Perceiving Things Divine: Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual Perception 9780198802594, 0198802595

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Perceiving Things Divine

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/11/21, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/11/21, SPi

Perceiving Things Divine Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual Perception Edited by

F R E D E R IC K  D.  AQU I N O and

PAU L  L .  G AV R I LY U K

1

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2022 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2022 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021946207 ISBN 978–0–19–880259–4 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802594.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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In memoriam William J. Abraham (1947–2021): Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace.

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Foreword Mark Wynn

This volume is a successor to Paul Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley’s 2012 collection The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity. That text introduced various traditions of thought, and the present volume draws out, most excitingly, some of the implications of those traditions for contemporary debate—showing how close attention to the idea of spiritual perception can deepen and, in some cases indeed, transform our approach to an array of otherwise apparently quite disparate theological themes, including: liturgy, the reading of scripture, eschat­ ology, spiritual formation, divine hiddenness, and the spiritual import of, for instance, the experience of nature and of beauty. It is to be hoped that the intel­ lectual project that has been initiated in these pages will be taken up more widely—and in that case, we may expect theological enquiry to become newly alert to the deep-­seated connections between religious understanding and our capacity to orient ourselves in the everyday world, through our apprehension of values that are presented to us in sensory and more than sensory form. The central themes of this collection are very fully and acutely described in Frederick Aquino and Paul Gavrilyuk’s Introduction, so rather than present a fur­ ther survey of the volume’s contents, in the following brief remarks, I shall try to draw out the significance of its concerns by showing how they intersect with three further contexts of enquiry, each of which is of obvious practical and theological interest. I shall introduce these contexts in turn, by touching on: the nature of knowledge of place; the emotions as sources of evaluative insight; and the role of salience in the perceptual field in disclosing the import of the sensory world. We all of us negotiate our physical environment not only by reference to its structure—as when I duck to avoid a low-­lying beam—but also with a view to acknowledging the existential significance of particular spaces: when I comport myself differently in a football ground as compared with, say, a lecture theatre or graveyard, that is not only because of the different physical dimensions of these spaces. And when we orient ourselves appropriately in a particular place in bodily terms, in ways that give due recognition to the existential significance of the place, we do not normally rely on some process of reflection—as if I were to rehearse first the thought that this place is a graveyard, and then the thought that the dead are to be treated with respect, and then the thought that I had therefore better not kick a ball or raise my voice while here. Rather, in standard cases, it is in the responses of the body, rather than mediately, by means of some process of

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viii Foreword reflection, that we apprehend the significance of the space, and adapt our ­demeanour to fit the space. Of course, the existential import of a place is commonly defined by the stories with which it is associated: in such cases, it is the history of the space that defines its meaning for us in the present and calls for appropriate practical acknowledge­ ment in the present. And when we are attuned to the storied significance of a place in bodily terms, rather than by way of some discursive assessment of its import, we seem to navigate our way through the world by means of something like a spiritual perception—that is, by means of a non-­inferential apprehension of the space that tracks not only its sensory but also its existential import. And there is some reason to think that spiritual perception that is theological in content works similarly. This is most straightforwardly true of spaces whose religious meaning is fixed by reference to their history, as with, say, sites of pilgrimage. But it is also true, potentially, on a wider scale, in so far as theological traditions offer us a storied account of the significance of particular items in the world, human beings among them, and indeed of the world itself, considered as the object of divine creation and care: these distinctively theological storied meanings can also be acknowledged, we may suppose, immediately in our bodily responses. A num­ ber of the essays in this volume carry very fruitful implications for how we might elaborate on an account of the nature of spiritual perception of broadly this form, that is, one that understands spiritual perception by reference to our bodily attunement to place-­relative, story-­mediated existential meanings. Moving to a second context of enquiry, it is a commonplace of recent philo­ sophical work on the emotions that emotional feelings can themselves be thoughts, rather than simply stimuli for thought, or the by-­products of thought. Here is one example of how this proposal might be developed, presented by Peter Goldie: imagine you are in a zoo, looking at a gorilla grimly loping from left to right in its cage. You are thinking of the gorilla as dangerous, but you do not feel fear, as it seems to be safely behind bars. Then you see that the door to the cage has been left wide open. Just for a moment, though, you fail to put the two thoughts – the gorilla is dangerous, the cage is open – together. Then, suddenly, you do put them together: now your way of thinking of the gorilla as dangerous is new; now it is dangerous in an emotionally relevant way for you. The earlier thought, nat­ ur­al­ly expressed as ‘That gorilla is dangerous’, differs in content from the new thought, although this new thought, thought with emotional feeling, might also be naturally expressed in the same words. Now, in feeling fear towards the gorilla you are emotionally engaged with the world, and, typically, you are poised for action in a new way – poised for action out of the emotion.1 1 Peter Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 61.

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Foreword  ix Although he is concerned with a somewhat unusual state of affairs, Goldie’s remarks point very readily to a number of insights into the nature of emotional feelings, and their importance for everyday life. First, it seems a clear implication of this sort of example that emotional feelings are themselves forms of thought: here, the feeling of fear (of feeling towards, as Goldie puts the point) involves some reckoning with the character of the world. Moreover, this reckoning runs beyond what can be captured verbally in the statement ‘That gorilla is dangerous’. So as with our apprehension of the storied import of a place, so here, we seem to be dealing with an insight that is not standardly realized in a discursive, verbally articulated train of thought, but in the responses of the body. In this case, the new insight is presented in a response of feeling, rather than in the body’s disposition to orient itself in space—though as Goldie notes, the understanding that is vouch­ safed in the feeling of fear is also of its nature action-­guiding. We can draw out the sense of this example a little further by noting that it would be possible in principle to apprehend both that the gorilla is dangerous and that the cage is open without seeing what follows for our wellbeing from the fact that these truths hold in combination—that is, without grasping what needs to be done in these circumstances. By contrast, the understanding afforded in the feel­ ing of fear brings together these two truths—the gorilla is dangerous and the cage door is open—in such a way as to disclose their combined import for the person’s safety. In such cases, we can think of emotional feelings as involving an integra­ tive kind of understanding: one that reveals the overall sense of various features of a situation, thereby orienting the person in practical terms. This account offers, potentially, another way of representing the nature of spiritual perception—in this case, because religious understanding is commonly thought to be concerned not so much with individual entities, nor even with God considered as an indi­ vidual entity, as with the connectedness of things, or with questions about how the world, as it were, hangs together, so as to add up to a meaningful context, one that calls for practical acknowledgement in the lives of human beings. This account also invites the thought that spiritual perception is integrative in the fur­ ther sense of involving a unitary state of mind, in which the affective, cognitive, and volitional strands of the person’s engagement with the world are fused. Again, a number of the essays in this collection speak very directly to this question, by showing how the subject of spiritual perception is the person considered in their affective-­intellectual-­moral integrity, and by exploring the ways in which spiritual practices can contribute to the formation of this unified state of mind. Lastly, and very briefly, let us note one further way of thinking of spiritual ­perception—again, one that intersects with various themes in this collection. In or­din­ary experience, the perceptual field is of course structured—so that certain items are thrown into relief, while others are consigned to the periphery of our awareness. Accordingly, in our perception of the world, objects are not presented to us neutrally, rather, certain features of our environment are salient in the per­ ceptual field, and are thereby picked out as more deserving of attention than other

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x Foreword features. Accordingly, the ordering of the perceptual field can track, for example, the relative moral significance of the items that fall within our purview—so that we are focally aware of, say, the facial expressions of human beings, rather than of the inanimate objects that are also presented to us on a given occasion of percep­ tion. And by extension, it seems reasonable to suppose, the contouring of the per­ ceptual field can also count as more or less appropriate in theological terms—and will count as theologically fitting to the extent that an object’s salience in the per­ ceptual field is directly proportional to its importance relative to some religious or spiritual narrative. When there is such a correspondence, between the salience of objects and their theological significance, then the world as it appears in our experience will mirror the divine vantage point on the world—since the patterns of salience that are inscribed in the perceptual field will now track a divinely ordered scale of values. We might even say that, in such a case, the world as it appears will offer a window onto the mind of God—by giving us a sensory image that matches the divine assessment of the relative importance of the contents of the perceptual field. Here, then, are three ways of thinking about the nature of spiritual perception, namely, by reference to: the body’s spontaneous sensitivity to the storied signifi­ cance of particular places; the integrative, action-­guiding understanding that is afforded by emotional feelings; and our ability to track the relative importance of objects via the structuring of the perceptual field. When understood in these ways, spiritual perception turns out to be rooted in capacities that are continuous with our capacity to apprehend the normative significance of the world in other respects. These accounts allow us to see, therefore, how it is possible for human beings to register the full range of values in their practical engagement with the sensory world—that is, not just, say, prudential and moral values, but in addition spiritual values. The essays in this volume lead us more deeply into these same issues—and thereby they show us both what we need to understand if our lives are to be well-­ordered in theological terms, and what it would take for a creature of our capacities and mode of embodiment to display that sort of understanding in their relationship to other human beings and the everyday world.

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Acknowledgements We owe a debt of gratitude to many scholars and organizations. The first impetus for this book project was given by the Analytic Theology Seminar at Southern Methodist University in August 2012, organized by William Abraham, at which we agreed to assemble a team of researchers in order to advance the work of The Spiritual Senses volume (2012) in a constructive direction. As a result, we organ­ ized three symposia to discuss individual chapters and form a coherent vision of the volume. The first symposium was held in Atlanta, Georgia, in November 2015 with the participation of William Abraham, James Arcadi, Kenny Boyce, Sarah Coakley, Boyd Taylor Coolman, Brandon Gallaher, Amber Griffioen, Stephen Grimm, Douglas Hedley, John Kern (as an assistant), Dominika Kurek-­Chomycz, John Martens, Mark McInroy, Timothy O’Brien, Marcus Plested, Michael Rea, Ann Taves, Allan Torrance, Sameer Yadav, and Ray Yeo. The second symposium was held in San Antonio, Texas, in November 2016 and additionally included Chance Juliano (as an assistant), David Luy, Michael McClymond, Kevin Nordby, Nicole Reibe, and Mark Spencer. The third symposium was held at the University of St Thomas, St Paul, Minnesota, in July 2017 and included William Abraham, Hans Boersma, Sarah Coakley, Boyd Taylor Coolman, Richard Cross, Erika Kidd, John Martens, Mark McInroy, Faith Pawl, Darren Sarisky, and Erika Zabinski (as an assistant). In the fall 2017, Paul Gavrilyuk and Mark Spencer organized a faculty seminar on spiritual perception at the University of St Thomas co-­funded by the Dean’s office and the Templeton Foundation through the Philosophy of Religion Center at the University of Notre Dame. The seminar participants were John Froula, William Junker, Stephen Laumakis, Mathew Lu, John Martens, Mark McInroy, Stephen McMichael, Faith Pawl, Barbara Sain, and Deborah Savage. The guest speakers who presented their work at the seminar and offered public lectures were Aquino, Greco, and Taves. In June 2017 Gavrilyuk’s graduate seminar ‘Perceiving God: The Spiritual Senses in History and Theology’ at the St Paul School of Divinity, University of St Thomas, was enriched by the contributions of  the following guest speakers: Aquino, Coolman, Greco, McInroy, Spencer, and Yadav. In addition, the following events were held at different venues: a panel on spiritual perception at the annual meeting of the International Society of ­ Neoplatonism Studies in Seattle, Washington, in June 2016 organized by Frederick Aquino with contributions from Paul Gavrilyuk (in absentia) and Mark McInroy; ‘Retrieving Premodern Understandings of Spiritual Perception for Contemporary

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xii Acknowledgements Theology’ panel at the annual Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference at Villanova University in October 2016 and organized by Boyd Coolman with the participation of Frederick Aquino and Paul Gavrilyuk; a gradu­ate seminar on spiritual perception at Abilene Christian University (ACU), Abilene, Texas, organized by Frederick Aquino with presentations by John Cottingham and Paul Gavrilyuk in March 2018; ‘Spiritual Perception in Eastern Christianity’ session at the Inaugural Conference of the International Orthodox Theological Association and organized by Paul Gavrilyuk with the participation of Frederick Aquino and Marcus Plested in January 2019. Over the course of editing this book and writing his chapter, Frederick Aquino has benefited from conversations with William Abraham, Sarah Coakley, John Cottingham, Paul Gavrilyuk, John Greco, Jeffery Kinlaw, Chance Juliano, Michael Van Huis, and Taylor Bonner. The following institutions also provided op­por­tun­ ities to share material on spiritual perception and related ideas: a graduate sem­ inar on religious epistemology at Saint Louis University (March 2013), the Annual Aquinas Colloquium, Oxford University (March 2017), and the CSART Keynote lecture at ACU (March 2018). Paul Gavrilyuk wishes to thank different scholarly audiences who responded to earlier versions of the volume’s introduction presented at the following venues: a ‘Divine Hiddenness’ Panel of the Philosophy of Religion Group chaired by Amber Griffioen at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) in San Diego in November 2014; a session ‘Understandings of Spiritual Perception’ at the Logos Workshop organized by Michael Rea and the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame in May 2015 (with a commentary by Allison Thornton); a keynote address at McMurry University, Abilene, Texas at the invitation of Jeffery Kinlaw and Frederick Aquino in March 2018. We also wish to acknowledge the help of our editorial assistants Erika Zabinski, John Kern, Chance Juliano, and Taylor Bonner. Over the years, we have grown to rely on the spotless professionalism of Tom Perridge and his team at Oxford University Press.

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Table of Contents List of figures List of contributors Introduction

xv xvii xix

PA RT  I .  FAC E T S 1. The Possibility of Spiritual Perception: Objections and Replies John Greco 2. Developing Spiritual Perception: Lessons from Claude Monet and Wassily Kandinsky Paul L. Gavrilyuk

3

20

3. Training Spiritual Perception: A Constructive Look at John Cassian37 Frederick D. Aquino 4. Value Perception and Spiritual Perception in Max Scheler Mark K. Spencer

51

5. Radical Evil and Spiritual Perception William J. Abraham

67

6. Spiritual and Sensuous: Spiritual Perception, Eschatologically Considered81 Boyd Taylor Coolman PA RT I I .  I N T E R SE C T IO N S 7. Scripture as Signpost: A Perceptual Paradigm of Biblical Interpretation101 Sameer Yadav 8. Spiritual Perception and Liturgy Catherine Pickstock

117

9. Sensus Christi: A Liturgico-­Sacramental Therapy for a Pornographic Sensibility138 Boyd Taylor Coolman

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xiv Acknowledgements

10. Spiritual Perception and the Racist Gaze: Can Contemplation Shift Racism?153 Sarah Coakley 11. Divine Hiddenness, Agapē Conviction, and Spiritual Discernment Paul K. Moser

177

12. Healed and Whole Forever: Spiritual Perception in Nature Douglas E. Christie

193

13. Spiritual Perception and Beauty: On Looking and Letting Appear Mark McInroy

212

Afterword: The Spiritual Senses and Human Embodiment John Cottingham Index

229 233

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List of figures 2.1 The Water Lily Pond. Claude Monet’s Estate in Giverny, France. Photo: P. Gavrilyuk, 1 August 2015, 11.22 a.m.

23

2.2 Claude Monet, Water Lilies (1906). The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Photo: P. Gavrilyuk, November 2019.

24

2.3 Claude Monet, Grainstack, Sun in the Mist (1891), Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Photo: P. Gavrilyuk, May 2016.

27

13.1 Lewis Bowman, Transfiguration (2005). Rembrandt Van Rijn, “The Good Samaritan” (etching).

222 230

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List of contributors William J. Abraham  (1947–2021) was Emeritus Outler Professor of Wesley Studies at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas and Director of the Wesley House of Studies at Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University, Waco, Texas. His recent publications include Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology (Oxford, 1998), Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation (Eerdmans, 2006), The Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies (Oxford, 2009), co-­edited with James E. Kirby; The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology (Oxford, 2017), co-­edited with Frederick D. Aquino; and Divine Agency and Divine Action, vols. 1–­4 (Oxford, 2017–­2021). Frederick D. Aquino is Professor of Theology and Philosophy at the Graduate School of Theology, Abilene Christian University. His recent publications include Communities of Informed Judgment (CUA, 2004); An Integrative Habit of Mind (NIU, 2012); Receptions of Newman (Oxford, 2015), co-­edited with Benjamin  J.  King; The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology (Oxford, 2017), co-­edited with William  J.  Abraham; and The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman (Oxford, 2018), co-­edited with Benjamin J. King. Douglas E. Christie is Professor of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is the author of The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford, 1993), The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology (Oxford, 2013), and is the founding editor of Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality (Johns Hopkins, 2001–). Sarah Coakley  FBA is the Norris-­Hulse Professor Emerita, University of Cambridge, Professorial Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University, and Honorary Professor at the Logos Institute, University of St Andrews. Her recent publications include The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity (Cambridge, 2012), co-­edited with Paul Gavrilyuk; God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (Cambridge, 2013); and The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God (Bloomsbury, 2015). Boyd Taylor Coolman  is Professor of Theology at Boston College. He has authored: Knowledge, Love and Ecstasy in the Theology of Thomas Gallus (Oxford, 2017), The Theology of Hugh of St. Victor (Cambridge, 2010), and Knowing God by Experience: The Spiritual Senses in the Theology of William of Auxerre (CUAP, 2004). His interests lie in high medieval theology, the Victorine and Franciscan traditions, early scholasticism, and mysticism. He founded the ‘Boston Colloquy in Historical Theology’. John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading, and an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford University. His books include The Spiritual Dimension (Cambridge, 2005), Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach (Cambridge, 2014), and In Search of the Soul (Princeton, 2020).

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xviii List of contributors Paul L. Gavrilyuk is the Aquinas Chair in Theology and Philosophy at the University of St Thomas and the Founding President of the International Orthodox Theological Association. His books include The Suffering of the Impassible God (Oxford, 2004), Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance (Oxford, 2013), and The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity (Cambridge, 2012), co-­edited with Sarah Coakley. John Greco is the Robert L. McDevitt, K.S.G., K.C.H.S. and Catherine H. McDevitt L.C.H.S Chair in Philosophy at Georgetown University. He is the author of Putting Skeptics in Their Place: The Nature of Skeptical Arguments and Their Role in Philosophical Inquiry (Cambridge, 2000); Achieving Knowledge: A Virtue-­theoretic Account of Epistemic Normativity (Cambridge, 2010); and The Transmission of Knowledge (Cambridge, 2020). Mark McInroy is Associate Professor of Theology at the University of St Thomas. He is the author of Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses: Perceiving Splendour (Oxford, 2014), for which he received the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise in 2015. He is co-­editor of The Christian Theological Tradition (Routledge, 2019), with Michael J. Hollerich, and Image as Theology: The Power of Art in Shaping Christian Thought, Devotion, and Imagination (Brepols, forthcoming), with C. A. Strine and Alexis Torrance. Paul K. Moser is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of The Divine Goodness of Jesus (2021); Understanding Religious Experience (2020); The God Relationship (2017); The Severity of God (2013); The Evidence for God (2010); The Elusive God (2008); Philosophy after Objectivity (1993); and Knowledge and Evidence (1989); editor of Jesus and Philosophy (2010); co-­editor of The Cambridge Companion to Religious Experience (2020) and of the book series Cambridge Studies in Religion, Philosophy, and Society and Cambridge Elements: Religion and Monotheism. Catherine Pickstock is Norris-­Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. Her books include After Writing (1998), Thomas d’Aquin et la Quête Eucharistique (2001), Repetition and Identity (2013), Aspects of Truth (2020), and Truth in Aquinas (2001) co-­ authored with John Milbank. She is a co-­founder (with John Milbank and Graham Ward) of the critical international theological movement, Radical Orthodoxy. Mark K. Spencer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of the forthcoming book The Irreducibility of the Human Person: A Catholic Synthesis (The Catholic University of America Press), and of more than forty articles on metaphysics, phenomenology, and aesthetics. Mark Wynn  is Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Spiritual Traditions and the Virtues: Living Between Heaven and Earth (Oxford, 2020) and Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life (Oxford, 2013). Sameer Yadav  is a systematic and philosophical theologian and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Westmont College. He is author of The Problem of Perception and the Experience of God (Fortress Press, 2015) and a number of articles in edited volumes and journals on topics including Christian mysticism, religious epistemology, liberation the­ ology, and the intersection of race and religion.

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Introduction Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk

Perceiving Things Divine seeks to make philosophical and theological sense of spiritual perception. The objects of spiritual perception are God and all reality inasmuch as it can communicate divine presence. The possibility and mechanism of spiritual perception, as well as religious claims based on it, remain essentially contested. While pre-­modern Christian theology offers ample theoretical resources and a considerable historical record of ‘perceiving things divine’, no theory of ­spiritual perception was ever formally adopted as authoritative and the topic remained exploratory, rather than settled. In modernity, the possibility of spiritual perception was often questioned on epistemological grounds, as a matter of general scepticism vis-­à-­vis any religious claims, including the claims based on religious experience. While modernist epistemologies had precious little space for ‘perceiving things divine’, the concept of the spiritual senses continued to play a role in the theories and practices of spiritual direction.1 Taking into account such theories and practices, this volume aims at restoring spiritual perception to its rightful place in philosophy and theology. The constructive vision of the present volume builds on the historical groundwork provided in an earlier collection of essays on the spiritual senses.2 Representing the first phase of the Spiritual Perception Project,3 this collection surveyed the theme of spiritual perception throughout Christian history, beginning with Origen of Alexandria and ending with twentieth-­century theologians, such as Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and William Alston. Diachronically arranged, the study was largely descriptive and highly selective and thus focused primarily on Christian authors who gave a theoretical articulation of the notion of spiritual perception. While our historical research continues, in Perceiving Things Divine we expand the topic of the ‘spiritual senses’ by correlating spiritual perception with other types of perception, including physical, moral, aesthetic, and value perception.

1 For a classical treatment of this issue in Jesuit spirituality, see Augustin Poulain, Des grâces d’oraison; traité de théologie mystique (Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne, 1901). 2 Paul  L.  Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley, eds, The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 3 Online at spiritualperceptionproject.wordpress.com with videos on The Spiritual Perception Project Channel on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzQwXDBp6xIw_f4_z7eodeQ. Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Introduction In: Perceiving Things Divine: Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual Perception. Edited by: Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802594.001.0001

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xx Introduction Reflecting the results of the second phase of the Spiritual Perception Project, this volume argues for the possibility of spiritual perception. More exactly, it seeks to make progress towards a constructive account of the different aspects of spiritual perception while exploring its intersection with various theological and philosophical issues, such as biblical interpretation, aesthetics, liturgy, race, ecology, eschatology, and the hiddenness of God. Spiritual perception can be explained in two ways, on the analogy with the (five) physical senses, and, without such an analogy, as a perceptual capacity sui generis. When the analogy of the five senses is in play, it is often appropriate to use the tradition-­sanctioned expression ‘spiritual senses’, especially when the emphasis is on the nature of the spiritual sensorium. Spiritual perception may also be construed as a perceptual power sui generis, akin to but not reducible to intuition, moral discernment, conscience, or aesthetic taste, and thus not to be correlated exclusively with the fivefold sensorium.4 For this reason, our general preference in this volume is for the broader expression, ‘spiritual perception’, which includes all phenomena associated with the operation of the spiritual senses without necessarily implying an analogy with the physical senses. In what follows, we discuss the general features of perception, introduce a new interdisciplinary field of spiritual perception, and sketch out future research trajectories in this field.

Varieties of Perception Along with reason, memory, and testimony, perception is indispensable for acquiring beliefs about objects in the world. In its basic form, perception entails an awareness of a given object. In terms of its structure, perception generally includes the basic elements of (1) a perceiver, (2) an object, (3) an experience, and (4) a relation between (1) and (2). Perceptual modes of presentation include seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, though this list is not intended to be exhaustive.5 Moreover, perceptual experiences can vary in quality and accuracy. Traditionally, perception is taken to be the ability to acquire beliefs about objects in the world on the basis of experience and not as a result of a chain of reasoning. In this respect, what makes perception a distinctive source is that it is constrained by its object.6 The content of the perceptual experience is formed by the relevant properties that are phenomenally represented in it. In this sense, 4 Other examples of unique perceptual powers, usually classified as ‘extrasensory perception’ (ESP), include telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, distance vision, introspection, and the like. The discussion of these powers is outside the scope of this volume. 5  Since Aristotle’s De anima, it has been common in Western psychology to describe the physical sensorium as fivefold. Cultural anthropology brought to light other ways of differentiating sensory modes, different from the Aristotelian five. See David Howes, The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). 6 On this point, see Tim Crane, ‘The Problem of Perception’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-­problem/).

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Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk  xxi ­ erceptual experience is distinguishable from conception. As William Alston p explains in his groundbreaking work, Perceiving God, ‘what makes this a matter of perceiving the house, rather than just thinking about it or remembering it, is the fact of presentation, givenness, the fact that something is presented to consciousness, is something of which I am directly aware’. As a result, the givenness or ­presentation of the object to the perceiver is distinguishable from any conceptualization, however seldom the ‘former may be found without the latter in adult experience’.7 He argues that perception is ‘essentially independent of any conceptualization, belief, judgment, or any other application of general concepts to the object, though it typically exists in close connection with the latter’.8 So, a fundamental distinction remains between a blue object appearing to a person and a person taking it to be blue. Thus, as Sameer Yadav makes clear in Chapter 7, it is possible to distinguish between perceptual awareness and perceptual recognition. Scholarly debate has arisen concerning whether perception is shot through with background beliefs, dispositions, and practices, and could be altered or improved by training. For example, in The Evidential Force of Religious Experience, Caroline Franks Davis anticipates this new stage of studies in perception and captures well the extent to which our perceptual experiences incorporate interpretation: Psychological studies paint a very different picture of perception . . . Interpretation, far from being an extraneous element imposed from without, is absolutely ­essential to there occurring a perceptual experience at all. Perception of any type is never a purely physical activity; it involves the whole person. We are not p ­ assive recipients of ready-­made representations of our en­vir­on­ment; rather, stimuli from that environment must be processed by various interpretive mechanisms before they can have any significance for us and constitute a perceptual ­experience (as opposed to mere sensation).9

So, the movement from ‘mere sensation’ to ‘representation’ in Davis’s terms involves activity on the part of the perceiver.10 This kind of interpretative activity may reinforce one’s beliefs, desires, and wishes, or result in a kind of perceptual distortion (see chapters 5, 6, and 10). As we hope this volume will show, however, 7  William Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 27; emphasis in the original. 8 Alston, Perceiving God, 37. 9  Caroline Franks Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 148–9. 10  Some argue that there is a form of perception (e.g. simple perception) that does not require the possession of concepts (although this claim has been challenged). On the non-­conceptual aspect of perception, see Robert Audi, Moral Perception (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); for a good overview of the relevant issues, see Daniel O’Brien, ‘The Epistemology of Perception’, https:// www.iep.utm.edu/epis-­per/.

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xxii Introduction background beliefs, dispositions, and practices may also restore, purify, and enhance spiritual perception, for example, in how we read scripture (Yadav), interact with the environment (Christie), and engage in liturgical acts (Pickstock). We emphasize that training enables one to make fine-­grained perceptual judgements (Aquino, Gavrilyuk). Of equal importance to this volume is the expansion of the scope of perception. Some forms of perception in everyday experience appear to go beyond phys­ ic­al perception. These forms include moral and aesthetic perception. In Moral Perception, for example, Robert Audi seeks to show how perception factors in the acquisition of moral knowledge. In this regard, he makes a distinction between two kinds of properties: the perceptual and the perceptible. The former are sensory properties such as colours and shapes, while the latter are ‘not all sensory and include certain moral properties’ such as ‘being wrong, being unjust, and being obligatory, among others’.11 So, the phenomenal aspect of moral perception is a non-­sensory perception of injustice but not in ‘pictorial’ terms, say in how we see the Mesquite tree in our backyard. In this respect, Audi thinks that we should not expect moral perception to be reducible to physical properties. Consequently, this kind of research opens the door for exploring a phenomenon like spiritual perception. For example, in Chapter 1, John Greco explores the parity between moral and spiritual perception. In Chapter 11, Paul Moser locates spiritual perception in conscience thereby aligning it even more closely with moral perception. Similarly, the perception of beauty or aesthetic perception may include the apprehension of non-­sensory properties such as harmony, unity, complexity, and proportion, which are also plausible candidates for being perceptible in Audi’s sense of the term. Even if the apprehension of these properties is typically more cognitively loaded than the apprehension of physical properties, such as shapes and colours, as we saw above, the influence of cognitive factors on sensory aspects of perception does not warrant excluding a given property from the range of ­perception. Along these lines, the parallels between aesthetic and spiritual perception are explored in this volume by Gavrilyuk (Chapter  2) and McInroy (Chapter 13). Mark Spencer’s discussion of value perception in Chapter 4, which draws on the phenomenology of Max Scheler, also provides an important bridge between moral, aesthetic, and spiritual perception.

Spiritual Perception: A New Interdisciplinary Field The study of spiritual perception is a new interdisciplinary field of research, which requires a solid methodological basis. In this volume, we examine spiritual perception from different fields of inquiry, especially those that focus on meta­phys­ic­al, 11 Audi, Moral Perception, 35.

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Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk  xxiii epistemological, phenomenological, moral, aesthetic, and theological issues ­relevant to spiritual perception. The metaphysics of spiritual perception includes such issues as the nature of the spiritual senses and their relationship to other aspects of the self. Regarding the nature of the spiritual sensorium, the meta­phys­ic­ally weakest accounts construe the spiritual senses as no more than distinct acts, whereas the metaphysically strongest accounts construe the spiritual senses as powers, capacities, or even faculties. An equally significant metaphysical problem is the number of the spiritual senses. Some accounts construe the spiritual sensorium as unitary, other accounts insist that it is manifold, and still other accounts leave the number of the modes of spiritual perception unspecified. As we mentioned earlier, spiritual perception could be understood on the analogy of the five physical senses and without such an analogy. The ‘analogy of the five senses’ has a very respectable pedigree in the history of Christian theology. Within this analogy, at least three distinct models can be identified. The disjunctive model postulates that the spiritual senses operate when the physical senses are non-­operational and vice versa. The model emphasizes the independence of the spiritual senses from the physical senses and  in its metaphysically strongest version presupposes the existence of a non-­ material soul as a locus of the spiritual sensorium. The conjunctive model postulates that the spiritual senses are distinct from the physical senses, but that both operate in tandem: the spiritual senses are always engaged simultaneously with the physical senses. The third model holds that the spiritual senses are the ­phys­ic­al senses operating in an unusual way. In other words, that the spiritual senses represent a transformed state of the physical senses. In the twentieth century this model was retrieved by Hans Urs von Balthasar and, in this volume, it is developed by Mark McInroy in Chapter 13. It is not uncommon for the conjunctive and the third model to ‘bleed’ into each other, since both emphasize the unity of the physical and spiritual sensorium, as well as the distinctive character of spiritual perceiving. These three models could also be unpacked in terms of the integration of the self and the relationship between the spiritual sensorium and other aspects of the self, including heart, mind, conscience, will, desire, body, and affectivity. For example, in Chapter  11 Paul Moser proposes a unitary conception of spiritual perception, locating it in conscience and connecting its proper operation with human volitional and loving response to God and neighbour. In Chapter  8, on liturgy, Catherine Pickstock discusses how bodily disciplines and ritual practices influence the functioning of the spiritual senses. In Chapter  6, on the eschato­ logic­al body, Boyd Taylor Coolman develops an account of how an initially manifold and partially functioning physical and spiritual sensorium could become unified in the ‘spiritual body’ characteristic of the resurrection state. Additionally, the metaphysics of spiritual perception deals with the nature of the objects of spiritual perception, and the causal mechanisms that bring about

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xxiv Introduction perceiving spiritually. In Christian practice, the objects of spiritual perception include God, Christ, Holy Spirit, divine essence, divine attributes, divine energies, divine presence in creation, sacraments, saints, holy objects and places, scripture, moral properties, aesthetic properties, and other spiritual realities. We refer to these objects cumulatively as ‘divine things’ in the title of the volume. As emphasized by Paul Moser, God chooses to make himself available to spiritual perception in a manner different from that in which the physical objects present themselves to ordinary perception. Two paradigms of divine action could be distinguished: the first paradigm focuses on God’s reasons for voluntarily manifesting or hiding ‘divine things’ from human perceivers; the second paradigm assumes that divine presence is in principle available to all, focusing on the reasons for human failures to perceive God. One might call the first paradigm ‘voluntarist’, since it accentuates the sovereign divine decision to remain tran­ scend­ent to human experience and to reveal Godself whenever God wills; the second paradigm might be called ‘receptionist’, since it focuses on the human reception of divine communications. The second paradigm treats divine presence as always in some sense available and as a function of human receptivity. The epistemology of spiritual perception focuses on the conditions under which perceiving the divine is possible. Some epistemological issues include clarifying the relationship between the conceptual and the perceptual, determining whether spiritual perception provides grounds for beliefs about God in a comparable manner to how sensory experience grounds beliefs about material objects, explaining how spiritual perception is both conceptually loaded and non-­inferential, and unpacking the epistemically beneficial and harmful aspects of spiritual perception. Accordingly, in Chapter 1, John Greco addresses the major objections to the possibility of spiritual perception by arguing, among other things, that the objections apply also to the causes of physical perception. In particular, he takes up the question of whether spiritual perception is consistent with what we know about the nature and functioning of perception in general. Building on this argument, in Chapter 3 Frederick Aquino investigates how practices and virtues, such as purity of heart, provide favourable conditions for the development of spiritual perception. In addition, he draws attention to some of the inter-­subjective safeguards that aid in critically examining relevant perceptual claims. Similarly, Paul Gavrilyuk and Catherine Pickstock discuss how such practices as scripture reading and liturgical participation could be conducive to the activation, development, cultivation, expansion, and sharpening of spiritual perception. The epistemology of spiritual perception also considers how this form of perception can become epistemically harmful or distorted. In Chapter 9 Boyd Taylor Coolman notes that the apprehension of the beauty of the human body could be distorted by viewing pornographic images and potentially healed by viewing the presentations of the human body in religious art. In Chapter 10 Sarah Coakley clarifies how racism is a perceptual problem and how perceptual blindness can be explained in philosophical and theological terms. William Abraham explores the

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Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk  xxv influence of demonic deception on different aspects of human self, including imagination, will, cognition, and perception in Chapter 4. In Chapter 12 Douglas Christie takes up the question of how the cultivation of spiritual perception through contemplative practices can purge the gates of perception, while educating human desire and influencing human attitudes towards the environment. As the volume also shows, epistemological issues intersect with the moral and aesthetic domains of inquiry. For example, John Greco draws on the schema theory in empirical psychology in order to develop an account of moral perception that takes into account the extent to which various stages of perceptual process can be shot through with cognitive elements. Greco proposes that we come to recognize moral and personal properties based on certain cues, scripts, and schemas. Similarly, in spiritual perception, the recognition of God and divine things depends on the schemas derived from religious education, ascetic formation, and so on. Along these lines, in Chapter  3 Frederick Aquino focuses on the connection between ascetic formation and spiritual perception. An important aspect of the training of spiritual perception here involves focusing on the complex and inextricable relationship between the cultivation of a stable and properly disposed habit of mind and the different levels of spiritual perception. As a result, a reliably formed and trained spiritual perception is able to distinguish between salient and peripheral pieces of information and make the relevant progress towards the vision of God. In Chapter  2 Paul Gavrilyuk draws parallels between aesthetic perception (apprehension of beauty in nature and art) and spiritual perception. Human apprehension of the beautiful depends partly on emotional attunement and partly on the ability of perceiving the object as fraught with aesthetic and spiritual possibilities not otherwise captured by our background beliefs, concepts, and schemas. The aesthetic perception could be developed and sharpened depending upon the measure of the person’s immersion in the world of art; similarly, spiritual perception could be trained and habituated depending upon the measure of the person’s involvement in the life of God. The phenomenology of spiritual perception focuses on the structure of the ex­ peri­ ence of spiritual perception in itself. The phenomenological approach largely brackets metaphysical questions concerning the causal mechanism of spiritual perception and epistemological questions regarding the conditions for justifying claims made on the basis of spiritual perceptual experience. This is not to say that those who consider spiritual perception from a phenomenological angle ignore metaphysics or epistemology completely. Indeed, phenomenologists who consider spiritual perception are interested in metaphysical questions like that of how the experience of spiritual perception fits together with other experiences, and with the structure of the human person as a whole, and in epistemological questions like that of how knowledge arises from spiritual perceptual experiences. But these questions are considered from the point of view of the experiencing subject, rather than in the more ‘objective’ terms used in traditional metaphysics

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xxvi Introduction and epistemology. A phenomenology of spiritual perception can stand on its own as an account of spiritual perception, but it can also serve as providing experiential data for supporting or opposing some metaphysics or epistemology of spiritual perception. Phenomenologists often try to build an account of the whole of human ex­peri­ ence by using some experience as foundational for all others. This allows for many insights into the interconnections among the many kinds of experience, but it also often conceals other experiences and interconnections among experiences. Individual phenomenologies considered as a whole, and considered with respect to spiritual perception in particular, should be used as models for particular kinds of experience but are less helpful if they are taken to be an exhaustive account of human experience. In Chapter  4, on value perception and spiritual perception, Mark Spencer provides one model for a phenomenology of spiritual perception, by building on the work of German phenomenologist Max Scheler. On Scheler’s view, at the root of all other experiences is affective experience of values, that is, of various ways in which things have importance. The values that we feel in persons, situations, and things guide our attention to other aspects of those objects. Spiritual perception occurs when we are guided by the value of holiness, the highest value, and we experience the world along with God; only saints are fully guided by this value, and so only saints see the world as it truly is, as God sees it. Scheler’s model allows for clear descriptions of forms of spiritual perception just as the experience of seeing and loving the world along with God, seeing God sacramentally present in the world, and seeing oneself as God sees one, in ex­peri­ ences like that of conscience. But other models might help us describe other forms of spiritual perception. Emmanuel Levinas, for example, describes the experience of seeing the face of another in which one experiences oneself not as seeing God present in or revealing Himself through that face, but sees there God’s command to serve that other. Jean-­Luc Marion, drawing in part on the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, describes experiences of what he calls ‘saturated phenomena’, in which content that one receives from the world exceeds or ‘saturates’ the meanings that one expects to find in the world.12 The most profound example of such an experience is divine revelation. Finally, philosophers from outside the phenomenological tradition, including some from the analytic tradition, can be seen as providing phenomenological models for the careful description of ex­peri­ ence. For example, William Alston’s account of spiritual perception includes many phenomenological elements. While the metaphysical, epistemological, and phenomenological approaches to spiritual perception have their merits, they could also benefit from distinctly religious insights that theologically focused accounts of spiritual perception can 12  Jean-­Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002).

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Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk  xxvii offer. Within the Christian tradition, such accounts may draw on all loci of ­systematic theology, including the doctrines of God, Christ, Holy Spirit, creation, human nature, fall, sin, incarnation, redemption, church, sacraments, and last things. As a creator of the world, God remains transcendent and as such not available to ordinary perception in the manner characterizing his creation. And yet, in the incarnation, God has appeared in the world, and as a result God can now be perceived in the person of Christ. Furthermore, the ongoing presence of Christ can be perceived in the sacraments, which suggest that all five senses are involved in the perception of the divine. Christian theological anthropology postulates that humans are created ‘in the image and likeness of God’, and some accounts of spiritual perception assume that pre-­lapsarian human beings were capable of perceiving God. The fallen condition alters this state of affairs without, however, severing the communicative link altogether. The purpose of divine action in the incarnation and redemption is the restoration of the divine–human communication, including the perception of God. This communication is impossible without the work of the Holy Spirit. A question emerges, whether the operation of spiritual perception is a matter of grace or is it a function of human effort and practice? In our judgement, divine grace and human effort are not in causal competition; while the operation of spiritual perception is inconceivable without the sustaining and illuminating power of divine grace, its activation, cultivation, and habituation also involve a measure of human cooperation with God. While graced perception may be a divine gift, the main emphasis of this volume is on a developed perceptual power that becomes a vital aspect of the transformed human self. As such, the restoration of spiritual perception is a vital, if unjustly neglected, aspect of the process of sanctification and deification. A related question is whether spiritual perception is for everybody, or whether it is reserved exclusively for a few unique individuals with high-­level perceptual training, such as mystics. In Chapter 13, on theological aesthetics, Mark McInroy defends a strong version of the everyday spiritual perception and argues that spiritual perception is a constitutive feature of physical perception. Such an account would not rule out mystical spiritual perception, but would treat it as the cul­min­ ation and ultimate fulfilment of the everyday spiritual perception. We propose that spiritual perception is a capacity that is latent in all humans, although not all exercise it in an equal measure. The account of spiritual perception put forth in this volume presupposes that perceiving spiritually is to some extent a feature of everyday human experience, even if it is not always recognized as such. Just as it is possible to speak of weaker and stronger functioning of other human powers, such as, for example, physical strength or memory, it is equally reasonable to speak of spiritual perception as more or less attuned to the apprehension of God. While it is notoriously difficult to chart the precise stages of mystical ascent, it is nevertheless possible to speak of the experiences of God that are more mundane

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xxviii Introduction and those that point to the possibilities of the resurrection state, when God will be ‘all in all’. The restoration of the whole person in the resurrection state will feature the ‘spiritual body’ (1 Cor. 15:44), in which all human perception will be at once fully embodied and fully spiritual. Thus, a complete account of spiritual perception is inescapably theological and must present ‘perceiving things divine’ in relation to a grace-­filled human striving after a full communion with God. In the eschaton, this communion is so complete that it is Christ, who as the head of his mystical Body, the Church, does the sensing in the believers, who have acquired the ‘mind of Christ’ (1 Cor. 2:16, Phil. 2:5). This trope of medieval Western theology, considered in Chapter  6 by Boyd Taylor Coolman on eschatological fulfilment of human knowledge of God, is significant for understanding spiritual perception as the Christological transformation of the natural powers of the human self. For spiritual perception is not a secret sense that is a prerogative of the mystics; on the contrary, spiritual perception is how we are all meant to perceive God, the world, and each other.

Future Work on Spiritual Perception This volume does not seek to provide a comprehensive account of spiritual ­perception. As we have already noted, much in our constructive proposal remains exploratory. There is a need for work on spiritual perception in comparative religion, cultural studies, anthropology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and ­ psych­ology. We believe that our work has just begun and we welcome future studies that will take the emerging interdisciplinary field to new heights. Our study has important implications for the theory and practice of education in the West, where due attention to the spiritual dimension of learning is often lacking. It follows from our account that education is not merely about acquiring various pieces of information, but it is also about helping students to become better perceivers of the spiritual dimension of reality. Furthermore, if humans are capable of ‘perceiving things divine’, then the prevailing reductionist theories of human nature require critical evaluation and revision. The next stages of the project could involve a rigorous engagement of cognitive science in order to both draw on its insights and challenge its physicalist assumptions. Equally valuable work remains to be done in the fields of cultural anthropology and comparative religion. The aspiration of the Spiritual Perception Project in general and of this volume in particular, is to make progress towards understanding the powers of the human self, especially in terms of its openness to and preparation for ‘perceiving things divine’.

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PART I

FAC ET S

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1 The Possibility of Spiritual Perception Objections and Replies John Greco Throughout history and in different cultures, many persons have taken themselves to have a perception of God on some analogy to the perception of physical objects.1 There are numerous variations on the theme, but the central idea is that the ana­ logy is apt on at least two important dimensions. First, the idea is that there is some analogous kind of cognitive contact—that the mind–object relation in the two sorts of case are somehow importantly alike. Second, the idea is that there is some analogous epistemic relation—that the experience of God serves to ground beliefs about God in a way importantly similar to how sensory experience grounds beliefs about material objects. Again, variations on both themes abound, including variations that eschew talk of analogy. That is, some have thought that we can quite ­literally experience God in our lives, and that this quite literally counts as a kind of perception. No analogy needed.2 Others, of course, have thought that a perception of God would be impossible. Here we need not get into verbal disputes about the ordinary language meaning of ‘perception’. The real issues concern the ideas above about cognitive contact and epistemic grounding. Those who deny that a perception of God is possible, or who deny that the analogy is apt, are really denying that an experience of God could put us in a similar cognitive relation as we have with physical objects of perception. Likewise, they deny that an experience of God could provide epi­ stem­ic­al­ly good grounds for beliefs about God, in a way similar to how sensory experience provides epistemically good grounds for beliefs about physical objects. And again, variations on the theme abound. That is, the specific reasons regard­ ing why such a relation would be impossible, or why such grounding would be possible, are various. Nevertheless, I think we can identify three broad lines of

1 For numerous examples, see Paul Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley (eds), The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). See also William P. Alston, Perceiving God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), especially chapter 1; and William James The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green, 1916; originally published in 1902). 2  For example, in Perceiving God, Alston offers a general analysis of perception on which perceiving God counts as an instance.

John Greco, The Possibility of Spiritual Perception: Objections and Replies In: Perceiving Things Divine: Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual Perception. Edited by: Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802594.003.0001

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4  The Possibility of Spiritual Perception reasoning put forward by the naysayers. As it turns out, the details will not matter for our purposes. The first broad line of objection to the possibility of spiritual perception is that there is no good inference from religious experience to divine reality. Put differ­ ently, there is no rationally sound route from (a) experience of a religious charac­ ter to (b) the conclusion that such experience is caused by or accurately represents a divine reality. Let us call this the ‘no good inference’ objection. Like other objec­ tions to spiritual perception, this line of reasoning does not assume that God does not exist. That is, the idea is not that we cannot perceive God because there is no God to perceive. Rather, the idea is that, even if God does exist, it would be impos­ sible to perceive God, either literally or in an importantly analogous sense. More specifically, even if God does exist, there is no good inference from religious ex­peri­ence to divine reality. The second broad line of objection to the possibility of spiritual perception is that all religious experience is theoretically loaded, and therefore cannot provide the kind of immediate relation to God that perception is supposed to provide to the object of perception. Put differently, experience of a religious character is always ‘thick’ with the concepts, assumptions, and expectations of the religious believer. This sort of mediation is sometimes thought to be inconsistent with the kind of cognitive contact (the kind of mind–object relation) that perception is supposed to provide. Alternatively, this sort of mediation is thought to be incon­ sistent with the kind of epistemic grounding that perception is supposed to pro­ vide. Either way, the idea is that experience which is thus theoretically loaded cannot play a role similar to that which sensory experience plays in the percep­ tion of physical objects. Let us call this the ‘loaded experience’ objection. Finally, a third line of objection claims that neither God nor God’s properties can be a proper object of perception. The idea behind this objection is that per­ ception and perceptual experience are necessarily narrow in scope. For example, the properties that are presented in perception are restricted to relatively ‘low-­ level’ properties, such as colour, sound, motion, and shape. Higher-­level proper­ ties, involving causation and agency, for example, always fall outside the scope of what is presented by perception proper. Beliefs that are about such properties therefore require some kind of inference or interpretation, in that their contents are not delivered by perception itself. If this is right, then it turns out that God’s properties and activities, and thus God Himself, must fall outside the scope of perception. Call this the ‘no proper object’ objection. We have identified three broad lines of objection to the possibility of spiritual perception. I said above that variations of these abound but that further details will not matter for our purposes. That is because, I will argue, all three lines of objec­ tion are clearly misguided from the point of view of the contemporary cognitive science of perception. That is, they are clearly misguided even at this very general level of presentation. Accordingly, adding further details cannot save them.

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John Greco  5 The remainder of the chapter is organized as follows. The first part considers three issues in the cognitive science of perception that speak directly to our three lines of objection: (a) in what sense does perception involve inference or reason­ ing?; (b) to what degree is perception ‘cognitively penetrated’ by higher-­level mental states of the perceiver?; and (c) what is the proper object of perception? We will see that all three issues do involve substantive disagreements in the sci­ ence of perception, but none in such a way that leave our three lines of objection standing. That is, consensus positions about the nature and functioning of percep­ tion are enough to show that all three lines of objection are without force. The next part puts forward a model of moral and spiritual perception that shows how (a) these can be both conceptually and theoretically loaded and yet (b) non-­ inferential. The model also shows how moral and spiritual perception can be understood as kinds of expert perception, that is, perception that is enabled and improved by accumulated knowledge and training. The model is also psy­cho­ logic­al­ly realistic, in the sense that it is consistent with what we know about the nature and functioning of perception in general.

What We Know about Perception in General The science of perception is rife with interesting and difficult issues. Nevertheless, these issues are debated within a broad consensus about the nature of perception and perceptual functioning, and that consensus is enough to put aside the famil­ iar lines of objection considered above. These were framed as objections to the possibility of spiritual perception, but it is interesting to note that they might be framed as objections to moral perception as well. That is, the very same consid­ erations that were reviewed above could be directed against the possibility of moral perception with little or no adjustment. Thus, one might argue that there is  no good inference from moral experience to moral reality—that there is no rationally sound route from (a) experience of a moral character to (b) the conclu­ sion that such experience is caused by or accurately represents the moral facts. Likewise, one might insist that all moral experience is conceptually and the­or­et­ic­ al­ly loaded and therefore cannot provide the kind of immediate relation to moral reality that perception is supposed to provide. Finally, one might think that moral properties cannot be the proper object of perception, precisely because they are the sort of higher-­level properties that go beyond the low-­level properties that are made available by perception proper. Accordingly, our three broad considerations against the possibility of spiritual perception count just as well against the possibility of moral perception. But again, we shall see that all three lines of objection are misguided, and that this is made clear by consensus positions in the cognitive science of perception. Accordingly, let us turn to three relevant issues in that domain.

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6  The Possibility of Spiritual Perception

Does Perception Involve Inference or Reasoning? The first issue I want to consider is whether, or in what sense, perception involves inference or reasoning. This is important because our first line of objection claims that there is no good inference from religious experience to religious reality. Put differently, the idea is that religious experience does not ‘support’ religious belief. This line of objection is premised on the idea that perception in general, for example the perception of physical objections via sensory experience, does involve a good inference from experience to reality. The central thought of the objection is that spiritual perception falls short in a way that physical object perception does not. Put differently, the central thought is that religious experience fails to sup­ port religious belief in a way that sensory experience successfully supports percep­ tual beliefs about physical objects. The problem with this line of objection is that no one now thinks that physical object perception involves good inference from sensory experience to physical reality. More carefully, no cognitive scientist thinks that physical object percep­ tion involves inference or reasoning in the way that the objection requires. Clearly enough, and without controversy, physical object perception involves inference in some sense. And in fact, texts on perception frequently speak about ‘inferences’ in perception. But cognitive scientists use the word ‘inference’ in a very broad way. In effect, what they mean by ‘inference’ is any kind of information processing. Let us make a distinction between (a) information processing in general and (b) reasoning proper in particular. Information processing in general takes repre­ sentations as inputs, operates on those according to some relevant set of process­ ing rules, and then outputs further representations on that basis. In this very broad sense, physical object perception involves lots of information processing, as when the visual system represents distance from a variety of binocular and monocular cues. Much of this processing is subpersonal, in terms of both the rep­ resentations that are operated on and the processing rules that are used.3 Now let us consider the kind of information processing involved in reasoning proper. Reasoning takes prior beliefs as inputs, operates on these according to some relevant set of inference rules, and then outputs further beliefs on that basis. Moreover, the relevant processing operates on person–level representations (i.e. beliefs) according to person–level inference rules. ‘Good reasoning’ is reasoning that takes us from input beliefs (premises in the reasoning) to output beliefs (con­ clusion of the reasoning) in an appropriate way.

3  Subpersonal processes, in the sense intended here, are computational processes operating on r­ epresentations that are sub-­doxastic and hence not available to the subject, in this case the perceiver. For an informative discussion of the personal/subpersonal distinction as it is typically used in ­cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, see Zoe Drayson, ‘The uses and abuses of the personal/ subpersonal distinction’, Philosophical Perspectives 26/1 (2012): 1–18.

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John Greco  7 And now here is the point: physical object perception involves lots of information processing, but that processing is not relevantly like reasoning from premises to a conclusion, as the present line of objection requires. In short, the present line of objection misapplies the norms of good reasoning to perception. That is, when the objection claims that ‘there is no good inference’ from experience to belief in some candidate episode of perception, it is using the norms of reasoning to evalu­ ate perception. But perception is not a kind of reasoning, and is therefore not subject to the norms of reasoning. The moral of the story is that not even physical object perception involves a good inference from experience to reality. That is the wrong way to think about perception in general. Accordingly, it can be no objection to spiritual perception that there is no good inference from religious experience to religious belief. As noted above, the same point applies to moral perception.

Is Perception Cognitively Penetrated? There is a hotly debated issue in the contemporary literature regarding whether perception is ‘cognitively penetrated’. The question here is whether, or to what extent, perceptual experience is influenced by higher-­order mental states such as beliefs, background theories, expectations, desires, etc. Another way to frame the issue is in terms of the modularity of perception. On traditional models of the mind, perception is understood as ‘modular’, in the sense that perceptual process­ ing is thought to be independent from higher-­order modes of cognition, such as reasoning, supposing, desiring, etc. Friends of cognitive penetration deny such independence, offering evidence that what we perceive can be influenced by what we believe, expect, desire, etc. As Firestone and Scholl understand the issue, it is essentially about how the mind is organized. What do we mean when we say that cognition does not affect perception, such that there are no top-­down effects on what we see? The primary reason these issues have received so much historical and contemporary attention is that a proper understanding of mental organization depends on whether there is a salient “joint” between perception and cognition . . . whether visual perception is modular, encapsulated from the rest of cognition, and “cognitively (im)pene­ trable.” . . . We single out this meaning of top-­down not only because it may be the most prominent usage of the term, but also because the questions it raises are especially foundational for our understanding of the organization of the mind.4 4  Chaz Firestone and Brian J. Scholl, ‘Cognition does not affect perception: Evaluating the evidence for “top-­down” Effects’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39 (2016): 3.

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8  The Possibility of Spiritual Perception One might think that the controversy here has implications for the possibility of spiritual perception. For it seems that the best candidates for spiritual perception are clearly influenced by higher-­order mental states of the believer. For example, religious experience by Christians will typically have a Christian content, as opposed to a Hindu or Buddhist content. Likewise, the influence of desire, ex­pect­ation, and other aspects of will on religious experience are readily ac­know­ ledged in various religious traditions.5 But if perception proper is supposed to be isolated from the influence of higher-­order cognition, then these candidates for perception can be ruled out as proper instances. In fact, however, the relevant debates about cognitive penetration in percep­ tion have no such implications. We can see this by making a four-­way distinction between (a) the perceptual processing that takes place before or ‘upstream’ from the construction of a conscious sensory experience; (b) the qualitative features of conscious sensory experience, such as phenomenal colour, phenomenal pitch, etc.; (c) the conscious experience of low-­level perceptual features of objects in the environment, such as shape, texture, motion, distance, etc.; and (d) the perceptual beliefs or judgements that are provoked by sensory experience. And now the point is this: the controversies over cognitive penetration concern only categories (a)–(c). They concern: (a) whether higher-­level cognition affects perceptual pro­ cessing upstream from conscious experience; (b) whether higher-­level cognition affects the phenomenal quality of sensory experience; and (c) whether higher-­ level cognition affects the experience of perceived features such as shape and dis­ tance. Moreover, the reason that issues over cognitive penetration concern only categories (a)–(c) is that it is uncontroversial that top-­down effects occur at (d), the level of perceptual belief or judgement. That is, all parties to the dispute agree that perceptual belief is affected by prior beliefs, desires, expectations, and the like.6 Accordingly, it can be no objection to spiritual perception that beliefs based on religious experience are affected by higher-­level cognitive resources. That is completely in keeping with the nature and workings of perceptual belief in general. To see this point more clearly, let us take a closer look at what is and is not a matter of substantive disagreement here. First, let us take a closer look at what is controversial. In each of the cases below, a number of researchers have presented experiments that purport to demonstrate the relevant effect, and others have in one way or another disputed their findings.7 5  See Caroline Franks Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); as well as some of the chapters in this volume, especially the Introduction and Chapter 3. 6 For example, see the discussions in Jack Lyons, ‘Circularity, Reliability, and the Cognitive Penetrability of Perception’, Philosophical Issues 21/1 (2011): 289–311; William F. Brewer, ‘Perception is Theory Laden: The Naturalized Evidence and Philosophical Implications’, Journal for General Philosophy of Science 46 (2015): 121–38; and Firestone and Scholl, ‘Cognition does not affect percep­ tion’, 1–77. 7  See Firestone and Scholl, ‘Cognition does not affect perception’.

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John Greco  9 Consider the perceptual processing that takes place en route to but before the production of a conscious sensory experience. In the case of visual processing, this would include the subpersonal processing that begins when light hits the retina, and continues as the perceptual system builds up initial representations that will eventually be recruited to produce a three-­dimensional representation of the perceived environment. This is sometimes called ‘early vision’. Some contro­ versies in perception science are in regard to whether early vision and analogous early processing in other perceptual modalities is subject to cognitive penetration by higher-­order cognition. A second kind of controversy regards whether the qualitative character of con­ scious sensory experience can be affected by higher-­order cognition. For ex­ample, there is controversy over whether knowledge of an object’s typical colour (bananas are typically yellow, for example) can affect experienced colour. Similarly, some researchers claim to have shown that knowledge of race affects the experience of skin tone. There is also controversy regarding cognitive penetration at the level of per­ ceived low-­level properties, such as shape, size, and distance. For example, there is controversy over whether the anticipation of a physical task, such as climbing a hill, can affect perception of slope. Likewise, there are controversies over whether knowledge of an object’s desirability or perceived value can affect perceptions of distance. Now let us take a look at what is not controversial. For one, it is not controver­ sial that higher-­order cognition can affect the quality of sensory experience by means of attentional direction. For example, suppose that one is particularly fear­ ful of spiders and is therefore, due to some prompt or other, hypersensitive to the possibility of spiders in one’s environment. It is uncontroversial that in such a situ­ation, one is more likely to perceive spiders if they are there to be perceived. Similarly, suppose that you are a bird lover and that you are highly knowledgeable about and interested in local birds. It is uncontroversial that in such a situation, one is more likely to perceive birds in one’s environment—more likely than some­ one who is uninterested in birds and so not thus attentionally attuned. This is in fact commonplace, and no one working on perception denies it. It is easy to see why these kinds of attentional phenomena do not touch on the controversies over cognitive penetration reviewed above. Namely, one’s atten­ tional direction, at least in the examples we considered, affects what is input into early processing, as opposed to the processing itself.8 Thus, someone who is look­ ing for birds, even subconsciously, scans her environment differently from some­ one who is not looking for birds. For example, someone who is eager and interested to see birds will change their gaze in response to subtle movement on

8  There are real controversies over other kinds of attentional phenomena.

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10  The Possibility of Spiritual Perception the periphery of the visual field, or in response to a chirp from above. But again, this kind of attentional direction can be understood as affecting input to early processing, as opposed to the early processing itself. Nor does it affect the qualita­ tive features of one’s sensory experience, nor how low-­level features of the percep­ tual environment are presented, once the input is given.9 Another thing that is not controversial is that higher-­order cognition can affect one’s perceptual recognition abilities. Again, if one is a trained bird watcher, one is more likely to perceptually recognize an ambiguous figure as a bird. Likewise, one is more likely to perceptually recognize a bird if one is primed to do so, either by testimony, story-­telling, promise of a reward, or some other priming mech­an­ ism. Again, this is commonplace, and no one working on perception would deny it. Also again, we can see why this kind of phenomenon does not touch on actual controversies over top-­down processing. Namely, the kind of differential recogni­ tion presented in our examples can be explained by different reactions to the presentation of low-­level perceptual properties. For example, someone who is expert at identifying birds, or who is simply primed to see birds, will be more sensitive to bird-­relevant perceptual cues, such as shape and size, and thus more likely to recognize a bird as a bird. But this sort of phenomenon is consistent with enjoying the very same ‘thin’ qualitative experience as someone not disposed to see birds.10 It is also consistent with being perceptually presented with the very same low-­level features of the environment. In the examples we considered, it is the reaction to perceptual cues, rather than the cues themselves, that are subject to top-­down effects. In sum, it is uncontroversial that higher-­order cognition can affect perceptual judgement and perceptual belief. This is because it is uncontroversial that higher-­ order cognition can affect one’s perceptual experience by means of attentional direction, and that it can affect one’s ability to recognize perceived objects. There are other uncontroversial top-­down effects on perceptual belief as well.11 Thus it  can be no objection to spiritual perception that beliefs based on religious ex­peri­ence are subject to the same top-­down effects. Again, that would be entirely consistent with our best understanding of perception in general. What is controversial within perception science is whether there are top-­down effects on (a) ‘early’ perceptual processing, that is, processing before conscious sensory experience; (b) the qualitative character of sensory experience, such as phenomenal colour; and (c) the presentation of low-­level features such as size and distance. But the defender of spiritual perception need not take a stand on these 9 For discussions of attentional direction in religious experience, see chapters 2 and 3 in this volume. 10  For more on the distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ experience, see text below. 11  Most obviously, background beliefs can affect whether one trusts one’s perceptual experience, or takes it at face value.

