant influences on his theology. The first was Liberal Theology which convinced him that God acted in history; he saw his political action and protest, therefore, as being ‘on the right side of history’. Second, the impact of Mahatma Gandhi on his understanding of non-violent protest. Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha or ‘love force’ became embedded in his consciousness. This would break the scourge of slavery and colonialism. The third influence was Henry David Thoreau whose On the Duty of Civil Disobedience first published in 1949 argued that the moral person has the right to disobey any law that is unjust since under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is prison. After 1967 King firmly believed that unjust rulers never give up their power easily and he began to name a whole range of issues beyond that of racial segregation in the South which were unacceptable. But his resistance was not founded on humanity’s ability to change unjust structures but on God’s desire and he never lost this hopeful faith. As he said on the eve of his death, ‘I may not get to the promised land, but with you I believe that we as a people will get there’. He was assassinated on 4 April 1968. The development of Black Theology rose out of two strong influences. The first was African traditional religions and the second, the history of slavery. Hopkins writes movingly of the latter: ‘While white masters attempted to force their Christianity onto their black property, slaves worshipped God secretly. Out of these illegal and hidden religious practices, the “Invisible Institution,” black Christianity and black theology arose’ (quoted in Livingston and Schussler Fiorenza, 2006, p. 450.) Ralph Ellison’s novel

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Invisible Man (2001) captures this practice well. The opening to the Prologue sets forth: ‘I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; … I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even have said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me’ (2016, p. 3). Hopkins claims that ‘For blacks, God and Jesus called them to use all means possible to pursue religiously a human status of equality … ’ (quoted in Livingston and Schussler Fiorenza, 2006, p. 450). 1960s America was a place of social unrest and turbulence due to the exclusion of people of colour from a growing economy and what emerged in response was the cry for ‘Black Power’. The stark statement the Black Power movement issued in 1966 claimed that: ‘The fundamental distortion facing us in the controversy about “black power” is rooted in a gross imbalance of power and conscience between Negroes and white Americans … . The conscience of black men is corrupted because, having no power to implement the demands of conscience, the concern for justice is transmuted into a distorted form of love, which, in the absence of justice, becomes chaotic self-surrender. Powerlessness breeds a race of beggars’ (quoted in Livingston & Schussler Fiorenza, p. 452). The 1969 Black Manifesto signalled a demand for reparations: ‘We know that the churches and synagogues have tremendous wealth, and its membership in white America has profited and still exploits black people … Underneath all of this exploitation, the racism of this country has produced a psychological effect upon us that we are beginning to shake off. We are no longer afraid to demand our full rights as a people in this decadent society’ (quoted in Livingston & Schussler Fiorenza, p. 454). One of the most significant voices to emerge from this movement was James Cone (1938–2018) whose A Black Theology of Liberation (2010) crystallised for black Christians the way forward by his revisionist theory of revelation challenging white European understandings. Revelation is God’s self-disclosure to humankind through liberation and to know God is to know God’s work of liberation on behalf of the oppressed. The People of God must desire a similar thing. The sources of black theology are black experience; black history; black culture; revelation; scripture and tradition. He argued that black theology cannot speak of God and God’s involvement in contemporary America without identifying God’s presence with the events of liberation in the black community. Any reflection on God’s desire for us and our reciprocal desire for God cannot make any sense unless it is allied to the quest for liberation. The struggle and longing to discover God only comes about through black people’s experience of oppression and injustice and their fight to free themselves from this. There can be no separate spiritual space for seeking God outside the struggle and longing for justice. God’s self-revelation to the human race comes through the event of human liberation: ‘Revelation is what Yahweh did in the event of the exodus; it is Yahweh tearing down the old orders and establishing new one’ (Cone, 2010, p. 31). Cone is definitive: ‘ … to know God is to know what God is doing in human history for the oppressed of the land’ (2010, p. 31). Abstract notions of

Modern Voices 117 desire for God separated off from the God of history do not reflect black experience and therefore do little to assist us in our encounter with God. What Cone says about the witness of scripture is a reminder to European theologians that their theology of revelation can easily slip into ‘private moments of religious ecstasy or into the religious sanctification of the structures of society’ (2010, p. 32). The ‘experience of the resurrection is the experience that no human being has to be the slave to anyone, but must rebel against all principalities and powers which make human existence sub-human’ (2010, p. 33). Any movement towards God is not possible which is unrelated to the condition of humanity’s oppression. Those who control with power unfairly cannot define what love is: ‘How could white scholars know that love means turning the other cheek?’ (2010, p. 75). ‘Blacks cannot adhere to a view that will weaken their drive for liberation’ (2010, p. 77). Cone’s understanding of the immanence and transcendence of God is crucial to his understanding of what living the Christian life entails: ‘The immanence of God is the infinite expressing itself in the finite. … the divine is revealed in the concreteness of the world’ (2010, p. 81). Transcendence means ‘black humanity is not dependent on our power to win’ (2010, p. 81). Cone refers to Tillich’s view of the infinite tension between the absoluteness of its claim and the relativity of its life because he argues that for black theology this means the ‘struggle for liberation is the infinite participating in the concrete reality of human existence’ (2010, p. 83). His book is one important influence on the presentday Black Lives Matter movement. Indeed, in his memoir, the last book he would write, he commented: ‘Black Lives Matter! God hears that cry, and black liberation theology bears witness to it’ (quoted in Cone, 2010, p. 158). Womanist theology emerged in parallel to black theology and was ‘both a critical and a constructive reflection on the Christian faith based on the experience of African American women. Like Feminist theology, it criticised the patriarchal practices of the churches, the misogynist interpretations of the Bible, and androcentric theological constructions’ (Livingston and Schussler Fiorenza, 2006, p. 460). From this grew black womanist theology which was a critical and a constructive reflection on the Christian faith based on the experience of African American women. Like Feminist theology, it challenged the patriarchal dominance of the churches, the misogynist interpretations of the Bible and androcentric theological constructions. The above theologies of liberation have the desire for justice at the heart of their theology and this can never be separated from the desire for God and his Kingdom. The Twenty-First Century Jean-Louis Chrétien (1952–2019)

For the French continental philosopher Jean-Louis Chrétien which are fundamental elements in seeking the Truth is always associated with God’s desire for us, His call and His enticing beauty are key elements in his

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philosophy of longing. His seminal texts L’Appel et la Réponse (The Call and the Response, 2004) and Corps à corps: à l’écoute de l’oeuvre d’art (Hand to Hand. Listening to a Work of Art, 2003) draw attention to the call and power of beauty to evoke a spiritual response of desire unlike any other. This beauty itself embeds within itself a call and a beckoning, signalling a ‘vocational’ dimension to its nature. Beauty and call are inseparable, as the discussion of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry in Chapter 6 will delineate: ‘By giving its name to beauty, the call designates that which is essential to beauty, the very nature of its manifestation’ (Chrétien, 2004, p. 9). Supported by pseudo-Dionysius’ theological claims, Chrétien shows how the disclosure, call and emanation of beauty entices our desirous return to its source. In his Divine Names pseudo-Dionysius points to the indelible associations of call and beauty: ‘“He calls (kaloun) all things to himself, and this is why he is called kallos, beauty”’ (2004, p. 15). Chrétien extends this idea: ‘What is beautiful is what calls out by manifesting itself by calling out. To draw us to itself, to put us in motion toward it, to move us, to come and find us where we are, so that we will seek it – such is beauty’s call and such is our vocation’ (2004, p. 9). In other words, beauty evokes desire, just as in sexual attraction. Humanity’s calling and vocation, then, is understood in terms of their thirst and desire for beauty. By responding to beauty we are ‘saved’. It returns humanity to unity and to its source and assists in ‘recalling’ what we have felt as lack through our ceaseless yearnings for something more. The same idea is present in Plato’s Phaedrus and is commented upon by Hermeias: beauty ‘is a light sent from the source of the intelligibles all the way to this world, calling to itself and uniting lovers to what they love, so that beauty is that through which the ascent takes place’ (2004, p. 9). The key is to recognise that these feelings of need and lack are not something which can be filled with inadequate ‘idols’. Since our greatest desire is for God, Christian living does not engage in false hopes. It is possible to assuage the restless yearnings of the heart if the right object of desire is chosen. Chrétien adds that the power of beauty invites a remarkable engagement with the ‘spiritual senses’, those modes of perception which make desire for, and contact with, the divine, felt, smelt, seen and heard (Gavrilyuk and Coakley, 2014). Using the French poet Paul Claudel’s notion of ‘the eye listens’ (l’oeil écoute), he suggests that we listen with our eyes to the call that beauty makes upon us: ‘We listen to pictures just as we listen to anything, by making ourselves silent, by entering into the active silence of attention’ (2003, p. 19). Note the art historian James Clifton’s description of his first seeing of Masaccio’s The Expulsion in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence: ‘There is also a silent beauty to art as the passage of light over shapes raises objects to a kind of incandescence; they are, therefore, destined not to ordinary contemplation, but rather to acts of listening’ (1999). We are called to listen to as well as see the light which makes its impact upon our spiritual senses; the experience inevitably changes us incrementally but drastically and

Modern Voices 119 we move on to desire more and more. Art encourages this dynamic of sense engagement, as I shall show in Section 3. The desire for God entails a longing to return to the Edenic garden where all was once sweet and light. Echoing Plato’s Phaedrus, Chrétien notices how the call engenders an awakening of a memory of a distant beauty which has been lost in ‘terrestrial life’ (Chrétien, 2004, p. 10). ‘To see beauty is to see it again, to go towards it is to go back to it’ (2004, p. 10). But, paradoxically, ‘its second time is really its first’. The call ‘speaks to us in our exile, in our oblivion, our distance … ’ (2004, p. 10) and it throws us ‘off-balance’, since by it we experience a paradox at its heart – ‘the proximity of the far-off’ (2004, p. 10). The call of beauty is thus both distant and intimate. This is why it ‘wounds’ people deeply, since it recalls us to our own uncontaminated selves, to a deep feeling of regret about what we lack and have come to make do with as a poor substitute. It ‘speaks’ of that which we have known and yet failed to keep alive. It is, therefore, paradoxically, partly known by its absence. However, more positively, the wound is disquieting but never wholly destructive, since it brings to life what beauty has to offer ceaselessly: ‘To wound us in the heart brings its utterance to life. It draws us out of our poise and makes us lose our immobility. It calls only to disquiet us’ (2004, p. 10). Chrétien believes that prayer is inseparable from call and is frequently agonic: ‘It always has its origin in the wound of joy or distress, it is always a tearing that brings it about that the lips open … . Wounded by this hearing and this call that have always already preceded it, and that unveil it to itself, in a Truth always in suffering, always agonic, struggling like Jacob all night in the dust to wrest God’s blessing from him’ (Chrétien, 2000, pp. 174–75). Wounded by the beauty and alterity of the One to whom prayer is addressed, the person who prays learns from the encounter never to seek a complete healing of the wound, for one is made stronger by receiving and enduring its pain (2000, p. 175). Joy comes about through the acceptance of the wound and the knowledge of the inseparability of pain and love. There is no redemption apart from the wound and never any blessing. For spiritual growth to occur these senses need to be activated. The environment here might be a sacred space of silence and beauty which encourages a different and more refined sense than is possible within other contexts. This is a matter of spiritual survival and transformation and desire centres around living in harmony with a sacred universe as well as a craving for the Word of life. It is about gradually adapting ourselves to be able to see, hear, touch and smell the things of God. Chrétien writes specifically about touch: ‘God himself touches the soul (tangit animam) by causing grace into it … The human mind in a way touches God (tangit Deum) by knowing him and loving him’. There plainly is, in a way, mutuus contactus. (Chrétien, 2003, p. 129). The entire body burns and radiates this divine touch particularly through song and its apophatic nature: ‘That which it sings with its entire being, collected whole and gathered by the Other, is what it cannot say, what infinitely exceeds it’ (2003, p. 131). This amounts to a listening with one’s whole being. ‘The flesh listens’ (2003, p. 130).

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And the fact that it listens is what makes it respond. He notes how St John cites Psalm 34:10: ‘ … the Holy Spirit springs once again from the soul’s treasure to the body, and the whole sensitive part delights in it, as well as the limbs, bones, marrows, … with a feeling of great delectation and great glory, which is sensed down to the last joints of the feet and of the hands. And the body feels such a great glory in the soul’s glory that it exalts God in its own way, feeling Him in its bones, in conformity with David’s statement: ‘All of my bones will say, My God, who is like thee?’ (2003, pp. 130–131). The antithesis to this spiritual attuning is a feeling of despair which comes about through the denial of the heart as a vehicle for desire, knowledge and perception. Without re-awakening the sensitive yearnings of the heart, sadness and anxiety are likely to occur. Eric Varden (1974–)

In The Book of the Monkish Life (1899) the German poet Rilke placed most of his poems in the speaking voice of a monk whose poetic tone holds the sequence together. ‘God becomes a humanised presence, animated, close by, concrete’ comments Freedman about this Rilkean method (1996, p. 104) The monk’s vows and his simple ways produce an aura tinged with the erotic attraction of asceticism towards the Divine. The mood of the poems is permeated by the pious spirit that Rilke and his lover Lou celebrated after their visit to Moscow. In one poem a monk wrestling with his longing for God is advised in marriage terms that it is ‘the high office of groom for which you’ve been named’ (Freedman, 1998, p. 49). Ironically this ‘office’ of monk is sometimes most acute amidst the storms of the lustful self which is prone to see ‘On pious paintings even the cheeks once pale/turn crimson red with strange appeal;’ (quoted in Varden, 2018, p. 49) but which knows within a ‘rampant dreadful din’ that metaphysical desire is also felt, a ‘longing I hold in’ (2018, p. 51). Even when he sees the beckoning allure of a woman ‘in my neighbourhood/who waved at me from wilting wear’ (2018, p. 51) he is aware of another horizon and a God who speaks of ‘distant lands/so that my concentrated gaze/runs past the rolling hills’ (2018, p. 51). Humbling himself before such human and divine encounters, he is raised up: ‘I have a hymn that I keep to myself./To an upward gaze within I bow my head:’ (2018, p. 52). He knows again that he is made for longing for the Divine. In the Book of Pilgrimage written during one week, 18–15 September 1901, Rilke writes of the rest to be found in the contemplative heart. When ‘not surprised by a storm’s force./You’ve seen it grow’, you must ‘go into your heart as into the plain’ where the great solitude begins ‘and the days turn deaf’ (Freedman, 1998, p. 148). Varden writes in similar terms about the spiritual life: ‘Our most intimate desires carry messages from afar. They make us homesick for a land we have not yet discovered’ (2018, p. 134). Few individuals are satisfied with the mundane and base, even (perhaps especially) when it manifests itself through the temptation of erotic pleasure divided off from love; no one likes prostituting him/ herself, unless they have to do so; they feel shame when they give into this

Modern Voices 121 temptation. Rouault’s compassionate paintings of prostitutes convey this feeling. For there is a higher calling, a spiritual marriage possible, which becomes the goal for both human and divine longing and love. If this is the case, argues Varden, then we are never alone, since the echo of the transcendent situates itself within our being and within our ceaseless longing; it destroys any sense of isolation. This is captured in the title of his book The Shattering of Loneliness (2018). The need for engagement is part of a movement of longing for that which is Other, beyond, removed from proximity and yet close at hand to be called upon in response to a first call. It is an experience characterised by an awareness, intuition, homesickness or longing for the transcendent. And it carries with it a theological contextualisation whereby one comes to acknowledge a divine voice from beyond, away from the un-satisfactoriness of the world postulating a ‘metaphysical relation that can [be] accounted for on a strict theological reasoning’ (Varden, 2018, p. 135). Teilhard de Chardin, as I have indicated, would claim this is part of a much larger cosmic yearning which will eventually reach its mysterious centre and end – the Omega point. Note 1 Mahoney makes the point, a little too vehemently I think, in The Making of Moral Theology that St. Augustine had a strong sense of human sin related to the Fall which influenced much later Catholic moral teaching. This was not apparent in all his theological writings, but on matters of morality this dark strain was evident: ‘It is saddening to note how the works of this great and loving man, with their passages of sublime beauty and of moving eloquence, are often flawed by this note of melancholy, of disgust, and even brutality, towards man in his sinfulness and weakness resulting from his initial fall from God’s grace’ ( Mahoney, 1989, p. 46). Note also in Chapter 8 of this book, how the author specifically refers to liberation theology in light of the growing Catholic theological pluralism. Mahoney’s claim is that any statements of disapproval by the magisterium concerning, for example, theological method in liberation theology, raise questions about appropriate methodologies within the magisterium itself.: ‘ … such expressions of disapproval cannot themselves be exempted from the fundamental questions which the possibility of pluralism raises. … Furthermore, there is increasing theological pluralism about the Church itself, on its magisterium in teaching on matters of faith and morals, and on the degree to which the comparatively recent distinction between the teaching and the learning Church can be maintained in all its starkness’ (1989, p. 336). See Mahoney’s discussion of the issue of ecclesia docens and ecclesia discens, 119–120.

References Boff, L. and Boff, C. (1987). Introducing Liberation Theology. New York, Orbis. Boff, L. (1990). Church: Charisma and Power. Liberation Theology and the Institutional Church. New York: Crossroad. Braybrooke, N. (1965). Teilhard De Chardin: Pilgrim of the Future. New York: Seabury Press. Cassidy, L. and Copland, M. (2021). Desire, Darkness and Hope. Theology in a Time of Impasse. Engaging the Thought of Constance Filtzgerald OCD. Collegeville, Minnesota Liturgical Press.

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Chrétien, J-L. (2000). The Wounded Word: Phenomenology of Prayer. In D. Janicaud (Ed.), Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’. The French Debate (pp. 147–175). New York: Fordham University Press. Chrétien, J-L. (2003). Hand to Hand. Listening to the Work of Art. New York: Fordham University Press. Chrétien, J-L. (2004). The Call and the Response. New York: Fordham University Press. Cone, J. (2010). A Black Theology of Liberation. NY: Orbis Books. de Chardin, T. (1962). Le milieu divin. London: Fount. de Chardin, T. (1965). The Phenomenon of Man. London: Collins. de Chardin (1968). Writings in Time of War. London: Collins. de Lubac, H. (1967). The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin. London: Collins. Freedman, R. (1998). Life of a Poet. Rainer Maria Rilke. Northwestern University Press. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. Gavrilyuk, P. and Coakley, S. (2014). The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johns, L. (2019). The Way of Benedict. Eight Blessings for Lent. London: SPCK. Kee, A. (1990). Marx and the Failure of Liberation Theology. London: SCM. Livingston, J. and Schussler Fiorenza, F. (2006). Modern Christian Thought. The Twentieth Century. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Mahoney, G. (1989). The Making of Moral Theology. A Study of the Roman Catholic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nickoloff, J., (Ed.) (1996). Gustavo Gutiérrez. Essential Writings. London: SCM. Rahner, K. (1968). Spirit in the World. London: Sheed and Ward. Rahner, K. (1971). Theological Investigations. Vol. 8. Further Theology of the Spiritual Life. London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Rahner, K. (1978). Foundations of the Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity. London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Rahner, K. (1984). Theological Investigations. Vol. 19. Faith and Ministry. London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Rahner, K. (1985). The Practice of Faith. London: SCM. Segundo, J. (1976). The Liberation of Theology. New York: Orbis. Sobrino, J. (1978). Christology at the Crossroads. A Latin American View. London: SCM. Torevell, D. (2007). Consenting to the Communion: An Approach to Teilhard de Chardin’s Attitude to Death. Mortality, 10(4), 308–320. Varden, E. (2018). The Shattering of Loneliness. On Christian Remembrance. London: Bloomsbury. Vaughan, B. (1972). The Expectation of the Poor. The Church and the Third World. London: SCM. Wells, S. and Quash, B. (2010). Introducing Christian Ethics. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Weil, S. (1972). Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul. Weil, S. (1978). Waiting on God. The Essence of Her Thought. London: Fount. Weil, S. (2005). An Anthology. London: Penguin.

Part III

The Arts and Desire

5

Theoretical Frameworks

An important relationship exists between religion, culture, the Arts and desire. Arts education, a rich repository of emotional knowledge and insight, is an education of the imagination and allies itself with religion since it teaches and enlarges the heart, educating us how to feel with appropriate measure. Great works of Art aid us in rehearsing in imagination the knowledge that we might one day need to live a good and fulfilled life. They use the finite and material to encourage a movement beyond what we can empirically verify and remind us of those things which carry undying value and significance. Focusing on literature in particular, Boyle says it is the employment of engaging language free from any instrumental purpose which seeks to reveal the Truth: ‘our truth is being told to us and we look each other in the eyes and know that our truth is everyone else’s’ (2004, p. 130). It is personally revelatory and universally recognisable and has a direct connection to Being. Art achieves this goal through the concrete and finite. Lynch’s work on the necessity of the material claims that: ‘There are no short-cuts to beauty, or insight. We must go through the finite, the limited, the definitive, omitting none of it lest we omit some of the potentencies of being-in-the-flesh’ (2001, p. 16). The imagination is an act which operates in two directions at once – down into the concrete and up into the unlimited and the ‘the finally desirable goal of religion’ is ‘only reached by a passage though time …’ (2001, p. 55). The immanent is never disparaged in favour of the transcendent just as the body according to Aristotle and Aquinas can never be cut loose from the soul for it has a living, self-pluralising integrity which enfolds the body in its manifest materiality (Torevell, 2022). Thus, ‘using our remembered experience of things seen and earned in a cumulative way creates hope in the things that are not seen’ (Lynch, 2001, p. 16). The renowned iconoclastic debate of the eighth century, besides being a theological discussion about the justification of the use of images is also a reminder that art (and materiality more specifically) is an important constituent in the life of faith if done with integrity and is able to engross participants in unfathomable mystery and beauty. In Christological terms, St John of Damascus knew that the incarnation was the means par excellence for the DOI: 10.4324/9781003227540-9

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instantiation of the invisible and it was for our benefit that God assumed this visible form (Torevell, 2007). The Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment and much (post)modern thinking ransacked any notion that art was able to serve religious purposes seriously. As institutional Forms of Christianity developed from the sixteenth century and beyond, the category of ‘aesthetics’ became largely divorced from the life of the Church. After 1750 and the publication of Baumgarten’s Aestethica, fine art, music and poetry became important in the educational and spiritual formation of individuals often outside ecclesial contexts. With this development and the severing of the arts from religion they became a primary means of cultivating the ‘soul’ outside institutional religious Forms. What need is there of religion when art could perform this task? There is a distinct migration to the power of art here and according to Desmond it seems to be ‘standing in as surrogate, or incognito for a transmuted metaphysical origin, or a muted religious sense of transcendence’ (2003, p. 10). Kant (1724–1804) and Schopenhauer (1788–1860): Art and Desireless Desire Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgement (1790) suggests that aesthetics should not be underestimated as one of the surest ways of getting to ‘know’ God. It is evidence of a very different kind to that offered by medieval scholastics. Aesthetic experience is primary in coming to a realisation that God exists since art (and Nature) promote in us a distinctive feeling of transcendence, out of time and space. It awakens a feeling for the Divine, a sense of the supernatural which all religions attempt to convey. It is particularly through the experience of beauty and the sublime that the Divine is felt and is akin to the way persons feel when they are connected to Nature (e.g. a waterfall or a mighty river). Both are able to ‘raise the soul’s fortitude above its usual middle range …’ (quoted in Thiessen, 2004, p. 187). Kant argues that such encounters with aesthetics imprint on our senses an intimation of a transcendent realm (Scruton, 1982). They allow individuals to rise above the conceptual and to have an experience of something beyond the natural realm. They enable a person to view herself in relation to a transcendental or supersensible reality which lies beyond the reach of thought. It also reminds those who participate in Art that this transcendent world is never ours to know fully and that a humility of reason must be recognised and accepted. Although a participant feels and acts as a member of a transcendent realm, she accepts that she can know only the world of Nature. Full knowledge of what is real is impossible for finite creatures. A willed effort to experience transcendence will not bring about what is desired. What is needed is an aesthetic ‘judgement’ and ‘taste’ for the beautiful best summed up as a religious sensibility. A feeling of the transcendent is what Kant is aiming to describe in his Critique.

Theoretical Frameworks 127 Disinterested contemplation is the method to be employed to achieve this judgement and sensibility. Kant writes that: Everyone must allow that a judgement on the beautiful which is tinged with the slightest interest, is very partial and not a pure judgement of taste. One must not be in the least prepossessed in favour of the existence of the thing, but must preserve complete indifference in this respect, in order to play the part of the judge in matters of taste. (2008, p. 37) He wishes to show that our own estimate of the object of beauty can only be a ‘pure judgement’ if we are able to dislodge our own ‘interest’ in the object itself. What is required is a disinterested contemplation. This kind of disinterest is only possible once selfish desire is eradicated and is akin to the Buddha’s teaching in his first sermon. It is not possible to evaluate the beauty of a thing if egotistical want or craving form a part of our response. In other words, the will and desire must be controlled. ‘Free delight’ only emerges from a disinterested and contemplative approach to beauty and the sublime which amounts to ‘taste’ as a form of delight. This is not a cognitive judgement since taste in the beautiful is the one and only disinterested and free delight. A judge cannot perform his duty well if he is swayed by personal desire or want. A contemplative approach which sees the object as existing in its own right without any purpose it might have towards its usefulness in the world and my existence, allows for the appreciation of beauty and for the very thing that it is. Or, in strict Kantian terms, as it appears to me to be. I have to do the changes necessary to be a person of taste, to be able to judge the value of a thing. If I can achieve this, an object of beauty will appeal to my reason which supersedes my empirical self. It will lend itself to me as something highly significant. Since it does not appeal to my desire or ego but to my disinterested Nature, which is beyond desire, I can then take a legitimate delight in it. The ability to take part in a judgement of taste comes from a disposition which is able to stem the surge of desire. Human reason allows us to take pleasure in something, for example, a sublime seascape, without ever interlocking this with appetite, need or desire. This type of reason looks for a meaning to the world that is more authoritative and complete than any that emanates from desire. The moral aspect of this disinterest then becomes apparent. Once we are able to ‘see’ things outside and apart from their usefulness and purpose we begin to form a virtuous character. The moral person is one who can recognise things for their intrinsic value. Work can become self-fulfilling in itself, in spite of its consequences (e.g. the money one earns, the status it gives). And any disinterested attention to Art helps us to experience things of value which are not subject to time or space and which gives us a transcendent sense that there is something above Nature which is immortal. This approach gives to aesthetics an importance comparable to that once attached to religious worship. In summary, taste is a form of ‘free

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delight’ which only emerges from a disinterested and contemplative approach to beauty and the sublime. Such judgement centred on taste is free of selfish want. A judge cannot perform his duty well if he is swayed by personal desire or want. The idealist Kant gives precedence to the knowing, conscious subject. Disinterest assists a person to see a quality of beauty inherent in the object viewed and rests on the mind’s subjective disinterestedness resulting in pleasure. Claims about beauty’s aesthetic universality may then be made which involves judgement of a special kind combining the predicate of beauty to the object and extending this predicate to judging subjects. According to Kant, the object of beauty will appeal to that which supersedes my empirical self and will then lend itself to me as something highly significant, since it does not appeal to my craving or ego but to my disinterested Nature. I can, therefore, take delight in it and attribute a universal appeal to its Nature. If Kant suggests human beings have the potential to secure a transcendental experience depending on the extent of individuals’ disinterestedness, than Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) extends this notion by suggesting that Art invites individuals into a space where they may lose themselves and find peace. When referring to those things which artists are concerned to communicate to others, he argues Art allows us to find ‘rest’ (quietens) as we forget ourselves completely in this object actually present, whether it be a landscape, a tree, a rock, a crag, a building or anything else. The person is then able to become a pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge. Endorsing a Platonic notion of Forms and Ideas, Schopenhauer writes that the relation of represented things in the sensible world are encountered by what he calls the ‘principle of sufficient reason’. However, what is required is a form of contemplative perception which pierces the surface and allows individuals to be raised or as he puts it soar ‘aloft in this contemplation’ to ‘actual being’ or what one might call ultimate reality. He agrees with Plato who attributes actual being to Ideas alone and only an apparent, dreamlike existence to the things in space and time. Art plays an indispensable part in helping us to see the Ideal Forms which exist beyond their representation. The genius of the artist is her ability to represent things as they truly are, by her contemplative approach to the world. Knowledge is thus communicated through Art. For Schopenhauer the world is full of strife, selfish desire, misplaced will and warfare. The genius of the artist consists in communicating the Truth by her ability to see the world outside these characteristics. Science forever runs after every ‘end it attains and again and again’ is directed further. This pursuit can never find an ultimate goal ‘anymore than running we can reach the point where the clouds touch the horizon’ (quoted in Cahn and Meskin, 2008, p. 197). Art is different. It is a moment outside time and holds before the world the Truth, the Idea to be contemplated: ‘For it plucks the object of its contemplation from the stream of the world’s course, and holds it isolated before it’ and ‘stops the wheel of time’ (quoted in Cahn and Meskin, 2008, p. 197). He compares this to a vertical line of incision, intersecting the horizontal flow of space and time.