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John Greco  11 controversial issues. At least not until there is some reason to think that religious experience involves some such phenomena in a way that perception proper does not. At this point, a sceptic about spiritual perception might think that we have missed the relevant issue. For the point of the ‘loaded experience’ objection is about religious experience, not religious belief. The problem with spiritual percep­ tion, the objection goes, is that religious experience itself is shaped by higher-­level resources, and this is the crucial disanalogy with physical object perception. To answer this charge, we may invoke a distinction that is more familiar in philosophy than in cognitive science—that between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ experience.12 According to this distinction, thin experience is supposed to have a purely quali­ tative nature, exhausted by purely phenomenal properties. Thick experience, on the other hand, is supposed to involve representational content—it presents ex­peri­enced objects as having properties. In different terms, thin experience is understood as uninterpreted qualia, whereas thick experience is understood as carrying an interpretation, presenting some object as having some property. At least typically, thick experience is understood to fall short of judgement. Thus, I can experience a stick in water as being bent or broken, while judging that it is straight. Nevertheless, my (thick) perceptual experience is thought to represent, in some sense, the stick as broken. And whatever sense this is, it goes beyond a merely phenomenal presentation. Thus, a perceiver who lacks the concepts of stick and of being broken could not enjoy the same thick experience, although she could enjoy the same thin experience, that is, the same purely phenomenal presentation. With this distinction in hand, we may now see that the present objection dis­ solves. For either the charge is (a) that religious experience considered as purely phenomenal, thin experience is cognitively penetrated, or (b) that religious ex­peri­ ence considered as interpreted, thick experience is cognitively penetrated. The first version of the objection is clearly without force. On the one hand, it is controver­ sial whether any perceptual experience considered as thin is subject to top-­down effects, and so it is not clear that there is a difference here between religious ex­peri­ence and sensory experience in physical object perception, even if religious experience is subject to top-­down effects. On the other hand, it is not clear whether religious experience considered as thin really is subject to top-­down effects. That is, it is not clear that the purely qualitative or phenomenal character of religious experience is so affected. Indeed, this would be a hard thing to

12  The language of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ perceptual experience probably originates with philosophers influenced by Immanuel Kant’s distinction between ‘intuition’ and ‘concepts’ in his Critique of Pure Reason. For example, see C. I. Lewis, Mind and The World Order: An Outline of a Theory of Knowledge (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929, reprinted in paperback by Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1956).

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12  The Possibility of Spiritual Perception establish, for reasons similar to why the same issue remains controversial in the case of physical object perception. The second version of the objection is also without force. This is now the charge that religious experience considered as thick is subject to cognitive penetration. But as we have already seen, perceptual experience in physical object perception is clearly subject to cognitive penetration when considered as thick. Remember, thick experience is experience carrying representational content, as when one perceives a bird as a bird. In other words, thick experience involves the same kinds of high-­level representational capacities as does perceptual belief. But we have already seen that this kind of representation is penetrated by higher-­level cognition, and uncontroversially so.

What is the Proper Object of Perception? A third issue in the philosophy and science of perception concerns the proper objects of perception. The issue here can be framed partly in terms of a distinc­ tion that we have already seen—that between (a) the low-­level properties of per­ ceptual objects, such as size, shape, and motion, and (b) higher-­level properties involving causation, agency, dispositions, etc. As Siegel points out, the issue is over which properties are represented in perceptual experience. Positions on which properties are represented in experience can be located on a rough continuum, with low-­level properties (where these include color, shape, illumination, and depth) at one end, and high-­level properties (where these include kind properties, agential or other emotional properties, and semantic properties) at the other. The issue is which of these properties can be perceived as being instantiated: e.g., whether one can have a visual experience that repre­ sents that someone is trying to do something.13 13  Susanna Siegel, ‘The Contents of Perception’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016), , 39–40. Siegel notes that defenders of the view that only low-­level properties are repre­ sented in experience include Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Fred Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Austen Clark, A Theory of Sentience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Richard Price, ‘Aspect-­ switching and Visual Phenomenal Character’, Philosophical Quarterly 59/236 (2009): 508–18; Berit Brogaard, ‘Do we Perceive Natural Kind Properties?’, Philosophical Studies 162/1 (2013): 35–42; defenders of the view that high-­level properties are repre­ sented in experience include Christopher Peacocke, A Study of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Charles Siewert, The Significance of Consciousness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Susanna Siegel, ‘Which Properties are Represented in Perception?’, in T.  Gendler Szabo and J. Hawthorne (eds), Perceptual Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 481–503; Susanna Siegel, The Rationality of Perception (Oxford University Press, 2017); T.  Bayne, ‘Perception and the reach of phenomenal content’, Philosophical Quarterly 59/236 (2009): 385–404; Farid Masrour, ‘Is Perceptual Phenomenology Thin?’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 83/2 (2011): 366–97;

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John Greco  13 Siegel is here concerned with which properties are represented in perceptual ex­peri­ence, but we can also ask which objects are so represented. Does perceptual experience present us with chairs, trucks, and waiters, etc., or merely with three-­ dimensional objects that must be judged to be chairs, trucks, and waiters? According to theories on which visual experience represents only very low-­level properties, such as color, the shapes of facing surfaces, their illumination prop­ erties and nothing more, visual experience does not carry information about whether any of the facing surfaces belong to the same ordinary object, and does not carry information about whether there are any ordinary objects in the immediate environment at all. Instead, visual experience represents that low-­ level properties are instantiated at certain locations, without taking a stand on whether ordinary objects are instantiating them. A version of this view . . . argues level properties) that experience represents colors (and perhaps other low-­ instantiated in regions of space-­time around the perceiver, and nothing else.14

Once again, however, it is essential to note that the current controversy is over which properties and objects are represented in perceptual experience. There is no analogous controversy over the proper objects of perceptual belief or judgement. That is, all parties agree that perceptual beliefs (judgements) are about ordinary objects in the environment, including people, furniture, and the like. For ex­ample, my perceptual beliefs include the beliefs that there is a waiter walking toward the table, that there is a firetruck parked on the street, and that my dog is lying down quietly. The only controversy in the area is how such perceptual beliefs are related to perceptual experience—whether they reflect the same or similar content, or whether they go beyond the content of experience in significant ways. It can be no objection to spiritual perception, then, that religious beliefs have higher-­level objects and properties as their content. This is entirely consistent with perceptual beliefs about physical objects, which also can have higher-­level objects and prop­ erties as their content.

A Model for Moral and Spiritual Perception So far we have seen that perception should not be understood as involving an inference from perceptual experience, not if by ‘inference’ we mean the sort of movement from premise to conclusion that is manifested in reasoning, and that is Bence Nanay, ‘Do we see apples as edible?’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92/3 (2011): 305–22; Ned Block, ‘Seeing-­As in the Light of Vision Science’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89/1 (2014): 560–72. 14  Siegel, ‘The Contents of Perception’, 47–8, cites Clark, A Theory of Sentience, ch. 5 as a defender of this kind of view.

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14  The Possibility of Spiritual Perception subject to the norms of good reasoning. Nevertheless, we have also seen that ­perceptual belief is influenced by various higher-­level mental states and resources, including presumed theories, prior beliefs and background knowledge. We have also seen that the objects of perceptual belief can be, and in fact usually are, or­din­ary objects with high-­level properties. How are these various features of per­ ception consistent with each other? How is it that perception can be both non-­ inferential but conceptually and theoretically loaded? A very general answer is that background knowledge can influence perception in ways other than by act­ ing as premises in an inference. Put differently, higher-­level mental states can ‘shape’ perceptual dispositions in various ways, by shaping expectations, in­flu­en­ cing attention, distributing salience, and the like. In this part of the chapter, I present a psychologically realistic model for how this might work. My claim is not that perception does work this way. Neither is the claim that this is the only way that perception can incorporate top-­down pro­ cessing. Rather, the point is to describe one model for explaining how perception can be both non-­inferential and yet subject to various top-­down effects of higher-­ order cognition. The same model also demonstrates the possibility of moral and spiritual perception. That is, it shows how there could be, quite literally, a percep­ tion or moral and spiritual reality. A central idea of the proposed model is that perception operates by employing various kinds of cognitive heuristics. In general, a heuristic is a ‘mental short-­cut’ employed in cognitive processing. Heuristics are ‘short-­cuts’ in the sense that they forgo more costly information processing for the sake of efficiency and speed. Thus, Shah and Oppenheimer write that ‘heuristics primarily serve the purpose of reducing the effort associated with a task’,15 and do so by (1) examining fewer cues, (2) reducing the difficulty associated with retrieving and storing cue values, (3) simplifying the weighting principles for cues, (4) integrating less information, and/or (5) examining fewer alternatives.16 Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier adopt the following general definition: ‘A heuristic is a strategy that ignores part of the information, with the goal of making deci­ sions more quickly, frugally, and/or accurately than more complex methods’.17 Early work on heuristics typically claimed that heuristics trade speed and effi­ ciency for accuracy.18 But as their definition suggests, Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier dispute this, arguing that cost-­saving heuristics can sometimes increase accuracy.

15  A.  K.  Shah and D.  M.  Oppenheimer, ‘Heuristics Made Easy: An Effort-­reduction Framework’, Psychological Bulletin 134/2 (2008): 207. 16  Shah and Oppenheimer, ‘Heuristics Made Easy’, 209. 17 Gerd Gigerenzer and Wolfgang Gaissmaier, ‘Heuristic Decision Making’, Annual Review of Psychology 62 (2011): 454. 18  For example, see A.  Tversky and D.  Kahneman, ‘Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases’, Science 185 (1974): 1124–30.

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John Greco  15 If we think of heuristics very broadly, and in terms of ‘reducing the effort a­ ssociated with a task’ by ‘examining fewer cues, integrating less information, and examining fewer alternatives’, then it is fair to say that heuristics are used in the early stages of perceptual processing, including the subpersonal processing of early vision and other perceptual modalities. In fact, these are ‘hard-­wired’ into perceptual systems. They take advantage of stable structures of the perceptual environment, such as typical lighting patterns, and are responsible for many well-­ known perceptual hallucinations. In what follows below, however, I am interested in the role of higher-­level heuristics in perceptual judgement. In particular, I want to look at the role of perceptual ‘schemas’. The central idea of schema theory in empirical psychology is that cognition in general often involves heuristics known as ‘scripts’ and ‘personae’. In the following passages, Nisbett and Ross describe how scripts and personae are supposed to work. To understand the social world, the layperson makes heavy use of a variety of knowledge structures normally not expressed in propositional terms and pos­ sibly not stored in a form even analogous to propositional statements.19

They distinguish between two kinds of schema: event-­schemas, or ‘scripts’, and person-­schemas, or ‘personae’. A script is a type of schema in which the related elements are social objects and events involving the individual as actor and observer . . . A script can be com­ pared to a cartoon strip with two or more captioned ‘scenes’, each of which sum­ marizes some basic actions that can be executed in a range of possible manners and contexts (for instance, the ‘restaurant script’ with its ‘entering’, ‘ordering’, ‘eating’, and ‘exiting’ scenes).20 Social judgements and expectations often are mediated by a class of schemas which we shall term ‘personae’, that is, cognitive structures representing the per­ sonal characteristics and typical behaviors of particular ‘stock characters’. Some personae are the unique products of one’s own personal experience (good old Aunt Mary, Coach Whiplash). Others are shared within the culture or sub-­culture (the sexpot, the earth-­mother, the girl-­next-­door, the redneck, the schlemiel, the rebel-­without-­a-­cause) . . . Once the principal features or behaviors of a given indi­ vidual suggest a particular persona, subsequent expectations of and responses to that individual are apt to be dictated in part by the characteristics of the persona.21

19 Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross, ‘Judgmental Heuristics and Knowledge Structures’, in Hilary Kornblith (ed.), Naturalizing Epistemology, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 278. 20  Nisbett and Ross, ‘Judgmental Heuristics and Knowledge Structures’, 280. 21  Nisbett and Ross, ‘Judgmental Heuristics and Knowledge Structures’, 281–2.

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16  The Possibility of Spiritual Perception The application to perception is straightforward. When we are seated at the ­restaurant table and a man approaches, we perceive that the waiter is coming. According to schema theory, this perception is not based on an inference from other things we believe. For example, we do not reason that ‘waiters typically dress in such and such a manner, there appears to be a man dressed this way, and therefore this must be the waiter’. Rather, we are operating with a script that dis­ poses us to expect a waiter in the present time and place, and that provokes an interpretation of present perceptual cues. Suppose that we are working with the persona of the surly waiter. We will be apt to interpret a tone of voice as impa­ tient, or a facial expression as sarcastic. On the present proposal, such perceptions are not grounded in anything like a reasoning process. As was explained in the passages quoted above, scripts and personae are not thought of as beliefs or assumptions, as premises for inferences would have to be. Nevertheless, percep­ tion is theoretically loaded on this view. As was also explained above, scripts and personae can be part of our cultural inheritance, the result of special training, or gleaned from previous life experience. The present account of physical-­object perception opens up possibilities for moral perception and spiritual perception. For example, the present account explains how we might see (quite literally) that an action is wrong, that a child is innocent, or that a man is dishonest. The basic idea is that we are equipped with moral scripts and moral personae. If perception in general involves schema-­ governed interpretation, then moral perception involving this kind of informa­ tion processing would be just another kind of perception. In effect, the moral perception that some man is dishonest would not be essentially different from the empirical perception that some man is a waiter. Again, the main idea is that, as perceivers, we employ moral scripts and perso­ nae. Put differently, we employ scripts and personae that have moral content. In our cast of characters there is the shifty lawyer, the cop on the take, the school­ yard bully, the vicious drug dealer, the petty neighbour, and the greedy doctor. There is also the selfless mother, the devoted teacher, the kind doctor, the cour­ age­ous cop, and the crusading lawyer. The list goes on and on. There are also countless moral scripts. As with personae, many of these are highly specific to time, place and culture. Others are more universal, perhaps showing up in the great literature of several distinct cultures. According to schema theory, then, perceptual processing can involve scripts and personae. Some feature of a situation activates a relevant schema, and as a result we are disposed to see or hear things a particular way. The present sugges­ tion is that these might be moral ways as well as empirical ways. For example, moral schemas might influence one to see a movement as aggressive, to hear a voice as threatening, or to feel a touch as reassuring. Of course, some schemas amount to no more than stereotypes and myths. In such cases their influence would undermine the reliability of our moral judgements, thereby having a

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John Greco  17 negative epistemic effect. But it is also possible that schemas contribute positively to the reliability of moral judgements, helping us to see or hear or feel what is actually the case, to perceive what we otherwise would miss. The present account of perception in general shows how moral perception is possible. In fact, aside from its subject matter, moral perception would have little to distinguish it from perception in general, working pretty much the same way that empirical perception does. Can we say the same things about spiritual per­ ception, or the perception of God? Here things are more difficult, since God does not typically appear to us in sensory experience. Nevertheless, we can broaden our notion of experience to include more than sensory experience, or experience from the five senses. It seems natural, for example, to talk about feeling God’s presence, feeling God’s love, or hearing God’s voice, although in the typical case we would not interpret ‘feeling’ or ‘hearing’ as sensory feeling or hearing. Besides these pedestrian sorts of religious experience, available to any Joe in the pew, there are the more powerful religious experiences of mystics and special revelation. Those who report such experiences invariably use analogies and meta­ phors involving sensory experience to describe what they take as an experience of God. Here is a quotation cited by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience.22 I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hilltop, where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite . . . The ordinary sense of things around me faded. For the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and exultation remained . . . The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen . . . Then, if ever, I believe, I stood face to face with God, and was born anew of his spirit.

Suppose we allow these broadened notions of experience. The next thing to note is that perceivers are often equipped with religious schemas—religious scripts and personae that help them to interpret their world. But then just as moral sche­ mas can influence us to interpret a scene or event morally, religious schemas can influence us to interpret a scene or event religiously. For example, a creation script might influence the interpretation of a beautiful landscape in terms of God’s cre­ ation. Likewise, any number of biblical scripts or personae might evoke a reli­ gious interpretation of some social event, such as the birth of a baby, or an encounter with a stranger. Likewise, religious schemas might influence us to interpret some more subjective experience religiously, as an experience of God’s love, or of God’s presence, for example. Of course, like moral schemas, religious schemas can be no more than hateful stereotypes or self-­serving myths. But also

22  The passage is repeated in Alston, Perceiving God.

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18  The Possibility of Spiritual Perception like moral schemas, apt religious schemas might enable perception rather than distort it, allowing one to see or feel what otherwise would be missed. Finally, it is worth noting that the present account of perception yields a plaus­ ible account of expert perception. Specifically, persons with better scripts and personae will be in position to make more fine-­grained and more reliable percep­ tual judgements. For example, consider the different schemas available to the tourist and the seasoned city dweller. Walking in the city, the tourist is ill-­ equipped with personae and scripts derived largely from movies and sensational­ ist news reports. Accordingly, she might see a particular look as aggressive or a particular gesture as threatening, whereas the New York City native would make no such moral interpretation. Likewise, someone who is insulated racially or religiously will lack richness in his or her schemas for interpreting the words, looks, and actions of strangers. On the contrary, people from other groups will be interpreted in ham-­fisted ways, with gross generalizations—with stereotypes, in the more common, and negative, sense of that word. Compare this sort of social blindness with the resources avail­ able to someone more familiar with the group in question. Persons who are ‘native’ to a cultural group, or who are culturally ‘multilingual’ in the sense that they inhabit multiple cultural environments, will be equipped with a more impressive set of cognitive resources, including better scripts and personae for better perceiving their social environments.23 The present account, then, helps to explain how expert perception is possible, and how some moral and/or spiritual perception might count as a kind of expert perception. More generally, the account helps to explain significant differences in perceptual capacities, both intra-­culturally and cross-­culturally. In general, we are born with certain natural perceptual capacities, and then these are ‘trained up’, as cognitive scientists say, in specific ways according to specific circumstances. One way they are trained up, plausibly, is that we are enculturated with different sche­ mas that in turn influence subsequent perceptual processing. This happens dif­ ferentially as persons pursue different paths and gain different areas of expertise within the same culture, and as persons pursue different kinds of expertise avail­ able in different cultures, in each case being exposed to different schemas (as well as other kinds of higher-­level cognitive resources) that will shape different per­ ceptual dispositions. Clearly enough, this will include differences in the moral and religious schemas that persons assimilate, helping to account for differences in moral and spiritual perception both within and across cultures. 23 See John Greco, ‘Perception as Interpretation’, in Michael Baur (ed.), Texts and Their Interpretation, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association (New York: American Catholic Philosophical Association, 1999). For more extended discussions, see Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Krista Hyde, A Virtue-­theoretic Account of the Epistemic Effects of Marginalization, PhD Dissertation, Saint Louis University, 2017.

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John Greco  19 Of course, just as our natural capacities can be nurtured and developed, they can be neglected or distorted as well, and our perceptual capacities are no excep­ tion. There are racists and religious bigots, who fail to perceive the moral dignity of those they hate. Likewise, our perceptions can be distorted by ignorance and fear, so that we see aggression where none is intended, or feel danger where none exists. Nevertheless, schema theory allows for the possibility of expert and other­ wise excellent perception, driven by apt scripts and persona. Insofar as there can be moral and religious schemas, and insofar as these can be enabling of reliable perceptual judgements, our model allows for the possibility of expert moral and spiritual perception as well.

Conclusion The first part of the chapter explored some issues in the cognitive science of per­ ception that are directly related to three familiar objections to the possibility of spiritual perception: that there is no good inference from religious experience to divine reality; that religious experience is conceptually and/or theoretically loaded; and that God and His properties cannot be the proper object of percep­ tion. It was concluded that all three objections can be dismissed on the basis of consensus position in the cognitive science of perception. The second part pre­ sented a psychologically realistic model for how perceptual processing is subject to top-­down effects of higher-­level cognition, and argued that the same model illustrates the possibility of moral and spiritual perception. The same model shows how moral and spiritual perception can be culturally embedded, and yet nevertheless qualify as a kind of expert perception, that is, perception that is en­abled and improved by relevant experience, knowledge and training.24

24 Thanks to Frederick Aquino, Paul Gavrilyuk, Krista Hyde, Michael McClymond, Gary Osmundsen, Ted Poston, Eleonore Stump, and John Zeis for comments on earlier drafts and in dis­ cussion. Thanks also to participants at the Spiritual Perception Symposia, organized by Paul Gavrilyuk and Frederick Aquino in Atlanta, San Antonio, and at the University of St Thomas.

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2 Developing Spiritual Perception Lessons from Claude Monet and Wassily Kandinsky Paul L. Gavrilyuk [I]mpressionism gave us something which has always been one of the great attainments of art: it enlarged our range of vision.1 In Chapter  1, John Greco gave a positive account of how spiritual perception might work by drawing analogies between spiritual and moral perception. In this chapter, I explore the analogies between aesthetic and spiritual perception in order to suggest ways in which the perception of God could be developed similar to the perception of beauty. I begin by considering the nature of aesthetic perception taking it to be a perception of beauty. For insights into the nature of aesthetic perception and the expansion of its range, I selectively draw upon the work of Claude Monet (1840–1926) and Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944). I focus on three dimensions of Monet’s work: first, his art itself, especially the paintings that he created in his family estate of Giverny in France; second, the impact that his paintings may have on suitably disposed viewers; third, his theoretical account of aesthetic perceiving. I rely on Kandinsky primarily as a theoretician of art’s potential to introduce the viewer to another way of seeing the aesthetic dimension of reality. These artists have been selected because they especially emphasize the art’s capacity for expanding our powers of perception. I subsequently propose that it is possible to develop spiritual perception in an analogous way under an appropriate set of circumstances. One way of developing spiritual perception is to be immersed in the reading and interpretation of scripture. I consider three modes for such immersion: a private reading, a guided study, and communal worship. I develop parallels to such immersion in the world of art. My principal goal is to demonstrate how perception can be directed, developed, and trained to apprehend beauty and, by analogy, the presence of God.

1  Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949), 95.

Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Developing Spiritual Perception: Lessons from Claude Monet and Wassily Kandinsky In: Perceiving Things Divine: Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual Perception. Edited by: Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802594.003.0002

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Paul L. Gavrilyuk  21

The Nature of Aesthetic Perception Human perceptual powers and practices vary widely. When it comes to seeing, some have 20/20 vision; others are less fortunate and need to use corrective lenses in order to engage in various activities that rely on eyesight. The same applies to human capacity to see colours, depth of field, and brightness. Audition, similarly, ranges from being stone deaf to having very acute sound sensitivity, such as perfect pitch. Even within perfect pitch, there are important variations of auditory acuity depending, for example, on how many notes played at the same time a person can recognize. In childhood, some of us are capable of hearing sound frequencies that escape most adults. With ageing often comes a gradual atrophy of the senses, including hearing loss. It is common for individuals who lack one sensory modality to compensate by relying more on the other senses. For example, blind people often have audition that is more acute than people who have normal sight. This is another indication that a particular sensory power, in this case audition, can be developed throughout life. While the strength of perceptual powers differs, human communication is possible because there is considerable overlap in the phenomenological content that the sensory powers collect under similar circumstances, that is, when the same objects are perceived under roughly similar conditions. The overlapping range of perception may be dubbed ‘basic perception’ or ‘ordinary perception’ to distinguish it from the perceptual practices that are outside of the ordinary range, which would fall into the categories of ‘trained perception’ or ‘expert perception’. Under certain favourable conditions, most people may expand their range of perception, although not all follow through with such an expansion. For example, in the same dark room one person, whose eyesight has already adjusted to low light conditions, may discern the shape of objects, while another person who has just entered such a room may need some time to be able to see anything at all. While in a very dark room most people would report failing to see anything, a person with especially keen eyesight or equipped with night-­vision goggles may be able to see something. In this example, ‘seeing more’ is different from merely imagining something that is not there, seeing things in a distorted manner, or making guesses from the memory of things in a well-­lit room to the shapes of things that are not seen clearly. There are certain cases of ‘seeing more’ that go beyond merely being more observant, or seeing more distinctly, or seeing more details of a given object. One important instance of ‘seeing more’ is aesthetic perception. The primary object of aesthetic perception is reality, inasmuch as it can be viewed as art and manifest beauty. According to the nineteenth-­century Realist painter Gustave Courbet: ‘The beautiful exists in nature and may be encountered in the midst of reality under the most diverse aspects. As soon as it is found there, it belongs to art, or

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22  Developing Spiritual Perception rather to the artist who knows how to see it there.’2 For Courbet, beauty has both objective and subjective aspects, both in reality and in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is objective inasmuch as it is not merely a figment of one’s imagination but can be ‘found’ in reality. However, beauty is also subjective, inasmuch as it is apprehended by a person, such as an artist, who knows how to find and see it. Once the artist finds beauty, he turns what he sees in nature into art, and then invites other perceivers to travel the path of his discovery, mediated by a work of art. The process of such a discovery may be demonstrated by studying the works of Claude Monet. One of the founding figures of French Impressionism, Monet produced mul­ tiple series of paintings showing the same motif under different light conditions and from different viewpoints. Of particular interest for our discussion will be two such series: The Haystacks and The Water Lilies.3 More than 250 paintings depicting the water lilies have been preserved in different museums around the world, including the Orangerie Museum in Paris. In addition to being immortalized in Monet’s paintings, the subjects of The Water Lilies series—the pond and the plants that adorn it—can be viewed in the artist’s former family estate in Giverny (France). After admiring The Water Lilies paintings at a museum, visitors to Giverny have a unique opportunity to see the pond through the eyes of the artist.4 To paraphrase Courbet, the beauty that Monet found in Giverny became the art exhibited in the Orangerie. In terms of the intricacy of landscaping, the pond itself was a work of art (see Figure  2.1). Monet gave specific instructions regarding the kinds of water lilies that were to be introduced to the pond from different parts of the world; he supervised the construction of the Japanese bridges connecting different areas of the pond; and when it became necessary, he thinned out the water lilies and the plants and trees growing on the banks of the pond. In addition, he used a special boat that served as a mobile studio, which allowed him to view the surface of the water and different parts of the pond from various angles and distances. He also built a glass-­roof studio close to the pond that could house large, 6.5 ft high and 14 ft wide and wider paintings, some of which became a part of the Orangerie’s permanent collection. One might say that Monet converted the artist’s studio into a laboratory, where the primary object of observation was nature’s beauty rather than biodiversity. 2 Gustave Courbet, Letter to His Students (1861), cited in Joel Isaacson, ‘Observation and Experiment in the Early Work of Monet’, in John Rewald, ed., Aspects of Monet (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1981), 16–35, at 17. 3  Properly speaking, the objects that are commonly referred to in English as ‘haystacks’ were actually ‘grainstacks’, although both designations are used in present-­day English-­language catalogues. Monet painted several Water Lilies series, including Les Grands Décorations at the Orangerie Museum in Paris. 4  The photographs of the Water Lilies series are on the Orangerie’s website at http://www.musee-­ orangerie.fr/fr/article/lensemble-­de-­lorangerie.

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Paul L. Gavrilyuk  23

Figure 2.1  The Water Lily Pond. Claude Monet’s Estate in Giverny, France. Photo: P. Gavrilyuk, 1 August 2015, 11.22 a.m.

By focusing on the surface of the water and deliberately cutting off everything above it, Monet sought ‘the illusion of an endless whole, of water without horizon or shore’.5 Aiming to capture the most evanescent and intricate variations of ­colour, Monet depicted ‘the instability of a universe that changes constantly before our eyes’.6 His work invited the viewer to see more than various objects, such as trees or clouds, reflected on the surface of the pond (see Figure 2.2). ‘Landscapes of Water’, as Monet preferred to call his water lilies, were a disclosure of the ‘in­stabil­ity of the universe’ itself. Monet achieved this effect by focusing on colours rather than on the meaning and function of individual objects comprising his picture. As he counselled one of his students: When you go out to paint try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your naïve impression of the scene before you.7

Monet’s impulse to return to a ‘naïve impression’ found its theoretical support in John Ruskin’s notion of ‘the innocence of the eye’. According to Ruskin: ‘Everything

5 Julian Beecroft, Claude Monet: Water Lilies and the Garden of Giverny (London: Flame Tree Publishing, 2015), 104. 6  Ibid., 142. 7  Lilla Cabot Perry, ‘Reminiscences of Claude Monet from 1889 to 1909’, The American Magazine of Art, XVIII/3 (March 1927), 120.

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24  Developing Spiritual Perception

Figure 2.2  Claude Monet, Water Lilies (1906). The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Photo: P. Gavrilyuk, November 2019.

that you can see in the world around you, presents itself to your eyes as an arrangement of different colours variously shaded . . . The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify,—as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted by sight.’8 Monet, who in general had a ‘horror of theories’,9 found Ruskin’s ideas to be quite congenial and attempted to recover ‘naïve impression’, ‘the innocence of the eye’, and ‘childish perception’.

8 John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing (1857), in The Complete Works, eds E.  T.  Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London, 1904), vol. XV, p. 27. For the discussion of this passage, see Charles F. Stuckey, ‘Monet’s Art and the Act of Vision’, in Rewald, Aspects of Monet, 108. 9  See Charles S. Moffett, ‘Monet’s Haystacks’, in Rewald, Aspects of Monet, 150.

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Paul L. Gavrilyuk  25 To be clear, an expert adult perceiver like Monet could not return to a ­child-­like state. More importantly, because children’s perception at a relatively early stage is already constrained by schemas (grass is supposed to be green, not yellow; sky is supposed to be blue, not green; house walls are rectangular, not un­even­ly shaped, and so on), there was no advantage to returning to ‘childish perception’ in the sense of operating with simplistic schemas. Rather, the point was for an adult perceiver to set aside the overly rigid schemas normally used for the recognition of specific objects, such as trees or flowers, in order to capture more of each object’s unique features in the painting.10 Monet’s artistic gaze took in the same motif of the pond under varying lighting conditions every time as a new object, distinct from the one perceived minutes before.11 By renouncing the constraints that an ingrained schema impose on perception (e.g. ‘water lilies are not roses or daffodils, and they are meant to look so and so’), Monet aimed at opening the eye to the possibility of ‘seeing more’. As a result, Monet’s paintings conveyed a sense of immediacy and freshness that he described as ‘naïve impression’. It should be emphasized, however, that unlike the work of Primitivist artists, such as Paul Gauguin, Monet’s brushstrokes and his overall technique were not stylistically ‘childish’ or ‘naïve’ by any means. Rather, his ability to convey the most intricate shades of colour betrays well-­trained powers of attention and the sure hand of a skilled artist. Instead of advocating a return to childhood experiences, Ruskin and Monet sought to recover what has been called a ‘second naiveté’, which served as means of ‘seeing more’ of nature’s beauty.12 For Monet, ‘naïve impression’ was a vehicle for breaking out of the perceptual paradigm of Realist art in order to view nature anew and to ‘see more’ in a manner that was not accessible to artists before. In the process, Monet was inviting viewers to a new manner of seeing, which involved upsetting previous aesthetic paradigms: the dissociation of patterns of colour from the concrete objects with which they were associated. In a similar fashion, a scientist who makes a major discovery begins to view the same phenomena as exhibiting new patterns and as manifesting different properties. What is at stake in a scientific paradigm shift cannot be reduced to merely bringing a different interpretative framework to bear upon the same perceptual content. Rather, as Thomas Kuhn has shown, a scientific paradigm shift involves a new mode of perceiving, a change in how ­specific, previously overlooked features of the same object are taken in by the

10  On the schema theory in empirical psychology, see Chapter 1 by John Greco. 11 ‘For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment’, Beecroft, Claude Monet: Water Lilies and the Garden of Giverny, 57. 12  Cf. Jean-­Baptiste-­Camille Corot, Corot raconté par lui-­même et par ses amis (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1946), vol. I, p. 96: ‘Je prie tous les jours le bon Dieu, qu’il me rende enfant, c’est-­à-­dire qu’il me fasse voir la nature et la rendre comme un enfant, sans parti pris.’

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26  Developing Spiritual Perception perceiver.13 Kuhn’s construal of paradigm shifts as precisely perceptual shifts emphasizes the role of selective attention and cognitive penetration in perception.14 Certain paintings of Monet’s pond focus on small and seemingly unprepossessing sections, which contain only a smattering of water lilies. Even in such cases, his paintings invite the viewer to ‘see more’ and to treat the surface of the pond as visually inexhaustible. One is reminded of Jean-­Luc Marion’s concept of the ‘saturated phenomenon’, which calls attention to the fact that any act of perceiving contains an ineffable residue, a phenomenological surplus that remains unexpressed, yet calls for an expression.15 Monet’s focus on one object in a series of paintings elicits a sense that a pond or a haystack could be viewed as a ‘sat­ur­ ated phenomenon’ whose phenomenological content cannot be exhausted by any one representation, no matter how skilful and detailed. Monet’s paintings share with other masterpieces an extraordinary potential of drawing the viewer so deeply into the world of the picture that the result is a shift in perception. Such was certainly the impact of Monet’s Haystack (Meule au Soleil, 1891) on the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, who saw this picture at an exhibition in Moscow in the mid-­1890s. As Kandinsky recalled: Previously I had known only realistic art, in fact only the Russians and had often remained standing for long time before the hand of Franz Liszt in the portrait of Repin, etc. And suddenly, for the first time, I saw a picture. That it was a haystack, the catalogue informed me. I didn’t recognize it. I found this nonrecognition painful, and thought that the painter had no right to paint so indistinctly. I had a full feeling that the object was lacking in this picture. And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably upon my memory, always hovering quite unexpectedly before my eyes, down to the last detail. It was all unclear to me, and I was not able to draw the simple conclusions from this experience. What was, however, quite clear to me was the unsuspected power of the palette, previously concealed from me, which exceeded all my dreams. Painting took on fabulous strength and splendor. And, albeit unconsciously, objects were discredited as an essential element within the picture.16

13 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 124–30. 14  For a discussion of selective attention and cognitive penetration, see the Introduction and chapters 1 and 3 in this volume. 15  Jean-­Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). For further discussion of this concept, see Chapter 4 by Mark Spencer. 16  Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Reminiscences/Three Pictures’, in Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, eds, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 363.

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Paul L. Gavrilyuk  27

Figure 2.3  Claude Monet, Grainstack, Sun in the Mist (1891), Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Photo: P. Gavrilyuk, May 2016.

Kandinsky noted that the experience was so lasting that it ‘stamped my whole life and shook me to the depth of my being’.17 While initially painful and baffling, the impact was so profound that he found the picture ‘always hovering quite unexpectedly before [his] eyes’ and revealing an ‘unsuspected power of the palette’. The encounter with Monet’s Haystack precipitated a paradigm shift in Kandinsky’s aesthetic perception from realism to abstract art. Such a shift is justified by a comment Monet made apropos his Haystack series: ‘To me the motif is an insignificant factor; what I want to reproduce is what lies between the motif and me’.18 By focusing on his immediate impressions of the object, rather than the object itself, Monet and other Impressionists drew artistic gaze from representation towards abstraction (see Figure 2.3). Kandinsky and others gave this tendency a fuller expression by removing the concrete object altogether. Kandinsky was convinced that a great artist had a prophetic task of intro­du­ cing humanity to another way of seeing the world: And then, without fail, there appears among us a man like the rest of us in every way, but who conceals within himself the secret, inborn power of ‘vision.’ He sees and points. Sometimes he would gladly be rid of this higher gift, which is

17  Kandinsky, ‘Reminiscences/Three Pictures’, 363. 18 Beecroft, Claude Monet: Water Lilies and the Garden of Giverny, 53.

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28  Developing Spiritual Perception often a heavy cross for him to bear. But he cannot. Through mockery and hatred, he continues to drag the heavy cartload of struggling humanity, getting stuck amidst the stones, ever onward and upward.19

Switching his metaphor, Kandinsky represented ‘struggling humanity’ as a tri­ angle (rather than a ‘heavy cartload’), at the top of which stood his artist-­seer, whose vision was mocked or ‘regarded as mentally abnormal’ at first, but subsequently embraced by the lower parts of the human triangle that had been able to follow his vision.20 Kandinsky’s artist-­seer, his Platonic and Nietzschean in­spir­ ations notwithstanding, pointed the way of spiritual progress for humanity and planted his way of seeing in those who were willing and capable of following him. In his essay ‘Whither the “New” Art?’ (1911), Kandinsky connected his assertion that the ‘artist is the seer of the future and is a leader’ with the French Impressionists.21 The mission of the artist is both to disclose the beautiful and to awaken in the spectators the ability to ‘see more’—to extend their perceptual powers. Kandinsky warns that because such a transformation initially appears ‘mentally abnormal’, as Monet’s Haystack first appeared to him at the exhibition, many people will be disposed to mock and resist it. The resistance has to do with the fact that the eyes of the crowd are not sufficiently prepared and emotionally attuned to the pos­si­bil­ ities that shine through in a new vision. After the artist’s vision has affected the upper parts of the triangle, his mode of seeing begins to have an indirect effect upon the lower parts of the triangle, becoming more broadly diffused in culture. Perhaps a spectator who views Monet’s Haystack with Kandinsky’s guidance may open herself to the possibilities of abstract art and begin ‘seeing more’, despite the original intention of seeing the picture as a classical expression of French Impressionism. Kandinsky’s theorizing applied most directly to the modernist artistic styles, which initially were met with scepticism and resistance, sometimes even mockery, before they won public recognition.22 Kandinsky emphasized that the artist not only represented the spiritual in art but also beckoned stubborn and visually impaired humanity to awaken its latent powers of aesthetic perception. In the words of Merleau-­Ponty, the viewers began 19 Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 131. 20 Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 135. The reaction of surprise, derision, and ridicule—not always entirely unjustified—often characterized the viewers of non-­representational art a century ago. 21  ‘Whither the “New” Art?’, in Lindsay and Vergo, eds, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 100. 22  Hans Urs von Balthasar makes a similar point in Why I am Still a Christian: ‘A great work of art is never obvious and immediately intelligible in the language that lies ready to hand, for the new, unique language that comes into existence with it is its interpreter. It is “self-­explanatory”. For a moment the contemporary world is taken aback, then they understand, and begin to speak in the newly minted language (e.g. “the age of Shakespeare”) as though they had invented it themselves. The unique word makes itself comprehensible through its own self. The greater a work of art, the more extensive at least the cultural sphere it dominates will be’, in Two Say Why, trans. John Griffiths (London: Search Press/ Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1973), 21. I am grateful to Mark McInroy for drawing my attention to this quotation.

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Paul L. Gavrilyuk  29 to see ‘according to or with the picture’.23 A sceptic may object that a picture could indeed leave a lasting impression, but no specifically perceptual shift in the viewer would ensue. To be impressed with an image and find oneself incapable of articulating one’s impression does not always amount to an altered perception. A shift in artistic style is a matter of technique and fashion, not a different way of seeing. To insist on the alteration of perception, where none is at work, is a category mistake. Faced with this objection, the following considerations could be offered in defence of Kandinsky’s theory of aesthetic vision. First, Kandinsky does not claim that great art consistently evokes such a profound change in all spectators at all times. In fact, he insists that the very opposite is the case. When presented with a new aesthetic vision, most people mock and resist the credibility of what they see. We might recall that Kandinsky himself was originally baffled and even scandalized by the indistinct manner in which Monet painted his haystack. Second, those few who are capable of opening themselves up to the possibility of a new vision, have to be properly disposed and emotionally attuned.24 They have to allow the image to have its visual impact upon them. The image that delights the eye has the potential to disclose more than the image to which the heart remains indifferent. The aesthetic gaze of the crowd often remains closed to the highest expressions of beauty. There needs to be a freeing of the perceiver from prejudice and from the bonds of conventions in order to ‘see more’, as Monet insisted. Third, while a dramatic expansion of vision could in certain rare cases be trigged by viewing a unique work of art, a gradual change owing to repeated exposures to a new artistic style is far more common. Such exposures may take different forms. One possibility would be for an amateur to view a particular piece of art numerous times, perhaps even gazing at it with some regularity and making it a part of her life in some way. Another possibility would be for an art critic to appreciate the significance of a particular piece in the history of art and point out the impact that a particular style of representation, for example, Leonardo da Vinci’s sfumato had on his Renaissance followers, or Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro had on Caravaggisti, and so on. The chief question is whether a style of representation is purely a matter of technique, or whether it also entails enriched perception. As a rule, mastering a technique is accompanied by sharpening the relevant perceptual powers. Conversely, the inability to ‘hear more’ in music

23  ‘I do not look at [a painting] as one looks at a thing, fixing it in its place. My gaze wanders within it as in the halos of Being. Rather than seeing it, I see according to, or with it’. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, in Galen A. Johnson, ed., The Merleau-­Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 121–49, at 126. 24  On emotional attunement, see Mark Wynn, Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Cf. Balthasar, Why I am Still a Christian: ‘A great work of art has a certain universal comprehensibility but discloses itself more profoundly and more truly to an individual the more attuned and practiced his powers of perception are’, Two Say Why, 21.

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30  Developing Spiritual Perception or to ‘see more’ in art often severely limits one’s technical powers of expression, rendering one’s imitation of the work of a great artist lifeless and mechanical. Following Courbet, one could say that both Realists and Impressionists dis­ covered the beauty that existed in nature but chose to present it to the gaze of the spectators under very different forms. The contemplation of these different forms of beauty cannot be exhausted by a set of categories and requires a certain adjustment of perception.25 A novice artist not only opens herself to the influence of her mentor’s technique but also attempts to see the world in the way in which her mentor sees it. As we recall, Monet instructed his students to acquire a ‘naïve perception’ by concentrating on the representation of the variety of colours, rather than on the identification of individual objects. Such a concentration allowed a discovery of beauty in nature that did not present itself as powerfully to the gaze of other artists. To see the beauty that Monet saw is to discover a universe on the surface of the pond, to delight in the minutest change introduced by light, and in Ruskin’s words, to see the colours as ‘the blind man would see them if suddenly gifted by sight’. For Monet, blindness was not merely a metaphor but a serious disability with which he struggled towards the end of his life, precisely at the time when he was painting the large canvases of The Water Lilies that now grace the Orangerie Museum. In 1922 an eye examination established that Monet had advanced cataracts, which rendered his right eye virtually blind and left 10 per cent vision in his left eye. After the cataract on his right eye was surgically removed, Monet re­covered about 70 per cent vision in that eye, although he suffered from distortions and a shift of colour in the direction of yellow, a condition known as xanthopsia. By the summer of 1924 he no longer had xanthopsia, but complained of seeing everything with a bluish tint, or cyanopsia. In addition to this, Monet lost most of his ability to distinguish between the shades of colours, drawing on the numbers of his paints and his visual memory to reconstruct how the colours would look on the canvas. As he related to his oculist, ‘I know that red and yellow are on my palette and a specimen of green and a certain violet. I cannot see them as I used to, and yet I remember exactly what colours they used to make.’26 Most importantly, ‘he could see his palette and the brushstrokes well enough but could no longer check his work by standing back ten or fifteen feet as he was used to

25 It could be objected that the alteration of perception entailed in such a social experiment amounts to a distortion of perception, rather than its extension. While there is an element of distortion in any art—and the difference between more or less representational art is a matter of degree— the intended purpose of such a distortion, at least in the case of Courbet or Monet, is to bring out the object’s beauty. Other artistic distortions may have the exact opposite effect, obscuring the object’s beauty rather than revealing it. The purpose of art is to guide aesthetic perception towards the contemplation of beauty. 26 Beecroft, Claude Monet: Water Lilies and the Garden of Giverny, 175.

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Paul L. Gavrilyuk  31 doing’.27 When one realizes that The Water Lilies series (specifically, Les grandes decorations) consist of very large paintings, which have to be viewed at a distance of at least 10 ft to be taken in as meaningful compositions, we are left with the inevitable conclusion that most of the integration was done in the artist’s im­agin­ ation and memory. And yet, The Water Lilies series that Monet painted during this trying time were some of the most distinguished paintings that the artist had ever produced. What the artist could no longer see with his exterior vision, he could summon in his interior sight. Sensing the cruel irony of his situation, Monet compared his blindness to Beethoven’s deafness. If, on Kandinsky’s theory, Monet was a seer, he was at one point a nearly blind seer, just as Beethoven, who was followed by many and surpassed by none, could not always hear completely his own masterpieces with his external hearing. The inner hearing given to Beethoven was a match for the inner sight that was given to Monet. Both inner senses were a combination of memory, imagination, and intense practice. The fading of the external senses did not impede, but in some cases even precipitated, the development of the inner senses. In Homer, Milton, Beethoven, and Monet, aesthetic perception assisted by im­agin­ation triumphed over the weakening, or even lack, of some ordinary sensory powers. The development of aesthetic perception finds important analogies in the development of spiritual perception, to which we now turn.

Developing Spiritual Perception The primary object of spiritual perception is reality inasmuch as it can convey divine presence. God is said to be present everywhere, yet he is also not available to human perception in the manner of ordinary sense-­objects and is in this respect hidden. The omnipresence of God and the hiddenness of God present a paradox similar to the universal presence of beauty and its elusive character. What are the similarities between the function of aesthetic perception in the appreciation of beauty and that of spiritual perception in the apprehension of the presence of God? As we have seen, aesthetic perception can be cultivated on different levels of being drawn into the world of the great artists and their art. Similarly, spiritual perception can be awakened and fostered to varying degrees by being given access to the world of gifted spiritual perceivers and their writings, as we have seen in the case of Kandinsky’s awakening by viewing Monet. For Christians, the regular reading of scripture opens up the world of those who, like Moses ‘spoke to God face to face’ (Exod. 33:11); or, like the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel, were the 27  George Heard Hamilton, ‘The Dying of the Light: The Late Work of Degas, Monet, and Cézanne’, in Rewald, Aspects of Monet, 228.

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32  Developing Spiritual Perception recipients of ‘the word of the Lord’ (e.g. Jer. 1:4, Ezek. 1:3); or, like the apostle Paul, ‘heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat’ (2 Cor. 12:4). The readers of the Sermon on the Mount are exhorted to purify their hearts so that they may see God (cf. Matt. 5:8). The Prologue of the Gospel of John warns that ‘no one has ever seen God’, but then continues: ‘It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known’ (John 1:18). According to the same New Testament author, Jesus answers his disciple’s request to make God manifest: ‘He who has seen me, has seen the Father’ (John 14:9). Even such an admittedly sketchy selection of passages indicates that scripture provides resources for training spiritual perception. In a certain sense, scripture could be treated as a manual for seeing God with the eyes of faith. Similar to aesthetic perception, the training of spiritual perception may take place through immersion in the relevant practices. The simplest one, but by no means the least important, is an individual reading of scripture. Repeated, attentive, prayerful, and meditative reading imprints the words of scripture upon the memory, making the scriptural text a matrix within which the world is perceived. The first-­century Jewish theologian Philo of Alexandria stands at the foundation of a tradition that intertwines the book of scripture with the book of nature. For many Church Fathers, the scriptural text became a medium through which the world was perceived. In other words, meditative and repeated reading of scripture superimposes scripturally informed perception upon ordinary sense-­perception. Such an alteration of spiritual perception is analogous to the impact that visiting an art exhibition may have on a spectator. In the earlier section of this chapter we discussed how Monet’s Haystack ‘impressed itself ineradicably upon [Kandinsky’s] memory, always hovering quite unexpectedly before [his] eyes, down to the last detail’. The profound shift from realism to abstract art in Kandinsky’s aesthetic perception is akin to the opening of spiritual perception to the possibility of apprehending the presence of God, even if only partially and imperfectly. It is, of course, entirely possible to perceive something as beautiful and fail to perceive it as an expression of divine presence. But if one believes that there is a God who is the creator of all beauty, one would eventually come to see beauty as a form of divine presence in creation. For believers, the beauty of this world is a pale reflection of the glory of God. Such a belief might be based on a short inference or, what is more relevant here, could be a matter of direct perception.28 Spiritual perception may be further deepened within the context of the guided reading of scripture, such as a prayer group or a bible study. In this context, the 28  For example, for Jonathan Edwards the ‘immediate object of this spiritual sense’ is ‘the beauty of holiness’ and ‘true moral and spiritual beauty’. See William J. Wainwright, ‘Jonathan Edwards and his Puritan Predecessors’, in P. Gavrilyuk and S. Coakley, eds, The Spiritual Senses, 232. For the development of this point and the indispensable role that spiritual perception plays in the process, see Mark McInroy, Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses: Perceiving Splendour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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Paul L. Gavrilyuk  33 cultivation of the individual believer’s spiritual perception can be supported both by reading and by the insights that such a reading generates from others. Multiple interpretations, as long as they do not deteriorate into an incoherent cacophony, attest to the inexhaustibility of the sensus plenior, of the divinely intended ‘fuller meaning’ of scripture. By analogy, Monet’s multiple depictions of his lily pond reveal the equally inexhaustible beauty of nature. The uncovering of the spiritual sense of scripture is a hermeneutical task that is akin to the aesthetic perception of nature’s beauty and the spiritual perception of divine presence.29 Group reading also provides an opportunity for mutual correction and further honing of spiritual perception through the guidance of more skilled spiritual perceivers. One biblical author warns that ‘solid food’, by which he means more challenging religious issues, is suitable ‘for the mature who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil’ (Heb. 5:14). The cultivation of such moral discernment is pivotal for the development of spiritual perception. In art, a similar set of practices would correspond to engaging with paintings by listening to museum guides, attending art soirées, or reading related literature. Studying an art object in a group may guide one’s attention and enhance the ­powers of one’s perception. At the same time, it is important to guard against group bias and peer pressure. It must be emphasized that ‘seeing more’ is not the same as merely imagining things that are not there. Rather, when it comes to aesthetic perception, ‘seeing more’ is a disclosure of beauty that is in some sense already present in the object. As one familiarizes oneself more and more with the style of a particular artist, one becomes capable of distinguishing her hand from that of her followers and imitators. For example, a 2015 exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art on ‘Delacroix and His Influence’ demonstrated, on the basis of artistic and literary evidence, the extent of the Romantic painter’s influence on the younger gen­er­ ation of artists, including Paul Cézanne, Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Pierre-­Auguste Renoir, and Claude Monet, among numerous others.30 By ana­ logy, guided reflection on scripture makes possible the discernment of the hand of God in personal life, creation, and history. A more extensive training of aesthetic perception allows the dating and attribution of unknown artefacts as well as the differentiation between a genuine piece of art and a forgery. Not unlike the world of art, the religious sphere has its share of charlatans and forgeries. Along with scripture, the tradition of the church, especially the tradition of spiritual direction, has considerable resources for addressing the problem of spiritual delusion, which is a form of distorted spiritual

29  For a view that brings out the contrast between interpretation and perception, see Chapter 7 by Sameer Yadav. 30  See Patrick Noon and Christopher Riopelle, Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art (London: National Gallery Company Limited, 2015).

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34  Developing Spiritual Perception perception and judgement.31 The matter is somewhat similar to the development of guided imagination in art: one studies how to do so properly when one immerses oneself in a world of a true master rather than an imitator, or worse still, a forger or a charlatan. The chances of developing one’s perceptual powers properly are increased when one does so in a group setting, where mutual correction and guidance become a rule. Perhaps the most common and fertile ground for developing spiritual perception is communal worship. The immersion in a religious service holds promise of opening up channels of grace that awaken, empower, and revitalize spiritual perception in ways that surpass the context of a private Bible reading or that of a Sunday school. For example, early Christian liturgical texts approach the sacrament of baptism as illumination (photismos) of the baptizand’s body, mind, and senses. In some Christian communions, baptism includes a ritual opening of the ears, eyes, and other sense organs to the apprehension of God. The sacrament of chrismation, or anointing with the holy chrism, represents the bestowal of the gift ­ owers of the Holy Spirit and the sealing of the individual’s perceptual and mental p from influences that draw the self away from God. As practised by Orthodox Christians today, anointing with chrism involves different parts of human body, including the organs of perception, such as eyes, ears, nostrils, and hands. The morning prayers of the Orthodox Church include the petitions of the worshippers to ‘teach us, O God, thy righteousness, thy commandments, and thy statutes; enlighten the eyes of our intelligence that we may never fall asleep unto death in sin’, to ‘make shine in our hearts, O Master who loves humankind, the incorrupt light of thy divine knowledge, and open the eyes of our mind to the comprehension of the preaching of thy Gospel’, and finally ‘to enlighten our minds and to guard all of our senses’. The first petition is a call to the acquisition of virtues, to the following of the commandments, and, above all else, to watchfulness. The second petition asks for the divine illumination in comprehending the meaning of scripture. The third petition is a reminder about the importance of the ascetic ‘guarding of the senses’ from perceptual experiences that pull the self away from God. These prayers are intended to attune the senses to the sacramental presence of God everywhere, but most especially in worship. In the Orthodox divine liturgy, the invitation of the Psalmist ‘O taste and see that the Lord is good’ (Ps. 34:8) is chanted before communion. After communion, the congregation intones: ‘We have seen the true light. We have received the heavenly Spirit. We have found the true faith, worshipping the undivided Trinity. For the same has saved us’. The descent of the Holy Spirit within the eschatologically oriented movement of the liturgy renders the apprehension of God’s presence, even the contemplation of the divine light, more than a theoretical possibility. My

31  On this point, see chapters 3 and 5 in this volume.

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Paul L. Gavrilyuk  35 fellow parishioners sometimes report private visions of Christ, saints, angels, and other divine things during the liturgical celebration. If one succeeds in avoiding the temptations of isolating, sensationalizing, fetishizing, or cheapening such experiences, if one accepts these divine gifts as a dimension of the church’s sacramental life with due spiritual sobriety and humility, then such experiences could attest and contribute to the proper development of one’s spiritual perception. The cultivation of spiritual perception in the liturgical context is analogous to the training of aesthetic perception in the artist’s workshop. For a beginning artist, the job involves learning the tricks of the trade, listening to the master’s instructions, and imitating his hand. Some students leave the studio soon and, as a result, learn precious little, others stay longer and let themselves be transformed by the power of art, and a few others come to participate in the master’s artistic vision so thoroughly that in due course they become recognized masters in their own right. As a general rule, the deeper the immersion in a particular practice, the greater the transformation of perception. American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein possessed a rare ability to explain the most intricate pieces of orchestral music to very general audiences.32 The master’s explanations certainly helped the audiences to ‘hear more’ than what they were able to hear before. Similarly, when one views the recordings of the rehearsals conducted by Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, one is struck by the mesmerizing effect that the legendary conductor’s presence had upon his musicians. As a result, Karajan’s musicians had a keener aesthetic perception than the amateurs who were, like the author of these lines, much helped by Bernstein’s cap­tiv­at­ing lectures. Nevertheless, it would be highly unlikely that anyone taught by the great conductors, whether amateurs or musicians, would have surpassed these masters’ expert perception. The orchestra players trained by Karajan and Bernstein ‘heard more’ than the members of the audience, and the great con­duct­ors themselves ‘heard more’ than the musicians trained by them. While the degree of one’s immersion in a specific practice often increases one’s chances of developing one’s perceptual skills, one should not overlook the dimension of talent and inspiration. In the religious sphere, one should never underestimate the role of grace, which so often comes unasked, unexpected, and undeserved. While puzzling and disruptive, grace and inspiration are as im­port­ ant for spiritual perception as they are necessary, if often unrecognized, for aesthetic perception. Was it not grace that enabled a nearly deaf Beethoven to write his last sonatas and his Ninth Symphony? Was it not grace that dictated the lines of Paradise Lost to the blind Milton? Was it not grace that enabled nearly blind Monet to finish his Water Lilies series? Grace mysteriously healed what was 32  See, for example, Bernstein’s TV programme created for Omnibus in 1954 entitled ‘Bernstein Explains Beethoven’s Fifth’: https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Bernstein-­E xplains-­ Beethoven-­s-­Fifth-­Part-­1.

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36  Developing Spiritual Perception lacking in human experience, perception, memory, and imagination. Grace activated and increased the inner sight and the inner hearing, when the exterior senses were failing. Grace fuelled the desire that propelled the artist to train his perception through intense practice and years of hard work. Grace breaks through established patterns of thought and schemas of perception in order to create new perceptual paradigms. Ruskin’s call to acquire the ‘innocence of the eye’ and Monet’s de-­schematization of perception are akin to Vladimir Lossky’s appeal to apophasis. At its best, the apophatic approach to the mystery of God involves a shattering of all conceptual idols, a contemplative opening of the mind to a knowledge that is more than all ordinary ways of knowing, culminating in a union with God.33 If Ruskin called his readers to rediscover ‘childish perception’ in order to relinquish the existing paradigms of aesthetic perception, the Gospel commandment to ‘become like children’ could be read in postmodernity as a call to abandon the perceptual paradigms that imprison the senses within the immanent frame so as to render the mind open to the vision of God.34

33 Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997). 34  The author is grateful to Richard Cross, Mark McInroy, Mark Spencer, and all volume contributors for valuable feedback on earlier versions of this chapter.

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3 Training Spiritual Perception A Constructive Look at John Cassian Frederick D. Aquino Blessed are the pure in heart; for they will see God Matt. 5:8 An important part of the spiritual life involves the training of spiritual perception. Such training does not take place in a vacuum but is conditioned by the relevant background beliefs, dispositions, practices, and virtues in a congenial environment.1 As in other domains, the training of spiritual perception has its own method of inquiry, principles, practices, and goals. The focus here is on the social conditions under which people depend on structures, practices, and others to improve their perceptual capacities (e.g. perceptual belief, recognition, and judgement). Under the tutelage of others, people learn to attend well to things divine and are thereby primed to become better spiritual perceivers. The training of spiritual perception will often involve a long process of moral, spiritual, and intellectual preparation.2 As we will see, perceiving things divine requires the formation of a stable, properly oriented, and discerning habit of mind (e.g. the cultivation of a pure heart). As the epigraph of this chapter indicates, the cultivation of a pure heart is a precondition to the process of making progress towards and achieving the vision of God. However, it is not entirely clear in what sense purity of heart is integral to such a process. In this chapter I will flesh out this connection and thus clarify the extent to which purity of heart factors into the process of perceiving things divine. As I hope to show, purity of heart plays a crucial role in shedding perceptual distractions (such as vanity, pride, and so on), in cultivating perceptual readiness, and in fostering a stable and discerning habit of mind. As a result, purity of heart enables one to become more finely attuned to perceiving things divine. Ascetic training, sustained by purity of heart, creates a stable path for differentiating 1  See Caroline Franks Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 20 and ch. 6. 2  On the relationship between beliefs, judgements, desires, and training and the various stages of perceptual processing, see Chapter 1 by John Greco.

Frederick D. Aquino, Training Spiritual Perception: A Constructive Look at John Cassian In: Perceiving Things Divine: Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual Perception. Edited by: Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802594.003.0003

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38  Training Spiritual Perception between salient and peripheral information and for acquiring a more refined perceptual recognition of God. In this chapter I do not presume that training fully captures or encompasses all of spiritual perception, nor do I think that ascetic formation exhausts the kind of training that is requisite for perceiving things divine. However, training plays an integral role in redirecting our misapplied cognitive capacities, including spiritual perception. Accordingly, I structure this chapter in the following way. The first section will offer a brief account of the phenomenon of trained perception. It will also highlight the role that selective attention plays in forming fine-­grained perceptual judgements. The second section will briefly unpack the social dimension of spiritual perception. More importantly, it will focus on the aim and structure of purity of heart and show how it factors into the training of spiritual perception. Towards this constructive end, I will draw largely from the work of John Cassian (c.360–435 ce). In particular, I will call attention to two features of purity of heart (inner stability and discernment) and explain how they contribute to the process of training spiritual perception.3 In addition, I will clarify the extent to which spiritual perception is progressive in nature. The third section will take up the question of whether this kind of trained perception necessarily leads to a kind of brainwashing or confirmation bias. The fourth section will identify the need for further work on the nature and structure of other virtues and on how they contribute to the process of training spiritual perception.

Training Perception Training perception is important in many fields of knowledge. As Matthew Crawford points out, ‘When we become competent in some particular field of practice, our perception is disciplined by that practice: we become attuned to pertinent features of a situation that would be invisible to a bystander’.4 Once a particular domain ‘becomes important to us, differences among the objects in that domain necessarily become important for us’.5 Perceptual training, then, cultivates increased sensitivity to important features in an environment. As a result, it is deeply crucial to the process of refining our perceptual capacities and thus becoming better perceivers in the relevant domain.

3  I recognize that discernment is an outgrowth of purity of heart. Constructively speaking, however, I am including discernment as a feature of a properly functioning pure heart. 4 Matthew  B.  Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 25. 5 Robert  L.  Goldstone, ‘Foreword’, in Isabel Gauthier, Michael  J.  Tarr, and Daniel Bub (eds), Perceptual Expertise: Bridging Brain and Behavior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), vii.

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Frederick D. Aquino  39 Perceptual learning is an attention guided process.6 That is, one of the best ways to train perception is to improve our ability to attend well to things. More specifically, learning to attend well to things ensures that the relevant aspects of perceptual input will be processed further and more aptly. Accordingly, one aim of perceptual training is to cultivate an ‘alert state’.7 However, attaining this kind of state does not necessarily result in the capacity to make fine-­grained perceptual judgements. In other words, one can be alert but not very good at discerning or judging what is salient in concrete situations. So, the next step in perceptual training is to learn how to differentiate between salient and peripheral pieces of information. Not every piece of information is noteworthy! In fact, attending to anything in a sustained and skilful way requires the capacity to exclude ‘all the other things that grab our attention’. It calls for ‘a capacity for self-­regulation’.8 Perceptual training, then, includes learning how to recognize ‘the important signals, while ignoring or discounting the less important’.9 Along these lines, a key metaphor is spotlighting. ‘This spotlight of attention can illuminate only a limited amount of information at any one time, facilitating the perception of those focal stimuli’. As a result, ‘not all stimuli in the perceptual field receive equal attention; instead, some stimuli are selected for relatively intense scrutiny, making them more likely to reach the threshold of awareness’.10 In this respect, there are task and domain specific dimensions of trained perception. People trained in particular disciplines learn to improve their perceptual capacities in order to achieve higher-­level cognitive goals.11 Experts such as bird watchers, jewellers, radiologists, and dog show judges ‘develop specialized perceptual tools for analyzing the objects in their domains of expertise’. Training of this sort tailors ‘perceptual processes to more efficiently gather information from 6 See Sebastian Watzl, Structuring the Mind: The Nature of Attention and How it Shapes Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 7  Jin Fan, Bruce  D.  McCandliss, Tobias Sommer, Amir Raz, and Michael  I.  Posner, ‘Testing the Efficiency and Independence of Attentional Networks’, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 14/3 (2002): 340, identify three interrelated functions of attention: alerting, orienting, and executive attention. On the role that emotions play in training our attention and attuning us to the world around us, see Mark Wynn, Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding: Integrating Perception, Conception and Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially ch. 4.; Peter Goldie, ‘Emotion, Reason, and Virtue’, in Dylan Evans and Pierre Cruse (eds), Emotion, Evolution, and Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 249–67; and Robert C. Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). On the relationship between the evaluative and the perceptual, see Anna Bergquist and Robert Cowan (eds), Evaluative Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 8 Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head, 15. 9 Yuko Yotsumoto and Takeo Watanabe, ‘Defining a Link between Perceptual Learning and Attention’, Public Library of Science Biology 6/8 (2008): 1623. 10  Galen Bodenhausen and Kurt Hugenberg, ‘Attention, Perception, and Social Cognition’, in Fritz Strack and Jens Förster (eds), Social Cognition: The Basis of Human Interaction (New York: Psychology Press, 2009), 3. 11  See Carolyn Dicey Jennings, ‘Attention and Perceptual Organization’, Philosophical Studies 172 (2015): 1265–78. The ultimate claim of Jennings’s article is that top-­down attention is necessary for conscious perception (1266).