Theoretical Frameworks 129 Art is the fruit of a person who has reduced her own will and who encourages observers to do the same. Schopenhauer was deeply influenced by the Buddhist religion, not only endorsed the Second Noble Truth about selfish desire being the source of much of the world’s suffering, he protracted this to suggest reality itself is largely a bundle of competing forces from which it is necessary to be free. He differs from the Buddha’s teaching by never accepting his Third Truth that a permanent release from the pain of the world is possible. What exist are moments of respite which present us with a vertical slice into the flow of conflict-ridden time and space. Aesthetic pleasure, therefore, consists in enjoying a rest away from the conditioning and disturbances of the world; it is an experience of ecstasis, of losing the ravenous self. Schopenhauer to some degree endorses a Kantian approach to the Nature of the artist: ‘… genius is the ability to leave entirely out of sight our own interest, our willing, and our aims, and consequently to discard entirely our own personality for a time, in order to remain a pure knowing subject’, the ‘clear eye of the world’ (quoted in Cahn and Meskin, 2008, p. 197). Winston contends his idea is about escaping from the realm of earthly desires, which cause us pain as they unleash passions that can never be truly fulfilled. In the contemplation of beauty we can, if just for a short while, attain the bliss and peace of mind of true knowledge, free from all willing and thus from all individuality and the pain that results therefrom. (2009, p. 21) One might be reminded of Iris Murdoch’s poetic claim that in her attentive observation of the kestrel she came to lose herself and all anxious desires seemed to fade away: I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing but the kestrel. And when I return to thinking on the other matter it seems less important. (1970, p. 84; 1992) What Schopenhauer offers then is the privileging of Art as a facilitator for a more contemplative and truthful experience of the world than we normally feel. It encourages a form of disinterested pleasure freed from the will: The work of art is merely a means of facilitating that knowledge in which this pleasure consists. That the Idea comes to us more easily from the work of art than directly from nature and from reality, arises solely from the fact that the artist, who knows only the Idea and not reality, clearly

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repeated in his work only the Idea, separated it out from reality, and omitted all disturbing contingencies. (Quoted in Cahn and Meskin, 2008, p. 201) Aesthetic pleasure consists in enjoying a respite from the illusory conditioning and disturbances of the world and is capable of spilling over into our experience of life itself. If this claim is true, then Art is able to dispel false desires occasioned by the ego and the disquieting impulses of the will facilitating the pleasurable contemplation of Nature, life and truth (quoted in Cahn and Meskin, 2008, p. 201; Saward, 1997). In the selfless or ‘will-less’ pursuit pursued by the true artist, the person becomes entirely absorbed in the object and the will gives way to an objectivity. Genius is the ability to leave entirely out of sight our own interest, our willing and our aims and to discard entirely our own personality for a time in order to remain a pure knowing subject, a kind of clear eye of the world and a clear mirror of the inner Nature of the world. This method of contemplation considerate amounts to the ability to look up to the stars, to desire and to see beyond the mundane (Torevell, 2006, p. 200) This ability is inherent in all human beings to a greater or lesser degree which allows them to have access to the beautiful and the sublime. The artistic genius is different from other individuals only in degree, not kind. What Schopenhauer offers us is a privileging of Art as a facilitator for the contemplation of what is true. Benedict XVI agrees with Schopenhauer about the springs of creative genius. Any artist’s inner perception must free itself from impurity and through ascetic practice develop a new way of seeing reality. Schopenhauer’s losing of the self becomes for the late Pope the ‘way of overcoming ourselves; thus in this purification of vision that is a purification of the heart, it reveals the beautiful to us, or at least a ray of it. In this way, we are brought into the power of the truth’ (2002). In his 2002 essay, he sent to a meeting of the ecclesial movement ‘Communion and Liberation’, he notes this is not a stance against reason but a freeing of reason from its own limitations. A superior form of knowledge comes about by being struck by the arrow of beauty, the beauty of Christ which awakens a responsive form of knowing and desire based in the heart, an affective approach to epistemology which needs to be re-discovered. He refers to an experience of listening to Bernstein’s conducting of Bach to endorse his point (2002). He notes one objection to this view is that beauty might easily be deceptive and illusory. In other words, an arrow of beauty might lead us to discover not the truth but a false impression of truth. Reality is ugly and falsehood and this constitutes the way things are. Benedict XVI writes this ‘new trick’ contends that ‘over and above me there is basically nothing, stop seeking or even loving the truth; in doing so you are on the wrong track’ (2002). The way forward out of this quandary is to allow the wound of love

Theoretical Frameworks 131 to pierce deeply including responding to a form of love which sets aside external beauty and demonstrates the truth of the beautiful even through suffering. In a manner reflective of Schopenhauer, he outlines how a false dazzling beauty does not bring people out of themselves but sinks them further in. This stirs up false desire, the will to power, possession and pleasure (2002). Throughout much of his theological writings, Benedict XVI wishes to emphasise the intricate relationship between Art and spiritual growth. In his The Spirit of the Liturgy (2000), a third of the text was devoted to the place and significance of Art, in particular images and music. Like Schopenhauer, Benedict XVI believes Art leads us beyond what he calls use of ‘subjective reason’ to an ultimate reality freed from the conditioning of desire and will. Both philosophers emphasise that Art can bring peace due to the exercise of our contemplative faculty. Benedict XVI argues that Art’s main advantage is to lead us beyond what can be apprehended at the merely material level. Art facilitates this contemplation of Nature and life itself (Benedict XVI, 2000, p. 201) as the artist lets us peer into the beauty of the world through her eyes. She is able to give us this gift by means of her own creative genius. Benedict XVI takes the two antiphons which introduce Psalm 44:45 and offers two different interpretations of them, one for the season of Lent and one for Holy Week. The psalm is about the wedding of the King, his beauty, his virtues, his mission followed by a description of his bride. He claims that the Church invites us to read this first as a representation of Christ’s spousal relationship with his Church. The third verse of the psalm says the King is ‘the fairest of the children of men and grace is poured upon your lips’. On the Monday of Holy Week, however, the Church changes the antiphon to introduce the psalm in light of Isaiah 53:2: ‘He had neither beauty, nor majesty, nothing to attract our eyes, no grace to make us delight in him’. He then quotes from Augustine (one of his favourite theologians) to suggest these two statements exist side by side paradoxically, not in contradiction. One of the questions which affected the Church Fathers was whether Christ was beautiful and embedded in this question was a further concern: can beauty lead us to Truth and can ugliness ever lead us to Truth? He wants to show that beauty can lead to Truth and is manifest in the beauty of Truth which Christ displays by his willingness to suffer, to be treated ignominiously and to die (2002). The beautiful is thus inextricably interconnected with pain and suffering, a claim the Greeks were not unfamiliar with. Heidegger (1889–1976): Desire for the Concealed For Heidegger, the question of Being is central to his philosophy. He claims that it is impossible to understand fully its Nature and any limited knowledge of it requires a patient and attentive disposition. As McGilchrist comments:

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For Heidegger Being (Sein) is hidden, and things as they truly are (das Seiende) can be ‘unconcealed’ only by a certain disposition of patient attention towards the world – emphatically not by annexing it, exploiting it or ransacking it for congenial meanings, in a spirit of ‘anything goes’. (2012, p. 151) Heidegger understood truth in relation to the Greek word aletheia meaning ‘unconcealing’. Something exists prior to our ‘discovery’ of it. A process of unravelling hidden things is what discovering Truth amounts to. It is found by removing things which are in its way, not by trying to grasp it. It is more like a journey of gradual disclosure rather than a sudden, wayward pouncing. Truth is ‘seen’ by attending to it in a particular way; a spiritual not an instrumental path must be walked. We attend to it for its mystery which discloses rays of truth to us if we are trained to discover it in this way. A scientist might attend to truth in an empirical manner looking out for atoms and particles; attending to Being is different for it requires a distinctive inner disposition. We experience it at different levels of disclosure at the same time but can never know the Truth fully says Heidegger. The truth of Being is never fully graspable. To have an impression of things as they truly are is not to allow them to ‘present’ to us – what McGilchrist calls a left-hemisphere representation (McGilchrist, 2012, p. 152). Heidegger prefers to take a work of Art as an example of a distinctive kind of disclosure from a necessary hiddenness and unconcealment. Truth does radiate from great Art but it can never be wholly extracted from it for it resides definitively in its form. Heidegger’s work is enlightening for he suggests the approach needed is one of ‘waiting on’ rather than ‘waiting for’. This active attention is seen starkly in Fra Angelico’s painting of Mary in his Annunciation in San Marco, in Florence. What is portrayed here is a moment of responsiveness after attentive waiting, of answering the call of Being, of attending to Being. It communicates an intimate relationship between Being and the individual. Heidegger uses the word Entsprechen to highlight a response rather than a definitive answer, to signal a correspondence with Being. Human beings are encouraged to be alert to Being and desire consists in being ready; the one who desires the Truth is the privileged listener and is sensitively attentive to the Nature of Being. Steiner adds that for Heidegger, ‘The crucial motion turns on the meaning of ent-sprechen. An Entsprechen is not an “answer to” but a “response to” a “correspondence with” a dynamic reciprocity and matching which occurs when gears, both in quick motion, mesh’ (Steiner, 1987, p. 34). We must make ourselves answerable to and ‘open our ears, to make ourselves free for whatever speaks to us in and out of the tradition as the being of being’ (1987, p. 34). The tradition refers here to philosophy but Heidegger makes one of his few musical allusions here. When there is a true matching and co-ordination there is an attuning, an accord, ‘But the argument from harmony, the simile of the “tuning of the soul” to capture and echo the vibrations of truth, is at least as ancient as Pythagoras, and is central to Plato’ (1987, p. 35).

Theoretical Frameworks 133 This ‘tuning of the soul’ to listen to the promptings of Being is at odds with the Cartesian ego impatiently grasping from a distance the objective world and manipulating it to suit its own aspirations. McGilchrist puts it beautifully in relation to the right and left hemispheres of the brain: a “being-with” and inside, a relation of care (Sorge) and concern, suggesting involvement of the whole experiential being, not just the processes of cognition – this contrast evokes in my view some of the essential differences between the worlds that are brought about for us by the two hemispheres. (2012, p. 153) Heidegger writes that: Man is rather “thrown” from Being itself into the truth of Being, so that ek-sisting in this fashion he might guard the truth of being. in order that beings might appear in the light of Being as the beings they are. … The advent of beings lies in the destiny of Being. But for man it is ever a question of finding what is fitting in his essence that corresponds to such destiny; for in accord with this destiny man as ek-sisting has to guard the truth of being. Man is the shepherd of being. (Krell, 1993, p. 234) It involves a call: He gains the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by Being itself into the preservation of Being’s truth … The call comes as the throw from which the throwness of Da-sein derives. In his essential unfolding within the history of Being, a person’s being as ‘eksistence’ consists in his dwelling in the nearness of Being. Man is the neighbour of Being. (Krell, 1993, p. 245) Humanity is ‘thrown’ from Being itself into the truth of Being, so that eksisting in this fashion he might guard the truth of Being. This is in order that beings might appear in the light of Being as the beings they are. The advent of beings consists in the destiny of Being. ‘It is always a question of finding what is fitting in his essence that corresponds to such destiny; for in accord with this destiny man as ek-sisting has to guard the truth of being. Man is the shepherd of being’ (Krell, 1993, p. 234). The German language provides Heidegger with an opportunity to express what he means more fully. True thinking is Nach-denken, the common term for ‘thinking about’, but one in which Nach- also means ‘after’, ‘following upon’. The person who ‘thinks after’ is a follower of an attendant upon the object of his thought, which is Being. Therefore, his essential stance is one of expectation. It

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also calls to action, but more than political insurrection, it signals ‘to tend’ and ‘to conserve’ (Steiner, 1987, p. 125). To think is to ‘attend on Being’, a tending, a looking after (1987, p. 124). Such ‘thinking’ occasions gratitude and is paraliturgical since it gives thanks to Being. As Steiner comments: ‘Das Denken dankt: “thinking thanks”’. At its most penetrating ‘the exercise of thought is one of grateful acquiescence, in being … . For that which has been placed in our custody, for the light in the clearing’ (1987, p. 126). The great artists and poets are the celebrants of this. Art is able to ‘present’ Truth like Van Gogh’s Peasant Shoes does. Recognising the innermost quiddity of the object (like Hopkins’ haecenditas) brings meaning to the shoes whereas scientific investigation simply leads to a dull abstraction. Van Gogh presents to us the ‘shoeness’, the ‘truth of being’. Art is not as for Plato and Descartes merely an imitation of the real, but is more than real: ‘Creation should be custody: a human construction should be the elicitation and housing of the great springs of Being’ (Steiner, 1987, p. 130). Art is a ‘vocation’, a calling forth which encourages a person her native calling. Sadly, many attempts have been Gegenstande – an affront to our natural closeness with Being. For example, our technologies mask Being rather than bring it to light (Steiner, 1987, p. 133). The atomic bomb is one drastic example of the forgetting of Being. It is the most visible example of the alienation of individuals from Being, rather than the intimate shepherding of it. Nevertheless, where there is danger there is also possible strength, the agency of salvation. However, we have broken the links between techne and poiesis. It is time we returned to the poets. All this equates to Heidegger’s notion of presence. Since humanity is the ‘shepherd of being’ (der Hirt des Seins) she only exists fully to the extent that she remains open to Being. In his Letter on Humanism, he explains how a person is at best a custodian of being, never an architect or proprietor (Steiner, 1987, p. 124). True philosophy learns to exist in the nameless. … Before he speaks man must first let himself be claimed again by Being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say. Only thus will the pricelessness of its essence be once more bestowed upon the word, and upon man a home for dwelling in the truth of Being. (Krell, 1993, p. 223) Heidegger knows that for Marx the home of a person is located in the social and for the Christian it is the person of the history of redemption, who as a child of God hears and accepts the call of the Father in Christ. ‘Man is not of this world, since the “world”, thought in terms of Platonic theory, is only a temporary passage to the beyond’ (Krell, 1993, p. 224). However, unlike metaphysical understandings, Heidegger clams that: man essentially occurs only in his essence, where he is claimed by Being. Only from that claim “Has” he found that wherein his essence dwells. Only from

Theoretical Frameworks 135 this dwelling “has” he “language” as the home that preserves the ecstatic for his essence. Such standing in the clearing of Being, I call the Ek-sistence of man. This way of being is proper only to man. (Krell, 1993, pp. 227–228)

Tolstoy (1828–1910): The Desire to Share Feelings Tolstoy offered an original and morally grounded theory of art. In What Is Art published in 1899, he argued that the artist’s essential task was not to produce pleasure in the receiver of Art through the expression of beauty but to serve humanity through shared feeling. The capacity of a person to receive another person’s (the artist’s) expression of feeling and to experience those feelings himself is the activity upon which Art ought to be based. He gives the example of a boy coming across a wolf. If the boy when telling of his experience again experiences the feeling he went through and infects his hearers and compels him to experience what the narrator had experienced, it is Art. In just the same way, it is Art if a person experiences in reality or in imagination feelings which he can then communicate to others by means of external signs. Such feelings may be strong or weak, important or insignificant but what matters is the ability to communicate feelings and to encourage what might be called a shared community of feeling between those who experience the Art and the artist herself. A bond of unity is then established between all those who encounter the artist’s expression of feeling and the artist herself. Tolstoy offers a broad definition of Art from church services to lullabies. He emphasises that it is possible in good Art for the receiver to enter into a distinctive relationship with the artist and with all those who encounter the artistic expression. He writes: ‘Every work of Art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced it … and with all those who, simultaneously … receive the same artistic impression’ (quoted in Cahn and Meskin, 2008, p. 236). He adds a person who receives another person’s expression of feeling is capable of experiencing the emotion of the person which moved the person who expressed it. This relationship inevitably Forms a common bond. Artists who create ‘real art’ as opposed to ‘counterfeit art’ have a moral responsibility since a strong bond of solidarity comes about through their endeavours. This community is not based on thinking alike but on feeling alike and depends on the receptive openness of the one who encounters the Art. Emotional solidarity is then instigated by the artist. It is upon this capacity of individuals to receive other individuals’ expression of feeling and to experience these feelings herself, that the activity of Art is based. Art is a means of union among people joining them together in the same feelings and is an indispensable means of progress towards the well-being of individuals and humanity. It is more important than speech itself. Language communicates propositions and thoughts while the artist attempts to convey distinctive feelings and this is the essence of true Art. She

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conveys what she has lived through either personally or through her imagination. This may entail communicating the feelings of others at the present time or those experienced in the past. Without Art we are simply ‘wild beasts’. It is essentially a religious activity which flows from the artist’s spiritual perceptions and feelings. Religion communicates and encourages the Good as opposed to its opposite evil, so ‘real art’ as opposed to counterfeit Art transmits feelings which are considered good in a religious sense and entails humanity’s expression of the meaning of life in relation to good and evil. Just as religion reflects the highest expression and comprehension of human life, so good Art conveys feelings which encourage humanity to live the ideal their religion indicates and promotes. In every period of history, there exists ‘an understanding of the meaning of life which represents the highest level to which men of that society have attained, an understanding defining the highest good at which society aims’ (Cahn and Meskin, 2008, p. 240). Religious concepts and estimations are able to determine the value of the feelings produced by Art. Metaphysical perception and insight is that which fosters the well-being of humanity and reflects the social harmony which it produces. Like a flowing river it indicates the direction all its members ought to take. Tolstoy was well aware of the decline in religious belief by many people during his own time. He countered this inconsistency of belief by arguing that such people denied the religious cult not the religious perception per se: ‘But even the very attacks on religion and the attempts to establish a life-conception contrary to the religious perception of our times most clearly demonstrate the existence of a religious perception condemning the lives that are not in harmony with it’ (2008, p. 241). Art which divides or splits society is counterfeit Art. Aesthetic values are dependent upon religious and moral values which in turn communicate a sense of the brotherhood and sisterhood of all humanity. Art is indispensable for well-being. Without it individuals and humanity are more hostile to one another. Consequently, Art should always be clear about what sentiments it attempts to communicate. It is false Art if it panders to the whims of fashion or to a patron of the Arts. A key component of good Art is its infectiousness. It evokes a feeling of joy or spiritual union with others and encourages the receiver to be so united with the artist that she comes to regard her feelings as if they were her own. If Art is merely for oneself then it will repel since its aim is always to develop feelings of moral solidarity. Just as there is an evolution of feeling within religion, so too Art develops as feelings less kind and less needful are replaced by others more kind and more needful. All Art history shows that the progress of humanity is accomplished under the guidance of religion. Just as religious perception develops and grows so does the capacity of Art to communicate feelings of sisterhood and brotherhood including union among all nations. If a person without any effort ‘experiences a mental condition’ which unites him with the artist and with others who experience that Art then the object producing that condition is a work of art. If it does not evoke a distinct feeling of joy and spiritual union with another (the author) and with others who are

Theoretical Frameworks 137 infected with it then it is not a work of Art. Through good Art all feelings of separation between the artist and the receiver disappear. If a person is so infected by the author’s condition of soul, if she feels this emotion and this union with others, then the object which has effected this, is Art. The artist has the gift to express what the receiver had been wishing to express herself. It is in this freeing of our personality from separation and isolation and in this uniting of it with others that the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of Art lies. Tolstoy argues that the degree of infectiousness is the sole measure of the success of Art: ‘the stronger the infection, the better is the art as art’ (Cahn and Meskin, 2008, p. 239). This degree of infectiousness depends on three conditions: (1) on the greater or lesser individuality of the feeling transmitted; (2) on the greater or lesser clearness with which the feeling is transmitted; and (3) on the sincerity of the artist, that is, on the greater or lesser force with which the artist himself feels the emotion he transmits. Religious understandings of the self and the world improve life. They promote the union of all societies not the exclusion of one society over the rest. Tolstoy believed in the gradual moving forward and evolution of humanity’s understanding of the meaning of life. Religion is ‘man’s expression of the meaning of life, together with those superstitions, traditions, and ceremonies which form themselves around the memory of such a man …’ (2008, p. 238). Religions serve as the valuation of human sentiments. Tolstoy is categorical about this elevation of religion in society: ‘If feelings bring men nearer the ideal their religion indicates, if they are in harmony with it and do not contradict it, they are good; if they estrange men and oppose it, they are bad’ (2008, p. 238). If there is no religious perception it is because people do not want it and wilfully choose not to see it. Tolstoy believed that much of the Art produced during his time produced feelings of pride, wanton sexual desire and the worthlessness of life. This kind of ‘bad art’ was essentially exclusive and failed to appeal to a universal reception based on the creation of shared feeling. There was a moral onus on the artist – she had to convey honest feelings if she wanted others to feel. To sincerely feel and communicate feelings helped others to feel and to share in a community of feelings and shared values. These sentiments had to be based on religious values which reflected the highest ideal of human achievement. The quality or truth of the religious feeling for Tolstoy affects the value of the Art created. He believed Art had the potential to be democratic and universal and that much of the Art of his time appealed to one class of people and, therefore, failed to be Art at all. Art was only Art if it could be felt by everyone regardless of social class and division. One of the ideals of the Christian religion was the forming of a community of equality, where all barriers of race, class and creed would be broken down. Legitimate Christian formation can come about through Art. If the right Art based on religious values is chosen then a community of religious feeling will emerge, a feeling which brings humanity nearer to the ideal their religion postulates.

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Desmond (1951–): Art Beyond Self-Determination The contemporary philosophical theologian William Desmond discusses the problems associated with modernity’s reductionist self-determination in relation to aesthetics and religion. He argues that ‘mediative patience is needed to dwell on the ambiguous threshold of aesthetic/Art and sacred/ religious’ (2018, p. 18). Beauty provokes a delighting in but emerges from what is other to our mere self-determination. It is connected to an erotic of being, a yearning for fulfilment outside the confines of the finite self, as Plato contended. Human desire and beauty are also coupled with a finitely unsatisfied restlessness – any temporary delight they bring does not amount to the death of desire but is part of an ongoing, energetic drive towards further desire and fulfilment bringing about within the person a selftranscending higher state of being as they yearn for things beyond the finite self. They occasion a sense of belonging to something greater. What does the unquiet, restless heart of Augustine portent, he asks? (2018, p. 30). ‘Is it an unquiet opening onto a quiet that is less the death of desire’s longing as recharging its intimation of belonging?’ (2018, p. 30). The restless heart stetches beyond self-determining will: ‘We are not offered a sedentary sanctuary but an impulse to movement and wandering’ (2018, p. 30). And he adds: ‘There is an unbounded promise of self-surpassing that strangely shows human desire as exceeding all determination in terms of univocal animal desire’ (2018, pp. 30–31). The heart creates the possibility of experiencing a ‘passion of being’ (2018, p. 87) and is ‘primal because life opens us before we open to life’ (2018, p. 115). This does not require an act of the will but a receptive openness. Transcendental Beauty ‘calls us out of ourselves – it comes to us …’ as a ‘more primal receptivity’ (2018, p. 115). Love of life more original than self-love but in which self-love participates, suggests the possibility of a relationship with its Source. He tells us that: ‘To be is to be surprised by life, by its “overdeterminancy”, the too muchness of what gives’ (Desmond, 2018, p. 115; Rowan, 2017). (Post)modernity largely consisted of life dimmed and reduced to the technological and scientific and a diminution of exposure to the flesh of things. The development of cities and conglomerates show the stamp of techne, of a certain Newton-ian mechanism to life which results in living life on the surface of things. In contrast, Art as exemplified by Hopkins’ poetry communicates a life enriched by ‘seeing’ in depth, at a distance from superficiality (Desmond, 2018, p. 112). With the ‘modern’ emphasis on instrumentalism came an emphasis on the autonomy of the self. The attainment of self-actualisation – not the gift of grace – is thought to become the engine and master of history. The beauty of the created Order became ‘less attended to than … the constructive, activating of the human being’; thus, individuals became less aware of their status as created beings and the ‘subjectification of the human being’ began in earnest’ (2018, p. 112). He avers: ‘The order of Nature in modernity

Theoretical Frameworks 139 seems titled more and more towards a God in whom predominates the esprit de geometrie rather than the esprit de finesse (in Pascal’s terms)’ (2018, p. 110). He refers to this trajectory as ‘soul-less selving’: ‘Modern autonomy is a construction of freedom erected on the basis of a soul-less selving and the soil without music’. What occurred was ‘the twinning of objectification and subjectification in the Cartesian language of res cognitans’ (2018, p. 129). The problem with Hegel was his emphasis on self-determination; he ‘wants a more rational self-determination. … The self-determination takes over the souling, and wins over its porosity – wins over it not by the wooing of the music but in terms of the will that wills itself’ (2018, p. 147). The Hegelian ‘“self” determines itself “upwards” so to speak, through the rational selfsublation of its own soul’ (2018, p. 152). But this ‘Self-determination forgets its own more original passio essendi’ (2018, p. 152). An eschatological vision of self-fulfilment ‘is radically different to this “teleology” of selfdetermination. Does the self become reified? … the self subjected by the “thing”, when this occurs?’ (2018, p. 150). Calling on Nietzsche and Fukuyama he writes we end up with ‘the last men. Worse: last men who have read all about genius … and take themselves to be the glorious fulfilment of time’ (2003, p. 10). They are ‘counterfeits of completion who desire no more for they have no desire for more than themselves’ (2003, p. 10). Here we have a tragic excess of the autonomous self. The alternative religious quest is to be freed ‘into the song of life that is never our own, even when it is most intimately our own’ (Desmond, 2018, p. 152) and ‘The music of the soul is called to hear the song of the divine, in the saturated surface of all things, and the elemental self-affirmation of all being’ (2018, p. 163). Surely our creativity finds itself beholden to a primal porosity of being in which is offered to us sources of origination we could not produce through ourselves alone? To be philosophical and wise is: ‘to be mindful of what is it to be, but always in relation to significant others, such as science, Art, religion’ (2003, p. 4). Desmond coins the phrase ‘closed immanence’ to describe the secular trajectory of finding happiness outside metaphysical frameworks. Religion and Art address this dilemma for they initiate a thrust away from imprisoned temporality. He writes ‘… the exploration of religion and the intimate universal relates to exploring the immanent sources of creativity and the communicative impulse that carries us beyond closed immanence’ (2016, p. 8). This is aligned to his understanding of how lives might be energised and transported beyond the finite. However, this does not yield itself ‘to the neutral universal of traditional philosophers, nor yet the concrete universal of Hegel’ (2016, p. 8) and it avoids the sheer singularity of much postmodern thinking ‘outside all universals’ (2016, p. 8). In The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being, he suggests that the dynamics of the soul are what matters which involve a ceaseless yearning for truth often communicated by the language of over-determinacy rather ‘than the knowledge of a determinate matter that we can pin down with univocal fixity’ (2018, p. 162). The

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yearning to hear the song of the divine occurs in and due to ‘the saturated surface of all things, in the self-affirmation of all being …’ (2018, p. 163). Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom Desmond admires, is a master of the language of ‘over-determinacy’. Without a personal experience of what Desmond refers to as the ‘intimate universal’ within the particular, the self goes on a pointless, horizontal Sisyphean journey of meaninglessness. Along with the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, it is wise to recognise that it is impossible to ‘search out the furthest limits of the soul, even if you traversed all of the ways; so unfathomable is its logos’ (2018, quoted on p. 162). There is always a beyond to be experienced and sought. Hegel’s philosophy does mediate between this life and the next, but he disappointingly collapses the two into one immanent self-mediating universal. This inevitably culminates in an inadequate philosophy of being despite Hegel’s espousal of Christianity since: ‘The God-man mutates into the Man-god of a secular, rational postreligious humanism in which the highest comes to immanent social selfdetermination’ (2018, p. 45). Religion and Art are able to offer a context for the working and expansion of the soul of desire, although the universal has a character of its own which can never be fully imitated: ‘Crucial is the otherness of the original over against the immanent availability of the imitation’ (2018, p. 63). There is also a doubleness of showing and withholding and since no absolute appearance occurs, there is always a sense that something exists elsewhere for which one seeks and cannot be fully captured. Silence and the apophatic help a person appreciate this universal for ‘a night divine’ invariably opens onto ‘a lunar heaven of dreams and eros’ (2018, p. 66). Art has a significant role to play in appreciating the universal, but it must be a universality combined with intimacy. It ensures the inexhaustibility of the imitation and with a kind of mimetic intimacy we witness the dualism of image and original surpassed. Imitation offers a passage between the two sides of the universal by offering a pathway through the senses (2018, p. 71). But in the imitation, there is also a form of transcendence that is altus in the Latin sense of higher and deeper (2018, p. 76). The immanent otherness is ‘outside us, inside us, above us, down under us; criss-crossing the directionalities of the between, we come in the end to it, or it to us, and there is no end to it’ (2018, p. 76). Desmond poses the following questions about origins and otherness: ‘… why does our perplexity about origin not disappear … why is the question of otherness less some novel discovery of postmodern discourse as an abiding worry surviving uneasily and perhaps less recessively, in the tradition of philosophy?’ (2018, pp. 1–2) rightly claiming that ‘… our entire way of thinking about Art, origin, creativity are shot through with unnamed metaphysical presuppositions’ (2018, p. 3). Eroticism is embedded in the quest for the universal. The work of logos – rational intelligibility – is spurred on by an erotic longing, the striving for that which is permanent and secure in an unstable world. The deadening

Theoretical Frameworks 141 mathematical rationality of (post)modernity (what Desmond refers to as the ‘desireless desire of geometrical reason’) is inadequate to quench the human thirst for the real (2018, p. 305). Rationalism ‘has been so ascetic with its own energies as to seem to renounce the deeper sources of its own ardour for naked truth’ (2018, p. 305). The longing for the beauty of the universal is associated with being pleased (hedone) and the sweetness of ‘to be’ and experience is complacentia, a being pleased with. For this is to occur, individuals must make a stance against the ‘narcissism of superficial selfregard’ (2018, p. 309). A disposition of humility is essential for the quest. Longing for and being attentive to the ‘intimate universal’ means allowing ourselves to be disposed towards signs of this reality and a space for poetic dwelling. To live with this passion of being is to be connected to eros and it may be heavenly as well as tyrannous. It is impossible to mark this drawing towards infinite beauty in any normal way. Desmond asks: ‘Is this why we are drawn to it, but also find it difficult to say what draws us to it?’ (2016, p. 311). In listening attentively to the singing of the cicadas described in Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates finds himself in a space other than the constructions of the city which simply reflect the cries of human beings back to themselves. His great speech of divine mania given by the gods reflects the ‘porosity to the beyond of ourselves that allows reception of the offer of what is beyond rational calculation of serviceable disposability’ (Desmond, 2018, p. 314). In the song of the cicadas, there is also an invitation to readiness and encourages the philosopher to become porous to something that exceeds his own closed philosophy encouraging a beholding of things beyond use, one ‘in which the passion of being becomes compassion’ (2018, p. 315). In the Diotoma–Socrates dialogue in Plato’s Symposium poros is one of the parents of eros and signifies a way across. When penia couples with it there is a paradox of poverty and plenitude. The poverty of penia also entails an energy within, which drives it beyond itself. In the porosity, claims Desmond, is ‘crystalised something of power to surpass itself, power to surpass its own poverty’ (2018, p. 316). There is an overdetermination here as well as a double operation at work. One involves a receiving as passion, but which entails a going beyond itself and a willingness ‘to be; and to live in abundance or what St John calls life “to the full”’. This consists in immense achievement but also dangerous temptation: ‘We can … fly like the butterfly having undergone mysterious metamorphoses. Though taking to the air, Icarus-wise we fly close to the sun, though we are flimsy and blown about the sky’ (2018, p. 317). Eros surprises us. From the exciting roots of passion emerges a newly constituted person and in religious terms this new ‘selving’ which Hopkins advises ought to be coupled socially with others and other being. The energy of ‘to be’ has to be integrated into a new process of self-becoming. Any desirous thrust towards transcendence is related to a self-surpassing which allows the person to experience something greater and this allows one to do ‘justice to oneself’ (2018, p. 318). The restless longing for the infinite cannot

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be ultimately thwarted: ‘There is something extraordinary about the sweep of human desire. There is a promise of self-determination in the open indeterminacy, and all of this is companioned by the promise of the intimate universal’ (2018, p. 318, my italics). In a relative sense, we can stand above these fixed determinants and much of modernity consists in trying to increase this ‘being above’ (2018, p. 319). But our being measured and our own measuring are always marked by indeterminacy. We are substantially more than what can be measured and this is a key aspect of our erotic, desiring being. The ever-present danger is that there occurs a self-surpassing which is centred on the self alone. Therefore, it is crucial that humanity makes an adventure to otherness, although loving the self is not wrong in itself. Such erotic turning of the self to the Other is moved by surplus which the desirous self always seeks but never totally finds since it is always beyond: ‘It is surplus affirmation “to be” – in search of the other as offering it the good of its “to be”, sometimes drawn in to serve the good of the “to be” of self, sometimes wondrously loved for itself, turning the selving head over heels’ (2018, p. 324). Eros is associated with immortalising in religion and the likelihood of a personal singularity to this is witnessed in Christianity’s belief in the resurrection of the body and soul. ‘Is eros obscurely in love with eternity?’ (2018, p. 333) Desmond asks and replies: ‘The surge of eros is the praying desire of time for eternity – and this in both a singular and universal sense’ (2018, p. 333). Autonomy is questionable when it begets an insubordination to the Other and complains that life is not as we would have determined it. The claim that we could do better than God, outdo God entails undoing creation (2018, p. 338). The determined absoluteness of the self’s eros breaks through against Hegel’s dream of a complete Absolute Spirit established in social terms. It disturbs the self-satisfaction of mediocrity and becomes the arena once again for the movement towards excess and plenitude (Torevell, 2013). References Benedict XVI. (2000). The Spirit of the Liturgy. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Benedict XVI. (2002). ‘Wounded by the Arrow of the Beautiful’ Re-named ‘The Feeling of Things, Contemplation of Beauty’. https://www.newliturgicalmovement. org/2011/06/contemplation-of-beauty-by-cardinal.html#.Y6w8SXbP200 (Accessed 28.12.22). Bennett, M. and Torevell, D. (2021). The Naked Truth: Temptation and the Likely ‘Fall’ of Catholic Education. Religions, 12(11), 1–16. Boyle, N. (2004). Sacred and Secular Scriptures. A Catholic Approach to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cahn, S. and Meskin, A. (2008). Aesthetics. A Comprehensive Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell. Desmond, W. (2003). Art, Origins, Otherness. Between Philosophy and Art. New York: State University of New York Press.