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40  Training Spiritual Perception the world’.12 High perceptual skills ‘are possible because the experts’ “eyes” are trained through practice and experience’.13 As a result, the difference between trained and untrained perception can be cashed out in terms of how people perceive (recognize) objects at basic and subordinate levels. The former entails recognizing general features (e.g. there is a bird in the backyard) while the latter entails recognizing (as quickly) the same bird as ‘an American Tree Sparrow’.14 The subtle perceptual cues that go unnoticed by the novice are ‘obvious and automatic to the expert’.15 Categorization, not simply perceptual exposure, is deeply relevant to acquiring this kind of expertise. Immersion in the particular kind of training ‘leads to an increase in the ability to attend to more fine-­grained perceptual features, typically associated with subordinate-level processing’.16 So, people can perceive the same object but on different levels. More exactly, different perceptual judgements of the same object arise from antecedently formed beliefs, experiences, and training.17 Domain-­specific training, then, can play an important role in shaping our perceptual beliefs or judgements. Such training facilitates perceptual readiness and greater sensitivity to features within a particular environment. As we will see, trained spiritual perception likewise involves learning how to recognize salient patterns of the presence of God. To become a better spiritual perceiver is to take 12  Robert  L.  Goldstone, David  H.  Landry, and Ji Yi Son, ‘The Education of Perception’, Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (2010): 267. 13  Yotsumoto and Watanabe, ‘Defining a Link between Perceptual Learning and Attention’, 1623. 14  Lisa. S. Scott, James W. Tanaka, and Tim Curran, ‘Degrees of Expertise’, in Gauthier, Tarr, and Bub (eds), Perceptual Expertise, 123. These authors claim that ‘Evidence for increased subordinate-­level processing in experts comes from work showing that dog show judges and birdwatchers recognized dogs and birds at the subordinate level as fast as the basic level’ (123). See also, J.  W.  Tanaka and M. J. Taylor, ‘Object Categories and Expertise: Is the Basic Level in the Eye of the Beholder’, Cognitive Psychology 23 (1991): 457–82. 15  James W. Tanaka and Tim Curran, ‘A Neural Basis for Expert Recognition’, Psychological Science 12/1 (2001): 43. Chris Tucker, ‘Introduction’, in Chris Tucker (ed.), Seemings and Justification: New Essays on Dogmatism and Phenomenal Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 12–14, gives the Tuatara as an interesting example. To a novice, the ‘Tuatara’ seems to be a kind of lizard-­like creature but a trained person aptly recognizes that the Tuatara does not belong in this category. 16  Scott, Tanaka, and Curran, ‘Degrees of Expertise’, 123. 17 A comparable case could be made concerning moral perception, especially the difference between those who perceive and those who miss the salient features in particular situations. See Lawrence  A.  Blum, Moral Perception and Particularity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Wynn, Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding; Nancy Sherman, The Fabric of Character: Aristotle on Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Robert Audi, Moral Perception (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); John Greco, Putting Skeptics in Their Place: The Nature of Skeptical Arguments and Their Role in Philosophical Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Peter Goldie, ‘Seeing What is the Kind Thing to Do: Perception and Emotion’, Dialectica 61/3 (2007): 347–61. Along these lines, Goldie offers the following comments concerning the connection between skills or virtues and moral perception: ‘This account makes room for the possibility that some people, such as those with certain skills and virtues, can, because of their ability, perceive non-­inferentially what others, with normal eyesight, hearing and so on cannot. Thus two people can be looking in the same direction, at the same part of a scene, and yet one – the skilled or virtuous person – sees things that the other fails to see. And, once we have room for this, we can add the further point that skilled and virtuous people can be trained, developing an ability that can be learned’ (350). See also Chapter 4 by Mark Spencer.

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Frederick D. Aquino  41 up the relevant beliefs, practices, and virtues and learn how to screen out irrele­vant or vicious stimuli. As Caroline Franks Davis points out, we ‘are not passive recipients of ready-­made representations of our environment; rather, stimuli from that environment must be processed by various interpretive mechanisms before they can have any significance for us, and constitute a perceptual experience’.18 As a result, the perception of a trained person is ‘tuned to the features of the environment’ that are salient; extraneous information is dampened and irrelevant stimuli disappear.19

Purity of Heart: Learning to Attend Well In his Conferences, John Cassian gives a classical articulation of the practical and theoretical foundations of ascetical spirituality, particularly emphasizing the importance of training in spiritual perception.20 An important part of this training involves finding reliable processes, people, practices, and materials that put one in the best position to cultivate the spiritual life and to achieve the specified goals (e.g. purity of heart, discernment, the vision of God). His fundamental assumption is that the spiritual life, like any other discipline, has a particular kind of training, with its own method of inquiry, principles, practices, and goals.21 The focus here is on the person-­specific and social factors under which people learn how to form a virtuous habit of mind and how to become better perceivers of the divine. So, if one desires to ‘grasp’ or understand the contours of the spiritual life and how things divine can be perceived, one must learn to attend carefully to the rele­ vant ‘order and method of instruction’ and ‘the precepts and institutes of the most accomplished teachers in that area of work or knowledge’.22 In this sense, Cassian operates with a fundamental distinction between those who have been properly trained and those who appeal only to their personal judgement. As he says, ‘we should follow those who we recognize have shaped their lives in a praiseworthy and upright manner’, and ‘who have been instructed not in their own presumptions but in the tradition of their forebears’.23 Constructively speaking, the distinction here seems to be between basic (pre-­trained) perception and trained perception. 18  Franks Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience, 149. 19 Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head, 24. 20  Portions of this section draw from and develop some of the material in Frederick D. Aquino, ‘Spiritual Formation, Authority, and Discernment’, in William  J.  Abraham and Frederick  D.  Aquino (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 157–72. 21  John Cassian, The Conferences, trans. Boniface Ramsey, Ancient Christian Writers 57 (New York: Newman Press, 1997), 14.1.2, 1.10.5; see also 1.2.1–3; henceforth cited as Conf. 22  Conf. 18.2.1; see also 18.3.1–2. 23  Conf. 2.13.2; see also 2.10.1, 2.11.6–7; 2.14.3.

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42  Training Spiritual Perception Within the context of ascetic training, a high premium is placed on acquiring first-­hand perceptual knowledge. For Cassian, experience plays a fundamental role in the process of learning spiritual truths. ‘No one can understand the truth and power of this except the person who has perceived the things that are being spoken about with experience as his teacher’.24 The point here seems to be that without the relevant first-­hand knowledge, one lacks the requisite epistemic insights concerning what it is like to live out the spiritual life. The aim is not only to acquire true beliefs (and avoid false ones) about spiritual perception (though these are important goals) but also to become aptly prepared to make the relevant progress towards the ultimate end—perceptual knowledge of God. However, the point is not to trump all learning with an appeal to experience or to a way of life. In fact, Cassian rejects the claim that experience (or longevity in practising the ascetical life) alone necessarily results in reliably formed perceptual judgements, especially since not all appeals to experience are equally valid and sufficient for making spiritual progress.25 For example, some may be misled by excessive zeal or they may lack the required discernment for rendering apt judgements concerning the employment of spiritual practices for a particular end. Thus, the work of knowing how to become better spiritual perceivers includes a social (inter-­subjective) dimension; it is in and through a relationship with others (e.g. spiritual authorities) that one learns how to become a better spiritual perceiver.26 The assumption is that one’s insights alone are insufficient for gauging one’s progress and for properly deciphering the contours of spiritual perception. Instead, the training of spiritual perception has an inter-­subjective process of evaluation. This process provides safeguards against trusting or relying solely on one’s own perceptual judgements. A precondition to the training of spiritual perception, as well as the process of fostering relevant safeguards, is the cultivation of a pure heart. Forming a habit of sustained attention is the substance of a pure heart, considering how often and easily the mind can be distracted from God. Along these lines, purity of heart enables one to become more attentive to things divine and to maintain a ‘constant awareness of God’ (e.g. ‘constant and uninterrupted perseverance in prayer’, ‘contemplation of God in perpetual purity of heart’).27 What and how we perceive is grounded in the formation of a stable and properly disposed habit of mind. Accordingly, the ‘mind must be restrained from all dangerous wandering and straying, so that thus it might gradually begin to be elevated to the contemplation of God and to spiritual vision’.28 As Columba Stewart points out, ‘Time and dis­ cip­lined effort are required to restrain the human mind’s natural attraction to the

24  Conf. 3.7.4; see also 14.18. 25  ‘Therefore we should not follow in the footprints of all the elders whose heads are covered with grey hair and whose long-­life is the only thing that recommends them’ (Conf. 2.13.2). 26  Conf. 2.10.1–2; see also 2.11; 16.11.1. 27  Conf. 9.8.1, 10.10.2. 28  Conf. 9.3.2.

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Frederick D. Aquino  43 stimuli that come from all directions.’29 Consequently, ascetic training involves learning how to cultivate ‘steadfastness of heart’ and thus ‘keep the mind’s whole and entire attention fixed on God’.30 Ascetic training of spiritual perception includes the relevant virtuous and contemplative practices. In this respect, the cultivation of a pure heart (an inner stability of this sort) requires immersion in practices such as fasting, vigils, and meditation. These practices are ‘tools of perfection’ that are taken up for the sake of ‘cleansing the heart’ and thereby acquiring a transformed habit of mind.31 We engage in these practices ‘so that we may be able to acquire and keep a heart untouched by any harmful passion, and so that by taking these steps we may be able to ascend to the perfection of love’.32 As we will see, these practices are ‘undertaken in order to prime the conditions for the maturation of purity of heart, and their value is determined’ by the virtue of discernment.33 Purity of heart, for Cassian, is an inclusive concept, two features of which are especially relevant for our discussion.34 One feature is the formation of a stable, tranquil, and properly disposed mind.35 Understood in this way, purity of heart involves scrutinizing and cleansing improper motives and affections and redirecting them towards ‘spiritual things’.36 The kind of formation envisioned here does not call for a renunciation of our humanity; instead, it seeks liberation from false desires and thoughts. Love of wisdom means living and acting in accordance with the truth. It also means figuring out whether what we believe and think tracks with the world-­outside of our thoughts and desires. In this respect, purity of heart is not a return to some innocent state but rather the cultivation of a more discerning habit of mind.37 More exactly, purity of heart plays a crucial role in developing a positive orientation towards (or deep desire or love for) cognitive states such as illumination, contemplation, and the vision of God as well as fostering a steady pursuit of them.38 29  Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 44. See also Conf. 1.5.2–3. 30  Conf. 10.14.3. 31  Conf. 1.7.2–3; 1.10.1; 10.10.8; 10.14.1. 32  Conf. 1.5.4; 1.7.1; see also 10.10.8. 33  Christopher J. Kelly, ‘Cassian’s Hermeneutics: Purity of Heart and the Vision of God’, in Tarmo Toon (ed.), Patristic Theories of Biblical Interpretation: The Latin Fathers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 129. 34  On the connection between purity of heart and biblical interpretation, see Kelly, ‘Cassian’s hermeneutics: purity of heart and the vision of God’, 109–30. 35  Conf. 1.5.4; 1.7.4; 1.15.1; 7.6.3; 9.2.1; 9.6.5; 19.6.5; 19.11.1. Cassian’s notion of purity of heart seems comparable to Evagrius’s notion of apatheia. As Stewart, Cassian the Monk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 42, points out, purity of heart ‘embraces Cassian’s many other metaphors such as ‘“tranquility”, “contemplation”, “unceasing prayer”, “chastity”, and “spiritual knowledge” ’. 36  Conf. 1.22.2; 10.7.3. 37  Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979), 126, says as much: ‘I don’t think purity is mere innocence . . . I take it to be something that comes either with experience or with Grace so that it can never be naïve.’ 38 William Harmless, Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (Oxford University Press, 2004), 390, rightly points out that Cassian ‘routinely links purity of heart with tranquility of mind’ and thus treats heart as synonymous with mind.

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44  Training Spiritual Perception Purity of heart certainly entails the formation of an alert, stable, tranquil, and properly disposed habit of mind. However, this is not enough; a person can have this sort of habit of mind but lack the capacity to perceive (recognize) salient connections. In other words, a discerning heart (a second feature of purity of heart) is equally crucial to the process of improving our perceptual capacity (recognition) and to achieving our proper end—perception of divine things. Not all sensations and information are equal, nor are they necessarily truth conducive. As a result, we need to learn to perceive things with proper salience. As a gift of grace, discernment is a regulatory intellectual virtue that is foundational to the process of mapping the spiritual life and of making more refined perceptual judgements. Discernment certainly requires the human capacity to be open to the divine, but its cause is divine grace. Cassian claims that it is supreme and primary among all the virtues. This stems from the fact that discernment is ‘the source and root of all the virtues’ and ‘the begetter, guardian, and moderator of all virtues’ and thus ‘no virtue can either be perfectly attained or endure without’ it.39 So, the precondition of discernment is the cultivation of a properly formed habit of mind (e.g. purity of heart); training and experience are necessary for forming and strengthening an ascetic habit of mind. Though ascetically formed perception is shaped by background beliefs, dispositions, and so on, there still is a basic distinction between the perceptual and the conceptual. In this respect, there is a crucial distinction between the givenness of the divine presence and the human reception (or recognition) of it. As we have seen, the process of perceiving the divine is fallible and complicated. This is precisely why spiritual perception must be properly trained and why there need to be intersubjective safeguards. As a result, this feature of purity of heart entails the capacity to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant sensations and thereby consign the latter to the periphery of one’s awareness.40 Cassian’s assumption here is that in turning one’s ‘gaze’ inward, all of the ‘secret places of our heart, therefore, must be constantly scrutinized and the prints of whatever enters them must be investigated in the most careful way’.41 Without a properly formed and discerning heart, our thoughts and actions are obscured, ‘wrapping them in the blindness of vice and the darkness of confusion’. Alternatively, a discerning heart, ‘fortified by true judgment and knowledge’, perceives rightly, ‘casts light’ on all of a person’s ‘thoughts and actions’ such as moral blindness and self-­deceptiveness, and wisely determines what must be done to remedy the situation at hand.42 The claim here then is that insofar as one possesses purity of heart, one will be able to ‘pierce through the maze of subtleties, ambiguities, illusions, contradictory feelings, etc., which so crowd in upon us, in order to see God transparent in life. Furthermore,

39  Conf. 2.4.4; 2.9.1; 1.23.1. 41  Conf. 1.22.2; 10.6.1.

40  Conf. 1.5.2–3; 10.9.1. 42  Conf. 2.2.5–6.

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Frederick D. Aquino  45 not only do spiritual persons perceive the presence of God in what appears good, but they also perceive the potential for good in all that is not yet good’.43 As we have seen, engaging in the relevant practices is clearly an important part of acquiring deeper levels of spiritual perception. For Cassian, discernment is a fundamental component of trained perception. That is, a stable and discerning habit of mind is needed to determine how these practices are to be exercised properly and how they best contribute to acquiring the relevant goals. Some, for example, say the best route to spiritual perfection ‘consists in pursuing fasts and vigils’, while others see solitude as the best way. However, these proposals are bound to fail if they lack or are not regulated properly by a discerning habit of mind, especially since it enables one to avoid excesses (e.g. inflexible rigour/ ab­stin­ence, unreflective zeal, self-­righteousness, uncritical claims to divine revelation/illumination) and ‘teaches’ one rightly how to ‘proceed along the royal road’.44 However, purity of heart is not the ultimate end. Instead, the cultivation of a pure heart is to be pursued for the sake of acquiring a greater epistemic state, namely, the kingdom of heaven in which God will be perceived and ‘grasped by a pure vision’.45 Consequently, the quest for the vision of God is at the heart of Cassian’s account of the spiritual life. It is the ultimate goal towards which the pure in heart seek to make progress (‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God’, Matt. 5:8). Spiritual perception is progressive, and thus it has degrees of achievement. In other words, the various levels on which one is able to sense the presence of God depends upon the extent to which one’s perceptual capacities have been purified and thus properly trained.46 It is clear in Cassian’s thought that spiritual perception has an eschatological orientation insofar as the ultimate goal is direct perceptual knowledge of God. All the same, the point here is not necessarily to ‘defer beatitude to the afterlife’ but to get a ‘glimpse’, however brief, limited, and tentative, of ‘heaven on earth’.47 Those who long for ‘the continual awareness of God should be in the habit of meditating on it ceaselessly in [their] heart, after having driven out every kind of thought, because [they] will be unable to hold fast to it in any other way than by being freed from all bodily cares and concerns’.48 For example, a person engaged in contemplative practices, sustained by a pure heart, can experience a foretaste of beatitude. As it were, the aim is ‘to possess the image of future blessedness in this body and as it were to begin to taste the pledge of  that heavenly way of life and glory in this vessel. This, I say, is the end of all perfection—that the mind purged of every carnal desire may be elevated to

43  Francis Kelly Nemeck and Marie Theresa Coombs, The Way of Spiritual Direction (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1985), 43. 44  Conf. 2.4.4. 45  Conf. 1.15.3; see also 1.8.2–3; 14.2. 46 See Conf. 10.6.1. On the progressive nature of spiritual perception, see Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), esp. ch. 8. 47 Harmless, Desert Christians, 389; see also Stewart, Cassian the Monk, 47. 48  Conf. 10.10.2.

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46  Training Spiritual Perception spiritual things, until one’s whole way of life and all the yearnings of one’s heart become a single and continuous prayer’.49 The pure of heart become able to perceive ‘the divine, heavenly, spiritual, invisible, future, and hidden things that are all the more real for their elusiveness to ordinary means of perception’.50 The scope of spiritual perception, then, is not to be restricted to an eschato­ logic­al vision. Contemplation, for example, includes indirect and direct modes of perception: But the contemplation of God is arrived at in numerous ways. For God is not known only through wondering at his incomprehensible substance, because that is still concealed in the hope of the promise, but he is clearly perceived in the grandeur of things that he created, in reflecting upon his justice and in the as­sist­ance provided by his daily providence—namely, when we consider with most pure minds [emphasis mine] the things that he has accomplished with his holy ones over the course of generations . . . There are also other innumerable things of this sort to contemplate, which come to our minds (where God is seen and grasped by a pure vision) in accordance with the character of our life and the purity of our heart.51

With this in mind, spiritual perception is progressive insofar as the relevant training helps one to improve one’s capacity to perceive the divine in and through other things and thus creates a stable path to a fuller vision of the divine. In a helpful but more limited sense, one may perceive the divine in and through nature, exemplars of holiness, and scripture.52 For example, ‘we practice the frequent reading of and constant meditation on Scripture, so that we may be open to a spiritual point of view . . . so that the mind which has been stretched to its limits may not taste earthly things but contemplate heavenly ones’.53 In another but more ultimate sense, one ascends from nature, scripture, or spiritual exemplars to ‘the vision of God alone’ and feeds on ‘the beauty and knowledge of God alone’.54 In terms of perceiving God, Cassian’s distinction here may be comparable to William Alston’s distinction between indirect and direct perception. The former seems to mean that a person perceives the divine in and through something else (e.g. nature; scripture; exemplars) and the latter means that God is ‘directly presented or immediately present’ to a person.55 So, one’s awareness of divine things unfolds in step with a gradual transformation of our perceptual capacities.56

49  Conf. 10.7.3. 50 Stewart, Cassian the Monk, 48; see also 56. 51  Conf. 1.15.1. 52  Conf. 1.8.3; 1.15.1; 14.1.2. 53  Conf. 1.17.2. 54  Conf. 1.7.2–3; 1.8.3. 55 William Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 21. 56  See Mark Wynn, Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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Frederick D. Aquino  47

Implications and Challenges What Cassian seems to be saying is that the antecedent formation of a properly oriented and stable mind is indispensable to the process of training spiritual perception and thereby making progress towards the ultimate goal—the beatific vision. So, any possibility of making progress towards and acquiring the relevant epistemic goods such as contemplation, spiritual knowledge, and the beatific vision depends on the ‘character of our life and the purity of our heart’.57 As we have seen, for Cassian, different levels of spiritual perception depend upon the extent to which one’s perceptual capacities have been purified and transformed. Moreover, one has a pure heart insofar as one is positively oriented towards (or loves rightly) one’s proper end—the kingdom of heaven. The formation of this acetic habit of mind comes down to clarifying what in fact one identifies with and for what or whom one has a deep and abiding desire.58 Spiritual perception, then, is improved by the relevant ascetic training. A focused, attentive, and discerning habit of mind puts one in a better position to perceive God. The formation of a stable and properly disposed habit of mind transforms the way in which one perceives God, self, others, and the world. It is in and through the formation of a pure heart that new patterns of salience with respect to the presence of God emerge.59 One perceives the divine on the account of the manifestation of this ascetically formed character trait. A critical question is whether this kind of trained perception necessarily leads to a kind of brainwashing or confirmation bias. Does the envisioned ascetic training simply reinforce or confirm one’s beliefs, while giving disproportionately less consideration of alternative possibilities? In one sense, the issue largely comes down to a matter of reliability. That is, what matters is whether such training increases (rather than decreases) our reliability in terms of acquiring true rather than false perceptual judgements. Good training is the kind that improves our spiritual perception rather than making it worse or the kind that makes one more likely to get things right. It, then, certainly seems reasonable to say that if such training enables a person to hone his or her perceptual capacities and achieve the relevant cognitive goals, then the charge at hand does not necessarily apply. ‘Far from interfering with the goal of reliability, experts in the relevant domain have more justified perceptual beliefs than novices. The expert who identifies a bird as a pileated woodpecker is more justified in this perceptual judgment than the 57  Conf. 1.15.3. 58  On the notion of a positive orientation, see Jason Baehr, The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. ch. 6. For a good discussion of the epistemic significance of the distinction between the auxiliary and constitutive functions of virtue, see the recent discussion between Jason Baehr and Ernest Sosa in Mark Alfano (ed.), Current Controversies in Virtue Theory (New York: Routledge, 2015), 62–87. 59  On the notion of restoring salience, see Wynn, Renewing the Senses.

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48  Training Spiritual Perception novice, who is simply guessing’.60 As we have seen, trained perception happens in various domains, and so the fact that such ‘training is required before certain sorts of perceptual experiences occur in no way implies that those experiences are determined entirely by that training and not by any independent reality’.61 Improving our perceptual capacities can serve a positive role in training one to perceive things rightly. Since we learn to enhance our perceptual capacities in other domains, it should be no surprise to hear that undergoing the relevant virtuous and contemplative practices is crucial to perceiving things divine. As Caroline Franks Davis points out, ‘it should be no more worrying that we must undergo exercises of purification and quieting of the mind and body before we are likely to have a mystical experience than that we must have our eyes open and in good working order and not be distracted by other precepts and thoughts if we are to have a visual perceptual experience of a small object in front of us’. Such training ‘can tune subjects to an aspect of reality they are normally “set” to perceive and enable them both to perceive new features and to discriminate finer degrees of one feature’.62 In another sense, the kind of selective attention entailed in the training of spiritual perception requires inter-­subjective safeguards.63 This is precisely why relying on experienced and recognized guides of spirituality is crucial to making progress along the way. On the one hand, the cultivation of virtue can result in fine-­grained perceptual judgements concerning things divine. On the other hand, selective attention can become problematic when it overlooks information that is inconsistent with our antecedent training, beliefs, desires, and expectations. In this case, the resultant perceptual beliefs and judgements are less likely to be true.64 Thus, we need a robust set of virtuous and contemplative practices as well as guides that challenge naïve or uncritical claims. In other words, we need communal safeguards of discernment to ensure that one’s own perceptual judgements concerning things divine are not simply the confirmation of one’s antecedent beliefs, desires, and so on.65 As we have seen, ascetic formation, sustained by a pure and discerning heart, seeks to identify and root out the kinds of desires and beliefs that hinder or distort the process of perceiving God.

60  Jack, Lyons, ‘Circularity, Reliability, and the Cognitive Penetrability of Perception’, Philosophical Issues 21/1 (2011): 306. Lyons, 305, adds that the issue here is ‘whether the process is one that makes perception worse or better, where “worse” and “better” are truth-­linked notions’. See also chapters 1 and 10 in this volume. 61  Franks Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience, 157. 62  Franks Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience, 157. 63  On this point, see Aquino, ‘Spiritual Formation, Authority, and Discernment’, 164–8. 64  On this point, see Bodenhausen and Hugenberg, ‘Attention, Perception, and Social Cognition’, and Lyons, ‘Circularity, Reliability, and the Cognitive Penetrability of Perception’, 300. 65 See Conf. 2.5.1, Mark McIntosh, Discernment and Truth: The Spirituality and Theology of Knowledge (New York: Herder & Herder, 2004), 34–9, and Chapter 5 by William Abraham in this volume.

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Frederick D. Aquino  49

Conclusion This volume aims to make theological and philosophical sense of the phe­nom­enon of spiritual perception. It also seeks to make progress towards spelling out a robust and constructive account of spiritual perception. As this chapter has shown, recent work on trained perception is refreshing and is deeply relevant to the scope and nature of this volume. So, the time is ripe for bringing to bear more explicitly and more constructively recent work in perception on the topic of spiritual perception. In this chapter I have drawn attention to the general phenomenon of perceptual perception. In particular, I have shown how recent work on this topic helps us to make constructive sense of the process of ascetically trained perception, especially informed by the thought of John Cassian. More specifically, I have unpacked and developed the connection between the cultivation of a pure heart and spiritual perception. As we have seen, Cassian envisions the training of spiritual perception more in diachronic (over the long haul) than in synchronic (at a specific point of time) terms. In this respect, he does not take a time slice approach to the task of forming a perceptually ready and discerning habit of mind. Accordingly, the expectation of ascetic formation is not to be presented with a full-­blown map of the spiritual life or a picture that captures all of the relevant features of the divine in one perceptual experience. Instead, the training of spiritual perception is progressive and transformative in nature. In other words, there is a distinction between basic and acquired perception. Our basic (or ordinary) perceptual capacities need to be transformed through a set of virtues and practices. This kind of distinction is not unusual, especially when we look at the difference between low and high levels upon which different people perceive things (e.g. the difference between a trained bird watcher and a non-­trained person). As John Cottingham rightly points out, ‘our cognitive grasp of reality, what we know and understand of the world, often depends in crucial respects not just on what the world is like, but also on what we are like: how our sensibilities are cultivated and attuned, what we pay attention to, what distractions and temptations we have learned to set aside, how earnestly we persevere in the quest for sincerity and integrity, and how our perceptual powers are refined through experience’.66 So, it should not surprise us that the ‘progressive transformation of the self ’s response to the divine through a lifetime of practice, purgation and prayer’67 will be different than the person who is coming at this for the first time. That is, ‘our perception of God, and thus too our grasp of doctrinal verities, does not occur on a flat or procrustean bed, but is appropriately open to its object only to the extent 66  John Cottingham, ‘Saints and Saintliness’, in William J. Abraham and Frederick D. Aquino (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 79. 67 Coakley, Powers and Submissions, 136.

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50  Training Spiritual Perception that the faculties have been progressively purified’.68 In the case of Cassian’s account of spiritual perception, purity of heart plays a key role in fostering a ­stable and discerning habit of mind, and so it is not surprising that various degrees of perceptual judgements correspond to the level of perceptual readiness. Consequently, the training of spiritual perception requires deep immersion in a set of practices, materials, processes, and people over the long haul. An im­port­ ant aspect of the training of spiritual perception, then, involves focusing on the complex and inextricable relationship between the cultivation of a stable and properly disposed habit of mind and the different levels of spiritual perception. As a result, a reliably formed and trained spiritual perception is able to distinguish between salient and peripheral pieces of information and make the relevant progress towards the vision of God. This kind of trained spiritual perception (perhaps something more like bird watching than ordinary perception) is conditioned by a robust set of virtuous and contemplative practices. Although these virtuous and contemplative practices play an indispensable role in the spiritual life, they cannot, as Columbo Stewart points out, ‘bring one to perfection. Offered to God in the right spirit, however, they can provide the opportunity for God to confer the grace needed to complete the human effort (Inst. 12.14.2)’.69 Notwithstanding, the virtues and practices that shape the training of spiritual perception are diverse, and so we have only scratched the surface in terms of focusing on the connection between purity of heart and spiritual perception and by taking up all the relevant theological and epistemological issues. One could also explore the same kind of question concerning virtues such as attentiveness, love, and humility, and in so doing enlarge our understanding of the inner workings of spiritual perception. How in particular does each virtue guide and shape the training of spiritual perception? Greater clarification on a case-­by-­case basis is needed. Thus, it will take analysing the structure, aim, and role of each virtue to figure out the relevant category on which each fits. It is my hope that this chapter will provoke further reflection and development towards the constructive task at hand.70

68 Coakley, Powers and Submissions, 136. 69 Stewart, Cassian the Monk, 78. Cassian carefully and painstakingly emphasizes the necessity of grace in the Conferences (e.g. Conf. 2.4.4; 2.9.1; 1.23.1) and the ‘the danger of confusing ascetical means (and thus human effort) with their theological end, achievable only with the constant help of God. Cassian was very much aware that one of the great monastic dangers is focusing too intently on structures and practices, losing sight of both dependence on God and the obligations of charity toward others’ (19). 70  Thanks to Paul Gavrilyuk, John Cottingham, Michael Van Huis, and Taylor Bonner for comments on earlier versions of this chapter. Thanks also to participants in the Spiritual Perception Symposia, organized by Paul Gavrilyuk and Frederick Aquino, in San Antonio and at Abilene Christian University.

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4 Value Perception and Spiritual Perception in Max Scheler Mark K. Spencer

Spiritual perception is the human ability to perceive God, to be aware of God in a direct, non-­inferential way, either through the mediation of creatures (which I call ‘sacramental perception’) or directly, without such mediation (which I call ‘personal perception’).1 An account of these forms of perception, and a defence of the claim that we can experience them, requires grasping how spiritual perception is related to other forms of perception and experience, differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate spiritual perception, and explaining why some fail to engage in spiritual perception. One account that accomplishes these tasks is the phenomenology of value perception pioneered by Max Scheler, according to which we perceive not only sensible qualities and physical things but also ‘values’, qualities by which things have importance or make normative claims upon us. Guided by value perception, we are able to engage in spiritual perception. First, I present Scheler’s phenomenology of value perception. I then develop a Schelerian account of spiritual perception on the basis of that phenomenology, showing how this account meets the requirements given above. Finally, I draw on other phenomenologists to expand on and critique Scheler’s account of spiritual perception. Throughout this discussion, I emphasize the personalistic dimension of a Schelerian account of spiritual perception. By calling this account personalistic, I mean that it emphasizes that spiritual perception is a relation between created and divine persons, involving not only knowledge but also other aspects of persons, including our emotions, bodies, and ethical relations. This corrects deficiencies in accounts of spiritual perception that seem to consider it just as a cognitive act in which one gains some information about God.

1  This distinction resembles that between direct and mediate perception made by William Alston, Perceiving God (Ithaca: Cornell, 1991), 22.

Mark K. Spencer, Value Perception and Spiritual Perception in Max Scheler In: Perceiving Things Divine: Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual Perception. Edited by: Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802594.003.0004

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52  Value Perception and Spiritual Perception in Max Scheler

Value Perception Through feelings we perceive things as bearers of value (or importance).2 For example, we feel that a tool is useful for some task, that an athlete exudes vitality, or that a saint is holy. We experience values as properties belonging to objects, by virtue of which they have importance and call for some response. Indeed, on Scheler’s view, we only attend to anything at all because we first feel its value; to feel that something is valuable is to experience it calling for some response, such as attention. Understanding values (as opposed to just being affected by and responding to them) requires that we practice phenomenology: we must attend to what is essentially given in experiences of values, setting aside all non-­essential features of experience. For some content to be essentially given is for it to be unchanging across a variety of bearers. For example, there is an essential content to the look of the colour red or the taste of a peach, which does not vary in different bearers, and which we can consider on its own, in abstraction from its bearers. Similarly, we can consider the precise feel of beauty, vitality, or another value in itself, which includes the experience of their calling for a particular response.3 This, like all phenomenological accounts, is an account of what is given in ex­peri­ ence, not of the causal mechanisms underlying such feelings and objects. Scheler distinguishes two kinds of feelings. First, there are feeling states, such as hunger or depression, which do not disclose anything about objects in the world exterior to us. Second, there are intentional feelings, through which we perceive values and thereby experience a claim placed on us.4 (In this chapter, when I call an act ‘intentional’, I mean that it is directed to some object, not that it is done on purpose.) To each value corresponds an opposite disvalue, which calls us to be averse to its bearer; the preferability of value to disvalue is not based on induction, but is given intuitively, in a feeling.5 All of our other intentional acts—such as acts of sense perception, intellectual intuition, representation, volition, or striving— are guided by a prior value feeling (which Scheler also calls value perception).6 Our first conscious awareness of anything is a perception of its value, and these values, even if we do not directly attend to them, guide our attention to various features of that thing. For example, one who only feels utility values and not aesthetic

2  Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-­Formal Ethics of Values, trans. Manfred Frings and Roger Funk (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 12–16. Another value phenomenologist, Dietrich von Hildebrand (Ethics (Steubenville: Hildebrand Press, 2020), 201ff.), shows how perception of values includes value-­response: the value objectively calls for a certain response, but I must make this response, and I only grasp the value as it really is when I make my response. For example, I only fully grasp the beauty of a painting when I respond to it with the wonder it elicits in me. In this way, value perception includes the elements needed for proper spiritual perception. 3  Scheler, ‘The Theory of the Three Facts’, in David Latcherman, trans., Selected Philosophical Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 202–87. 4 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 62–8, 263–4; ‘Ordo Amoris’, in Selected Philosophical Papers, 101. 5 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 105. 6 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 201.

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Mark K. Spencer  53 values can consider features of an artwork in virtue of which it is saleable, but not in virtue of which it is art. The claim that value perception is our first experiential access to a thing is not meant to contradict the fact that, causally prior to value perception, things in the world cause events in our sense organs.7 Rather, the claim is that we do not fundamentally or normally experience things as value neutral physical entities or sense data—for example, we don’t first see pure colours and then add in value— but as value laden entities; normal perception includes not only the senses but feelings as well: normal perception is an act of the whole person, involving mul­ tiple powers. Seeing things neutrally, as we might do in scientific inquiry, actually requires a prior value perception, in which we are guided by the perception of values like utility—that is, we must feel things to be primarily useful (rather than, for example, as beautiful or holy) in order to take them to be free of those other values.8 On Scheler’s account of experience, when I feel a value, I do not just feel that particular value and its call for a response, but I also feel it to be more or less important than other values. For example, I might not just feel the beauty of a painting, but I might also feel that this is a higher, more important value than its utility on the market. I would then experience the normative demand of its beauty, which calls for appreciation and admiration, to be of greater weight than its utility. The hierarchical height of a value is felt in an act that Scheler calls ‘preference’.9 Each person subjectively prefers certain values to others. But Scheler contends that there is, in addition to each person’s subjective value hierarchy, an objective hierarchy of values. The fully virtuous person’s preferences disclose this hierarchy. Since values are given in feeling, no reasoning or decisive argument can be given for the claim that a certain hierarchical ordering of values is ob­ject­ ive­ly correct. However, evidence can be given for Scheler’s claims, though all such evidence is subject to critique, given the great possibilities for self-­deception and blindness to value. One value is higher than another when being guided by the former gives a deeper contentment than being guided by the latter. One value is higher than another when one can order more of one’s life around the former, but the latter only affects one superficially or momentarily. Higher values (like holiness) can be participated in by many people, and must be received as gifts, rather than produced by our own actions, while lower values (like pleasure) are more restricted to an individual’s experience and can be generated at will.10 The lowest values are values of utility, the values that belong to something inasmuch as it is a means to a further end. Second are values of pleasure, and third are

7 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 58–60, 121, 201–3 and ‘The Theory of the Three Facts’. 8  Scheler, ‘Ordo Amoris’, 118. 9 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 89. 10 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 90–100; Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (New York: Harper, 1960), 339–40.

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54  Value Perception and Spiritual Perception in Max Scheler what Scheler calls vital values: the values of strength, health, vivacity, athletic prowess, and so forth. Fourth are spiritual values, which include aesthetic values, moral values of right and wrong, and intellectual values belonging to truth and falsehood. The highest value is the religious value of holiness, with its corresponding disvalue of profanity. To feel that something is holy is to feel that it is of absolute importance and places absolute normative claims on us, beyond any claim made by moral goodness; it is to feel that that thing is numinous, awe-­inspiring, worth the dedication of one’s entire life. What holiness is beyond this will be worked out over the rest of this chapter.11 Lower values are relative in importance to the higher values—that is, we cannot fully understand and recognize the importance of a lower value unless we understand and recognize the importance of higher values; this requires that we be ready to sacrifice the lower values for the sake of the higher, and recognize that lower values exist for the sake of the higher.12 There are people who are exemplars at acting on the basis of each level of value: for example, the artist is exemplary at acting on the basis of aesthetic values and the saint at acting on the basis of holiness. To know how to perceive some value and act on its basis, one must look to the relevant exemplar.13 This objective hierarchy is the objective ‘order of love’ (ordo amoris),14 but each person also has his or her own ordo amoris, his or her own order of preferring values. This is a fundamental intentional stance towards values that gives one the ‘reasons of the heart’ that are the basis for one’s actions.15 To grasp a person’s ordo amoris is to understand him or her fully, for it is to understand the stance that is basis of all of that person’s acts. But one’s ordo amoris can change as one becomes more virtuous or vicious. As we have seen, to feel a value is to feel its call for some response. All persons feel the experientially given normative call of values, but one only grows in virtue if one responds well—that is, if one thinks through the calls one has perceived, evaluates which calls are to be given more weight, and responds accordingly. Good responses to values lead to growth in virtue, which in turn allows one to perceive values and their call more correctly. Correct value perception involves bringing my own ordo amoris into line with the objective one; indeed, it is each person’s task to match his or her ordo with the objective one.16 For this reason, as I have said, the perfectly virtuous person is the only one cap­ able of fully seeing why the true hierarchy of values is true. But this matching of subjective to objective ordo does not occur in the same way in all virtuous people.

11 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 104–10. 12 Scheler, Eternal in Man, 76, 93, 169, 346; Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. Lewis Coser and William Holdheim (Milwaukee: Marquette, 1998), 130ff. 13 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 572–5, 585; Eternal in Man, 341. 14  Scheler, ‘Ordo Amoris’, 99. 15 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 101, 111–17; ‘Ordo Amoris’, 116–17. 16  Scheler, ‘Ordo Amoris’, 98.

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Mark K. Spencer  55 Rather, each should feel him or herself to have a unique vocation, a personal ‘value-­essence’ or way in which he or she is called to respond to values, albeit in line with the objective order. In some cases, this will involve the discovery of new values that no one has ever felt before. The facts that in some cases only one person or culture can perceive a given value, and that a given value only exerts a call on one person or culture, does not detract from its objectivity, for it is still given as borne by the object, exerting a normative claim, with a place on the hierarchy of values.17 Love is the most fundamental intentional feeling; it is not a response to perceived values but an act of intentional feeling in which one opens oneself to and seeks to realize the full range of values, especially in oneself and in other persons. To love another person is also to intend that he or she should realize the highest value, holiness. Indeed, one cannot feel the value of holiness without a fundamental stance of love.18 By contrast, to hate is to close oneself off to values; this renders one incapable of perceiving features of the world that can only be perceived by being guided by higher values, and this in turn leads one to have a false or partial worldview.19 On Scheler’s phenomenology, persons are never presented as examinable objects of intentional acts, but only as subjects of acts or acting ‘spirits’. (In this section, I just present Scheler’s own phenomenological views; the claims of this paragraph on persons and how we can only grasp them through love will be subjected to phenomenological critique in the last section of this chapter.) To be a person is to be a subject that ‘flows’, as it were, into acts in which one reveals oneself, but is never exhausted in any of those acts, for one can always perform further acts. Since persons are pure subjects, never able to be considered as objects, Scheler contends that we grasp them only when we, through love, act and experience along with them, and, by this sympathetic co-­experiencing, experience their value essence. On his view, an experience of persons is never a matter of taking in cognitive information about them, reducing them to an object I possess, but is a sui generis experience that requires me to act and experience along with the ­other.20 We experience persons, including God, only through love. A person is not identical to his or her mind (that is, a stream of psychic experiences and powers of thinking, reasoning, and intuiting) or body, or to anything that can be regarded as an object (though we can, motivated by hatred or failure to attend to higher values, regard the person as these objective things).

17 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 489–91; ‘Ordo Amoris’, 103; Eternal in Man, 207. 18 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 109, 260–1; Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1970), 161. 19  Scheler, ‘Ordo Amoris’, 118, 127. 20 Compare to the view of Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 1969), on which I only perceive another person as such when I feel myself called to ethically serve him or her.

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56  Value Perception and Spiritual Perception in Max Scheler Rather, I act and experience ‘in’ my body, ‘in’ my mind, or in the world, but I experience myself as a subject apart from but acting in all these ‘spheres’.21 Each such ‘sphere’ is an experientially given realm of possible objects of experience. Scheler contends that we experience each such sphere a priori, as an essential kind of experience that is more foundational than any particular instance of that kind. For example, each person experiences him or herself to be essentially related to the sphere of the ‘Thou’—that is, each person experiences him or herself as capable of relating to other possible persons, even when we are not relating to any particular person. Likewise, we experience the sphere of the ‘Absolute’:22 apart from having any representation of God or relation to an actual God, persons feel themselves to be in relation to a possible realm of experience defined by absoluteness (that is, by being the foundation on which the entire world depends) and by the value of holiness. Even if one does not believe there is an actual God, one can still feel this to be a possible sphere of experience.23 Because of our a priori relationship to this sphere, Scheler defines persons as essentially religious beings.

Value Perception and Spiritual Perception We can understand spiritual perception in the context of value perception and of these spheres. In this section, I show how Scheler’s phenomenology of value perception allows us to understand both spiritual perception in relation to other experiences, and the failures of spiritual perception, meeting the requirements given above for an account of this sort of perception. We have seen that on Scheler’s view, we are aware of spheres of experience, including the sphere of the Absolute. Any member of this sphere would be something existing in itself, the basis for the existence of all other things, placing an absolute claim for obedience upon us due to its holiness, which is the value of beings set apart from others and of pure love.24 We can believe that this sphere is empty—that there is no actual Absolute being—if we fail to develop our love, or if we have a false ordo amoris and so are blind to the value of holiness and to those things to which it leads us to attend. But our normative orientation as persons is towards the highest value, holiness.25 We are not first aware of God as an existing

21 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 386–402; Nature of Sympathy, 167–8; Eternal in Man, 312–15; ‘Idealism and Realism’, in Selected Philosophical Papers, 300–3. 22 Scheler’s talk of the ‘Absolute’ is influenced by nineteenth-­ century Romantic and Idealist ­the­ology, but can, I think, be understood from that theology, so long as we understand his talk of the Absolute just to commit us to the idea of a personal reality that is distinct from the world and on which the world depends. 23 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 109, 294–5, 288–93, 588–90; Eternal in Man, 62, 162. 24 Scheler, Eternal in Man, 165, 168. 25 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 96.

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Mark K. Spencer  57 being;26 rather, through love, we are first aware of the sphere of the Absolute (that is, this possible form of experience) as a sphere of absolute holiness.27 All religious experiences and representations of God derive from feeling this possibility of a being of absolute holiness (rather than from reasoning from the world to God),28 as does our perception of the person of God. But we have already seen that, on Scheler’s phenomenology, we cannot be aware of persons as objects. Rather, we are only aware of other persons by acting and experiencing along with them. Hence, on Scheler’s view, to perceive God just is to experience the world with God as He experiences it, participating in His love for the world and for Himself. To those that baulk at the idea of God experiencing the world, Scheler contends that it is constitutive of personhood as such to experience a world, that is, what is other than oneself. By His love, God grasps the world in its entirety, and on Scheler’s view, to perceive God is to share in that world-­encompassing love. As I have said, I shall challenge Scheler’s contention that we only perceive persons in this ‘co-­experiencing’ way and never perceive them as objects. But I nevertheless contend that this account of spiritual perception by co-­experiencing is Scheler’s most important contribution to our understanding of spiritual perception. Whereas some other accounts of spiritual perception portray it as grasping objectively given contents belonging to or revealed by God, Scheler insists that it is fundamentally a matter of one person relating to another, and that it cannot be separated from this personalistic context. If a purported instance of spiritual perception is not at bottom personal perception—perceiving or ‘co-­experiencing’ with God—then it is not spiritual perception in the fullest sense. Such an instance would not be guided by feeling the value of holiness, which always belongs fundamentally to persons, and so would be a sort of value deception.29 Personally perceiving God requires that we are open in love to the highest values, but it also requires that God freely reveals Himself, since persons, being unable to be grasped as an object, are only known by their own free self-­revelation.30 For one person to perceive another as person, they must act and experience together, and this requires that each be open to the other in love, and that each reveal him or 26  On Scheler’s view, the existence of any being is given in the experience of its resistance to our efforts or drives. 27  Scheler draws on the proto-­phenomenological work of Rudolf Otto. 28  Formalism in Ethics, 293–5, 588–90; Nature of Sympathy, 169–70. However, Scheler does not deny that we can give reasons to think that God exists: for example, ‘person’ and ‘world’ are correlative notions, so there cannot be one without the other. But reality presents itself as a world exceeding any created person’s world of experience, so there must be an Absolute person who has all of reality as its world. See Formalism in Ethics, 397; Eternal in Man, 62, 186. 29  It is possible to know true things about God, and even to perceive God in some sense through other values than holiness, such as beauty, without perceiving God through holiness. One could hate God and still perceive God in some ways, but one cannot perfectly perceive God as the personal reality He is without loving Him. Any perception of God not as personal is, to some extent, a deception: it is to perceive things about God, but not to perceive God as such. Compare with William Abraham’s Chapter 5 in this volume. 30 Scheler, Ressentiment, 120.

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58  Value Perception and Spiritual Perception in Max Scheler herself to the other. Since God is love, and so strives to bring about the highest values in all others, He cannot fail to reveal Himself. So, any failure to perceive God is due to a false ordo amoris and blindness to the value of holiness in the created perceiver.31 One example of personal perception of God is a particular experience of ‘conscience’ described by Scheler. The experience of conscience that Scheler describes is not the experience of applying universal ethical principles to particular cases, that is, the sort of conscience that can be well or badly formed. Rather, the ex­peri­ ence that Scheler describes is an experience of being called to complete obedience to God, of standing under His judgement, and (most importantly) of seeing ourselves and the moral values and disvalues in ourselves as He sees them.32 This particular experience of conscience, like other religious acts like acts of faith and adoration, presupposes the feeling of holiness. To feel God’s holiness (and so be open to the personal perceptual experience of experiencing oneself or the world as He experiences them) includes an experience of God’s nearness or remoteness. When God is felt to be near, one feels this through the intentional feeling of bliss, and when God is far away, one feels this through the intentional feeling of despair.33 Feeling the value of holiness also leads to sacramental perception.34 This ex­peri­ence presupposes that one has had personal perception of God, on the basis of which one sees the world ‘in the light of God’,35 ‘according to’ God’s vision of it.36 In this light, one perceives created persons as images of the Absolute Person, and so as capable of bearing the value of holiness. One can also thereby perceive non-­personal things as bearers of a ‘symbolic value’ of holiness—that is, the holiness that properly belongs to persons is felt to be concentrated in them sacramentally (analogous to how the value of honour belonging to a nation comes to be felt to be concentrated in its flag). This is not a mere symbol of the value of holiness; if that were the way we perceived things sacramentally, the value itself would be felt to be entirely elsewhere, in God, and just signified by things.37 Rather, the value of holiness, with its numinousness and absoluteness, is felt to be present in the sacramental thing (such that it is appropriate to direct religious acts towards that thing), but present symbolically, such that the thing has holiness by way of standing in for what has holiness properly. Non-­personal things can also be felt to have 31 Scheler, Nature of Sympathy, 164; Eternal in Man, 334–6. 32 Scheler, Eternal in Man, 35, 60–1. 33 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 108–10. 34  ‘Sacramental’ here should be understood as the presence of God in creatures inasmuch as He acts in and towards them, and is thereby signified by them, not in the more robust sense of Sacraments like Baptism or Eucharist, which causally effect what they signify. 35 Scheler, Nature of Sympathy, 161; Eternal in Man, 62, 194. 36  Paul Gavrilyuk, in Chapter  2, draws on phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-­Ponty’s essay ‘Eye and Mind’, which describes how we can, by looking at artworks, see the world according to the vision of the artwork. Something similar happens in sacramental perception. 37  Scheler does not deny that we can perceive things in this way, but this is not the sacramental perception to which he wishes to draw our attention.

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Mark K. Spencer  59 a ‘technical value’ of holiness, that is, perceived to be means to holiness, directing our attention towards participating in God’s personal acts.38 To be guided by a value on the hierarchy leads one to take up a worldview. For example, being guided by the value of usefulness leads to the modern scientific or economic worldview and being guided by vital values leads to the worldview of one of the heroic cultures, such as that of medieval Europe. Since each value is relative to the ones above it, each worldview is relative to and contextualized within the ones above it. The saint, the one guided by the value of holiness in an exemplary way, alone sees the world as it most fundamentally is, because the saint alone is guided by the objective ordo amoris and has no value blindness. The saint participates in God’s experience and acts out of the firm foundation of the bliss that he or she has by being guided by holiness. On Scheler’s view, bliss is the basis, not the reward, of virtue. To feel and be guided by holiness is to feel a deep-­seated bliss, a confidence and joy in God that shapes all aspects of one’s life. Scheler contends that it is the hallmark of the saint that even when he or she undergoes extreme physical or psychological suffering, this underlying bliss, whereby the saint experiences the holiness of God, remains, giving unity and direction to his or her life. The saint’s love for others is a bestowal of goods on them out of the richness of bliss.39 Although spiritual perception is not a form of reasoning, having certain beliefs and performing certain practices are necessary to engage in spiritual perception, both in the sense that these beliefs and practices prepare one to spiritually perceive and, in the sense, that these beliefs and practices are involved in the act of spiritual perception itself. Scheler does not think, for example, that children have a pure value perception that then is corrupted by learning or influence. Rather, our perceptions, including our value perceptions, must be informed by concepts and beliefs. This is not to say that we explicitly consider these concepts when we perceive. Rather these concepts and beliefs are ‘functionalized’—that is, they guide our perception so that we either perceive more accurately or more blindly.40 Although all cognitive acts are guided by prior value perception, cognitive acts yield beliefs, which in turn can help us better attend to and act on the basis of 38 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 103–4, 109; Eternal in Man, 165. Hildebrand describes this ex­peri­ ence in more detail, focusing on how in feeling holiness to be symbolically present in non-­personal things, one feels the great disparity between the thing that bears this value, and the lofty value made present and expressed in it. See Dietrich von Hildebrand, Aesthetics, trans. Brian McNeil, vol. 1 (Steubenville: Hildebrand Project, 2016), 162–3, 166, 211. 39 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 359, 367–8; Ressentiment, 65–70. 40  Scheler, ‘Ordo Amoris’, 103, 118; ‘Idealism and Realism’, 312. cf. John Greco, ‘Perception as Interpretation’, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 72 (1999): 229–37. See also Frederick Aquino’s Chapter  3. This idea of functionalization is further expanded by Dietrich von Hildebrand, who describes how some beliefs can become so deeply ingrained in my consciousness that I see all things in their light, even when I am not considering them. Correct beliefs must ingrain themselves in me in this way if I am to have veridical spiritual perception. See Dietrich von Hildebrand, What is Philosophy? (New York: Routledge, 1991), 84–8. See also chapters 1–3 in this volume.

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60  Value Perception and Spiritual Perception in Max Scheler value experiences. But false beliefs, which can themselves result from a false ordo amoris, can inform one’s perception such that one is blind to certain values. Many worldviews are based upon an inversion of values, often founded in an attitude of ressentiment towards higher values. This is an inability to bear those higher values, and this leads to a preference for lower values, and thus to a blindness towards higher values.41 For example, some cultures prefer utility values to religious values; a member of such a culture might see religious acts as only worthwhile inasmuch as they bring about some goal, such as a more successful, happy, or equal society, rather than feeling the call of religious values in itself.42 Overcoming such blindness requires functionalizing correct beliefs in one’s perception, which then lead one to correctly perceive values. But one can only take on these beliefs through first apprehending their value, and that requires the intervention of someone, such as a saint, who can reveal the true value hierarchy,43 or through a sudden epiphany in which one is struck by a value in a new way. Merely learning new information without the encounter with value and with other persons is insufficient for the necessary conversion. Achieving a true ordo amoris and functionalizing true beliefs depends upon ascetic practices that move one from a bodily worldview (based on values of utility, pleasure, or vitality) to a worldview based on the value of holiness. This shift to God’s perspective requires denying oneself those things to which bodily values lead us to attend, in order to focus on higher values.44 Ascetic practices also intensify one’s experience of both higher and lower values, which leads to a more accurate perception of things, more virtuous action, and greater happiness. We often take on worldviews held in general by those in our culture, nation, religion, and other groups to which we belong; the concepts and beliefs of that worldview then become functionalized in our perceptions, so that we tend to perceive things as those in our groups perceive them. For this reason, perfected value and spiritual perception requires that one be part of the right community; on Scheler’s view, this is the Church.45 Persons experience themselves both as 41 Scheler, Ressentiment, 61, 112; Formalism in Ethics, 306. 42 Scheler, Ressentiment, 103, 121ff. 43  One might object that some saints, while genuinely holy, are incapable of properly perceiving lower values, like aesthetic values, and so the saint as such seems incapable of guiding us to see the true value-­hierarchy. But Scheler’s claim is not that the saint sees all values equally well. Rather, as we have seen, there are exemplars at acting on the basis of each level of value; the saint is just the exemplar for the highest value. The saint best sees two things: the value of holiness itself and the proper rank of each kind of value in the hierarchy—that is, the saint best sees how much each level of the hierarchy is to be loved, relative to holiness. But it does not follow from this that the saint sees the values at each level of the hierarchy in themselves better than anyone else. The artist sees aesthetic values in themselves (and has the knowledge that follows from that value perception) far better than the saint, but the saint best knows those values’ worth relative to holiness. 44 Scheler, Eternal in Man, 92. 45  By ‘the Church’, Scheler at least means the universal Christian Church, but sometimes he means the Catholic Church, though he never defends the claim that this is the referent of ‘the Church’.

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Mark K. Spencer  61 individual persons and as members of a ‘collective person’. The latter is presented experientially as an acting subject that is a community, which encompasses the individual: I experience the subject of some of my acts (such as acts of collective responsibility) not as this individual person but as a community, such as my family or nation, that encompasses me and other members.46 A collective person is not a conglomeration of or experientially derived from individual persons,47 but is given as a person, a subject of acts, in its own right. Nor is the individual person experientially derived from a collective person, as if we always experienced ourselves as mere parts of a community. Like spheres of experience, collective persons are fundamental ways in which persons are given to themselves. Both communal and individual persons are endowed with conscience and are responsible before God.48 Like individual persons, collective persons act towards the various spheres, can be open to the highest values, and are primarily organized around or oriented to the realization of some value family. The Church is organized around the value of holiness inasmuch as it is oriented to collective salvation, that is, an experience of love for all finite persons. As the highest value, holiness can be shared among persons more than any other value. Since to be a person is to ex­peri­ence oneself as an individual and as a collective person, one can only perceive all things ‘in the light of God’ if one is part of the collective person that relates to holiness, that is, the Church. So, spiritual perception is fully possible only in this community, and only there can I be fully aware of my salvation or sinfulness before God.49 Both individual and collective persons experience themselves both as ‘social persons’ (that is, they experience themselves as relating to other persons and as being members of collective persons) and as ‘intimate persons’ (that is, they ex­peri­ence themselves as transcending all responsibility for others, experiencing themselves in solitude from all other persons and in intimacy with God). The experience of oneself as an ‘intimate person’ alone with God is a crucial aspect of Scheler’s view of spiritual perception. Communal persons distinct from the Church, such as nations, as well as individual persons, experience this intimacy with God. They thereby can perceive themselves, apart from any reference to the Church, as co-­experiencing with God. However, though one can only have this sort of spiritual perception apart from the Church, full co-­experiencing with God and full spiritual perception is only possible in the Church.50

46 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 102–3, 299–300, 519–22; Eternal in Man, 57–8; Ressentiment, 114–15. 47 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 543. 48 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 534. 49 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 545–54. 50 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 561–4; Eternal in Man, 317. Compare this to the account of spiritual perception given by Thomas Gallus; see Boyd Taylor Coolman, ‘Thomas Gallus’, in Paul Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley (eds), The Spiritual Senses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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62  Value Perception and Spiritual Perception in Max Scheler

Expansions on a Schelerian Phenomenology of Spiritual Perception Scheler provides a well-­developed phenomenological framework for an account of spiritual perception, but we can retain this framework while revising his account so as to describe the full range of our actual experience more accurately than he does. In this section I outline some ways in which this could be done. First, Scheler’s account of the hierarchy of values requires development. On Scheler’s view, values fall into a strict hierarchy: higher values, like holiness, can give us the perception and motivation we need to properly order lower values, and lower values are properly felt as relative to higher values. But lower values do not, on this view, share in higher values—that is, Scheler never considers the idea that usefulness itself could be felt to be beautiful, or pleasure to be holy. Rather, on his view, only bearers of values (such as objects, persons, events, and states of affairs) share in values. But we do often feel not only the value of things, but the value of values.51 For example, we might, in watching a great athlete be aware of his or her vital values, the way in which he or she is a bearer of health, strength, and athletic prowess. But these values themselves (his or her vitality or prowess in themselves) and not just the athlete, have a beauty of their own—and, I contend, at least in some cases, a holiness of their own, at least in the sense of the symbolic value of holiness. There is a gracefulness to vitality that makes present the giver of all good gifts;52 we can perceive this especially if we functionalize beliefs about God’s presence in all things in our perception. Lower values can be bearers of higher values, especially aesthetic and religious values, and take on a sacramental significance. The saint, purified by ascetic practice and having functionalized true religious beliefs, perceives not only all things, but all values, in light of God. The saint can see even in mundane things a sacramental holiness—and, if Scheler’s account of worldviews is correct, thereby see these things as they truly are.53 This brings us to a second area that could be expanded phenomenologically. On Scheler’s view, one can only feel holiness properly speaking in another person, that is, another subject, which is distinct from the person’s body. Bodily acts can symbolically but not properly bear the value of holiness. Furthermore, on Scheler’s view, when one perceives holiness and the world ‘in the light of God’, God (or saints or the value of holiness itself) does not causally affect me—that is, He does not make anything come to be in me by His power. Rather, by feeling the value of holiness, I have a feeling of bliss, and out of this feeling, I imitate God and so become holy. Despite his personalism, Scheler focuses on intending values, 51  See Hildebrand, Aesthetics, 84–9. 52  See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Oliver Davies, et al., eds, The Glory of the Lord, v. 4, The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989), 90–100. 53  My claim is not that all lower values are holy or beautiful, but that some are and should be felt to be so.

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Mark K. Spencer  63 rather than their bearers: to be a religious being is to be related primarily to the value of holiness, not to real bearers of that value, even God, nor to being causally affected by those bearers. But this is problematic, both from an orthodox Christian point of view on which God acts upon me in giving me grace in virtue of Christ’s merits and thereby transforms not only my spirit but also my body, and from a phenomenological point of view.54 When we grow in holiness we do not primarily perform spiritual acts out of an interior sense of bliss. Rather, we experience ourselves being shaped and transformed by another, especially in transformative ascetical and mystical experiences like the dark night of the soul.55 To perceive God is not just to feel His holiness and then to share in His experience and acting towards the world; rather, it is to feel oneself acted upon by Him, both in Himself and through things. Contrary to Scheler, we do not normally start the religious life with a rich interior sense of bliss, out of which we lovingly act towards others; sometimes, we start the religious life with an interior sense of emptiness, and find ourselves being acted on and filled by God. Furthermore, this experience of transformation in holiness is frequently bod­ ily.56 Scheler denies that persons as such are bodily and that the value of holiness can be had by bodies (except symbolically) because he holds the erroneous principle that if something is what one is, then one cannot know or love it objectively as such. Since we can know our bodies as objects, our bodies cannot be what we persons are. On Scheler’s view, we ‘enact’ our spiritual acts—that is, we ‘become’ them or ‘flow’ into them, such that we are wholly taken up in them (though still in such a way that we can always perform further acts). We merely ‘live’ our bod­ ily acts—that is, we act into our body, such that it is a sphere of experience, but is always as different and at some experienced distance from ourselves. But this is phenomenologically inaccurate. We can experience our bodily acts to be as much our own as our spiritual acts, as occurs in sexual experiences, acts

54  See the summary of Karol Wojtyła’s critique of Scheler in Michael Waldstein, ‘Introduction’, in John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline, 2006), 69–77. Scheler is rightly concerned about making values mere means to my betterment, but his students Dietrich von Hildebrand and Aurel Kolnai showed that we can love goodness, and responding to values can improve me, without either implying that I respond to values just for the sake of my betterment. In fact, I am bettered most if I respond to values for their own sake. This is a theme throughout Hildebrand’s Ethics. See also Francis Dunlop, ‘Kolnai’s Dissertation’, in Zoltan Balazs and Francis Dunlop, Exploring the World of Human Practice (Budapest: Central European University, 2004), 269. 55  Scheler would explain these experiences as an intensified attending to the objective guilt in me, but coupled with and motivated by a deeper sense of my value and bliss. See Eternal in Man, 54–60. This fails to attend to the perception of God causally acting upon me to transform me. 56  See Boyd Taylor Coolman’s Chapter 6 for a discussion of eschatological bodily transformation, as well as Mark Spencer, ‘Perceiving the Image of God in the Whole Human Person’, Saint Anselm Journal 13 (2018): 1–18.