Theoretical Frameworks 143 Desmond, W. (2016). The Intimate Universal. The Hidden Porosity among Religion, Art, Philosophy, and Politics. New York: Columbia University Press. Desmond, W. (2018). The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being. On the Threshold between the Aesthetic and the Religious. Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kant, I. (2008). Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Krell, D.F. (1993). Basic Writings. Heidegger. London: Routledge. Lynch, W. (2001). Christ and Apollo. The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination. Belmont, NC: Wiseblood Books. McGilchrist, I. (2012). The Master and His Emissary. Yale: Yale University Press. Murdoch, I. (1970). The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Murdoch, I. (1992). Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Chatto and Windus. Rowan, P. (2017). A Jolly, Jobbing Journalist with Just One Idea: JKC. In P. Rowan and D. Torevell (Eds.), New Insights into Literature and Catholicism (pp. 40–63). Newcastle: CSP. Saward, J. (1997). The Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty. Art, Sanctity and the Truth of Catholicism. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Scruton, R. (1982). Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steiner, G. (1987). Heidegger. London: Fontana Press. Thiessen, G. (2004). Theological Aesthetics. A Reader. London: SCM Press. Torevell, D. (2006). Circles of Meaning: The Christian Dynamic of Contemplation, Meaning and Purpose. Journal of Christian Education, 49(3), 33–42. Torevell, D. (2007). Liturgy and Beauty of the Unknown: Another Place. Aldershot: Ashgate. Torevell, D. (2013). Wounded by the Arrow of Beauty’: The Silent Call of Art. Heythrop Journal, 54(6), 922–941. Torevell, D. (2022). Gaining Balance in Religious Training. What Might Sports and Physical Culture Coaches Learn from This? In D. Torevell, C. Palmer and P. Rowan (Eds.), Training the Body. Perspectives from Religion, Physical Culture and Sport (pp. 39–55). London: Routledge. Winston, J. (2009). Beauty and Education. London: Routledge.

6

Drama and Poetry Samuel Beckett, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Tennessee Williams

Samuel Beckett Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot dramatises desire and longing. It can be boldly interpreted within a hermeneutics of contemplative yearning. The dramatic employment of silence and the body are the primary means of achieving this. Beckett has indicated that his inspiration for the play partly came from two paintings by Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840): Man and Woman Observing the Moon and Two Men Observing the Moon. I will refer here specifically to the latter. This painting shows two men dressed in traditional German coats and hats looking across a landscape which features the moon. The dominant impression is one of contemplative beholding, the figures are standing still observing, motionless, the light from the moon the focus of their still attention. These two figures together express a humility and passivity, a sense that they feel together in another world. In the silence and stillness, something Other is indicated and it lends them a reassurance that one key to human happiness might well rest in this contemplative way of seeing and being. Vladimir and Estragon contemplate the moon towards the end of Act I. The stage directions add that in a moment the light suddenly fails and the moon rises gradually at the back, shedding a pale light on the scene. Estragon looks up at the moon, a movement that calls forth from Vladimir the question – what are you doing? In reply Estragon half re­ members Percy Bysshe Shelley’s To the Moon which reveals how the moon must be weary of gazing on the likes of them. The moon in Shelley’s poem becomes weary through disappointment at the wayward changeability of others, at not finding an object worth its constancy. But besides their own contemplation of the moon they are aware of the moon’s contemplation of them and a little later Estragon asks Vladimir whether God might see him. One of the most explicitly religious statements of the play occurs when Estragon says that throughout his life he has compared himself to Christ. The self here is in relation to and compared with another. Just before this statement, there is a sense that as well as their looking at the moon they too are looked upon by the light. These are the moments in the play when the silence signifies an all-seeing presence, an experience not of surveillance but DOI: 10.4324/9781003227540-10

Drama and Poetry 145 of consolation. Such presence can be as alarming as comforting since it points to our dependence on something outside our control and asks us to accept something greater than ourselves. At one point in the play Estragon begins to speak, using the language of prayer, and implores that God might have pity on him. Vladimir’s retort is: ‘And me?’ reminding the audience he too wants to be caught up in a dialogical encounter and to react positively to the waiting they must live through. Pieper’s understanding of the receptivity of contemplative stillness draws attention to this reciprocal and dialogical dimension: ‘it means the soul’s power, as real, of responding to the real – a co-respondence, eternally estab­ lished in nature – has not yet descended into words’ (1998, p. 31). Consequently, not only does the audience’s experience of the characters’ dialogue with silence signify a shared experience of something ‘real’ which cannot be expressed in any more potent manner, but the silence itself becomes the means of foregrounding the visible and audible. Silence is the source of the visible, the spur which encourages liturgists and artists in their attempts to create the most appropriate forms, to give some kind of expression to the invisible and the unheard, to ritualise their latent force, the presence felt but ever fully articulated. Religions have always taught the interplay of this kind of concealment and disclosure in relation to silence’s erupting presence. Although the text has often been linked to absurdist theatre (with its seem­ ingly meaningless pursuit of filling the time), I wish to show how one of Waiting for Godot’s central concerns rests upon a long history of understanding con­ templation in relation to silence and attentive longing. In the author’s dramati­ sation of passive, Weil-like attentive waiting there emerges a receptivity and opening up to that which resides within the experience of silence. It is true that as the play unfolds nothing much is done and the phrase ‘Nothing to be done’ which is repeated by Estragon suggests initially a frustration with, rather than a meaningful experience of time in relation to another, better time, but in their ‘non-doing’ they come to realise that conversation cannot give them the hope they desire and that it is in the keeping of silence that the purpose of their lives might be realised or at least hinted at. Estragon says frustratingly that they are ‘incapable of keeping silent’ and that they talk ‘so we won’t hear’ (Beckett, 2006, p. 58). They come to realise that their talking is an excuse for not living in the silence and that often they have ‘blathered’ ‘about nothing in particular’ (2006, p. 66). Nevertheless, they observe that during their frequent and, at times frus­ trating conversations, the seasons move in silence and over time the tree has changed dramatically. Vladimir encourages Estragon to look at the tree, to behold it, contemplate it, to see how it has blossomed. He attempts to change Estragon’s ‘I see nothing’ into seeing something: ‘But yesterday evening it was all black and bare. And now it’s covered with leaves’ (2006, p. 61) he insists. Here he encourages Estragon to behold the transformed tree that he too might be transformed or at least recognise that things never stay dull or the same for long. If these moments of contemplative seeing fail to sustain the audience that life is made up of expectant waiting, then other examples are witnessed in the

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central characters’ shifting but enduring relationship. In Act II, Estragon attempts to sleep as Vladimir takes off his own coat and lays it across his shoulders. Then, startled by disturbing thoughts, Vladimir, with his arms wrapped around him, reassures his companion that he is still there and that he should not be afraid. This oscillation between human isolation and inti­ mate companionship is revealed earlier in their relationship at the start of Act II. Beckett writes in his stage directions that after Vladimir tells Estragon to look at him ‘They look long at each other, recoiling, advancing, their heads on one side, as before a work of art and then they embrace’ (2006, p. 54). Vladimir on seeing Estragon after a night’s absence says he will embrace him and a little later that he missed him while at the same time he was happy. Similarly, when Pozzo asks for help, Vladimir gives one of the most inspiring speeches of the play reflecting a purpose not articulated before in the play. He comments how at this specific moment in time they are given an opportunity to help in a particular situation no others are given and they should make the most of it before it is too late. Related to this is their tendency to reflect on their ‘doing’. As Vladimir comments, ‘What are we doing here, that is the question’? – a satirical echo of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. This is both a pastoral and a philosophical question and they become intimately related to each other at this point in the drama. Eyre and Wright suggest that Beckett’s ‘great theatrical insight was that, being a play, its action had to be waiting’s opposite: filling the time’ (2000, p. 220). Although this is true, such ‘filling the time’ is more significant than might at first appear. Rather than communicating a meaningless frustration about the occupying of time, its dynamic rests upon an enactment of time–space in perpetual relation to another dimension of time and space. Their waiting and desire is hopeful and there is always a sense that there is another world, to which at times their silent waiting represents and points. Waiting for Godot stages an intense longing for a revelation of meaning in relation to a future event which has been promised. Through this experience their lives are given hope and changed, if at times, stubbornly endured. Beckett’s work reflects this attentive listening and it is the contemplative rather than absurdist waiting which propels the dramatic action. This patient waiting is itself dramatic and performative. The silences and pauses become the central experiences for the characters and the audience with the silence signifying much more than the mere absence of sound or words, an experience of filling the time which has to be lived through. Patient expectation, therefore, is always the backdrop and mood to the words and gestures which interrupt the silence. The demand and chal­ lenge for the audience is the level to which this silence can be kept in creative tension with the words, movements and gestures they hear and see. But if, and when, the silence can be endured, it allows for a different kind of ‘hearing’ and a different kind of ‘seeing’ far more potent than what is acknowledged by the physical senses. Silence here becomes expectant and revelatory. Not unlike many writers of the Middle Ages, Beckett seems to conceive of his characters sub specie aeternitatis with a recognition that humility is

Drama and Poetry 147 required on the part of created humankind (Kern, 1987, p. 18). Knowing consists of not only accepting the limitations of human cognition, but of accepting unknowingness itself. When the blind Pozzo tires in getting to his feet after falling over Lucky, he has to admit they are only mortal. What is exposed of what is waited for is unknowing, but an unknowing of signifi­ cance. When the French suffix ot is added to the Anglo-Saxon word God it indicates an apophatic theology as the way forward. Vladimir and Estragon begin to believe in this approach as the play unfolds. Although at first hearing Lucky’s major speech might suggest a cruel and meaningless world, the rhythm of the verse gives weight to and falls on the phrase ‘for reasons unknown but time will tell’. This is not too far away from Julian of Norwich’s belief that ‘all will be well’. As Taylor-Batty and Taylor-Batty point out, it was during Beckett’s 1975 direction of the play that he pointed out that the ‘threads and themes’ of the play were brought together (2008, p. 43). Although God appears to show apathia (indifference to human suf­ fering) and athambia (the inability of God to be provoked into action) and although there is a clear sense that strong metanarratives have collapsed, there is a keen sense in the play that the story is not over yet and that unfinished work still needs to be done. The line ‘the labours abandoned left unfinished’ hints at an ongoing discovery of meaning and the ‘waiting’ in the title of a desire to discover what at present is hidden and concealed (Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1 Waiting for Godot: Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan.

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Just as much as there is an intrinsic tension between words and silence in many of Beckett’s plays, so there is an intrinsic relation between immobility and movement. This dynamic of movement/immobility is always in relation to the silence and the pauses which accompany it. Words and movement flow from the silence. Consequently, since words and actions emerge in relation to another silent place and time, they assume a greater significance, becoming dramatic features set against that which is beyond the form. And they require skilful communication since every detail of their instantiation is set against something else, is always in relation to an Other, and denote more than they at first seem; they are played out against a silence felt by the audience. Beckettian language and movement thus operate against and in relation to silence’s presence. The body becomes a central feature in all this. Becket’s aim is not to reduce the stage to words, but to focus upon language that is pronounced by the body, words expulsed by the body. Both word and gesture are restored to a primal significance. Once the stage is set in relation to silence, the body – motionless, in motion and gestural – utters stark words which take on a paramount significance. The slightest of gestures or movements which accompany the words, are always set against another action and sound not seen or heard. In accompanying the bodily actions, silence becomes its most perfect partner. The Beckettian actor, as a result, must be trained in an economy of movement and in a bodily concentration and focus so that (s)he can communicate the greatest significance in the smallest gesture, the least movement. Beckett himself when directing his plays never approached them primarily through a psychological examination of character or motivation. It was the body which became the central focus and it was the physical which became foremost; then actors worked backwards towards the psychological underpinning of the physical form. As McMullan comments in her essay on Beckett as director, ‘The emphasis was almost entirely on the shape, position and movement of the body and on the sound, rhythm or inflection of the voice’ (1994, p. 202). Most actors who have worked with Beckett relate how their preparation for performance requires immense discipline. Brenda Bynum who has acted in many of Beckett’s productions comments, ‘… the visual images are overwhelming … absolute purity, not a syllable that wasn’t essential. It seemed almost mathematical, a certain number of required syl­ lables. Yet the emotions are in the spaces between them’ (quoted in McMullan, 1994, p. 206). When Beckett produced Waiting for Godot in Berlin in the 1970s, he wrote down in precise detail all the actions, move­ ments and gestures of the characters. This is in opposition to a commonly held tradition of directing where the director allows the emotional response of the actors to determine the kinds of actions they will make on stage. Beckett instead determined this for them and it suggests that he knew, in a manner similar to Bourdieu, that bodily practices precede disposition and emotional attitude. After many months the actors mastered the moves ex­ actly and the play was an enormous success.

Drama and Poetry 149 Brooks suggests that ‘holy’ drama can become an experience which tells us that the routine of life is not all there is; it can be ‘the sparrow in a prison cell’ (1968, p. 48). There is no need to be imprisoned within the noise of the world. What liturgy and the theatre endorse through such dramatisation of silence is that there is legitimacy in acknowledging that silence can lead to freedom. He is right to suggest that Beckett’s plays always invite us to see light; they offer us a means of recognising ourselves through the symbols offered – the two men in Waiting for Godot existing by a stunted tree which later blossoms. He writes: This is how Beckett’s dark plays are plays of light, where the desperate object created is witness to the ferocity of the wish to bear witness to the truth. Beckett does not say ‘no’ with satisfaction; he forgets his merciless ‘no’ out of a longing for ‘yes’ and so his despair is the negative from which the contour of its opposite can be drawn. (1968, p. 65, my italics) Referring to Beckett’s Happy Days, he suggests the optimism of the lady buried blinds her to the truth of her condition. It is the wish for optimism that prevents her from finding hope. When we attack Beckett for pessimism, it is we who are the Beckett characters trapped in a Beckett sense. When we accept Beckett’s statement as it is, then everything is transformed. Optimism is false hope and deadly (Eagleton, 2019). Brooks goes as far as to suggest that we are full of a kind of irrational joy once we accept situations with honesty. Joy, it seems, emerges from the courage to confront our own reality. Salvation comes from un-blinkered self-scrutiny and through the celebration of life itself in all its strange and mysterious guises. I think Brooks is both right and wrong here. Right in that any avoidance of self-knowledge and the way things are leads to a fragile optimism, but wrong in that silence simply encourages a form of self-scrutiny and not a relationship with something greater than the self. I think Beckettian silence does more than Brook suggests by offering a metaphysical perspective that there is always something more and greater to be experienced. Leaving us, to enter into a ritualised silence, is not leaving us obsessionally alone with our­ selves or encouraging us to be amused by life’s paradoxes and irrationalities. Such dramatic usage of silence, to repeat the title from Gröning’s film, leads us Into Great Silence (2006), a silence that is given and meaningful rather than created by human endeavour alone. Consequently, one might legitimately infer that Beckett’s use of silence and sign are potentially liturgical in that they give witness to another life expressed through and yet beyond the dramatic form. The symbolic use of the tree which has four or five leaves at the beginning of the second act and which is contemplated by Vladimir and then followed by his singing and crowned by his embrace of Estragon, after they have looked at each other, ‘as before a work of art’ (2006, p. 58) become moments of delight enough to dispel the notion that life is without hope. The characters are not part of a

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hopeless attempt to conjure a future for themselves. Not only is the waiting not hopeless in a distinctly ‘Weil-ian’ manner, but the frequent moments of intimacy and surprise within time determine that time is neither flat nor stale. It is more persuasive to read the play as a contemplative passage of time in which moments of divine disclosure pierce the surface of seeming mean­ inglessness and become enough for the audience to recognise the fruitfulness of silence and existence. This is not absurdist but contemplative theatre and the audience enters a stretch of silent time along with the characters as they begin to see the world and themselves in a new way. Waiting for Godot therefore, not only suggests that silence and desire carry a metaphysical significance – it really is not simply the absence of sound – but that the actions, gestures and words which punctuate the silence gain their impact in relation to this alerting experience. Worton suggests that the silences in Beckett enable the author to present three things: (1) inadequacy when the characters cannot find the words they need; (2) repression when they are struck dumb by the attitude of their interlocutor or their sense they are breaking a social taboo; (3) anticipation when they await the response of another which will give them a temporary sense of existence (1994, p. 75). But there is more to the silences than Worton suggests and it rests on a hopeful longing for the Other. This kind of dramatic silence in Waiting for Godot is not unrelated to the silence ‘filmed’ in Gröning’s Into Great Silence based on the Carthusian monastery La Grande Chartreuse situated high above Grenoble in the Alps. Founded in 1084 by Bruno of Cologne, the monks became known for their strict rules of silence. Even the monks of Cluny were astonished by their ascetic ideal (Bruce, 2007). Although they did not refuse guests they did not accommodate horses and as a result visitors had to arrive by foot which deterred many since the monastery, set high in the Alps, was difficult to reach. The Carthusians only came together in communal prayer on Sundays and feast-days and a strict discipline regulated their conduct. Each day they would meditate on the account they would have to render on the Day of Judgement for every careless word spoken as if it were their last. Even their servants who attended to the livestock were expected to remain silent. They modelled themselves on the early Christian community of Thessalonica who were exhorted by St Paul to toil day and night and to live quietly. Peter the Venerable compared them to the Desert Fathers (2007, pp. 160–161), especially in their desire to remain silent and bridle their tongues. This is seen in Into Great Silence. The opening sequence of the film shows a Carthusian monk kneeling in silent prayer wearing the white robe of his Order. His deliberate posture and movements become responses to the silence and with few distractions he orders his life towards something ‘Great’ – the silence itself; something outside the self yet paradoxically realised by the contemplative movement of the inner self. The camera catches his being enveloped by the greatness of silence. This is the impact of the film – that the silence experienced is not simply the empty void of no sound but the presence of something ‘Great’.

Drama and Poetry 151 The Scriptural passages are not read aloud but silently by the monks and the audience; the film itself becomes a mediated experience of the monastic silence. In the darkness and silence of the cinema, the audience respond to greatness too. The film itself is a sequence of evocative images based on 1 Kings 19: 11–13 which tells how God is not revealed in the earthquake or fire but in ‘a gentle whisper’. The intimacy of attentive desire and listening to the divine encounter is emphasised here. An accompanying scriptural verse relates how ‘anyone who does not give up all he has cannot be my disciple’. There is, therefore, a condition attached to being formed by Great Silence – the willingness to relinquish those things which stand in its way so that one might begin to hear what the silence speaks. The words ‘Behold the silence’ appear on the screen, suggesting a con­ templative submission to what silence has to offer. This monastic understanding of the goal of human life is situated in this humbling and yet lifting of the self. Words emanate from silence and return to it. Within this context Silence becomes a means and agency of revelation, the avenue for divine disclosure; it uses sexual imagery of desire – erotic and beckoning, moving those who ‘hear’ it into a divine space: ‘O Lord, you have seduced me and I was seduced’ proclaims another scriptural quotation on screen. The words express the intimate nature of the embrace of divine love, felt most acutely in silence. The words penetrate the heart as they emerge from the silence reflecting The Prologue to St John’s Gospel that God is silence, he does not merely issue forth from silence. Throughout this filming of silence, as the camera focuses on the monks’ movements and gestures as well as the changing of the seasons, they assume a symbolic significance and at the same time convey a renewed meaning to the smallest of actions and objects. During one episode, a group of monks begin to discuss the importance of signs and symbols and a monk offers how important it is to realise that it is not we who ought to be questioning the signs but the signs which ought to be questioning us. The camera points our attention to such signs throughout the film as they serve to question us from the horizon of the Great Silence; in signs’ silent questioning we begin to ‘behold’ that there is more to life than the dull directionless passage of time. As Cardinal Poupard notes in his commentary, in this separate space–time God’s eternity and human time become linked as a ‘window is thrown open onto eternity’. The heart’s deepest desires start to be satisfied in the repeti­ tion, measure and silence of the monastic ordering of the day. One result is that we are beckoned to stand ourselves in an adoring silence, praising that which is the Great Silence. It is the beginning of awe and the stuff of worship. Not all silences carry this kind of resonance. Different liturgical silences reflect the shifting mood changes of the liturgical year. But all point to the overriding objective power and greatness of silence which always implies presence rather than absence within the framework of the paschal mystery. Note, for example, other expressive arts on this theme – James MacMillan’s Symphony Number 3: Silence and Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence. The contrast with Pinter’s use of silence in The Homecoming could not be sharper. Here silence splits community and communication rather than

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strengthening it. The dramatic ‘exploitation’ of silence is made possible by the words and actions which give rise to it. Unlike Beckett, Pinter creates an ominous silence which verges on violence. Silence is no longer the invitation to enter into something beyond the human but rather the device for creating a mood of human tension and untrustworthiness. There is nothing relational or dialogical with this kind of silence, but rather it suggests sinister gaps of communication, taut pauses of withheld anger, stretches of dangerous subconscious violence. Although he demonstrates the influence of Beckett, his drama is far removed. Hall suggests something different has developed out of Beckett in Pinter’s use of silence as dangerous foreboding. Nothing could be more removed from Gröning’s Into Great Silence than a Pinter play. The playwright exploits silence for its own good, and manipulates its potential for revelation into something disturbingly oppressive. There is something tortuous about the silence Pinter creates; it creates isolation and alienation and is the instigator of noncommunication. Rather than being objectively enrapturing, it reflects the tense awkwardness of the characters themselves and there is nothing about such silence which is independent of the lives of the characters on stage. The opening of The Homecoming starts with a question which is repeated since it is not heard (or perhaps ignored) the first time: ‘I said I am looking for the scissors. What have you done with them?’ (1999, p. 3) demands Max. The questioning here, unlike Beckett’s use of questioning, is potentially violent – the scissors suggesting a weapon to be used. Although the con­ versation is mundane and uninspiring, it has a raw edge which encourages the pauses to be laden with an awkwardness that increases as the play un­ folds. If the words in Beckett allow for an opening to the metaphysical, the silence in Pinter determines a mood of anger and dislocation. Hall com­ ments: ‘The unsaid becomes almost more terrifying than the said. Pinter actually writes silence; and he appropriates it as a part of his dialogue’ (2000, p. 124). For example, Max tells Lenny that he ‘used to knock about with a man called MacGregor’ and that they were the two most hated men in the West End of London: ‘We’d walk into a place, the whole room’d stand up, they’d make way to let us pass. You never heard such silence. Mind you, he was a big man, he was over six foot’ (1999, p. 5). Silence here motivates fear and terror not awe; it is the silence of intimidation. Hall suggests that there are three types of silence in Pinter. First, there is the ellipsis while the actor searches for a word or words, a time of ‘incoherence’. Then, there is the pause which is a longer halt in the action where, writes Hall, ‘the lack of speech is a form of speech in itself’ (2000, pp. 126–127). This is a time of threat, a moment of non-verbal tension. Last but not least is the silence, which is the longest and most potent of the three gaps in the action. Hall suggests the latter is ‘a crisis point’. After the silences the characters have changed, moved on to another psychological place, shifted their emotional range to either cope with more or with less. What these silences do is hide the frustration or anger of the charac­ ters, which at times erupts onto the stage. The silence betokens the

Drama and Poetry 153 feelings of latent mistrust among the characters, a deep-seated and invisible well of dissatisfaction. Hall comments that when he is rehearsing a Pinter play he encourages the actors to show their emotional colouring to the point of melodrama and then he rehearses again telling the char­ acters to bottle up and hide their emotions. This allows the actors to know what they are hiding. This playing of the drama behind the text allows the mask to be at the same time ‘the enigmatic tool of commu­ nication and the main way in which human beings protect themselves from each other’ (Hall, 2000, p. 129). This is far removed from the silence which sustains spiritual desire and the hopeful waiting we see in the Christian tradition and of which we catch a glimpse in Waiting for Godot. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) ‘Ah! There was a heart right! There was a single eye! Read the unshapeable shock night And knew the who and the why’ (Hopkins: the Wreck of the Deutschland – stanza 29) ‘Yes to him … and this last sigh of desire, this one aspiration, is the life and spirit of a man …’ (Sermons and Devotional Writings). Many now regard the English Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins as one of the greatest nineteenth-century European poets (Brett, 1965; Ellsberg, 2017; Gardner, 1971; MacKenzie, 1970; Mariani, 2018; Robson, 2018).1 In the light of western secularisation and de-traditionalisation, this is an intriguing phenomenon. Two themes dominate his work – the seeking of his vocation and the desire for beauty. Although these two categories might appear as distinct facets, there is a strong inseparability between them. The ‘call’ and corresponding ‘sigh’ that Hopkins felt to write poetry and to become a priest were never wrenched from his desire to experience beauty. The beauty of Christ, as reflected in humanity and nature, was the overriding influence and driving force of his life, even though this became challenging for him throughout his short life. The ‘great sacrifice’ of Christ was to become so embedded in his consciousness that it became impossible for him to regulate his life without recourse to its theological dynamic. Despite feelings of ‘strangeness’, unrest, alienation, loneliness, ill-health and depression during his relatively short life, his work and priesthood are testimony to this desire for Christ and to his Lord’s ‘sacrifice’, offered for the sake of others, for whom he wished his endeavours to be ‘as the circling bird’, bringing order, harmony and ‘Love, O my God’ (Let me be to Thee as the circling bird). Living a holy existence for Hopkins meant fostering a ‘heart right’ (The Wreck of the Deutschland, stanza 29). It was the thing Hopkins always sought

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and longed for, but as his life progressed, he realised this would inevitably entail considerable disappointment and suffering. During a retreat in Beaumont in September 1883, he wrote: ‘In meditating on the Crucifixion, I saw how my asking to be raised to a higher degree of grace was asking also to be lifted on a higher cross’ (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 254). Like Newman, he understood failure as success, epitomised by the paschal mystery of Christ and taught how the good cannot conquer, except by suffering (Nixon, 1989; Ker, 2007; Schlatter, 2008). The annihilation of the self was a necessary step to take before a higher stage of spiritual awareness could take place. Carrion Comfort relates how avoidance of such mortification is one possibility; he ‘Can something hope, wish day come, not choose not to be’. On the surface, this act of free-will seems a defiant dec­ laration of resilience in the face of depression, but for Hopkins it amounted to a selfish example of disobeying his Creator. As Wolfe comments, ‘… in not choosing not to be, he is pitting himself against the Almighty. Taking pride in the invincible human spirit, Hopkins is coming close to denying man’s essential dependence on God’ (1968, p. 91). This tension between Hopkins’ own will and God’s will is witnessed throughout his life and poetry, becoming a constant struggle for him as a Jesuit ‘Soldier of Christ’. In The Soldier, he admires the one ‘who served his soldiering through …’ and he asks why do we look up to such a person? His answer: because his selfless longing and action are ‘manly’ and the reward is great, because Christ out of gratefulness and love for the soldier will ‘lean forth’ and ‘kiss’ his endeavours, crying ‘O Christ-done deed!’ The conflict is essentially about what one is called to do and whether one can answer that invitation. During his retreats, Hopkins reflected prayerfully on St Ignatius’ The Spiritual Exercises and would have been familiar with the words ‘… if someone did not answer his call, he would be scorned and upbraided by everyone and accounted as an unworthy knight’ (Ignatius, 1991, p. 146). In light of such quotations, he deliberated throughout his life on whether or not his desire to be a priest could be reconciled with his yearning to be a poet. At one stage, he burned all the poems he had written. Hopkins sees in the figure of the martyr a supreme model of answering Christ’s demanding call and refers to ‘The Christ-ed beauty’ of St Margaret Clitheroe’s ‘mind’. In his sermon at St Joseph’s Church, Leigh, Lancashire, in December 1879, he tells the congregation that she was ‘so marvellously cheerful and happy’ (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 48) on her final journey to painful death in York in 1586 and suggests to parishioners that they should react in a similar spirit during their own tribulations. He also wrote a ‘great ode’ on the Jesuit St Edmund Campion who was hanged, drawn and quartered for treason at Tyburn in 1581, but this has not survived (Dubois, 2017, p. 114). In The Wreck of the Deutschland, he equates the death of the ‘tall nun’ due to her banishment, with Christ’s passion; she becomes a ‘martyr-master’ (stanza 21). Any such attain­ ment of a Christ-like persona in relation to a divine call dominated Hopkins’ thinking. In one of his Sermons, he describes how St Joseph travelled to Bethlehem because of the Roman census, which was ‘inconvenient and painful’ but was necessary to serve the divine plan (1959a, p. 263). What makes a person

Drama and Poetry 155 who he really is – and free – is partly a decisive willingness to obey a tran­ scendent call. As Sobolev comments, ‘… what matters is not only the deed, but the choice, the action of the free will (of the arbitrium in his scholastic terms), which is the direct continuation of the self in the realm of inner spiritual freedom’ (2001, p. 308). The gradual perfection of a person comes about by the cumu­ lative choices he makes and by committing himself to a sense of duty, even though Hopkins acknowledges this is testing when ‘work goes on in a great system and machinery which even drags me on with collar round my neck though I could and do neglect my duty …’ (1959a, p. 263) (Figure 6.2). For Hopkins, genuine ‘self-consciousness’ is about discovering the uniqueness of one’s own personhood and destiny, without which human

Figure 6.2 Gerard Manley Hopkins.

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fulfilment and happiness are not possible. By reading Duns Scotus’ lectures given in Oxford in 1298, he learnt the importance of God-given individuality and of appreciating that one is not like any other being. One of the medieval theologian’s disputed questions is: ‘Utrum substantia materialis per aliquid positivum intrinsecum sit de se individua’ – whether material substance is of itself individual through some positive intrinsic thing’ – (Duns Scotus, 1987, Ordinatio, Distinction 3, Q.2). In his Comments on the Spiritual Exercises, he echoes the theologian’s claim: ‘Nothing else in nature comes near to this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, and selving, this selfbeing of my own’ (Hopkins, 1989, p. 309). However, the ‘self’ cannot bestow ‘self’ upon ‘oneself’ entirely – it must come from without too: ‘to be determined and distinctive is a perfection, either self-bestowed or bestowed from without’ (MacKenzie, 1989, p. 312). Like Jacob wrestling with the angel, Hopkins battled against any Pelagian self-determination, telling himself not ‘to feast on thee’ (Carrion Comfort).This is not to suggest that he does not regard individuality as a good in itself, but it must always be related to the gracefilled harmony of all things, exemplified in the beauty of the chestnut which is both original and part of a universal species. Haecceitas (‘thisness’) is the key to understanding humanitas but is only made sense of in relation to losing the self to something greater. In his poem Henry Purcell, he writes that his music ‘is the rehearsal / Of abrupt self there so thrusts on, so throngs the ear’ but is only so (as he adds in his introductory rubric to the poem) because ‘he has uttered in notes the very make and species of man … and in all men generally’ (Hopkins, 1989). For Hopkins, spiritual perfection was an overriding desire, driving moti­ vation and incentive. As a workaholic he strove to the point of obsession for the very best he could achieve and this applied to his spiritual life too. Following a strong Ignatian lead, he knew that humanity was ‘made to give to God glory and to mean to give it; to praise God freely, willingly to rev­ erence him, gladly to serve him’ (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 239). Deeply influenced by St Paul’s ‘hymn’ in Philippians 2.1–11, he loved Christ because he ‘annihilated himself, taking the form of servant … he emptied himself’ (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 108). He pledged to do likewise, even though he knew this would entail an intense struggle with the God he loved. In Carrion Comfort God is ‘lion-limb’ with ‘devouring eyes’ and that is why, at times, the poet is ‘frantic to avoid’ and ‘flee’. The poet was frequently agonised with the question: ‘Can I face and act on who Christ wishes me to become, as He Himself did?’ As a Jesuit, he would have practised the Particular Examen in The Spiritual Exercises, which involved a daily self-scrutiny to encourage and sustain the desire to live like Christ. The text makes a distinction between ‘consolation’ and ‘desolation’ within the spiritual life, the former being characterised by joy when attracted to heavenly things and ‘deso­ lation’ when there is loss of hope, a darkening of the soul and a troubling of mind, a movement to base and worldly things (Ignatius, 1991). The struggle which Hopkins, like all Jesuits faced, was to align oneself to

Drama and Poetry 157 ‘consolation’ by relentlessly following God’s directive of service, not one’s own. However, as von Balthasar notes, there is a more central question: ‘What is the human self, the person, in the face of God’s gracious election in Christ?’ (1986, p. 377). Hopkins’ attempt to address this dilemma is given primarily in three prose pieces: Homo creatus est (1880); On Creation and Redemption: The Great Sacrifice (November, 1881); and On Personality, Grace and Free Will (December, 1881), the latter two written during his nine-month tertianship (his Long Retreat) at Roehampton. The first, written on 20 August 1880 in Liverpool when he was 36 years old, is his account of what he considers to be the foundational principles of the Spiritual Exercises. His understanding of personhood and vocation come into view here: ‘I find myself both as man and as myself something most determined and distinctive, at pitch, more distinctive and higher pitched than anything else I see’ (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 122). He acknowledges that his life is exactly aimed at something, like an arrow that hits the bull’s-eye, set on its course, marked out, harmonised, picked out, elected. The source of this pitch is the One who is Himself ‘of finer and higher pitch’ and who is able to ‘force forward the starting and stubborn elements to the one pitch required’ (notice here the trope of ‘movement’ and any possible re­ sistance to this). This determination is felt in one’s sensuousness, the feeling one has of oneself: that taste of myself, of I and me, above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnut leaf or camphor, and is uncommunicable by any means to another man … to me there is no resemblance: searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being. (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 123) However, clearly, Hopkins did try in poetry to transmit this inalienable ‘taste’ of self and individuality in both human beings and nature. A person is able to choose from his ‘freedom of field’ what he wishes to achieve in his life. This becomes perfected over time, as the individual integrates himself with the distinctive taste and sound of his own being, preconceived and destined by God from eternity. St Ignatius explains how God trains the human will to choose what God has already chosen for him from eternity (Ignatius, 1991, p. 135). It is necessary to ‘ask in what kind of life or in what state his Divine Majesty wishes to make use of us?’ (Ignatius, 1991, p. 135). This requires a disciplining of the mind, so that it can choose in keeping with the mind of Christ (De Mello, 2010). If there is no internalised personal philosophy in keeping with the Christ’s way of seeing things, a person is unlikely to make the correct decision. Hopkins took seriously the videre personas and videre locum of Ignatian contemplation:

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As all places are at some point of the compass and we may face to them: so every real person living or dead or to come has his quarter in the round of being, is lodged somewhere and not anywhere, and the mind has a real direction toward him. (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 186) However, because there is a selfish reluctance to choose this direction as a result of sin, it can become a refusal to opt for the archetype of the self, conceived and chosen by God and consequently for it to develop into the murder of God, from where sin ‘receives its meaning and structure, and to which it is in fact related to the Cross of Christ’ (von Balthasar, 1986, p. 378). Hopkins’ under­ standing of grace is crucial to this estimation of personal choice (arbitrium), for this is how a person is able to determine himself in relation to the supernatural plan. Prevenient (forestalling) grace moves us naturally towards the good – ‘it rehearses in us our consent beforehand’ (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 150). As it pene­ trates, movement starts to occur, a newfound desire, a ‘strain’ for the exercise of freedom, a different ‘cleave’ associated with a ‘shift’ occurs. Then, an emerging consenting self starts to occur, and at this stage the personal arbitrium begins to travel along the road to a higher self, accompanied by grace ‘in a decision that man can achieve only inchoately, only in a “sighing of consent”’ (von Balthasar, 1986, p. 379) Hopkins writes that this decision is ‘found to be no more than the mere wish, discernible by God’s eyes, that it might do as he wishes, might correspond, might say Yes to him … and this last sigh of desire, this one aspiration, is the life and spirit of a man … . (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 155) This ‘sigh’ is ‘in fact prayer’, an ‘aspiration or stirring of the spirit toward God is a forestall of the thing to be done’ and once this is acted upon, the decision made becomes ‘the bridge across the gulf between humanity and God’. The future is open to change now since, ‘The sigh of correspondence links the present … to the future … it begins to link it, it is the first infini­ tesimal link in the chain or step of the road’ (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 158). At the height of this free positive response to God’s calling, one experiences ‘God’s finger touching the very vein of personality … and man can respond to … by bare acknowledgement only, the counter stress which God alone can feel …’ (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 158). Humanity is still free to discard this future, as Hopkins was free to do throughout his life and to abandon his priesthood and return to being a poet or another occupation as his primary calling. Hopkins tries to gauge whether an emerging, spiritual self can be com­ pared to the self in other things. He rejects chance but offers that maybe some universal spirit of nature or the world (in the Hegelian sense), is ‘en­ selfed in my self’. However, this does not seem to be the case, since ‘self tastes different to him than to me’ (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 129). It is God, says

Drama and Poetry 159 von Balthasar in his summary of Hopkins’ position, who ‘as the highest self may indwell all created persons in virtue of his uniqueness and transcen­ dence, but only because he has singled out these selves … and set them in being’ (1986, p. 376). In one of his 1882 sermons, Hopkins takes up Bonaventure’s theology of ‘utterance’ carried forward by Scotus: ‘God’s utterance of himself in himself is God the Word, outside of himself in this world. The world, then, is word, expression, news of God. Therefore, its end, its purport, its meaning, is God and its life or work to name and praise him’ (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 129). His laudatory poem about nature Pied Beauty starts with ‘Glory be to God for dappled things’ and ends with the exhortation ‘Praise him’. And Harry Ploughman tells of the dignity of manual labour out of a sense of ‘selving’ and service to others: ‘And features, in flesh, what deed he each must do – / His sinew-service where do’. Hopkins developed his ideas about personhood during a Long Retreat he undertook in December 1881 and it centres on the ‘great sacrifice’ of Christ. Following Philippians 2:5–11, he writes that Christ annihilated himself … taking the form of servant; that is, he could not but see what he was, God, but he would see it as if he did not see it … he emptied or exhausted himself so far as that was possible … . It is this holding back of himself … seems to me the root of all his holiness and the imitation of this is the root of all moral good in other men. (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 108) The eternal, universal, temporal and spatial instantiation of God in Christ is seen in the emptying and sacrifice of Himself in the created order. Hopkins realised how this theme was the key to unlocking the Christological history of the universe and his own life. He did not believe that Christ became incarnate due to humanity’s sinfulness but saw creation as dependent upon the incarnation. He believed it was an act of love which would have taken place in one form or another, even if there had not been any sin. Again, influenced by Scotus, he saw that the world of angels and humanity were fields for Christ where He was able to offer his joyful adoration of the Father. He became increasingly interested not only in how Christ is the ‘inscape’ of creation, but also how humanity could work out God’s design for itself and the world, through its sacrificial choices and actions. After reading Marie Lataste’s work in 1978, he began to formulate how there were two ‘strains’ or intentions by which God acts on the world. There is the creative strain which moves things according to their nature and there is the sacrificial strain which depends upon the personal choices of free agents. The latter is rooted in the sacrifice of Christ, and ‘is a consequence and shadow of the procession of the Trinity, from which mystery sacrifice takes its rise. … It is as if the blissful agony or stress of selving in God had forced out drops of sweat or blood, which drops were the world’ (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 110). Both as a priest and poet, his desire was to imitate the ‘Great Sacrifice’ and

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believed that Lucifer’s sin was an excessive, narcissistic dwelling on his own nature as likeness to God, so much so that when newer images of God presented themselves, he averted his will from them. The exemplar to be imitated is Christ at Gethsemane, who kept his own free will balanced as he learnt to follow the divine will. Hopkins derives the distinction between the elective will (voluntas ut arbitrium) and the ‘affective will’ (voluntas ut natura) from St Ignatius and sought to live out the non-separation of desire and choice, epitomised in the marriage union. In Harry Ploughman, he writes that ‘Each mortal thing does one thing … Crying What I do is me: for that I came’, showing how doing and being are interconnected and, as in Augustine’s writings, demonstrates how humanity is free to choose the objects of love which, in turn, may lead to a flight to the Divine as he writes in Love preparing to fly: ‘He play’d his wings as though for flight … In eddies of the wind he went / At last up the blue element’. There are times when Hopkins clearly cannot keep desire and choice in union, when the recalcitrant will struggles against all that is most attractive to its higher nature. What becomes clear in Hopkins’ life, poems and prose, is that this ‘natural’ tendency to choose the morally desirable was a fraught one for him to sustain. His own struggles with his sexual feelings and his constant sense of alienation, made the inseparability difficult at times. In his memoirs All Down Darkness Wide (Hewitt, 2022), Hewitt identifies with Hopkins in his struggle to reconcile his Catholic and gay identities and to understand the poet’s desires and own tendency to depression. He informs us that when he read Hopkins’ sermons the word which came coming back to him was ‘paraclete’ (2022, p. 213). What also struck him was his life of desire: Hopkins spoke of Christ’s body, his beautiful form, his strong limbs, ‘moderately tall, well-built and tender in frame’. ‘I make no secret’ he told his listeners, ‘I look forward with eager desire to seeing the matchless beauty of Christ’s body in heavenly light’. Where he had to make secret his desire for other men, his longing for Christ’s body could be shared, and was all the more feverish for the impossibility of attaining it. (2022, pp. 213–214) Hopkins had fallen in love with a fellow undergraduate Dolben while he was at Oxford and this double desire for Christ and men remained throughout his life. The Jesuit Order at that time would have been hostile to any open talk about homosexuality. Was this tension the basis and cause of Hopkins’ own depression? Certainly it was severe – his sonnets testify to this. In Carrion Comfort, he experiences the Divine as ‘terrible’ and questions why God would ‘rude on me / Thy wring-world right foot rock?’ Is it to bring about joy within God or within himself or both? Whichever it is, like Jacob, the poet lay ‘wrestling with (my God!) my God’. The sheer number of heart-felt questions in the poem is testimony to Hopkins’ inability to answer them definitively in his own life.2

Drama and Poetry 161 Hopkins believes that the creation of the world is an implication of the incarnation; thus, it follows, that the cosmos manifests as a whole, a Christological form, if seen with a spiritual eye. Even in the most challenging occurrences, Christ is witnessed and ‘admired’. In the storm and devastation of The Wreck of the Deutschland, he is able to ‘admire thee, master of the tides / Of the yore-flood, of the year’s fall; The recurb and recovery of the gulf’s sides’ (stanza 32). Through Christ’s descent into hell and a person’s imitative spiritual death of himself, a victory will occur. Conversely, those who live simply for themselves, can never ascend through descent, just as the murderer in St. Winefred’s Well only has ‘thoughts sour as blood’ and in refusing to yield to Christ, no longer hopes or prays and ends in ‘despair’. Hopkins wishes for the brother and sister in his 1886 unfinished poem, On the Portrait of Two Beautiful, Young People, a life of ‘selfless self of self’ which is ‘most strange, most still’, in other words, one devoted to following Christ’s ways. And in As Kingfishers Catch Fire, he records that Christ is able to be ‘enselved’ in each person, if he works with God’s grace, to the extent that He … plays in ten thousand places / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his’, a metaphor reiterated in On Personality, Grace and Free Will: ‘That is Christ playing at me and me playing at Christ, only that it is no play but truth; That is Christ being me and me being Christ. (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 154) Hopkins’ understanding of the theosis of the self drew partly on Aristotle’s metaphysics, in particular his writings on potentiality and actuality. In his 1867 undergraduate essay ‘The Probable Future of Metaphysics’, he outlines how from Heraclitus to Hegel, Not-Being, Being and Becoming have been set forth as the three most important stages in any understanding of Reality and correspond to notions of the potential, the actual and the passing over of one to the other (Hopkins, 1970). This attention given to ‘becoming’ assists in understanding Hopkins’ attitude to spiritual growth. For example, he uses the word ‘hollow’ to indicate the receptivity and ongoing development of humanity to receive the divine presence. In 1881, he claimed God rests in a human being ‘as in a place, a locus, bed, vessel, expressly made to receive him as a human jewel in a case hollowed to fit it, as the hand in the glove or the milk in the breast’ (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 195). As Dau comments in her fine analysis of love in Hopkins’ poetry, ‘his synecdoches signal our capacity to receive and contain God; the bed suggests the intimacy of that reception’ (2013, p. 70). He uses the simile of lettering on a sail which ‘are best seen when it fills’ and compares humanity’s reception of Christ into its heart, to Mary’s carrying of Christ in her womb. The undated Latin hymn to Mary, Ad Matrem Virginem contains the following lines: ‘He creeps in, O Mary / In the Eucharist. He Himself wishes to enter: I cannot deny myself to Him’. A person’s true nature is only realised when it becomes filled with Christ.

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Persuaded by his reading of Parmenides (Brown, 1997, pp. 168–191), Hopkins shows that his metaphysics rests on a distinctive notion of Being and Becoming. All inscapes are grounded in Being and this is why difference does not hold any difficulty for the poet, since any individuality is part of a larger whole and rooted in God’s Being. The words of his 1877 poem Pied Beauty echoes this philosophy: ‘All things counter, original, spare, strange’ are a reflection of God whose ‘beauty is past change’. Every person has the potential to be immortal, because he holds the inner capacity to be one with Christ: ‘I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am’ he writes in That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection. As Brown notes, this belief is shown in the language and metre of the poem: ‘Change and its fluctuous word patterns are finally banished by this tau­ tology (and pedantically perfect rhyme), which pivots about the copula, the simple assertion of being: “immortal diamond, / Is immortal diamond”’ (2004, p. 77). The ‘aspiration’ to change and become Christ-like depends upon a person being inspired to respond to the Holy Spirit: ‘Even the sigh or aspiration itself is in answer to an inspiration of God’s spirit and is followed by the continuance and expiration of that same breath which lifts it … to do or be what God wishes his creature to do or be’ (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 156). Poetry itself is a reply, a giving back to God, an utterance. He helps us to give by his incarnational ‘utterance’. Between May 1868 and December 1875, he found a growing reconciliation between his dual vocations as priest and poet which is why he had no qualms about writing The Wreck of the Deutschland when invited to compose a piece by his superior at St Beuno’s in honour of nuns drowned in the mouth of the Thames. His sprung rhythm, with its carefully placed stresses and emphases, was to become in Hopkins’ mind another method of ministry, a creative way of acknowledging and pro­ claiming Being: ‘each word is one way of acknowledging Being’ he wrote (Hopkins, 1959b, p. 129). He also began insisting that his poetry was to be read out loud, a spiritual exercise of inhaling and exhaling, as the reader negotiates his breath throughout the delivery of a poem. Any such ‘utterance’ is exhalation, a natural response to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. This is why Hopkins uses the expression ‘ah!’ numerous times in his poetry to signal, on the one hand, the breath of God and humanity and, on the other, to express astonishment that poetry is able to be an ‘aspiration’ to God’s ‘inspiration’ (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 158). Conversely, a refusal to answer the call and ‘pitch’ results in a person becoming ‘To his own self-bent so bound …’ (Ribblesdale). This is dia­ metrically opposite to St Margaret Clitheroe’s calling whose ‘will was bent at God’s’ (Margaret Clitheroe). Paradoxically, by her silent submission to death, she was able to echo the divine voice of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit: ‘The Utterer, Uttered, Uttering’. The martyr ‘caught’ (a word Hopkins uses frequently to indicate a brief, sensate glimpse of beauty) the Trinitarian ‘eternal ring’ when she heard the ‘crying of those Three’, as God mourned for her death. Akin to a bell tolling, she tells ‘His name times-over

Drama and Poetry 163 three’, just as in As Kingfishers Catch Fire, stones ‘ring’ out ‘broad’ God’s ‘name’. The Word becomes ‘uttered’, in poetry, bringing about the fleshing of God, as in the incarnation. In 1865 as an Oxford University undergraduate, Hopkins wrote his essay On the Origins of Beauty. A Platonic Dialogue where he imagines a con­ versation on the nature of beauty between a newly appointed Professor of Aesthetics and a student. The core of the dialogue concerns how beauty is characterised by irregularity, variety and strangeness, as much as by con­ formity, unity and harmony; regularity and irregularity co-exist. The chestnut-fan with six leaves illustrates this idea well because it is similar to and yet different from one with seven leaves. Such an emphasis on unique­ ness within uniformity is fundamental to Hopkins’ metaphysics, upon which much of his life, poetry and prose rests. In his 1881 letter to his friend, Bridges, eight years before his death, he admitted that ‘You give me a long jobation about eccentricities. Alas I have heard so much about and suffered so much for and in fact been so completely ruined for life by my alleged singularities that they are a sore subject’ (Hopkins, 1935, p. 126). His final years in Dublin were characterised by an acute sense of isolation and alienation which became the springboard for his ‘dark’ or ‘terrible’ sonnets. In 1885, he was able to combine his own sense of difference with that in nature as a whole: To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life epitomises this feeling which pervaded his entire life. And yet, paradoxically, the cre­ ation of beauty emerges from difference, for God ‘fathers-forth’ … ‘All things counter, original, spare, strange’ (Pied Beauty). As early as 1863 in a letter to Baillie from the Isle of Wight (a location he liked visiting for its beauty), he recorded: I think I have told you that I have particular periods of admiration for particular things. … The present fury is the ash, and perhaps barley and two shapes of growth in leaves and one on tree boughs and also a conformation of fine-weather cloud. (Hopkins, 1970, p. 202) Hopkins’ early drawings, which he hoped would be seen from a ‘Ruskinese point of view’, capture both the peculiarities of a scene, as well as its organic unity (Ward, 2002, pp. 56–75). About his sketch of waves from Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight in 1863, he said he was able to ‘catch’ both the individuality and the form of the sea – that ‘network’ which he tried to ‘law out’. The skilled eye and other senses, are capable of discovering the ‘inscape’ in things – the distinctive quality of ‘the dearest freshness deep down things’ as he puts it in God’s Grandeur, besides the overall pattern and symmetry of the scene. This passage indicates why he moved from painting to poetry as his preferred art. Enraptured by the touch – ‘huddle’, sound – ‘clocked’ and movement – ‘the backwater runs over’ more than the mere sight – ‘network’ of the waves, Gardner’s observation that ‘painting’s very stillness and dumbness would have oppressed him … and

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“he would have been plagued by all the nightingales of nature and art”, is a judicious one I think’ (1948, p. 15). What really captivated Hopkins was the beauty of the sound, of words, carefully spaced to maximise their rhythmic patterns and hues, which he often compared to music. Like colours in nature, he was fascinated with the sound of nature and he refers to ‘the chord of colour’ of a lily (Hopkins, 1959b, p. 237; Brown 2004, p. 29). While Professor of Rhetoric at Manresa House between September 1873 and July, 1874, he wrote ‘Poetry and Verse’ in which he comments: ‘Verse is speech having a marked figure, order of sounds independent of meaning’ (1959b, p. 276). The visceral, Anglo-Saxon intensity and ‘primitive’, guttural, tone of his verse compels a democratic audience of listeners primarily though rhythm and sound. The uneducated can be drawn into Hopkins’ verse, just as much as the educated to the plays of Shakespeare, which draw audiences into their musical folds. Hopkins’ poetry is characterised by how the heart desires and is lifted in admiration for the wonder and beauty of Being. In The Windhover dedicated ‘To Christ our Lord’, the poet discloses: ‘My heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird …’ as he becomes caught up by its ‘Brute beauty’, ‘the mastery of the thing’, the kestrel’s surging flight and speed of movement, its individuality, its self-confident ‘pride’, its uniqueness. Such language reflects an intimate reciprocity between the looker and the looked at: ‘When you look hard at a thing, it seems to look hard at you’ he observes in 1863’ (Hopkins, 1989, p. 140). Like a great painter, Hopkins was able to see things which other eyes could not, and his love of Van Gogh’s work influenced his own contemplative ability to see the unique beauty of things, such as ‘skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow’ or ‘Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls’ (Pied Beauty). While he lived at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, a gardener was amazed to notice how he kept looking intently at stones; and, in May 1870, Hopkins exclaims: ‘I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it’ (Hopkins, 1989, p. 134). This attention to the natural world is due to his capacity to appreciate, like Whistler (one of his fa­ vourite painters), ‘what I call inscape (the very soul of art …)’. His own joyful engagement with the particularity in nature is, he believed, available to everyone. But in 1872 he reflects: ‘I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again’ (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 221; 1989, p. 161). Hopkins’ own confident ability to discern the beauty of Christ in every­ thing was derived from his reading of Scotus. On the subject of encountering him in the Baddeley library on the Isle of Man in 1872, he reflected: At this time I had first begun to get hold of the copy of Scotus on the Sentences … and was flush with anew stroke of enthusiasm. It may come to nothing or it may be a mercy of God. But just then when I took in inscape of the sky or sea I thought of Scotus. (Hopkins, 1989, p. 161)

Drama and Poetry 165 The word haecceitas or ‘thisness’ in Scotus is often linked to Hopkins’ use of the word inscape, although his use of this word is contested. Persuasively, Sobolev rejects this association because he believes he uses the word as a general guiding principle for his work; Ward, too, is sceptical and suggests that Scotus’ concept of formalitates is a far better way to describe Hopkins’ use of the word ‘inscape’, since it involves how the imagination is able to be shaped and moulded by the senses, organising these by a method of formalitates, a strategy for separating out the particularities of a thing, without destroying its inseparability from the whole (Ward, 2002, pp. 187–191, 194–197). As Baker (undated) contends in her phenomenological reading of Hopkins, his enthusiasm for Scotus was likely due to the fact that he saw in him an avenue for epistemology, a basis for knowledge through feeling and sensing the divine within nature and humanity which all people could experience. This analysis resonates with the poet’s reading of and correspondence with John Henry Newman, in particular his notion of the illative sense which encourages a confidence in the ‘felt sense’ of truth. Hopkins read Grammar of Assent in 1873, three years after its publication and referred to the work as ‘heavy reading’ but ‘The justice and candour and gravity and rightness of mind is what is so beautiful in all he writes …’ (Hopkins, 1970, p. 58). In some of Hopkin’s poems, a sense of beauty and inscape is associated with the beauty, movement and extension of the human body, as he goes about its work Harry Ploughman records how he ‘leans to it, Harry bends, look. Back, elbow, and liquid waist / In him, all quail to the wallowing of the plough’ suggesting a mouldable aspect to his form, looked at from a distance by the poet, who shares a common, if different corporeality. In Felix Randall, there is again an emphasis on physicality, movement and employment, ‘When thus … / Didst fettle for the great grey horse his bright and battering sandal!’ But there is a closeness between them here because as a ministering priest he comes near to him with the last sacramental rites. Felix’s sickness and mortality draws him beside the poet who regrets the decaying of the once strong body, as he approaches death. By way of contrast in Epithalamion, written in 1888, he conjures up the beauty of a pastoral scene, as healthy, attractive boys with ‘bellbright bodies’ swim ‘waterworld thorough hurled’ in a river while a ‘listless stranger’ does the same in a nearby pool. Without doubt, the central dynamic in Hopkins’ estimation of and desire for beauty is the figure of Christ. Beauty is Christ’s own gift to humanity and nature, and what becomes possible by this, is a mutual act of exchange. He encourages readers of The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo to ‘Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver’. And in To What Serves Mortal Beauty? Hopkins is keen to acknowledge the Source of beauty, as well as a warning against its ability to entrap by its sensual power. It can be ‘dangerous’ because it has the potential to lead to lust; keeping ‘warm’ and alive ‘Men’s wits’ to ‘the things that are’ is not the full story. He even gave up looking at things closely for six months of his life due to this ‘danger’. However, Hopkins does want to emphasise that beauty can often lead to Christian action and refers to how Pope

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Gregory caught a sight of beautiful English boys in the slave market in Rome which encouraged him to act and send out missionaries to that country. Human beauty, too, is to be cherished, because it prevents us from wor­ shipping ‘block or barren stone’ and has the potential to lead to a higher spiritual beauty, ‘God’s better beauty, grace’. Hopkins makes an important distinction between a ‘glance’ which signals a response of ascesis and a ‘gaze’ which effects lust. Saville suggests that the sestet presents the most difficult conundrum which faced Hopkins during his entire life – ‘if we are to love the “selves” of men, their pitch, haecceitas, or thisness, and if stalling on the inscape or patterns of physical form leads us to appreciate that haecceitas, are we not justified in gazing on the body of the beautiful … through which we may glimpse the beauty of the soul?’ (2000, p. 180). The Hopkins-ian response is clear: one may look only long enough to catch the divine sub­ limity of such beauty: ‘Merely meet it; own / Home at heart, heaven’s sweet gift; then leave, let that alone’. Thus, it is beneficial to remember that times of renunciation and brief moments of pleasure, give way to the experience of more lasting spiritual grace. The beauty captured in the transient flying of a bird, for example, is also able to be at the same time, an experience of Christ’s beauty. During his years of pastoral activity, Hopkins came to see human beings as sacramental forms of God. He ‘could hardly bear the pollution of inno­ cent souls. … and on the other, men and women, in their homecoming, as sinners, to God …’ (1986, p. 398) suggests von Balthasar. In a letter to E. H. Coleridge on 22 January 1866, he writes: It is one adorable point of the incredible condescension of the incarnation (the greatness of which no saint can ever have hoped to realize) that out Lord submitted not only to the pains of life … but also to the mean and trivial accidents of humanity … it is not surprising that our reception or non-reception of its benefits shd. be also amidst trivialities. (1970, p. 19) As Mariani comments in his analysis of Felix Randall, Hopkins’ ‘vision is to have seen in the daily shoeing of horses by a common blacksmith, without “forethought of” its special significance, the abiding presence of Christ’ (1970, p. 172). ‘The metamorphosis of the “great grey drayhorses” into light, supple, Pegasean steed with “bright and battering sandal” is an exact parallel of Felix Randall’s spiritual transformation’ (1970, p. 171). Hopkins sees himself as an agent of change secured by the dying man’s receiving of the viaticum, assisting his soul’s final journey to death, just as the horse on its ongoing life’s journey is made strong by the ‘sandal’ (Mariani, 1970, p. 171). The beauty of Christ has the ability to ‘capture’ Hopkins’ imagination and spiritual aspirations. Although in one of his letters to Bridges in February 1879, he regrets that his love for Christ is only occasionally felt: ‘the only person that I am in love with seldom, especially now, stirs my

Drama and Poetry 167 heart sensibly’ (1935, p. 66), some of his best poems illustrate his pas­ sionate love for Christ. In The Windhover, the poet flies upwards like the bird, just as in Plato’s Phaedrus the soul in love, regenerates its wings and returns to its original home. In relation to the description of eros in Plato and the dove in the Song of Songs (both texts known well by Hopkins), we read in The Wreck of the Deutschland that the ‘heart in flight embodies the heart of the one who has fallen in love with Christ’ (Dau, 2013, p. 65; Saville, 2000, p. 3). However, this movement of expansiveness, and the freeing of the heart, in a sudden outburst of emotion is often in tension with Hopkins’ Jesuitical ascetic training which encouraged self-denial and obscurity; the phrase ‘my heart in hiding’ reflecting this disciplined ideal. Dubois suggests: ‘The Windhover’ tussles across its volta with how much admiration for nature’s vigour can be reconciled with the seclusion de­ manded by religious vocation’ (2017, p. 104). And Saville notes that Hopkins ‘draws from a long-standing devotional rhetoric that uses erotic imagery to convey spiritual thoughts’ (2000, p. 22). Even though he is disappointed that much of God’s creation has been ‘wrecked’, he longs, in compensation, for the day ‘with eager desire to seeing the matchless beauty of Christ’s body in the heavenly light’ (Hopkins, 1959a, p. 36). He is also reassured that God knows the deeply felt tension in humanity between the temporary and the eternal. Indeed, God looks on the beauty of his own creation and hears its yearning cries, or as von Balthasar puts it: ‘He hears ‘man’s inchoate sigh of assent …’ (1986, p. 386). God sees behind the surface a person’s struggles and assists him with grace to start again when he falls: ‘Complete thy creature dear O where it fails / Being mighty a master, being a father and fond’ (In the Valley of the Elwy). It is Christ who is the ‘instress’ which is felt within all created things and grace operates as ‘mouthed to flesh-burst / Gush! – flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet / Brim, in a flash, full! –’ (stanza 8, The Wreck of the Deutschland). Due to the consoling, beautiful cross which is imprinted on humanity in all its endeavours, Hopkins is able to say, in a sermon at Leigh on 14 December 1879 to his working-class congregation: We must put a stress on ourselves and make ourselves find comfort where we know the comfort is to be found. It is a comfort that in spite of all, God loves us … We have only to force ourselves to see it, to dwell on it and at last to feel that it is so. (Hopkins, 1959a, pp. 47–48) It was such comfort which allowed him to say as his last words, ‘I am so happy. I am so happy’ (Mariani, 2019, p. 71). In summary, Hopkins learnt to read the forms of nature and personhood as a response to his desire for Christ and his intent to imitate his sacrifice. He expressed this longing in poetic and prosaic language so he might utter God’s Word with originality and conviction, thereby encouraging others to do the