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64  Value Perception and Spiritual Perception in Max Scheler of affection, or liturgical acts like genuflecting, processing, or bowing.57 Here, the bodily acts are not symbols of what is properly a spiritual act; rather, the bodily act is itself directly experienced as a personal act. I experience the subject that I  am not as something standing back from a body though living in it, but as a subject that is irreducibly bodily.58 If this is right, and if persons are the proper bearers of values of holiness, then the human body could itself be a bearer of holiness in itself. Perception of Christ’s body or a relic of Christ’s cross, or even perception of an icon, a statue, or a saint’s bodily act of charity, can transcend the level of being a symbolic bearer of holiness, and be a proper bearer of holiness in its own right. Furthermore, bodily ascetic practices are not just instrumental in bringing about a more accurate value perception but are an experience of being transformed so as to act and experience with God in one’s bodily acts. Late in his career, Scheler developed the idea of bodily affective drives, which move us blindly towards some desired good; the experience of a drive is an ex­peri­ence of exerting effort. By their resistance to these drives, we feel the real existence of things.59 On this later view, our experience of the world is fundamentally a complex of spiritual or personal experiences of values and feelings, and of blind drive experiences. Indeed, Scheler came to contend on the basis of this twofold foundation to personal experience that reality itself fundamentally is made up of personal spirit and blind drives. So fundamental did Scheler take these two experiences to be that, in a departure from classical theism, he argued that even God must have both spirit and drives in Him.60 We can perceive God’s spirit by the feeling of the value of holiness, but we perceive God’s drives by what Scheler called the ‘Dionysian reduction’.61 Scheler does not describe this method of ­phenomenological reduction in any detail, but the idea is that one would set out of one’s conscious awareness all consideration of intelligible or sensible contents, or of values, and just immerse oneself in a pure feeling of drives, which Scheler describes as a pure feeling of vitality or erotic impulsion—that is, an experience of life without any consideration of the value or meaning of life. This, then, seems to be a concession to the observation that we can perceive God in a bodily way. Aside from the fact that this is problematic in terms of Christianity and of classical theism, this ‘concession’ also overlooks the way in which the body can be

57  This is phenomenologically defended by e.g. Jean-­Luc Marion, In Excess, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), ch. 4; Levinas, Totality and Infinity, section II. 58  This does not exclude the possibility of also having experiences in which I experientially stand back from or transcend my body. See Mark Spencer, ‘Habits, Potencies and Obedience’, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 88 (2014): 165–80. 59 Scheler, Eternal in Man, 191; ‘Idealism and Realism’, 318. 60 Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (New York City: Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy, 1961), 88–95; Scheler, The Constitution of the Human Being, trans. John Cutting (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2008), 154–62. 61 Scheler, Constitution, 99–100, 401–3.

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Mark K. Spencer  65 genuinely personalized,62 such that one can perceive holiness in a bodily way, without recourse to immersing oneself in blind, amoral drives. The body, no less than the spirit, can be a proper locus of personal acts, into which I wholly ‘flow’ and am ‘engaged’. For this reason, the body can be perceived, after the necessary asceticism whereby one distances oneself from what is non-­personal (no longer construed as everything bodily), as a locus of properly personal values, including the value of holiness. So, a body (primarily that of Christ, but secondarily those of the saints) can be proper objects, not merely in a symbolic sense, of adoration, worship, and other religious acts. This goes not only for the individual person’s body but also for the collective person’s ‘body’, that is, the living community of believers and their bodily acts of charity and of liturgical worship. This would affect the way that we ought to engage in spiritual perception with regard to these bodily realities, and the sorts of religious attitudes of love that we ought to have towards them: love is properly directed to persons, but if what I have argued here is correct, this will include an irreducible bodily component, and not merely be directed to the person as spirit. This brings us to the third and final area where a Schelerian phenomenology of spiritual perception needs revision. We have seen how, on Scheler’s view, we cannot perceive a person, including God, as an object of awareness but only as a subject through experiencing and acting with them. Furthermore, we cannot, on his view, perceive God in creatures such that we come to our first perception of God through them; rather, we must start with a personal perception of the Absolute and its holiness, and come to sacramentally perceive God in light of that. But this seems phenomenologically inaccurate. Persons, including ourselves, are presented both as subjects and as substances, stably existing things capable of being partially examined in themselves and having natures of their own.63 Scheler errs in thinking that all consideration of things as objects is objectification, reducing those things to only being objects of my intentional acts; since persons are themselves intentional actors, he reasons that they can only be grasped in themselves if we do not subordinate them to our acts. But I can intentionally experience something as an object without reducing it just being an intentional object, for some acts allow me to grasp a reality as it is in itself. When I come to know another person, it is not purely via a sympathetic co-­acting and co-­experiencing, whereby I know that person’s ordo amoris. It also involves coming to know that person in him or herself—and not just the properties of his or her body or mind (such as that person’s beliefs or desires). Rather, it involves coming to know that person, in his or her unique content, as a sort of object, through a sort of intuition, motivated 62  Dietrich von Hildebrand, In Defense of Purity (Steubenville: Hildebrand Press, 2017), 29. 63  For phenomenologically motivated arguments that being a subject does not exclude being a substance, see Mark Spencer, ‘Aristotelian Substance and Personalistic Subjectivity’, International Philosophical Quarterly 55 (2015): 145–64. This is affirmed by value phenomenologists like Hildebrand and Wojtyła.

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66  Value Perception and Spiritual Perception in Max Scheler by love. Spiritual perception can involve such an intuition of God, as well: we come to really see what He is like, in Himself,64 in personal perception, as well as how He has revealed Himself to be through creatures, in sacramental perception. Just as we do not start the spiritual life with an interior sense of bliss out of which we act, so we do not always begin spiritual perception with an experience of the sphere of the Absolute and its holiness, in light of which we see all things religiously. Rather, we sometimes start with an awareness of creatures motivated by values lower than the religious (such as aesthetic or moral values) and then come to feel the value of holiness and perceive God through these values, based on our act of lovingly being open to higher values. This is a sacramental ascent to God through things. None of these corrections are meant to take away from the immense helpfulness of the phenomenological framework for spiritual perception that Scheler provides. This framework shows us both how we can perceive God personally and through creatures sacramentally, all motivated by the feeling of the value of holiness. It shows how spiritual perception and the feeling of the value of holiness fit into a larger framework for our experience, and it shows why spiritual perception can sometimes fail through value blindness. In this way, Scheler’s phe­nom­en­ology meets the desiderata for a plausible philosophical theory of spiritual perception.

64  This could be understood in various ways. It could be understood, inspired by Thomas Aquinas, as a grasp of God’s essence, or, inspired by Gregory Palamas, as a contact with God but not with His essence. The core claim is that one can see God in some sense, as the object of one’s intentional act of spiritual perception.

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5 Radical Evil and Spiritual Perception William J. Abraham

In this chapter I want to explore the role that radical evil plays in distorting our spiritual perception and thus inhibiting, undermining, or damaging our ability to discern the truth about God. En route to this I shall assert claims about the dis­ cernment of radical evil that I shall not pursue in any detail. Thereby, I shall signal that much work needs to be done both philosophically and theologically in a wider inquiry into the ontological and epistemological questions that deserve attention. I am all too aware that in this chapter I am merely touching the hem of a very intricate garment. Thus, most of my efforts will be preliminary. However, I intend to show how recent insights in contemporary epistemology and empirical psych­ ology can pave a way forward in thinking constructively about radical evil and spiritual perception. Taking into account the preliminary nature of this chapter, C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters will provide a fruitful, though fictional, proposal of radical evil that is illuminated by these current waves of thought.

Spiritual Perception and Contemporary Epistemology One way to think of epistemology is to think of it as the critical investigation of capacities and practices related to the normative supervision of our intellectual life. Think of the epistemic goal of our intellectual life as that of securing and sus­ taining those beliefs that we value as true, justified, warranted, rational, coherent, judicious, cogent, within our rights, substantiated, and the like.1 The terms of our evaluation can remain relatively open; for the most part we work informally with background assumptions about relevant criteria of evaluation. The crown jewel of our efforts, to be sure, has been named as the attainment of knowledge. Much effort has been exerted to make ‘true’ and ‘justified’ the hallmarks of knowledge. However, truth and justification are but two of our coveted desiderata as we think of the normative supervision of our intellectual life with respect to our beliefs. 1  We could also add the goal of eliminating those beliefs which are false, unjustified, unwarranted, and so on.

William J. Abraham, Radical Evil and Spiritual Perception In: Perceiving Things Divine: Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual Perception. Edited by: Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802594.003.0005

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68  Radical Evil and Spiritual Perception Moreover, we can live with contested accounts of what counts as knowledge ­without due strain. It was surely a mistake to make the self-­conscious justification of our beliefs according to universally agreed upon methods or criteria of assess­ ment the exclusive test of knowledge.2 Different subject matters require quite dif­ ferent tests. We do not engage in geometrical reasoning to test the claims about the whereabouts of our dog; nor do we resort to experiments in chemistry to check claims about whether Caesar crossed the Rubicon. History differs from physics; exegesis of Paul is not the same as archaeological investigation. Human capacities and judgement are inescapable across the board. My own preference is to embrace a vision of epistemology that focuses on the crucial place that normative human capacities and practices play in governing our intellectual activities. Put simply, human agents are incredibly complex truth-­ detecting organisms. They possess various capacities (memory, perception, and the like) that give them access to the past and present.3 They develop ingenious practices (deduction, arguments to the best explanation, and the like) that seek to track the epistemic desiderata already identified. They have varied powers of cre­ ativ­ity and imagination that lead them to think up fecund possibilities of ex­plan­ ation and understanding. They have a moral sense that allows discernment of good and evil (cf. Heb. 5:15). The bedrock conviction in play here is that even the coveted quest for ‘justification’ favoured in the modern period by forms of inter­ nalism depended on human judgement.4 The relevant deductions had to be con­ structed—precise, formal regulation was in this case rightly prized—and the ensuing inferences had to be tested for their soundness and validity. These actions depend crucially on basic or fundamental human capacities. In their own way, this insight or intuition has driven the recent emphasis on proper cognitive func­ tioning, reliabilism, particularism, theories of intellectual virtue, and their kin­ dred forms within the literature. The changes in epistemology over the last generation have created space for a wealth of important new material that has required the creation of a new subdis­ cipline between philosophy and theology that has been identified as the epis­tem­ ol­ogy of theology.5 Within this new subdiscipline, the retrieval and development 2  The problem, as developed in certain strains inspired by Descartes, was felicitously noted early on in the following comment by Cardinal Bossuet: ‘For on the pretext that one should admit only what one clearly understands – which within certain limits, is quite true – each person gives himself free­ dom to say: I understand this, I do not understand that; and on this sole foundation, one approves or rejects whatever one likes . . . . Thus is introduced, under this pretext, a liberty of judging which involves advancing with temerity whatever one thinks, without regard for tradition.’ Quoted in Patrick Riley, ‘Introduction’, in Nicholas Malebranche, Treatise on Nature and Grace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 73. 3 For a very important study of the significance of personhood for epistemology, see Simon J. Ervine, Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 4  This judgement applies equally to classical foundationalism. 5  See William J. Abraham and Frederick D. Aquino, eds, The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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William J. Abraham  69 of spiritual perception as pivotal in securing well-­ordered beliefs about God, is no surprise. To be sure, this does not mean an end to debate. However, this is ever the case in philosophy; the research agenda on spiritual perception continues to run its course.

The Many Faces of Evil Once we put human agency in its proper place in epistemology, we create the space for exploring how radical evil affects our pursuit of knowledge of God. The general point in play initially is that human agents are inescapably social in nature and depend on other agents for the formation and health of their intellectual lives. We worry about those who get their information mainly from Facebook; more seriously we become alarmed when our children fall into the hands of, say, racist or Nazi cults.6 The issue I want to explore here is the possible effects of rad­ ical evil on our theological beliefs, including those that are formed as a result of the operation of our spiritual perception. At this point I take reference to spiritual perception in a broad sense. Thus it constitutes reference not just to rare and special occasions but to more mundane cases where one perceives, say, divine presence in the universe, in special revela­ tion in history, in providence, and in fitful awareness of the divine in worship and in the works of grace.7 For this reason I will be looking in part at texts that deal with this broader conception of spiritual perception. I speak of radical evil here as a place-­holder for discourse about the demonic. While this may allay the immediate resistance of some, I assume at this point that the relief may only be short-­lived. Talk about the demonic has the tendency to scare off serious inquiry.8 So be it; our interest is in paving the way elsewhere for a robust account of what may be at stake.9 However, it may help to ease our way into the topic in hand. Consider the fol­ lowing observation by Roger Scruton. 6  The depth of that dependence is well brought out by the crucial place of our communities in ­furnishing us with the very concepts we deploy so readily in our interaction with the world. 7 The broader conception shows up in an especially illuminating way in William  P.  Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), ch. 1. The narrow conception shows up technically in treatments of ‘gnosiology’. See, for example, Harry Boosalis, Knowledge of God: Ancient Spirituality of the Christian East (South Canaan, PA: St Tikon’s Seminary Press, 2009). 8  For an exception that proves the rule, see the brilliant work of Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Neiman takes up the important theme of how evil threatens human reason by challenging our ability to make sense of the world. She also brings out how the canon of modern philosophy by means of which we are initiated into the discipline conveniently ignores crucial philosophical texts which do not fit with more assured accounts of reason delivered to incoming students. 9  For a very fine study, see Shandon L. Guthrie, Gods of this World: A Philosophical Discussion and Defense of Christian Demonology (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2018).

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70  Radical Evil and Spiritual Perception We distinguish people who are evil from those who are merely bad. Bad people are like you or me, only worse. They belong in the community, even if they behave badly toward it. We can reason with them, improve them, come to terms with them, and, in the end accept them. They are made, like us, from ‘the crooked timber of humanity’ [Kant]. But there are evil people who are not like that, since they do not belong to the community, even if residing within its terri­ tory. Their bad behavior may be too secret and subversive to be noticeable, and any dialogue with them will be, on their part, a pretense. There is, in them, no scope for improvement, no path to acceptance, and even if we think of them as human, their faults are not of the normal, reliable, human variety but have another and more metaphysical origin. They are visitors from another sphere, incarnations of the Devil. Even their charm – and it is a recognized fact that evil people are often charming – is only further proof of their Otherness. They are in some sense, the negation of humanity, wholly and unnaturally at ease with the thing that they seek to destroy.10

Scruton is explicitly speaking here in terms of metaphor. We can in fact track four different ways in which discourse about the demonic functions. First, there is an expressivist use where demonic discourse is used to express hatred of enemies or critics. This shows up, for example, in the polemical interchange between Protestants and Roman Catholics during the Reformation. Much of this discourse could be classified as obscene, not least when it is used in the iconography that is developed.11 Second, there is a prescriptivist use where the speaker seeks to evoke similar responses from others, that is to cause the hearer to express hatred and intense opposition. The intention is to get others to share the negative evaluation of enemies and critics held by the speaker. Third, there is thus usage where the language of the devil and demons is to dramatize evil by treating instances of evil as inspired or brought about by alien agents who are out to harm human welfare. Inward impulses like lust, greed, anger, pride, vanity, and the like are treated as external agents assaulting the soul. Finally, there is the ontologically substantive use of the language of the demonic, where the Devil and his demons are con­ strued as genuine agents who work to thwart the purposes of God. We might say that in this case we are dealing with invisible personal agents or spirits, usually identified as fallen angels. They are creatures ontologically distinct from God who 10  Roger Scruton, On Human Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 134–5. Scruton develops a network of insightful contrasts between a bad person and an evil person. The bad person is guided by self-­interest; the evil person has selfish designs on others. The bad person’s motives are intelligible; the evil person’s motives are uncanny, inexplicable, even supernatural. The bad person is open to reason; the evil person is impervious to reason. In the case of the bad person, we are suspi­ cious and fearful; in the case of the evil person we dread them because they want to erase our will, freedom, conscience, and integrity; they seek to destroy our humanity and our souls. 11  Ample evidence for this can be found in Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther, Renegade and Prophet (New York: Random House, 2017).

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William J. Abraham  71 seek to harm God’s good creation, including human agents made in God’s image and destined for eternal life.12 This usage has enormous provenance across cultures in the pre-­modern period; and it shows up fitfully in contemporary literature.13 For the purposes of this chapter, I will leave aside the first two uses. What is at issue epistemologically is the phenomena in play when we speak of radical evil in terms of the demonic as indicated in the third and fourth senses just identified. The reason being is because the third and fourth senses suggest that deception undergirds the demonic intent to malform the human soul. Whether the demonic agent is dramatized as instilling and fostering vices (third sense) or is an onto­ logic­al­ly substantive entity seeking to harm the human’s progress towards eternal life (fourth sense), these senses capture the role demonic activity has in impeding the agent’s moral, spiritual, and intellectual journeys. Even then, I shall spend the bulk of my space working with the third sense, and that for the following reason. Against the stream of the currents of much contemporary philosophy (the issue is not discussed in mainstream philosophy given our conceptual formation in a secular society and academy), I take seriously the observation that folk across space and time have been well able to pick out demonic activity from other neigh­ bouring phenomena, especially, preternatural musings and mental illness. Thus I  think that ordinary people across space and time have the native capacity to perceive and identify demonic activity in the fourth sense noted above. However, this capacity is a very limited one, in the sense that the relevant reports make clear that we are at a loss on how best to describe the agents involved.14 It is as if we know, and know even with deep certitude, that we are dealing with demonic agents; yet we find ourselves at a loss for words. This is not at all unusual with moral and spiritual reality. It applies to cases where we want to speak of experi­ encing and encountering radical moral failure in our own lives and in others. It also applies in our efforts to describe our encounters with God. It is therefore not at all surprising that we fill out our descriptions of the demonic with content derived from sources other than our spiritual perception. Most naturally we turn to scripture, divine revelation, speculative reasoning, received tradition, the teaching magisterium, and the like. Thus, as other chapters in this volume have shown, cognition often factors prominently in our perceptual

12  For a very helpful overview, see Darren Oldridge, The Devil: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 13  Two recent texts come to mind: M. Scott Peck, Glimpses of the Devil (New York: Free Press, 2005) and Phillip  H.  Wiebe, God and Other Spirits, Intimations of Transcendence in Christian Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 14  Consider Frank S. Boshold, Blumhardt’s Battle: A Conflict with Satan (New York: Thomas E. Lowe, 1970), where he notes that Blumhardt mistakenly distinguished between evil spirits understood as demons and evil spirits understood as captive spirits of the wicked dead (endnote p. 61). This little volume is a remarkable first-­hand account of demon possession and exorcism as told by a Lutheran pastor in Germany in July 1838.

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72  Radical Evil and Spiritual Perception experiences.15 John Greco in Chapter 1, for example, proposes schema theory as a psychological model helpful for explaining how ‘higher-­level mental states can “shape” perceptual dispositions in various ways, by shaping expectations, influ­ encing attention, distributing salience, and the like’. Within the field of psych­ ology, schema theory posits that ‘cognition in general often involves heuristics known as “scripts” and “personae”.’16 Scripts impact our ‘social judgments and expectations’ while personae refer to the ‘personal characteristics and behaviors’ we expect of ‘stock characters’.17 For our purposes, suppose the perceptible event is an instance of demonic activity. Schema theory would suggest that one whose ‘script’ contains spiritual resources such as scripture, divine revelation, received tradition, and the teaching magisterium possesses a script that disposes the indi­ vidual to perceive this event as demonic. Furthermore, the persona of ‘demon-­ possessed person’ might also function as a kind of stock character for religious individuals that enables such persons to non-­inferentially perceive a person as demon possessed. On the other hand, someone with a different script might be disposed to misperceive a demon-­possessed person as merely schizophrenic. While schema theory provides a way to understand the relationship between cog­ nition and perception, it also allows us a way to conceive of the epistemic and perceptual consequences for someone who possesses bad scripts. Bad scripts, for our purposes, refer to those scripts which dispose one to perceive any event or object X incorrectly or incompletely. Thus, it is not just the case that a person who lacks the relevant spiritual scripts is unable to understand or believe the instance to be demonic; more to the point, it is the case that such a person would be disad­ vantaged in perceiving it as such.

Dulling Spiritual Perception It seems apparent that if one possesses bad scripts, then one is more liable to mis­ perceive certain objects or events. Alternatively, a good script would presumably enable one to perceive the object correctly. It also seems reasonable that if radical evil plays a role in fostering bad scripts, then it plays a concomitant role in in­hibit­ ing the proper function of one’s perceptual faculties. The challenge here can ini­ tially be captured by a review of the obstacles to proper belief-­formation that arise with the passions and sensations that well up within the human agent. In his Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis, for example, provides a rich anthropology illustrat­ ing these various obstacles. Lewis illustrates how demonic activity, whether

15  See, for example, Chapter 1 by John Greco. 17  See Chapter 1, p. 15.

16  See Chapter 1, p. 15–19.

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William J. Abraham  73 ontologically substantive or not, impedes the human’s progress in becoming a good moral, intellectual, and spiritual agent.18 Specifically, Screwtape often encourages Wormwood to deceive the individual through the target’s perceptual faculties. The idea is for Wormwood to mould his assigned human in such a way so that he is constantly misperceiving his fellow churchgoers, his mother, the virtuous life, and even God’s own presence. If the human is deceived into perceiving the world partially, as does a demon, then the human is won. Screwtape encourages Wormwood not to focus on spectacular sins; rather, Screwtape advises that it is in the small and mundane sins that Wormwood can effectively inculcate misperceptions within his target about self, world, and others. While spectacular sins may be advantageous in this effort, ‘the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts’.19 Thus, a primary goal of the demon is to subtly deceive the human into becoming the kind of person for whom spiritual content is not easily perceived. The demon wishes for the human to become a perceiver who, though encountering objects with spiritual content, is only able to perceive such objects as physical. As such, the demon’s task is not to take away the perceptible spiritual objects but for the human’s perceptual faculties to be bombarded by such objects and be unable to perceive anything spiritual about them. In other words, one task of the demon is to provide the human with bad scripts and personae. If we take schema theory into account, we may reasonably suspect that demonic deception functions both cognitively and perceptually. For instance, the cognitive aspect might be evident when a demon deceives a human into adopting faulty scripts. In this way, the available script will lead to false or incomplete per­ ceptual judgements. However, it may be the case that, over time, the perceptual faculty itself becomes dulled in terms of correctly perceiving the object. Thus, it may be the case that one’s constant employment of faulty scripts really does incline one to perceive the object in accordance with those scripts. Consider, for example, how a racist or Nazi cult perceives black persons or Jews. While these groups certainly have faulty and morally noxious schemas, it is also the case that their perceptions of these persons are flatly wrong. It is not just that they have been brought up in or are employing faulty schemas; moreover, it is the case their perceptual faculties have been dulled to the point where their misperceptions of these persons are in accordance with the bad scripts and personae they possess. Nevertheless, though their perceptions might fit their scripts and personae, we would rightly say their perceptions and the schema that informs them are not in

18  It is not at all necessary to agree with Lewis’s theology to appreciate his analysis; in fact, his work on temptation has secured appreciation across cultures and religions. One can simply substitute an alternative theology and make the necessary adjustments. 19 C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2001), 61; henceforth cited as SL.

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74  Radical Evil and Spiritual Perception accordance with reality. They are, quite literally, perceiving these people falsely. I take it these effects, the dulling of the perceptual faculties, to be similar in kind to the effects of radical evil on our faculties of spiritual perception. Through the fictional character ‘Screwtape’, C.S. Lewis highlights several ways in which demons may use deception to inculcate faulty scripts, dull the spiritual perceptual faculties, and foster misperceptions about the world. Lewis demon­ strates how deception can impact the way one views the church, relationships, virtues, and Christianity itself. Take, for example, a new convert. Once converted, the goal of the demons is to make him feel disappointed by church folk and to make everything as hazy as possible. This haze is evident when the human is deceived into perceiving his fellow church-­attendees through a false understand­ ing of Christian spirituality. So long as the target is deceived in this way, he will misperceive church members in accordance with his false beliefs. All the while, Wormwood must never let it enter into the target’s mind that his understanding of Christian spirituality is merely ‘pictorial’.20 In this way, when he encounters members who ‘sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes’, he will ‘quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous’.21 Disappointment arises when the individual’s pictorial rep­ resentation of Christianity is contrasted with the persons sitting beside them in the pews. Wormwood must be careful to make sure this disappointment is not directed towards the deficiencies in his own understanding but in the deficiencies of those in the pews unable to live up to the target’s understanding of authentic Christian spirituality. As a result, though the church members are Christians, the man never perceives them as such. Screwtape encourages Wormwood to extend this manner of thinking into the target’s personal relationships to induce a state of false humility. Wormwood is to get help from a colleague in order to make the target’s mother as irritating as pos­ sible, so that when the target prays for her, he is hyper-­spiritual, paying all atten­ tion to her soul and none to her rheumatism. Screwtape notes that ‘since his ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous’, Wormwood will likely find that the target ‘will, in some degree, be praying for an imaginary person . . .’. The goal is for Wormwood to ‘make that imaginary person daily less and less like the real mother . . .’.22 In this case, Wormwood is to use prayer as an instrument for fostering misperceptions by drawing a contrast between the target’s mother as conceived in prayer, and the mother herself as perceived by the target in their daily interactions. It is not that the human will be unable to physically perceive his mother; rather, the demonic intention is for the target to misperceive his mother as merely physical. In this way, the target’s attentiveness to the spiritual

20  SL, 6.

21  SL, 6.

22  SL, 12.

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William J. Abraham  75 well-­being of his mother’s soul in prayer will become disconnected with his treatment of her throughout the day. Meeting and forming new friendships also play a vital role in distracting the convert. These can induce him to develop a double life in which his vanity causes him to look down on his ‘“priggish”, “intolerant”, and (of course) “Puritanical”’ associates at church.23 Alternatively, his worldly friends can deploy flippancy and ridicule to deaden his intellect and make virtue look silly and unattractive. In the meantime, it is important to keep him from taking his guilt seriously, and to con­ tinue distracting him in prayer by leading him into trivialities rather than focus­ ing on God. The danger at this point is the possibility of a second and deeper conversion evoked by a direct encounter with the Enemy or by the enjoyment of real pleasures that lead to a fresh submission which enables him to find his true self in such submission rather than in bowing to the conventions of the World. When this happens, the crucial next move is to make sure he does not act out the consequences of his experience, so that his will remains disengaged. An add­ ition­al danger in the neighbourhood at this point is the possibility of genuine humility; the strategy now is to induce a note of pride in his humility or to sug­ gest a false modesty that undermines commitment to truth. The task is to keep the convert’s mind on himself, and, if possible, on contempt for others. Beyond this, success can be gained by riveting his mind on the future and by drawing him into alternative philosophies that ignore the significance of Eternity or the pre­ sent. The latter can be augmented by getting him to focus on criticism of the church, turning him towards warring parties within it and thus fostering hatred towards those who disagree with him over ecclesiastical fripperies. None of these ploys should inhibit the steady appeal to vice as a way to under­ mine the faith. However, the demon’s wish is not to remove the human’s desire to live a virtuous life but to misconstrue the object being desired. The intent is for the human to end up becoming vicious in their pursuit of virtue. Screwtape pro­ vides the example of a woman who is in the ‘care’ of a fellow demon colleague, Globose. In this example, the woman is very concerned with combatting the vice of gluttony yet is unaware of the ‘querulousness, impatience, uncharitableness, and self-­concern’ growing within her.24 The reason for this woman’s vicious demeanour is because Glubose has deceived the woman into believing that glut­ tony is merely about quantity. In doing so, when the woman says to the waiter, ‘Oh please, please . . . all I want is a cup of tea, weak but not too weak . . .’ she believes her request for a small portion combats gluttony when in reality her glut­ tonous disposition is on full display by demanding that every one of her requests be met. The aim is clear. The demon is to provide the woman with impartial views of virtue and vice so that she is unable to perceive herself as vicious. All the while,

23  SL, 52.

24  SL, 87.

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76  Radical Evil and Spiritual Perception the woman becomes precisely that which she seeks to avoid. She never realizes the ‘way in which her belly now dominates her whole life’.25 With this in place Wormwood can move on to tackle the challenge of chastity. The larger issue in this instance is to make a great deal about falling in love as the essence of marriage and thus undermine classical notions of ‘fidelity, fertility, and good will’.26 If the demon is able to persuade the human into believing that the feeling of ‘being in love’ is the foundation of marriage, then the human will come to believe that a marriage which has lost this feeling ‘is no longer binding’.27 Through instilling false notions of love, marriage is now perceived as a means to gratify selfish desires instead of pursuing ‘the good of another’.28 Similar to other ex­amples we have seen, the demonic intent is not to take away the concept of love from the target’s cognitive repertoire but to misconstrue it so that what the target misperceives as love is incomplete, inaccurate, and unfulfilling. By distorting the human’s understanding of love, the demon tries to make sure the target never experiences it. For though love involves the giving away of oneself for the sake of another, the deceived human will come to perceive such actions as too demand­ ing, painful, and involving far too much compromise. Unfortunately, though the target desires love; in reality, it becomes that which is most detestable to them. The same tactic is used to attack the target’s understanding of divine love, pro­ posing that it is really a disguise for something else rather than the genuine, disin­ terested love it is supposed to be. However, the general strategy is to deploy the concern about falling in love to ‘make the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible’.29 At the same time this obsession with falling in love can be turned to further good effect by encouraging peevishness driven by a sense of illusory en­title­ment. Chastity can just as easily be attacked by the target believing that human agents own their own body; it is his to do as he thinks fit and proper. By add­ition­al prodding this whole attitude can be directed towards God, turning God into yet one more item to be used for his own ends. Misunderstanding the love of God is to be bolstered by the target’s misunder­ standing of Christianity. At a deeper level the attack on the convert’s spirituality requires that he be drawn away from mere Christianity into forms of it that make a great to-­do about, say, Christianity and the New Order, or Christianity and Spelling Reform. Starting with the love of change that rightly arises from the rhythm of everyday life, the goal is to so dwell on the proper pleasure of novelty that he comes to hate the heart of the faith as boring and stagnant, all the while yearning for the fashions and vogues that crop up. So Wormwood is to pursue the general policy of ensuring that he will be distracted, joining with those who

25  SL, 88.

26  SL, 96.

27  SL, 93.

28  SL, 94.

29  SL, 107.

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William J. Abraham  77 decry the vices of which they are least in danger. Make them run about with fire-­extinguishers when there is a flood. Hence, ‘nonsense in the intellect may re­inforce corruption of the will’.30 Wormwood must also bear in mind that different phases of his target’s life— from youth through middle age and on to old age—will require their own kind of temptation. When he is young, inspire the illusion that Earth can be turned into Heaven by some kind of political scheme; in middle age, use prosperity to knit him to the world. Even then, there will always be room for a guiding of his emo­ tions, so that hatred can be turned into an attractive virtue. Every effort needs to be made to undermine courage and cultivate cowardice. There is also space for a direct assault on the emotions that makes him perceive reality as only physical while spiritual responses to reality are merely subjective. Regrettably, all this fine work is brought to an abrupt end when his subject suddenly dies and experiences ‘sheer, instantaneous liberation’.31 Poor Wormwood for his part is faced with becoming a dainty morsel for Screwtape. Lewis has in this remarkable medium provided us with an initial opportunity to take stock of our query. Note immediately the anthropology in play. Human agents are essentially concentric circles with fantasy in an outer ring, intellect in a middle ring, and will in the innermost ring. Through this work, Lewis has allowed us the opportunity to chart the various ways in which the human agent can be deceived from knowing the truth and turned towards falsehood. More spe­cif­ic­ al­ly, Lewis’s account allows for helpful speculation on the effects of evil upon one’s faculties of spiritual perception. We might catalogue some of the actions of Wormwood in a rough and ready way by the following taxonomy. Consider this list first: causing intellectual confu­ sion by encouraging fuzzy thinking, creating disappointment about church life, suggesting he forget the great truths of the faith and focus on party ideologies, making worldly and unbelieving friends seem attractive in their thinking and sensibility, keeping him from acting on his deeper repentance and conversion, suggesting he think of Christianity as a means to an end and not an end in itself, making him run after novelty at the expense of tested tradition, riveting his mind on the future, and unsettling him with conundrums about prayer and divine fore­ knowledge. Lewis is perhaps thinking like this. Get folk to entertain all sorts of potential falsehoods and half-­ truths about God, the church, themselves, the world, and whatever bears on the truth of Christianity; then lead them to believ­ ing these falsehoods and half-­truths; this in turn will undermine their wills, dull their faculties of spiritual perception, and undo their faith and trust in God.32

30  SL, 138. 31  SL, 172. 32  It would not be difficult to correlate this analysis with an analysis of the Fall in Genesis 3.

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78  Radical Evil and Spiritual Perception The second and third lists can be treated more briefly. The second focuses on the passions: working on a twisted obsession with food that masks the underlying analogy with gluttony, and tackling the emergence of sexual passion by providing a twisted vision of marriage that makes the role of the eye all important in observ­ ing other human agents as sexual objects. The third focuses on spirituality: in­du­ cing bad prayer habits, making the agent worry about loss of earlier ardour, undermining the attraction of virtue, masking vices like hatred as virtues, and working constantly to distract and make much ado about irrelevant trivialities. Lewis deliberately chose the genre of the demonic precisely because it brings out the deep inner unity between spontaneous reflection, the impact of inner pas­ sions, the effects of cultural-­social formation and ongoing relations with others, and the ingenuity, sophistry, and even the wickedness of the human intellect. He portrays the human intellectual situation as one not of neutrality but of a battle­ ground where it is extremely difficult to reach for and sustain the ultimate truth about God, ourselves, and the universe. In this environment, persuasive presenta­ tion of the truth and relevant arguments do indeed matter; however, their recep­ tion and continued commitment to the truth attained are deeply affected by other features of the human situation, namely, our inner desires, our struggle with goodness, our distorted fantasies, the impact of those around us, and the state of our emotions. Human agents in reaching for the truth have to reckon with these factors; and part of the challenge is that their negative impact is all too often hid­ den from us. No doubt this is one reason why Lewis deploys the language of the demonic; it captures the complexity of what is at stake in an engaging and ef­fect­ ive manner.33

Conclusion Where does all this leave us as far as the relation between radical evil and spiritual perception are concerned? Once we allow for the critical place of the proper func­ tioning of our intellectual and perceptual capacities in the search for truth, then it is clear, first, that these can be severely damaged by the influence of radical evil. It is equally clear, second, that there is no simple way of unpacking how exactly this happens.34 These observations stand whether we take radical evil in a deflationary way to indicate deep evil impulses and dispositions in the human agent or in a

33  Lewis, to be sure, was committed to an ontology which included the demonic, but this should not undercut the epistemological point at stake. Witty and dramatic narrative is surely one way to capture truths and develop our understanding in ways that cannot be presented in merely prop­os­ ition­al form. 34  I suspect that this applies as much to the original formation of our beliefs as it does to the preser­ vation of true beliefs. Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof. The Screwtape Letters are clearly focused on the undermining of the beliefs of the faithful.

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William J. Abraham  79 much more robust way as representing real spiritual principalities and powers hell-­bent on destroying our spiritual lives by undermining the truth about God, ourselves, and creation. Given my own orientation in epistemology as focusing on the capacities and practices of human agency, these observations strike me as important platitudes. Moreover, given that we function as whole persons in our intellectual de­lib­er­ ations, I see little to be gained by trying to isolate the impact of radical evil on our spiritual perception taken in isolation from all the factors that play a role in the perception of spiritual realities.35 Think of it this way. When we operate by means of our spiritual perception, we rely on conceptual resources already to hand. We depend on a host of background beliefs that are already in place. We are affected by the health of our bodies. We are influenced by all sorts of social factors that tilt us in one direction rather than another. We may take into account complex criti­ cisms before reaching any all-­things-­considered interpretation of our perceptual experience. We informally deploy various axes of epistemic evaluations which serve to regulate the depth of assurance and commitment. This is surely the least we should say about our epistemic situation. It is therefore unpersuasive to think that the effects of radical evil would damage only one strand of this complex of abstractions. There are a host of avenues where things can go wrong in the experi­ ence and interpretation of evidence made available by spiritual perception. An immediate danger now lurks. If the demonic cuts this deeply into our epi­ stem­ic capacities and practices; and if the reality of this is mostly hidden from us; will this not lead to an ineradicable scepticism that will undermine all our beliefs, including those beliefs that arise from our use of our spiritual perception? The issue is not at all a new one. Recall Descartes’s ruminations about the possibility of being deceived by an evil demon. The argument I have in mind here is general in nature; it is not simply directed at this or that potential instance of spiritual perception. Suffice it at this late hour to draw attention to an obvious consideration that blocks this worry for the time being. The looming scepticism only arises because we have made an inference from observations about the radical impairment of our intellectual capacities and practices to the conclusion that we are subject to delusion all the way to the bottom. However, this is pragmatically, self-­referentially incoherent. If things are this bad, we cannot trust our judgement about the infer­ ence in play. Hence, we cannot conclude that this kind of scepticism follows rationally. We are asked to use our rational faculties to undermine our rational faculties. Something is clearly amiss here.

35  There is an especially fine discussion of some of the crucial issues involved in Caroline Franks Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), ch. 6. Her introduction of the idea of incorporated interpretation is especially helpful.

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80  Radical Evil and Spiritual Perception If the argument seeks to limit the scepticism merely to instances of potential spiritual perception, then we have a very different challenge on our hands. Note too that this is not a new issue. Teresa of Avila grappled with this in dealing with her experiences of divine locutions and visions.36 Jonathan Edwards wrestled with this challenge across two dense volumes.37 We can block this move initially in the following manner. First, the tradition has developed an extensive literature on how to guard against delusion. There are detailed accounts of the practices and principle of discernment.38 Second, in the end we have to trust that our capacities and practices do really give us access to reality, even in this case. There is no non-­ circular guarantee available at this point. The mere fact that we are able, for ex­ample, to pick out radical evil from ordinary badness and from goodness shows that we should not be tempted to lose our nerve and follow the siren calls of the sceptic. Perhaps Descartes was right to warn us that such scepticism itself has its source in the demonic world. If all that is at issue in the end can be naturalized in terms of human frailty and human evil, we should not underestimate the multi-­dimensional challenges that radical evil poses for attaining truth and avoiding falsehood; we will need strong medicine to bring about healing. If there is a deep Enemy of our souls, it would be foolhardy to limit his efforts to undermine the truth about God to any one dimen­ sion of our intellectual life. Either way—whether we prefer a deflationary or more robust ontology—it would be equally foolhardy to underestimate the manifold resources of grace made available to bring us to the truth that saves our souls and heals the world. Deep believers cannot, if they know their faith, be sceptics. Robust doctrines of creation and redemption make this all too clear.39

36  See, for example, her incisive comments in Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1979), 150–5. 37  For his more mature work, see Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). It is interesting that Edwards was accused of being in league with the Devil by his critics at Harvard. 38  I pick two random samples: The Watchful Mind: Teachings on the Prayer of the Heart, by a Monk of Mount Athos (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2014). This text was published originally in 1851 and its author remains unknown. And Timothy  M.  Gallagher, The Discernment of Spirits: An Ignatian Guide to Everyday Living (New York: Crossword, 2005). 39  I am grateful to Frederick Aquino and Paul Gavrilyuk for comments on earlier versions of this chapter; I am especially grateful to Taylor Bonner for his critical feedback and constructive suggestions.

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6 Spiritual and Sensuous Spiritual Perception, Eschatologically Considered Boyd Taylor Coolman

Introduction Eschatology is an especially speculative and conjectural part of Christian the­ology. The relevant scriptural witness is sporadic and uneven, and often couched in figurative language. Whatever normative role human experience should play in any theological endeavour, furthermore, there is on this score precious little data. Even Jesus himself, humanly speaking, claimed to be agnostic on at least some of the details, and the Apostle Paul’s experience of being briefly raptured into the next life eluded his own subsequent attempts to describe it, not to mention those of subsequent interpreters. Despite these difficulties, though, the scriptural data seems to warrant three tentative claims, all of which together bear upon the topic of spiritual perception in the next life. First, if the later chapters of Isaiah, scattered comments in the New Testament, especially the accounts of Jesus’ post-­resurrection appearances, and the complex imagery of the Book of Revelation are any indication, a striking feature of the next life is its subtle ambivalence in relation to this life: Isaiah and Revelation speak of a ‘new heaven and a new earth’, but the descriptions thereof seem to describe a renewing, rather than a discarding of the old; the resurrected body of Jesus is both unrecognizably different from before, but also bears its pre-­ resurrection scars; his body walks through walls, but also eats and drinks; Paul compares this life to the next with the language of seed germination, where the ‘natural body’ of this life is sown and dies, only to spring forth in the next life as a ‘spiritual body’. For Paul, this means that the corruptible will ‘clothe itself ’ with incorruptibility; the mortal, with immortality. To adopt the shorthand ter­min­ ology of subsequent Western Christian reflection on the matter, beatitude (a single term for the entire eschatological state), the final human state of blessedness, and human existence in patria (the ‘homeland’), will be both similar and dissimilar to this present mode of existence, to life in via (‘on the way’). In relation to the present, that is, beatitude exhibits both dramatic novelty and striking continuity. The second claim is a function and specification of the first: human beatitude seems to be a sensuous affair, entailing a form or modality of what we currently Boyd Taylor Coolman, Spiritual and Sensuous: Spiritual Perception, Eschatologically Considered In: Perceiving Things Divine: Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual Perception. Edited by: Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802594.003.0006

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82  Spiritual and Sensuous think of as physical sense perception, which is most explicitly captured scripturally in the language of sight or vision: the blessed will ‘be like’ the resurrected Jesus, ‘for [they] will see Him as he is’ (1 John 3:2); the blessed will partake in the wedding feast of the Lamb, in which the blessed will ‘see his face’ (Rev. 22:4); and ‘the pure in heart will see God’ (Matt. 5:8). This sensuous activity of the blessed, significantly, is integral to the experience of beatitude—beatitude is experienced through the senses. A third, less-­ noted, eschatological ‘first principle’ merits mention. As just noted, the New Testament suggests that the incarnate, resurrected Christ is the Object of beatific experience—‘we will see him as he is’. But there is more. Careful attention to certain Pauline texts warrants the claim that the resurrected Christ is also in some fashion the Subject of beatific experience too. In various places Paul speaks of believers already in this present life sharing somehow in Christ’s own mind; for example, ‘Let the same mind (φρονεῖτε/sentite) be in you that was in Christ Jesus’ (Phil. 2:5) and ‘we have the mind of Christ’ (nous Christou/sensus Christi) (1 Cor. 2:16). The terms ‘nous’ and ‘sensus’ have wide connotations that include even sense perception.1 Importantly for present purposes, in the Epistles to the Ephesians and to the Colossians, the resurrected Christ whose mind believers should possess, has ‘ascended far above all heavens’ (Eph. 4:10), where the Father has ‘seated him at his right hand in the heavens’ (Eph. 1:20–1; Col. 3:1). In this eschatological position, Christ is ‘head over all things to the church, which is his body’ (Eph. 1:22). Already arrived, the incarnate Lord, as Head of his Body, is the eschatological Source of a dynamic growth process of the rest of his members towards beatific union with him: ‘we should grow in every way into him who is the head, Christ’ (Eph. 4:15), ‘until we all attain . . . the full stature of Christ’ (Eph. 4:13). Believers, joined to the Lord as members of his body, though not yet fully arrived, are nevertheless ‘already seated with Christ in the heavens’ (Eph. 2:6). The Head–Body reality ‘straddles’ thus ‘the already and the not yet’. All this has implications for beatific experience: those ‘in Christ’ might ‘comprehend with all the saints the height, depth, breadth and width’ (Eph. 3:14ff.) of the love of God. In their genitive grammatical construction, the ‘nous’ or ‘sensus’ of Christ suggests both aspects of this Christological focus in beatitude: both that of which he is object (‘we shall see him as he is’) and that of which he is subject (i.e. his own mind in which believers might share). 1 Though nous is typically translated into English as ‘mind’ or ‘understanding’, Bauer’s New Testament dictionary indicates that the term ‘denotes the faculty of physical and intellectual perception, then also the power to arrive at moral judgments’, Frederick  W.  Danker, Walter Bauer, William  F.  Arndt, and F.  Wilbur Gingrich, Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 243. It appears mostly in Pauline literature and was translated in the Vulgate sometimes as sensus, sometimes as mens. As Brian Dunkle SJ, has observed in private conversation: ‘The Latin sensus carries a few more “sensual” connotations than mens, although nous is more “sensual” than “mind”.’

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Boyd Taylor Coolman  83 So, it seems plausible to hazard the following basic description: human beatitude is an intimate experience of God, (a) in and through union with the resurrected Jesus, (b) by human persons constituted as soul–body composites, in a new, spiritual mode of their pre-­resurrection existence, that (c) is best understood as a form of spiritual perception (e.g. vision) of God. In this light, if further speculation about the nature of this beatific visio Dei were to inquire (as Christians have in fact done at least since Origen of Alexandria and especially Augustine of Hippo) about what kind of seeing is possible for a ‘spiritual human’, but broadened the question to include all the senses (on the assumption that visio could plausibly represent all the other senses too), what might be said? To answer such a perennial question, with an inflection towards the entire beatific sensorium, it will be fruitful to interrogate and, pursuing a ressourcement method of theology,2 perhaps to retrieve the ancient Christian trad­ itions on this locus. Augustine’s ruminations on such matters at the end of City of God (XXII) are justly famous and will be considered below, but theologians of the high Middle Ages also offer rich insights from which to draw current speculation regarding the sensuous nature of human beatitude.

A Sensuous Beatitude To begin, it should be noted that the notion or intuition that beatific experience must somehow be sensuous and that the language of vision in some fashion encompasses all the other senses, is ancient, reaching back to the early church. The fullest expression of such, though, is found in the Middle Ages. Writing in the latter twelfth century, for example, Ralph Ardens argued that the resurrected body will receive seven gifts, including such unsurprising traits as ‘subtlety’ and ‘incorruptibility’, as well as somewhat unexpected ones, such as ‘velocity’ and, of particular interest, ‘sensual delight’ (voluptas), which he describes thus: For then all the corporal senses will be delighted by true and eternal pleasures. For vision will be delighted by the splendor of eternal clarity. Hearing [will be delighted by] the suave melodies of celestial hymns. Taste [will be delighted by]

2  Ressourcement is a theological method that emerged among Catholic theologians in France in the mid-­twentieth century, dubbed by its opponents the ‘Nouvelle théologie’, whose rallying cry was ad fontes!, ‘back to the sources!’, which signalled its vigorous engagement with, and retrieval or at least appropriation of, ancient theological traditions. See Darren Sarisky, ed., Theologies of Retrieval: An Exploration and Appraisal (London: T&T Clark, 2017) and Gabriel Flynn and Paul  D.  Murray, eds, Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-­Century Catholic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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84  Spiritual and Sensuous the sweetness of celestial and eternal goods. Smell [will be delighted by] by the suavity of all aromas and odors. Touch [will be delighted by] ineffable and soothing suavity.3

This is an account of a sensuous beatific experience, one that clearly implicates the physical or corporeal senses of a resurrected body and desire, as well as af­fect­iv­ity. Roughly a century later, a sermon from St Bonaventure posits an account of beatitude focused more on the soul: In that Jerusalem, the soul will be illumined thus: by fixing its sight on eternal splendors [. . .], by directing its hearing to celestial harmonies, by the drawing of smell to the super-­celestial ointments of the spouse [. . .], by the accustomed taste of the divine suavities [. . .], through the binding touch of the sacred embrace of Jesus [. . .].4

In another sermon, Bonaventure refers to ‘the five spiritual senses which are for comprehending the highest beauty, harmony, suavity, sweetness, and health’,5 by these, he adds, ‘the soul is elevated through Christian wisdom to comprehending the most high’.6 A few decades earlier, the Parisian master, William of Auvergne, posited a sensuous beatitude for both body and soul: 3  Ralph Ardens, ‘Homily 55’, Dominica Prima post Pascha (PL 155.1865D-­1866A): ‘Sextum erit voluptas. Tunc enim omnes corporei sensus veris et aeternis voluptatibus delectabuntur. Visus delectabitur in splendore aeternae claritatis. Auditus in suavi melodia [1865D] hymnorum coelestium. Tunc enim omnes corporei sensus veris et aeternis voluptatibus delectabuntur. Visus delectabitur in splendore aeternae claritatis. Auditus in suavi melodia [1865D] hymnorum coelestium. Gustus in dulcedine coelestium bonorum et aeternorum. Odoratus in suavitate omnium aromatum et odoramentorum. Tactus ineffabili suavitate et mollitie.’ 4  Bonaventure, ‘Sermon 166’, Sermones de tempore (reportationes sermonum s. Bonauenturae a Marco de Montefeltro congestae, iuxta codicem Mediolanensem Ambros. A11 sup.), 235.2: ‘Illuminatur anima ierosolymitana: – per fixionem aspectus in splendoribus aeternis, Is. 58: Implebit splendoribus animam tuam; Eph. 5: Surge qui dormis etc., et illuminabit te Christus; – per suspensionem auditus concentibus angelicis, Iob 38: Ubi eras cum me laudarent astra matutina etc.; – per attractionem olfactus supercaelicis sponsalibus unguentis, Cant. 1: In odorem unguentorum tuorum curremus; – per assuefactionem gustus charismatibus sive suavitatibus divinis, Eccli. 51: In sapientia eius luxit anima mea etc.; – per astrictionem tactus Iesu sacris amplexibus, Cant. 3: Inveni quem diligit anima mea, tenui eum nec dimittam.’ 5  Bonaventure, ‘Sermon 34’, Sermones de diuersis: reportationes, v. 2 (de s. Andrea apostolo), redactio longa, collatio, 5.8 (451.114): ‘Unde dicit: Ostendit mihi angelus fluvium procedentem de sede Dei et Agni; et ex utraque parte lignum vitae afferens fructus duodecim per singulos menses. Ista enim conservantur, scilicet creata et illa meliorantur, scilicet opera reparata; et consequens est quod a Verbo aeterno quod est principium essentiarum, fluunt duodecim vitae ordinatae, scilicet vegetabilis, sensibilis, rationalis, vita angelica, archangelica; et sic de aliis novem ordinibus. Et sicut istae vitae, illi duodecim gradus emanant a Verbo quod est fons vitae; sic etiam duodecim immissiones manant ab ipso animas vivificantes quae per Verbum vivificantur. Istae duodecim immissiones sunt tres virtutes theologicae, quattuor cardinales, quinque sensus spirituales qui sunt in comprehendendo summe pulchrum, summe harmonicum, summe suave, summe dulce, summe salubre.’ 6  Bonaventure, ‘Sermon 34’, Sermones de diuersis: reportationes, v. 2 (de s. Andrea apostolo), redactio longa, collatio, 5.9 (451.122): ‘Sic per duodecim gradus reducimur ad fontem vitae; et quia Verbum sapientiae aeternae est affixum in cruce, ideo in stipite crucis est ingressus in sapientiam ubi et unde

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Boyd Taylor Coolman  85 There, [in the next life] all the powers and senses of the body and soul will rest, but in no way here. Here, it’s a pauper’s table, since no power of the soul, no bodily sense has full refection here, for neither the sight of the eye, nor the hearing of the ear is sated, and so with other [senses]; but there, all the powers of the soul and senses of the body will be fully satisfied, as in the verse: ‘I will be satisfied when your glory appears’.7

All these texts—and further examples from this period are easily adduced— describe a sensuous experience of beatitude, involving both the ‘senses of the body’ and the ‘powers of the soul’. From the methodological perspective of ressourcement, these representative texts offer a basis for positing the robust presence and activity of human sensation in the next life.

Sensus Christi I: Having the (Eschatological) Mind of Christ In his mature speculation regarding beatitude, Augustine of Hippo framed the entire enterprise with the insistence that beatitude involved the continuation, from this present life into the next, of the Body of Christ, specifically of the union of the members with Christ their Head.8 For the bishop of Hippo, ‘growing into maturity’, ‘growing up into full stature of Christ the Head’, is ultimately an eschato­logic­al achievement, though initiated in this present life. Augustine’s eschato­logic­al extension of his ‘totus Christus’ ecclesiology acquires significance for this investigation when coupled with the little noted but striking fact that when medieval thinkers appropriated it, they capitalized on the organic body imagery to reflect on the modes of spiritual perception and knowledge of God that such a Head–Body reality furnished. Again, the twelfth-­century authors took the lead in this regard. They pursed the notion that, just as all five physical senses were located principally in the head, so too all five spiritual senses reside principally in Christ; and just as the rest of the body is able to sense by being joined to the head, so too, individual believers receive the capacity for spiritual sensation by being joined to Christ. William of St Thierry, whose On the Nature and Dignity of Love contains an extensive

influunt duodecim immissiones Dei, scilicet trium virtutum theologicarum et quattuor cardinalium et quinque sensuum spiritualium in quibus consistit sapientia christiana, inveniens summe pulchrum, summe harmonicum, summe suave, summe salubre quo anima elevatur, scilicet per sapientiam christianam - ad comprehendendum alta, Apocalypsi 22.’ 7  Bonaventure, ‘Sermon 137’, Sermones de tempore (dominica IV in quadragesima), CM 230A (11.2): ‘Ibi omnes uires et sensus anime et corporis quiescunt, hic autem nunquam. Hic mensa pauperum est, quia nulla uis anime, nullus sensus corporis habet hic plenam refectionem, non enim saturatur oculus uisu nec auris auditu, et ita de aliis; ibi uero omnes uires anime et sensus corporis plene reficiuntur, secundum illud: satiabor cum apparuerit gloria tua.’ 8  cf. Augustine, City of God, 22.18, citing Eph. 4:10 and 1 Cor. 12:27, 10:17, Eph. 1:22.

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86  Spiritual and Sensuous discussion of the spiritual senses, observed: ‘The Body of Christ is the universal Church . . . . In the head of this body . . . there are four senses: sight, hearing, smell and touch.’9 William then singles out the sense of taste for extended treatment. More typical is the description attributed to Hugh of St Victor (d. 1141): ‘For this reason Christ is called the head of the church: since just as all the bodily senses are completely in the head of a man, namely, sight, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching; so in Christ there is the fullness of all the spiritual senses, namely, the fullness of grace, “from whom we have all received” (Jn 1).’10 As head, Christ possesses all the spiritual senses; joined to Christ as head, the church as body receives from Him the capacity for spiritual sensation. Hugh’s contemporary, Hildebert of Lavardin (d. 1133), explains: ‘since Christ is related to the church as head to body, he provides for the church and rules it, and in him are all the spiritual senses of the church, just as all the senses of the body are in the head.’11 Endowed with these senses, the members of the church are enabled to know and perceive God through the spiritual senses of their head in whom they participate, a point stressed by Herveus of Bourg-­Dieu (d. 1150), invoking biblical texts oft-­cited in this discussion: ‘. . . all the spiritual senses of the church are in Christ, so that in him, the church might see God and hear his word, and “taste how sweet he is” (Ps. 33) and draw [to itself] the odor of his knowledge and touch him spiritually, saying: “it is good for me to adhere to God” (Ps. 72).’12 This apparently widespread sentiment concerning the ecclesial ‘location’ of the spiritual senses found its way into the writings of Peter Lombard at mid-­century. Commenting on the Letter to the 9 William of St Thierry, On the Nature and Dignity of Love, Cistercian Fathers Series 30 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1981), 3.29, 88–9. 10  In Epistolam ad Ephesios, Quaestio X (PL 175.570C): ‘Christus caput Ecclesiae dictus est, quia sicut in capite hominis plene sunt omnes sensus carnales, scilicet visus, auditus, odoratus vel olfactus, gustus et tactus; sic in Christo est plenitudo omnium sensuum spiritualium, scilicet plenitudo gratiae, de cujus plenitudine nos omnes accepimus.’ 11  Hildebert of Lavardin (Hildebertus Cenomanensis), In Epiphania Domini Sermo Primus (PL 171.408B–C): ‘“Ipse est” enim, ut ait Apostolus, “corporis”, scilicet “Ecclesiae principium, primogenitus ex mortuis, in omnibus primatum tenens (Col. I, 18)”, caput utrique est Ecclesiae, quia unita est illi Ecclesia gratia et natura, ut capiti corpus. Quia itaque se habet ad Ecclesiam ut caput ad corpus; providet enim Ecclesiae, [408C] et regit eam, et in eo sunt omnes sensus spirituales Ecclesiae, ut in capite omnes sensus corporis.’ Hildebert continues: ‘For just as the soul animates and vivifies our whole body, but it senses/perceives in the head through all the senses, and for this reason they are all subject to the head so that they may operate; . . . For where all the senses appear, so in the universal people of all the saints, as in one body, [there] Christ the man is the head, all whom the Wisdom of God il­lu­min­ates until the last judgment, which was fulfilled in Christ.’ [Sicut enim anima totum corpus nostrum animat et vivificat, sed in capite omnibus sensibus sentit, ideoque capiti sunt omnia subjecta ad operandum; illud autem super locatum est ad consulendum, quia ipsius animae quae consulit corpori quodammodo partem gerit caput, in quo omnis sensus apparet, sic universo populo sanctorum, tanquam uni corpori, caput est homo Christus, quos omnes usque ad ultimum justum sapientia Dei illuminat quae plenius in Christo fuit.] 12  Harvey of the Mount of God (Herveus Burgidolensis or Hervé de Bourg-­Dieu), In Epistolam ad Ephesios (PL 181.1219B): ‘Nam, sicut omnia membra humani corporis reguntur a capite, id est visus, auditus, gustus, odoratus et tactus, ita omnes spirituales sensus Ecclesiae sunt in Christo, ut in eo videat Deum, et audiat verbum ejus, et gustet quam suavis est Dominus (Ps 33), et odorem notitiae ejus attrahat, et spiritualiter eum tangat, dicens: “Mihi autem adhaerere Deo bonum est” (Ps 72).’

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Boyd Taylor Coolman  87 Ephesians, Peter wrote: ‘God gave him to be the head, in whom are all the spiritual senses of the church, namely the gifts of grace.’13 His Commentary on the Letter to the Colossians, moreover, repeats verbatim the text of Hildebert quoted above.14 In his subsequently influential Sentences (Book III, d. 13), though, Peter proffered a controversial opinion on the matter. While concurring with the earlier consensus regarding the presence of all the spiritual senses in Christ the head, he restricted the sense capacity of the ecclesial body to that of touch alone: Augustine said To Dardanus15 that Christ was filled with all grace; but grace does not so inhabit the saints: ‘Just as in our body there is a sense in the individual members, but not as in the head; for in the head is sight, hearing, smelling, tasting and touch, but in the other members there is only touch.’ So in Christ ‘all the fullness of divinity dwelled’ (Col. 2:9), since he is the head in which are all the senses; but in the saints it is as if there is touch alone, to whom the Spirit was given according to measure, since ‘from him they have all received’. (Jn 1:16)16

Not surprisingly, the Lombard’s comments stimulated discussion of the topic among later scholastic commentators, such as Alexander of Hales,17 as well as William of Auvergne and St Bonaventure already cited above.18 13  Peter Lombard, In Epistolam ad Ephesios (PL 192.178D): ‘Et, id est quia, ipsum, qui adeo altus est dedit Deus caput, in quo sunt omnes spirituales sensus Ecclesiae, scilicet dona gratiae.’ 14 Peter Lombard, In Epistolam ad Colossenses (PL 192.263D–264A): ‘For he provides for the church and rules it, and in him are all the spiritual senses of the church, just as in a head are all the senses of the body. For just as our soul animates and vivifies our whole body, but it senses/perceives in the head through all the senses, and for this reason they are all subject to the head so that they may operate; . . . For where all the senses appear, so in the universal people of all the saints, as in one body, [there] Christ the man is the head, whom the Wisdom of God illuminates from Abel to the last judgment, which was fulfilled in Christ.’ [Providet enim Ecclesiae, et regit eam, et in ipso sunt omnes spirituales sensus Ecclesiae, uti in capite omnes sensus corporis. Sicut enim [264A] anima totum corpus nostrum animat et vivificat, sed in capite omnibus sensibus sentit, ideoque capiti cuncta subjecta sunt ad operandum; illud autem supra locatum est ad consulendum, quia ipsius animae quae consulit corpori, quodammodo personam gerit caput. Ibi enim omnis sensus apparet, sic in universo populo omnium sanctorum, tanquam uni corpori, caput est homo Christus, quos omnes ab Abel usque ad ultimum justum Sapientia Dei illuminat, quae plenius fuit in Christo.] 15 Augustine, Letter 187, c. 13, n. 40 (PL 33.847; CSEL 57, 117). 16 Peter Lombard, Magistri Lombardi Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, 2 vols, eds Collegi S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas. ‘Spicilegium Bonaventurianum 4–5’ (Grottaferrate, Rome: Editiones Collegii  S.  Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1971–81): ‘. . . ut ait Augustinus Ad Dardanum, quod omni gratia plenus est; non ita habitat in sanctis. Ut “in nostro corpore inest sensus singulis membris, sed non quantum in capite: ibi enim et visus est et auditus et olfactus et gustus et tactus, in ceteris autem solus est tactus.” Ita et in Christo habitat omnis plenitudo divinitatis, quia ille est caput, in quo sunt omnes sensus; in sanctis vero quasi solus tactus est, quibus datus est spiritus ad mensuram, cum de illius plenitudine acceperunt.’ 17  Alexander of Hales, Glossa in III Sent, d. 19, n. 41 (Glossa in quattuor libros sententiarum Petri Lombardi, Bibliotheca Franciscana Scholastica Medii Aevi XII–XV [Quaracchi, 1951–7]): ‘[Christ] is called head, since all the senses flow from the head to the members of the Church.’ 18  It appears that the Lombard is here influenced by the pseudo-­Hugh of St Victor’s, Quaestiones et decisiones in Epistolas D. Pauli. V., ‘Quaestio 10’, In Epistolam ad Ephesios: ‘Quare Christus dicitur caput

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88  Spiritual and Sensuous To pursue a ressourcement of this medieval tradition, the Pauline phrase noted at the outset, nous Christou (1 Cor. 2:16), proves useful. Most modern English translations render it the ‘mind of Christ’, but the Vulgate captured well the semantic possibilities with ‘sensus Christi’. The Latin sensus has a wide range of meaning, encompassing many of the different ways that humans experience reality, from the physical senses, to the more interior dimensions of perception and experience, to more typically intellectual or cognitive dimensions. Indeed, the list of English equivalents includes: perceive, feel, experience; think, realize, see, and understand. An apt paraphrase might be: ‘Christ’s way of feeling, perceiving, and experiencing reality’ or perhaps even ‘the sensibility of Christ’. In light of the foregoing, it seems warranted to propose that if there is an eschato­logic­al continuation of the spiritual senses, they would continue to be sourced from this Christo-­ecclesial Body; they would continue to flow from Christ the head into his glorified members; their activity would continue to be corporate and communal. They would thus be seen as communal capacities or activities begun in this life in the reception of the grace of Christ the Head, perhaps also developed and cultivated through various forms of training and exercise, and perfected in the next, in the life of glory, through that same relationship to the glorified Christ. In short, having the ‘mind of Christ’ is an eschatological participation in Christ that includes a sharing in his glorified senses. In the words of Hugh of St Victor, even in the next life, the blessed will be ‘made sensate by their Head’ (sensificentur a capite).19

Sensus Christi II: Sensing Christ Beatifically Medieval speculation on the spiritual senses not only posited Christ as the perduring Source of spiritual sensibility, both in via and in patria; it also saw Christ as the beatific object of such.20 Here, the genitive construction of the Pauline phrase, ‘sensus Christi’, can be repurposed to posit a second point, namely, that the sensuous nature of human beatitude has an irreducibly Christological Object.