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same. Summing up Hopkins’ ambition, von Balthasar writes: ‘Together with the man, the language must reach out beyond its immanence because the mystery of God does not hold sway as something incomprehensible behind the forms of the world; rather, the Divine Word was made flesh’ (1986, p. 393). His genius lies in his use of language, rhythm and sound to com­ municate such a fleshed-out metaphysics, which a ‘heart right’ (cor rectum) is able to capture. Hopkins would surely have been content and able to rest peacefully in his grave, if he thought he had succeeded in this. Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) Tennessee Williams was a master at dramatising individuals’ desperate search for peace and happiness in a world which he believed was at times brutally cruel and uncaring. At the end of his (1871–1958) highly acclaimed tragedy A Streetcar Named Desire (published in 1943), Blanche DuBois, the drama’s central figure, says to the Doctor who escorts her to a mental asylum and whose arm she tightly holds, ‘Whoever you are – I have always depended on the kindness of strangers’ (2000, p. 563). In an earlier scene, she confesses to her new boyfriend, Mitch, that before meeting him, she had many inti­ macies with strangers by which she means casual sex with men, even a 17-year-old boy. Her reason for this was out of ‘panic’ of being alone; they were desperate attempts to fill ‘her empty heart’, ‘hunting for some protection – here and there, in the most – unlikely places’ (2000, p. 546). The affairs took place after the suicide of her first lover, Allan, whom she discovered after her marriage, to be homosexual. In this short sequence, we encounter central themes which pervade the whole play and indeed Williams’ entire oeuvre, as well as his own personal life.3 As Eyre and Wright argue, Williams has tended to become the dramatic voice of the dispossessed, women, gays, blacks, the mad, the wayward, the lonely (2000). Williams’ characters search for peace of mind and happiness but their desire for these is thwarted by their own fragility and the cruelty of the world from which they attempt to escape. Human attempt to withstand the cruelty of the world through dissembling and fake imaginings illuminate a truth about the nature of the self. Williams writes that: ‘Fear and evasion are the two beasts … They distract us from feeling too much about things’ (quoted in Bigsby, 1982, p. 46). Art can present and restore truth. Unlike a magician, a dramatic story teller, says Tom in The Glass Menagerie ‘gives you the illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you the truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion (1996, p. 2). The theatrical metaphor is prevalent in Williams. Ironically, Art can offer a release from illusion and the passage of time by capturing it still through the creative imagination and offers a certain kind of grace. Nevertheless, it always contains ‘a hermetic atmosphere conjured by a world constructed by the imagination out of memory and desire’ (Bigsby, 2001, p. 41). Williams comments on the power of theatre to ‘snatch the eternal out of the desperately fleeting’ (quoted in Bigsby, 1982, p. 46). So, writes Bigsby,

Drama and Poetry 169 ‘the trick of the artist becomes paradigmatic; the act of invention becomes crucial to survival and personal meaning, and the imagination a vital instrument of redemption’ (1982, pp. 46–47). What is the truth and reality the characters seek to escape from in Williams’ plays? In The Glass Menagerie, the political situation certainly – the Depression of 1930s’ America, Guernica and the Spanish civil war, the emerging fear of a Second World War, but more importantly their own dissatisfaction with the present and their lot in life in tandem with their innate desire to seek something better and to find love. The play also exposes the sham of empty capitalism; Tom exclaims about his employment that it is simply about power. Amanda’s hus­ band left his wife because he ‘fell in love with long distances’ (1996, p. 3). She reminisces about her romantic past as Blanche does in Streetcar. Laura has re­ treated into a separated world of glass animals which she cares for as it they were real. Tom, yells his mother, continually seeks an escape from responsibility and is often out until the early hours of the morning; he says he is at the cinema – his mother and the audience do not believe him and is interpreted by his mother as doing ‘things that you’re ashamed of … Nobody goes to the movies night after night’ (1996, p. 17), suggesting a rebellious and sexual release to his frustration, perhaps through homosexual relationships. The play is about longing and desire. Tom says of his work mate Jim that he is a symbol: ‘he is the long delayed but always expected something that we live for’ (1996, p. 3). There is a strong yearning expressed here which sug­ gests that their lives are unfulfilled which is why they are so ‘restless’. What is it that the characters live for and desire? Laura’s mother whose husband left her, longs to see her daughter married – to fall in love. Tom exclaims fiercely to his mother during one of their many shouting matches: ‘You think I’m in love with the Continental Shoemakers? … Look! I’d rather somebody picked up a crow bar and battered my brains out – than go back mornings’ (1996, p. 17). Laura loves her glass animals and delights in how the light shines from them and tells Jim to ‘Hold him over the light!’ (1996, p. 64). But: ‘But if you breathe it breaks’ (1996, p. 64). This is where she finds comfort; not in the grim reality of the world which she says looks down on her because she is a ‘cripple’ and which causes her to feel isolated. Jim (who believes he has found the love of his life and is about to get married) retorts about her favourite animal the unicorn ‘Poor little fellow, he must feel sort of lonesome’ (1996, p. 64). All the characters except Jim are ‘lonesome’ and seem unable to withstand the ‘reality’ of the world and find ways of escaping. Amanda tells Tom how Laura at the Young Peoples League at the church ‘spoke to no-body, no-body spoke to her’ (1996, p. 27). Amanda asks her son why he is so unhappy. The reply given is his inability to communicate what is in their heart. Tom tells his mother: ‘You say there’s so much in your heart that you can’t describe to me. That’s true of me too. There’s so much in my heart that I can’t describe to you!’ (1996, p. 25). They have all looked inside their own troubled and restless hearts and have discovered their inner lives are in turmoil.

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A similar bleak picture emerges in A Streetcar Named Desire which dra­ matises the stages of guilt-ridden Blanche’s life (due to the death of Allan and her own promiscuity). The play plots her tortured mind which relishes the shadows and the dark – a life characterised by the refusal to face the truth about herself: ‘I like the dark’ she comments. Like strangers ‘The dark is comforting to me’ (2000, p. 544). The paper lantern covering the light bulb becomes the visible symbol on stage for Blanche’s desire to live an illusion. Williams directs that the light should give the audience a sense it is not ‘real­ istic’ and in keeping with the atmosphere of memory, the stage should be dim. The use of lighting in The Glass Menagerie conveys a similar sense of unreality. Williams wants light to be shed on the characters themselves, on their inner lives and in particular Laura which corresponds to the ‘light in religious paintings, such as El Greco’s, where the figures are radiant in atmosphere that is relatively dusk …’ (1996, xix). There is a fragile holiness to Williams’ characters as they attempt to do battle with the forces of darkness and hold on to a sense of their own dignity and self-worth. Willy Lomax in Miller’s Death of a Salesman fights similar internal wars (Torevell, 2021). However, fantasy often takes over during the strife they experience. Blanche fantasises about her life and tells lies about her companions to cover up the truth. Mitch comments, ‘You never want to go out till after six and then it’s always some place that’s not lighted’ (2000, p. 544). Like a prostitute’s place of work, bathed in artificial light, the lighting throughout the play gives a strong sense of unreality and subterfuge. Blanche acclaims, ‘I’ll tell you what I want. Magic!’ (2000, p. 545) and explains to the audience how she tries to ‘give that to people’, a clear reference to her many, sexual clients and, more generally, to her myriad relationships. Her brother-in-law, Stanley, confronts her ruthlessly with her dis­ sembling. Although shamed, she adds ‘… if that be sinful, then let me be damned for it!’ (2000, p. 545) which gives a strong indication she does not feel it is wrong at all. This is partly because Blanche has come to believe that the only way to live in a cruel world is to pretend to be who you are not. But, as Raymond Williams writes about such stances taken up by many of Williams’ characters, ‘It is in their consciousness, their ideals, their dreams, their illusions that they lose themselves and become pathetic sleepwalkers’ (1966, p. 119). Make-believe leads to downfall. Unfilled desires leads to despair. When asked about the meaning of his work, the playwright replied, ‘the ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the savage and brutal forces of modern society’ (quoted in SmithHoward and Heitzelman, 2005, p. 273). Williams’ contemporary, Arthur Miller touches on similar themes, even if his central characters are less traumatised sexually than Williams’. Smith-Howard and Heintzelman argue that ‘All the characters in Streetcar have been ravished by life to some degree’ (quoted in Smith-Howard and Heitzelman, 2005, p. 273). However, there is a sad vulner­ ability and at the same time, a brave attempt at resilience in Blanche’s profile. She relies on others to bring her hope, kindness and comfort rather than abuse. Amanda also shows signs of resilience in The Glass Menagerie and Tom, too, in his desire to free himself from the mundane and boring.

Drama and Poetry 171 The symbol of the mirror features significantly in Streetcar. In scene 10, Williams’ stage directions add that Blanche places ‘the rhinestone tiara on her head before the mirror of the dressing table and murmuring excitedly as if to a group of spectral admirers’ (2000, p. 548). She fantasises about being desired by others, in reality, mere figments of her own imagination. Later in the scene, Stanley ruthlessly mocks her regal pretentions and her refusal to look at herself honestly: ‘And look at yourself! Take a look at yourself in that worn-out Mardi Gras outfit … You come in here … and cover the lightbulb with a paper lantern and lo and behold the place has turned into Egypt and you are the Queen of the Nile!’ (2000, p. 552). What she dresses up to see in the mirror is an illusion. Near the close of the play, Blanche comments ‘How Strange!’ that she has not had a call from her invented boyfriend, Shep Huntleigh. The stage directions add, ‘Blanche stands quite still for some moments – the silverbacked mirror in her hand and a look of sorrowful perplexity as though all human experience shows on her face’. Williams presents his audience with a character who has to endure the cruelty of others as they force her to confront her own fragile self. Cabral writes: ‘The illusory reflection of a non-existent desired life that keeps Blanche DuBois weakly tied to reality is cut loose when Stanley Kowalski breaks the mirror of romantic fantasies she has tried to build’ (2010). It is equivalent to Merton’s examination of the construction of the ‘false self’ (Torevell, 2019). Blanche’s own downfall is largely due to her inability to forgive herself for her sexual lapses and to face the reality of the shame she feels. Blanche’s reaction is to hide from shame, like Adam and Eve in the garden (1994, p. 78). However, just as influential on Blanche’s downfall is the cruel treatment of others, which she abhors: ‘Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable. It is the one unforgivable thing in my opinion and it is the one thing of which I have never, never been guilty’ (2000, p. 552). Nevertheless, in spite of all this, Blanche believes that the best way of dealing with desire is to live a refined life. It is the main reason why she fell in love with ‘the boy who wrote poetry’ and ‘worshipped the ground he walked on!’ (2000, p. 533) and why she is grateful ‘such things as art – as poetry and music – such kinds of new light have come into the world …’ (2000, p. 511), an allusion to the light of Christ in St John’s Prologue. Stanley represents someone who seems to withstand far better than Blanche, the ‘arrows of outrageous fortune’, but he does not completely avoid their sting (Thompson, 2015).4 He is scarred, like Mitch, by his experience of the Second World War and succumbs like Blanche, to addiction – in her case alcohol, in his alcohol and gambling. His character, if played by a seductively handsome actor like Marlon Brando (who took on the role in the Broadway production in December 1947 and in the 1951 film version, both directed by Elia Kazan), can become attractive and ‘an object of straight male envy and a universal object of gay and female lust’ (Eyre and Wright, 2000, p. 180). But he too longs for the comfort of someone else’s arms and after hitting his wife in a drunken rage cries out in

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desperation: ‘Stella! My baby doll’s left me!’ The stage directions are ‘he throws back his head like a baying hound and bellows his wife’s name: ‘Stella! Stella, sweetheart! Stella!’ (2000, p. 502). A little later the text adds, ‘Stanley (with heaven-splitting violence): STELL-LAHHHHH’ (2000, p. 502). There might be a raw animal urgency about this out­ burst, but like Blanche, he craves for affection and the comfort and kindness of another human being in a world he finds difficult to negotiate. Williams’ attitude to Stanley is double-edged and ambiguous. Bigsby is right to suggest that ‘He dominates existence and in such a way commands Williams’ respect, even if he represents a brutalism which frightens a writer who is drawn instinctively to the fate of those less equipped to confront the modern world’ (Bigsby, 1982, p. 60). Thus, in one sense, Williams admires his ability to survive, but he also knows this is combined with a potentially violent sexuality and susceptibility to anger; indeed, he hits his wife and rapes her sister, Blanche, who becomes the enemy in the house, potentially destroying his marriage. In the final moments of the play, the audience experience this tension, a toxic cocktail of deep affection and raw lust: ‘Now, honey. Now, love. Now, now, love. (He kneels besides her and his fingers find the opening of her blouse.) Now, now, love, Now, love …’ (2000, p. 564). The final, telling line of the drama is spoken by Steve, one of the poker players: ‘This game is seven-card stud’; and Stanley knows how to win at it. I partly agree with Bigsby’s claim that Stanley is a Lawrentian figure: Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movement and attitudes. Since earliest manhood the centre of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and taking of it, not with weak indulgency, dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens. (1982, p. 60) But it also needs saying that Stanley is as vulnerable as Blanche when comfort is taken away from him. What characterises both characters is their ruthless and relentless internal battle between the body and the spirit, a combat every human being knows. Raymond Williams argues that Williams offers a tragic vision of life precisely due to this tension: Tennessee’s characters are isolated beings who desire and eat and fight alone, who struggle feverishly with the primary and related energies of love and death. At their most satisfying they are animals; the rest is a covering of humanity and is destructive. … The human condition is tragic because of the entry of the mind on the fierce, and in itself tragic, animal struggle of sex and death. The purpose of the drama is to cut through these mental illusions to the actual primary rhythms. But the one redemptive thing in all this bleakness, is the power of art to assuage this desperate battle with sympathy for others who feel like you. (1966, p. 119)

Drama and Poetry 173 Their isolation enhances their strained desire to find love and peace of heart. For Tennessee Williams, the theatre can become an arena where ‘our hearts are wrung by recognition and pity so that the dusky shell of the auditorium where we gathered anonymously together is flooded with an almost liquid warmth of unchecked human sympathy …’ (quoted in Williams, 1966, p. 120). As such, the audience are the strangers who give comfort to the dramatis personae and to each other by their sympathy for and empathy with, the characters on stage; the actors exhibit feelings of longing similar to their own, if somewhat more vehemently. The desire for love is a perennial and universal yearning. Notes 1 It was not until 1918 that Hopkins’ friend, Robert Bridges, sought to get Hopkins’ poetry published. 750 copies of his work were made available, but it took ten years to sell that number. The Jesuits themselves were never fully convinced of the beauty and significance of his poetry, and it was not until the 1930s that a number of leading poets in Oxford, including W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, recognised his genius ( Mariani, 2018). The American poet, Robert Lowell, admired Hopkins for his ‘heroic sanctity’ and understood him as living an exemplary Jesuitical life – ‘a soldier’s life, close to the physical Incarnation, in some ways rather footloose; it seems to flower most in furious activity, as in the case of the Canadian martyrs’ ( 1944, pp. 583–584). Lowell converted to Catholicism largely due to Hopkins’ influence. The American poets, John Berryman and Hart Crane, were also deeply affected by his work, as was Denise Levertov. His extraordinary appeal continues worldwide today. 2 Sobolev puts forward the thesis that there is a severe split in Hopkins between faith and human existence. He refers to how during a retreat in 1988 he indicates how the earthly life can be compared to a person who is dazzled by a spark or star in the darkness. Sobolev argues that there is an ontological dichotomy between human existence and faith. Unlike Aquinas who sees this division is metaphysically overcome by recognising the goodness of the world, Hopkins acknowledges a real discrepancy between the natural world and human living, although he does see the possibility of redemption when the two realms come side by side. But he suggests that this remains only a possibility – it is part of a colloquy, a wish, a summons. Even in God’s Grandeur, which is regarded as one of Hopkins’ most positive poems, the discrepancy between nature and human existence is great. Although the volta marks a dividing line allowing the poet to return to nature once again in the sestet, the theodicean question at the end of the first quatrain remains unanswered. The sonnet implies that human existence does not correspond to nature, not only due to sin but ‘gives birth to metaphysical questions that the poem has to leave unanswered’ (2011, p. 119). However, he does concede that for Hopkins the poetic space can become both the mirror and the symbolic alternative to his existential situation. I am in part agreement with Sobolev’s thesis and while I acknowledge Hopkins is disappointed with humanity’s failures and sin and gives no easy answers to the apparent meaninglessness of human existence, his poetry as a whole, gives testi­ mony to the redemptive power of human suffering and alienation and there is a strong sense in some of Hopkin’s poetry that once the desire and beauty of Christ’s theophany is present, human life itself becomes transformed. The fact that Hopkins experiences alienation, anxiety and depression for some of his life does

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not mean he experienced a severe split between nature and life in the manner in which Sobelov suggests. Christian living does not give surety, but, as Hopkins discovered throughout his life, the possibility of aligning oneself to Trinitarian life and thus sensing all will not end in despair. 3 Tennessee Williams was the son of a travelling shoe salesman who was an alco­ holic and whose mother was a minister’s daughter who became a patient in a psychiatric hospital. He drew the religious allusions in his plays from the time he spent in his grandfather’s rectories while his father was away on the road. He was devoted to his sister Rose, who was diagnosed in her teens with schizophrenia and who was given a pre-frontal lobotomy which Tennessee knew nothing about until it had been performed. Tennessee knew from personal experience what it felt like to be marginalised, unfairly judged and lonely, because he was a gay man growing up in the American South of the Depression years and ‘where to be gay and white was barely better than being black, and he observed the sober, heterosexual, clubbable, gullible subscribers to the American Dream with the eye of the outcast’ ( Eyre and Wright, 2000, p. 180). 4 Thompson’s insightful study of Williams’ plays in terms of memory, myth and symbol argues that the dramatic agon between Stanley and Blanche ‘represents an ex­ ternalisation of their own inner conflict: the struggle between the brutal desires of the flesh and the transcendent aspirations of the spirit or soul … . Stanley embodies the Dionysian antithesis to Blanche’s romantic dreams and moral pretensions, the person­ ified projection of her own libidinous impulses. Thus, Blanche’s animosity towards Stanley’s “animal force” and “bestial sexuality” is also self-disgust at her own irrepressible carnality for in Jungian terms “that which one passionately hates is sure to represent an aspect of his own fate”’ ( Thompson, 2015, pp. 37–38). Williams studied Greek at the University of Washington and knew its mythical stories well. The myth of Dionysius is one of the archetypal foundations of Williams’ work. Roche-Lajtha writes that ‘Dionysius was a god of paradoxes, who could be the most gentle and yet the most terrible of divinities … The god brought ecstatic bliss to his worshippers but hunted his enemies down with the utmost ferocity. This duality is dramatized in Euripides’s Bacchae, which … is a structural analogue to Streetcar’ (2011, pp. 58–73). The dra­ matic use of myth and ritual should not be underestimated in Williams’ work. In an age bereft of a commonly shared mythos, Thompson persuasively argues that Williams attempts to restore symbolic meaning to the modern existential condition and en­ courages a granting of religious significance and value to human relationships, however limited and compensatory they may be. He offers no solution for loneliness other than the rare and transient embrace with one’s fellow human being, but in this embrace resides a degree of redemption. Williams’ dramas thus endow acts of human kindness with religious and metaphysical value.

References Baker, C. (Undated). Taste and See: A Phenomenological Reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins. https://www.academia.edu/10573985/Taste_and_See_A_Phenomenological_ Reading_of_Gerard_Manley_Hopkins (Accessed 24.5.20). Beckett, S. (2006). Samuel Beckett. The Completed Works. London: Faber and Faber. Bigsby, J. (1982). A Critical Introduction to American Drama in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bigsby, J. (2001). Entering the Glass Menagerie. In M. Roudane (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams (pp. 29–44). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Drama and Poetry 175 Brett, R.L. (1965). Poems of Faith and Doubt. London: Edward Arnold Pub. Ltd. Brooks, P. (1968). The Empty Space. London: Penguin. Brown, D. (1997). Hopkins’ Idealism. Philosophy. Physics, Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Brown, D. (2004). Gerard Manley Hopkins. Tavistock: Northcote House. Bruce, S. (2007). Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism. The Cluniac Tradition, 900–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cabral, S. (2010). Blanche through the Looking-Glass. https://www.academia. edu/4300674/A_Streetcar_Named_Desire_Blanche_Through_the_Looking_Glass (Accessed 29.12.22). Dau, D. (2013). Touching God. Hopkins and Love. London: Anthem Press. De Mello, A. (2010). Seek God Everywhere. Reflections on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. London: Penguin Random Books. Dubois, M. (2017). Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duns Scotus. (1987). Duns Scotus. Philosophical Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co. Eagleton, T. (2019). Hope Without Optimism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ellsberg, M. (Ed.) (2017). The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins. New York: Plough Publishing House. Endo, S. (2006). Silence. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company. Eyre, R. and Wright, N. (2000). Changing Stages: A View of British Theatre in the Twentieth Century. London: Bloomsbury. Gardner, H. (1971). Religion and Literature. London: Faber and Faber. Gardner, W. (1948). Gerard Manley Hopkins. A Study Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition. London: Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd. Gardner, W. and MacKenzie, N. (Eds.) (1948). The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. 4th edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gröning, P. (2006). Into Great Silence. DVD: Soda Picture Limited. Hall, P. (2000). Exposed by the Mask. Form and Language in Drama. London: Oberon Books. Hart, K. (2018). Poetry and Revelation. For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Hewitt, S. (2022). All Down Darkness Wide. London: Jonathan Cape. Hopkins, G. (1935). The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges. London: Oxford University Press. Hopkins, G. (1959a). The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins. C. Devlin (Ed.). London: Oxford University Press. Hopkins, G. (1959b). Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins. H. House and G. Storey (Eds.). London: Oxford University Press. Hopkins, G. (1970). Further Letters of Gerald Manley Hopkins. C. Abbott (Ed.). London: Oxford University Press. Hopkins, G. (1989). The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. W. Gardner and N. MacKenzie (Eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ignatius of Loyola. (1991). The Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works. New York: Paulist Press. Jasper, D. (2009). The Sacred Body. Asceticism in Religion Literature, Art and Culture. Waco, Texas: Baylor.

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Kearney, R. (2011). Anatheism {Returning to God after God}. New York: Columbia University Press. Kearney, R. and Zimmermann, J. (Eds.) (2016). Reimagining the Sacred Richard Kearney Debates God. New York: Columbia University Press. Ker, I. (2007). John Henry Newman and Hopkins. http://gerardmanleyhopkins.org/ Lectures_hopkins-and-newman (Accessed 28.5.20). Kern, E. (1987). Beckett’s Modernity and Medieval Affinities. In H. Bloom (Ed.), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for God (pp. 17–35). London: Chelsea House publishing. Lowell, R. (1944). Hopkins’ Sanctity. Kenyon Review, 6, 583–586. MacKenzie, N. (1970). Hopkins. In A. Pollard (Ed.), The Victorians (pp. 312–333). London: Sphere Books Ltd. MacKenzie, N. (Ed.) (1989). The Early Poetic Manuscripts and Note-Books of Gerard Manley Hopkins. New York: Garland. Mariani, P. (1970). A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Mariani, P. (1989). The Consoling, Terrifying Presence of Hopkins. Renascence, 42(1/2), 13–20, 583–586. Mariani, P. (2008). Gerard Manley Hopkins. A Life. New York: Viking. Mariani, P. (2018). YouTube interview, Boston College. Gerard Manley Hopkins. A Life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so0dDJwLOBo (Accessed 1.6.20). Mariani, P. (2019). The Mystery of It All. The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernity. Orleans, Massachusetts: Paraclete Press. Martin, R. (1991). Gerard Manley Hopkins. A Very Private Life. London: Harper Collins. McMullan, A. (1994). Beckett as Director: The Art of Mastering Failure. In J. Pilling (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Beckett (pp. 196–208). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nixon, J. (1989). The Kindly Light: A Reappraisal of the Influence of Newman on Hopkins. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 31(1), 105–142. Pieper, J. (1998). Leisure: The Basis of Culture. South Bend, ID: St. Augustine’s Press. Pilling, J. (Ed.) (1994). The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pinter, H. (1999). The Homecoming. London: Faber. Poupard, C. 2006). Commentary on Into Great Silence in Into Great Silence. DVD. Robson, C. (2018). Gerard Manley Hopkins. In S. Greenblatt (Ed.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The Victorian Age (pp. 592–605). New York: W.W. Norton. Roche-Lajtha, J. (2011). Dionysius, Orpheus and the Androgyn: Myth in A Streetcar Named Desire. Études Anglaises 64(1), 58–73. Saville, J. (2000). A Queer Chivalry. The Homoerotic Asceticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia. Schlatter, F. (2008). Hopkins and Newman: Two Disagreements. Christianity and Literature, 57(3), 401–418. Smith-Howard, L. and Heitzelman, G. (2005). A Literary Reference to His Life and Work.New York: Facts on File Publishers. Sobolev, D. (2001). Hopkins’ Portraits of the Artist: Between the Biographical and the Ideological. Connotations, 10(2–3), 304–328. Sobolev, D. (2011). The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins. An Essay in Semiotic Phenomenology. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press.

Drama and Poetry 177 Taylor-Batty, M. and Taylor-Batty, J. (2008). Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. London: Continuum. Thompson, J. (2015). Tennessee Williams’ Plays. Memory, Myth, and Symbol. New York: Peter Lang. Torevell, D . (2019). Distractions, Illusion and the Need for a Contemplative Spirituality: A Critique of Thomas Merton’s Advice. Journal for the Study of Spirituality, 9(2), 152–162. Torevell, D. (2021). Living with Meaning at a Time When Believing in God is an Option: An Investigation into Arthur Millers’ Death of a Salesman and Its Implications for Catholic Education. In S. Whittle (Ed.), Irish and British Reflections on Catholic Education. Foundations, Identity, Leadership Issues and Religious Education in Catholic Schools (pp. 133–144). Singapore: Springer. von Balthasar, H.U. (1986). The Glory of the Lord. A Theological Aesthetics Volume III: Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Waterman Ward, B. (2002). World as Word. Philosophical Theology in Gerard Manley Hopkins. Washington: Catholic University of America Press. Williams, B. (1994). Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Williams. R. (1966). Modern Tragedy. London: Chatto and Windus. Williams, T. (1996). The Glass Menagerie. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers. Williams, T. (2000). Plays. 1937–1958. New York: The Library of America. Wolfe, P. (1968). The Paradox of the Self: A Study of Hopkins’ Spiritual Conflict in the “Terrible” Sonnets. Victorian Poetry, 6(2), 85–103. Worton, M. (1994). Waiting for Godot and Endgame: Theatre as Text. In J. Pilling (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Beckett (pp. 67–87). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

7

Film and Painting Xavier Beauvois and Masaccio

Xavier Beauvois In 1996, while serving their Muslim neighbours, seven Cistercian monks1 of the monastery of Tibhirine were kidnapped and brutally murdered by terrorists. Xavier Beauvois’ film Des Hommes et des Dieux (Of Gods and Men, 2010) not only captures their exemplary martyrdom, but also invites those who see it to reflect on the choice which confronted the monks at that time – whether to leave the monastery altogether and abandon their vocation or to remain and endure the unknown consequences. To flee or to stay. The bitter ordeal and the final decision they take as a community in Christ directly parallels the words of scripture they have imbibed, the liturgy they have embodied and the vow of stability they have undertaken as professed contemplatives and their life of desire for the transcendent and the holy (Kiser, 2003). The Cistercian community at Tibhirine in Algeria faced a difficult dilemma in the mid-nineties when an extreme Islamist terrorist group began to murder foreigners in the vicinity of their monastery. What was going to be their response, both individually and collectively, to this situation? They had been assisting their Muslim brothers and sisters by acts of charity for many years and had come to recognise that their community’s vocation was to live among the poor who needed their physical and spiritual sustenance.2 But the extraordinary circumstances they were now faced with compelled them to investigate anew the meaning of the life they had pledged themselves to by following the Rule of St. Benedict through a disciplined, prayerful longing for God, and the dangerous theology they had promised to keep. They were well aware that, at baptism, their own bodies had been incorporated into the death and resurrection of Christ and that monastic life was a continuous call to conversio until death, when the white garment which had been wrapped around their bodies at birth would be used again to wrap their bodies in death. Such ongoing conversion demanded ascetical practices, periods of suffering and time (Huerre, 1994). But they were now confronted to live out that paschal mystery in very different circumstances to the one to which they were accustomed. It seemed that their newly clothed identity as baptised Christians and as solemnly professed monks beckoned them to something DOI: 10.4324/9781003227540-11

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else: to put into practice what they had learned about the dangers of pow­ erless vulnerability to the terrors of a fallen world, just as their Saviour had. And to partly redeem the world by this submission. The monastic life would have rehearsed them – to some degree – to face this ordeal, but this does not mean that accepting the full significance of their baptismal incorporation was an easy one; far from it. Merton writes that the monastic life directly encourages a desire for a kind of death to the exterior, material life and that it is a difficult learning process encompassing huge risks of faith: ‘ … we will dread his coming in proportion as we have identified with this exterior self and attached to it. But when we understand the dia­ lectic of life and death we will learn to take the risks implied by faith, to make the choices that deliver us from our routine self and open to us the door of a new being, a new reality’ (McDonnell, 1989, p. 427; Ford, 2009). The alternative to taking such risks is to live the life of a prisoner to con­ ventional ideas and to one’s own desires and autonomy. Freedom only comes through accepting ‘an unfamiliar truth’ and a supernatural desire. The baptised must let go of the familiar and consent to what is new and unknown: ‘I must learn to “leave myself” in order to find myself by yielding to the love of God’, he writes (McDonnell, 1989, p. 427). Their lives as monks were already a public and radical consent to this ‘newness’, to the embrace of an alternative understanding of desire and longing, to dying in order to live. But the threat of Islamic terrorism was to become their greatest testing of this consent. Monks are aware that all Christ is by nature, they can become by grace. But they also realise that this growth in deification, which they so earnestly yearn for, is at jeopardy if they fail to live up to the promises they made at baptism. As Collins writes, ‘ … the intimate relationship with God into which baptism grants admittance entails recognizing a staggering truth clearly taught in the New Testament and reiterated by Christians throughout the centuries … : all that Christ is by nature we are invited to become by grace’ (2011, p. 226). Crucially, a dynamic of radical internalisation is necessary if the pattern of Christ’s life is to embed itself into the heart and to be instantiated in their everyday actions: ‘Monastic spirituality with its various disciplines aims to help believers do just that: to keep alive the constant memory of God (memoria Dei) by focusing one’s whole existence on his presence in the heart’ (Collins, 2010, p. 226). Charitable and loving actions come about as the fruit of conversion and an alternative longing to what is sought outside the monastery gates. The sacrament of baptism has enormous repercussions for ontology, selfunderstanding and daily living (Radcliffe, 2012). Since the baptised are made and encouraged to stand outside the self, the Christian life is always an adventure into living an ecstatic life (ekstacis in Greek), of being taken outside and forgetting oneself, since the person to whom the baptised devote their lives is not themselves, but Christ and his body, the Church. When one leaves the old body behind and endorses a ‘new’ one, the self becomes