Ecclesiae’: ‘Hence we are called his members, as if possessing a certain sense, but not all, just as certain members of the body have only one sense, but none of the members has all, except the head . . ..’ [Ideo Christus caput Ecclesiae dictus est, quia sicut in capite hominis plene sunt omnes sensus carnales, scili­cet visus, auditus, odoratus vel olfactus, gustus et tactus; sic in Christo est plenitudo omnium sensuum spiritualium, scilicet plenitudo gratiae, de cujus plenitudine nos omnes accepimus (Jn 1), unde et membra dicimur, quasi aliquem sensum non omnes habentes, sicut caetera membra corporis unum solum sensum habent; nullum habet omnes praeter caput.] 19  Hugh of St Victor, De scripturis et scriptoribus (PL 175.10A). 20  Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis Christianae fidei 1.6.5: Wisdom is ‘a pasture within; the work of wisdom, a pasture without.’ Human knowing, through the body and the soul, could perceive both internal and external wisdom, knowing them both ‘by cognition’, being refreshed in both ‘by love’.

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Boyd Taylor Coolman  89 Richard of St Victor elaborates on this Christological focus of beatitude by linking the imagery of milk and honey (common medieval symbols of beatific experience) with a text from John’s Gospel referring to Christ as the sheepfold: ‘we will go in and go out and find pasture’ (John 10). Richard interprets the Evangelist’s meaning thus: ‘we will go out through the physical senses, and we will find pasture in the milk of the humanity of Christ; we will go in through the rational senses, and we will find pasture in the honey of his divinity. In this, there will be eternal satiety, the fullness of joy . . ..’21 After making the same point, an anonymous Victorine writer secures the classical Christological logic behind claim: For God is honored on this account: that in himself he will beatify the whole man; that the whole conversion of man will be toward God himself, that the whole love of man will be in God himself. For if the Creator of man is God, and God is not man, it would be God himself that is seen by the senses of the mind, but what the senses of the body perceive would not be God; and it would endure perpetual reproach in the senses of the flesh by the absence of the Creator, and it would always be wandering in poverty among creatures, and never attaining to its Creator. Therefore, lest the senses of the flesh in man carry that reproach perpetually, such that it would always rightly be asked of them, where is your God (Micah 7), were they never admitted into the contemplation of its Creator, the Creator assumed flesh; which by the senses of the flesh, through the flesh, God would be seen in it, so that the food of the flesh would be milk in the contemplation of the flesh, that the food of the mind would be honey in the contemplation of divinity. And he will go out and go in and find pastures (Jn 10). External pastures in the flesh of the Savior, internal pastures in the divinity of the Creator. And the one Savior and Creator will be the one joy, both in the milk of the flesh and in the honey of the divinity.22 21 Richard of St Victor, Sermo in die paschae (PL 196.1074A–B): ‘Sic igitur procedamus donec occurramus omnes in virum perfectum, in mensuram aetatis plenitudinis Christi obviam Christo in aera. Deus bonus pastor, qui posuit animam suam pro ovibus suis, introducat nos in veram terram promissionis, in terram viventium, quae fluit lacte et melle. Haec terra viventium est nobis promissa a Christo qui est Dei virtus et Dei sapientia, quam terram dabit nobis in haereditatem, quando manifestabit se nobis ducens ad paternam visionem, ad summi boni fruitionem, ad omnium deliciarum affluentiam. Et nos egredientes et ingredientes pascua inveniemus. [1074B] Egrediemur per sensum carnis, et pascua inveniemus in lacte humanitatis Christi. Ingrediemur per sensum rationis, et pascua inveniemus in melle divinitatis ejus. Ibi erit aeterna satietas, gaudium plenum quod nemo tollet a nobis, quia aeternum hoc erit in fine sine fine, ad quem nos perducat ipse auctor pietatis.’ 22  Elucidationes variae in scripturam moraliter (PL 177.523A–C): ‘Sic enim demum demonstrabitur nobis terra visionis a Domino, in qua ipse videbitur Dominus, quam in repromissionem posuit filiis, lacte et melle manantem: lacte in contemplatione [523B] humanitatis, melle in contemplatione divinitatis. Propterea enim Deus honorificatus est, ut totum hominem in se beatificaret, ut tota conversio hominis esset ad ipsum, et tota dilectio hominis esset in ipso. Si enim Creator hominis Deus esset, et Deus homo non esset, esset in ipso, quod sensu mentis videretur, sed quod sensu corporis perciperetur, non esset; et sustineret sensu carnis perpetuum opprobrium absentiae Creatoris, et esset in abjectionem semper oberrans in creaturis, et non attingens ad Creatorem suum. Ne igitur sensus carnis in

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90  Spiritual and Sensuous Here is a strong medieval claim that beatific experience not only implicates the whole human person, both body and soul (as argued in Section I), but also, as a corollary, that beatific experience has the whole incarnate Lord, both divine and human, as its Object. Apparent in these two Victorine texts is a theological claim that thirteenth-­ century Franciscan scholastics will adopt and exploit (with the very same imagery and scriptural citations) as crucial argumentation in the debates around the ‘motive of the Incarnation’. For such authors as Robert Grosseteste and Alexander of Hales and his school, including St Bonaventure, it is at least highly probable, if not quite necessary, that Christ would have been incarnate, even in an unfallen world, precisely because the absence of the incarnation would have deprived embodied humans of the possibility of complete beatitude in both soul and body. So, the multi-­author Franciscan Summa Halensis will claim: ‘For this reason God became man, that the whole man would be beatified in him, that man would advance both inwardly through intellect, and excel outwardly through sense, finding pasture in his Creator; interior pasture in the cognition of the deity; outward pasture in the flesh of the Savior.’23 Writing at nearly the same time as these Franciscans, the Englishman, Alexander of Ashby (Esseby),24 puts the matter thus: How many scents caress the nose, how many colors charm vision, how many flavors delight taste, how many tones charm hearing, how many suavities and emollients soothe the body’s touch all at once? If such are the delights of the body, what will be the delights of the spirit? [. . .] How sweet and delectable will it be for all the elect to see the ineffable clarity of your glorified humanity, on which the angels long to gaze, whence the whole heavenly fatherland seems to be illumined and decorated! But how much sweeter and more delectable to contemplate your divine glory, which is the font of all joys and all delights! If it is sweet and delectable to see the sun, the moon, and the stars shining with effulgent clarity, how much sweeter and more delectable will it be to see the glorious clarity of the Creator.25 homine opprobrium istud in perpetuum portaret semperque merito illi diceretur, Ubi est Deus tuus (Mich. 7), si nunquam ad Creator is sui contemplationem admitteretur, assumpsit Creator carnem; [523C] quae a sensu carnis in ipso videretur per carnem, ut carnis cibus esset lac in contemplatione carnis, mentis cibus mel in contemplatione divinitatis. Et egrederetur et ingrederetur, et pascua inveniret (Jn 10). Pascua foris in carne Salvatoris, pascua intus in divinitate Creatoris. Et Salvator et Creator unus unum gaudium esset et in lacte carnis, et in melle divinitatis. Quod, etc. Amen.’ 23  Summa Halensis (Quaracchi, Florence: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1924–48), Bk III, Inq. I, tract. 1, quaest. 3, cap. 2. 24  In Latin ‘Alexander Essebiensis’, a celebrated English theologian and poet who flourished about the year 1220. See Greti Dinkova-­Bruun, ‘Alexander of Ashby: New Biographical Evidence’, Mediaeval Studies 63 (2001): 305–22. 25  Alexander of Ashby, ‘Meditation 10’, Meditationes (CCCM 188), 10.1301–21: ‘Quot odores mulcent olfactum, quot colores uisum, quot sapores gustum, quot sonora auditum, quot suauia et mollia tocius corporis tactum? Si tot sunt delicie corporum, quot erunt delicie spirituum? [. . .] Quam dulce et delectabile erit omnibus electis uidere ineffabilem humanitatis tue glorificate claritatem, in quam

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Boyd Taylor Coolman  91 For Alexander, the clarity of Christ’s glorified humanity produces ‘delights of the body’, while the clarity of the divinity produces ‘delights of the spirit.’ Several features of these texts are noteworthy. First, because humans are embodied, rational creatures, their ultimate beatitude must somehow implicate the whole person, body and soul. Second, all beatific experience of God is therefore ineluctably Christological. In fact, these authors are so insistent on the sensuous nature of beatitude (both spiritual and physical senses) that it pushes at least some of them to reconceive the ultimate motive for the Incarnation itself. An extension of that claim, thirdly, is that it is the divine nature of Christ that is encountered beatifically; that is to say: the visio Dei is a visio of the divinity of the incarnate Christ. Fourth, at the same time and strikingly (perhaps troublingly), at least some of these authors seem to conceive of that experience as rigidly bi-­ modal, in which the two natures of Christ become, in effect, two separate Objects of beatific experience.

The Beatific Interpenetration Thesis: ‘Spiritually Sensuous’ Beatitude? The medieval texts surveyed above clearly evince a Christological account of beatific experience and one that implicates the whole human person, specifically, the ‘senses of the body’ and the ‘senses of the soul.’ But the strict separation of these two human sense modalities and their rigid correlation with the human and divine natures of Christ raises questions from the perspective of classical Chalcedonian Christology. From a Chalcedonian perspective that takes seriously the post-­Chalcedonian concerns raised by Monophysite and the Monothelite thinkers regarding a lingering Nestorian bifurcation and hypostasizing of the divine and human natures in Christ, it is important to insist on the hypostatic unity of the God-­Man. In the early centuries of the Christological debates, a crucial strategy in this regard was to affirm in the one person of the God-­Man a profound and ultimately unfathomable communication of properties (communicatio idiomatum) of the two natures. Without blurring or compromising the distinction between the divine and human, this strategy insisted that these interpenetrated and co-­inhered in one another in the single hypostatic reality of Jesus. The one God-­Man expressed human nature divinely and divine nature humanly. While the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum was a claim about Christ in his earthly manifestation, it does not of course cease to be true of the glorified Christ and, accordingly, would desiderant angeli prospicere, unde tota celestis patria illustrari uidetur et decorari! Set quanto dulcius, quanto delectabilius contemplari diuinitatis tue gloriam que est fons omnium gaudiorum et omnium deliciarum? Si dulce est et delectabile uidere solem, lunam et stellas mira | claritate fulgentes, quanto dulcius et delectabilius erit uidere gloriosam creatoris claritatem, cum claritas creaturarum nulla sit respectu claritatis que est in creatore?’

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92  Spiritual and Sensuous obtain for the beatific experience of Christ by the blessed. But this suggests that it may well be theologically fitting to posit an anthropological correlate of this Christological unity of the divine and human: namely, that beatific experience of Christ somehow involves a profound and mysterious co-­inherence and inter­ pene­tra­tion of physical and spiritual perception in the beatific encounter with the co-­inhering and interpenetrating natures of the God-­Man, experienced as a single hypostatic reality. On this reading, the medieval theologians had a helpful intuition, but were perhaps hamstrung by a slightly ‘Nestorian-­esque’ division and bifurcation of the two natures, all too neatly and discretely cordoning off the physical from the spiritual senses, along with their corresponding objects, the human and divine natures. In fact, it may not be too much to claim that the only theological anthropology adequate to a correct understanding of the hypostatic union and the communication of properties therein is what is here posited as a kind of eschatological ‘interpenetration thesis’ of physico-­spiritual sensation, or of what could be called ‘spiritually sensuous’ beatitude. The same ‘interpenetration thesis’ might helpfully be evoked from the opposite perspective. It is possible that beatific experience involves anthropological conditions, especially those having to do with the resurrected body, which do not presently obtain. That is, at present, the post-­lapsarian ‘soul–body unit’26 is still marked by the Fall. Whatever a ‘spiritual body’ might be, it is not a present feature of life in via. It is entirely possible, accordingly, that our current experience of embodiment, of having a body, of being corporeal, is at best a faint and muted, and at worst a distorted and faulty, indicator of the ultimate nature of spiritual embodiment.27 It is also entirely possible that the current soul–body composite (however that might be understood) at present contains certain divisions and fault lines, a certain bi-­furcation or lack of integration or unity, that will disappear in the next life. Put positively, it is entirely plausible that ‘the post-­resurrection soul–body unit’28 will be far more unified than its present state, and accordingly, it may well entail a certain synthesis or integration of soul and body, which might have the appearance, at least from our current vantage point, of a kind of ‘somatization’ or ‘corporealization’ of the soul and, simultaneously, a certain ‘spiritualizing’ or ‘sublimating’ of the body—without negating the difference between soul and body, nor the integrity of each. This intensified soul–body integration may well have implications for beatific experience of God that also blur 26  Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University, 1995), 290. 27  Cf. C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory: ‘The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy. As St. Augustine said, the rapture of the saved soul will “flow over” into the glorified body. In the light of our present specialized and depraved appetites we cannot imagine this torrens voluptatis, and I warn every­one seriously not to try. But it must be mentioned, to drive out thoughts even more misleading— thoughts that what is saved is a mere ghost, or that the risen body lives in numb insensibility. The body was made for the Lord, and these dismal fancies are wide of the mark.’ 28 Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 290.

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Boyd Taylor Coolman  93 the distinction between intellectual noesis and sensual aesthesis, as presently experienced. Is it possible that what we might call beatific experience could be simultaneously both intellectual and sensual, conceptual and perceptual, noetic and aesthetic, in a single human act? Might the visio Dei encompass all human modes of perception, taken in the broadest sense, such that it would be marked— again sim­ul­tan­eous­ly—by both the directness, immediacy, and pleasure of physical sensation (as currently experienced) and the clarity, distinctness, and objectivity of conceptual knowing and ideational understanding (as currently experienced)? In short, might beatitude entail a single experience in a single human act of beatific encounter? Given the ressourcement methodology of this investigation, it would be appropriate to ask whether there is any evidence of this ‘interpenetration thesis’ in the Christian tradition. It seems that Augustine of Hippo (d. 431), Hugh of St Victor (d. 1141), and William of Auxerre (d. 1231) offered versions of such. At the conclusion of City of God, Augustine speculates precisely on the topic at hand. After foregrounding the discussion in his totus Christus ecclesiology (the Head–Body model treated above in Section I), Augustine proceeds to ask ‘what will be the grace of that spiritual body . . . of which we have had as yet no experience’?29 He then puts his finger on the crux of the issue, hinting at the subtle interplay between spiritual and physical in patria: ‘the spiritual flesh will thus be subject to the spirit, but it will be flesh, not spirit, just as the carnal spirit was subject to the flesh, and yet was spirit, not flesh’.30 He then proceeds to face squarely a common-­sense philosophical assumption of his day (and perhaps ours too) about the essential incommensurate difference between physical sensation/ perception and spiritual or intellectual apprehension: ‘Now the philosophers maintain that “intelligible” things are seen by the mind’s vision, and “sensible” things, that is, material things, are apprehended by the bodily senses, whereas the mind, they say, cannot observe intelligible things by means of the body, nor ma­ter­ial things by its own unaided activity.’31 But upon reflection, Augustine finds this to be a patently false claim (citing various scriptural situations which suggest the opposite of the philosophers’ claim). He then posits a kind of ‘crossover’ of this tidy division from both directions, at least in the context of the next life where the resurrected body will be a spiritual body: ‘It is agreed, then, that material things are apprehended by the spirit: why should there not likewise be such a mighty power in a spiritual body that the spirit may be perceived by such a body?’32 He then summarizes his intuition about beatific perception:

29 Augustine, City of God, 22.21. 31 Augustine, City of God, 22.29.

30 Augustine, City of God, 22.21. 32 Augustine, City of God, 22.29.

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94  Spiritual and Sensuous For such reasons it is possible, it is indeed most probable, that we shall then see the physical bodies of the new heaven and the new earth in such a fashion as to observe God in utter clarity and distinctness, seeing him present everywhere and governing the whole material scheme of things by means of the bodies we shall then inhabit and the bodies we shall see wherever we turn our eyes. . . . Similarly, in the future life, wherever we turn the spiritual eyes of our bodies, we shall discern, by means of our bodies, the incorporeal God directing the whole universe. God then will be seen by those eyes in virtue of their possession (in this transformed condition) of something of an intellectual quality, a power to discern things of an immaterial nature.33

Strikingly, in these passages the ageing African bishop blends the physical and the spiritual together without collapsing the distinction: intellectual knowing will have direct and immediate perception of physical bodies; bodily sensation will acquire an intellectual quality, a capacity to sense spiritual and intellectual real­ ities directly. Leaping forward 700 years, Hugh of St Victor, himself dubbed by his contemporaries a ‘second Augustine’, seems to have taken his mentor’s intuition to heart: When, therefore, ‘this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality’, then we, being spiritual in mind and body equally, will after our small measure understand everything through the il­lu­ min­ation of our minds, and have power to be everywhere through the lightness of our incorruptible bodies. Our minds will fly by contemplation, our bodies will fly on account of incorruption. We shall perceive with our mind, and in a manner of speaking we shall perceive with our bodies too; for, when our bodily senses are themselves converted into reason, and reason into understanding, then understanding will pass over into God, to whom we shall be united through the one Mediator between God and men, the Lord Jesus Christ [emphases added].34

Intriguingly, Hugh here anticipates an eschatological spiritualization not only of the body, as would be expected, but also of the mind. Both are transformed in patria. What that entails, moreover, is not, as some other medieval authors cited above have suggested, that body and soul run on parallel (not intersecting or overlapping) tracks, so to speak, in their respective beatific modalities. Rather, Hugh envisions a kind of ‘upwardly assimilative’ transformation of sense perception into reason (ratio), and then of both sense and reason into understanding (intellectus).35 Hugh does not speculate, unfortunately, on what the resulting form

33 Augustine, City of God, 22.29. 34  Hugh of St Victor, De Arca Noe Morali, 1.15. 35  In his Kephalaia Gnostika (2.62), Evagrius seems to suggest something similar, namely, that in the eschaton bodies will be transformed into souls, and souls into intellects, so that contemplation will be immaterial but not apart from this higher mode of corporeality.

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Boyd Taylor Coolman  95 of perception might be like. At the very least, the result seems to be an integrated modality of soul–body encounter with God. Confirming the Christological framework of beatitude noted above, Hugh’s account of beatific interpenetration is mediated by the God-­Man. This insistence on the Christological mediation would create an awkward asymmetry in his account if the upward assimilation entailed the complete evacuation of all forms of sensuality. Lastly, William of Auxerre’s doctrine of the spiritual senses, which he explicitly locates in the sphere of beatific experience, offers a final instance of this ‘inter­ pene­tra­tion thesis’. In William, we find this by now familiar sounding description of beatitude: ‘We will delight in the beauty (pulchritudo) and symphony (simphonia) and aroma (odor) and sweetness (dulcedo) and attractiveness (suavitas) of God. But in God these are none other than delectable things (delectabilia); and all these pertain to all the spiritual senses.’36 In his ensuing analysis, though, William makes a surprising move. He insists that, despite this multisensory description, in reality ‘there is . . . only one spiritual sense’,37 namely, the intellect. His argument involves key assumptions about both the subject and the object of beatific experience. Regarding the subject he claims: To sense (sentire) spiritually is to perceive (percipere) spiritually, is to cognize spiritually (cognoscere).38 But all spiritual cognition is in the intellect; thus every spiritual sense (omne sentire spirituale) is in the intellect; thus all spiritual sensing is understanding (intellectus). As all agree that the intellect is one, there is then only one spiritual sense.’39

William allows, on this basis, that ‘“with the intellect, it is the same thing to see what one hears, and to smell what one tastes.” Therefore, the spiritual senses do not have essentially diverse operations.’40 Regarding the divine Object, he claims that there is ‘one simple and invariable (simplex et invariabile) Object of those five spiritual senses, namely God; 36  William of Auxerre, Summa Aurea IV.18.3.3.2.2: 506.39: ‘Item delectamur in pulcritudine Dei et simphonia et odore et dulcedine et suavitate. Sed in Deo non sunt alia delectabilia; et hec omnia per­ tin­ent ad omnes sensus spirituales.’ 37  William of Auxerre, Summa Aurea IV.18.3.3.2.3: 509–510, 36ff.: ‘Item, dicit Augustinus: “Crede, et manducasti.” Ergo per fidem manducamus; ergo per fidem gustamus, et per fidem videmus: hoc certum est; et per fidem audimus, quod dicit Iesus, ut dicit Origenes. Idem ergo est in essentia visus, auditus, gustus spiritualis.’ 38  Cf. William of Auxerre, Summa Aurea IV.18.3.3.2.2: 507.67: ‘Item, caritas aut est sensus, aut non. Si est sensus, contra. Sentire est percipere, et percipere cognoscere. Sed cognitio non est in caritate, quia in solo intellectu est cognitio spiritualium. Ergo caritas non est sensus; sed delectatio non est nisi in convenientis consensu; ergo caritate non delectamur in Deo, nec fruimur ipso.’ 39  William of Auxerre, Summa Aurea IV.18.3.3.2.3: 510.43ff.: ‘Item, sentire spiritualiter est percipere spiritualiter, est cognoscere spiritualiter. Sed omnis cognitio spiritualis est in intellectu; ergo omne sentire spirituale in intellectu est; ergo omnis sensus spiritualis est intellectus. Et constat quod non est nisi unus intellectus; ergo non est nisi unus sensus spiritualis.’ 40  William of Auxerre, Summa Aurea IV.18.3.3.2.4: 513.53f.: ‘Sed contra hoc est auctoritas Augustini, qui dicit quod intellectui idem est videre quod audire, et olfacere quod gustare. Ergo spiritualis sensus non habet diversas operationes in essentia.’

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96  Spiritual and Sensuous therefore, the spiritual senses are one in essence, since even the physical senses are distinguished according to their objects’.41 It is precisely the single divine Object which implies a single spiritual sense. All this sets the stage for William’s account of sensuous beatitude: For by seeing God we will hear spiritually, since by seeing we will have cognition (cognitio); and this is to hear by seeing (audire videndo). We will assemble the goods given to us by God and this will be to perceive the odor (odorari) of God by seeing (odorari videndo). We will know the internal rationes of God; and this will be to taste (gustare) spiritually. Likewise, by seeing God we will be inflamed by his love, of which it is said: our God is a consuming fire (Heb. 12:29); and this will be to touch (tangere) him . . . And, just as all natures exist in their own way in God, namely power, goodness, sweetness and other similar things, so also will that vision have in itself every delectable without multiplication of movements and delectations.42

Here, beatific experience of a single divine Object, God, is a single act of the soul, assimilated to a single sense modality, the sense of sight or vision. Yet, it sim­ul­tan­ eous­ly (perhaps also paradoxically) encompasses and subsumes the manifold character of all the physical senses and their correspondingly distinct physical objects, as we currently experience them. Accordingly, this description has a synaesthetic quality: the blessed will ‘hear by seeing’, ‘smell by seeing’, and so forth. At the same time, strikingly, these manifold objects of spiritual sensation are unmistakably noetic or ideational: the ‘internal rationes of God’, ‘divine power and goodness.’ In this beatific experience, in effect, two modes of perception that we currently distinguish—intellectual cognition of concepts and sensual perception of sensibles—seem to coalesce. Quite apparently, in all this, William seems to be struggling, awkwardly and not altogether successfully, to unite things that we currently separate. In sum, all three authors provide warrants from the pre-­modern Christian trad­ition for positing an interpenetration thesis regarding beatific experience of God.

41  William of Auxerre, Summa Aurea IV.18.3.3.2.3: 509.23: ‘Unicum est simplex et invariable illorum quinque sensuum spiritualium, scilicet Deus; ergo unus est sensus spiritualis in essentia, quia secundum obiectum distinguuntur etiam sensus corporales.’ 42  William of Auxerre, Summa Aurea IV.18.3.3.2.4: 513–14.56ff.: ‘Concedimus, sicut dictum est, quod in patria visio erat tota merces; et ibi sensus spiritualis non habebit nisi unam operationem. Videndo enim Deum audiemus spiritualiter, quia ab ipso habebimus cognitionem; et hoc est auidre videndo. Conferemus bona nobis a Deo data, et hoc erit odorari videndo. Cognoscemus innas rationes Dei; et hoc erit gustare spiritualiter. Item, videndo Deum inflammabimur in amore eius, de quo dicitur: Deus noster ignis consumesns est; et hoc erit tangere ipsum.’

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Boyd Taylor Coolman  97

Conclusion As the forgoing has demonstrated, an identifiable strand of the ancient Christian tradition of the spiritual senses of the soul locates the proper sphere of their activity after this life. For this reason, this doctrine is best understood as a deep-­seated Christian intuition or prediction regarding the ultimate state of human existence in relation to God. Though often associated with Christian mysticism or spirituality in a rather unspecified way, the spiritual senses ought to be considered first and most properly an aspect of Christian eschatology. Put otherwise, the claim advanced is that in some fashion beatitude will be sensuous and it will be sensuous for both body and soul. A second claim is that this sensuous beatitude is irreducibly Christological, and is so in two ways. First, in patria, the blessed will participate in the sensus Christi. As in via, the grace of Christ the Head (‘capital grace’) will continue to ‘flow down’ and animate the members of his Body, through the Holy Spirit, endowing them with and activating in them the capacity for spiritual sense. Secondly, beatitude will be sensuously oriented towards the Incarnate Christ in his two natures, the divine and human. A third claim builds upon the second by exploiting logic of the ‘one-­person, two natures’ formula of Chalcedonian Christology to derive an anthropological correlate to the communication of properties in the one person of the God-­Man. With this approach, it seeks to overcome an overly rigid demarcation of both the divine and human in the Christ and also to overcome a rigidly dualistic account of human sense capacities in beatitude by proposing an ‘interpenetration thesis’ regarding beatific experience. On this account, fourth, the sensuous nature of beatitude could be described thus: on the one hand, beatitude is ‘sensuously spiritual’, in that it is an experience for the soul that is marked by characteristics that we currently associate with bodily senses; conversely, beatitude is ‘spiritually sensuous’, in that it is an experience of the body and its sense acts (e.g. taste, touch, smell) whose object are in some way conceptual and ideational, which we currently associate with intellectual acts. In short, these accounts of sensuous beatitude seem to blur distinctions that are quite familiar in our current state: the distinction between bodily perception and intellectual conception, between intellectual noesis and sensual aesthesis. Overall, the pressure of these texts pushes towards a fully integrated ‘beatific sensorium’. In short, we posit here a beatific experience of God that will be both ‘spiritual’ and ‘sensuous’, even if for now we can only stammer in trying to explain it. In the end, though, it must be conceded that it is very difficult to offer any fully coherent and intelligible teaching regarding the eschatological activity of the spiritual senses that adopts the current state of human nature as its normative

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98  Spiritual and Sensuous anthropology.43 Yet, the fact that Christian theology has tended to assume some form of continuity between life in via and in patria justifies the extrapolation from the former to the latter pursued here. In this life, the great difficulty conceiving of, let alone imagining how beatitude could be an act both spiritual and sensuous at once confronts all eschatological speculation—after all: ‘eye has not seen, nor ear heard’. For now, the doctrine of the spiritual senses functions as a ‘place-­holder’ in speculation regarding beatific experience of God.

43  Perhaps the history of Christian religious epistemology has been unhelpfully framed by this fallen anthropology, such that either disembodied, intellectual noesis or embodied, sensual aesthesis has been privileged over the other, or the two have been awkwardly juxtaposed.

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PART II

IN T E R SE C T IONS

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7 Scripture as Signpost A Perceptual Paradigm of Biblical Interpretation Sameer Yadav

Scripture and the Perceptual Paradigm Suppose that a ‘scriptural meaning’ is just whatever meaning God intends to con­ vey to us by way of the words of the Christian Bible—including whatever relevant historical, linguistic, and literary features of the text and whatever divine/human relationships are implicated in God’s communicating to us in and through its words.1 Suppose further that acts of ‘scriptural discernment’ are those acts of Christian individuals or communities that attempt to determine just what God is conveying to us here and now in and through the words of the Christian Bible. At first glance, this notion of scriptural discernment may not seem like a very prom­ ising topic to explore for a volume on ‘perceiving things divine’. The trouble isn’t that scriptural meanings fail to be spiritual or divine. The meanings conveyed by God by way of the Bible are, ex hypothesi, divine in virtue of their source, and ‘spiritual’ in the sense that they are meanings commended by the Spirit to our spirits (1 Cor. 2:7ff.). Rather, the trouble is that scriptural discernment does not at first glance seem to plausibly consist in anything like sensing or perceiving. Discernment is just a matter of making a clear determination of what seems obscure, and we often make determinations of that sort by way of perception, such as when I poke my head outside my front door and listen to hear if my chil­ dren are in still playing in the yard, or when I look at the fill line on my coffee pot to discern whether I’ve put in enough water. But on our ordinary use of the terms ‘interpretation’ and ‘perception’, scriptural meanings most naturally seem to figure as objects of interpretation rather than perception. Ordinarily, we use the language of perception to denote an immediate and pas­ sive sensory receptivity that may or may not be sufficient for imparting some

1  For an account of what such disputes are about, see David Kelsey, The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1978), 89–119. See also Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Sameer Yadav, Scripture as Signpost: A Perceptual Paradigm of Biblical Interpretation In: Perceiving Things Divine: Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual Perception. Edited by: Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802594.003.0007

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102  Scripture as Signpost understanding of the object perceived.2 For example, my infant daughter, my wife, and I may all be properly said to ‘see a dog’ even when (1) my daughter, being without the requisite animal concepts, could not see it as a dog, no matter how perfectly her visual faculties are functioning; (2) I, being nearsighted, am unable to make out what I’m seeing as a dog, though I could if my visual faculties were intact; and (3) my wife is able to see it as a dog simply by looking. Focusing on this third case, note that my wife’s ‘seeing’ is not merely seeing a dog, but also see­ ing it as a dog, or seeing that it is a dog. We ordinarily allow that this sort of ‘see­ ing’ counts as an instance of literal seeing, as a matter of perception, precisely because her understanding is achieved without being mediated by any active attempts on her part to apply any concepts or engage in any reasoning. Instead the understanding that accompanies her visual sensation is acquired immediately, just by looking. By contrast, we ordinarily use the language of interpretation to indicate pre­ cisely the kind of understanding that is mediated to us by actively applying con­ cepts or drawing inferences about the objects we are interpreting. That is, we speak of interpreting in contexts when we lack understanding or when we con­ sider the possibility that the understanding we possess is insufficient for our pur­ poses.3 Thus, for example, while in some contexts we are happy to regard the sorts of understandings given in the second and third examples above as literally per­ ceptual, we switch to regarding them as ‘interpretations’ precisely when they prompt active reasoning—when I must puzzle out the blurry image before me, or when my wife’s claim to see the dog becomes subject to question (‘Did you really see a dog, or merely interpret it as a dog?’). A straightforward perception or simple seeing may thus take on the status of a perceptual interpretation just when it enters into a chain of inferential reasoning about the possibility that it is mistaken.4 This way of drawing the perception/interpretation distinction will come in for greater analysis below. For the moment, it is sufficient to observe that while it seems clear enough that Christians would regard scriptural meanings as objects

2  This is not to deny that perception can be conceived as an activity, nor to deny that there is or can often be an active element in acts of perception. Both points have long been recognized in philo­soph­ ic­al psychology. See, for example, José Filipe Silva and Mikko Yrjönsuuri (eds), Active Perception in the History of Philosophy: From Plato to Modern Philosophy (New York: Springer, 2014). Rather, the point is that perception always and necessarily involves a passive element; it is fundamentally a form of receptivity to perceptual input or uptake, even when one is an active participant in receiving that input or facilitating that uptake. 3 William P. Alston, Perceiving God (New York: Cornell University Press, 1991), 27–8. 4 Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, edited with commentary by Robert Brandom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 107ff. Sellars identifies immediate sensory impressions that are capable of standing within the ‘space of reasons’ as always potentially susceptible of requiring rational justification. Perceptions that impart understanding, he concludes, must always be capable of switching from playing a non-­inferential role in our thinking to playing an inferential role.

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Sameer Yadav  103 of interpretation, the idea that they can become objects of perception or simple seeing, hearing, etc. seems implausible on its face. Surely, we might suppose, matters such as what God intends to convey to us by way of biblical texts are not matters of what we can literally see in the same way my wife sees a dog. In what follows, however, I will first briefly suggest that we ought to be motivated by Scripture itself to suppose that we can perceptually discern scriptural meanings. Second, I will then go on in more detail to offer a perceptual paradigm for dis­ cerning scriptural meaning that renders that notion plausible. Ordinarily, we recognize that discerning the scriptural meaning of the Bible is difficult. Even if other dimensions of the text were to become transparent to us (such as its historical or literary significance), still, we often suppose that deter­ mining what God is prompting us to think, say, or do is something we can receive only by wrestling with the text. It is a puzzle that always calls for deeper investiga­ tion and contemplation. The Christian Bible itself at many points supports an interpretive paradigm for spiritual discernment. Thus, for example, the words of the Law that Moses delivered to Israel are to be taught and talked about (Deut. 11:18–23); they are to be studied and reflected upon (Ezra 7:10; Ps. 119:15–16). Prophetic visions are often regarded as requiring the work of interpretation, such as when God sends angels to interpret Daniel’s visions to him (Dan. 8). Our attempt to determine what God is saying by way of a text very often echoes the sentiment of the Ethiopian eunuch encountered by Philip in Acts 8:31. Upon reading the book of Isaiah Philip asks him ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’,5 and the eunuch, along with the Christian of every age, replies ‘How can I, unless someone explains it to me?’ When faced with the divine instruction given to the church by way of Paul’s letters, even the author of 2 Peter ac­know­ledges that there are in them ‘some things that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures’ (2 Pet. 3:16). Proper discernment of God’s message to us, in such cases, is a matter of seeking out the proper interpretation. The interpretive paradigm, however, is not the only framework for scriptural discernment to be found in the Christian Bible. We can also find evidence of a distinct sort of paradigm according to which the divine deliverances of scripture are not mysteries to be puzzled out of the text by way of any interpretive activity on the part of the readers or hearers of scripture. Rather, the revelatory import of the text is available to its readers or hearers immediately and without any active reasoning on their part. Thus, for example, the psalmist supposes that the divine guidance given in scripture can be acquired not by reasoning, but by sight—‘Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law’ (Ps. 119:18). The divine

5  All Bible references are taken from the Revised Standard Version.

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104  Scripture as Signpost meaning of scripture on this paradigm is not a challenge to be worked through but transparent, enabling us to pass from the words of scripture to what they are about, with no discernible gap from reading or hearing to comprehension of divine guidance. Scripture thus acts as a light that directly and immediately illu­ mines our path (Ps. 119:105). Jesus is likened to this light as the divine Word in John 1. His words are often represented in the Gospels as being properly or improperly discerned by his hearers not on the basis of having deployed a proper chain of reasoning, but rather on the basis of whether or not his hearers have receptive faculties properly sensitized or attuned to recognizing what God is say­ ing or doing through him. ‘Those who have ears,” he says, “let them hear’ (Mark 4:9). We might well suppose that some of the sensory language of these texts is just metaphor for intellectual apprehension, without involving any literal sensa­ tions. But sensation is also implicated in these texts, insofar as their objects— divine speech and words—are mediated to us by literally hearing the sounds or seeing the marks of speech. In their appeal to the language of literal sight and hearing as means of being passively impressed upon with scriptural meaning, therefore, these passages suggest what we might call a perceptual paradigm of scriptural discernment. A final observation on this interpretive versus perceptual contrast in scriptural discernment is that both forms of discernment concern not merely our relation to texts but also to the world. It is not only the Bible that conveys scriptural meaning to be either puzzled out interpretively or taken in perceptually. Rather, the mean­ ing of Scripture is meant to direct us towards the meaning of the world, and our interpretations and perceptions of the world can therefore exhibit scriptural meaning. Thus, for example, Psalm 19 asserts a structural parallel between the ordering of the divine words of Torah and the ordering of creation as a mode of divine speech. Luke 24 likewise pairs the disciples’ ability to properly understand the Law and Prophets with their ability to properly recognize the risen Jesus who sits before them breaking bread. The very idea of a perceptual rather than interpretive relation to scriptural meaning raises several interesting questions: in what sense can textual meanings become objects of perception? Assuming that we can make sense of the idea of scriptural perception, what are the relative gains and losses of discerning scrip­ tural meaning perceptually rather than interpretively? I’ll address these questions in the following two sections. First, I will defend the idea that textual meanings and their instantiations in the world can be discerned perceptually rather than interpretively by appealing to the ordinary perceptual relationships we bear to a kind of non-­scriptural text that likewise purports to direct and guide us—namely, signposts. Second, I will defend an analogy between perceptually discerning the direction conveyed by a signpost and perceptually discerning the divine direction conveyed by scripture.

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Sameer Yadav  105

Perceiving and Interpreting Signposts There are many non-­religious contexts in which we seem to passively and imme­ diately comprehend texts just by seeing or hearing them, without the interposing of any active reasoning on our part to infer what they mean.6 An analysis of the perceptual paradigm for scriptural discernment might therefore begin by analys­ ing these cases and then argue that our relationship to scripture can likewise con­ form to that analysis. Consider, therefore, the case of an ordinary signpost. Say you are an experienced hiker following a footpath in unknown territory searching for the trailhead. You spot a signpost that reads ‘Trailhead in .2 miles, right at the fork’. It might be that simply seeing what the signpost says succeeds in passively and immediately informing you of which way to go, without your engaging in any active reflection. Those accustomed to hiking might even have the seamless ex­peri­ence of glancing up, taking in the sign, and automatically changing course in response to its directions without even realizing that they’ve done so. In the context of using a signpost to navigate one’s terrain, reading or hearing a string of words can likewise be a passive and occurrent experience of immediate and unfolding comprehension, like visually tracking the movement of a bird across a skyline or listening to the development of a musical composition. When things go well, it is not necessary to initiate any act or process of reasoning or reflection. Merely seeing or hearing the relevant configuration of words conveyed by the signpost is sufficient for impressing upon us an understanding of how it purports to direct us towards the landscape before us.7 The relevant question is therefore whether this kind of occurrent, passive, and immediate comprehension of the directions conveyed by the signpost counts as a kind of perception of the way it purports to guide us to the trailhead. In order to address that question, we need a more precise definition of perception. ‘Perception’ in the strict and unqualified sense denotes a relation of the following sort: For any subject S, any object X, and any property P exhibited by that object, we ordinarily take S to be perceptually aware of X as P just in case X’s being P is non-­inferentially presented to S by way of some sensory input. For example, I can be perceptually aware of my coffee table’s being brown just in case I can immediately visually regis­ter its being brown by its presence to me. Perceptual awareness is thus a suc­ cess term; in those cases where we are ‘perceptually aware’ of X’s being P where X

6  Ludwig Wittgenstein considers many cases of this sort in his discussion of ‘rule-­following’. See Philosophical Investigations, 4th edition edited and translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009), 86–8, §§197–202. 7  Both in my reading of Wittgenstein and in my analysis of our ordinary perceptual relations to signposts, I follow John McDowell’s discussion in ‘Wittgenstein on Following a Rule’, Synthese 58 (1984): 325–63.

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106  Scripture as Signpost is not in fact P, it is rather that we seem to be perceptually aware of X’s being P.8 In other words, for me to have a perceptual awareness of the table as brown the table must in fact be brown, I must be capable of visually registering its brownness, and my suitable sensitivity to its brownness must be activated not by any active reason­ing on my part, but passively and immediately simply in virtue of the pres­ ence of the table’s brownness to me. So, to put our question in terms of this definition of perception qua perceptual awareness: is being non-­inferentially aware of those features of a signpost that are presentable to you by way of sensory input sufficient for grasping the directions it conveys? It would seem not. For it is possible to be perceptually aware of all the sensory features of the signpost that convey its directions without being able to identify or recognize those features as conveying any directions at all. My one-­ year-­old daughter Ella, for example, can be perceptually aware of all the same features of a signpost that it presents to you. But whereas Ella can be visually aware of the size, shape, and colour both of the signpost and any inscriptions it might have, still she does not—and this stage of her development cannot—recog­ nize the object she sees either as a signpost or its shapes, markings, etc. as convey­ ing any navigational instructions. What more is required beyond mere perceptual awareness? What is it that en­ables your seeing the signpost to afford you a recognition of the signpost as a signpost and as conveying some directions, while it affords Ella no such recogni­ tion? The difference seems to be that the hiker identifies what she sees as an instance of some established convention according to which a particularly pat­ terned material configuration constitutes a norm that sorts our behaviour into correct and incorrect responses. Such a convention specifies that under the appropriate conditions, the relevant material configuration (e.g. a board on post, shaped, or inscribed in a certain way and appropriately placed) counts as the expression of navigational instructions (e.g. as indicating the location of a trailhead).9 That particular ‘counting-­as’ convention, moreover, requires an extensive established infrastructure of social practice. All of our linguistic conventions are subject to analysis in terms of counting-­as relations whereby the particular con­fig­ur­ations of sounds or markings count as expressions of letters, words,

8  For an explication and defence of this analysis of perceptual awareness, see Alston, Perceiving God and Sameer Yadav, The Problem of Perception and the Experience of God (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2015). 9  For a discussion of conventions as ‘counting-­as’ relations, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 12–16. See also John Searle’s discussion of ‘conditions of satisfaction’, in Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 49. Note that my use of the term ‘convention’ throughout does not imply any notion of conventionalism, the thesis that counting-­as relations are arbitrary. See, e.g., David Lewis, Conventions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). My account is neutral as to whether the social establishment of any given convention is grounded in God, nature, social relations, etc.

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Sameer Yadav  107 and strings of words. Something similar would hold for certain shapes whose configurations conventionally designate directional arrows and for the pictorial conventions governing the counting-­as relations of maps. So whether a signpost conveys its navigational instructions by way of directional shapes, words, or maps, it will thereby require the hiker’s initiation into all the relevant counting-­as con­ ventions embedded in the norm it expresses. Moreover, beyond recognizing the configuration of the signpost itself, grasping its navigational convention also requires grasping all of the counting-­as conventions relative to an entire practical infrastructure associated with hiking. For example, the hiker could not possibly recognize the signpost as pointing the way to the trailhead without knowing that some material configurations of terrain and not others count as trailheads and trails, and that certain patterns of activity and not others count as hiking. So whereas both the hiker and Ella may be perceptually aware of the same material features of the signpost, only the hiker familiar with a complex infrastructure of social conventions connected to hiking is capable of identifying the relevant sub­ set of the signpost’s material features as satisfying a convention for the expression of some navigational directions. Thus while Ella and the hiker may have in common a perceptual awareness of the signpost, only the hiker can understand this awareness as satisfying the con­ ventions that enable her to recognize what she sees as a signpost and further as conveying navigational directions. This can lead us to suspect that what visually ‘shows up’ in the hiker’s perceptual awareness is just the same as what shows up in Ella’s perceptual awareness, or would show up to a Martian if its sensory equip­ ment resembled ours—namely, a visual field naked of any of the counting-­as con­ ventions that constitutes signposts or their use in sorting our navigational behaviour. Still, given the hiker’s initiation into the relevant social convention, he is able to supply an interpretation of his bare visual awareness, conceptually cloth­ ing the mere awareness that he, Ella, and the Martian have in common with the further structure of some established norms. The hiker must therefore be engaged in some such interpretive act, we might suppose, in order to span the obvious gap separating his uncomprehending discernment of raw sensory input from his comprehending recognition of the signpost as such. In virtue of being disposed to apply the requisite concepts or make the appropriate inference, he converts his mere seeing into a ‘seeing-­as’.10 But this idea that recognizing the content of our perceptual awareness in terms of our conventions is always a matter of interpreting that content has to be mis­ taken. At the very least, it is belied by our ordinary phenomenology. After our earliest stages of infancy, we almost never experience our environment in terms of a bare uncomprehending perceptual awareness, not even as a preliminary 10 John McDowell, ‘Experiencing the World’, in The Engaged Intellect (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 243–56.

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108  Scripture as Signpost experience that we then go on to render intelligible by a subsequent act of interpretation.11 Instead our environment ordinarily shows up to us by way of a perceptual awareness that passively and non-­inferentially presents itself to us already in the terms of our conventional infrastructures. Upon entering my office, my experience is not one of an undifferentiated mere perceptual awareness but rather a visual awareness of books and coffee mugs and student papers to be graded. As Heidegger observes: We never really first perceive a throng of sensations, e.g., tones and noises, in the appearance of things . . . [W]e hear the three-­motored plane, we hear the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkswagen. Much closer to us than all sensations are the things themselves. We hear the door shut in the house and never hear the acoustical sensations or even mere sounds. In order to hear a bare sound we have to listen away from things, divert our ear from them, i.e., listen abstractly.12

All such ordinary experiences of recognizing the objects of perceptual awareness are phenomenologically incompatible with the definition of ‘interpretation’ offered above, since the conventional understanding of objects given to us in our experience of them is conveyed not by any acts of inference from us as agents. Such experiences instead passively and non-­inferentially occur to us as patients.13 Moreover, seeing cups and hearing cars cannot be conveyed in the absence of those objects, but is necessarily conveyed to us by way of some sensory mode under which such objects are presented to us. Accordingly, the phenomenology in our use of signposts is not one in which we first undergo visual (or auditory) sen­ sations of some shapes (or sounds) inscribed on a board atop a post (or uttered by a friend), and then engage in some reasoning about those sensations, inferring 11 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §201. Supposing that every rule-­governed understand­ ing of an object can be decomposed into an inherently meaningless presentation and the expression of a norm that we use to assign it a meaning results in an infinite regress, since the expression will also always consist in another meaningless presentation that likewise stands in need of a normative interpretation. 12  Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 1972), 25–6. 13  John Greco suggests that we regard some interpretations as possibly passive and non-­inferential in ‘Perception as Interpretation’, in Annual ACPA Proceedings, Vol. LXXII, edited by Michael Bauer (Bronx, NY: Fordham University, 1999), 229–37. But this strikes me as a non-­standard and potentially misleading way of understanding an interpretation. Rather, as Wittgenstein rightly observes, what makes it plausible to use the word ‘interpretation’ to speak of perceptual recognition is just that what is perceptually recognized as thus-­and-­so might also come up for interpretive scrutiny as to whether it really is in fact thus-­and-­so. To regard a perception as a kind of ‘interpretation’ is therefore a kind of synecdoche for a merely potential role that our perceptual recognitions can—but need not—play in our active reasoning. See his Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, volume 1, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 2–11. See also the development of this Wittgensteinian insight by Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, to which I’ve also referred in n. 4 above.

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Sameer Yadav  109 from them that this inscribing (or sound) is the letter (or sound) ‘t’, the subsequent one is the letter ‘r’ etc., and then infer further that together such sounds constitute the word ‘trailhead’, and finally engage in some further reasoning about what trailheads are and which or what sort of trailhead is being referred to here as located at the right of a fork.14 Instead, our seeing or hearing the text and our understanding what it means can and often does strike us ‘all at once’ in a single unified experience of recogni­ tion absent of any such logical or temporal sequence of reasoning. For a hiker who is sufficiently initiated into the relevant ‘counting-­as’ conventions, the sign­ post can likewise convey to her which way to go just by looking—simply and immediately in virtue of her visual awareness of it. But if our capacity to passively and immediately acquire a comprehension of some texts is neither a mere percep­ tual awareness nor an interpretation, then what sort of discernment is it? The phenomenology of the cases under consideration suggests that in addition to being capable of mere perception and interpretation, we are also capable of perceptual recognition. Recognition, we have seen, is just a matter of identifying a material configuration as satisfying the conditions for a socially established con­ vention that expresses a norm of meaning. So if some materials and markings satisfy our conventions for counting as a signpost and the particular con­fig­ur­ ation of its markings satisfies our conventions for counting as a set of directions, then one correctly recognizes the signpost as expressing those directions. To claim that we are capable of perceptual recognition, then, is just the claim that we can identify objects as satisfying conventional conditions for the expres­ sion of meaning passively and non-­inferentially, simply by way of an object’s sen­ sory modes of presentation to us—that is, by way of our perceptual awareness of them. Our gradual initiation and habituation into vast and complex interlocking infrastructures of conventional practices disposes us towards a perceptual aware­ ness of our environment in terms of the conditions of satisfaction for our conven­ tions, and we thus ordinarily come to think of our perceptual awareness of our environment primarily in terms of our socially established conventions. Our ini­ tiation into the relevant counting-­as conventions ensures that the world’s sensory impressions on us involuntarily ‘wring’ from us recognitions of those surround­ ings as correctly or incorrectly satisfying our socially established conventions. For example, my ability to immediately visually recognize the object in the tree outside my window as a bird is an ability to literally see it as a satisfaction of whatever conditions are sufficient for counting something as a bird.15

14  Kevin Hector gives a similar example in Theology without Metaphysics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 186–9. But he seems to suggest that all perceptual awareness for us just is per­ ceptual recognition, which I deny (Yadav, Problem of Perception, 215–67). 15  John McDowell, ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, in Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 256–74.

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110  Scripture as Signpost In some cases of perceptual recognition, everything that is needed to satisfy the relevant counting-­as relation is presented in my perceptual awareness—I can rightly identify the object in the tree as a bird solely in terms of features that visu­ ally appear to me. In other cases, however, the background knowledge elicited in our perceptual awareness of an object includes conditions of satisfaction for iden­ tifying that object which cannot possibly be satisfied by anything that shows up in our perceptual awareness. In such cases, our perceptual recognition is theory-­ laden. Robert Brandom’s example of the physicist’s ability to observe mu-­mesons is a canonical example. Physicists, Brandom tells us, routinely report observing mu-­mesons in a cloud chamber, although, strictly speaking, humans do not pos­ sess sensitivities suitable for detecting the features of mu-­mesons as they do for detecting birds. However, their background knowledge and training makes them capable of non-­inferentially reporting on the presence of mu-­mesons in virtue of a visual awareness of hooked vapour trails in a cloud chamber. The activity in the cloud chamber can thus appear to the properly trained physicist to satisfy some conventional conditions for something’s counting as the behaviour of a mu-­ meson.16 In such cases physicists can rightly be said to literally see the behaviour of a mu-­meson only if their background theory of fundamental particles is correct. This introduces a further distinction regarding our perceptual recognition of objects. Namely, in addition to being theory-­laden or not, they can be direct or indirect. What the physicist is directly aware of by way of her theory-­laden per­ ceptual recognition is not strictly speaking a mu-­meson, even if her theory is cor­ rect. It is rather the effects of a mu-­meson. It is just that (on the theory) the activity she perceptually recognizes is a reliable indicator of the presence of mu-­mesons, and hence when she non-­ inferentially identifies the visual appearance of a hooked-­vapour trail as satisfying the convention for regarding something as a mu-­meson, she is indirectly perceptually recognizing the presence of a mu-­meson by way of a perceptual recognition of some of its effects. Similarly, our perceptual recognition of some objects is sometimes non-­theory-­laden but indirect. For example, even though the conditions of satisfaction for something to count as an airplane can be satisfied entirely by what shows up in a visual presentation of an airplane, I might also perceptually recognize the presence of an airplane in­dir­ ect­ly by way of my direct perceptual recognition of its contrail.17 Given the proper initiation into the right sort of social and practical infrastruc­ ture, hikers can perceptually recognize signposts as conveying navigational rules immediately simply by way of a perceptual awareness of their configurations as a particular way of satisfying the conditions for a navigational convention. Such a recognition can be not only non-­inferentially impressed upon them by 16  Robert Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 363–4. 17 Alston, Perceiving God, 21–2.

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Sameer Yadav  111 way of a sensory presentation, but it can also be non-­theory-­laden and direct since every condition of satisfaction for something’s counting as a signpost and further as a particular set of navigational directions can be visually presented in the perceptual awareness of the material configuration of the signpost (i.e. its shape and markings). A perceptual recognition that accords with the socially established infrastruc­ tures of conventional practice is our primary and default way of understanding and navigating the world. Interpretations, on the other hand, are secondary and arise only when we have sufficient reason to interrupt our primary perceptual relation to the world. When things go well, the hiker’s use of the signpost should not require her to interpret it. She can instead acquire the directions it conveys simply and immediately by looking. But things do not always go well. One prob­ lem that might arise is that the material configuration of the signpost does not clearly satisfy any established conventions for conveying navigational directions. Or even in cases where the material configuration of the signpost does clearly exhibit a navigational convention, the hiker may not be sufficiently initiated or skilled in the practice of identifying configurations that satisfy the relevant count­ ing-­as conventions. In either case, our primary and more paradigmatic relation of perceptual recognition will give way to the need to hazard an interpretation, in which the hiker actively seeks to infer or puzzle out what sort of navigational con­ vention is being satisfied by the material configuration of the signpost. This analysis of the hiker’s discernment of the meaning of the signpost further enables us to analyse the possible roles of perception and interpretation not only in comprehending what the signpost means, but also the possibility of a trans­ formed relationship to the world that this enables. However she comes to discern the navigational meaning of the signpost (perceptually or interpretively), that meaning can then itself serve as a condition of satisfaction for her perceptual rec­ ognition of whatever the signpost points to in the world beyond the signpost. For example, when surveying the terrain before her, the hiker may have come to the signpost unable to perceptually recognize the trailhead before her, while a com­ prehension of the signpost newly enables her to see some stretch of the terrain before her as the trailhead. Prior to reading the sign, she did not possess the requis­ite bit of background knowledge about which visually perceptible features of the terrain before her is supposed to count as the trailhead. It is just that bit of conventional background knowledge that her discernment of the signpost supplied. So whether the hiker has grasped the meaning of the signpost perceptually or interpretively, it can furnish her with a newly formed capacity for perceptually recognizing the terrain before her. Having grasped what it conveys, it becomes possible for her to return to the scene before her anew, newly disposed to imme­ diately perceptually recognizing something perceptually unavailable to her just moments ago. Or, just as she might encounter a problem that requires her to interpret the signpost, so too she may need to fall back on an interpretation of the

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112  Scripture as Signpost landscape before her due to a problem with the satisfaction conditions she’s acquired from the signpost or due to her relative lack of skill in identifying the relevant material configurations in her visual field that satisfy them. She might accordingly find herself having to engage in more or less interpretive activity in order to visually pick out the relevant material configuration that counts as the trailhead that the signpost has purported to indicate.

Towards a Perceptual Paradigm: Scripture as Signpost Why not analyse a perceptual paradigm for scriptural discernment along the same lines as our ordinary perceptual recognition of texts such as signposts? On this proposal, our initiation into Christian community includes our in­corp­or­ ation into a vast infrastructure of socially established ‘counting-­as’ conventions. Among those conventions are specifications of what sorts of patterns or con­fig­ur­ ations of biblical text ought to count as modes of God’s guiding and directing Christian belief and practice in specific sorts of ways. Christians initiated and habituated into those conventions may become disposed to identifying the relevant patterns of scriptural discourse as satisfying the conventions. A proper Christian initiation renders the relevant identifications second nature, thereby enabling them to perceptually recognize their scriptural reading as instances of divine guidance, simply by an auditory or visual presentation of some con­fig­ur­ation of biblical text, quite apart from any interpretive or contemplative activity on our part. Moreover, whereas certain audible or visible configurations of the text would count as instances of scriptural meaning, such meaning itself would, like the sign­ post, direct us to various features of the world in order to identify it in the light of scriptural meaning. A signpost we’ve never encountered before can convention­ ally convey to us a set of directions that transforms our ability to perceptually recognize features of the landscape before us in the light of those directions (allowing us to, for example, make use of its directions to visually pick out a trail­ head we’d otherwise fail to notice). Likewise, each engagement with scriptural reading or hearing can transform our ability to perceptually recognize the fea­ tures of the world before us uniquely in the light of scriptural meaning, and by doing so supply us with divine guidance for navigating the world it illuminates.18 We can thus experience scripture as a light to our path. Of course it needn’t be that the divine guidance afforded by every biblical text is recognizable perceptually. Perhaps certain scriptural conventions necessarily require interpretive engagement with the text. But for those scriptural texts that are susceptible of perceptual recognition, our need to discern what they mean by an act of interpretation means that something has gone wrong. In such cases, 18  Brian Goldstone and Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Disciplined Seeing: Forms of Christianity and Forms of Life’, South Atlantic Quarterly 109/4 (Fall 2010): 765–90.

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Sameer Yadav  113 having to engage in scriptural interpretation ordinarily signals that we are not sufficiently skilled to recognize the text as satisfying the relevant scriptural con­ vention, forcing us to actively engage it with some inferential reasoning. Similarly, having been informed by scripture as to how God purports to guide our beliefs and practices, we might find ourselves directed to the world unable to per­cep­ tual­ly recognize it in the light of divine direction. So we must struggle to see how the world might comport with whatever God is conveying to us in scripture. In these cases, our puzzling out the text or the world marks a secondary mode of engagement, a fallback position after our primary mode of engagement—that of perceptual recognition—has failed. It can rightly be complained that this picture is thus far merely formal—it doesn’t tell us just what the proper scriptural conventions are or what if anything about God, the text, and the world grounds those conventions. Any specification of that kind belongs to a more substantive theological theory of Christian ­scripture—a theory that tells us, first, which or which sorts of configurations of biblical text ought to be regarded as conveying God’s guidance and direction (and why these configurations and not others), and, second, what sorts of discernible acts or events we ought to regard as scripturally licensed instances of divine guid­ ance and direction (and why these sorts of acts and events and not others). This dependence of scriptural conventions on some theological background theory highlights an important disanalogy between scripture and the signpost. Whereas everything I require in order to identify a signpost as conveying its directions to me may be visually available to me in the signpost itself, the same is not true of scripture. Rather, the configurations of biblical text can present me with a visual or auditory indicator of divine guidance only if some specifiable theological back­ ground theory of scripture is correct. Both in the case of the signpost and scripture, however, the perceptual recogni­ tion of the world as satisfying the relevant convention may be either direct or indirect. Just as a signpost might convey a set of features that count as the trail­ head and those features are directly presented to me by the trailhead itself in my visual field, so too scripture might convey some features of the world about which God is guiding me to form a belief or engage in some practice, and those features may be directly presented to me in my sensory relation to the world itself. Likewise, just as a sign posted on a cloud chamber might enable me to per­cep­ tual­ly recognize a mu-­meson by way of its characteristic vapour trail rather than its direct sensory presentation, so too scripture might enable me to perceptually recognize a feature of the world as a characteristic effect of divine activity, rather than as a direct sensory presentation of Godself. Here too, just what sorts of direct and indirect forms of perceptual recognition are possible in the case of scripture depends upon which theological theory of scriptural convention we ought to hold. I won’t propose any such theory of scriptural conventions here. In The Uses of Scripture, David Kelsey identifies several distinct theories of scriptural convention that he finds underlying the way various theologians appeal to the Bible to justify

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114  Scripture as Signpost their theological claims. For example, according to Kelsey, Karl Barth holds that God has intended for biblical words to count as narrative portrayals of God’s presence and action in Jesus Christ that manifest his presence to us here and now. By contrast, B. B. Warfield, on Kelsey’s reading, claims that biblical words count as propositions that God asserts in order to commend for our belief. What matters for my argument is not which (if either) of these scriptural ‘counting-­as’ conven­ tions is correct. I am not here claiming to know what the relevant conventions are but only that (1) there are or could be such conventions and (2) we are or could become capable of perceptually recognizing both the biblical text and the world as satisfying the relevant scriptural conventions. I’ll therefore conclude by briefly considering a few objections to these two claims. It could be that the way God guides us via scripture is simply not a matter of conventions at all. The very idea that there are socially established conventions that link particular patterns of biblical discourse with particular modes of divine guidance or direction seems to place limits on God’s freedom, straitjacketing scripture as a living and active vehicle of divine presence and action into a kind of closed system of coded meanings. But this worry presumes an unduly restricted conception of socially established counting-­as conventions. We are social crea­ tures. Any divine guidance or direction given to us via scripture will therefore have to be accommodated to our social location if it is to be so much as in­tel­li­ gible to us. Nor is there anything about socially established counting-­as conven­ tions that requires a strict relation of determination between the sensible material configuration and the kind of meaning it signifies. Think of the varied and inde­ terminate range of meanings that a wink or a traditional Indian head-­bob might communicate in any given social context. Neither does the above analysis require that the relevant conventions are impermeable to various trajectories of change or radical alteration by God; it only requires that we construe God’s changing accommodation to the social locations of Christian communities or God’s disruption of previously established conven­ tions as evolving or establishing new conventions, even if the new convention is limited to a single instantiation. For example, I often invent games with my son in which I stipulate that some bodily motion will carry a given significance (e.g. rais­ ing my arm counts as an injunction to hop on one foot), even though it has never carried that significance before nor will it after the game is over. To have conven­ tions for recognizing one thing as an indicator of another does not imply any­ thing about the malleability or temporal extension of the convention in question. Objections about such things would belong not to the very idea of scriptural con­ ventions for conveying divine guidance, but rather to some particular theological theory for specifying the nature of such conventions.19 19  Jean-­Luc Marion’s phenomenology of ‘saturated phenomena’ in In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, translated by Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), and its appli­ cation to scripture reading in ‘They recognized him; and he became invisible to them’, Modern

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Sameer Yadav  115 A distinct sort of worry might confront my second claim, that scriptural conventions—however we theorize them—are or could be susceptible to perceptual recognition in the way that I’ve analysed signposts and traffic signs. One reason to deny this might be that scriptural conventions are connected to much larger swaths of text embedded in social, historical, and literary contexts of far greater complexity than we find with the short bits of text emblazoned on signposts. We might see how it is possible to perceptually recognize ‘STOP’ on a stop sign as an injunction to stop, but it seems strange to suggest that an instance of divine teach­ ing or leading conveyed by way of a sentence deeply embedded within the ancient socio-­historical and literary context of the Christian Bible could yield its divine meaning so easily. Whatever theory of scriptural conventions we develop, such conventions will likely depend upon some prior comprehension of the social, lit­ erary and historical contexts of the biblical texts that Christians suppose are the vehicles for God’s guidance of Christian individuals and communities. It may well also include information about how Christian individuals and communities in the past have made use of the biblical text to discern divine guidance. But it seems absurd to suppose that any of this requisite information could be imparted to anyone simply by perceptual recognition. If that were so then Christians would not have the manifest needs we do for there to be biblical exegetes, theologians, ecclesial magesteria, and the like. Recognizing what the relevant scriptural con­ ventions are and the circumstances in which they are satisfied in any given instance of scriptural discernment would seem to demand the difficult work of interpretation. But we can readily acknowledge that interpretive work of this sort is necessary for establishing scriptural conventions, while also holding that it is possible for the deliverances of expert interpretations to be incorporated into practices that dispose us towards perceptually recognizing the textual and worldly patterns that comport with those interpretations. Recall the physicists capable of perceptually recognizing mu-­mesons in a cloud chamber. It may well be that very complex forms of inferential reasoning were required in order to determine that hooked vapour trails are indeed indicators of the presence of mu-­mesons. Once that con­ vention has been established, however, not only physicists but also non-­physicists can nevertheless be trained to recognize mu-­ mesons perceptually, without re­tracing the relevant forms of reasoning that justify the correlation of the indica­ tor to what it purports to indicate. Indeed, we can imagine non-­physicists who have been initiated into the practice of perceptually recognizing mu-­mesons while being completely unable to reproduce any of the physicist’s reasoning. Theology 18/2 (2002): 145–52 can be read as a sustained critique on revelatory meaning as conven­ tionally determined. Divine revelation mediated by scripture is for Marion precisely the rupture of any such conventions. I have argued, however, that Marion’s phenomenology conflates an in­de­ter­min­acy of significance with the kind of determinacy involved in the formation and use of concepts (Yadav, Problem of Perception, 139–74).