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gradually deified. This is primarily enhanced through prayer, grace, the sacraments and acts of yearning love (Benedict XVI, 2005). The ‘new’ body also learns to re-situate itself to a larger body, the Church, of which Christ is the head: ‘Baptism is never, therefore, a private act, but is always a public proclamation of the beginnings of a Christian life rooted in the Word … and made real in the body through the sacramental life of the Church, a series of events which are enacted from birth to death’ (Matthews and Torevell, 2011, p. 30). This beginning and ongoing formation of a ‘new creature’ is of paramount significance for it claims that such newness is nothing other than the ex­ perience of being an adopted son or daughter of God (2 Cor. 5:7; Pt. 1.4) whereby their bodies become a temple of the Holy Spirit (Catechism, 1994: 1265). This signifies that the baptised have been marked by Christ to live according to His teachings and since they are incorporated into His body, they no longer belong to themselves and their own concerns, but wish to imitate Christ who died and rose on their behalf (1 Cor. 6:19; 2 Cor. 5:15). Thus, the Christian life after baptism becomes an ongoing performance of longing for and witness to Christ. The baptised are consumed by the first performance of the Biblical rite which releases a new but demanding life which gradually conforms itself to Christ. Just as Christ abandoned Himself to the waters of baptism on the banks of the river Jordan (although he had no need of this) so, too, Christians commit themselves to the waters of new life of searching for God. But this first baptismal abandonment signifies other abandonments which will follow, maybe even to the cross: As Collins puts it, Christ’s ‘obedient descent into the waters in solidarity with sinners is a mystery in the strictest sense, a symbolic act charged with the grace of spiritual energy, by means of which Christ manifests his passage from death to an endless life’ (2010, p. 221). It signifies and involves a descent into the waters of death, having undergone capture into the hands of oppressors and the violent. All those involved changed by baptism will have to face similar, if not such dauntingly intensive experiences of estrangement that the community at Tibhirine endured. All Christians’ intimate, adoptive relationships with Christ are a source of consolation at such times, but they are also the fulcrum around which those experiences rest. More hopefully, they entail the mys­ tical identification with all the baptised which removes any sense that the self is isolated or abandoned, since their bodies are handed over to the one Body. No Christian is ever alone. S/he is trained to recognise and delight in this one body, where all barriers of race, cultures, class and gender are dissolved. This extends to those outside the Christian body, since nothing that is truly human fails to find an echo in the hearts of Christians who ‘cherish a feeling of deep solidarity with the human race and its history’ (Flannery, 1992, pp. 903–904). Once the gift has been received and recognised, then gratitude is its most natural response. The Christian life is always one of thankfulness and praise, a response to the One who desires us to live a happy and fulfilled

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life. This sometimes means enduring agonising feelings of abandonment which may paradoxically be the path to a renewed and invigorated living in Christ. After baptism, a Christian continues to be formed and shaped by the liturgical, and especially sacramental life, of the Church: ‘The performance of baptismal liturgy was the drama of the beginnings of a new life, a per­ formance which would be repeated through the receiving of the sacraments throughout life, especially the Eucharist’ (Matthews and Torevell, 2011, p. 29). As early as 1943, Maritain was arguing that Catholic formation is about shaping a person’s disposition and must resist attempts to place people in a one-dimensional universe where the only yardstick is practical utility and the only value is economic and technological progress (Maritain, 1943; Bryk, Lee and Holland, 1993, pp. 37–40; Hancock, 2005, pp. 81–106). Such shaping within a new transcendental horizon means recognising that the paschal mystery transcends all times ‘while being made present in them all’ (Catechism, 1994: 1085). During the Middle Ages, and to a large extent still today, three sources were used by monks for the protection and enhancement of this ‘new cre­ ation’: scripture, the patristic tradition and classical literature all of which encouraged the desire for God (Leclercq, 1982, p. 71).3 Reading (unlike modern practices) involved a bodily and performative exercise which was part of a wider enactment of liturgy. Its meditatio element consisted in applying oneself attentively to this practice with total memorisation and the repeated mastication of the scriptural words were invariably couched in a lexicon of spiritual nutrition, including eating, chewing and digesting. It was a corporeal act, affecting the ‘en-souled body’ as Aquinas might say. Such mastication of the text was able to release its fullest flavour and was never a largely cognitive practice accumulating knowledge discursively, but an em­ bodied experience of prayerfully savouring the Word, the source of all life. Not about mastering, but of inwardly absorbing the words, monks became attuned – by their longing for the Divine – to beauty and symbolism and were transformed by listening with ‘the ear of the heart’ (Caldecott, 2009, pp. 39–49; Torevell, 2009, pp. 23–29; Cook, 2013, pp. 7–12). It consisted in a passive openness to the fruits which the text might yield with patient attention. Foster admits that this entails learning to tune into a different level of the text’s meaning than is normally associated with critical reading which resulted in a feeling of transformative rest (Foster, 2005, p. 4). All this is associated with a contemplative and intimate approach to reading and flows naturally from a philosophy of Catholic existence which acknowledges all life and knowledge as gift, what Ward terms an ‘onto­ logical scandal’ since it ‘concerns God’s uncreated power to call something into being from nothing, bring flesh from bread. The scandal is the gift of being itself – that something should be rather than not be – which the transformative Word of God announces’ (2000, p. 89). Pace Ward, Griffiths’ insights into the foundations of Christian formation encourage us to re­ cognise that such creation ex nihilo entails believing that everything created

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is good. Knowledge of that goodness through learning is therefore a blessed thing to do and is recommended by the Church (Griffiths, 2011, p. 106). To know something, therefore, is to know something of what God has made. It is ‘to become intimate with it; and since to become intimate with a good is itself a good, the conclusion is unavoidable and delightful in itself, that all knowledge and all thinking are goods’ (Griffiths, 2011, pp. 106–107). This is an exercise of gratitude for the gift of goodness given in the created order. The heart expands as a result (Torevell, 2009, p. 26). Prayer, then, is the wise thing to do before studying, since it reminds the one who learns that their understanding does not come from themselves, but from God, the source of all wisdom. Such learning is one aspect of seeking the Divine through knowledge of the created Order. Beauvois skilfully positions a shot of the monks in silent reading in their library directly after a scene of them praying and chanting in the chapel; reading is another form of prayer. It demands a humble act of leaving oneself, of moving away from the trappings of selfconsciousness and narcissism enabling a process of ekstasis through desire to take place. It is why the intellectual life can be so beautiful and transform­ ative and is associated with a distinctive Christian philosophy of gift.4 In accepting and drawing from the liturgical and sacramental life of the Church, the baptised are able to withstand and bear any ‘defeat’ by those who would profess otherwise. It equips them to understand the weaknesses of others, even those who instigate violence: ‘Recognizing our own weak­ nesses, I accept those of others. I can bear them, make them mine, in imi­ tation of Christ’, speaks Brother Christian. It is not too adventurous to suggest here that in this recognition of their own and others’ weaknesses, they learn to forgive those who will eventually wrong them, just as Christ forgave those who crucified Him before he died. The Christian paradox at the heart of the gospel and the film is that such apparent weakness is not weakness at all, but rather its opposite – courage: ‘The apostle’s weakness is like Christ’s. It is neither resignation nor passivity. It requires beaucoup de courage and incites one to defend truth and justice’. The latest statement by the Congregation for Catholic Education, Educating Together in Catholic Schools: A Shared Mission between Consecrated Persons and the Lay Faithful (2008), makes exactly this point about powerlessness in relation to the notion of communion: Catholic education is ‘not given for the purpose of gaining power but as an aid towards fuller understanding of and communion with people, with events and with things’ (2008: para 39). The word ‘communion’ is important here, implying a deep bonding of humanity resulting from one’s communion with Christ. What the monks yearn for and attempt to live out is this communion with others, where all barriers are broken down. That is why they care for their enemies and why Brother Christian prays over the dead body of Ali Fayattia, one of the terrorist leaders, much to the disgust of the government authorities. Jamison sums this up nicely: ‘ … communion in the Catholic school leads to a deeper communion with God and with the world’ (2013, p. 12).

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This inculcation into liturgical agency is framed within cyclical time, not metronomic time which is subject to the law of measure and finitude. The body learns to adjust itself to a new way of living outside the usual time–space coordinates. Death is not experienced as the end of linear time and annihilation, but as part of a personal and cosmic drama, where death gives way to a different form of life. This eschatological learning about and desire for the heavenly Jerusalem is never far from the monks’ finite ex­ istence, since it is the framework that the liturgy they encounter each day and hour endorses (Leclercq, 1982, pp. 53–70). The prayerful submission to this repetitive cycle echoes the body’s gradual and intimate engagement with the quotidian challenges of dying to the self and repeating that dying until the end of time. The Christ-child, the minute he is born, is the child who is destined, from all eternity, to die a tortuous death and to take on Himself the sins of the world and then to rise in glory. An understanding of spiritual desire takes seriously this eschatological framework. The preparation for death has always been a hallmark of Catholic philosophy and is not a dark fascination for the end of things. As Haldane suggests, ‘It is not morbid to think often of mortality when the point of doing so is to reflect back on one’s present condition. … It is within this context that a catholic philosophy of education should be developed’ (1999, p. 192). The cadences and rhythms of the liturgy, including the undulations of poetic form within sacred scripture, penetrate the folds of the body with their ‘virtually endless modulations’ (Fodor, 2004; Burton-Christie, 1993) assisting participants to attune to the resonances of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection. It is a formation released by wishing for systolic time which is a characteristic of heavenly time. For the duration of the film, Beauvois cuts back to the chapel scenes on a regular basis, as the film’s frequent shots of the monks’ worship – in par­ ticular, their chanting in front of the paschal candle, the altar of sacrifice and the crucifix – highlight the liturgical cycle to which they conform their own bodies as one body in Christ. To be born anew each day is to allow oneself – through prayer – to enter into this mutual exchange, by receiving the life of Christ. This entails a Christian anthropology which is theandric – that is, it involves a divine–human exchange most clearly expressed by St Augustine’s homily to neophytes on Easter day when he encourages them to wake up and celebrate the exchanges of life offered by Christ in exchange for his own death: ‘I receive death from you: receive from me life. Wake up: see what I give, what I receive’ (quoted in Leachman, 2009, p. 175). Christ has given his body for the world, but it requires an antiphonal giving from all those who are baptised, patterned on His own life and giving. The monks’ response to their oppressors is contextualised within a larger framework of desire to imitate Christ whom they encounter in the liturgy and absorb into their own flesh at the Eucharist. Their actions gradually become more like the actions of the One whom they adore and eat, whom they imitate, whom they love and praise around the altar of sacrifice. In gathering there as one body, the

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Figure 7.1 Of Gods and Men.

monks prepare themselves for those times when they too will be called to replicate in their own lives the love of Him whom they worship. The film traces this bitter trail which they take. The constant echoing of the road to Golgotha endures throughout the film. There is no easy imitation of sub­ mission. Theirs, like Christ’s, is an agonising one, of excruciating self-doubt and resistance, demanding nothing less than the relinquishing of their own wills to the Father’s (Figure 7.1). This obedient submission is what the feast of Christmas calls attention to and encompasses what liturgical agency involves. The agonising question of Carlo Caretto, ‘Why is faith so bitter?’ is partly answered by the Biblical birth narrative which proclaims that relationships in Christ are never built on power or prestige, but on a fragile powerlessness where innocence is often desiccated. What the film so genuinely represents is the struggle the monks endure in relation to this incarnational theology. Eventually, painfully, Je reste (I stay), becomes translated into the plural – we stay – and the monks speak and act as one voice and one body. They are certain that they will have to confront the ‘unknown’ and that although their lives would be at risk each day from the violence of the terrorists, it is a risk worth taking, since it is the risk of faith. Although they do not seek martyrdom and did not choose the monastery, as Brother Christophe comments, ‘to commit collective suicide’, their collective decision is at the heart of their faith. They know that the

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Good Shepherd does not abandon his flock to the wolves, since they have listened to this teaching time and again, year on year. The audience becomes convinced of this, too, as the camera captures in wide-angle shots the hills and countryside where sheep roam and graze. The monks walk among them, are one with them, shepherd them. By not abandoning their Muslim brothers and sisters, they acknowledge they will not be abandoned by God. Any leaving would simply constitute an unfruitful, non-paschal dying. Consenting to this type of ‘communion’ with their fellow monks and Muslim neighbours is rehearsed in the Eucharistic food they share and eat. The camera takes time to focus the audience’s attention on the paten and the host (the body of Christ) and the chalice (the blood of Christ). The blood of the victims of the terrorists who have their throats cut and the killing of the monks themselves become associated with the blood of Christ in the Eucharistic liturgy they share each day (Cavanaugh, 1998). The spilling of their blood is therefore never without meaning, since their innocent vic­ timhood becomes at one with the victimhood of Christ. If Girard is right, then this is a cultural and perpetual cycle of violence and is only ever assuaged by the killing of the scapegoat (Girard, 2005; 1986; 1987). They chant their communal identification with the bloodied One they adore: ‘Because he is with us in this time of violence / … Who beckons us from the cross’. His passion is their passion too. They know why they open their lips and why their mouths proclaim His praise, for he is the One of whom they sing, ‘He sacrificed Himself, loving to the end’. The title of the film taken from psalm 81: ‘You are gods, sons of the Most High’ reminds the audience that although in their baptismal adoption they are ‘as gods’, they ‘shall die like men and fall like princes’. In light of this claim, it is not surprising that a Catholic understanding of desire entails tears. Let me explain why with reference to one of the final scenes before the monks are brutally bullied and frog-marched to their deaths in the forest. After all agreeing that they will stay and after their final talk by Brother Christian, they share their final meal together. Obviously, this is an echo of the Last Supper of Christ with his disciples and in silence the monks drink the cup of wine which they have all agreed to drink. The audience hear Tchaikovsky’s evocative Swan Lake overture as this takes place. As the camera records close-up shots of the monks’ faces, one by one, it captures their intense oscillation between joy and sadness, their brotherly love of each other, their Oneness in Christ and their resignation to their destiny, the will of the Father. Tears flow down the cheeks of Brother Christian and Brother Amédée. As one student suggested to me in a class discussion about the decision of the monks to stay, ‘There is an unspoken recognition that they must stay and this is confirmed by the readings they have listened to’. The film has revealed already how dependent upon scrip­ ture the monks are, so it is not surprising that weeping is shown on screen; it is ‘an expression of one’s utter dependence upon God and in the firm hope that God’s mercy will soon be made manifest’ (Burton-Christie, 1993,

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p. 187). Such a life entailed both the judgment and mercy of God and a radical dying to the old self, with a commitment to the new. Resisting the temptation (or demon) to flee from the demands of the scriptures was an ever-present struggle for monks, but they also believed that such scriptures possessed an additional power to deliver them from the evil which they encountered in the world and, at times, in their own hearts. The film prepares the audience for the inevitable death of the monks. They offer the full abdication of their own wills to the Father as a sacrifice of themselves to God. After the example of Christ, who came to do the Father’s will, they are led to serve all their brothers and sisters to the end. If the suffering of Christ is the paradigmatic salvific event to which the monastic community give allegiance, then there is no option but to centre their own lives on this witness. To avoid, this is to move themselves away from the passion of Christ, even as they gather themselves around the altar of sacrifice each day. It is to abandon their desire to be like Christ. Sacred geography captured in the film so evocatively comes into play for the liturgical space they inhabit trains them to instantiate that space in the outside fallen world, the world of mistrust, reprisals and violence. It demands that they witness to another ground which they have always longed for and which is alien to the one upon which power and violence makes its claims. Not to do so is to betray the sacred ground upon which they stand. None of this is easy. Staying, rather than fleeing the monastery, is the decision they take after agonising turmoil. Brother Christian’s final talk to his brothers is con­ textualised within the theology of innocence. This is how they will make sense of their fate. He reminds them that day by day they have learned to embody the Christ-child who was born so absolutely helpless and so threatened from the time of his birth. They must bring the child that they embody to the world and teach it that whoever saves his life will lose it and whoever loses his life will inherit eternal life. This claim is at the heart of any Catholic philosophy of life (Hancock, 2005). The intense wrestling is represented in a number of scenes within the film. Brother Christophe tells Brother Christian that he is deeply confused about whether to go or to stay. God has become silent – when he prays, he hears nothing. In his cell, alone, his anguished prayer, ‘Don’t abandon me. Help me’, is heard by his fellow monks; his bitter experience is theirs too (Kennedy, 2013).5 This is not only an echo of the Gethsemane experience of Christ the night before he died, when he ‘was deeply grieved and agitated’ (Luke 26:37) before the raw acceptance of the will of the Father, but an echo of the cry of desolation uttered by Christ on the cross, ‘Why God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:34; Matt 27: 46). This can only be fully appreciated as the other side of the experience of intimacy with Christ begun at baptism and developed throughout monastic life (Collins, 2010, p. 22). The scene then cuts to Brother Christophe kneeling silently before the chapel altar, head down in agonising prayer. ‘Why is faith so bitter?’ might be the audience’s question. But the camera also catches rays of light emerging

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from the widow to the left of the frame. The scene is one of intense struggle, but hopeful endurance which comes from considering the path he knows he must follow and which has been laid before him at his baptism and throughout his monastic life. There is no other path – what is at stake is his determination and courage to follow it. Other scenes reflect a similar agi­ tation within the Abbot himself. Even though he encourages the community to stay from the very start, his solitary walk over the hills and beside the lake during the rainstorm is no less bitter than Brother Christophe’s struggle. Nevertheless, in the midst of this inevitably lonely trail where each monk has to make up his own mind, Beauvois includes moving and memorable shots of brotherly embrace and resolve. When Brother Christophe tells his superior he cannot pray, they finally embrace one another in mutual support; as the deafening noise of the government forces’ helicopter drowns their prayers, they gather together, arm in arm as one body corporately defying the invasion of their chants; when Brother Luc embraces and then kisses the bosom of the crucified Christ in the painting; when Brother Amédée em­ braces the last surviving monk, after the remainder of the community have been captured and marched to their deaths. These physical and communal acts of brotherly love become the visible expression of their Christian identity. As they walk to their martyrdom in the snowy, bitter landscape, the audience gradually lose sight of their bodies as they fade silently into the mist. The audience grieve for their loss, but applaud with admiration how their baptismal promises have been kept to the very end. The beauty of the film Of Gods and Men lies first in representing a courageous living out of the paschal mystery in the monks’ relentless desire for and imitation of Christ in difficult circumstances. In so doing, it draws attention to the ontological change that takes place at baptism and how those who have been plunged into its waters begin a ‘new’ life devoted to joyful self-sacrifice and the yearning for transcendence. Having been handed over to the One who calls them and assists them to see and live life as a gift, the monks witness what a holy and happy life signifies. In the story of the Cistercian monks at Tibhirine the audience might be given the strength to imitate such fortitude in their own daily lives, if not to the same agonising degree. Ultimately, the monk’s philosophy rests on the Biblical claim that those who lose their lives for the sake of justice and truth shall find it, and those who gain their life shall lose it. The film is built on this paradoxical teaching and is rooted in the nature of the baptised self, all that demands and the desires which are re-configured thereafter. There is nothing morbid or pessimistic about such a view, for it offers a redemptive and hopeful un­ derstanding of what desire and love mean and entail as well as how death might be conquered. The film highlights that it is not possible to understand any Catholic philosophy of life without referring to the Church’s liturgy. The acceptance of the redemptive powerlessness which underpins the community’s final decision to remain in the monastery is made sense of through their adoration

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of the Saviour’s birth, whom they already know never resorted to retaliation or violence and who learned, as they must, to submit to the will of the Father. This is not a philosophy of weakness, but of courage, made possible through grace. Third, the film indicates that there are some things in this life which are worth dying for and that martyrdom is an ongoing dimension of the Christian tradition. The worthwhileness of martyrdom pierces so deeply the hearts of the monks because they have become attentively receptive to the Word and strengthened by the Eucharist. Since metronomic time gives way to systolic time so abundantly within the monastery, such a view appears right and proper. I referred earlier to Beauvois’ choice of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake as the musical score to the monks of Tibhirine’s final, shared meal before their abduction and brutal murder. Dance, in particular ballet, has the potential to skillfully employ the distinctive features of sound and graceful movement to allure audiences into representations of desire, beauty, goodness and truth. There is a short-lived corporeal reality to performing ballet which dancers feel intensely and which they have to negotiate over the course of their career (Midgelow, 2015). Matthew Bourne’s celebratory production of Swan Lake represents the dramatic dynamics of longing. Although the work became known for the director’s casting of the swans as male and for their appearance – toned, semi-naked bodies, whitened, plumped with black striped foreheads – what significantly drives the narrative is a Platonic and spiritual desire for beauty, goodness and value (Palmer and Torevell, 2022). Thus, although some critics might emphasise homoeroticism as the definitive characteristic of the work, a theological hermeneutic is suggested here – metaphysical desire is a solid foundation on which to appreciate the dance. Let me say a little more about this chosen art form – ballet. The dance was choreographed by Matthew Bourne and performed by professional dancers in his New Adventures Dance Company who were intent on creating an evocative and memorable portrayal of danger and love, centred on the themes of longing and desire. Through their refined craft and the audience’s willingness to suspend their disbelief upon the curtain rising, onlookers are invited to engage with a dance performance of desire. The movement creates a sense of enduring love which is pure if tragic, uplifting and transcendent as the dancers enact a narrative of love and loss. There was another distinctive feature to this production – the casting of male swans. As an artist and choreographer, Bourne was intrigued in the early 1990s with the idea of a male swan: ‘I was wondering what a gender change would do to the story’. He continued ‘the idea of a male swan, powerful, wild and dangerous, started to make a lot of sense to me’ (Bourne, 2010). When Bourne’s Swan Lake was first performed in 1995 he commented: ‘nobody could imagine what a dancing male swan looked like. So that first appearance of Adam Cooper (lead ballet dancer) was really the shock of the production. He was a wild, lyrical, menacing and totally masculine creature’ (2010). Woodward points to misconceptions about the male ballet dancer in society, related to

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confused sexual identities, essentially contesting the notion that ballet dancers are ‘gay, effeminate, soft homosexuals – all suggesting weakness for lack of manliness’ (1977, p. 287). His comments may reflect a feature of prejudice preceding and during the 1970s that may still linger today. Bourne’s male swans crushed that chronic and damaging image. The entire production broke convention. As Bourne states: ‘It was key to making a new Swan Lake, one that could possibly wipe away those powerful images of the [female] ballerina swan that were so embedded in the psyche of dance lovers and even the wider public’ (2018, p. 9). Part of the shock, delight and joy of seeing this ballet performed in this particular way centred on the representation of intense desire made visible through the graceful movement of bodies and their fleshy physicality. The swan is prevented from searching for his Beloved by the self-obsessed, en­ vious obstinacy of his opponents; this becomes poignant and disturbing for the audience, since an attractive longing, characterised by languishing and movements of elegant gesturing, is rudely sabotaged by awkward, angular physicality. Rival swans who attack the longing and love of the protagonists are so concerned with their own self-determination that they become bitter towards others’ longing, even those who had once been a part of their own community. This becomes disturbing for the audience to watch as the swans’ yearning, represented by movements of sweet languishing and elegant ges­ turing, is rudely sabotaged by awkward, disruptive physicality and the subsequent isolation of the lovers from their community. Longing is visibly sabotaged for a troublesome while. For those in the audience who believe in a fallen world this is not surprising (Palmer and Torevell, 2022). The final scene after death – where the two swans become united – not only reveals that, theologically speaking, longing will always fail to be fully consum­ mated in this world, but that lovers’ determinations to find resolutions for their innate longings are worth the efforts involved and reflect a deep-seated constituent of who they are – people in pursuit of beauty, happiness and transcendence. Bourne’s most recent 2018 interpretation of Swan Lake was revised to reflect current-day trends in gender identity and stereotypes, inequality, racial discrimination, impacts of war, social disharmony and power relationships, but essentially the same story was told. And that story was a narrative of longing. Masaccio’s The Expulsion Temptation, Desire and Shame: Self-Elevation Exposed

The Biblical narrative told in Genesis 3:1–18 is essentially about the mis­ placed desire for and consequences of self-elevation. The American Jewish literary critic Greenblatt argues that the story of Adam and Eve continues to enrapture readers and listeners from across and beyond the boundaries of religious traditions due to its mirroring nature:

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For reasons that are at once tantalising and elusive, the few verses of the story of Adam and Eve in an ancient book have served as a mirror in which we seem to glimpse the whole, long history of our fears and desires. It has been both liberating and destructive, a hymn to human responsi­ bility and a dark fable about human wretchedness, a celebration of daring and an incitement to violent misogyny. (Greenblatt, 2018, pp. 5–6) I now deal with four aspects of this narrative in relation to Masaccio’s fresco The Expulsion: a universal story of erroneous desire and envy, pride, shame and loss; the fresco itself; St Augustine’s insights into the text; and finally, shame, hiding and the possibility of forgiveness. The Jewish and Christian seminal account of Adam and Eve’s sin in Genesis 3: 1–18 is essentially an anthropological narrative concerning who human beings are and to what extent they are dangerously susceptible. As a universal text with a timeless significance, it appeals to all humanity, not simply Jews and Christians. Critical of (post)modern writers who suggest such universalism is ill-advised, along with Eagleton, I insist that religious thinking and texts posit a common humanity easily identifiable. As he comments, ‘a God who concerned himself only with a particular section of the species, say Bosnians or people over five foot eight inches tall, would appear lacking in the impartial benevolence appropriate to a Supreme Being’ (2015, p. 188). Biblical texts have the advantage of being timeless and pertinent to all cultures and histories. The dramatic story has become traditionally known as the ‘Fall’ of humanity and involves five characters – God, Adam, Eve, the devil and the cherubim – who become embroiled in a personal and cosmic battle. Much Jewish and Christian life and theology rest upon this spiritual warfare, the consequences of which can be either redemptive or devastating. The narra­ tive focuses on the importance of obeying God’s commands, not desiring worthless and damaging things and staying in a loving relationship with Him. It therefore exhorts the living of a virtuous life through the following of God’s will, not our own. Autonomy is exposed. The dangers of false desire, pride, envy, self-aggrandisement and rivalry are signalled throughout the story, as it explores these human traits in a highly dramatic manner. The word ‘Adam’ comes from the Hebrew noun ‘ha Adamah’ which means ‘ground’ or ‘earth’. Readers are reminded how ‘the Lord God formed man of dust from the earth’ (Gen. 2:7) a theological truth about humanity’s mor­ tality and creaturehood. Unequal to God, humanity’s challenge is not to desire rivalry with Him, with others or with ourselves. The author of Ecclesiasticus echoes a similar warning: ‘Do not exalt yourself, or you may fall and bring dishonour upon yourself’ (1: 30). Atheists, agnostics and religious people alike surely recognise this commonly felt temptation. As testimonies to its enduring significance, the episode has lent itself to multiple creative mythologisations in the creative and performing arts. One

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of the greatest of all English epic poems is directly based on the narrative, Milton’s (1608–1674) Paradise Lost. Its opening lines reveal starkly the consequences of not obeying God’s commands: ‘Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world … ’ (opening verse). Marlowe’s (1564–1593) renowned play Dr Faustus addresses the same issue by staging how the protagonist attempts to usurp divine power and knowledge and the distressing consequences of such hubris. The chorus tells the audience at the beginning of the play how the protagonist’s ‘waxen wings did mount above his reach/And melting heavens conspired his overthrow’ (1972, p. 265). There is an allusion to the Greek myth of Icarus here, who wishing to leave Crete, tried to fly, but soon rea­ lised he was a mere human being. His ‘waxen wings’ melted when he drew near the sun, making him plunge to his death. He literally and metaphori­ cally ascended too much for his own good. Peter Paul Rubens’ (1577–1640) The Fall of Icarus (1636, Musées Royaux Des Beaux-Arts, Brussels) shows Daedalus, the father of Icarus, watching his son’s tragic fall to his death, an incident Ovid (b. 43 BCE) writes about in Metamorphosis. Both Faustus and Icarus have ‘swollen heads’; both thought too highly of themselves. In per­ sonal terms, the narrative warns against the dangers of a misplaced elevation of the self. Perhaps the greatest literary text which deals with the same theme is Shakespeare’s Othello. Iago decides ‘to abuse Othello’s ear’ (Act 1, 3, l. 371) like the serpent in Genesis, penetrates the core of Othello’s being, an inner space ‘where I have garnered up my heart/Where either I must live or bear no life’ (Act 4, 2, ll. 56–57). Like Adam and Eve, he falls through pride at the erroneous suggestion that his wife is unfaithful. Both texts are also stories about shame as one consequence of acting on false desire, a trope revealed in St Peter’s denial of his Master three times but ‘when the cock crowed, he realised what he had done, went outside and wept bitterly’ (Luke 22: 62). According to Augustine, Peter’s character, was ‘more wholesome when he wept than when he was pleased with himself and presumptuous’ (1998, p. 610). As was Othello’s when he wept as he confronted his wife with his false accusation of adultery in the bedchamber minutes before he murdered her: ‘I must weep’ (Act 4, 2, l. 41; Act 5, 2, l. 20). Towards the end of the play, we hear Othello, crippled by shame and self-hatred, condemn his sin and offer himself up for punishment: – ‘O cursed, cursed slave! Whip me, ye devils/From the possession of this heavenly sight! Blow me about in winds! Roast me in sulphur! Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire! / O Desdemon! Dead Desdemon! Dead! O! O!’ (Act 5, 2, ll. 275–277). Here the audience witness a repentant sinner aware of his crime and his need to be punished. But his anguish at his own failings overrides any redemptive move towards accepting God’s forgiveness allied to his own repentance. Consequently, like Adam and Eve, he finds himself in unremitting despair and kills himself. Iago remains devoid of such shame or repentance throughout the play.