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116  Scripture as Signpost

Conclusion An active contemplation and reflective puzzling over scripture of the sort offered in a standard hermeneutical paradigm can supply us with many spiritual goods over and above that of discerning how God is guiding our belief and practice. Deriving such guidance by wrestling with the text can humble us, it can enlarge our imaginations, it can become a means of existential seeking and finding. Moreover, these goods seem unavailable to us on a perceptual paradigm, for which the divine deliverances of scripture become immediately and passively available to us in an unproblematic and occurrent experience of divine guidance as we read or hear the text. But a perceptual paradigm for scriptural discernment brings its own dis­tinct­ive spiritual goods. To be immediately scripturally guided by God in responding to the world’s continual and varied impingements on us can vivify and deepen our sense of open receptivity to God. It can sensitize us to our surroundings in a way that affords us an unbroken responsiveness to the world as a theatre of divine prompting—a form of responsiveness not available to those bogged down in acts of interpretive reasoning. Enacting such a paradigm, however, would require more than merely supplementing my account with a substantive theory of scrip­ tural conventions. It would also require the development of a corresponding infrastructure of Christian practices of reading and listening to scripture that train our ears to ‘hear what the Spirit says to the churches’ (Rev. 2:7).

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8 Spiritual Perception and Liturgy Catherine Pickstock

In what follows, I argue that, in the case of Christian tradition, spiritual perception, and ritual practice need to be considered together. Several related terms can be drawn together in order to help us to understand liturgical activity. These are spiritual perception, the spiritual senses, ‘common-­sensing’, and the synaesthetic mingling of the different physical and spiritual senses which this involves. Why should the senses, human perception and their union or commingling matter for a consideration of liturgy? To answer this question, one might tarry over a further question: what is liturgy for? That there might be further liturgies may be the most crucial answer. But why should human beings need to repeat their liturgy? The answer here is that, as fallen, the human being forgets that she is created, that in every moment of flourishing, she copies and draws near to God; she exults when she remembers this, and her mind is aligned with her created ontology, and that of her neighbours; and she despairs when she tends away from this, forgetting her true alignment. In liturgical enactment, the human person performs and then recollects her spiritual and embodied unity with herself, with her neighbours and with God. Because human acts of worship do not coincide with human nature, as it should, the gesture of worship must be explicitly repeated. Conscious and active repetition of liturgy is needed, and so liturgy itself is requisite. Within liturgical enactment, one might look for a theology of alignment: of the redeemed physical senses, of their co-­ordination with spiritual counterparts, of their commingling and unification, as a prefigured restoration of the paradisal body. The four kinds of sense outlined above are often held to be quite separate in tradition and perceptual compass. Spiritual perception is taken in this volume to refer to a range of perceptual powers that make divine–human contact possible. In a much more specific fashion, the tradition of spiritual senses concerns the heightened psychic equivalents for physical sensations, and even parts of the body, traceable to Origen. The sensus communis or central sense, for Aristotle and later developed by Aquinas, by contrast, refers to the unification of the primary sense-­perceptions, the perception of perception, to judgements of comparison, contrast, and discrimination of the deliverances of the senses, and the residual sense images that compose imagination, together with the voluntary and involuntary reproduction of sensation through memory. Finally, the term ‘synaesthesia’ Catherine Pickstock, Spiritual Perception and Liturgy In: Perceiving Things Divine: Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual Perception. Edited by: Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802594.003.0008

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118  Spiritual Perception and Liturgy refers to the perceptual phenomenon whereby  stimulation of one sensory or ­cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. It is taken to apply to a pathological phenomenon, but it can be argued that such pathology heightens a sensory mingling and transference that occurs in all of us, if a ‘common sensing’ and so the first emergence of intelligible ‘sense’ (or meaning) is to be possible at all. Although these terms are not usually taken together, the gestural and enacted nature of liturgy, its sensory complexity, and its exorbitant fusion of high metaphysics and lived, inhabited reality, suggest that it would be instructive to allow for their connection for the purposes of such a discussion. The reality of the ‘spiritual senses’, ever since Origen, was thought to depend neither on a purely spiritual organ, or set of organs, nor a corporeal metaphor for spiritual apprehension. Rather, it was rooted in a classical ontology of the bodily senses which viewed them as already obtaining a pneumatic aspect. Spiritual sensing accordingly involved a heightening of this natural capacity in its being directed towards the angelic and the divine. It would be more accurate, however, to say that ordinary sensing was seen rather as a diminished exemplification of this supernatural scope, impaired since the Fall; and that in the liturgical fusing of the ideal and the real, one finds an aspiration to the unification of the senses, a harbinger, a partial realization of the anagogic marriage of sense with spirit, in which fallen reason is offset by the bringing together and intensified alignment of bodily sense perceptions, in such a way that, for example, although reason fails to discern the body and blood in the Eucharistic elements, nonetheless the senses do, drawn by their sweetness and savour.1 Given the marked physicality of our activity in the offering of liturgy, it is even the case that, since fallen reason has lost its power to guide the human senses, they must now take the lead over the human mind, guiding fallen reason through a mimicry of its restoration, as if in aspiration that authentic realization will follow upon such momentary and repeated copying. Indeed, this eventual realization is itself a true copying of the divine pattern of the Logos that is the very copy of the Paternal origin. Since Trinitarian doctrine teaches the paradox that this secondary copying is essential to the origin in which it adheres, our normal inclination to instrumentalize the ritual is reversed in the Christian case. For if mimetic gesture is ‘original’, then liturgy remains even when it is completed as spiritual attitude. For liturgy remains even in God as the eternal filial praise of the Father. One can observe other related forms of liturgical alignment: between the ­individual and the collective, between unity and diversity, body and spirit, word and sense. It is as if, in the liturgical space, realized through enactment, an ex­ter­ ior­iza­tion of the sensus communis is dramatized, and the human participants 1  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III Q. 74 a. 3 ad 1; a. 79; Q. 81 a. 1 ad 3. I have developed some of the present arguments in Aspects of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

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Catherine Pickstock  119 become, as it were, personifications of sense. The link between the senses of the individual bodies in shared meaning is ‘transubstantiated’ into the link between all the sensing bodies into that shared cultural sensibility which was the earlier meaning of ‘common sense’ present more judgemental daily usage.2 The space of the liturgy, the edifice of the Church or the performed space of enactment becomes a dramatization and exteriorization of the mind, of unfallen reason which remembers that it is created and is now at one with the diversity of creation and with God, where knowing and unknowing coincide in illumination and the forgetting of self. These considerations suggest that it would seem arbitrary not to draw these alignments of the ‘senses of sense’ together, and surmise as to their mutual ­contribution, even if it is not possible to arraign them in causal sequence or fully understand their compass or priority. A consideration of the diverse kinds of  sensing—spiritual, unified, commingled, and borrowed—taken together, can assist us in gaining a better understanding of the theological complexity of l­ iturgy, and especially the soteriological role of sensation. However, liturgy concerns not just gesture and bodily comportment but also language and its chanted, musical extension. This chanting dimension constitutes a certain link between the verbal and the sensing. Thus, Plato adverted to the way in which we do not adequately understand the impact of language and representation upon our spiritual estate; the profound and sometimes dangerous spiritual interiorization of ideas through the senses of hearing and vision when the mimetic arts propound disordered or distorting representations of reality. The ancient audience, on witnessing the mimetic performances of the tragedians, would put on their sufferings, exult and despair along with the characters.3 One can mention, in addition, Origen’s identification of the anagogical sense of scripture whereby the reader puts on or enters into a scriptural passage so completely that she exceeds contemplation and knows the words with her whole being.4 Language can in these ways both confound and restore the human person, which prompts us to note that language does not keep pace with reality, as a figment of our invention, a transparency we lay over the real to archive its affairs. Rather, language is part of reality: it adds to its panoply, and so it can shape the human person’s mind, leads her ahead of herself, or take her away from herself, undo her. One might suggest that sensation is driving reason ahead of itself from beneath, while chanted language draws reason beyond itself on a horizontal

2  Hans-­Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. William Glen-­Doepel (London: Sheed and Ward, 1975), 19ff. 3 Plato, Republic, X 597 B; Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); Hans-­Georg Gadamer, ‘Plato and the Poets’, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, P. Christopher Smith, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 39–73. 4 Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. Marc Sebanc and E. M. Macierowski, 3 vols (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans and Co., 1998, 2000, 2009).

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120  Spiritual Perception and Liturgy plane. Together, word and sensation compose the gestural and ritual act, which expresses a vertical inclination, in excess of the ‘finished’ products of reason, of the whole person. This active fusion of the sensing and the linguistic was also exemplified in Origen’s connecting of mystical and hermeneutic doctrines, in such a way that defined the authentic later grammar of the Christian life. Because of the incarnational focus of Christianity, and the biblical derivation of full understanding from the operation of the ‘heart’ (both corporeally and linguistically in excess of mere ‘mind’), spiritual perception was understood, in its cleaving to the bodily, as ­correspondingly diversified in terms of the five natural senses themselves. These ‘sensings’ were held to be involved in the discernment of the three (and eventually after him, fourfold) ‘senses’ of Scripture which were developed initially by Origen. At the core of his hermeneutic theory stood the Solomonic Canticles, the central book of the Bible for Origen, insofar as it alone had a directly allegorical meaning, concerning Christ and his Bride. What is more, the same book was taken by Origen to be the prime and most sensuous source for the understanding of the spiritual senses.5 The two ‘senses’ of ‘sense’ – physical response and active spiritual meaning— hereby dramatically converged. In a further doubling, the bride of Canticles was seen to be primarily a figura of the Church, but secondarily a figura of the soul and its destiny to be united with God. Just by reason of this complex set of connections, the liturgy of the Church and its ritual chanting, enactment, and proc­ lam­ation of the allegorical sense of Scripture were inseparable for the Patristic and medieval period from the pious disposition of the individual Christian, her simultaneously outward bodily and inwardly spiritual comportment, as witnessed by the precise postural and gestural modes depicted in Peter the Chanter’s De oratione et speciebus illius, as representative and instilling of specific prayerful ­dispositions and spiritual estates.6 In this chapter I will explore the heuristic nature of the sacraments; the sen­sor­ ial nature of liturgical enactment as itself part of the work of saving mystery; the redemptive intensification of the senses; and the liturgical transformation of the human body into transparent image. As already described, the features of liturgy which are of particular interest in this chapter are the realising of an aspiration to the redeemed unification of the several senses, through common sensing synaesthesia, spiritual sensing, and the gestural, chanted fusion of sensory attentiveness with ecstatic verbal utterance.

5  Jean-­Louis Chrétien, Symbolique du Corps: La tradition chrétienne du Cantiques des Cantiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005). 6  Peter the Chanter, The Christian at Prayer: An Illustrated Prayer Manual, Richard C. Trexler, ed., Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (Binghampton, NY: SUNY). See especially 133–65.

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Catherine Pickstock  121 The active, political and performative character of ritual, which one might take to be common to many societies, was shaped in the case of Christian societies by the transformative power ascribed to Christian liturgy, and especially the Eucharist, as an extension of the divine transformative assumption of human flesh in the Incarnation.7 In line with the foregoing, recent study of pre-­modern monastic and liturgical rituals has emphasized that such operations do not encode hidden messages remote from ordinary activity, nor divide inner purpose from outer gesture. Rather, they seek to re-­align inner motive and outer shape via the formation of virtues through the exercise of certain disciplines, which are embedded within, and constitutive of, a way of life. Indeed, rather than appending ritual activity to the normative instrumental activity of the everyday, it is implied that, if anything, one should approach the matter the other way around: ordinary extra-­liturgical life is suspended from its heightened or semi-­perfected realization in liturgy. For this reason, ritual and quotidian activity reinforced one another during the medieval period in part because of the ‘instructive’ character of Christian liturgy. The latter tended to bring together thought and physicality to a paradigmatic degree, again in terms of a further enactment of Incarnation and the mediation of a Trinitarian God who was internally as well as externally active, ordering, expressing, speaking, imaging, and inspiring.8 As several Danish scholars have recently shown, this mediating integration was achieved by recourse to synaesthesia, taken in an extended and philosophically established sense of simultaneous appeal to all the bodily senses. This was not by successive recourse to individual senses, but through their commingling, in such a way as to transfigure at once the things perceived, and the subject perceiving them, and to unite them through the ‘immutation’ of the senses which conforms them to, rather than extrinsically representing, the objects of perception.9 This common practice concurred with the emphasis of Aristotelian-­influenced theologians such as Bonaventure and Aquinas upon our habitual ‘common sensing’, whereby an ‘inner sense’ blends together the products of the five senses, and perceives through them all, through a shared quantitative dimension (perceiving

7 Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 203–47. 8  Giorgio Agamben, Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty trans Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 17–86. 9 Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen, ‘Into the Saturated Sensorium: Introducing the Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages’; ‘Sensorium: a Model for Medieval Perception’; Kristin Bliksrud Aavitsland, ‘Incarnation; Paradoxes of Perception and Mediation in Medieval Liturgical Art’; Laura Katrine Skinnebach, ‘Devotion: Perception as Practice and Body as Devotion in Late Medieval Piety’; Nils Holger Petersen, ‘Ritual: Medieval Liturgy and the Senses’, and Henning Laugerud, ‘Memory: The Sensory Materiality of Belief and Understanding in Late Medieval Europe’, The Saturated Sensorium: Principles of Perception & Meditation in the Middle Ages, H.  H.  L.  Jørgensen, H. Laugerud, and L. K. Skinnebach, eds (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2014), 9–23, 24–71, 72–90, 152–179, 180–205, 246–272, respectively.

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122  Spiritual Perception and Liturgy size, shape, position, and so forth) as the mediating threshold between body and mind, and as essential to the thinking-­process of finite creatures.10 In this way, everything conspired in the medieval liturgy to enchant matter and to concretize spirit, in such a way that may seem contradictory to post-­Cartesian thinkers. At the same time, the incarnated mystery was seen as divine by virtue of  its creative, transformative capacity, as already mentioned. For this reason, the  miraculous was not seen as surprising, and the thaumaturgic was almost ‘expected’ and was frequently recorded. Synaesthesia itself encouraged this sense of openness, because illuminating sight came to be immediately linked with the haptic, or the sense of touch; insight with movement; and vision with alteration. Touch, after Aristotle, was regarded as inherently diverse, lacking a common genus, such as ‘vision’ for the eye, and united by its prodigious substantive location, which is the whole physical body. Since touch was regarded, in Aristotelian terms, as the surface medium between mind and matter, human knowing as such was seen as a kind of haptic circulation and real ontological exchange of spirit with corporeal things, so connecting physical with spiritual perception.11 Given the foregoing considerations, one can argue that medieval Christendom was liturgical in the deepest sense, with the divine offering in a perfect coincidence of reality with ceremonial, to be endlessly repeated until the end of time. Beyond the mere abstraction of ideas, and the inert givenness of lapidary things, the deepest reality was disclosed as radically operational, and creatively mastering of matter besides spirit, holding the active key to their integration.12 It is in these terms that Giorgio Agamben has argued that in Christianity, the ritual character of human life finds a new pitch of intensity by seeking to make all of life coincide with the heightened life of liturgy, just as Christ’s perfectly restored humanity is a continuously unbroken broken offering. Agamben cites the religious orders as an especially intense example of this; the unceasing round of Cluniac prayer, the Benedictine integration of labour into liturgy, and the attempt of the orders of friars to extend this coincidence to everyday life. Being, life, and prayer by aspiration come to coincide.13 This approach to an absolute fusion of life and liturgy arises from a specific Christian anthropology, which emphasizes that human beings are mixed

10 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4. See Daniel Heller-­Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of Sensation (New York: Zone Books/MIT Press, 2007) and John  G.  Gamack, ‘Synaesthesia and Knowing’, Language, Vision and Music:  Selected Papers from the 8th International Workshop on the Cognitive Science of Natural Language Processing, Paul Mc Kevitt, Seán Ó. Nualláin, Conn Mulvihill, eds (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press, 2002), 157–171, especially 159ff. Silvia Casini, ‘Synesthesia, transformation and synthesis: toward a multi-­ sensory pedagogy of the image’, The Senses and Society 12:1 (2017), 1–17. 11 Aquinas, In De Anima, I, 54–82, II, 22; Jørgensen, ‘Into the Saturated Sensorium’; Petersen, ‘Ritual’; John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2001), 60–87. 12 Agamben, Opus Dei, 17–86. 13 Agamben, Opus Dei, 17–86.

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Catherine Pickstock  123 creatures, neither quite beast nor quite angel, as Blaise Pascal expressed it.14 This apparently grotesque hybridity is the miniature dignity of the human being. Unlike angels, human beings combine in their persons every level of the created order, from the inorganic, through the organic and the animally psychic, to the angelically intellectual. God must communicate to human beings through their bodies and senses, as a tilting of his sublime thought towards their particular mode of understanding. But this tilting denotes more than condescension and economic adaptation, however much these are necessarily involved. This is because human beings, unlike angels, have a privileged access to the mute language of physical reality.15 The latter is an essential aspect of God’s creation, part of the plenitude of divine self-­expression, and so, in this respect, human beings enjoy a certain advantage, as compared with angelic spiritual confinement. For even if material reality is lower in metaphysical status than angelic or human rational being, it must, as part of the plenitude of creation, be an essential part, and so reveal something of God hidden even from the angels, just as the angels could not comprehend the mystery of the Incarnation.16 The dumb simplicity and lack of reflexivity in physical things, or the spontaneity of animals, show aspects of the divine simplicity and spontaneity itself, which cannot be evident to the somewhat reflective, discursive and abstracting operation of limited human or angelic minds. This is why sacramental signs have, for Christian theology, a heuristic function; they are not just illustrative or metaphorical. They rather prompt human beings to new thought, and provide guidance into deeper modes of meditation because they contain a surplus which thought cannot anticipate or fathom. It is also the case, as Aquinas elaborates in his discussion of analogical language in Summa Theologiae I, q.13, that when one hazards an analogical predication of God, one cannot comprehensively survey its meaning, but only tentatively move in the direction of its sense. For the source of its meaning lies pre-­eminently in God, and only derivatively, by dint of participation, in the world to hand. From this, it follows that if such density of language applies especially to theological discourse, the latter intensifies what pertains in the case of all language, since all words refer, as Aquinas indicates, primarily to material things, but these things themselves borrow their being and ultimate significance from divine pre-­ containment. It is implied that the use of any word, and exorbitantly sacramental signs, do not keep pace but rather exceed the limit of human understanding, and the deployment of such signs, in semi-­unknowing, itself assists in our inner and outer alignment with what is unknown.

14  Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Paris: Delagrave, 1897), § 329. 15 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q 77, a 3 resp. 16  Ephesians 3:9–10.

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124  Spiritual Perception and Liturgy So, liturgy is in part an alignment of the human worshipper with God, and of the inner and outer dimensions of the human person, and their bodily and spiritual aspects. Liturgy is not simply a public duty. Rather, it is the primary means by which the Christian, throughout her life, from baptism to extreme unction, is gradually inducted into the mystery of revelation and transformed by it. It is also significant that liturgy forms a conscious threshold between knowing and unknowing. ‘Mystery’ for St Paul names the primal secret shown through Christ’s life: ‘the wisdom shown in mystery that was once hidden’, as one might translate the phrase in 1 Cor. 2:7.17 It is an ancient Greek term whose early context was the mystery religions, especially those of the cults of Eleusis, Ilion, Thebes, and Arcadia, and the oracular cult of Boeotia. While such rites had initially been seen as local fertility cults,18 some later commentators have observed a metaphysical and sometimes Pythagorean element in their later developments, associated with an induction into immortal life for the participants’ souls.19 The term musterion referred to the rite itself which revealed and yet preserved a secret. Its Eleusinian context, indeed, thematized the withholding of secrets: the awful mysteries [are] not to be transgressed, violated, or divulged, because the tongue is restrained by reverence for the gods.20

Paul’s later use of the term, whilst retaining a resonance of mystery, seems to present the withheld quality of divine secrecy as compatible with, and not contradicted by, revealedness. The revelation in Christ as perpetuated by the Church, implies that for Paul, the historical drama of Christ’s life (which indeed began with his obscurely liturgical baptism by John in the Jordan) as itself a liturgy, the perfect worship of the Father, which could be performed by the Son alone. However, Paul implicitly saw the liturgy of the Church as making present again, and even as a continuation of, the original salvific drama. These human contributions to the mystery are a crucial part of its secret, new stages in its unfolding, showing forth what is at the same time, and by the same gesture, held back. It follows that, through the course of the Christian mysteries, humanity is thought to be redeemed through participation in the liturgical process: this is at once a speaking, acting, sensorial, and contemplative process (as the twentieth century German liturgist, Dom Odo Casel, emphasized), even if the aetiology and full entailments of words and actions are not commanded, or even known or 17  See also 1 Cor. 5:51; Col. 1:27; Matt. 13:11. 18 J.  D.  Mikalson, Ancient Greek Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 85–7; W.  Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1987). 19  M.  B.  Cosmopoulos, ed., Greek Mysteries: The Archaeology and Ritual of Ancient Greek Secret Cults (London: Routledge, 2003); Mikalson, Ancient Greek Religion, 90. 20 A. N. Athanassakis, The Homeric Hymns (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), see Hymn to Demeter.

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Catherine Pickstock  125 understood.21 The Christian mystery, like the pagan mysteries, concerns an induction into things shown, said, and done, but not exhaustively interpreted— otherwise, Christ would be a human example or template, and not the God-­Man who infused into humanity a new sharing in the divine life by conjoining his own body with the body of the Church. However, the Christian mystery, unlike pagan mysteries, is an initiation offered to all, to slaves and metics as well as to freemen, women, and children. It brings together initiation with universal citizenship, and an entering of all into a school of wisdom, so synthesizing mystical, political and philosophical elements.22 The ‘logic’ of Christian liturgy was a means to transform the consciousness of the worshipper through the manner of alignment discussed in the foregoing, by a vivid appeal to her imagination, and by a blending of life and liturgy. This was in part possible because, as the early twentieth century German Catholic philosopher and priest, Romano Guardini, emphasized, liturgy is a kind of play, something which is carried through like a game, for its own sake, and not for the sake of an extrinsic goal or end.23 The only reason for performing a liturgy is that there might be more liturgies, and that its participants might eventually offer themselves in the eschatological liturgy. That ultimate worship, like all preceding worship, enacts and celebrates the outgoing of all things from God, and the return of all things to God, including the rejection of God by created things through the perverse will of human beings and fallen angels, and the divine overcoming of this rejection through the ‘mystery’ of the divine descent and human elevation. But liturgy is not play in a whimsical or flippant sense, since it not only recalls, but re-­effects the cosmic drama of divine descent and human elevation. Its ef­fect­ ive means are essential to this elevation, since to be fallen means to be without the capacity of rising by one’s own activity. For Christian understanding, once Adam had asserted himself against God, and so ceased to offer all back to God in worship, it was not possible for him to recover himself by recovering a true concept of the divine. This concept was only available through the right orientation or alignment of the human person—in her spiritual, psychic, and bodily sensing—in worship. In order to restore human worship of God, God must descend in person to offer again through the human being such true human worship. Only the divine impersonation of our flesh ensures the restoration of a paradisal sensation, which is inseparable from a paradisal verbal expression or song of praise. Just as touch can only be at once passive and active, so also a true passivity

21 O.  Casel, The Mystery of Christian Worship, B.  Neunhauser, trans. (London: D.  L.  T., 1963); L. Bouyer, Life and Liturgy (London: Sheed and Ward, 1978); A. Louth, ‘Afterword: Mysticism: Name and Thing’, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 22 B.  Blumenfeld, The Political Paul; Justice, Democracy and Kingship in a Hellenistic Framework (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001). 23 R. Guardini, Sacred Signs, G. Banham, trans. (St Louis: Pio Decimo, 1956), 176–84.

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126  Spiritual Perception and Liturgy of utterance is already a true response. Inversely a true expression is ecstatic just by virtue of its continued active reception of the divine source that is being hereby expressed. How does this construal of human worship relate to the question of spiritual perception? The kenotic movement which is central to Christian liturgy is repeated within the ordering of the individual human economy itself. Even though the human body and the senses can teach the mind something which the mind does not know, requiring the mind’s humble submission to the body, it is nonetheless the case that the mind should govern the body on account of its greater capacity to abstract, judge, and comprehend. But when Adam and Eve yielded to temptation, they allowed their power-­seeking passions to overrule their intellects. In this way, the natural government of the mind over the passions, the senses, and the body was overthrown. However, Augustine, other Church Fathers, and Aquinas taught that this nat­ ural order is paradoxically to be restored through a further humiliation of the mind. The body, the senses, and the passions are relatively innocent; they have simply been given undue weight. The mind, on the other hand, is submitted to a more distinct perversity, insofar as it has deliberately turned away from its true end in the contemplation of the eternal: So that movement is not from God. But then where does it come from? If I told you that I do not know, you might be disappointed; but that would be the truth. For one cannot know that which is nothing.24

The senses, it seems, are deployed, liturgically, to re-­instruct the mind. The logic behind this is as follows. Because the means deployed was in the first instance the Incarnation of the Logos, and this involved, beyond instrumentality, the eternal elevation of Christ’s human nature, including his body, to unity with the godhead, all human sensation is likewise eternally raised higher than its originally created dignity. As the Eastern Orthodox tradition has emphasized, matter—and particularly the human body—is now, after the Incarnation, more porous to the passage of the divine light.25 The liturgy is therefore a play of the newly transformed and heightened or intensified physical perception, beckoning the intellect to follow them back into the divine ludic economy. Since the passions and the sensations have now become intensified or heightened through liturgical re-­alignment, in the ways indicated above, the tradition 24 Augustine, De libero arbitrio, Thomas Williams, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), Book II, p. 69. 25  Olivier Boulnois, Au-­delà de l’image (Paris: Seuil, 2008), 133–85.

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Catherine Pickstock  127 also intermittently recognized a subtle transformation in the ontological order of gender relations: a Man, Christ, stands highest amongst humanity, yet only as more than human, as divine reason incarnate. But within the ranks of human beings, a woman now stands in the highest place: Mary the Mother of God, rather as ‘sovereignty’, which the king must assume and wield, is seen as both sym­bol­ic­ al­ly and (perhaps, beyond humour) female in Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’: the formally ruling ‘divine’ king or husband must have informally submitted first to the ‘female’ figura of just power, or the pre-­legal dignity of his wife’s equal humanity.26 Since the supposedly weaker sex first fell victim to temptation, it is the weaker sex which must reverse this temptation and be raised to the status of first amongst mortals, more elevated even than the cherubim. As certain medieval writers suggested, whilst it was Eve who seized the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil from the tree, so it is Mary who, through a passionate yielding to the Holy Spirit, now bears in her womb the living fruit of the Word of God itself, and this is later transformed into the fruit of the Eucharist which all may eat for their salvation.27 The liturgical action is not only primarily a sensory affair, it is also a movement of active receptivity on the part of the Church, which is identified with Mary as the Bride as well as Mother of Christ. As passionate Bride, she is conjoined to the Bridegroom of true reason in order once more to engender the Bridegroom as human Son in the new form of a sacramental food which is nourishing to our entire person—body, senses, imagination, and intellect. Finally, liturgy is cast as neither passive contemplation, nor merely a human work of art. Rather, it is held to exceed this contrast. Liturgy is not entirely a human artefact, but is somewhat given to us, because the life of Christ is the first liturgy and continuing inner reality of all Christian liturgies. This is the way in which it is thought that the full grace of Christ comes to human beings—li­tur­gic­ al­ly, in baptism, the Eucharist, and other sacraments. But because it comes li­tur­ gic­al­ly, it is not something in which participants must simply passively believe, and so be ‘justified’ by extrinsic imputation.28 Rather, because grace is liturgical in character, the transmission of a mystery through a sharing in that mystery, the reception of grace has from the outset also a practical and creative dimension. In order to receive the action of the liturgy, human beings must also perform it, and in this respect, it is a human work of art. The Opus Dei of the liturgy, as it was known to the Benedictine order, could not be ‘work’ at all unless it were also a human work.29

26 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, Steven Croft, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 27 A.  W.  Astell, Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middles Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 27 ff. 28 Casel, The Mystery of Christian Worship, 9. 29 J. G. Clark, The Benedictines in the Middle Ages (London: Boydell, 2011), 60 ff.

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128  Spiritual Perception and Liturgy Guardini suggested, in line with the medieval attempt to render all of life liturgical, that liturgy overcomes the duality between life’s pathos and art’s idealiz­ ation of life, because here the contrast between ‘real’ history and artistic representation is foregone. Within liturgical time and space, participants borrow liturgical roles, assumed more intensely than those they inhabit in their quotidian runnels. Just as liturgical symbols and objects are hyperreal, more real than everyday instrumental things or words, so the worshippers become themselves as being works of art. This was perhaps most exemplified in the dense ‘thinginess’ of Romanesque art and ritual, in which no attempt was made at illusion, as with the Baroque,30 and the dominating trope was not Gothic transparency. Rather, things are rendered as even more solid, and human bodies as even more bodily, with metaphors for spiritual realities following the most literal contours: ladders to heaven are ordinary ladders; angels hold up a mandalum of Christ, as if they really felt its weight. By apparently absurdly rendering concrete and visible the spiritual and invisible, the mind is all the more drawn towards the excess which is thereby obliquely intimated.31 In these ways, one can see how liturgy could be seen to fulfil the purposes of art as imaging, according to the modern Russian filmmaker and photographer, Andrej Tarkovskij. The image should displace the original because the original thereby becomes more itself, as if the very existence of a created thing, and especially the human creature, is after all ‘image’, the image of God. So, when, in the course of liturgy, the participants are transformed into a wholly signifying— because worshipping—body, they are at that moment closest to their fulfilment as human beings. In the foregoing, we have discussed four aspects of liturgy, through which we find a context for thinking about the nature of spiritual perception: (1) Sacraments are heuristic not metaphoric; (2) the physical and sensorial liturgical enactment is itself the work of saving mystery; (3) liturgy involves a redemptive heightening of the senses into the playing of the divine game; and (4) liturgy exceeds the contrast of art and life, transforming the human body into transparent image. These four aspects may be borne simultaneously in mind in our further reflection on the innate logic of Christian liturgy. Sensation, in a liturgical context, has both passive and active dimensions, in accordance with the principle that liturgy is a divine–human work, because it is a Christological work. In l­ iturgy, the participants undergo sensory experiences, but they collectively produce this sensory experience, along with the natural materials and instruments which they deploy. In this process, sacramental elements, ornaments and ‘technological’ instruments for better focusing upon things (such as the ciborium) tend to merge into 30  José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, Terry Cochran, trans. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986). 31  Aavitsland, ‘Incarnation’.

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Catherine Pickstock  129 one another.32 Equally, they work to alter the human subject who has, as both artist and immersed spectator, served as their artificer, and, as a subject, been ­re-­shaped by this mediated inspiration. Such inspiration passes into her inner sense and then is ‘stored’ in her imagination, eventually to be blended with the memory-­store of mental inspirations.33 Since, from the perceptive outset, she imagines and remembers what is sensorily encountered—memory being oddly for us more active than the imagination for medieval thinkers—the liturgical subject is in one sense recomposed by things, yet in another she is their ‘alchemical’ re-­composer, through re-­memoration and the repeated expressive utterance of melisma and modulatio. Her musica humana, harmonizing soul and body, is realized through corporeal musical utterance which itself expresses and conveys the musica mundana of the cosmos. But again, a bringing together of the senses occurs: ‘music’ is in the dance of the spheres, rendered in spoken as well as sung signs, and in human rhythms of movement and painting, just as the sung note is never without a word, and a word is never without an illustration which further incarnates it.34 First, in terms of liturgy, let us consider the sensing and spectatory aspect, remembering that this cannot readily be divided from the sensation-­forming, acting aspect. Insofar as the sensory and aesthetic experience of the Mass is a manner of instruction adapted to the mode of humanity, as Thomas Aquinas emphasized, it incites the participants’ spiritual desire to penetrate further into the public secret, and worship ever more ardently: the ‘inner chamber’ is first of all situated as a fold within external and collective space, for it is archetypically the nuptial chamber, after Origen. And most primarily, our very own psychic ‘inner chamber’ is paradoxically external to us because it is really the inner chamber of God himself, for Origen as for Augustine.35 Were the smell of incense or the sight of the procession or the savour of the elements mere triggers for the recollection of concepts, held aloft, they might do their work on one single occasion, once and for all. But that they must be repeated, and returned to, suggests that they are vehicles for the forward moving of human spiritual desire, which can never be disincarnate, or separated from these physical allurements. This point can appear to be contradicted by the long Christian tradition of ‘the spiritual senses’, linked with meditation upon Solomon’s Song of Songs, an erotic poem about the love between an unidentified man and woman which the Church has read allegorically to refer both to the love between God and the soul and between Christ and his bride, the Church. Since this poem involves an active 32 Guilielmus Durandus, ‘On the Mass’, in The Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, trans. Rama Coomaraswamy (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2007), cap I, 12, 237; Jørgensen, ‘Into the Saturated Sensorium’; Aavitsland, ‘Incarnation’. 33 Aquinas, Summa Theolgiae, I q. 78, a. 4; Skinnebach, ‘Devotion’; Laugerud, ‘Memory’. 34  Jørgensen, ‘Into the Saturated Sensorium’. 35 J.-L. Chrétien, L’Espace Intérieur (Paris: Minuit, 2014), 38–74.

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130  Spiritual Perception and Liturgy cata­logue of bodily parts and sensations, an allegoresis sought to find both spiritual and ecclesial equivalents for each of these physical aspects. It spoke, for example, following the Pauline ‘eyes of the heart’,36 of the neck as representing steadfastness, of hair which cannot suffer even when cut as representing spiritual endurance, of the ears as actively obedient to God’s word, of the lips as pouring forth the honey of divine praise, of the feet as the heart’s following in the footsteps of previous saints and hastening to welcome Christ the Bridegroom.37 This might seem to be reducible to the operation of a rather mechanical sort of metaphoric indexing: the senses as they function within the liturgy being harnessed as natural symbols for an inner attentiveness and responsiveness to divine meaning. However, the sacraments are heuristic rather than metaphorical. If ­sensations are essential lures for our true thinking, and all the more so in the order of redemption after the fall, can it really be the ‘spiritual’ sensations are all that really matter? The French philosopher, Jean-­Louis Chrétien has shown in his discussion of the tradition of commentary upon the Canticles why this is not the case. First, the idea of the ‘spiritual senses’, or the notion that there are elevated psychic equivalents for physical sensations, and even parts of the body, enabling a ‘sensing’ of or alignment with the spiritual realm and of God himself, is traceable to Origen. This holds a biblical rather than Greek lineage, since the Bible spoke of ‘the heart’ of a human being in a way that was both physical and spiritual, and included both thinking and willing as well as suggesting a concentration of the whole human personality.38 Such a sense is preserved today in the liturgical sursum corda: ‘lift up your hearts’. It is, however, the Christian reading of the Canticles as referring to our love for Christ who is God incarnate, which seems to have suggested a kind of physicalization and diversification of the biblical heart, which, for Origen, was more commonly, though not always, construed in terms of the soul, though Augustine often reverts to the term ‘heart’ (cor). One should not read this nomenclature, Chrétien argues, as simply many analogues for the essential unity of the heart or soul: only in God is it the case that the diversity of the spiritual senses is mysteriously ‘one’ in pure simplicity of meaning. Rather, there is a real diversity in the human soul, despite its fundamental unity, on account of its close link with the body, of which it is the form, in Greek philosophical terms. The soul ‘hears’, for example, in its imaginative recollection, or in its mental attention to God, because it is primarily conjoined with the hearing function of the physical body.39 However, as Chrétien implies, the point just made may be reversed. It is not that, via a secondary move, sensation is metaphorically transferred from body to

36  Ephesians 1:18. 37  Chrétien, Symbolique du Corps. 38 Heather Webb, ‘Catherine of Siena’s Heart’, Speculum 80:3 (July 2005): 802–17; Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 39  Chrétien, Symbolique du Corps, 15–44.

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Catherine Pickstock  131 soul; rather, it is the case that sensing has a double aspect, outer and inner, from the very outset, in accordance with the double biblical meaning of the term ‘heart’. In this way, liturgy can be seen as the best guide to the double aspect of all sensation, as understood by Aristotle (and referred to earlier) which it instantiates in an intensified manner. Here Christian liturgy points to the primacy for humanity of the history of ritual over both material utility and ideal intention. For, as has been discussed, the core gesture of ritual is simultaneously externalizing and in­ter­ior­iz­ing. This is because the ritual object ‘interrupts’ and ‘stands out’, because a normally taken for granted exterior process is here stalled through reflection, and so folded in upon itself both as artefact and as mental awareness. Without this exterior and interior duality, it could not occur in the way that it does. A related point is that if one sees with the outer as well as with the inner eye, then one relates one mode of sensation to another. The mental operation of synaesthesia is in play whenever just one of our physical senses is activated.40 The Church Fathers sometimes spoke in the synaesthetic terms implied by all ancient Christian liturgy when they suggested that our eyes should listen, our ears see, or our lips attend like ears to the word of God through a spiritual kiss, suggesting that for our inner sense, contemplation is also active obedience and vice versa, while all our speaking to and of God must remain an active attention to his presence, as it were in the liturgical space of the sensus communis. But this kind of language does not remove us from our literal bodies into an ethereal inner space of heightened perception; rather, the inner and synaesthetic echo that is ‘inner sensing’ pervades our bodily surface in the course of our original sensitive responses, since were these purely physical we would have no sensory awareness. In the process of liturgical alignment of worshipper and God, physical and spiritual reality, inner and outer sense, common sensing and synaesthesia combine; here worshippers are regarded as making a response of incarnate souls—a response of the heart—to the incarnate God. This response is immediately inscribed in their bodies and requires no extrinsic interpretation. In liturgical terms, worshippers are invited to adopt diverse stances appropriate to the various phases of worship and the various positions that should be assumed before God.41 Sometimes they stand before God, alert and ready as his militant troops, as Guardini suggests.42 Sometimes they kneel before him, adopting a posture, which, according to some writers in the Christian tradition, rehearses both cor­por­eal­ly and psychically the foetal situation of a baby in the womb. Here the worshippers express their birth from Mother Church as well as their dependence upon God. The drawing closer together of the knees and the cheeks suggests for some sources a concentration around the eyes, the source of tears which should constantly be 40  Chrétien, Symbolique du Corps, 35. 41  See Peter the Chanter, The Christian at Prayer, especially Part Two. 42 Guardini, Sacred Signs, 21–3.

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132  Spiritual Perception and Liturgy shed by the Christian soul, both for sorrow and for joy. This suffering includes a constant spiritual shedding of blood. According to a ‘synorganic’ logic, psychic blood was regarded as blood that is clear with the luminosity of tears that are transparent to the divine light.43 At other times, such as in processionals, the soul and body should be in movement towards God, towards other members of the congregation or outwards towards the world. As for the feet, so for the hands. Sometimes they are tightly clasped together as though guarding psychic or bodily integrity. At other times, they are placed palm to palm in serene self-­meeting through self-­touching that allows the beginning of psychic reflexivity. Equally, however, as every Christian child used to be taught, this gesture expresses microcosmic identity with the Church and its attentive pointing towards God. Hands may also be raised in supplication or openly uplifted by the priest in a gesture of triumphant saturation by the divine. Finally, the priestly hand is often raised in blessing, which is an acknowledgement of what is there, and what has been done. Hereby flows a conferring of grace and which allows what is there fully to be at all—echoing the divine benediction – ‘and God saw that it was good’ – in his act of creation.44 If, as we have seen, bodily postures are also inward, then conversely inner ­sensation has an outward aspect. Because sensation has an interior dimension from the beginning, it becomes possible for this interiority to be deepened, and so for the sight of material things to turn into the sight of spiritual things. However, the possibility of this deepening is paradoxically connected with the excess of ma­ter­ial things over rational thought. The mind can exceed abstract reflection in the direction of mystical encounter (the inward absorption of the liturgical ­mysteries) only through the constantly renewed prompting of corporeal sensing by the sacramental realities. The distance of material things from us is thereby a vehicle for conveying the infinite ‘distance’ of God from us. And because of the Incarnation, in the Eucharistic liturgy which is its extension, these two distances become one and the same. If the Eucharist renders the distance of matter from us also the distance of God from us, then, when the participants receive the Eucharistic elements, it is assumed that God comes to be as close to them as food and drink entering their stomach. Hegel suggested that human religion began when people stopped seeing nature as simply something to be eaten and started to contemplate it instead. But this would suggest that specific sacramentality began with the reservation of nature and the simplistic move from the utile to the conceptual.45 It is rather the case that human eating has always had a ritual dimension, in accordance with

43  Chrétien, Symbolique du Corps, 42–3. 44 Guardini, Sacred Signs, 15–8, 81–4. 45 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, T. M. Knox, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), § 109; see also W. Hammacher, Pleroma: Reading in Hegel, N. Walker and S. Jarvis, trans. (London: Athlone Press, 1998).

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Catherine Pickstock  133 new evidence that religion preceded the birth of agriculture. Religion began with a sacred doing and not a sacred looking, even though the latter is an aspect of the former. And ritual eating has always been at the heart of most religion, conjoined with sacrificial practices.46 Eucharistic worship sustains this human universality, but with the radical emphasis that the supreme creator God has been sacrificed for humanity and offers himself more than humanity can offer itself to Him, since he sustains humanity through a spiritual feeding.47 In the Eucharistic rite, moreover, one finds a combining of spectacle with feasting. Not merely is the sacred food accompanied by ritual; it is itself the supreme ritual object and the very thing that is most displayed, in the elevation by the priest. Albert the Great spoke of the supreme beauty of the Eucharistic host in terms which combine inner and outward aspects. The elements, like the crocus flower, exhibit claritas, subtilitas, and agilitas, since they show the splendour of the fullness of grace, penetrate to the height of deity and flow with the fragrant odour of the virtues.48 There may seem to be something shocking in the idea that the participants then proceed to ‘eat beauty’, but, as the historian Ann Astell has shown, this idea was thematized in the Middle Ages. Whereas under ordinary circumstances, to eat beauty would be to destroy it, here the eaters are partially assumed by the very beauty they consume, and their own beings are transfigured and shine with a new inward and outer light. By a further process of synaesthesia, the participants are called upon in the Mass to ‘taste and see’, not first to see and then to taste, but through tasting seemingly to see further.49 The sensory aspect of the liturgy is, however, not merely something passively received by the individual worshipper; it is also actively and collectively produced. The participants pray, sing, process, look forward, and exchange the pax through mutual touch. The resultant sensory experience can to some degree be received by  an individual worshipper but is more purely received for an angelic and a divine gaze. The collective body of the congregation is nonetheless made up of individual bodies. It is the individual body which stands as the gatekeeper between the two different allegorical senses for the bodies of the lovers in the Canticles—by allusion to the soul, on the one hand, and to the Church, on the other. Within the liturgy, this is perhaps most symbolized by the ceremony on Maundy Thursday, and at other times of the mandatum or the washing of the feet (in imitation as once of Christ and of Mary Magdalene) by monks by fellow monks, or of the congregation by the priest. This was described by Rupert of Deutz as ‘a sacrament of the

46  M. Detienne and J. Vernant, The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks, P. Wistig, trans. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989). 47 Astell, Eating Beauty, 27–253. 48  Albert the Great, De corpore Domine. 49  Psalm 34:8; Astell, Eating Beauty, 1–26.

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134  Spiritual Perception and Liturgy sacraments’ because of its kenotic blending of high and low, meaningful and ­sensory, spectacular and haptic.50 The parts of these bodies and their sensations have spiritual aspects as the ­spiritual senses. Thereby, as we have seen, Christianity diversified the unity of the  soul. Bodies and their sensations, following St Paul, represent offices in the Church, since the latter, more emphatically than the soul, is taken to be the ‘bride’ of the Canticles. And so Christianity unified the human social community in a very specific manner.51 The relationship between the inner soul and the collective body as mediated by the individual body is central to a deepened grasp of the liturgical action which dramatizes the relationship between Christ and his Bride. In doing so, it draws, like Christianity itself, upon a certain fluidity within the Canticles, a book which, Chrétien suggests, the Church effectively raised to the status of a kind of ‘Bible within the Bible’, an hermeneutic key to the relationship between the two testaments.52 It was such a key despite or perhaps because of its own obscurity and intrinsic call for interpretation. Chrétien observes that we do not know who its pro­tag­on­ ists are at a literal level, and that their status as lover and beloved is not exhausted by any conceptual equivalence. They are God and Israel, Christ and the Church, Christ and the soul, but also human marriage partners (given the Pauline signification of Christ and the Church) as the supreme model of natural inter-­human love, and so by extension they represent any human loving relationship. We can see a pattern here: a sensory image elevates the participants’ perceptions, but it does so because and not despite the fact that it is a sensory image. It can only further elevate them if it is constantly returned to, just as the human worshipper can only grow in love for God if she is constantly re-­confronted with the challenge of her human neighbour. In the liturgy, all these relationships are at stake. And the individual, sensing physical body is their pivot. How, then, are we to understand its mediating role? One can start with the earlier observation that while Christianity diversifies the soul, it also grants organic unity to the human collectivity. Instead of the polis being compared with the hierarchy of the soul, as for Plato, St Paul compares the Church polity to the cooperation of the various functions of the human body, rendering the congregation a collective sensorium, fusing the multiple sensory perspectives of individual worshippers into one. The collective ‘body’ is no more a metaphor than was the case with the relationship of the physical with the spiritual senses: there is no simple priority of the ‘common sensing’ within an individual over the ‘common sensing’ of a community. If anything, as Chrétien points out, metaphoricity runs from the collective to the individual body. This is because 50  Petersen, ‘Ritual’, 202. 51  Chrétien, Symbolique du Corps, 15–72. 52  Chrétien, Symbolique du Corps, 291–5.

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Catherine Pickstock  135 St  Paul speaks of eye and hand, head and feet announcing their need for one another, like holders of different offices within the Church (1 Cor. 12:21). This is to compare eye and hand, which in reality are mute, with individual Christians, who are not, rather than the other way around.53 Similarly, one might expect a metaphoric transference of the unity of the physical body to the unity of the Christian people. However, the ‘bodiliness’ of a social body is not a fiction; it is literally the case that human beings physically and culturally depend upon one another, and one could argue that this is our primary source for understanding embodied unity, since our psychic unity tends to be most immediately aware of the diverse capacities and demands of the individual organic body. These parts of the individual soul-­body remain ‘parts’, and so definitionally parts of a whole, however, and might be regarded as merely apparent diversifications on the surface of something more fundamentally one. It is rather through the comparison of the eye and hand and other bodily parts to members of the Church that this possibility is interpretatively avoided, and so the body, and in consequence the soul, are dramatically diversified. If the body is first of all the collective body, so also, and it would seem paradoxically, it is the parts of this body which first possess distinct integrity. Only the collective body of the Church possesses decisively distinct parts, since these are independent persons with independent wills, even though they are diversified according to specifically defined offices—priesthood, prophecy, the diaconate, and so forth—rather than according to their biological individuality. For this reason, the Church, unified through the Holy Spirit, uniquely possesses a fully organic or bodily unity, a unification of genuinely independent parts which nonetheless exceeds their sum. This reflection suggests the priority that traditional theologians have given to the Church-­reference over the soul-­reference with respect to the import of the Bride in the Canticles. Our bodies and souls are to be conformed to the Church more than the other way around. This is why Christian spirituality is perforce liturgical in character. For the rich potential of diversity specific to the Christian soul is opened up through participation in collective worship, just as the unity of individual character is given as a mirroring of the collective character of the Church. When the participant loses herself in the liturgical process, they find themselves, whereas when they cleave to a supposedly natural unity of soul and body, they will find that this hysterically dissolves.54 At the same time, the individual is not absorbed into the congregation as though into a modern undifferentiated mass or ‘crowd’, which represents an anti-­ congregation.55 Individual rumination within and upon the liturgy is crucial, and this is shown especially with respect to the traditional Canticles imagery of the 53  Chrétien, Symbolique du Corps, 45–72. 54  Chrétien, Symbolique du Corps, 45–72, 294–5. 55 E. Canetti, Crowds and Power, C. Stewart, trans. (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1982).

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136  Spiritual Perception and Liturgy teeth. Collectively speaking, the teeth guard the Church, but they also allow entrance of the divine word and a mastication of this word by Church doctors in order that they further utter through their mouths truths appropriate to time, place and circumstance. But this digestive process can only be consummated within the individual person, the organic unity of soul and body.56 One can observe in Christian practice a liturgical tension between the priority of a congregational construction of sensation, on the one hand, and a private sensory meditation, on the other. This tension is benign and perhaps never resolved, since it derives from the originally liminal and oneiric character of all ritual action. The hierarchical offices of the Church were provided liturgically and are reproduced through liturgical performance, which is sensory in character. They concern the relative verbal activity of the priesthood and the relative verbal passivity of the laity. Yet they also concern, by contrast, the relatively contemplative vocation of the clergy and the relatively active vocation of laypeople.57 The liturgical participants never leave their senses behind, and must work together to produce a collective ‘sensation’ which fuses life with art. Thus, with respect to questions of government and human relationship, we can see how liturgy opens out beyond what happens inside church buildings. The redemption of the world is understood to evolve the increasing absorption and fulfilment of human and cosmic life within liturgical celebration. In the foregoing ways, Christian liturgy exemplifies the logic of ritual process. But more specifically, it inflects this logic with an intensified emphasis upon the body as the mediator between inner and outer, which ritual experience must hold in balance. This insistence upon the body as a crucial pivot helps to perfect this balance. Such corporeal focus arises because of Christian incarnationalism, and the mediation of the sacred through an economy (oikonomia) of the physical and the corporeal. Moreover, beyond the economic perspective, the doctrine of the resurrection exalts the body to an eternal finality. In consequence, as we have seen, the extreme focus upon bodily experience in Christian liturgy is often regarded as being in harmony with, and not opposed to, a spiritual intensification of perception, and is an anticipation of the resurrection of the body. This vision accords with the logic of ritual, because, as we have seen, the inherently ritual birth of language suggests that in this threshold of sense resides the very possibility of meaning. From this perspective, one can approach Christian liturgy not simply as the claimed worship of the triune God and of the Logos incarnate, but as a complex and collective attempt performatively to meditate upon the character of the pre-­human logos which calls us within the dream of the body out of our merely corporeal state, into a state of fides, or of trust already

56  Chrétien, Symbolique du Corps, 73–88.

57  Chrétien, Symbolique du Corps, 65–8.

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Catherine Pickstock  137 tending to a fuller gnosis, in a secure but partially concealed, and partially ‘sensed’ or experienced order which human culture seeks to manifest and to restore. In this respect, Christian liturgy performs exorbitantly a function which all cultural rituals perform to a degree. The faith which informs it is in a sense nothing but the assertion of an exhaustive coincidence of the liturgical with the ontological, and of worship with being. And it is bodily gesture, coded and yet in excess of all codes, through its alignment and re-­alignment with spiritual perception of the spiritual realm, which secures and witnesses to this fusion. What is implied by the foregoing is that Christian thought and practice is dramatically poised between public practice and authority, on the one hand, and the court of individual discernment, prayer, and conscience on the other.58 And that between the two, the body was the pivot of this connection, the site of individual isolation and of individual relationality, and ‘parochial’59 union of a shared cor­ por­ate formation and co-­belonging. It is because, for Christian tradition, spiritual perception is a heightening of physical perception, it cannot be privatized. Rather, a tension is sustained between the privacy of the individual body, on the one hand, and the public connections in which it is inevitably involved, on the other: connections of transmission through time, and interactions through space. The collective sum of these connections composes a public body which is by no means merely metaphorically secondary to the private one. One might suggest that the circle is complete: the spiritual senses are literally diverse because of their bodily attachment; but the individual soul, as attached to its body, is as much or more a metaphor for the Church, as the Church is a ­metaphor for the soul, since they are both equally spousal. In this way, spiritual perception is inseparable from liturgy because the latter is a collective spiritual sensing, while the former is an internalized public liturgy. The ancient parallel of soul and city is retained by Christianity, but rendered more corporeal, and mediated by interpersonal relation.

58  Pierre Manent, ‘Political History and Political Philosophy: Making Sense of the West’, Perspectives on Political Science 2:2 (2012), 100–5. 59  In the etymological sense of a neighbourly gathering, as survives in the Kentish dialect term ‘parrock’.

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9 Sensus Christi A Liturgico-­Sacramental Therapy for a Pornographic Sensibility Boyd Taylor Coolman Real relationships with others, with all the challenges they entail, now tend to be replaced by a type of internet communication which en­ables us to choose or eliminate relationships at whim, thus giving rise to a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature. Today’s media do enable us to communicate and to share our knowledge and affections. Yet at times they also shield us from direct contact with the pain, the fears, and the joys of others and the complexity of their personal experiences. For this reason, we should be concerned that, alongside the exciting possibilities offered by these media, a deep and melancholic dissatisfaction with interpersonal relations, or a harmful sense of isolation, can also arise.1

Introduction The socio-­cultural crisis aptly termed the ‘pornification’ of Western societies shows no signs of abating.2 The phenomenon goes well beyond the explicit consumption of pornographic images, though that is perhaps the core of it. It consists of a pervasive and increasingly unselfconscious way of perceiving not just human bodies but many aspects of reality; a particular overarching narrative of the way things are and how people are to be valued and treated; and a corresponding way of being in the world and of relating to others in it. Pornography’s abstraction, commodification, and objectification of the human body are often seen as its most deleterious effects: ‘Pornography abstracts images of bodies from the people themselves, commodifying human body parts and human bodies, commodifying 1  Pope Francis, Laudato si’ (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015), 47. 2  Pamela Paul, Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families (2005).

Boyd Taylor Coolman, Sensus Christi: A Liturgico-Sacramental Therapy for a Pornographic Sensibility In: Perceiving Things Divine: Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual Perception. Edited by: Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802594.003.0009

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Boyd Taylor Coolman  139 sexuality and the sex act itself.’3 Without denying or minimizing the cultural, ­economic, biological, and even neurological dimensions of pornography, it is helpful to insist that it is also a habit-­forming practice, which occurs organically within a worldview, which it also reinforces and ingrains. By suggesting certain liturgical tools for healing the pornographic gaze, the present essay offers a modest proposal for resisting the ‘pornifying’ tendencies of contemporary Western culture. Its utility will not likely be universal; some may find it minimally helpful if at all. If implemented, it will certainly need to be used in conjunction with other practices, in a supplementary and, it is hoped, complementary way. It is addressed primarily to individuals, though its use is integrally situated within larger communal contexts. More precisely, the practice described here is offered to those who count themselves intentional followers of Jesus Christ; it presumes, that is, implementation by believing Christians. It will also most likely be most relevant to Christian men, who are still the predominant (though not exclusive) consumers of pornography. Its greater utility to men is also due to its heavy focuses on the sense of sight (seeing, gazing, visualizing), which is of course the primary sense implicated by pornography, but which also seems to work differently for men than for women. The perspective adopted here, finally, is explicitly theological and, one could say, spiritual, as distinct from (though not in opposition to or competition with) neurological, psychological, socio-­cultural, and economic approaches, and is particularly focused on the way human bodies are perceived sensually. Summarily stated, this essay suggests that a certain set of liturgical and sacramental practices might help to facilitate the acquisition of a counter-­sensibility, in relation to the perception of bodies, that is not only opposed to a pornographic sensibility but aims to transform the ‘pornographic gaze’ into a properly human sensorium capable of the fullest possible perception of others in their spiritual and physical dimensions.

Sensus Christi In the Latin Vulgate, the apostle Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians harbours an intriguing expression regarding the relationship between Jesus and his followers. In many modern English translations, Paul says that believers have ‘the mind of Christ’ (1 Cor. 2:16). For most modern English speakers, the word ‘mind’ has a rather narrow intellectual connotation, suggesting that in some way believers can (or should) think like Jesus. But the Latin Vulgate translates the Greek, nous

3  Maria C. Morrow, ‘Pornography and Penance’, in Leaving and Coming Home: New Wineskins for Catholic Sexual Ethics, ed. David Cloutier (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010), 69.

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140  Sensus Christi Christou, as sensus Christi.4 In Latin, sensus has a deep and wide range of m ­ eanings, encompassing many of the different ways that humans encounter extra-mental reality, from the activity of the five physical senses, to the more interior dimensions of perception and experience, to the more typically intellectual or cognitive dimensions. In Latin, by contrast, sensus has a deep and wide range of m ­ eanings, encompassing many of the different ways that humans encounter extra-­mental reality, from the activity of the five physical senses, to the more i­nterior dimensions of perception and experience, to the more typically intellectual or cognitive dimensions. Indeed, the list of English equivalents found in Latin dictionaries includes: perceive, feel, experience; think, realize, see, and understand. So, a helpful paraphrase of sensus Christi might be: ‘Christ’s way of perceiving, experiencing, and knowing’ or perhaps even ‘the sensibility of Christ’. Given this broad definition, the term sensus encompasses all aspects of human experience, including those implicated in pornography. The pursuit of a remedy for pornographic addiction among Christian believers should involve (among other things) the acquisition, maintenance, and cultivation of the sensus Christi. Indeed, Paul’s phrase provides a rich, multivalent notion for reflecting on what that might mean and how it might best occur, going well beyond a simplistic sort of WWJT—‘what would Jesus think?’ In particular, the above-­noted semantic plenitude of the Latin term ‘sensus’ allows it to be a versatile theological concept for reflecting on the formation of sensibility opposed to pornography. The grammatical ambiguity in the genitive phrase ‘of Christ’, moreover, enables it to describe Christ as both remedial subject and object of a pornographic sensibility in need of healing transformation. Most significantly, I will argue that the possession of the sensus Christi is most properly understood within an ecclesial context, wherein it is acquired and maintained sacramentally and cultivated liturgically. In this way, the sensus Christi emerges as an antidote for what could be called the ‘pornographic sensibility’.

Re-­situating the Pornographic Struggle In the Christian therapeutic literature on the topic, the attention of those struggling with pornography is often directed to the crucifixion of Christ, citing such New Testament passages as: ‘I have been crucified with Christ’ (Gal. 2:20); ‘those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires’ (Gal. 5:24); ‘put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires’ (Rom. 13:14). These texts are frequently depicted as the basis of a kind of cognitive therapy or meditational exercise, and then presented rhet­oric­al­ly as an admonition or exhortation to the believer struggling with pornography both to appropriate this connection to Christ, to his cross and passion specifically, and 4  See Chapter 6, n. 1.