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In political terms, the myth of the Fall is easily understood as a warning against jingoistic supremacy, the tendency to see one’s own nation as better than others. Nazism and its inculcation of a purified Aryan race as well as the damaging aspects of colonialism are simply two historical examples which exhibit clear Faustian traits. Thomas Mann (1875–1955) in his 1943 novel Dr Faustus uses the narrative to explore the rise of Nazi Germany. Adrian Leverkühn, the pro­ tagonist, is compared to the moral degradation and culpability of the German nation. As Von Rohr Scaff writes, ‘As the modern Faust, Leverkühn stands for humanity’s … most devastating frailties. … having made his deal with the devil, he is the very image of fallen humanity’ (2002, p. 169). Mann did not identify himself as a Christian, but he was deeply influenced by the Genesis story. It is not impossible to interpret the slogans of the political leaders Trump and Johnson in Faustian terms: ‘America First’ and ‘Bring Back Control’ might easily be read as the misguided elevation of one nationhood over another. Thus, Genesis 3: 1–18 lends itself to myriad personal and political interpretation and is of concern to those who hold beliefs and persuasions outside explicitly religious frameworks. The word ‘naked’ (arom) is mentioned four times between 2: 25 and 3: 11: 2:25:’And the man and his wife were naked, and were not ashamed’. 3:7: ‘Then the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked.’ 3:10: ‘ … and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.’ 3:11: ‘Who told you that you were naked?’ Why is there this emphasis on nakedness? One possible answer revolves around the association between nakedness and truth in the Christian tradi­ tion. Christians are invariably encouraged to be naked and truthful before God in other words, to be frankly honest. For Weil truth is not revealed except in nakedness and the expression the ‘naked truth’ is used commonly in much discourse. Revelation is frequently described as unveiling the Truth about those things which were previously hidden or concealed. Nakedness has a clear association with shame, the genitals and sexual desire. The Greek word aidoia means genitals and is a derivative of the word aidos which means shame and similar terms are found in other languages. Aidos is the Greek goddess of shame and modesty. Although the Genesis the text does not explicitly state that Adam and Eve’s fault was of a sexual nature, the forbidden tree is symbolic of temptation and unruly sensual desire. After eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve feel shame and guilt and become scared as they hear ‘the sound of the Lord God’ walking in the garden (v. 8) panicking that they might be seen by Him, which is the reason why they hid. Those in the seventeenth century who covered over Masaccio’s painting of Adam and Eve’s nakedness with fig leaves due to the scandal it might cause, exhibit this tendency to associate nakedness with shame and sexuality. The fig leaves were removed in the 1980s and the painting is now as Masaccio originally painted it. We shall have more to say about shame a little later (Figure 7.2).

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Figure 7.2 Masaccio: The Expulsion.

Has God banished Adam and Eve or have they banished themselves, we might question? Whichever view we take Masaccio certainly paints verses 23–24 with dramatic intensity. It is only with the coming of Christ that a realignment becomes possible. Masaccio uses a vast amount of space and shadows on the fresco to represent the rough ground on which Adam and Eve now stand and this reflects verse 3:17: ‘Cursed is the ground because of

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you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you’. Richardson comments that the expulsion is ‘no arbitrary divine decree, but the fact that wo(man) is unfit to live in paradise. They have made God’s good world a place of strife and rivalry … and the road of redemption is long and steep’ (1959, p. 78). Throughout political history leaders have alluded to this perennial struggle and toil. For example, President Biden echoed this in his January 2021 inaugural speech: I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real. But I also know they are not new. Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal, that we are all created equal, and the harsh ugly reality that racism, nativism and fear have torn us apart. The battle is perennial and victory is never secure. The Expulsion is based on Genesis 3: 23–24 ‘ … therefore, the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east end of the Garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life’. It was painted between 1425 and 1427, in the Brancacci chapel in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine, in Florence, which has become known as the Sistine chapel of the early Renaissance. The fresco sits alongside his other work Tribute Money. Masolini’s (1383–1447) The Temptation of Adam and Eve is opposite. Their other paintings cover the rest of the walls, all of which represent episodes in the life of St Peter. Masaccio was the student of Masolini and 21 years his younger. Born in a small town just outside Florence in 1401, his real name was Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone Cassai. He became known as Masaccio which means ‘clumsy Tom’ because he took no interest in his appearance, people or politics due to his absolute focus on art. Two major influences, besides Giotto, were the architect Brunelleschi from whom he learnt linear perspective and the sculptor Donatello, whom he imitated in paint with his ‘sculptural’ depictions of figures like Adam. He died in Rome at the age of 26 in 1427, some say by poison administered by a rival artist, some say by the plague. Masaccio’s Expulsion is the first one a visitor sees on the left, high up, as s/ he enters the chapel. What is the expulsion doing here? Does it suggest that the Church led by St Peter offers the grace required to counter the Fall? Perhaps. It is painted on what is known as buon plaster and Masaccio would only have been able to paint small sections each day, otherwise the plaster would have been too dry. There is a sense of forced, strained movement echoing the verse ‘therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden … He drove out the man … ’ (3: 23–24). They appear to be pushed out of the garden; even the rays of light (now dark) seem to steer them away, just as much as the angel. The painting conveys a trajectory of culpable expulsion from the left – innocence and joy in the garden – to the right – toil and pain on the earth outside. The heavy, vertical line of the gate, as well as the menacing sword of the angel, seem to prevent re-entry. They are truly

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banished. The sword and rays of light (now black) to the left of the painting, besides giving a feeling of rushing movement and a directional pushing out of Adam and Eve, would have been originally silver, representing the glorious world from which Adam and Eve had been expelled. The bright red folds of the angel’s garments and the carpet on which he lands are in stark contrast to the darkness of the earth. The sword acts as an incentive to banishment and as a barrier to re-entry. The seventeenth-century devotional writer St Francis de Sales interpreted this verse about the sword as the need for everyone to be pierced by divine love in order to live the Christian life. For him, the sword was a symbol of redemptive pain. The angel’s body is foreshortened which allows Masaccio to compress the body to allow the eye to think it is looking at the person from a distance. Such compression creates a sense of depth or three-dimensionality and perspective. The artist wishes to indicate that this destiny-changing incident is taking place in a definitive space and time and communicates feelings of intense loss. Like a frozen frieze from a film, the artist captures the precise moment of guilt-ridden exposure and expulsion. The architectural features of the gates and the emotional impact were most likely influenced by Giotto’s work. Masaccio creates a stunning visual effect, a colourful and dramatic scene of displacement long before Computer-Generated Imagery. Eve is modelled on Venus, the Roman goddess of love and sex, the Greek equivalent to Aphrodite. Like her, she covers in modesty her breasts and genitalia. She has a contrapposto posture – the Italian word for a human figure standing with most weight on one foot and the other relaxed, which causes the hips and shoulders to rest at opposite angles. The most famous examples of this are Michelangelo’s David and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. The stance gives the impression that the character is ready to move on quickly when necessary. Adam and Eve seem as if they are in transit to another location, which is clearly what Masaccio was attempting to do by his use of this technique. The contrast between the dark, barren landscape outside the garden and the glorious radiant red of the angel’s attire and carpet on which he lands conveys what they have lost. Here the two worlds are at odds with each other. Masaccio does paint them moving towards some hint of light and post-incarnation viewers might see the painting with New Testament eyes which assuages any feeling that the artwork is definitely depressing. Nevertheless, Masaccio wants to display the seriousness of humanity’s fall, not their future redemption. This echoes the Pauline theology of just how generous Christ’s salvific work is in light of humanity’s rejection of God’s love. As he writes in his First Letter to the Corinthians 15:45–48: ‘The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit … . The first man was from the earth, a man of dust, the second man is from heaven’. And Romans 5: 15: ‘But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of that man Jesus Christ abounded for many’. As Jesus Christ becomes the New Adam and Mary the New Eve,

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things are reversed, so much so that the Easter liturgy can proclaim the Fall as a ‘happy fault’. The exsultet is sung on Holy Saturday night with the words, ‘O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem’ (‘O happy fault that gained for us so great, so glorious a redeemer’). The depiction of the bodies and gestures of the Edenic couple highlight their nakedness and by doing this Masaccio contradicts the earlier verse 22 that ‘the Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skins and clothed them’. He wants to portray their exposure and shame by this em­ phasis. Adam’s body is muscular and tensed, due to his anxious state of mind and his inner turmoil. The covering of his face suggests his psychological torment, whereas Eve displays the agonising despair of her face. Light shines on both bodies from the right, to expose their guilt and shame. The vanishing point is situated on their torsos which focuses onlookers’ eyes on their naked bodies. Greenblatt writes: Masaccio’s unforgettable figures depend … on their overwhelming sense of embodiment … Adam’s right foot still touches the threshold of Paradise, but not for long. They are in the world now, and unlike the angel who possesses wings, a beautiful garment, a sword, and a kind of magic carpet, the humans are utterly unprepared. … They are entering a very harsh environment, and they have nothing whatsoever to shield or protect them. From this perspective, Adam’s penis, strikingly central in the fresco’s composition once the overpainted fig leaves were removed, is less a sign his virility, than of his being what Shakespeare calls “unaccommodated man”. … His Adam and Eve were no longer abstract, decorative emblems of human guilt; they were particular suffering people, who had bodies with volume, weight, and, above all, movement. (2018, p. 150) Clifton (1999) makes the illuminating point that in the fifteenth century there were deeply entrenched attitudes towards gender difference, at odds with arguments about gender fluidity which rage today. Masaccio would have been aware of these and he exploits them. Is he attempting to suggest ironically, as many do now, that sharp distinctions between genders are no longer helpful or valid? Although Eve’s sin that led to the Fall is not actually ‘specified as a lack of chastity per se’ in the text, what has developed in Western Christianity is an association of sin with sexuality, and this owes much to the scriptural portrayal of the Edenic couple. What developed over time was a ‘consistent blaming of Eve for her role in tempting Adam. … Masaccio’s image … maintains the association of shame and nakedness (and, by extension, sexuality), in the figure of Eve only, providing for Adam a contrasting gesture, which also signifies shame, but of a different sort … ’ (Clifton, 1999, p. 647). By portraying Eve’s gestures of covering her breasts and genitalia, Masaccio identifies her sexuality as the location for her sin and shame.

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It was widely recognised at the time that women’s bodies were the sites of provocative and alluring temptation and that females were innately unable to control their emotions and lustful bodies. In contrast, Adam covers his face not his body, and since his visage was associated with the mind at this time, Masaccio is suggesting that Adam loses his mind during the Fall and a corresponding contemplation of God. It has very little to do with the control of his body. He also loses his ‘manliness’ due to the ‘unreasonable’ behaviour of giving in to Eve’s suggestion, since fifteenth century thinking associated maleness with reason. No wonder he feels bad about himself – a man losing his manliness, what more shameful thing is there to endure, then or now? Men in the fifteenth century and beyond were discouraged from public displays of emotion in keeping with their presumed rationality. Has anything changed, one might question? Thus, Adam hides his face, lest he demon­ strates ‘unmanly’ emotion. Eve, on the other hand, wails openly and pub­ licly, her gesture of shame centred on her body and her provocative sexuality. Might it be farfetched to suggest that since Masaccio was so aware of the nonsense of entrenched gender differences and stereotypes that he painted them ironically to highlight their absurdity? Was Masaccio the first male feminist and the first in history to be aware of the reality of gender fluidity? Augustine writes that since there was no prior evil in the garden, the door of pride let it in. Adam and Eve succumbed to the belief that they ‘will be like God’ (Gen. 3: 5), if they eat of the ‘fruit of the tree’ (Gen. 3: 3). They had forgotten that they were ‘dust and unto dust thou shalt return’ (Gen. 3:19). They forsook the foundation on which their minds and hearts ought to rest – God – and opted instead for their own foundation, blatantly raising them­ selves above the Divine. Augustine defines the nature of their pride: ‘And what is pride but an appetite for a perverse kind of elevation?’ (1998, p. 608). Enjoyment and rest consequently became turmoil. Varden describes the incident in these terms: By acting as he did, … Adam preferred his (own) criteria to those of his Maker. He, who, at first, had stood face to face with the flaming countenance of God, whose being reflected God’s glory, yielded to presumption. He thought he subsisted at God’s level by some quality intrinsic to himself. The tempter’s trick was to speak of God as being jealous of man … . If the ruse worked, it was because Adam, at some level, did consider himself God’s equal. (2018, pp. 15–16) Augustine claims that Adam refused to forsake his life’s companion Eve and instead became ‘her companion in sin’ (1998, p. 608). He insists, ‘ … even though the woman committed the transgression because of the serpent’s persuasion, and the man because of the woman’s offer, the transgression was nevertheless their own act’ (1998, p. 611). However, the falling away from

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their true nature as children of God did not entail for Adam and Eve a complete loss of their being, but it did fracture a part of it and like Narcissus himself, their personhood became diminished and lost strength: ‘By striving after more, (wo)man is diminished; when he takes delight in his own selfsufficiency, he falls away from the One who truly suffices him’ (1998, p. 610). Augustine became obsessed with the book of Genesis throughout his life and spent fifteen years writing The Literal Meaning of Genesis and dealt with it again in The City of God. The story of Adam and Eve became for him a way of understanding his own and others’ struggles with the will and desire. It became an incessant problem for him throughout his life, enhanced by the guilt he felt about his 13-year relationship with his lover before his conversion. The toil each person endures outside the garden partly consists in the battle between unruly desire and the will and it is a lifetime struggle. This is the curse. Augustine refers to ‘voluptuous thoughts’ he often had in his monastic cell towards the end of his life. Masaccio captures with intensity this sexualised sense of shame and of toil. The enduring question Augustine asked himself was this: why is it impossible for the will to control desire? His answer was that this spiritual battle only came about after the Fall. Desire was not in opposition to the will in the garden. As a neo-Platonist, Augustine believed that it would have been perfectly possible for Adam and Eve to have had ‘un-lustful’ sexual inter­ course, had they not fallen. They would not have had the activity of tur­ bulent lust in their flesh, but only the movement of peaceful will by which they commanded the other members of the body. He comments ‘How happy, then, were the first human beings, neither troubled by any distur­ bance of mind nor pained by any disorder of the body!’ (1998, p. 603). They incurred the penalty of exile from Paradise before they could unite in the task of propagation as a deliberate act undisturbed by passion. Thus, Adam and Eve’s disobeying of God’s command was all the greater in proportion to the ease with which it could have been avoided, precisely because their desire was not in opposition to their will. Nevertheless, they had free will. The conflict between selfish, sexual desire and the will only came about after the Fall: ‘For, now, the flesh is in such a condition that it simply cannot serve our will’ (1998, p. 613). And it was ‘right to be greatly ashamed of this lust, and it is right that the members which it moves or fails to move by its own right, so to speak, and not completely in accord with our will, should be called shameful … ’ (1998, p. 615). He had his answer to his questionings. Or so he thought. After the Fall everything changed. Adam and Eve saw for the first time what they had never seen or felt before – that they were naked and it filled them with shame and impelled them to reach for fig leaves to cover as a veil for when ‘grace was removed and a punishment commensurate with their disobedience inflicted on them, there appeared a certain shameless movement of the body … ’ (1998, p. 615). They became victims of both involuntary

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desire and voluntary arousal for satisfaction. Up until this Fall, the Edenic couple had lived in perfect freedom. Now outside the garden they lived imprisoned by their proclivity to succumb to desire, lust and the wiles of the flesh. This is not only the Edenic couple’s proclivity but every person’s, since he believed this tendency was passed on through later generations. All forms of addiction – sexual, alcoholic, gambling, drug – are susceptible to uncontrollable desire which the will seems inadequate to resist. Desire fea­ tures strongly in the Genesis account and the tree becomes the symbolic, sensual allure which ‘was a delight to the eyes’ and to ‘be desired’ (Gen. 3: 6). Augustine’s view of the devil is informative. The proud fallen angel, en­ vious by reason of that same pride which had induced him to turn away from God, encouraged Adam to gloat over subjects of his own, rather than be subject to God Himself. The devil became envious of Adam and Eve because they did not possess the unfallen nature which he possessed. The method of the devil’s attack on the Edenic couple is worth noting. Augustine says the devil transfigured as a serpent, chose to ‘speak through this creature, slippery and moving in twisted coils’ and sought to ‘insinuate himself, by crafty suggestions, into the heart of man, whose unfallen state he envied now that he himself had fallen’ (1998, p. 606). This echoes Psalm 12: 2 where one translation reads how enemies tell lies which ‘slide off their oily lips’. The serpent directly appeals to the vanity of Adam and Eve insinuating doubts about the virtuous nature of God Himself (Gen. 3: 5). Ephrem the Syrian (306–373) asks whether Adam and Eve became trapped in the imagined godlikeness that the serpent falsely provided. And St Anselm adds that the selfelevation witnessed in the garden is centred on the devil not only wanting to be equal to God, but also to be greater than God by desiring what God did not want him to, because he put his own will above God’s. For the modern Biblical commentator, Richardson, the serpent should be seen not as something external to our nature, but as a personification of human temp­ tation and that disobedience and doubting are two parallel processes, quoting the Danish theologian Kierkegaard, ‘It is hard to believe because it is hard to obey’ to make his point (1959, p. 72). We focus on one issue dominating much educational thinking at the present time - the promotion of the autonomous self. Much discourse about learning and teaching centres on students’ independent learning and the encouragement of self-esteem and clearly this can be a legitimate aspiration in light of some young people’s debilitating need for dependency and lack of self-confidence. However, as Pring points out, the religious version of autonomy is very different from the secular one since it relies on an under­ standing of the person drawn from sacred Scripture and tradition which reflects a form of reasoning which places importance on the ‘mystery’ of life related to an ideal to be sought outside the self – revelation and the person of Christ (Pring, 2018, pp. 87–88; Whittle, 2016). Human beings are not ‘independent’ in a religious sense, because they depend for their existence on God’s creative act of love and are sustained over time by their intimate

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relationship with God in Christ. Consequently, it is important to use phrases like ‘independent learners’ with caution, lest they undermine the distinctive theological anthropology involved in religious notions of the self. Fukuyama draws attention to this (post)modern move towards estab­ lishing a strong sense of self. He suggests that although economists assume that most human beings are motivated by ‘preferences’ or ‘utilities’ – desires for material resources or goods – they forget they are far more galvanised by Plato’s notion of thymos — the craving for positive estimations of their selfworth and dignity (2018, p. 29). This can come from within as they develop self-esteem, or from without, as others come to acknowledge their distinc­ tiveness (and their struggles) positively. When they internally absorb positive responses to themselves by others, they feel pride; if they are refused these, they feel anger or shame. The rise of identity politics and the contemporary emphasis on equality resides within this establishment of self-worth. Rousseau foresaw that human beings are apt to compare, contrast and evaluate themselves with other human beings. In Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire (Reveries of the Solitary Walker) he confesses how he himself became the victim of other people’s evaluation (1997, pp. 55–56). And in his Discourse on the Origins and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men, he denounces the shift from legitimate amour de soi (love of self) to amourpropre (self-love or vanity) which leads to feelings of pride and to the fre­ quent use of contrasting words like strong and weak, swift and slow, fearful and bold (1997). It is a theme Taylor picks up in his analysis of the bour­ geoning of a secular age (2007). Augustine offers a warning about amor sui (self-love). Paradoxically he teaches that it is humility which elevates the mind, for it ascends by making itself subject to God. Exaltation to God abases the mind, unlike the devil’s exaltation of himself, which held a debilitating sway over him. In City of God, he advises his readers that love is the central dynamic when it comes to the practice of Christianity. Existential problems which might arise throughout life can never be associated with love itself, only in relation to what chosen object love is directed. The right object of love is God and humanity – one’s neighbour, made in the image of God. Other things are mere idols. He shows how ‘in the one city of God, love of God has been given pride of place, and, in the other, love of self (amor sui)’ (1998, p. 609; O’Donovan, 2020). Adam and Eve had already become too pleased with themselves before the devil’s temptation and that is why Adam was sus­ ceptible to the claim that they will become like God. It connected to a mindset to which he was already moving. Adam and Eve would have been better aligned to becoming gods (since they were made in God’s image) if they had ‘clung to the highest and true ground of their being and not, in their pride, made themselves their own ground’ (1998, p. 610). By proudly striving for more than what had been donated, they became diminished. Augustine uses the metaphor of light to describe this descent into self-love – Adam is delighted with himself as if he were his own light and, therefore,

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turned away from that Light ‘which, if only he had been pleased with It instead, would have made the man himself a light’ (1998, p. 610). St Paul in his Letter to the Philippians previously denounced this latter tendency: ‘Their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things’ (3:19). The text records how Adam and Eve, on realising their guilt, ‘knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons’ (Gen. 3:7). They were afraid that God would see them naked and ashamed so ‘the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden’ (Gen. 3:8). Adam replies to God’s question ‘Where are you?’ with the words, ‘I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself’ (Gen. 3: 10). But God’s reply to Adam is: ‘Who told you that you were naked?’ (Gen. 3:11). Presumably before they sinned, they were not ashamed or fearful of their nakedness – like young, innocent children, they were blissfully unaware that they were. Innocence has nothing to do with cover up or hiding. However, once Adam and Eve realise they were naked and exposed after they felt guilt and shame, they attempt to blame others to avoid any further exposure of the truth. Adam says, accusing both God and his companion: ‘The woman who thou gavest to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree … ’ (Gen. 3:12). And Eve also passed the buck when she said, ‘The serpent beguiled me and I ate’ (Gen. 3:13). Never do they admit publicly that it was their own fault, nor do they take any responsibility for their action. Nevertheless, they feel ashamed of their be­ haviour. Masaccio captures this sense of pain and shame with such intensity which for us even outstrips the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch’s (1909–1943) agonised painting of The Scream. The Jewish author Zornberg, drawing from midrashic sources, comments that after the Fall, Adam and Eve’s existence shrinks and they lose all sta­ bility as they move out of the garden. Adam now has ‘a spinelessness, a vapidity. A splendid being decomposes before our eyes’ (1995, p. 24). Masaccio has represented this collapse by Adam’s downward gaze, his face hidden and buried in his hands. Not looking up, not even a side glance to the one he loves. Eve’s posture is different, but equally tragic as she covers her breast and genitals with her hands in shame, lest she be fully exposed. Rarely in Western art is the feeling of regret and shame so powerfully represented as in this fresco. And to some degree at least, it is a universal feeling. Don’t we all know how they both felt? Shame also often results, says Augustine, in isolation. In de Trinitate he indicates how the soul slipped away from the shared whole to its own restricted part. The two figures no longer have any eye contact between them. And, what is worse, they have to endure this loneliness on a brutalised earth, or as the narrative puts it, ‘ … thorns and thistles it shall bring forth’ (Gen. 3:17–18). Adam and Eve’s guilt and shame could have been easily reversed. God appears to them and offers his gentle voice of welcoming return ‘at the cool of the day’ (Gen. 3:8). Symeon (949–1022) advises us that God searches for the Edenic couple because he

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loves them and ‘God was not angered, nor did he immediately turn away’. But he also adds on God’s behalf, ‘Do you think you can hide from me?’ God’s question to Eve, ‘What is this you have done?’ (Gen. 3:9) gives her the opportunity to admit their fault. As the Orthodox Lenten Vespers states, ‘Then the Saviour said to him: “I do not desire the loss of the creature I formed, but that he should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. For he who comes to me I will not drive awayˮ’. But instead, Adam and Eve hid themselves and did not confess their guilt. Psalm 32:5 identifies a way forward after wrong-doing and the encouragement to ‘acknowledge my sin to thee/and I did not hide my iniquity. I said “I will confess my transgression to the Lord”; then thou didst forgive the guilt of my sin’. And a little later in that same psalm: ‘Thou are my hiding place for me’ (v. 7). Adam and Eve did not take advantage of this possibility. Luther (1483–1546) writes vehe­ mently on this verse about Adam and Eve’s hiding after their Fall seeing it as a deliberate desire to hide from God Himself: ‘ … they tremble at the sound a shaking leaf … This fleeing from God is therefore the strongest possible testimony of Adam against himself’ (undated, unpaginated). He writes, ‘O! how awful a fall! To fall from the safest security and delight in God into fear and dread so horrible. … For it is not the devil from whom Adam and Eve are now fleeing. They are rushing from the sight of God their Creator … This dread, therefore, is actually a flight from and a hatred of God himself’ (unpaginated). Notes 1 The Cistercian Order was formed in 1089 after a group of 21 monks and their abbot left their Benedictine monastery in Burgundy to set up a new community in Cîteaux (Latin, Cistercium) unreservedly devoted to simplicity and austerity. Their Order is characterised by a uniformity of strict custom, discipline and architecture. Probably the most famous Cistercian is St Bernard of Clairvaux, who in letters, sermons and treatises set down the ideals of the Cistercian founders. In 1892 a further reform was established – the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, popularly known as the Trappists. Thomas Merton belonged to this Order, which became known for its dedication to a highly disciplined form of asceticism and to almost perpetual silence. Today, many Cistercian monasteries still exist and their monks continue to lead a hidden life of contemplation and prayer dedicated to the Rule of St. Benedict. They live a life of solitude and silence. Prayer, reading and work make up their daily routine and undivided attention is given to the liturgy around which their entire existence revolves. Each community is also dedicated in a special manner to the Blessed Virgin Mary who is never far from Cistercian monks’ hearts. 2 The film is remarkable in its representation of the dialogue and friendship which has been established between the Christian and Muslim communities around Tibhirine. Not only is the chanting of Qu’ranic verses harmoniously set side by side with the chanting of Gregorian chant, but the leader of the terrorist group shows deep respect for the festival of Christmas and for the birth of Jesus on his first raid on the monastery, made all the more significant in light of his terrorist activities. Further work needs to be done on the implications of the film for the future of Christian–Muslin encounters.

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3 During the Middle Ages, two features dominated a monastery’s literature. The first was centred on compunction whose aim was to foster a desire for God. This was invariably expressed in the language of the spiritual senses, especially taste. Monastic life was one of pre-libation, resulting in a kind of intoxication brought about by the anticipation and foretaste of the heavenly abode in fellowship with the angels. The monastery became a place of waiting and desire for the heavenly city ( Leclercq, 1982, p. 56). The second was otium – leisure, which had a very different meaning from the one which is given to it today as I have indicated earlier. Christian monasticism developed this idea and leisure became associated with a life dedicated to contemplation and the ‘work’ of the liturgy in which one found rest and peace ( Pieper, 1998; Cook, 2013, pp. 46–47). 4 If this Catholic philosophy of life is to be taken seriously, then a corresponding pedagogy is demanded. It needs to be rooted in a contemplative approach where silence and stillness become essential features of the learning environment ( Leachman, 2009; Grace, 2011). 5 Kennedy’s moving account weaves together her own work as a human rights lawyer with the theme of abandonment and situates them within the Lenten lit­ urgy: ‘To reinforce our belief in human rights, we only have to consider the life and death of Christ – the corrupted intelligence which came from Judas, Christ’s arrest, persecution and torture, the travesty of a trial, the washing of hands by those in power, the denial of him by his friend, Peter, the fear generated amongst his dis­ ciples by the horrifying events and then the slow, excruciating execution. “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani,” “Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me?” Christ too felt abandoned’ (2013, p. 17).

References Benedict XVI. Emeritus Pope. (2005) Encyclical Letter: Caritas in Veritate. [online] Available at: www.vatica.va.com> (Accessed 13.3.2022) Bourne, M. (2010). Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. Interview transcript. A New Adventures Production. DVD. NVC arts. Warner Classics. Bryk, A., Lee, V. and Holland, P. (1993). Catholic Schools and the Common Good. MA: Harvard University Press. Burton-Christie, D. (1993). The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caldecott, S. (2009). Beauty for Truth’s Sake. On the Re-enchantment of Education. Ada, Michigan: Brazos Press. Catechism of the Catholic Church. 1994. London: Geoffrey Chapman. Cavanaugh, W.T. (1998). Torture and the Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body. Oxford: Blackwell. Clifton, J. (1999). Gender and Shame in Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Art History, 22(5), 637–655. Collins, G. (2010). Meeting Christ in His Mysteries. A Benedictine Vision of the Spiritual Life. Dublin: The Columba Press. Cook, B. (2013). Pursuing Eudaimonia. Re-appropriating the Greek Philosophical Foundations of the Christian Apophatic Tradition. Cambridge: CSP. Flannery, A. (1992). Vatican Council II. The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents (New Revised Edition). Dublin: Dominican Publications. Fodor, J. (2004). Reading Scriptures: Rehearsing Identity, Practising Character. In S. Hauweras and S. Wells. (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (pp. 141–155). Oxford: Blackwell.

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Ford, M. (2009). Spiritual Masters for All Seasons. Dublin: Columba Press. Foster, D. (2005). Reading with God: Lecto Divinia. London: Continuum. Girard, R. (1986). The Scapegoat. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press. Girard, R. (1987). Things Hidden from the Foundation of the World. London: The Athlone Press. Girard, R. (2005). Violence and the Sacred. London: Continuum. Grace, F. (2011). Learning as a Path, Not a Goal: Contemplative Pedagogy – Its Principles and Practices. Teaching Theology and Religion, 14(2), 99–124. Greenblatt, S. (2018). The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. The Story that Created Us. London: Vintage. Griffiths, P. (2011). From Curiosity to Studiousness: Catechizing the Appetite for Learning. In D. Smith and J. Smith (Eds.), Teaching and Christian Practices. Reshaping Faith and Learning (pp. 102–122). Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Wm.B. Eerdmans. Hancock, C. (2005). Recovering a Catholic Philosophy of Elementary Education. Pine Beach, NJ: Newman House Press. Huerre, D. (1994), Letters to My Brothers and Sisters. Living by the Rule of St. Benedict. Collegville: The Liturgical Press. Jamison, C. (2013). ‘God Has Created Me to Do Him Some Definite Service’ (Cardinal Newman): Vocation at the Heart of the Catholic Curriculum. International Studies in Catholic Education, 5(1), 10–22. Kennedy, H. (2013). Right at Our Heart. The Tablet (pp. 16–17). Kiser, J. (2003). The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love and Terror in Algeria. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Leachman, J.G. (2009). The Liturgical Subject. Subject, Subjectivity, and the Human Person in Contemporary Liturgical Discussion and Critique. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Leclercq, J. (1982). The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. New York: Fordham University Press. Maritain, J. (1943). Education at the Crossroads. New Haven: Yale University Press. Matthews, J. and Torevell, D. (2011). A Life of Ethics and Performance. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. McDonnell, T. (Ed.) (1989). A Thomas Merton Reader. New York: Doubleday. Midgelow, V. (2015). Some Fleshy Thinking; Improvisation, Experience, Perception. In N. George-Graves (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre (pp. 109–122). Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Donovan, O. (2020). The Problem of Self-Love in St Augustine. Origen: Wipf and Stock Publishers. Palmer, C. and Torevell, D. (2022). ’The Sweet Pain of Life’ – Dancing Metaphysical Longing: A Theological Reading Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. International Journal of Social Sciences, 8(2), 63–71. Pieper, J. (1998). Leisure: The Basis of Culture. South Bend, ID: St. Augustine’s Press. Pring, R. (2018). The Future of Publicly Funder Faith Schools. A Critical Perspective. London: Routledge. Radcliffe, T. (2012). Take the Plunge. Living Baptism and Confirmation. London: Bloomsbury. Torevell, D. (2007). Liturgy and the Beauty of the Unknown. Another Place. Aldershot: Ashgate.