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Boyd Taylor Coolman  141 then to imitate Christ’s crucifixion in regard to one’s own pornographic in­clin­ations. The one who struggles with pornography must ‘also put to death . . . whatever . . . is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire’ (Col. 3:5). This approach is also often linked to certain underlying theological assumptions, specifically, soteriological frameworks, associated with classical Protestant views of justification by faith—understood as fully accomplished at the moment of conversion. This seems to prompt a rhetorical stance towards one who struggles with pornography in which he is reminded that, because of his faith in Christ, he already has all the grace needed for overcoming pornography use.5 Continued failure can only be explained either by ignorance of this fact or by a mysterious inability to ‘tap’ into that grace (i.e. to appropriate it effectively in the battle with pornography). But one senses that, on this model, the gap between the ‘already’ of complete justification and the ‘not yet’ of incomplete sanctification, and of the concomitant continued indulgence in pornography, remains exasperatingly inexplicable: If I am already crucified with Christ, if I have already died with Christ, if I have already crucified the flesh with its sinful desires, why the continued struggle with pornography? The present proposal endorses this recourse to Christ crucified, but conceives of it in significantly different ways. A more Catholic soteriological framework, coupled with liturgical practice, sacramental reception, and ecclesial community, may well offer a useful, alternative paradigm, both in theory and in practice. A striking feature of the theological renewal of Vatican II was that it negotiated the above-­noted diastema between the ‘all ready’ and the ‘not yet’ of Christian experience liturgically and sacramentally. That is, it conceived of believers ‘working out their salvation’, a salvation that God has already accomplished in Christ’s paschal mystery, through sacramental participation in Christ in the liturgy, which then flows forth into ecclesial life. ‘In Christ’, on the one hand, ‘the perfect achievement of our reconciliation came forth,’ which He ‘achieved . . . principally by the paschal mystery of His blessed passion, resurrection from the dead, and the glorious ascension, whereby “dying, he destroyed our death and, rising, he restored our life”.’6 Christ sent the apostles (and their successors) to preach the message regarding what he had accomplished, on the other hand, so that these apostolic emissaries ‘might accomplish the work of salvation which they had

5 Cf. Jon Snyder, The Mighty Man Manual: Victory and Freedom over Lust, Pornographic, and Sexual Addictions (Edgemont, PA: Jon Snyder and Mighty Man Industries, 2009), 22: ‘The truth of our identity in Christ is that we HAVE been made a new creation, we ARE now the righteousness of Christ, we HAVE been set free from the power of the enemy, we HAVE EVERY spiritual blessing already in Christ, our old man HAS been killed and crucified with Christ, we ALWAYS are victorious in Christ. When we get the grace to actually believe these truths from the Bible, it changes everything. As you read this book, God will establish these things in your heart more and more and heal you of many heart wounds. But through grace we don’t have to wait until “some day” to walk in freedom – we are free today and in the Spirit we have access to everything we need to win every battle’ (http:// sharedhope.org/wp-­content/uploads/2014/03/Mighty-­Man-­Manual-­by-­Jon-­Snyder-­SAMPLE.pdf). 6  Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), 5.

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142  Sensus Christi proclaimed, by means of sacrifice and sacraments, around which the entire ­liturgical life revolves’,7 especially baptism and Eucharist. Yet this is not a different work than that already accomplished by Christ himself; rather, ‘to accomplish so great a work, Christ is always present in His Church, especially in her liturgical celebrations.’8 Thus, ‘the liturgy’, is that ‘through which the work of our redemption is accomplished’,9 which ‘daily builds up those who are within into a holy temple of the Lord, into a dwelling place for God in the Spirit [Eph. 2:21], to the mature measure of the fullness of Christ’ [Eph. 4:13].10 This liturgical out-­working of salvation is the means by which believers ‘are sanctified’, a ‘sanctification . . . signified by signs perceptible to the senses’, and ‘effected in a way which corresponds with each of these signs’11. Within this liturgical context, then, which makes Christ present in his paschal mystery in a uniquely powerful and effective mode, the grace of Christ Crucified and Risen is offered to human persons, and it is received initially in the sacrament of baptism. Here, baptismal justification is understood as the real communication or infusion of the grace of Christ to the believer, by which the believer is ‘in-­grafted’ into Christ.12 United thus to Christ as body to Head, as branches to Vine,13 believers have a real, life-­giving communion with their living Lord, a link however that needs—indeed requires—ongoing main­ten­ ance, cultivation, and intensification, which is always an increase of participation in Christ.14 The present proposal, accordingly, wishes to ‘locate’ the believer struggling with pornography within this particular liturgical and soteriological framework and to ground all subsequent remedial strategies upon this foundation of sacramental participation in Christ’s saving paschal mystery. What follows will consider this sacramental participation from the perspective of the different, though complimentary ways in which the phrase ‘sensus Christi’ can be understood.

7  Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 6. 8  Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 7. 9  Secret of the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost. 10  Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 2. 11  Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 7. 12  Council of Trent, ‘Decree on Justification’, 7: ‘But though He died for all, yet all do not receive the benefit of His death, but those only to whom the merit of His passion is communicated.’ For ‘though no one can be just except he to whom the merits of the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ are communicated, yet this takes place in that justification of the sinner, when by the merit of the most holy p ­ assion, the charity of God is poured forth by the Holy Ghost in the hearts of those who are justified and inheres in them; whence man through Jesus Christ, in whom he is ingrafted, receives in that justification, together with the remission of sins, all these infused at the same time, namely, faith, hope and charity’. 13  Council of Trent, ‘Decree on Justification’, 16: ‘For since Christ Jesus Himself, as the head into the members and the vine into the branches, continually infuses strength into those justified, which strength always precedes, accompanies and follows their good works.’ 14  Council of Trent, ‘Decree on Justification’, 10: ‘faith cooperating with good works, [they] increase in that justice received through the grace of Christ and are further justified’; 11 [they] ‘proceed onward through Jesus Christ, by whom they have access unto this grace’.

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Boyd Taylor Coolman  143

Sensing with the Body of Christ Sharing in the paschal mystery may be expressed helpfully in terms of a genuine participation in the sensus Christi, taking the phrase as a subjective genitive; that is, from the perspective of sharing in Christ’s own sensus, or sensing with Christ. As is well known, baptismal union with Christ has been perennially understood in the Christian tradition as a sharing in Christ’s death and resurrection, articulated aboriginally by the apostle Paul and reaffirmed recently by Vatican II: ‘by baptism [believers] are plunged into the paschal mystery of Christ: they die with Him, are buried with Him, and rise with Him.’15 Approaching this notion from the perspective of ‘sensing with Christ’, it seems fitting to draw on the ancient Christian notion of ‘capital grace’, namely, of the grace of Christ the head, which flows down into those united to him as to his body: ‘[Christ] is called head (caput), since all the senses flow from the head to the members of the Church.’16 Just as all the physical senses are located principally in the head, while the rest of the body is able to sense by being joined to the head, so too all spiritual sensibility resides principally in Christ, while through baptism individual believers receive a cap­acity for spiritual perception by being joined to Him: ‘they are made sensate by their Head’ (sensificentur a capite).17 At least three implications flow from this. First, for the one who struggles with pornography, it would follow quite logic­al­ly that baptismal union with Christ crucified would be the appropriate framework in which to situate his own attempts to mortify pornographic desires and practices, to put to death his own pornographic sensus. Here, having the sensus Christi is the personal appropriation of, by real sharing in, Christ’s own act and experience (sensus) of self-­denial and mortification. Second, since sharing in the paschal mystery is not only sharing in Christ’s death, but also sharing in his resurrected life, at least inchoately and proleptically, then this is the site in which to seek and appropriate a share in Christ’s own resurrected human nature, a human nature that has conquered the devastating ravage of sin on the human sensus: ‘In the human nature united to Himself the Son of God, by overcoming death through His own death and resurrection, redeemed man and re-­moulded him into a new creation.’18 Third, baptismally united to Christ, the believer shares in the sensus that Jesus himself possessed in his own human nature. The traditional assumption that Jesus himself possessed a rightly ordered sexuality,19 as part of his complete 15  Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium 6. Cf. Rom. 6:4; Eph. 2:6; Col. 3:1; 2 Tim. 2:11. 16  Alexander of Hales, Glossa in III Sent, d. 19, n. 41. 17  Hugh of St Victor, De scripturis et scriptoribus (PL 175:10A). 18  Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium (1964), 7. Cf. Gal. 6:15; 2 Cor. 5:17. 19  Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd revised and expanded edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996): ‘In many hundreds of pious, religious works, from before 1400 to past the mid-­16th century, the ostensive unveiling of the Child’s sex,

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144  Sensus Christi human nature, means that, in principle, baptismally mediated union with him is also a participation in his rightly ordered sexual sensibility (sensus).20 In this light, the Gospel depictions of Jesus’ direct and even physical interaction with women presumed to be prostitutes, that is, with (presumably) sexually available women—table fellowship, even allowing his feet to be washed by the hair of a sinful woman who may well have been a prostitute—appear strikingly germane. What the Gospels seem to depict is not a Jesus who flees any contact with sexually available women or who simply shuns all sexually laden interaction with the bodies of other people—to put the matter most generally—but rather one whose physical relations and indeed sexual inclinations are rightly ordered and properly integrated. In these ways, to ‘have the sensus Christi’ is not just to imitate the ‘mind of Christ’ in some vague fashion, but rather quite actually, as members of his Body, to share in his sensus—his own self-­denial, the reality of his own restored human nature, his own rightly ordered human eros. Above all, though, the Eucharist occupies the central place in this approach to pornographic sin. The Vatican II claim, noted above, that the liturgy is that ‘through which the work of our redemption is accomplished’,21 receives the following specification: ‘most of all in the divine sacrifice of the Eucharist’.22 For it is this sacrament ‘in which “the victory and triumph of his death are again made present”.’23 Here, in a unique way, Christ is personally present, ‘not only in the person of His minister, “the same now offering, through the ministry of priests, who formerly offered himself on the cross”,24 but especially under the Eucharistic species.’25 For that reason, ‘no other action of the Church can equal its efficacy’,26 because ‘from the Eucharist, as from a font, grace is poured forth upon us; and the sanctification of men and women in Christ . . . is achieved in the most efficacious possible way’27.

or the touching, protecting or presentation of it, is the main action. And the emphasis recurs in images of the dead Christ, or of the mystical Man of Sorrows’ (3). 20  Cf. Lee Siegel, ‘Pope Francis and the Naked Christ’, The New Yorker (17 Dec 2013): ‘Steinberg relies on St. Augustine . . . to argue that Christ’s erection was a singular way to demonstrate Christ’s chastity. Without the capacity to yield to lust, Christ’s triumph over carnal desire would have no human meaning. Unlike men after the fall of Adam, who fell victim to lust, Christ willed his erection; it was not an involuntary physiological event. By both willing and resisting it, he declared his victory over the stain of sin bequeathed to humanity by Adam and Eve, and over the death that their carnal weakness brought into the world. That, after all, is the significance of the resurrection.’ 21  Secret of the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost. 22  Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 2. 23  Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 6, quoting Council of Trent, Session XIII, Decree on the Holy Eucharist, c.5. 24  Council of Trent, Session XXII, Doctrine on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, c. 2. 25  Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 7. 26  Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 7. 27  Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 10.

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Boyd Taylor Coolman  145 In the Eucharist, the believer who struggles with pornography is, in a uniquely intense and efficacious way, united to Christ in his paschal mystery in its entirety, but especially to his suffering and death. ‘We must always bear about in our body the dying of Jesus, so that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our ­bodily frame.’28 This Eucharistic reception the primary means of extending and deepening the above noted union with Christ, and indeed the sensus Christi, originating in baptism. Here, especially, the notion of union with Christ offers the believer a sacramental means by which to offer himself, his own body and indeed his own sensus, through the self-­offering of Christ himself: ‘. . . we ask the Lord in the sacrifice of the Mass that, “receiving the offering of the spiritual victim”, he may fashion us for himself “as an eternal gift”.’29 As Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Deus Caritas Est: ‘The Eucharist draws us into Jesus’ act of self-­oblation . . . we enter into the very dynamic of his self-­giving.’30 From this perspective, the various Pauline statements noted above—being ‘crucified with Christ’ (Gal. 2:20); having ‘crucified the flesh with its passions and desires’ (Gal. 5:24); putting ‘on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires’ (Rom. 13:14)—find here their proper theological context, as grounded in, actualized by, and efficacious through, Eucharistic union with Christ. As Vatican II put it: ‘by offering the Immaculate Victim, not only through the hands of the priest, but also with him, [believers] should learn also to offer themselves’.31 The holiness and moral purity for which believers strive—to ‘offer their bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, which is spiritual service of worship’ (Rom. 12)—is here eucharistically sourced. With this strategy the one struggling with pornography is offered, not merely a homiletical exhortation to imitate the Lord’s cruciform example, but rather a real participation in the life-­giving Presence of his passion, so that he ‘might become a Eucharist with Christ, and thus become acceptable and pleasing to God’.32 In sum, the strategy proffered here is to seek a remedial therapy for pornographic sin in an ecclesial context of liturgical activity and sacramental practice. More precisely, sacramental participation in the paschal mystery of the Lord, established in Baptism and cultivated in the Eucharist,33 must be the foundation

28  Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 12. Cf. 2 Cor. 4:10–11. 29 Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 12, quoting Secret for Monday of Pentecost Week. 30  My thanks to Fr Robert Imbelli for drawing my attention to his text. 31  Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 48. 32 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Eucharist and Mission’, in Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: The Church as Communion (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2005), 78. 33  Though it cannot be pursued here, sacramental participation in the sensus Christi can be maintained or recovered, even cultivated and increased, through the sacrament of penance and reconciliation. Rightly understood and practiced, this sacrament would seem to offer a powerful resource for believers struggling with pornography. Indeed, it has recently been described as a ‘counter-­practice to

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146  Sensus Christi and framework—the crucible, one might even fittingly say—of the pursuit of and progress towards healing, wholeness, and holiness. Most precisely, this sacramental practice seeks to replace a pornographic sensibility with the sensus Christi, a participation in Christ’s own sensibility—Christ’s own restored human nature and rightly ordered sexuality, Christ’s own self-­mortification and suffering in the flesh, Christ’s own sacrificial offering of his whole self, body and soul, pleasing and acceptable, to the Father.

Sensing the Body of Christ As noted above, the phrase, sensus Christi, can also be taken as an objective genitive, where Christ is not the subject of a sensus in which the believer might therapeutically share (as treated above), but is the object of the pornography viewer’s own sensus. Pondering the history of Christian worship in the Latin West can evoke an experience where something quite familiar and well known reappears, as if for the first time. In this case, what reappears is this: since at least the early twelfth century, most Western Catholics have enacted their communal worship of God, and indeed their Eucharistic encounter with Jesus, while gazing, typically, at a sensuous representation of his essentially naked body, viewing which they were encouraged to cultivate—in varying degrees, more or less explicitly—an affective response. But putting it this way in an age awash in pornography is rather unsettling. For, if we define ‘pornography’, at least in a very general and non-­technical sense, as the intentional cultivation of sexual affectedness or affectivity through a visual representation of a naked human body, then a rather eerie parallel seems to emerge between liturgy and pornography, at least at this point. And if we rush to insist that the difference is whether or not the affective response is erotic or passionate or sensuous, a quick glance at the history of liturgical and sacramental art seems to occlude that strategy, at least for the medieval and early modern periods, in which liturgical meditational practices were often supported with quite erotic imagery and with the sensuous language of the Song of Songs.34 And, even if we were to expunge the erotic dimension from our affective liturgical gaze, does not

pornography and pornification,’ which resists the objectification and commodification of the human body. See Morrow, ‘Pornography and Penance,’ 62–83. 34  Anyone familiar with medieval devotional practices around the Eucharist will know that this practice was central to many different spiritual and mystical traditions of the Middle Ages, among both men and women, famously in men such figures as Bernard of Clairvaux and in women such as Mechthild of Magdeburg, just to name the more well known. St Bernard famously and provocatively spoke of and encouraged in his listeners a ‘carnal love of the carnal Christ’ as the starting point for a transformative process by which desire and love were reoriented, reformed, and properly re-­ordered so as to produce both psychological health and spiritual well-­being.

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Boyd Taylor Coolman  147 the nearly naked body of Christ still have a startling structural and formal parallel to pornography that seems problematic? So, what to do? Rather than running away from the sensuousness of the visual culture of the much traditional Christian liturgy, we ought to embrace it, for it may well contain the solution rather than exacerbate the problem. Perhaps, precisely in view of its structural parallel with pornography, liturgical gazing at the nearly naked body of Jesus may become a strategy for counteracting a pornographic sensibility. But this is a complicated and delicate proposal, and so let me offer four tentative, experimental reflections on the matter. First, there may be utility in merely juxtaposing the image of Christ crucified over and against pornographic memory-­images. Indeed, at one level this is what is often proposed to individuals struggling with pornography. Therapists and counsellors do sometimes recommend meditation on the passion of Christ as a technique for dampening or diffusing pornographic temptation—like a douse of cold water in the face.35 While this may have a certain kind of effectiveness, it seems to offer merely a confrontation between two visual images, in which one neutralizes the other, after which the visual exercise will have done its job, so to speak, and the erstwhile viewer of pornography will have avoided or reduced the offending activity. Yet, this seems fairly superficial: less a therapy for bringing about deep change and more a simple technique for avoiding an occasion for sin. Might there be deeper resources here? For example, as a second point, does the fact that the stripped body of Jesus is not only sensuous and even attractive but also suffering, vulnerable, victimized, degraded, and abused provide a more power­ful image with which to ‘re-­sensitize’ the pornographic sensibility? Might one effectively overlay the suffering, naked flesh of Christ upon a ‘pornified’ memory, which would push the viewer of pornography to reframe his perspective and thus to see other people, especially other bodies, with compassion, sympathy, even identification with vulnerability and weakness? If pornographic images cannot be expunged from memory, might they at least be somehow healed by sensing this body of Christ, that is, by this sensus Christi? Might we re-­ vision ‘pornified’ bodies through Christ’s suffering and vulnerable nakedness? Could

35  For example: ‘I would tell the person that while I understand how they feel, that it feels like an uncontrollable urge, that is the great deception of this sin. It isn’t uncontrollable. If Jesus, freshly crucified, blood pouring down his agony riddled face, the crunch of bone as nail pierced his flesh, gasping for air on the cross, were physically present in your living room, would your urge still feel uncontrollable? Would you still click on to the filth that contributed to our Lord of Glory’s suffering? I HIGHLY doubt it’ (http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2013/11/elder-­questions-­pornography/). ‘Bishop Fulton Sheen (d. 1979) told the story of a young man in college whose roommate hung pornographic pictures on his wall in their small dorm room. He asked Sheen what he could do. Sheen suggested he hang a large picture of Christ crucified on his wall. He did, and it wasn’t long before the roommate’s pornography came down. Taking a cue from this, I have suggested to a number of men that they tape a small picture of the crucified Christ on their computer monitor. When they look at this, they find it much harder to pursue internet pornography.’

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148  Sensus Christi such a re-­imaging of nakedness move pornography viewer from callousness to compassion, from objectification to identification, from domination to devotion? Third, and even more daringly, might the unavoidably erotic depictions of Christ’s nakedness, and his interaction with both male and female beloved dis­ ciples model a kind of transformed eros, the contemplation of which would properly re-­sensitize those who mediate on it? Does the nuptial or spousal gaze shared between Christ and his mother and beloved disciples, in which medieval Christians so obviously revelled, provide a way for us not to run away from or avoid eros but to see it reformed and transformed? Can those images teach us how properly to relate to the naked body not just of Jesus but of others too? Perhaps one contemporary strategy for dealing with pornographic culture is to recover medieval practices of cultivating affective devotion to the sensuous, suffering body of Jesus.36 But there is a fourth point to be made here. Those medieval representations of Jesus’ naked body were typically altarpieces. That is to say: they were encountered and gazed upon in the context of Eucharistic liturgy, the sacrament of the Mass. Accordingly, this moment of affective gazing on Jesus’ body was the beginning37 of a liturgical movement and sequence that led the worshipper beyond this initial experience and affective gaze. This is an obvious but crucial point. In the context of Eucharistic liturgy, the worshipper is led from the sight of Christ’s naked body to actual physical contact with that very Body, to a unitive embrace of Him in the Eucharist.38 It is worth pointing out that this process can be coordinated, stepwise, with the other senses, from hearing the word read and preached, to smelling incensed aroma, to tasting its bread-­and-­wine-­like presence, and finally to the culmination in touch, embrace, and union. The crucial point here is that the Eucharistic liturgy does not allow one simply to remain gazing affectedly at the body of Jesus, however therapeutic that might be in itself. Rather, the liturgy moves us from sight, through the other senses, finally to taste and touch, to communion. Here, medieval writers assist us again. Most medieval descriptions of the spiritual life narrate a movement from seeing to touching God, since both phys­ic­al­ly and spiritually, touch is union, and union with God is ultimate goal. The implications for healing a pornographic sensibility are not far to seek. A widely noted effect of pornography use is that it undermines healthy sexual relations among married couples. For pornography entails a permanent cultivation of visual titillation, a stultifying dominance of the sense of sight, a remaining arrested in affected gaze, 36  It would be prudent, of course, to find strategies for monitoring and responding to the possibilities for self-­deception in this regard. 37  Note, though, not the end (as it sometimes, even often, was in these medieval devotional traditions, where only spiritual reception was more common). 38  At least in a context where Eucharistic communion/reception is practised in both its sacramental and spiritual modalities, that is, where the sacraments are received both with proper affectivity and physically (‘in the mouth and with the heart’ as Hugh of St Victor said, or both ‘sacramentally and spiritually’, as Aquinas put it).

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Boyd Taylor Coolman  149 which both psychologically and even physically can inhibit pornography viewers from progressing on to real contact with the real bodies of real people, even in real sexual intercourse. Put otherwise: porn is the refusal, and ultimately the ­inability, ‘to go all the way’. It is premature closure; arrested experience; stifled affectivity. The pornography addict can no longer touch and be touched. If so, then Eucharistic liturgy, which begins with affected vision but is inexorably consummated in unitive contact, enacts precisely what is missing in porn. Perhaps, accordingly, Eucharistic liturgy can function as a kind of therapeutic practice or exercise for learning or re-­learning how to sense and relate to real bodies properly. What is advocated here is the cultivation of an expanded sensorium that strives to engage all the senses and relegates sight to that of a preliminary and initial experience, while also prioritizing touch, contact, and union as the goal. Let me just gesture at what a touch-­oriented paradigm might offer. We are affected by both what we see and what we touch, but in very different ways. Perhaps the most obvious difference is that touch simultaneously involves both less objectification of the one touched and more vulnerability to the one touched. One can see without being seen, but one cannot touch without simultaneously being touched. Tactile voyeurism is an oxymoron. Touch is inexorably mutual and bilateral, vul­ ner­able and intimate,39 while sight is often none of these.40 This, in sum, is the second meaning of the sensus Christi, sensing the body of Christ as object. It sees the Eucharistic liturgy as therapeutically re-­forming the pornographic sensibility, first by re-­orienting it properly to the physical body of Jesus and second by transcending and thus relativizing the visual by leading to the tactile and unitive. In so doing, it expands the sacramental/spiritual sen­sor­ium by cultivating the full sensual apparatus with which to encounter the body of Christ, and draws the pornography viewer beyond and below the two-­dimensional surface, leading him ultimately to communion with the real body of Christ. At this juncture, there occurs a certain Eucharistic convergence of the two meanings of sensus Christi considered thus far. Drawn liturgically towards the body of Christ as object of loving, compassionate, meditative gaze (sensus Christi as objective genitive), culminating in sacramental reception and union of his body, believers increasingly share Christ’s own mode of sensing, his own mode of 39  This claim about touch would need to be nuanced in relation to the issue of sexual violence, which of course is quite germane to the topic of pornography, given the high frequency of aggression in popular porn videos. In one sense, of course, such violence is a form of physical touching, but clearly the opposite of what is intended here, especially the absence of genuine mutuality and vulnerability of touch in such acts. This fact also makes the abuse crisis all the more tragic as it impedes the possibility of a chaste touch. 40  Their respective modalities may be distinct as well. Note that the pattern here is from visual consumption to tactile reception. Is there a subtle but important distinction here? Obviously, at one level, both consumption and reception involve coming to have or possess something, but at another level they may entail very different ways of relating to that which is possessed. Consumption involves a measure of active control over its object, while reception entails a dimension of passivity, in the literal sense of undergoing or even suffering (Latin: passio), that consumption lacks.

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150  Sensus Christi viewing and experiencing and interacting with others—his sensibility—his ability to see others, including their bodies, rightly. That is, they come more and more to have ‘the mind of Christ’ (sensus Christi as subjective genitive), as the Lord shifts from being the object of sense perception, to being in some the subject of it.41

Sensing in the Body of Christ In the liturgical context assumed here, the sacramental encounter with Christ is never an individualistic or private affair; rather, it occurs communally and cor­ por­ate­ly in the Body of Christ. As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, once put the matter: ‘The most intimate mystery of communion between God and man is accessible in the sacrament of the Body of the Risen Lord; conversely, then, the mystery lays claim to our bodies and is realized in a Body . . . .’42 Cardinal Ratzinger intimates that the pursuit of holiness by individual believers, and in their individual bodies, occurs most properly within the corporate Body of Christ. Indeed, Vatican II insisted that grace of union with Christ in his paschal mystery, described earlier and so central to the therapeutic strategy here pursued, is received most fully in this ecclesial Body: ‘In that Body the life of Christ is poured into the believers who, through the sacraments, are united in a hidden and real way to Christ who suffered and was glorified.’43 This may be expressed as a third form of sensus Christi, distinct from but in­tim­ate­ly related to the first two. For, properly understood, the experience of Christ as both mystical Subject and as therapeutic Object of our own sensibility, our own sense perception, is communal and corporate; neither is ever experienced alone. Here, then, the sensus Christi means sensing in the Body of Christ, understood not just as Christ the individual but as Christ the head of his ­corporate body, the Church.44 From this perspective, the third meaning of sensus Christi refers to the way the believer participates in a sensibility that is not only ­personally Christic but communally ecclesial. With a nod to Ignatius of Loyola, what emerges here could be described aptly as a form, at one and the same time, of sentire cum Christo and sentire cum ecclesia—to sense with Christ and with the

41  There is significant New Testament scholarship on Jesus’ relation to women—e.g. his willingness to speak with them in public, to teach them, etc.—that would be very germane to include here. 42  Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1986), 113. My thanks again to Fr Robert Imbelli for bringing this text to my attention. 43  Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, 7. 44  Ratzinger, “Eucharist and Mission”, 78: ‘The Eucharist is never an event involving just two, a dialogue between Christ and me. Eucharistic Communion is aimed at a compete reshaping of my own life. It breaks up man’s entire self and creates a new “we”. Communion with Christ is necessarily also communication with all who belong to him: therein I myself become a part of the new bread he is creating by the resubstantiation of the whole of earthly reality.’ (Again, my thanks to Fr Robert Imbelli for noting this text.)

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Boyd Taylor Coolman  151 Church. Such a communal sacramental sensibility runs directly contrary the ­private, individualistic character of the pornographic sensibility. This third meaning of sensus Christi may also be coordinated helpfully with the liturgical action and movement thus far narrated. For the Eucharistic reception of Christ and union with Christ in the liturgy—that point at which we are currently located—is a kind of pivot or hinge of the liturgical action, in which the direction of movement is reversed, so to speak, and the believer turns back to the gathered community, resumes his place in the Body of Christ and among the people of God, and then, both individually and communally, is sent out into the world, to live out the universal vocation to holiness in the world. The liturgy in its turn moves the faithful, filled with ‘the paschal sacraments,’ to be ‘one in holiness’;45 it prays that ‘they may hold fast in their lives to what they have grasped by their faith’;46 the renewal in the Eucharist of the covenant between the Lord and man draws the faithful into the compelling love of Christ and sets them on fire. From the liturgy, therefore, and especially from the Eucharist, as from a font, grace is poured forth upon us; and the sanctification of men in Christ [. . .].47

In short, the ‘liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed’, and ‘at the same time it is the font from which all her power flows’48. Given the oft-­noted importance of ‘accountability groups’ for assisting those addicted to pornography, from the perspective adopted here, the ecclesial and Eucharistic gathering could function as just such a group—a single Body, with a single Head, striving together to cultivate the ‘mind of Christ’ (sensus Christi), and in the case of pornographic addiction, to transform a pornographic sensibility into a sacramental one, to cultivate a single, sanctified sensorium with which to sense and perceive the whole creation, but especially the bodies of other human beings, as sacred, precious, and inviolable creatures that should be cared for and cherished with the dignity proper to persons created in the image of God. More concretely, pornography support groups might benefit from more intentional and explicit integration of such practices as Reconciliation, meditation, and Eucharistic adoration into the actual structure of their meetings.

Conclusion: An Eschatological Proviso The approach to pornography addiction here does not pretend to be sufficient in and of itself to overcome the problem. Rather, it seeks to provide an overarching 45  Postcommunion for both Masses of Easter Sunday. 46  Collect of the Mass for Tuesday of Easter Week. 47  Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 10. 48  Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 10.

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152  Sensus Christi theological framework within which to approach the matter. It also wishes to ­recommend an ecclesial context, a liturgical practice, and a sacramental orientation around and within which the various other strategies for overcoming this addiction might find their place. Finally, it would be pastorally important and sensitive to acknowledge that, consistent with the ultimately eschatological orientation of the church in the world, participation in these three dimensions of the sensus Christi must remain incomplete in this life. For many, the struggle with pornography will not be fully victorious until the complete restoration of all things in Christ. In this life, the believer clings to the Cross especially, even as he strives in hope to live in the power of the resurrection. In this respect, the enduring and ongoing posture of the believer who struggles with pornography is that of the perennially penitent. For, in its current pilgrimage towards eschatological fullness, towards ‘the full measure of the stature—and sensus—of Christ’ (Eph. 4:13), ‘the Church, em­bra­ cing in its bosom sinners, at the same time holy and always in need of being purified, always follows the way of penance and renewal’.49 Spiritual perception is often contrasted with physical perception, but the mode of perception advocated here is not a distinct, non-­physical mode of perception. Rather, it is a mode of perception that strives for, and ultimately requires, a dis­ pos­ition and posture on the part of one experiencing the body of another that could well be called spiritual, in that it is compassionate, intimate, mutual, and vulnerable, that recognizes the sacred beauty of the human body, as something to be cherished, fostered, even revered as the holy creation that it is.

49  Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, 8.

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10 Spiritual Perception and the Racist Gaze Can Contemplation Shift Racism? Sarah Coakley

Introduction: Why is Spiritual Perception Anything to Do with Racism? In this essay on ‘spiritual perception’ and its moral significance I shall not, i­ nitially, be attacking the problem of whether it is possible to ‘perceive’ God, directly or indirectly,1 although in the course of my discussion that issue will indeed re­appear as a (perhaps unexpected) contrapuntal theme. Instead, the main and immediate focus of this chapter will be the problem of human ‘perception’ going awry (specifically in relation to so-­called ‘systemic’ ra­cism2), and on some of the purported reasons for this eventuality. This will turn out to be a surprisingly complicated matter, but it will ultimately also lead us back to the question of God. I start, then, with a couple of painful contemporary par­ ables about American racism, in order to set the scene.3

1  See John Greco’s Chapter 1, with whose general argument (in defence of the possibility of perceptions of God) I concur; my own contribution on this point will, however, later complicate the picture by underscoring the ‘obscure’ (or ‘dark’) nature of this perception epistemically. (On the problem of utilizing the metaphor of ‘darkness’ in the context of contemporary discussions about racism, see nn. 30, 45, and 50 below.) 2  I use this term sparingly, and with some caution, in this chapter, since it raises a host of theoretic and practical issues which cannot here be analysed or assessed in any depth; and its definition, and indeed instantiation, remain matters of dispute. First, I take it that ‘systemic’ (or ‘structural’) racism involves forms of racism that have become ‘normalized’ (and thus to a large degree unconsciously embedded) in a society which discriminates against non-­white people in such publicly attestable areas as criminal justice, employment, housing, banking or mortgage support, healthcare, political power, and education, etc. Secondly, if my account of racist ‘perceptual blindness’ in this essay has cogency, then it presumably has a pervasive undergirding role in this public scenario, although clearly it does not exhaust its remit. (For comments on the often-­connected secular category of ‘implicit bias’, see nn. 14, 24, and 25 below.) 3  My approach here, so far from ‘instrumentalizing black bodies’ for other (purportedly detached) philosophical ends—as might be charged—is intended to highlight the ways that perceptions appear to be distorted ‘all the way down’ in a racist political system; and hence the pressure, as I shall argue later, towards utilizing in addition an undergirding theological narrative to explicate the profound problems that these narratives bespeak.

Sarah Coakley, Spiritual Perception and the Racist Gaze: Can Contemplation Shift Racism? In: Perceiving Things Divine: Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual Perception. Edited by: Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802594.003.0010

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154  Spiritual Perception and the Racist Gaze During the heights of the violent protests occasioned by the police shooting in August 2014 of an unarmed young black man, Michael Brown,4 in Ferguson, Missouri (the notoriously troubled suburb of St Louis), a local black rapper, calling himself ‘Tef Poe’, emerged not only as a vibrant and prophetic singer about the shootings but also as a canny spokesman and analyst of the underlying racial tensions.5 Interviewed on the early BBC Today programme in London some months later, he made the following arresting remark (I paraphrase from memory): ‘The American civil rights movement has failed,’ he announced with emphasis. ‘The question of civil rights does not even get to the deeper and more profound issue of racism: for that is a problem of seeing.’ As it happens, I have since heard this insight passingly expressed twice more— once in a journalistic6 and once in a black church7 context. Perhaps, then, it is now a coming cultural aphorism.8 But what exactly does it mean? The thought that the problem of racism is fundamentally a perceptual one (however this may be understood: we shall attempt to unpick its possible meanings below) may still seem novel and striking to some, at least in the context of certain dominant white ‘liberal’ discourses about the topic. For it seemingly cuts against—or more truly underneath—what have become, since the birth of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s, the

4  Details of this death remain extremely ambiguous, and witnesses contradicted each other—we have no video or webcam evidence in this case. The most important and contentious perceptual elem­ ent in the various accounts relates to whether Michael Brown intended to ‘surrender’ just before he was fatally shot, raising his hands (hence the ‘Hands Up United’ movement which issued from this event), or whether he was actually about to effect an aggressive ‘charge’ against the police officer: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Michael_Brown (accessed 20 Jan 2021). A recent film by the conservative black commentator, Shelby Steele (‘What Killed Michael Brown?’, released October 2020) has recently re-­ ignited the debate about the causes, and the final truths, of Michael Brown’s death. 5  For details of Tef Poe’s (real name: Kareem Jackson’s) work as a rapper and as a co-­founder of the ‘Hands Up United’ movement, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tef_Poe. 6  Sendhil Mullainathan, ‘Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions’, New York Times, 3 Jan 2015: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/upshot/the-­measuring-­sticks-­of-­racial-­bias-­.html. 7 Pastor Cass Bailey, in a sermon to his interracial Episcopal congregation, Trinity Parish, Charlottesville, VA, September 2016. 8  Yet for those familiar with the classic analysis by James Baldwin (1924–1987) of what he termed the ‘whiteness problem’, this idea is not new at all. As Baldwin is often quoted: ‘Whiteness is a dangerous concept. It is not about skin color. It is not even about race. It is about the willful blindness used to justify white supremacy’ (see Raoul Peck, I am Not Your Negro, 2016 retrospective documentary on the life of Baldwin). Note that Baldwin underscores here the notion of ‘blindness’ in white racism, setting this ‘whiteness problem’ off against what was regularly called the ‘Negro problem’ in his era. The nature and root of the ‘wilfulness’ of this blindness is however what I suggest still needs further analysis, epistemologically and spiritually, as does the complexity of the problem as somehow deeper even than the effects of ‘colour’ or power; and this is what I am trying to grapple with in this chapter, both philosophically and theologically. Note that Baldwin also earlier drew attention, and para­dox­ic­ al­ly, to the seemingly unconscious nature of this white ‘blindness’: ‘Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves’ (‘Letter from A Region in My Mind’, The New Yorker, 17 Nov 1962). For reflection on how these insights relate to what is often now called ‘implicit’ or ‘unconscious’ ‘bias’ (and on the puzzlingly generic scope of these terms), see nn. 14, 24, and 25 below.

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Sarah Coakley  155 standard philosophical and social-­science analyses of constricted rights, poverty, electoral disempowerment, and educational disadvantage for black and brown people as constituting the prevailing matrices of American racism according to a familiar Enlightenment paradigm of democratic advance. (The advantage of these latter analyses, of course, is that they seem at least in principle capable of being ‘fixed’ in due time by American libertarian good will and élan, whether political, educational, or economic.) Yet, as I heard Tef Poe that day on the radio, I do not think that his insight about ‘seeing’ was intended merely as a rebuke to two constituencies which relate ambiguously to this ‘liberal’ civil rights discourse and which he might well, in part, have been addressing: first, those optimistic younger liberals (sometimes white, but strangely often not) who announce that ‘race’ is now irrelevant to them, since their generation has happily become morally ‘colour-­blind’;9 nor second, those notorious racism-­deniers (usually white, often older generation, but not always so, and well charted in the statistical literature10) who deny that there are instances of ‘unconscious’ or ‘systemic’ racism at work in American society at all, since seemingly they are also unaware of (or ‘blind’ to) the pervasive social and economic inequalities related to ‘race’ which surround them all the time. The point is not often so stated: but I think we might regard these two opposed constituencies as paradoxical, and inverse, manifestations of the same ‘liberal’ trad­ ition of civil rights (in a certain, questionable, mode): the first, the optimistic announcers of its supposed success in relation to racism; the second, the stolid deniers of its necessary application to anything other than autonomous individual social achievement and success.11 It is wholly probable, of course, that Tef Poe was including both these latter parties in what he had to say. But as I heard him, his comment went deeper, and represented a more thoroughgoing and disturbing proposal: that some sort of generic ‘perceptual’ incapacity or distortion—perhaps some inherently visual, epistemological, and accompanying moral malaise?12—lies at the heart of all ‘white’ racism, even for those who profoundly believe they are not racist. In other words, whatever it was that happened in the moments before Michael Brown’s 9  A striking exemplar of this position is the tennis star Venus Williams (see The Times colour supplement, Saturday 17 June 2017), echoing well-­cited comments of hope for a ‘colour-­blind’ society by former-­President Barack Obama. 10  See Bruce Bartlett, ‘The Right’s Farcical Denial of Systemic Racism’, The New Republic, 5 Oct 2020, for a recent review of some of these evidences. 11  One striking presentation of this position from a black academic author is John McWhorter, Losing the Race: Self-­Sabotage in Black America (New York, The Free Press, 2000). For a more recent update of such a black conservative stance, written in response to the ‘race’ crises of Summer 2020, see Glenn Lowry’s interview on race, equality and cancel culture: https://providencemag.com/video/ glenn-­loury-­on-­race-­equality-­cancel-­culture/. 12  I am sliding quickly here, and deliberately, over the relation between the ‘perceptual’, the (more broadly) ‘epistemological’, and the ‘moral’—all distinct categories philosophically. See the last section of this chapter for the untangling (and re-­connecting) of these categories.

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156  Spiritual Perception and the Racist Gaze death involved, for Tef Poe, ‘not seeing’ in some morally culpable sense. And note that we cannot rule out the inverse possibility, too (even though Tef Poe made no explicit mention of it): that there may also be perceptual distortion in the cor­res­ pond­ing (or rather, reactive) response of self-­alienation, distrust, resentment, and anger from the side of the racially disempowered—again, even for those who profoundly believe they are not racist; and moreover that this ‘problem of seeing’ has a strangely evanescent cultural quality of its own, perhaps—as Shulamith Firestone famously put it in another context of feminist critique—‘so deep as to be invisible’.13 In other words, if I heard Tef Poe aright, contemporary American racism may potentially affect and afflict all of us ‘perceptually’ in one way or another, and all the way down. This is not of course to ‘bracket’ the all-­important differentials of power in this complex perceptual and epistemological scenario—far from it; and I shall come back to this matter later with some force. But it is to draw attention to a prevailing mood of perceptual distortion with which all may be said to struggle in the context of established social practices of racialized difference. If so, the judgement on Michael Brown’s death cannot simply be seen as a visual and testimonial disagreement between different witnesses about whether Brown lifted his hands to surrender or to indicate an aggressive intent against a police officer; rather, it goes deeper into the arena of what this same ‘liberal’ tradition now (rather inchoately and desperately) calls ‘unconscious bias’, a category to which, however, it finds it notoriously hard to give precise content in contexts of legal dispute or conflicting testimony.14 So it seems that even now this ‘problem of seeing’ is still not clear enough. What exact form does this ‘perceptual’ incapacity of which we have spoken take,

13  I am reapplying her justly famous phrase on ‘sex class’: The Dialectic of Sex (orig. 1970; Boston, Women’s Press, 1979), 1. 14  I am deliberately avoiding appealing to this (highly au courant) category in this particular essay, for at least two reasons. First, generic ‘unconscious’—‘implicit’—‘bias’ of a racist sort is in any case very hard to pin down empirically, but is certainly wider in remit than the specifically perceptual elem­ ent which I am focusing on here. Secondly, recent studies of ‘implicit bias’ investigations, most famously those emanating from the Harvard Psychology Department (the ‘Implicit Association Test’), indicate that their empirical results are very hard to correlate with actual ‘racist’ behaviours: for an important survey article on these theoretical problems, citing relevant recent scholarly publications, see Jesse Singal, ‘Psychology’s Favorite Tool for Measuring Racism Isn’t Up to the Job’, https://www. thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-­racism-­measuring-­tool-­isnt-­up-­to-­the-­job.html. We must underscore here also the paradoxical nature of the relation of the modern ‘rights’ tradition (centrally concerned with autonomy, freedom, conscious intentionality, ‘Enlightenment’), to the equally modern birth of psychoanalysis, and its attempted probing of the realm of the unconscious. Note that the problems of contemporary American racism sit notably astride these divergent, if not contradictory, directions in modern thought, leading to very different theoretical understandings of ‘race’ and its problems. Of late, the liberal ‘rights’ tradition has come into outright conflict with ‘identity politics’ on precisely these issues: for a perceptive journalistic reflection on this dénouement, see The Economist, 11 July 2020,https://www.economist.com/international/2020/07/09/enlightenment-­liberalism-­is-­losing-­ ground-­in-­the-­debate-­about-­race.

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Sarah Coakley  157 we must ask again, and how are we to explain it philosophically—or perhaps even theologically?

What is it that Cannot be ‘Seen’ in Conditions of Racism? Let me take another painful example of a black man’s recent death to unpack this difficult point of Tef Poe’s a bit further.15 It, too, has already become an iconic symbol of fatal police violence against a black man in the United States of America; and note that, in this instance, the relevant policeman responsible for a shooting death is not white, but Latino. Note too that in this second case it is not conflicting (ex post facto) verbal testimonies that constitute the problem of assessment of blame, but conflicting interpretations of actual audio-­visual recordings of the event in question. That is, what we have here is a much ‘thicker description’ of what occurred, via both aural and visual materials, and the evidences issue both from a police webcam and from a streamed Facebook video at the site of the shooting, recorded by the victim’s girlfriend. The story runs thus. Two policemen in a suburban area of the Twin Cities (one Latino, one white) were doing standard patrol in July 2016 when a black couple with a child in the back seat were spied driving perfectly ordinarily and legally in a suburban area.16 The Latino policeman, Jeronimo Yanez (who was driving the patrol car) immediately remarked, however (as captured on the webcam), that he ‘D[id] not like the look of that flat nose’ [sic] of the black driver, and was inclined to associate him therefore with a robbery that had just been reported to the police; and on no­ticing that one of the back lights of the couple’s car was burnt out, the two policemen moved to pull it over. In the police webcam we see this occurring, and the black driver, Philando Castile, immediately complying with police questions and requirements. The policemen saunter up to the car, and Castile (who, as was subsequently disclosed, was well used to many police ‘stopping and searching’ events, forty-­nine times in all, but had never been convicted for anything) exercises great calm and politesse in the interaction with Yanez (Castile more than once calls him ‘sir’), who leans into the driver’s window and asks for Castile’s driver’s licence and evidence of insurance. What follows speedily constitutes the terrible dénouement: Castile quickly gives his insurance details to Yanez, but before getting his driver’s licence out of his pocket tells Yanez—again calmly, and one would have thought 15  I want to record my indebtedness to Dr Faith Glavey Pawl (University of St Thomas, MN) for several engaging and instructive conversations about the Philando Castile case and its relevance to my philosophical discussion of ‘perception’ in this essay. (The shooting of Castile occurred very close to Pawl’s home.) 16  Once again, there is detailed material online about these events: see https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Shooting_of_Philando_Castile.

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158  Spiritual Perception and the Racist Gaze sensibly and honestly—that he must mention that he does have a ‘licence to carry’ [a gun] and that his gun is in the same pocket as his driver’s licence. A confused verbal altercation then takes place in which Yanez is clearly panicking and has drawn his own gun; he is telling Castile not to put his hand in his pocket, but this is in contradiction to his demand that he show him his driver’s licence; and even as Castile’s girlfriend screams an objection, Yanez shoots at Castile seven times at point-­blank range, with two of the bullets piercing his heart. Exactly as this is happening, Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, has switched on her Facebook live recording and the whole event goes viral: Castile is now bleeding out and dying, but no ambulance has been called fast enough to do any good (he is eventually declared dead some time later in hospital). Reynolds continues screaming and recording, even as she is pulled out of the car and her mobile phone is thrown to the ground; and her 4-­year-­old daughter in the back seat is heard expostulating with her lest her own ‘Mommy’ also gets shot. Reynolds is handcuffed and arrested (on no obvious legal basis whatsoever), and only at 5 a.m. the next morning let out of police custody. Anyone who watches the recordings of this event (which remain online17) is likely to be deeply shocked and traumatized, as well they might be. And yet even here, with all the relevant webcam and Facebook material to hand, subsequent assessments remains split as to the faults involved in the fatal interchange (and Yanez has subsequently been formally exonerated): those supporting the police side simply take it for granted that Yanez was right to shoot in ‘self-­defence’; those sympathetic to Castile notice his polite deference, his honesty about his ‘licence to carry’, and his carefulness in alerting the police officer to the ambiguity of pla­ cing his hand into the same pocket that also held his driver’s licence. What then can we conclude on the ‘not seeing’ problem from these two, contrasting, cases, Brown’s and Castile’s? And what further work is needed in this particular essay to explicate their philosophical (and possibly also theological) significance? First, Tef Poe’s comment on the Brown shooting almost certainly had in mind not just the problem of a white policeman not ‘seeing’ what Michael Brown intended when he put his hands up, but more fundamentally not ‘seeing’ this black man as a citizen with certain rights who—even though he had indeed committed a minor felony and possibly had some reactive aggressive intent—did not deserve an on-­the-­spot fatal police wounding when strolling unarmed in the street.18 This story, note, already represents a ‘perceptual’ problem with enormous added hermeneutical, moral, and legal force; for these reasons it certainly requires

17 Castile shooting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85Y_yOm9IhA. This YouTube video includes both the police and the Reynolds recordings, pasted together. 18  See n. 62 below for some brief comments on the epistemological complexities of the phenomenon of ‘seeing as’, as originally expounded by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations.

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Sarah Coakley  159 further, and probing, philosophical analysis, which will be attempted later (in the last section of this chapter). But if we add the intuitions we come away with from the Castile example, we begin to wonder whether something even deeper still, and perhaps—I suggest—irreducibly theological, may be at stake. Let me explain. It would take an unusual kind of a-­theological argument to establish that an absence of a fundamental good in a narrative of deathly police violence such as I have just recounted is actually suggestive of the non-­existence of a God.19 Such discourses are of course commonplace in analytic philosophical discussions of the ‘problem of evil’; but I am not reaching that far here. What I do want to propose, however, is that there are conditions of human life in which some psychologically entrenched kind of ‘other’-blame,20 conjoined with a strange form of perceptual and moral distortion that attends it, coalesce into conditions in which deathly violence may well become the outcome, especially in the realm of state-­ empowered (and gun-­carrying) police enforcement. Moreover, such violence is then characteristically presented as having a form of mandated justification strangely deeper than any obvious rational or legal force. If we then ask if this nexus of themes has any allusions in the Western ‘imaginary’, I think the answer is obvious, and inexorably theological: we are in the realm of ‘sin’ and its mysterious origins in the story of the Fall. We recall here not the first moment of sin in Genesis chapter 3, when the apple is taken and eaten (Gen. 3:6), but rather what happens immediately afterwards: the ‘opening of the eyes’ which is at the same time a distortion of sight accompanied by shame (Gen. 3:7, 10); and then the accompanying self-­deception about that shame, which instantaneously transmutes into a projective blame of the ‘other’ (the woman, the serpent) (Gen. 3:12–13). We  note too the debasement and distortion of ‘desires’ and motivations which attend this whole corrupting event in the Garden;21 and the almost immediate 19  Though some analytic philosophers have of course entertained such an a-­theological possibility in relation to grievous human evils: see, for instance, Marilyn McCord Adams, with her special category of ‘horrors’ in Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1999); or Peter van Inwagen, in his survey article on ‘The Problem of Evil’, in William J. Wainwright, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005), 188–219, esp. 210–16. I should add here that I take the (classic, Augustinian) view that both sin and evil are to be theorized as ‘absences’ rather than as ‘substantial’ presences. That does not mean that evil and sin are not real, or do not have devastating consequences for human life. It does, however, make a profound difference to the way that analytic arguments on the ‘problem of evil’ are finally weighed. 20 This might involve, in philosophical terms, what is called ‘second-­order’ perceptual content, raising the problem of whether unconsciously held prejudicial views may actually infect ocular vision itself (so-­called ‘cognitive penetration’); for one recent examination of this phenomenon within the context of racism, see J. Correll, B. Wittenbrink, M. T. Crawford, and M. S. Sadler, ‘Stereotypic vision: How stereotypes disambiguate visual stimuli’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 108 (2015), 219–33 (https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/pspa0000015). For further discussion of how to unpack this issue philosophically and critically, see the final section of this chapter. 21  For a close analysis of how ‘desire’ features so centrally in the story of the Fall, and of the tragedy of its ‘misaggregation’ in relation to God in the ‘first moment’ of the Fall, see my 2016 Analytic Theology lecture, ‘Sin and Desire in Analytic Theology: A Return to Genesis 3’: https://www.facebook. com/NDphilreligion/posts/view-­t he-­sixth-­annual-­analytic-­t heology-­lecture-­sin-­and-­desire-­in-­ analytic-­theol/1349400118428223/. To suggest that racism is the ‘original sin’ (as Hillary Clinton and

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160  Spiritual Perception and the Racist Gaze progression to mutual competition, envy, resentment, and violent death, even between those who belong intimately to each other in the ‘Adamic’ descent (Cain and Abel).22 In short, we are talking about that great Jewish, Christian, and Muslim narrative of the ‘Fall’ in Genesis chapters 3–4, in all its demanding mystery and ambiguity.23 As we have already noted, ‘unconscious bias’ has become the go-­to secular explanatory model for such violent police events as we have discussed here, even if such a lurch into a realm beyond conscious intentionality sits uneasily alongside the ‘liberal’ discourse of autonomy, legal responsibility, and equal ‘rights’. The problem then, it seems, is that tests for such ‘unconscious bias’ (even if we discount their ongoing controversial theoretic basis24), can only go so far in ‘explaining’ prejudicial or distorted perceptions as in some sense aberrant; they cannot, by definition, unmask an incapacity, tout court, to see a raced ‘other’ as fully human, as a beloved fellow child of God (see Rom. 8:15–17), or—even, as in the most demanding teaching of Jesus—as an initially perceived ‘enemy’ demanding nothing less than love (see Matt. 5:43–4). These latter requirements are essentially theological—they represent a profound theological ‘good’, we might say, which is fatally ‘absent’ in the police narratives I have outlined above.25

others have claimed), strikes me thus as both biblically and theologically confusing. It is in the ‘second moment’ of the story—that of shame and perceptual distortion and other-blame—that we might see the roots of the perennial tendency to patriarchy, xenophobia, and racist ideology. For a developed account of this proposal, see my Sin, Racism and Divine Darkness: An Essay ‘On Human Nature’ (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming as the second volume of my systematic theology). 22  Gen. 4:1–16. René Girard’s Freudian account of competitive desire famously makes this (third) ‘moment’ in the whole unfolding of the Fall story the crucial one—‘mimetic’, sibling rivalry with ­violence—the first primeval ‘scapegoating’ and the real outcome of the Adam and Eve story (for a brief interview with Girard on these themes, see http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0201/interv/). But this is not the force of the story overall, note, which is more complex and multifaceted, as suggested above. If we skip over what I call ‘the second moment’ we miss the conjoined roots of perceptual ­distortion, shame and ‘other’-blame which form the psychological cradle of racism. 23  Unfortunately, the mysterious ambiguity and richness of the Fall story has also allowed for it to become a mandate for racism, as opposed to an exposé of its projective roots. This is another reason why the story of ‘sin’ and its classic renditions cannot be kept artificially separated from the story of racism in America: see David N. Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)—citing, inter alia, the disturbing article, Edward Atkinson, ‘The Negro a Beast’, The North American Review 181 (1905), 202–15—for a probing historical account of the post-­emancipation American renditions of the Fall which cast the ‘Negro’ as the serpent in the Garden and himself the original cause of sin. 24  See n. 13, above and references supplied there on the current academic controversy about the reliability of psychological testing of such ‘bias’. For a balanced philosophical assessment of the problematic issues encoded in the term ‘implicit bias’ (metaphysical, epistemological, moral), and relevant bibliography, see Michael Brownstein’s article, ‘Implicit Bias’, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicit-­bias/. 25 Compare here my approach with that of Leigh Vincens (‘Sin and Implicit Bias’, Journal of Analytic Theology 6 (2018), 100–11). Vincens sees ‘implicit bias’ as a ‘form of sin’, whereas I want to argue that the very category of ‘implicit bias’ does not have the clarity or inherent capacity to deal with the problems it itself throws up in the way that the category of ‘sin’ does.

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Sarah Coakley  161 It seems, then, that the category of ‘sin’, complex and disputed as it is, may be a richer and more fruitful one for reflecting on the racist problems confronted in narratives of police violence such as we have examined than any secular analogue, even though in the language of the law courts it is necessarily occluded and bracketed. And this situation of course leaves us with an inevitable and deeply problematic cultural paradox, which it will be the task of the rest of this chapter to unfold and adjudicate. I started this chapter with the question: what has ‘spiritual perception’ got to do with ‘racism’? I must now explain how the next two sections of the chapter will explore this problem contrapuntally, first from a theological perspective and then from a philosophical one. This pincer movement will, I trust, prove both diagnostic and curative. I choose to start from the theological perspective (a priority which might seem, on the face of it, counter-­intuitive), because what such an enfolding narrative of God-­directed meaning can propose is not only an aetiology of sin and evil of the sort we have already intimated here, but ultimately a horizon of hope and healing in response to it. This is not to deny, I repeat once more, that Christian theo­ logic­al meaning systems are also precisely those that can covertly promote and justify racial prejudice, and in the past have done so in the most explicit and egregious forms which now have mainly gone ‘underground’; it is precisely this deadly paradox that needs to be probed. So when we examine this problematic theo­ logic­al nexus we need to find classic Christian exponents who have not only explored the so-­called ‘noetic’ effects of sin on our intellects, affects, and wills,26 but are capable of explicating in some detail the way that sin also affects our sensorium (our ‘spiritual perceptions’ in the physical as well as the psychic sense) and thus our less-­than-­conscious desires and motivations; only thus, I suggest, can we sufficiently expose in theological terms the original challenge presented by Tef Poe, and only thus can we outline the beginnings of a curative spiritual response to perception-­gone-­awry-­through-­sin. However, and secondly, a secular philosophical analysis of the mechanisms of such perception-­gone-­awry may have its own very important, indeed unique and 26  The term ‘noetic effects of sin’ goes back to Calvin, was developed by Kuyper and Brunner, and has been further embroidered and analysed by the ‘Reformed epistemologists’, especially by Alvin Plantinga. For a historical account of the term and some of its contemporary uses, see Stephen K. Moroney, The Noetic Effects of Sin: An Historical and Contemporary Reflection on How Sin Affects our Thinking (Washington, DC, Lexington Books, 1999). Plantinga’s more developed account of the ‘noetic effects’ of sin (Warranted Christian Belief, New York, Oxford University Press, 2000) subsequently went on to touch—albeit only fleetingly—on two issues relevant to this chapter: sin as ‘blindness’ (Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 207), and desire for God as in some sense ‘physical’ as well as spiritual/intellectual (Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 312). But these themes remain muted in his philosophy as a whole. For a discerning account of how Plantinga both follows, and departs from, Calvin in his earlier account of the ‘noetic effects of sin’, see Paul Helm, ‘John Calvin, the sensus divinitatis, and the noetic effects of sin’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 43 (1998), 87–107.

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162  Spiritual Perception and the Racist Gaze irreplaceable, contributions to make as an initial diagnostic of the shades and ­levels of the epistemological and moral problems to be confronted here. For the main danger, as we have already noted more than once, of declaring racism a ‘sin’ problem, is that this can have both a falsely homogenizing and a falsely de-­ contextualizing effect. If simply everyone has a ‘sin’ problem (in virtue of some form of the theory of ‘original sin’), then this presumption may distract us from the very particular ways in which that underlying sin problem affects perceptions, desires and moral motivations in differently-­racialized and differently-­empowered contexts.27 And it is in these areas that analytic epistemology, perception theory, and moral philosophy have all made hugely important diagnostic strides in recent decades—albeit not with any theological goals in mind. It is less clear, however, that this philosophical literature, sophisticated as it is, is able to deliver all the transformative goods and goals towards which it evidently strives. In short, these discourses are enormously powerful in sorting and clarifying the manifold problems about ‘perception’ as it may affect racism (discrete philosophical problems professionally known as perspectival ‘seeing as’, ‘standpoint epistemology’, ‘se­lect­ ive attention’, ‘cognitive penetration’, ‘epistemic’ and ‘hermeneutical’ injustice, the epistemology of ‘vice’, and so on); but it is less obvious that they can solve them by these analyses alone, whether epistemologically or morally. It thus may be at this point that we need to turn back to the question of God, and to the purportedly purifying and salvific effects of a distinct ‘spiritual perception’ that first, under the impetus of the Holy Spirit and through the divinely-­ infused activity of ‘contemplation’, turns, in a kind of progressive reversal of the Fall, straight into the divine gaze in order to address the profound sin-­problem of distorted perception (and other related ills). It is here, I propose, that one branch of the ‘spiritual perception’ tradition within Christianity may hold some deeply suggestive promise.

John of the Cross (1542–1591) and the Transformations of ‘Sense’ and ‘Spirit’ So far we have been charting preliminarily the proposed connection between the realms of ‘spiritual perception’ and sin to give content to the seemingly puzzling idea of a racism as a ‘problem of seeing’. To call the 16th-­century Carmelite John of the Cross into the discussion at this point requires some justification: it might

27  For an illuminating survey of how the themes of evil, sin, and political power have been variously treated by different Afro-­ American theologians in the contemporary period, see Larry  G.  Murphy, ‘Evil and Sin in African American Theology’, in Katie  G.  Cannon and Anthony B. Pinn, eds, The Oxford Handbook of African American Theology (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012), 212–27.

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Sarah Coakley  163 even strike some readers as perverse.28 But as we shall now show, John of the Cross is unique in the Western Christian tradition in laying out a systematic vision of how sin affects not just the intellect and will (the capacity to respond to God noetically and volitionally/affectively29), but more fundamentally the whole realm of the senses, including of course the perceptual senses: visual, auditory, and tactile. Moreover, John’s subtle diagnostic account here of how sin affects us ‘all the way down’ is at the same time countered by a very particular theory of how a direct (but veiled, ‘dark’, ‘obscure’30) perception of God in the attentive discipline 28  I can think of at least three immediate reasons why there might be such a negative reaction, but one may quickly provide a riposte to these objections, and thus clarify further why the use of John’s work is particularly apposite for our current purposes. First, it is often assumed that the great 16th-­ century Carmelite writers (supremely John himself and his famed collaborator Teresa of Avila) are early modern ‘mystics’ concerned only with interior ‘spirituality’ and its importance for an elite group of enclosed religious, bent on resisting the external world of political realities. Nothing could be further from the truth: John’s writing is politically astute, socially subversive, and designed to effect profound religious and cultural transformation precisely by its call to personal union with Christ: his invitation to systematic interior examination is simultaneously the call to ecclesiastical and social reform (why otherwise would he have been regarded as such a threat within his own order?). Secondly, it might be said that John’s spiritual programme has nothing to do with contemporary issues of ‘race’ and ‘racism’. But again, any discerning account of the importance of the early modern period (and especially of the missionizing work of Spain and Portugal in the ‘New World’ at exactly the same time as John’s writing) will be aware of how significantly this era still affects what is called ‘race’ in American and Europe; and moreover, this new negotiation of racial identity in the period in which John was writing was deeply affected by the (then quite recent) ejection of Jews from Spain in 1492, and the re-­ taking of land previously occupied by the ‘Moors’ (‘Moriscos’, those of Muslim heritage). There is some evidence that John himself was of part-­Jewish (‘conversos’) ancestry, as was more certainly Teresa of Avila. Thirdly, it may—more appositely—be objected that John does not self-­identify as a conscious follower of the ‘spiritual senses’ tradition in Christianity, itself a diverse and complex phenomenon. This point is on target semantically, in the sense that, on the rare occasions when John refers (in Spanish) to ‘spiritual sense’, he is more often confronting a problem that can arise in spiritual direction—that of a potential misleading confusion of exciting physical effects with spiritual advance—than embracing his otherwise explicit account of transformation, in the Spirit, towards union with Christ within the very life of the trinitarian persons. However, as we shall now show, the more modern term ‘spiritual perception’ is not inappropriately applied to John’s wider theory of the effects of divine contemplation on the realm of the sensorium and the mental ‘faculties’ in general. I am not the only philosopher of religion to have brought John of the Cross into discussion on questions of spiritual perception of late. Jack Mulder, Jr, ‘Whiteness and Religious Experience’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 89 (2021), 67–89 (published between an original version of this chapter and its final draft) also attempts, very suggestively, a preliminary application of potential sanjuanist insights into current racial problems, but restricts his focus to how white people (‘we’) might be challenged out of racism by John’s spiritual programme. (Since John himself was at the sharp end of political and personal opprobrium, and subject to a lengthy imprisonment and ill-­ treatment by his brethren, I would urge that his insights on the transformation of body and soul are at least as important, mutatis mutandis, for the disempowered and oppressed.) Mark R. Wynn’s Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. ch. 6, provides another recent philosophical account of spiritual ‘darkness’ according to John and its application to sensual regeneration, though without engaging the issue of ‘race’. 29  John also retrieves from Augustine the significance of ‘memory’ as well, alongside the scholastic renditions of the other mental ‘faculties’, intellect and will. For an analysis of the significance of this retrieval, see André Bord, Mémoire et espérance chez Jean de la Croix (Paris, Beauchesne, 1971). For a brief, but discerning, new account of how John thus draws memory into his unique account of how desire is purified in relation to God, see Sam Hole, John of the Cross: Desire, Transformation, and Selfhood (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020), 151–4. 30  As already flagged at the start of this chapter (n. 1 above), the biblical/traditional use of the term ‘darkness’ to connote a state of sin has become controversial in ‘race’ studies for the obvious reason of

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164  Spiritual Perception and the Racist Gaze of contemplation infuses divine grace for the means of this trans­form­ation and cure of our sinful and distorted perceptions of the world, of ourselves, and of others. By being moved ever more deeply within ourselves under the impress of  the divine invitation, starting with the realm of sense and proceeding to the sphere of the spirit, we finally confront layers of self-­deception and sinful deceit which are painfully and by degrees ‘burnt’ out of us until at last we reach a state in which God is ‘all in all’.31 This initial move ‘inwards’ away from the realm of sense is therefore an integrative process which ultimately recovers sensuality in its purified form, and thus affects the outward gaze as much as our inward perception of ourselves. Hence John’s entire theological vision (as expressed in his three great major works, his poetry, and his other letters and aphorisms32) insistently expresses a systematic programme for the purification, chastening, and final sanctification and unification of the realm of ‘sense’, once fully attuned to the realm of ‘spirit’. Indeed, herein lies the core idea which drives the whole journey of the Ascent of Mount Carmel and the Dark Night, and is most memorably expressed in the extraordinary diagram33 which John drew for his brethren in expressing how sensual and spiritual desire is ‘purged’ through the repeated ascetical ‘Nada, nada’ (‘not this’, ‘not that’) which alone can hone the primary and ultimate desire for God. In short: the whole story of John’s account of the purification of body and soul for union with Christ (through a progressive attunement to divine love in contemplation) is worked out on the assumption that the sensorium, as well as the mental faculties (memory, understanding, and will), are finally capable of such transformation and joyful restoration; and thus human ‘perception’ in all its multifacetedness comes once more into its own as it finds its true centre and foundation in the God who has all along secretly sustained it.34 As John puts it at the end of the Living Flame of Love (Stanza 4), ‘The soul [now] knows creatures through God rather than God through creatures’ (Collected Works, 710). Such, indeed, is a potential conflation with ‘racial’ ‘darkness’. In the case of John of the Cross, however, a third meaning of ‘darkness’ (divine, purifying darkness working salvifically in the ‘nights’ of sense and spirit) might be said itself to interrupt such a potential slippage. For more on John’s alternative use of the language of ‘obscurity’ here, see n. 45 below. For one astute reflection on whether ‘black’ theology should continue to use the language of ‘darkness’, especially in relation to ‘apophatic’ prayer, see Andrew Prevot, ‘Divine Opacity: Mystical Theology, Black Theology, and the Problem of Light–Dark Aesthetics’, Spiritus 16 (2016), 166–88. 31 In Dark Night, Bk 1, 1–7, John pre-­announces this necessary process of the peeling back of self-­ deception by indicating how ‘beginners’ (albeit seemingly observant and good Christians) are afflicted by the deadly sins in ways that they are unaware of. Only in full ‘union’ (as described supremely in The Living Flame of Love) is the soul wrested completely away from self-­delusion and perceptual distortion. 32  The complete oeuvre in English is available in a one-­volume version: trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross (rev. edn, Washington, DC, I.C.S. Publications, 1991). All citations hereafter are from this edition. 33  In markedly phallic shape, indicating precisely the directionality of good desire (for God) and the dangers of idolatrous ill-­directed or immoderate desires: MS.6296, f.7, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, conveniently reproduced in Hole, John of the Cross, 141. 34  Living Flame, Stanza 4, 14 (Collected Works, 713–14).