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Conclusion

Throughout the book, I have emphasised the importance of metaphysical desire in living the Christian life and agreed with all those Biblical writers, contemplatives and theologians who have persuaded others that this is at the core of religious endeavour and progress. For spiritual transformation to take place, it is enough to desire it. The opposite of holiness is sloth (acedia) which is not mere idleness but the renouncing of the kind of being God wants and yearns for us to be. When the sister of St Thomas Aquinas asked him how to become a saint he replied, ‘Want (desire) it’ (David, 2019, pp. 62–63). This kind of longing is Janus-faced: God’s desire for us to share his life that we might live happily and fully here and in the next life, and our antiphonal response to His loving call. The Benedictine Sr Mary David goes as far as to suggest that the whole essence of the gospel can be summed up in the divine Word who longs for us and His patient waiting for our answer (David, 2019, p. 21). She was in good company for Augustine offered the same in his homilies based on the First Letter of John about which he refers to as the ‘stretching’ of ‘holy desire’: The entire life of a good Christian is holy desire … by desiring you are made large enough, so that, when there comes what you should see, you may be filled. For, if you wish to fill a purse, and you know how big what will be given you is, you stretch the purse … You know how much you are going to obtain, and you see your purse is small; by stretching it you make is that much larger. This is how God stretches our desire through delay, stretches our soul through desire, and makes it large enough by stretching it. Let us desire, then, brothers, because we have to be filled … Let us stretch out to Him so that, when he comes, he may fill us. (Quoted in David, 2019, pp. 24–25). I have also concurred with the Catholic Church’s catechetical admittance that ‘The desire for God is written in the human heart’ and a person is created by God for God who never ceases to draw humanity to Himself (1994, p. 14). This ontological aspect of human fulfilment and hope may be DOI: 10.4324/9781003227540-12

Conclusion 207 impeded by myriad obstacles as Chapter 2 demonstrated through its delineation of the emergence of the ‘secular self’. Nevertheless, I added these cultural trajectories did nothing to disrupt seriously or sever the delight which many continue to find in yearning for God for ‘He never ceases to call every man to seek him, so as to find life …’ (1994, p. 15). I have also outlined how metaphysical desire is a movement towards transcendence and definitive, immortal quies (rest) away from the anxietyfuelled vicissitudes of finite existence, prescient at a time when the West is suffering from a mental health crisis. Like Zacchaeus in the gospels whose intense longing to see God overcame natural impediments (his stature), such desire allows a person to bypass her autonomy allied to an obsessional self and frees it to condition the vey shape of life here on earth. Varden is correct to indicate that the facile slogan ‘you can become what you like’ through your own self-willed agency is the assumption that has saturated Western consciousness and it is doomed to fail for: ‘We encounter ourselves as we are: limited, vulnerable, mortal’ (2022, p. 20). I included, too, that searching and longing is not always about the future either. The heart can find its peace in the endeavour itself; desiring entails finding here and now a commensurate joy, as the parable of the fine pearl indicates (Matt. 13:44). Four threads or contours have been woven together in this book to help in understanding better the nature and dynamics of desire: ontology/disposition, revelation, the heart and liturgy. These strands integrate the life of metaphysical desire into an integrated whole sustaining and strengthening the endeavour as the ‘spiritual self’ becomes transformed and the heart enlarged. Looking for God as the fulfilment of our deepest longings is most keenly felt and experienced in the fourth contour – the sacred liturgy – for it is in this arena of grace-filled plenitude that we come to know and feel that we are loved by an Infinite Love who desires our happiness as the liturgical theologians I have referred to so eloquently instruct us. Having made this claim, we recognise that our individual human nature, experience of divine revelation and the ongoing cultivation of our own hearts all contribute to the trajectory of longing which consists of a ceaseless entry into a mysterious divine depth until death. I have attempted to draw out analogies between sexual desire and metaphysical desire pointing to their differences and similarities in the hope that we will appreciate them more fully for what they might offer humanity’s striving for fulfilment. The Song of Songs featured strongly since it is the text which, above all others, figures God’s love for us and our love for Him in erotic terms. In a highly sexualised, largely secular Western culture which relies on pleasure frequently allied to instant gratification as a model for living the good life, this analogy inevitably comes under immense strain. During an age when Biblical, monastic and theological texts are often no longer sought for wisdom and instruction in the manner they used to be, I devoted a final section to the arts trusting they might offer insights into yearning, if not explicitly religiously motivated, by their inventive capturing of our imagination. Like Schama, I believe

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they can be powerful forces for changing people’s perceptions and the world and are revelatory in the sense that they seek the truth creatively about human striving and longing (2022). They can never replace the Word, but we should not disparage them because of this. Influential monastics, theologians and philosophers ranging from Plato to Varden have shed light on the constituencies and dynamics of longing and desire. The former insisted on the deep-seated connections which exist between the immortal soul and desire allied to a contemplative flight towards beauty and truth. Augustine and Pascal enlightened our understanding by pointing to affectivity as a bedrock for longing, more stable and instructive than reason. Reference to monastics and mystics like Cassian, Augustine, Evagrius of Pontus, St Benedict, Gregory of Nyssa, John of the Cross, Merton, Howe, Fitzgerald and Varden have all, in their distinctive ways, advised us into the ways of asceticism and silence as indispensable and reliable methods for securing and sustaining desire. Francis de Sales assisted us in seeing the longing for God as an experience which lifted us above our sometimes wayward inclinations. From the philosophical writings of Kant and Schopenhauer, we understood that disinterested desire is the beginning of a serious search for knowledge and truth and without this little progress can be made. From Weil, I drew from her conviction about the need for patient and attentive waiting as a necessary strand in metaphysical longing. She, more than any other contemporary voice I think, believed that such waiting would always result in a progression along the path towards sanctity. Her life of toil and hardship ensured that her writings emerged from a spirit which had known suffering and were all the more confident due to her personal endurance. They reflected the belief of a mystic 800 years her junior, Julian of Norwich, who placed longing at the centre of her theology and knew assuredly, like Weil, that eventually ‘all will be well’ and that our yearning is never futile. Teilhard de Chardin saw the interplay between God’s awakening of our desire and the unfolding of the cosmos towards the Omega point. He believed the heart of the world beats mystically within our own hearts and only in Christ is the reckless vow of love realised. Rahner illuminated us by daring to offer that desire forms part of a universal human quest for meaning and spiritual ascent rooted in quotidien experience and may be as much a part of nonreligious as religious people’s aspirations as they search for identity and purpose in their everyday lives. Longing is embedded in the excessus felt in humanity’s encounter with the mystery of the world. Liberation and black theologians such as Gutiérrez, Martin Luther King and Cone spelt out that yearning has a deeply embedded political dimension to it and that the struggle for justice and equality is never far removed from our longing for God. Womanist theologians reminded us in their revisionist theology of revelation that desire is inseparable from the seeking of equality and fairness. The God who draws us to Himself is the God who yearns to free us from oppression and tyranny. Chrétien drew our attention to the dynamics of call, beauty and desire, seen most memorably in the poetic originality of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Conclusion 209 Interwoven with these examinations was my analysis of Fukuyama’s keen interest in the future of liberal democracies and identity since it highlighted humanity’s personal and social endeavours to secure prosperity and peace in political rather than religious terms. I suggested here that feelings of consumerist self-satisfaction are never enough and the so-called ‘end of history’, if that is ever feasible, will never be sufficient in fulfilling our deepest longings. There is a perennial search for more as I noted from the work of the contemporary Irish Christian philosopher Desmond. Popes John Paul II, Emeritus Benedict XVI and Francis agree: the heart’s desire will never be satisfied with the finite and material. I have also shown by five examples how the Arts have engaged with the issue of longing and desire in innovative and memorable ways. Beckett portrayed a contemplative search for meaning and truth with such dexterity in his Waiting for Godot that it seems that the last word for him could never be absurdity. Beauvois matched this with his unassailable cinematic portrayal in Of Gods and Men of brotherly love, spiritual courage and a Hopkins-like undiminished desire for Christ in the midst of horrendous historical circumstances. From Williams’ dramatic works especially A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie came the conviction that human longing for fulfilment takes place in the midst of bitter disappointment, cruelty and an uncaring world (paralleled in the forlorn bodies of the dancers in Swan Lake before their final reunion in eternity) reminding audiences that art can offer some solace in their recognition of the raw and brutal reality of human existence set against humanity’s most lofty, spiritual ambitions. Masaccio painted fallen desire on the agonised faces of the Edenic couple in such a manner that it cannot fail to advise onlookers of the consequences of hubris and acedia. Finally, let the sentiments of psalm 24:3–4 epitomise the thesis of the book: Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, and does not lift up his soul to what is false, does not swear deceitfully. References Catechism of the Catholic Church: Text and Commentaries. (1994). Dublin: Veritas Publications. David, Sister Mary. (2019). The Joy of God. Collected Writings. London: Bloomsbury Continuum. Schama, S. (2022). History Now. BBC2. Varden, E. (2022). Entering the Twofold Mystery. On Christian Conversion. London: Bloomsbury Continuum.

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Index

Note: Italicized page numbers refer to figures. Page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes. Abbess of Stanbrook Abbey 33 Abbey of Saint Denis 23 Absolute Love 8 acedia 21, 54, 206, 209 aesthetic pleasure 129, 130 aesthetics 126–128 affective Dionysianism 23 affectus 27 agape 63 agonia 70 aletheia 19, 132 alienation 8, 23, 66, 69, 85, 134, 152, 153, 160, 163, 173n2 amor fati 101 amor sui 200 amour de soi (love of self) 200 amourpropre 200 anachoresis 73 Andrea, D. 33 Angelou, M. 3 Anknupfungspunkt 16 anomie 8 Anthony of Egypt 72, 73 anxiety 1–3, 20, 23, 53, 57, 59, 64, 70, 75, 120, 173n2, 207 apatheia 35, 60, 63–65, 147 Aquinas, St T. 40, 53, 125, 181, 206; Summa Theologiae 62, 107; theology of knowledge 107 arbitrium 155, 158 Arch of Triumph 25 Arendt, H. 49–50 arete 60 aristeia 60 Aristophanes 86 Aristotle 37, 73, 125, 161

art 126–131, 135–137; counterfeit 135, 136; infectiousness 136, 137; reat 135 Article 30 42 Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, The 66 askésis 33 athambia 147 Athanasius 2, 73, 94 Auden, W. H. 173n1 Augustine 6–7, 9, 28, 57, 61, 94, 131, 191, 197–198, 200–201; City of God 200; City of God, The 198; Confessions 3, 7, 31–32, 50; epistemology of lament 30; Exposition on the Psalms 38 6, 30; Literal Meaning of Genesis, The 198; Making of Moral Theology, The 121n1; theology of grace 31; On the Trinity 29 authenticity 48, 54–59 autonomous self, limited horizon of 48–54 autonomy 54, 55, 57, 72, 74, 138, 139, 142, 179, 190, 199, 207; personal 58; secular 58; selfconscious 72; self-willed 58 baptism 178–180 Baumgarten: Aestethica 126 beauty 2, 19, 20, 30, 39, 42, 73, 76, 83–86, 88–91, 93, 94, 97, 98, 102, 105, 117–119, 125, 129, 131, 135, 139, 141, 153, 154, 156, 159, 160, 162–167, 173n1, 173n2, 181, 187–189, 208; sublime 121n1, 126–128, 130; transcendental 7, 40, 138

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Beauvois, X. 178–189; Des Hommes et des Dieux 178; Of Gods and Men 184, 187–188, 209 Beckett, S. 144–153; Happy Days 149; Waiting for Godot 102, 144–150, 147, 153, 209 Benedict XVI, Pope 22, 53, 88, 108, 130–131; ‘Communion and Liberation’ 130; on creative genius 130; Deus Caritas Est 83, 87; habilitationschrift 24; on liturgy 42; Milestones 24–25; on Plato’s Phaedrus 84; Spe Salvi 25; Spirit of the Liturgy, The 131 Berryman, J. 173n1 Bigsby, J. 172 Black Lives Matter movement 117 Black Manifesto (1969) 116 black power 116 Bloom, A. 58 Boff, C. 108, 109 Boff, L. 108, 109, 114–115 Bonhoeffer, D. 111 Book of Revelation 42–43 boredom 23, 41, 50, 53, 99, 101, 103 Bosco, J. 17 Botticelli: Birth of Venus, The 195 Bourne, M.: New Adventures Dance Company 188; Swan Lake 92, 185, 188, 189, 209 Brakke, D. 36, 64–65 Bridges, R. 173n1 Brock, B. 30 brokenness 31 Bruce, S. 39 Bruno of Cologne 150 Buddhism 101 Burton-Christie, D. 35 Cabasilas, N. 85 Caravaggio: Call of St Matthew, The 40–41 Carlisle, C. 18 Cartesian ego 133 Casey, M. 4 Cassian, J. 36; Conferences 62; Institutes 62 Cassiodorus 2 Catholic Tubingen School 25 celebrity culture 55 Chardin, P. T. de 102–105; Hymn to Matter 105; Le Milieu Divin 102, 103, 105; Mass on the World 105; Omega 103, 104, 121, 208; Phenomenon of Man, The 103, 105

charity (caritas) 29, 30 Chrétien, J-L. 117–120; Corps à corps: à l’écoute de l’oeuvre d’art (Hand to Hand. Listening to a Work of Art) 118; Divine Names 118; L’Appel et la Réponse (The Call and the Response) 118 Christogenesis 105 Cistercian Order 202n1 Claudel, P. 118 Clement of Alexandria 64 Clifton, J. 118, 196 cognitivism 23 Coleridge, E. H. 22 Collins, G. 179, 180 communion 182 Cone, J. 117; Black Theology of Liberation, A 116 Congar, Y. 25; Dictionary 24; Meaning of Tradition, The 24 Congregation for Catholic Education: Educating Together in Catholic Schools: A Shared Mission between Consecrated Persons and the Lay Faithful 182 conscientisation 110 contemplation (contemplatio) 22, 33–35, 65, 128; disinterested 127; Ignatian 157–158; supernatural (contemplation surnaturelle) 24; theological 24 Cottingham, J. 3–4, 19 Crane, H. 173n1 cynicism 8, 58 Dalton, D. 83; Selige Sehnsucht 5 death, sociological analysis of 77 de Chardin, T.: Le Milieu Divin 7 De Coenobiorum Institutes 38 denial of life 113 depression 1, 8, 25, 53, 54, 59, 75, 153, 154, 160, 169, 173, 195 de Sales: Treatise on the Love of God 17 de Sales, F. 208 desire: for the concealed 131–135; contours of 15–44; desireless 126–131, 141; discernment 2, 6, 15, 29, 38, 48, 64, 65, 70, 164; eschatological dimension of 2; infinite 18; intentional 6, 19; metaphysical 1, 2, 4, 8, 27, 51, 53, 57, 63, 84, 120, 188, 206, 207; obstacles of 48–77;

Index ontological dimension of 2; politics of 107–118; selfish 127–129; sexual 8, 10, 19, 86, 90, 93, 137, 192, 198, 207; to share feelings 135–137; spiritual 7–9, 19, 24, 33, 37, 43, 57, 71, 153, 183, 188; supernatural 179; transcendence 3, 15, 18, 22, 34, 54, 59, 72, 76, 86, 106, 107, 117, 126, 140, 141, 159, 187, 189, 207; see also idividual entries desireless desire 126–131, 141 Desmond, W. 138–142; Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being, The 139–140 detachment 18, 23, 58, 59, 61, 65, 68, 101; ascetic 65 deus absconditus 105–106 Deuteronomy 4 DeYoung, R. 62, 76 dhamma 75 Dieu trompeur 49 discernment 2, 6, 15, 29, 38, 48, 64, 65, 70, 164 disinterested contemplation 127 disinterestedness 128 disposition 15–20 dispositional belief and trust 20 distracted self, limited horizon of 48–54 divertissements 59–70 Divine Law 16 divine love 3, 42, 87, 89, 93, 94, 151, 195 divine madness (theia mania) 83, 88 Divine Names 24 divine voice 121 Divine Wisdom 26–27 Driscoll, J. 4 DuBois, B. 171 Eagleton, T. 58, 73 ecclesia discens 114 ecclesia docens 121n1 ecstasis 129 Eliot, T. S.: Four Quartets 9; Little Gidding 9; Waste Land, The 1 Ellison, R.: Invisible Man 115–116 emotions 23 Endo, S.: Silence 151 Enlightenment 126 ennui 23, 53 enterprise culture 50 enthusiasm 84

225

Ephrem the Syrian 199 epistemology 130 Erfahrung 74 Erlebris 74 eroticism 140; homoeroticism 188 eudaimonia 37, 76 Evagrius 60–62; Evagrius of Pontus 39 expressive individualism 50–51 ‘eye listens’ (l’oeil écoute) 118 Eyre, R. 168 feelings 23, 28, 135–137 Feminist theology 117 fitness: essential 17; habitual 17 Fitzpatrick, G. 32, 33 Flood, G. 18 Florensky, P. 39 formalitates 165 Foster, D. 34, 44, 75 Foundations of the Monastic Life 59 Four Noble Truths 5 fragility 31 Francis, Pope 2, 15 freedom 36, 37, 55, 64, 71, 73, 108–110, 112, 115, 139, 149, 155, 157, 158, 179, 199; individual 58; infinite 19; selfdetermining 54 Freire, P.: Pedagogy of the Oppressed 115 Friedrich, D.: Man and Woman Observing the Moon 144; Two Men Observing the Moon 144 Fukuyama, F. 1, 55, 200; ‘Empires of Resentment, Empires of Deference’ 56; Identity 56 Gallus, T. 23 Gandhi, M. 115 Gegenstande 134 gender identity 55, 189 genius 130 German romanticism 25 Gerson, J. 24 Girard, R. 49 givenness 50 Gormley, A.: Another Place 107 grace 26 Grammar of Assent 165 Greenblatt, S. 189–190, 196 Gregory the Great: Exposition on the Book of Job 38 Gregory the Great, Pope 62 Griffiths, P. 92, 181–182

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Gröning, P.: Into Great Silence 149, 150, 152 Grosseteste, R. 23 Gutiérrez, G. 109–114, 208; Theology of Liberation 112–114 habitus 17, 33, 72 haecceitas (‘thisness’) 156, 165, 166 Haldane, J. 183 Hall, P. 152, 153 Harvey, P. 75 Heaney, S.: Redress of Poetry, The 100 heart 27–41; delight 86 Hegel, G. W. F.: Phenomenology of Spirit 49 Heidegger, M. 22, 48, 59, 131–135; Annunciation 132; Letter on Humanism 134 Heitzelman, G. 170 Herbert, G.: Love 100; Pulley, The 3, 100 hesychia 75 Hewitt, S.: All Down Darkness Wide 160 hexis 17 Hoff, J. 67 hominisation 104, 105 homo economicus 68 homoeroticism 188 hopelessness 25 Hopkins, G. M. 22, 23, 40, 118, 140, 153–168, 155, 173–174n2, 208; Ad Matrem Virginem 161; Carrion Comfort 154, 156, 160; On Creation and Redemption: The Great Sacrifice 157; Epithalamion 165; Felix Randall 165, 166; God’s Grandeur 40, 163, 173n2; Harry Ploughman 159, 160, 165; Henry Purcell 156; Homo creatus est 157; As Kingfishers Catch Fire 161, 163; Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo, The 165; On the Origins of Beauty. A Platonic Dialogue 163; On Personality, Grace and Free Will 157; Pied Beauty 162–164; On the Portrait of Two Beautiful, Young People 161; ‘Probable Future of Metaphysics, The’ 161; Soldier, The 154; Spiritual Exercises 156, 157; St. Winefred’s Well 161; That

Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection 162; To What Serves Mortal Beauty? 165–166; Windhoverm, The 164, 167; Wreck of the Deutschland, The 105, 153–155, 161, 162, 167 Howe, J-M. 35–36 Huerre, D. 44 Hugh of Balma 24 humanitas 156 humanity 1, 3, 5, 6, 16–19, 21, 22, 25, 29–34, 38, 40–42, 44, 48–51, 54, 55, 57, 58, 63, 66, 68, 69, 83, 85, 87–89, 91, 92, 107, 115, 117, 118, 133–137, 142, 153, 156, 158–162, 165–167, 172, 173n2, 182, 190, 192, 195, 200, 206–209 humility 31, 32, 34, 38, 42, 53, 61, 64, 67, 76, 102, 126, 141, 144, 146–147, 200 hypomene 102 hypomone 25 hypostasis 25 hypostole 25 identity 55, 74, 88; politics 56; selfidentity 52, 72, 77 identity politics 53 illative sense 165 immanence 117, 139, 168 inculturatio 36 information units 68 Innerlichkeit 42 intellectual integrity 4 intellectualism 23 intentional desire 6, 19 intuition 7, 23, 29, 99, 105, 107, 121 “Invisible Institution” 115 isothymia 55, 56 James, W. 52 Jamison, C. 36–37 John of the Cross 99, 110, 114 John Paul II, Pope: Fides et Ratio 15, 22 Julian of Norwich 30, 208 Jungmann 43 Kant, I. 126–128; Critique of Judgement 126 Kierkegaard, S. 48, 199 King, M. L. 115, 208 Kirwan, M. 49

Index Knust, W. 88 Kojève, A. 49, 57 Kowalski, S. 171 krisis 65 Labat, E-P. 7 Lacan, J. 16 La Grande Chartreuse 150 Laird, M. 93 LaNave, G. F. 27 landscape and soulscape, interrelationship between 35–36 Lasch, C. 74 Lataste, M. 159 Lawrence, F. 88 lectio divina (divine reading) 35 Les limites de la teologia moderna: un texto de Bonhoeffer 111 Letter to the Hebrews 25 Levertov, D. 173n1 liberation 108, 109; theology 110 liturgical agency 183 liturgy 41–44, 183 Lomax, W.: Death of a Salesman 170 longing 1–3, 5–9, 15, 18–20, 22, 25–27, 30, 33, 36, 39–41, 44, 53, 56, 57, 59, 64, 69, 74–76, 83–90, 94, 97, 98, 104–108, 116, 118–121, 138, 140, 141, 144–146, 149, 150, 154, 160, 167, 169, 173, 178–181, 188, 206–209 Love 100 Lowell, R. 173n1 Luther, M. 202 Lynch, W. 125 Macarius, A. 34 MacMillan, J.: Symphony Number 3; Silence 151 Mahler: Symphony no. 2 (Resurrection Symphony) 8 Mann, T.: Death in Venice 86; Dr Faustus 192 Maritain, J. 181 Marlowe, C.: Dr Faustus 191 Masaccio: Ecclesiasticus 190; Expulsion, The 118, 189–202, 193; Tribute Money 194 Maximus the Confessor 15–16 McGilchrist, I. 23, 58, 59, 131–133 McKellan, I. 147 McMullan, A. 148 meditation (meditatio) 35

227

megalothymia 55, 56 Mellor, P. 8 Merton, T. 3, 33–34, 50, 51, 67, 69, 70, 179, 202; Ascent to Truth, The 65; Where Prayer Flourishes 66 metanoia 32 metaphysical desire 1, 2, 4, 8, 27, 51, 53, 57, 63, 84, 120, 188, 206, 207 metaphysical inertia 53 Mezei, B. 20 Michelangelo: David 195 Miller, A. 170 Milton, J.: Paradise Lost 51, 191 mistrust 50 modernity 8, 22, 49, 54, 138, 142; (post) modernity 23, 48, 51, 56, 58, 67, 68, 77, 138, 141 Munch, E.: Scream, The 201 Murdoch, I. 129 narcissism 30, 57 natural principle 15, 16 Nault, J-C. 53–54 Nazism 192 neo-liberalism 57 neo-scholastic intellectualism 24 Newman, J. H. 24–26; Meditation on the Kingdom of God 26 New Testament 71, 109, 114 Nickoloff, J. 109 nostalgia 2, 84, 85, 93 oeuvre 168 Old Testament 37, 43, 90, 109, 114 olfactory sense 27 ontology 15–20 oppression 108–110, 114, 116, 117, 208 Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (Trappists) 202n1 orthopraxis and orthodoxy, relationship between 113 Orwell, G.: 1984 1 Ovid: Metamorphosis 191 Palladius: Life of Evagrius 63 pantheism 103 Parmenides 162 Pascal, B. 27–32; Fragment 131 28; Fragment 183 29; Fragment 192 31; Fragment 201 32; Fragment 424 29; human nature, paradoxical understanding of 32; postulates 27–28; theology of grace 31

228

Index

Philokalia 76 Pieper, J. 15, 21–22, 84 Pinter, H.: Homecoming, The 151–152 Plato 2, 15, 58, 83–96, 132, 138, 200, 208; Phaedrus 83–86, 119, 141, 167; Symposium 83, 86, 141 plenitude 101, 141, 142, 207 politics of desire 108–117 (post)modernity 23, 48, 51, 56, 58, 67, 68, 77, 138, 141 (post)modern reflexivity 58 potentia oboedientialis 107 poverty 20, 108, 109, 111–113, 133, 141 praktike 64 prayer with words (oratio) 35 presence 134 prophetic denunciation 110 Protestant Reformation 126 protopassions 61, 62 Putnam, R.: Bowling Alone 59 Pythagoras 132 Rahner, K. 105–108; God of My Life 106; Hearer of the Word 106; Spirit in the World 106, 107 Raposa, M.: Boredom and the Religious Imagination 101–102 rationalism 141 reading (lectio) 35 receptivity 17, 21, 39, 42, 50, 67, 95, 138, 145, 161 reductionism 9n1 religious belief 4, 5, 20, 77, 136 religious knowledge 23 religious melancholy 52 religious philosophy of life 18 ressentiment 49 revelation 20–27, 35; self-revelation 88, 116 Rilke, R. M.: Book of the Monkish Life, The 120 Rolheiser, R. 8 Romanticism 51; German 51 Rousseau, J. J.: Discourse on the Origins and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men 200; Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire (Reveries of the Solitary Walker) 200 Rubens, P. P.: Fall of Icarus, The 191 Sacrosanctum Concilium 42 Salesian Order 17

salvation 49 sangha 75 satyagraha 115 scapegoating 49 Scheler, M.: Deceit, Desire and the Novel 49 Schneider, C. 16 Schopenhauer, A. 128–131 scientia (know-how) and sapientia (wisdom), relationship between 22 scola amoris (school of love) 24 Scott, A. 77n1 Scotus, D. 156, 159, 165 Scruton, R. 87 Second Noble Truth 66, 129 self-actualisation 48, 55, 138 self-assertion 72 self-begot 51 self-consciousness 155 self-contentment 56 self-determination 48, 55, 57, 138–142, 156, 189; rational 139; reductionist 138 self-determining freedom 54 self-esteem 54, 55, 74, 199, 200 self-identity 52, 72, 77 selfish desire 127–129 selfishness 28, 30 self-revelation 88, 116, 199 self-satisfaction 53, 56, 142, 209 self-worth 53, 55, 68, 170, 200 sexual desire 8, 10, 19, 86, 90, 93, 137, 192, 198, 207 sexual imagery 8, 151 sexuality 8, 56, 160, 172, 174n4, 192, 196, 197 Shakespeare, W. 58; King Lear 68; Othello 191 shared community of feeling 135 Shelley, P. B.: To the Moon 144 Shilling, C. 8 sign language 39 Sisyphus 4 Smith-Howard, L. 170 Sobolev, D. 173n2 solidarity 114 Song of Songs 7, 8, 85, 87–95, 167, 207 soulscape: and landscape, interrelationship between 35–36 Spender, S. 173n1 spiritual bonding 72 Spiritual Canticle 110

Index spiritual desire 7–9, 19, 24, 33, 37, 43, 57, 71, 153, 183, 188 spiritualisation 104 St Aelred of Rievaulx 36 St Benedict 44; Rule of St. Benedict, The 4, 33, 34, 36, 178, 202n1 St Bernard of Clairvaux 90–91 St Bonaventure 27; Journey of the Mind, The 26 Steiner, G. 134 Stevens, W.: Notes toward a Supreme Fiction 5 Stewart, P. 147 St Gregory of Nyssa 2, 89, 90, 93–94; Ecclesiastes 65, 69 St Gregory the Great 76 St Ignatius: Spiritual Exercises, The 154 St John of Damascus 125–126 St John of the Cross: Ascent to Mount Carmel 27; Dark Night 27; Living Flame of Love, The 27 Stoicism 102 Stoics 67 St Symeon the New Theologian 41–42 Suarez, Cardinal 24 sufficient reason, principle of 128 supernatural desire 179 Symeon 201–202 Symeon the Stylite 73 tapas 73 taste 127–128 Taylor, C. 54 Taylor-Batty, J. 147 Taylor-Batty, M. 147 Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake 92, 185, 188, 189 techne 138 telos 16, 17, 33, 57 theologia mystica 23; definiton of 24 theoria physike 64, 65 Third Noble Truth 129 Thoreau, H. D.: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience 115 ‘thoughts’ (logismoi) 60–64 thymos 55–56, 200 Tilby, A. 61–63 Tolstoy, L. 135–137; What Is Art 135 totalitarianism 9n1

229

transcendence 3, 15, 18, 22, 34, 54, 59, 72, 76, 86, 106, 107, 117, 126, 140, 141, 159, 187, 189, 207 transcendental beauty 7, 40, 138 Tyler, P. 23, 24 udaemonism 29 Van Gogh, V. 164; Peasant Shoes 134 Varden, E. 1, 5, 8, 17–18, 120–121, 197, 208; Book of Pilgrimage 120; Shattering of Loneliness, The 57, 121 Vatican Council II 114; Dei Verbum 24–26 Vespers, L. 202 Viladesau, R. 107 virtue ethics 76 vita contempliva 42 vital connaturality 24 von Balthasar, H. U. 20, 30, 168; Glory of the Lord, The 39–40 Von Rohr Scaff 192 waging a war 70–77 Watten, A. 34 Weil, S. 97–102, 208; Forms of the Implicit Love of God 98; Gravity and Grace 100; Of Gravity and Grace 100–102; Human Personality 97; Waiting on God 97 Williams, R. 170 Williams, T. 168–173, 174n3, 174n4; Glass Menagerie, The 168–170, 209; Streetcar Named Desire, A 168, 169, 170, 209 Wittgenstein, L. 73; Culture and Value 20 Wolfe, J. 54 Woodward, I. 188–189 wound of love 93–94 wretchedness 31 Wright, N. 168 Wynn, M. 22, 52 Zornberg, A. 5, 201