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Sarah Coakley  165 the fully proper implication of a Christian incarnationalism devoted to the idea of the participatory capacity of the human body/spirit for union with God, even in this life.35 In union, we might say, we come to understand what healed (sanctified) ‘perception’ looks like. John’s overall project, therefore, bears interesting comparison with that of his near contemporary John Calvin, on the Protestant side of the early modern story of the tracing of the epistemological and moral effects of the human condition of sin and its divine rescue.36 The creative retrieval in recent analytic philosophy of religion of Calvin’s theory of the ‘noetic effects of sin’ has indeed focused at times on the affective/erotic, as well as on the merely ‘noetic’, implications of the Fall for the reprobate or the un-­converted sinner, and on the importance in Calvin’s thinking of the role of the Holy Spirit in effecting the relevant transformations in the hearts and minds of the saved.37 But in comparison with the Calvinistic programme, the detailed sanjuanist cartography of sanctification remains remarkable for its initial focus on the body and the senses. For John, as we shall see, to turn, ‘nakedly’ and directly, into the inexpressible ‘darkness’ of divine love under the impact of the infusion of ‘contemplation’, is first to confront one’s profound implication in sensual sin, even as one who believes herself to be a morally upright ex­ample of Christian living.38 For the purposes of this current project on ‘spiritual perception’ and contemporary racism, then, we may draw out three particular implications of John of the Cross’s systematic vision of spiritual transformation that have peculiar relevance

35  Here John of course differs from the mainstream, earlier Western (Augustinian) tradition, which sees full ‘union’ as only possible after death. John and his discalced colleague and co-­reformer, Teresa of Avila, arguably present the most daring accounts of achieved (and sustained) ‘union’ in the Western mystical tradition. 36  John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John  T.  McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), esp. Bks 1 and 2 for Calvin’s distinctive account of the drama of sin and salvation. For a fascinating and highly relevant account of the quest for ‘certainty’ (both noetic and affective) in this crucial Reformation period (in comparison of both Protestant and Catholic milieux, and in relation both to sin and salvation/sanctification), see Susan E. Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise?: The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (New York, Oxford University Press, 2011). 37  See n. 26 above. Plantinga’s modern term for his reading of Calvin’s understanding of the reconstitution of selfhood under the impact of the Holy Spirit is that of ‘proper functioning’ (i.e. as God intended humanity to be), which then supplies the conditions of ‘warrant’ for certain ‘knowledge’, as opposed to mere ‘justified belief ’. A comparison with John of the Cross’s account of ‘union’ and its delivery of love and knowledge from the perspective of union with God-­as-­Trinity is instructive here. 38  See again, Dark Night, Bk 1, 1, for John’s account of the start of this journey, and of ‘how truly imperfect beginners are’ (Collected Works, 362). Sensual sin is here construed most especially as a failure in proper detachment from the realm of sense; yet the realms of sense and spirit are inextricably intertwined in that ‘all the imperfections and disorders of the sensory part are rooted in the spirit and from it receive their strength’ (Dark Night, Bk 2, 3; Collected Works, 398). It follows that ‘both parts are jointly purified’ (Collected Works, 399).

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166  Spiritual Perception and the Racist Gaze to our topic. As we shall see, ‘perception’ comes here to have a number of different, discrete, but integrally connected evocations in John’s programme.39 The first—and most pervasive—implication in John’s work for our current interests is his central and programmatic insistence that the journey of the ‘soul’ (self) towards union with Christ involves, first, a ‘purification’ (purgation) of the sensual realm in order to align it with the realm of ‘spirit’, and then a subsequent, and more terrible, purification of spirit in order to bring it too into alignment with Christ, and so finally to ‘union’ with him.40 The process involved thus includes both a perceptual/sensual and perceptual/psychic and moral trans­form­ ation of the most searching sort, as the purification begins with an extremely disconcerting and testing loss of previous (‘sensual’) satisfactions in the spiritual life, so that the whole realm of sense may be detached from inappropriate clinging to such satisfactions.41 All this can of course, for John, only take place through assent to the active outreach of divine grace, expressed immediately on entry into (what he calls) the ‘night of sense’ in the form of an inchoate form of attentive silent prayer initiated by God and named as ‘contemplation’.42 The effects on the ‘soul’ of this ‘first night’, as charted by John, are—it should be stressed—particularly important for their implications for human responses to ‘darkness’, variously conceived, and thus for any theory of how such a disconcerting perceptual response to divine ‘darkness’ or ‘hiddenness’ can be transforming.43 On the one hand, John tells us that the ‘soul’ now has to acclimatize itself to a form of prayer 39  It is not easy, however, to map John’s programme directly onto the forms of distinction made in contemporary analytic philosophical debates about the ‘the problem of perception’ or the ‘contents of perception’ as discussed, for example, in the excellent relevant Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy articles on these themes: Tim Crane, ‘The Problem of Perception’(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ perception-­problem/) and Susanna Siegel, ‘The Contents of Perception’ (https://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/perception-­contents/). This is because John of the Cross assumes a basically Thomist theory of perceptual receptiveness to the outside world, but then complicates this with his own theory of the internal purification of both ‘sense’ and ‘spirit’ from the ravages of sin. (As background to this, more complex, account of varieties of ‘perception’ in relation to the classic ‘spiritual sense’ tradition in Christianity, see the illuminating article by Colin  M.  McGuighan and Brad  J.  Kallenberg, ‘Ecclesial Practices’, in William  J.  Abraham and Frederick  D.  Aquino, eds, The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017), 141–56, which provides help in connecting traditional ‘ecclesial practices’ with contemporary epistemology and theory of perception.) 40  This progression is charted systematically through Dark Night, Bks 1 (the ‘night of sense’) and 2 (the ‘night of spirit’): Collected Works, 358–457. 41  Note that the opening and closing sections to this book (by Mark Wynn and John Cottingham) also both focus on the inextricability of issues of (transformable) perceptual sense and questions of value, such as is taken for granted by John of the Cross in the programme of the Dark Night. 42  The important transition into ‘contemplation’ is described in three places in John’s oeuvre, all slightly different in content, but all in agreement that ‘contemplation’ is technically done by God (‘infused’) in us: Ascent of Mount Carmel 2, 13; Dark Night 1, 9; Living Flame of Love, Stanza 3, 32–6 (Collected Works, 189–91; 377–80; 685–8). 43  I deal in greater detail with this crucial transitional moment in John’s account of the ‘entry into contemplation’ through the ‘night of sense’ in Sarah Coakley, ‘Divine Hiddenness or Dark Intimacy? How John of the Cross Dissolves a Contemporary Philosophical Dilemma’, in Adam Green and Eleonore Stump, eds, Hidden Divinity and Religious Belief: New Perspectives (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015), 233–7.

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Sarah Coakley  167 which embraces and accepts ‘sensual darkness’ as far as any positive consciousness of God is concerned: gone are the days of any sensual satisfaction in prayer, then, he warns, since God is now acting directly and purgatively on that desire for such satisfaction, as the self becomes acclimatized instead to a more painfully direct and ‘spiritual’ contact.44 But we note therefore that two forms of perceptual ‘darkness’ seem to be at stake simultaneously: the first being this new, divinely instilled sensual darkness (a form of disconcerting blankness in prayer, we might say, without any affective satisfaction), which has become a positive good rather than an ill to be shunned; the second being the obscure appreciation of the direct divine work of God on the perceptual capacities tout court, under the shadow of its own divine darkness.45 It goes without saying, therefore, that the perceptual capacities, during this time of prayer in the ‘night of sense’, are themselves being withdrawn from their previous operations as (improperly or sinfully) attached-­ to-­sense, and simultaneously purged from any presumptions about perceptual ‘darkness’ as a state to be avoided; the effect is noetically weird, we might say, but merely en route to a deeper and more demanding transformation that may follow, at least for those destined to endure the more ‘terrible’ ‘night of spirit’.46 On entry into that second ‘night’, then, ‘darkness’ now has an additional and painful further evocation: that of the progressive revelation of one’s own inner sinful existence before God. The previous sense of intrinsic divine obscurity (or protective divine ‘self-­hiding’, as John sometimes describes it47) also continues, of course; but what is now disturbingly added is the new and intensified perception of one’s own corruption and frailty, in particular one’s own propulsion to project blame onto others.48 But what is felt at this time as a simultaneous abandonment and assault by God is actually, as John explains, the ‘lightest touch of divine love’—the melting of the soul anew into the divine flame where union awaits it, as moral perceptual darkness is progressively burnt out of it as a ‘log’ thrown to the flames.49 It will be clear, then, that the whole programme of the ‘dark nights’ in John is a story of a (two-­stage) sensual and spiritual transformation up to union with Christ, one in which the initial projection of sinful ‘darkness’ onto others

44  Dark Night, Bk 1, 10–13 (Collected Works, 381–92). 45  I explicate this complex understanding of different types of ‘darkness’ in John more thoroughly in eds. Green and Stump, Hidden Divinity and Religious Belief, 237–9. 46  Dark Night, Bk 2 (Collected Works, 395–457). 47  Protective to us, that is, not to God: a too-­quick or naked encounter would, John says, be overwhelming: see again Green and Stump, Hidden Divinity and Religious Belief, 229, 239. 48  It perhaps goes without saying, therefore, that John’s account of sensual and psychic purgation is at the same time an enunciation of a particular kind of ‘virtue theory’ in ethics. As the self is progressively purged, so a concomitant habitus of growth in the virtues is enabled, now freed from the delusions of moral superiority with which the soul first entered the first ‘night’. For an excellent recent philosophical account of the need for meaning-­making spiritual narratives such as John’s to enhance and enrich contemporary neo-­Aristotelian accounts of ‘virtue theory’, see David McPherson, Virtue and Meaning (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020), esp. ch. 5. 49  Dark Night Bk 2, 10 (Collected Works, 414–19).

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168  Spiritual Perception and the Racist Gaze becomes transmuted and purged by an encounter both with mysterious divine darkness, and—quite differently—with a new recognition of one’s own inner moral frailty (acknowledged as personal moral darkness).50 The further two lessons from John of the Cross’s work follow from this, and may begin to make the ‘perceptual’ implications for contemporary concerns about racism a little clearer. The second is that, according to this spiritual programme, the human sensorium is not (finally) decried or rejected by John—as the demanding scheme of ‘Nada, nada’ might have suggested—but rather destined for the fullest and most joyous transformation, in which love becomes the central moral content of responsiveness to others in union with Christ. Indeed it is only, according to Teresa of Avila, from that ‘perspective’ of union that one may for the first time ‘see’ the true force of Jesus’s radical command to love the enemy.51 It follows that the joyous, and perceptually attuned, encounter with the ‘other’ is— by strong implication—a key feature of John’s account of the goal of the Christian life (‘at the end of the day we shall be examined in love’52); his account of being drawn into the inner life of the Trinity (actually sharing the Spirit’s breath between Father and Son) therefore has both profound perceptual and moral significance: it enables one to perceive the world and ‘other’ from the very perspective of divine love, and so also to respond in love to others with equal compassion and virtue. The third and last implication of John’s account of the (perceptual and moral) effects of sin is similarly important for a (perceptually attuned) account of contemporary racism, and relates to the falsely projective (or ‘blaming’) dimension of racism which we have already noted encoded in the Genesis account of the Fall.53 In John’s case, the analysis of such projection comes early on, in that extra­or­din­ ar­ily insightful section in Book 1 of The Dark Night, already mentioned, in which John charts, one by one, all the effects of the ‘negative passions’ which hinder those who are about to be drawn into the ‘night of sense’. When he comes to the ‘capital vice of anger’ (Dark Night, Bk 1, 5), he draws particular attention to the danger of projecting anger onto others, and of ‘setting oneself up’ as a ‘lord of virtue’.54 The projective and ‘blaming’ propulsion of sin is here made particularly evident; but—interestingly—it is specially assigned to a particular form of ‘spiritual immaturity’, and a false desire for ‘spiritual gratification’. Whilst John himself 50  For my own, extended, account of how the idea of racialized ‘darkness’ (accompanied by the projections of sin and blame in a ‘white’ racist society) may be interrupted and transformed by ‘divine darkness’ in the practices of contemplation, see my Sin, Racism and Divine Darkness: An Essay ‘On Human Nature’ (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), which builds on and extends the sanjuanist analysis of the relation of sin, sensual detachment, and ‘obscure’ divine hiddenness discussed here. 51 Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, Bk 7, 3.5, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD, The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila (Washington, DC, I.C.S.  Publications, 1980), vol. 2, 439. 52  The Sayings of Light and Love, ‘When evening comes, you will be examined in love’ (Collected Works, 90). 53  See n. 21 above. 54  Dark Night, Bk 1, 5 (Collected Works, 370).

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Sarah Coakley  169 does not here make a connection to racial or class ‘blaming’, we might say that he correctly locates a fundamental passion in what is now called ‘unconscious bias’, that of displaced anger (and, a fortiori, therefore, and when theologically expressed, of an incapacity empathetically to ‘see’ the blamed ‘other’ as beloved of God).55 What happens, by contrast, in the essentially defenceless human activity of contemplation, according to John, might be seen as the progressive undoing of that aspect of the Fall in which distorted perception, shame, blame, and anger conjoined to point the finger at the ‘other’ rather than directing attention to an inward malaise in urgent need of divine therapy. Let us now sum up what we have learned from John of the Cross’s account of the sensual, noetic, and moral effects of sin, and their potential connection to contemporary accounts of racism expressed as perceptual. I have argued, first, that it is not misleading (indeed actually revealing) to read John’s whole spiritual programme as a narrative of the development of integrative ‘spiritual perception’, despite his own rather differently chosen language. For what we have seen in John are at least the following instructive traits. First, he is fully au fait with the self-­ deceptive dimensions of projective moral blaming of others (whether individually or as a group), expressed as the ‘immature’ dimensions of the passion of anger and the failure to see others from the loving perspective of the divine gaze. Secondly, he provides a thoroughgoing analysis of the sensual, noetic and moral effects of sin (including such prejudicial blame), and a complete narrative account of the long and painful journey involved if God is to purge such effects and enfold the soul in divine love. Thirdly, he ramifies this narrative in terms of multidimensional forms of ‘darkness’: the direct impact of purgative divine ‘darkness’ on the self in contemplation, the sensual ‘darkness’ of the disconcerting loss of affective joy in the passage into this contemplation, and the increasing acknowledgement of inner human (sinful) ‘darkness’ as the soul comes to greater cognizance of its implication in such sin. Although John himself does not explicitly relate these tropes to the questions of ‘race’ with which his own generation also struggled (in its imposition of new colonial categories of ‘alterity’), it is not improper—I suggest—to make these connections more explicit than John himself did. The lesson: instead of projecting blame for (moral) ‘darkness’ onto some other (racially ‘dark’) constituency, the demand on the self must be to turn into the (wholly other) transformative ‘darkness’ of the divine in contemplation, such as then to be drawn in due course into a deeper acknowledgement both of one’s own moral implication in social injustice and prejudice, and of one’s incipient openness to the (seemingly) unthinkable transformations of divine love. In this way, John gives us a remarkable vision for the divine undoing of systemic, ‘perceptual’ racism, in which the ‘personal’ is indeed most profoundly the ‘political’. At the same time, 55  This then is the opposite of what I earlier called ‘attunement’ to God’s vision; we might call it an emotional ‘dissonance’ which in turn has the effect of a distortive perception.

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170  Spiritual Perception and the Racist Gaze and finally, since John was someone who was himself devastated by poverty and loss in childhood, and later imprisoned, physically and emotionally abused, and subject to endless distorting accusations and misrepresentations by his confrères and ecclesiastical authorities, John’s spiritual programme of ‘purification’ surely cannot be read as one intended solely for the privileged and empowered. On the contrary, it is in his own moments of greatest powerlessness that he breaks through into the profoundest poetic exploration of divine love and transformative forgiveness.56

Perception, Racism and ‘Epistemic Vice’ in Contemporary Analytic Epistemology But how, then, do we relate what John of the Cross has to contribute to an analysis of the sin of racism to what contemporary epistemology is now offering by way of an understanding of its perceptual and moral vices? What I shall argue in this last part of the chapter is that although various recent developments in analytic epistemology most illuminatingly converge to provide us, at least potentially, with a much ‘thicker’, contemporary-­based philosophical account of the challenges of ‘perceptual racism’ (in its various evocations) than does John of the Cross, they do not supply as significant or profound an account as he does as to how to begin to combat it. In short, it could be that there remains no substitute for some kind of repeatedly practised spiritual exercises (under the impact of grace) for the combatting of ‘perceptual’ systemic racism and its self-­ delusions; for it is only by means of some disturbing noetic challenge such as confronts one in silent openness to God in contemplation, and which cuts beneath and beyond any merely conscious attempt at moral or political ameli­or­ ation, that we are able to begin to confront a ‘darkness’ that already lies within, and which requires therefore a major perceptual reconsideration of the problem at hand, and the concomitant redeployment of virtues that resist it.57 That difficulty therefore remains with the (secular) epistemological analyses which we shall now briefly explore: for all their epistemic and moral insights, what are the available modes of perceptual transformation secured by means of them, and can they be guaranteed any obvious or easy success in actual social transformation?

56  See esp. the poetry written by John whilst in imprisonment in Toledo: The Spiritual Canticle (31 stanzas, in two redactions); ‘For I Know Well the Spring’ (poem); ‘In Principio Erat Verbum’ (romance); ‘On the Psalm, “Super Flumina Babylonis”’ (poem) (see Collected Works, 44–80, for John’s poetic oeuvre). 57  It follows, of course, that this chapter is suggesting that the sanjuanist narrative of meaning presents a much ‘thicker description’ of sin, self-­delusion, and resentment than that which can be captured in any ‘implicit bias’ test.

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Sarah Coakley  171 The cluster of insights from recent epistemological studies which seem to me to have significant bearing on our problem of ‘perceptual’ racism is roughly threefold. Let me look briefly here at one example of each of these, acknowledging the extra level of philosophical analysis and insight that each brings to our topic, and then attempt to assess the implications of their contribution. Let us note also that, in at least some of their insights, the extra acknowledgement of cultural powerimbalance (which we noted at the start of this essay was important to add to any ‘sin’ story about racism) is at least preliminarily considered in its epistemological impact. For the sake of concision in this short chapter, I have chosen three authors whose original contributions set out constellations of themes which others are now taking up and exploring further;58 in this way I am able to sketch out the burgeoning philosophical terrain which our topic of perception and racism is beginning to occupy. First, there are the insights of those who seek to give a close epistemological account of ‘attention and blindness’, and then to assess the moral implications that follow from this. A particularly suggestive and original article along these lines is by Rebecca Kukla,59 whose nascent insights here opened doors into further important work which has succeeded it; it thus may serve as an illuminating place-­holder for a cluster of further epistemological investigations which have been developed since, some spawned by Kukla’s lead. Kukla’s main butt in her article is, perhaps surprisingly, the work of Iris Murdoch, since Kukla sees Murdoch’s Platonically inspired account of ‘attention’ (as necessarily ‘disinterested, detached, and contemplative’) as precisely the op­pos­ite of what Kukla seeks to find in engaged empathy with her subjects.60 Her point is that ‘there are plenty of morally relevant features of particulars that are perceptually available only to agents with the right kind of contingent capacities, where these capacities are rooted in their personal history and can be actualized only from certain positions and perspectives’.61 Further, ‘we cannot fix our perceptual capacities simply by deciding to interact with members of a given

58  All three are women analytic philosophers, and not coincidentally, since the lead taken in analytic feminist epistemology from the 1980s and 1990s about the perceptual ‘situatedness’ of women has now begun to bleed revealingly into an epistemological analysis of white racism and its ills. For a now classic iteration of feminist epistemology, which antedates and foreshadows much of the work I  cover here on the epistemology of racism, see Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, eds, Feminist Epistemologies (New York, Routledge, 1993). 59 Rebecca Kukla, ‘Attention and Blindness: Objectivity and Contingency in Moral Perception’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 28 (2002), 319–46. 60  It might be objected (as I too would object) that this represents a misreading of Murdoch’s actual intentions in her theory of ‘attention’ (see Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good (New York, Schocken Books, 1971), which Kukla sees as an attempt to ‘withdraw the self ’ from moral engagement). But we may see the point of Kukla’s critique, even if she has mis-­aimed her objection at Murdoch herself. 61  Kukla, ‘Attention and Blindness’, 323.

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172  Spiritual Perception and the Racist Gaze community’.62 Kukla herself concludes, therefore, that greater ‘objectivity’ in ­perceptual and moral engagement with minority groups is (ironically) actually better achieved by ‘contingent’ and passionate affect than by ‘contemplative’ attention.63 But she admits that this does leave us with a problem of potential epistemic relativism and/or resistant bounded perspectivalism. The fact is, she argues, we do ‘see’ things and people differently, and attention to particular dimensions of the world can cause us to see it in very different ways.64 Kukla further rightly draws attention to different notions of epistemic or moral ‘blindness’: ‘not all blindness has the same structure’. We may be blind because our gaze is ‘averted’, or (rather differently) ‘distorted’ by (e.g.) ‘self-­absorption’, or—again, and more radically— because there is an intrinsic defect in ‘the perceptual capacities themselves’.65 Kukla is right to make these important distinctions: where does systemic (perceptual) racism fall within these alternatives? If the last category of blindness is at stake (as I suspect Tef Poe might urge), then mere ‘taking thought’ is not going to 62  Ibid., 324. Kukla does not here advert to the celebrated problem of ‘seeing as’ in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, but it would be suggestive so to do (see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (3rd edn, New York, MacMillan, 1968), 193e–214e, on ‘seeing as’ and ‘noticing an aspect’). For an astute analysis of the paradoxes and problems of coming to ‘see an aspect’ in Wittgenstein—for there is something deeply mysterious about the move to an entirely new perceptual or moral insight—see Stephen Mulhall, ‘Seeing Aspects’, in Hans-­Johann Glock, ed., Wittgenstein: A Critical Reader (Oxford, Blackwell, 2001), 246–67. Kukla does however briefly mention John McDowell’s related account of the particular rationality of a perception that is only ‘recognizable as such from within [a] practice’ (Kukla, ‘Attention and Blindness’, 334–5). The application of these complex philosophical issues to the ‘problem of seeing’ in the case of ‘race’ itself is, however, only briefly mentioned by Kukla, but with depressingly relativistic conclusions, involving a suggested ‘radical inability to interpret signs from even slightly outside the home discourse’ (ibid., 325, my emphasis). 63  This echoes earlier feminist work on ‘standpoint epistemology’: see, Alcoff and Potter, Feminist Epistemologies, esp. chs 2, 3, and 6. In this context Kukla herself draws on Lorraine Daston’s philosophy of science work on ‘objectivity’: see Lorraine Daston, ‘Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective’, Social Studies of Science 22 (1992), 597–618; and Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison, ‘The Image of Objectivity’, Representations 40 (1992), 81–128. 64  See, more recently, Alexandra Horowitz, On Looking (New York, Simon and Schuster, 2013) for an intriguing and approachable phenomenological account of the varieties of ‘interested’ forms of ‘seeing’ (and my thanks to Stephen Grimm of Fordham University for directing me to this book and for an important conversation on the issues it raises). In contrast, Sebastian Watzl’s probing and important analytic account of consciousness as itself ‘selective attention’ goes deeper into the technical arena of philosophy of mind, and would present an important contrapuntal challenge to Kukla’s view that only emotionally invested attention is likely to expand our ‘objectivity’: see Sebastian Watzl, Structuring Mind: The Nature of Attention and How It Shapes Consciousness (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017). 65  Kukla moves through these vital distinctions quickly, but others have taken them up in various ways since. Particularly important (and deeply challenging to Kukla’s prevailing pessimism about seemingly immovable perceptual prejudices) is the recent work of Susanna Siegel, whose two books The Contents of Visual Experience (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010), and (more importantly for the topic of perception and racism) The Rationality of Perception (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017) together challenge the received notion that perceptual experiences are merely epistemologically ‘basic’, and argues that ‘absorbing an outlook’ can be either ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’, and adjudicated as such. In other words, if there is indeed ‘cognitive penetration’ of visual experience by prejudicial views such as racism, there are also ways of analysing the rationality or otherwise of such effects in ‘perceptual experience’. This approach, if successful, marks a great advance in resisting the murkiness of ‘unconscious bias’ analyses of racism (of which Siegel provides a canny critique). See n. 39 above.

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Sarah Coakley  173 shift it. Moreover, Kukla admits, rather gloomily, that ‘some people’ just cannot see the injustices that others are able to notice out of their capacity for empathetic engagement. Kukla’s analysis, then, though in many respects telling and sug­gest­ ive, leaves us guessing about the possibly relativistic implications of her position,66 and the danger that she is finally merely acceding to racism and other forms of prejudice—despite her own best intentions—given the notable ‘incapacity’ for some people to ‘see’ the problems of racism at all. So this initial programmatic discussion, albeit with its rehearsal of some crucial potential theoretic divergences, still leaves open the fundamental problem of the epistemic conditions for ‘seeing’ racism in the first place, and thus for acknowledging one’s own moral implication within it.67 A second brand of epistemological literature that directly tackles ‘seeing’ racial injustice is that represented by Miranda Fricker’s important and influential work, Epistemic Injustice.68 Here the focus is not so much on the primary acts of attention or visual perception as such, but rather on the forms of testimony and interpretation that arise from them. Fricker’s aim in this book is thus to identify, distinguish and analyse two different forms of injustice that often remain hidden in the standard analytical literature on testimony more generally: what she calls ‘testimonial’ injustice, first, in which ‘prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word’; and then, secondly, the (deeper) ‘her­men­ eut­ic­al injustice’, where ‘a gap in collective resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their [own] social experience’ in the first place.69 Although Fricker (rightly, in my view) resists the Foucauldian tendency to reduce all rationality to ‘power’,70 she herself is highly attuned to how social power relations work to foster these particular forms of prejudice, and how difficult they are to shift. This is indeed one of her great theoretic advances and accomplishments: she is able to weave an analysis of power inequalities (including those of gender and ‘race’) into her epistemological assessments of types of testimony and their reception, and to provide a quite precise account of their bearing on the importance of testimony to truth. Like Kukla,71 she also makes suggestive use of the Aristotelian tradition of ‘trained’ moral sensibility (as 66  See, for instance, the pessimistic remark (Kukla, ‘Attention and Blindness’, 337), that ‘others may have a history and position that literally does not afford them the capacity to see what we can see’. This is used as a riposte to the version of ‘objectivity’ as ‘lowest common denominator’, but it has the effect of implying that some perspectives or prejudices cannot change. 67  Kukla admits the unfinished business in this article and the context of debilitating ‘anger’ out of which it was originally spawned: see ibid., 346 n. 37. Her final, more optimistic, conclusions (which do not seem to fit very well with earlier parts of the article) appeal after all to the ‘plasticity’ of ‘our perceptual capacities’, and the pale hope that under certain conditions they can be ‘re-­ educated’ (ibid., 346–7). 68  Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007). 69  Ibid., 1. 70  Ibid., 2–3. 71  Kukla, ‘Attention and Blindness’, esp. 319–21, 334–5, 338–41.

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174  Spiritual Perception and the Racist Gaze ­ roposed of late by MacIntyre and McDowell) to unfurl possibilities of social—as p well as merely individual—epistemic change; and in sections of her book she attempts to show how learning-­via-­literature might at least begin to shift sens­ibil­ ities about power-­relations even in a society so immured in racial hierarchy as apparently not to ‘see’ it at all.72 Yet at the end of the day she admits that ‘ha­bitu­ ation can work both ways – in the direction of virtue or of vice’;73 and thus in this volume, at least (and rather echoing Kukla), she is none too sanguine overall about the intentional manipulation of social change to a good end. The philo­ soph­ic­al sophistication of her analysis, therefore, is arguably not matched by an equivalent hope for unilateral success in the amelioration of social ills such as racism (which, to be sure, supplies only one example of such a pervasive social problem in her book). Her conscious—and more modest—aim, indeed, is to start by shifting ‘the philosophical gaze’ on epistemic injustice, rather than to shift a phenomenon like ‘perceptual’ racism itself. A third, and somewhat complementary, analysis of epistemic social ills is provided by Heather Battaly’s exploratory recent work on ‘epistemic vice’.74 Inverting and extending the more familiar analysis of ‘epistemic virtue’ in recent analytic epistemology, she points out that, as in the case of the (still burgeoning) literature on virtue epistemology, one may draw up a parallel typology of different possible kinds of ‘vice epistemology’. Thus, in virtue epistemology, she argues, we may distinguish ‘Virtue-­Reliabilism’ (as in the work of Sosa or Greco75), which argues that ‘an epistemic virtue is a stable disposition to reliably produce true beliefs’, from ‘Virtue-­Responsibilism’ (as in Zagzebski, Montmarquet76), which argues that virtue characteristics such as ‘open-­mindedness’ must be those over which we have some control, and which we can in some sense choose to acquire. By the same token, urges Battaly, there may be equivalent or parallel alternative forms of ‘epistemic vice’—some stable dispositions and some consciously chosen (or as James Baldwin put it in some moods, ‘willed’) forms of social vice. As with Fricker’s work, then, Battaly thus supplies a discerning set of philosophical alternatives and analyses; but although she comes closest in the philosophical literature to the theologian who insists on the irreducibility of the category of ‘sin’, she does not (as yet) supply any transformative ethical answers to the very problems of ‘vice’ she outlines and categorizes. Where specifically epistemological-­cum-­ curative responses to the systemic ‘vices’ of racism exist to date in the

72 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 177 (my emphasis). 73  Ibid., 81 (my emphasis). 74  See Heather Battaly, ‘Epistemic Virtue and Vice: Reliabilism, Responsibilism and Personalism’, in Chienkuo Mi, Michael Slote, and Ernest Sosa, eds, Moral and Intellectual Virtues in Western and Chinese Philosophy: The Turn Toward Virtue (New York, Routledge, 2015), 99–120; Heather Battaly, ‘Varieties of Epistemic Vice’, in Jonathan Matheson and Rico Vitz, eds, The Ethics of Belief (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014), 51–76; Heather Battaly, ed., Virtue and Vice: Moral and Epistemic (Oxford, Wiley 2010); Heather Battaly, ‘Virtue Epistemology’, Philosophy Compass 3 (2008), 639–63. 75  Battaly, ‘Epistemic Virtue and Vice’, 101–3. 76  Ibid., 103–5.

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Sarah Coakley  175 philo­soph­ic­al literature, then, it seems that they mainly focus on Foucauldian forms of ‘resistance’ by the oppressed as means of power,77 rather than on the possibility of specifically perceptual transformations of those who themselves oppress. But this leaves the fundamental problems of ‘self-­deception’ (‘vice’ in the sense of unconscious dispositions) relatively unaddressed by the epistemologists I have chosen to cover here.78 We come back in closing, therefore, to the problem as first stated by Tef Poe: if entrenched ‘perceptual’ racism is fundamentally resistant to attempts at conscious social amelioration, if it is a ‘problem of seeing’ so ‘deep as to be invisible’, what are the actual hopes of exposing, defusing, and transforming it, if not by probing to its deeper roots in the story of sin and salvation?

Conclusions My aim in this chapter has been a relatively modest and exploratory one. I have sought, on the one hand, to name and provisionally analyse what seems to be a profound and intractable set of perceptual issues in so-­called ‘systemic racism’. The particular analysis of sinful, selective, and distorted perception that has been essayed here does not of course in any way compete with historical, political, economic, and social analyses of the ills of racism; rather, it aims to complement and even undergird them via a specifically theological and philosophical analysis of flawed perception in its various modes. But the important philosophical material I have covered, however illuminating in its own right, has not yet in itself suggested any clear solution to a problem so deeply hidden, for the most part, in the recesses of the white social psyche, and so profoundly linked with unconscious projections of social blame. Nor has it probed to the depths of reactive pain and anger that is the inevitable consequence in conditions of racist oppression. As is well known, mandatory institutional ‘consciousness-­raising’, as such, often only tends to provoke further resistance and denial. It is in this context, therefore, that I have set out the systematic insights of John of the Cross precisely on the epistemic and moral effects of practised ‘contemplative’ attention to the divine—not as distanced ‘dispassion’ in Kukla’s understanding, but as submission first to sensual and then to spiritual purgation according to the logic of what I have here clustered under the term ‘spiritual 77  e.g. José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013). 78  Herbert Fingarette’s study of Self-­Deception (London, Routledge, 1969) remains a classic in this area of self-­deception, but draws heavily on the modern atheistic thinkers Freud and Sartre to argue that one still needs a ‘guide’ to emerge from persistent forms of self-­deception. The contrast with Pascal’s rich theological account of self-­deception in the Fall thus remains striking, on which see William Wood, Blaise Pascal on Duplicity, Sin, and the Fall: The Secret Instinct (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013).

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176  Spiritual Perception and the Racist Gaze perception’. Learning how to ‘see’ afresh, ultimately from the perspective of ­incorporated, trinitarian, divine love, is what John invites us to; but even if one chooses to follow John only to the gates of ‘contemplation’ into the ‘night of sense’ (to which he says all ‘beginners’ come quite quickly) it is the epistemics ­destabilization and purification of repeated acts of dark ‘contemplation’ that may begin to shift the racist gaze, and no less the hellish confinement and pain of those who suffer it, and to cause the world to look different under the impact of divine love. Or such it has been the task to suggest in this chapter: it is, at least, offered as a theological point of conversation to Tef Poe’s striking contemporary challenge. For it could just be that any mandatory secularism in response to this challenge makes the ‘problem of seeing’ in racism peculiarly hard to solve. Recall: I started this chapter with two deeply searing and troubling accounts of black men’s deaths under police assault in the United States. It has been my aim in what has followed to argue that the theological concept of sin is no mere optional accompaniment to our attempts to probe the turpitude of such events. Indeed, we need this ir­re­du­ cibly theological concept to be drawn into a fresh relationship with the burgeoning philosophical discourses on the epistemic and moral problems of ‘perception’ in order even to begin to expose the more hidden dimensions of ‘systemic racism’ and its cultural manifestations in the United States.79

79  The first drafts of this chapter were written during a period of research leave funded by the Leverhulme Foundation, during which time I was also generously supported in research assistance by the McDonald Agape Foundation. I wish to record my gratitude to both Foundations, and also to the many interlocutors not named here who have helped me with criticisms, rebuttals, and bibliographical suggestions.

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11 Divine Hiddenness, Agapē Conviction, and Spiritual Discernment Paul K. Moser

The perception of God by a particular human does not require that all other humans have access of any direct kind to this perception or to any other perception of God, because God can hide from the perceptual experience of (some of) these other humans. We shall see that humans are not in a position by themselves to remove divine hiding from their perceptual experience, even if they can put themselves in an improved position for perceiving God. The main causal factor is God’s choosing to self-­manifest in human perception at God’s opportune time, and that factor is not fully controlled by humans. We thus need an account of perceiving God that leaves room for divine hiding, and I shall propose that the relevant perceiving can be in human conscience under certain conditions. We also need, as we shall see, an approach to perceiving God that acknowledges the importance of a person’s evaluative attitude towards perceiving God.

Perceiving and Hiding What, if anything, do God’s moral character and will have to do with human perception of God? It would make good sense if the constituting conditions for such perception were determined by God’s own character and will. (Those conditions are not identical with the perception itself; they could exist without the perception being actual.) Being worthy of worship and hence morally perfect, God would have a profound interest in those conditions, because they could contribute significantly to the divine redemption of humans. If this redemption comes from a morally perfect God, it will be morally robust in a manner reflective of God’s own moral character. Otherwise, it would not be redemption into God’s distinctive moral life. What if divine redemption seeks at least the moral harmony of the universe, particularly the cooperation of its moral agents, with God’s moral character and will? A divine aim then would be that all agents, including agents who perceive God, imitate and reflect God’s moral character and will, in imitatio Dei. In that Paul K. Moser, Divine Hiddenness, Agape¯ Conviction, and Spiritual Discernment In: Perceiving Things Divine: Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual Perception. Edited by: Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802594.003.0011

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178  Divine Hiddenness, Agapē Conviction case, divine redemption would include moral challenge and change in any moral domain at odds with God, including in any wayward humans. The process of redemption then would not be easy or cheap, owing to a need for moral challenge and change. As a result, we need to consider whether a moral challenge that includes a kind of divine hiddenness could serve in this process. It could serve in some cases as a means of corrective judgement of human recalcitrance towards the desired moral harmony, but this is only one potential role. It also could serve as a challenge in favour of deeper moral commitment to God’s moral character and will, without a component of divine judgement. This kind of challenge may have figured in Jesus’s notorious cry of felt abandonment by God on Calvary, where Jesus appears to experience diving hiding of some kind. In any case, we need to ask whether, and if so how, divine hiddenness bears on the human perception of God. Talk of divine hiddenness is ambiguous between the idea of God’s passively being hidden from some people and the notion of God’s actively hiding from some people. If we assume that God actively hides in some cases, we can ask what divine purposes motivate such hiding. We also can ask how such purposes bear on the human perception of God, in particular on when God would allow or enable such perception. If God is a personal or intentional agent, the human perception of God would be relevantly different from the human perception of mere physical objects. God then would have a will and corresponding intentions that bear on when humans would be allowed or enabled to perceive God. In that case, God could choose not to be perceived by some humans under some conditions, by choosing to withhold a divine self-­manifestation from their perceptual ex­peri­ence. For good reason, God could choose to hide from some humans at times, even for a reason unknown to humans. Humans have no way to block this divine option, given their limited capacities relative to God’s power of self-­manifestation in human perception. Whatever else is involved, a person’s perceiving God requires causal influence from God in that person’s perception.1 A human person, however, does not have full control over that influence, because God alone has full control over divine self-­manifestation in human experience. The talk of causal influence here is vague and in need of some clarification. We may think of direct human perception of God as including one’s direct attention-­attraction by God’s self-­manifestation in perception, in a manner that is irreducible to one’s focusing of one’s attention and to one’s judging that something is the case. If God directly attracts one’s attention by divine self-­manifestation in perception, then something causal is happening to one, beyond one’s focusing of one’s attention and one’s judging that something is the case. So, the role of distinctive causal input to one’s experience is crucial to 1  On the role of causation in perceiving God, see William  P.  Alston, Perceiving God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

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Paul K. Moser  179 perceiving God. Even if direct human perception of God is mediated by human perceptual resources, it can be direct in not depending on other objects of perception in the process. A key issue concerns the kind of content present in one’s attention when directly attracted by God’s self-­ manifestation in perception. If such direct attention-­attraction is perception of God, it will have a de re component ir­re­du­ cible to propositional or conceptual content, because God is not reducible to propositional or conceptual content. God is neither a concept of God nor a proposition about God; instead, if real, God is a personal or intentional agent with causal powers to seek the achievement of various goals. So, the required de re component is actually de te, having to do with a ‘Thou’ or ‘You’, a personal or intentional agent in the second person relative to a perceiver. That is, the de re content would involve not a mere object, but an object that is a personal subject, complete with intentions and plans. If we omit such a personal subject, we omit the kind of God characteristic of the major monotheistic traditions. Our question about the relevant kind of content in perception amounts to a question about the qualitative content of human perception of God. What, in other words, is the distinctive quality of the de te perceptual content in question? We can say that it is the quality of divine self-­manifestation in human perception, but elaboration is needed. God would need to enable human perception of God with divine self-­manifestation, but that fact does not specify the perceptual quality of the self-­manifestation in human perception. The relevant quality will reflect God’s distinctive personal or intentional character in any direct perception of God; otherwise, one’s perception will have something other than God in its qualitative content. If God’s personal character is inherently morally good, in virtue of God’s being inherently worthy of worship, the quality of the self-­manifestation will include morally relevant goodness characteristic of God. More specifically, if God is inherently loving towards other agents, as some monotheists hold, the self-­manifestation will include divine love, that is, what various New Testament writers call agapē. In this perspective, if agapē is absent from what one directly perceives, one is not directly perceiving God. What would the perceived quality of divine agapē be, and how, if at all, would this quality become salient, or definite, for a person? We need specific answers if we are to understand direct human perception of a God who is worthy of worship and hence inherently loving towards persons. At its core, agapē is the compassionate willing of what is good, all things considered, for a person, even if the intended recipient chooses either to reject or to ignore it. So, the perceived quality of divine agapē would include one’s perceiving the willing of what is good, all things considered, for one, and that willing could include an offer of forgiveness for wrongdoing. In any case, it would be irreducible to mere human willing, owing at least to its freedom from moral defects in willing. Such agapē would not

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180  Divine Hiddenness, Agapē Conviction coerce one’s will, and it need not meet with reciprocity or cooperation. So, divine redemption aimed at moral harmony in agapē could be frustrated by unco­opera­ tive humans. Perhaps some divine hiding is a response to such frustration, for the sake of avoiding a human’s final rejection of divine redemption. A redemptive God would not be content with mere direct perception of God by humans, because one could have mere direct perception of God and hate God. (Taking a hint from James 2:19, we might say that even some demons could directly perceive God, including divine agapē, and simply shudder.) God thus would seek a special kind of direct perception of God among humans, and we shall clarify this kind. An important question concerns how one directly perceives God, in terms of one’s evaluative attitude towards perceiving God. A person could perceive God directly but have an improper and misleading attitude towards the supreme value of God’s self-­manifestation in perceptual experience. For instance, one could directly perceive God grudgingly, with settled dislike towards the divine self-­manifestation in one’s perception, or one could directly perceive God with complete indifference. We need not hold that such attitudes form, even partly, the quality of one’s perceptual content; it is enough that they would block  one’s properly appreciating and cooperating with a perceived divine self-­ manifestation. Those attitudes would not serve a divine redemptive aim or benefit a human perceiver in appreciating the importance of divine self-­manifestation. God would seek one’s discerning and acknowledging the primary goodness or value of divine self-­manifestation for one’s life, including its worthiness of life-­ conformity (that is, of imitatio Dei). That would be a cognitive component. In addition, God would seek one’s perceiving God with sympathetic, compassionate cooperation towards the divine moral character and will. That would be an affective-­volitional component. Combining these components, God would seek one’s cooperatively discerning the supreme value of God’s self-­manifestation in one’s perceptual experience, particularly its moral character and will of agapē towards one. This would entail directly perceiving God with cooperative discernment. Seeking imitatio Dei from humans, a redemptive God would want reciprocated compassion from humans towards a divine self-­manifestation. Why would discernment of supreme value matter in perceiving God? H.H. Farmer comments: ‘Many questions are answered wrongly, not because the evidence is contradictory or inadequate, but because the mind through its fundamental dispositions and presuppositions is out of focus with the only kind of evidence which is really available.’2 If one fails to discern the supreme value of divine self-­manifestation in one’s perceptual experience, one would be ‘out of focus’ with what it really is, including what it is intended to be by its source: supremely

2 H.H. Farmer, Things Not Seen (London: Nisbet, 1927), Preface.

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Paul K. Moser  181 valuable redemptive evidence from God. In that case, one easily could undervalue it and give it no role in how one decides or behaves in one’s life. So, one could neglect its redemptive significance for who one is and how one lives. This would run afoul of God’s redemptive plan for one’s directly perceiving God in a manner suited to imitatio Dei. So, God would seek proper human discerning of the value of divine self-­manifestation. The apostle Paul remarks that the good things given by God to humans are often not recognized by them as coming from God, because those things are to be spiritually discerned (πνευματικῶς ἀνακρίνεται; 1 Cor. 2:14; cf. Col. 1:9). This position suggests that the value of God’s self-­manifestation in human perception can be hidden from some humans owing to their failure to engage in spiritual discernment of a particular kind. Proper spiritual discernment relative to divine self-­manifestation would include a careful response that allows its value to emerge for what it is: a divine intervention of primary value for one’s life. Such discernment would become cooperative when joined with a sympathetic or agreeable attitude, and thus would enable human perception of God to be what God intends it to be: redemptive for humans. It would become redemptive as part of a co­opera­ tive human relationship with the God one directly perceives. We need to clarify the ‘cooperative’ component to understand the divine redemptive aim for the human perception of God. Paul links his idea of spiritual discernment to a notion of one’s having the mind of Christ (νοῦν Χριστοῦ; 1 Cor. 2:16). The latter notion arises in a context concerned with redemptive self-­sacrifice, both from God and in human response to God. Such sacrifice is at the heart of what various New Testament writers take to be agapē, and it separates divine love from various popular conceptions. We thus should ask how agapē figures in cooperative spiritual discernment of the kind that enables one properly to perceive divine self-­manifestation in human ex­peri­ ence, in keeping with imitatio Dei. Being motivated by the volitional and affective character of agapē, God would seek a particular volitional and affective response of cooperative conviction from humans towards divine self-­manifestation. This consideration enables us to make some sense of the redemptive purpose of perceiving God and of at least some divine hiding. Direct perception of God would not be an end in itself; it would have a divine redemptive purpose bearing on one’s attitude towards its value for one, in keeping with imitatio Dei. God could test for agapē in a person towards divine self-­manifestation to reveal if that person properly values, or would properly value, it. Proper valuing could save one from missing the redemptive value of the divine self-­manifestation in one’s experience, and could prompt the reciprocity of imitatio Dei in self-­ expressed agapē. If God properly cares about human motivation towards God and about humans knowing their motivation towards God, God would test for that motivation, in order to have it revealed to them. In particular, God would

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182  Divine Hiddenness, Agapē Conviction test for whether agapē is one’s primary motive in relating to God, including in one’s perception of divine self-­manifestation. The result of such a test could bear on whether God enables one’s direct perception of God rather than resorts to divine hiding for redemptive purposes. In any case, a redemptive God would not be promiscuous with divine self-­manifestation in human perception, but would assess whether a human is prepared to receive it redemptively.

Tested to be Led in Agapē If God is perfectly good and thus perfectly loving towards all persons, God would seek to have people freely cooperate in becoming loving towards others as God is, in relationship with God and each other. Part of this divine effort would include God’s testing people to reveal where they stand relative to this divine effort to form a community of people who love others as God does, and this would bear on how God enables (or hides from) human perception of God. This effort is acknowledged in Deuteronomy 13:3: ‘The Lord your God is testing you, to know whether you indeed love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul’ (biblical translations come from the NRSV, unless otherwise noted). We need a distinction between divine testing and morally or spiritually harmful testing. A morally perfect God, being perfectly loving towards others, would do no moral or spiritual harm to others. Even so, God could allow for physical harm, including death, for the sake of (testing for) moral or spiritual good among humans. God would be willing to cultivate love for others at the expense of lesser goods or pleasures, and this could be a painful experience for humans. The ‘testing’ of Job (Job 1:8–12) serves as an example, and it suggests that God could hide from people for a redemptive purpose, such as ultimately bringing a person to (deeper) submission to God (Job 42:1–6). We should consider a notion of intended redemptive testing in agapē, because it can illuminate an important part of perceiving God and of God’s hiding. Many biblical writers seem attuned to such testing as a challenge from God, on the assumption that God would care enough about humans to assess and test them on where they stand in relation to (cooperating with) God. Redemptive testing could serve as a needed wake-­up call to humans who have strayed from what they need morally and spiritually. Some inquirers neglect that a perfectly good God would want humans to learn to love others, even enemies, as God does, and this neglect can obscure inquiry about God. It can cloud how God, as perfectly good, would be available to be perceived and known by humans. We humans are in no position to set the terms for how God is to be perceived or known by us, because God would be sui generis and unmatched by us in moral perfection. So, as perfectly good, God would seek

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Paul K. Moser  183 to be perceived or known by humans on God’s redemptive terms, and this aim would include a role for imitatio Dei. Otherwise, God would fail to be perfectly good in the area of human perception and knowledge of God, and hence would be disqualified from being God. God’s redemptive terms for being perceived and known by humans would fit with God’s perfect moral character and will suited to worthiness of worship. God’s terms would require that humans, for their good, conform to God’s moral character and will, rather than that God conform to or condone defective human moral characters and wills. God would be morally negligent in failing to uphold such a standard. So, humans would face a challenge in coming to perceive or to know God, a challenge from the morally perfect character of God. The challenge would include a demand to conform to God’s character of perfect goodness, in imitatio Dei. This would require that one put agapē towards God and others at the top of one’s priorities for life, and thus that one love others as God does. One question concerns how this is to be done by humans, who seem to have selfish tendencies that interfere with their loving others. The writer of 1 John suggests that one’s lack of (cooperating with) agapē towards others leaves one in spiritual ‘darkness’, owing to a case of spiritual ‘blindness’ regarding knowing the way to go, including the way to (knowing and perhaps perceiving) God (1 John 2:9–11). A key claim is: ‘Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love’ (1 John 4:8). The writer holds that love of others is a basis for knowing that one has entered ‘the life’ (τὴν ζωήν) from and with God: ‘We know that we have passed from death to the life because we love the brothers’ (1 John 3:14, my translation). According to 1 John, then, we have a definite evidential or cognitive consequence from a human practical failure to cooperate with agapē towards others, and this can apply to human perception of God. One could say that God either causes the blindness in question (cf. John 12:40) or sets circumstances up so that they bring about the blindness. We cannot digress to that matter. The writer of 1 John holds that the relevant love one experiences is not merely human but is ‘from God’ (1 John 4:7). He remarks: ‘We love  because he [God] first loved us’ (1 John 4:19). A question concerns how one knows, if one does, that the relevant love one experiences is from God rather than from humans alone. We can find some illumination from Paul, in his following remark that ultimately bears on human reception of divine love: ‘All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God’ (Rom. 8:14). This remark prompts a question: What is it to be ‘led by the Spirit’ of God? In Galatians 5:18, Paul speaks of being ‘led by the Spirit’ in connection with loving others, among other ‘fruit’ of God’s Spirit. A redemptive God who seeks obedient ‘children of God’ would want those children to be led by the Spirit of God towards imitatio Dei, and would want human perception of God to serve a role to that end. In contrast, one’s being unwilling to be thus led

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184  Divine Hiddenness, Agapē Conviction by God’s Spirit could prompt divine hiding from one’s experience, for a redemptive purpose. James Dunn comments: ‘[Paul] was able to urge his converts to walk by the Spirit, be led by the Spirit, etc. (as in Rom. 8:4, 14; Gal. 5:16, 18, 25). In other words, so far as Paul was concerned, loving conduct was something much more spontaneous than can be tested by simple reference to the rule book and precedent . . . .’3. An important issue concerns the role of a human agent in the relevant experience of being led. Joseph Fitzmyer remarks: ‘“Being led by the Spirit” . . . is the Pauline way of expressing the active influence of the Spirit in Christian life, i.e., the reaction of Christians to the leading of the Spirit; Christians are under the vital guidance of God’s Spirit, which leads them when they allow it and thereby mortify the deeds of the body.’4 In this perspective, being led by the Spirit does not entail the suppression of a human will, but requires human cooperation in allowing the leading by the Spirit. Humans must allow themselves to be led by the Spirit, and this includes a kind of human cooperation with God.5 The role of human cooperation is clear in Paul’s understanding of human ‘sowing to the Spirit’ (σπείρων εἰς τὸ πνεῦμα; Gal. 6:8) and in his injunction to ‘walk by the Spirit’ (πνεύματι περιπατεῖτε; Gal. 5:16). Such talk would be misplaced if being led by the Spirit disregarded a cooperative human will. A problem would arise if God were to coerce people in leading them, perhaps via direct perception of God, to become obedient children of God. Why, if the coercion of humans is a divine option beneficial to them, has not God coercively led all people by now to become obedient children of God, thus sparing humans the difficulties of life without a positive relationship with God? If a perfectly loving God could use coercion in that supposedly beneficial manner, it would seem pointless and perverse to allow people to undergo such difficulties. Divine coercion thus would complicate theism in this regard, given that many people have not received the benefit of being coerced by God to obey. If, however, God seeks to preserve genuine human agency in submission to God and perhaps even in being given a divine self-­manifestation, we can make some sense of the trials of ongoing human life without a positive relationship with God. At least some of those trials may serve to challenge human agents to reorient, without coercion, their priorities for life towards God. We can identify a distinctive role for God as a power beyond humans in their being led by the Spirit if we ask what, if anything, would be the goal of leading by the Spirit. We get a hint from two prayers by Paul: ‘May the Lord make you 3  James Dunn, ‘Discernment of Spirits – A Neglected Gift’, in Dunn, The Christ and the Spirit: Volume 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 323. 4  Joseph Fitzmyer, Anchor Bible: Romans (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 499 (emphasis added). 5  See also Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, Vol. 1, trans. Kendrick Grobel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951), 336, contrary to the kind of coercive role suggested by Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, trans. G.W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), 226.

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Paul K. Moser  185 increase and abound in love for one another and for all . . .’ (1 Thess. 3:12). ‘This is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight (πάσῃ αἰσθήσει)  to help you to determine what is best . . .’ (Phil. 1:9–10). The love in question would offer insight into God’s ways because God’s redemptive purpose of imitatio Dei would be to benefit and promote such love by relating it to access to the divine character and will. The writer of 1 John offers a related hint in his suggestion that being led by God entails being ‘perfected’ in divine love: ‘If we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected (τετελειωμένη) in us’ (1 John 4:12; cf. John 15:2). God’s love could be perfected in a human partially or incompletely at a time. In that case, it would not make the relevant human perfect overall (cf. 1 John 1:8), but it would make perfect some feature of a person, such as an act or attitude of love at a time. So, humans need not be perfectly loving overall, or without exception, to be in a process of being perfected in divine love. If we talk of the overall status of a human, that human could be an incomplete work in progress towards overall perfect love. So, divine love could be in a process of being perfected in a person overall. The central role of a process over time ­figures in Paul’s following remark: ‘Not that I have already . . . reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus’ (Phil. 3:12–14). With a similar emphasis on maturation over time, Paul talks of a cooperative process of ‘making holiness perfect (ἐπιτελοῦντες ἁγιωσύνην) in the fear of God’ (2 Cor. 7:1). The righteous love in agapē would include the kind of ‘holiness’ Paul has in mind, and God could foster it through a developmental, diachronic process that ­honours maturing human agency.

Convicted in Perception of God Talk of ‘being led’ by the Spirit of God towards divine love suggests a distinctive experience of being led in the perfecting of divine love in one’s life, even if this experience ideally inhabits an ongoing interpersonal and dispositional relationship with God.6 How are we to think of this experience? I will propose that human conscience, being central to a morally good human life, would play a role here, and that human conscience can include perceptual experience of God in a

6  See Paul  K.  Moser, The God Relationship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), and Moser, Understanding Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

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186  Divine Hiddenness, Agapē Conviction manner to be clarified.7 If this is a live option, we can illuminate divine hiding in connection with human perception of God. Perception of God can occur in conscience, because conscience can include and convey, in relation to divine self-­manifestation, the kind of de re qualitative content characteristic of perception. We thus need to understand conscience as broader in its content than entertained concepts and propositions. It would be question-­begging now to assume that the content of conscience is limited to such concepts and propositions or that it cannot include de re qualitative content of a perceptual sort. The needed alternative acknowledges felt perceptual qualities in conscience, such as felt intrusions, (volitional) pressures, intensities, contrasts, and images. (Still, one can contrast mere feeling, such as anxiety, with perception, and one need not take perception to be just sensation.) God could self-­manifest in conscience in a way that presents one with felt qualities of God’s moral character and will, including the non-­coercive pressure of a will towards agapē for ­others. We cannot rule out this option; nor should we want to do so in advance of careful consideration of the actual qualitative content of one’s conscience. At any rate, we have no reason to deny that God could self-­manifest the divine moral character and will via perception of felt qualities in human conscience. Redemptively significant perception of God in conscience would include a typical human’s being convicted in conscience regarding selfishness on some occasion. On the positive side, such perception would include one’s being convicted as being challenged in conscience to cooperate with the source of the conviction, in loving others unselfishly, even one’s enemies. It thus would be responsive to a challenge that includes uncoercive volitional pressure in intruding upon one’s perception in conscience, and it thereby would engage one’s moral direction in life. Being an intrusion upon one’s conscience, the pressure would appear not to be of one’s own making, but it would not coerce one’s decision regarding God’s existence or lordship. The component of being convicted would prepare one to cooperate with divine self-­manifestation for what it is: an intended correction to one’s own selfish ways for the sake of agapē towards others. Seeking one’s being thus convicted, God would favour such conviction as a means of access to God’s moral character and will. The experience of ‘being convicted’ is mentioned in John 16:8: ‘When [the Spirit] comes, he will convict (ἐλέγξει) the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment’ (RSV, using ‘convict’ from the margin). It also emerges in Revelation 3:19: ‘As many as I love, I convict (ἐλέγχω) and instruct (παιδεύω)’ (my translation). If there can be convicting as challenging a person against sin, there also can be convicting as challenging a person toward righteousness, including righteous love. So, being convicted need not be simply a negative phenomenon; it 7  Compare Bernard Häring, The Law of Christ, Vol. 1: General Moral Theology (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1961), 146–8.

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Paul K. Moser  187 can have a positive moral and interpersonal goal towards which one is challenged (as John 16:8 suggests). Being convicted towards loving others, in any case, need not be static over time but could deepen beyond self-­interested goals over time. The deepening would encourage one’s becoming increasingly loving towards ­others, even towards one’s enemies. This is central to Paul’s two prayers noted above, and it agrees with the love commands issued by Jesus (Mark 12:30–1; cf. John 21:15–19). The relevant experience of ‘being convicted’ differs from what some philo­ sophers and theologians have called ‘conviction’. James McClendon and James Smith offer the following definition: ‘A “conviction” . . . is a persistent belief such that if X (a person or a community) has a conviction, it will not easily be relinquished and it cannot be relinquished without making X a significantly different person (or community) than before’.8 A ‘persistent belief ’ of that sort differs from being convicted in the manner indicated above, because such a belief need not include the passive experiential feature of an agent’s being convicted. It need not include an intrusion from volitional pressure on an agent that appears not to be of the agent’s own making or doing. A persistent belief could arise solely from one’s active commitments without one’s being experientially intruded upon in the manner suggested. So, being convicted does not reduce to a persistent belief. The deepening or extending of being convicted to love others as God does would be crucial to the perception in conscience of being led by God’s Spirit in an intentional manner. The conviction would not stop with one recipient of love, but would extend over time to all available recipients. It would be an ongoing process moving toward a goal, thus making it intentional and person-­guided, and not haphazard or otherwise nonpersonal. In being convicted, one thus would have evidence of an intentional agent, rather than a mere physical process, at work in one’s being convicted towards loving others. This would take us beyond a story of mere efficient causation to an experience of the intention or purpose of a loving agent in action. Absence of moral defect in the agent would raise the question of a divine agent at work. Because the process would be cooperative, to preserve human agency in submitting to God, one would need to allow oneself to be convicted towards loving others. So, the power in being convicted towards divine love would be uncoercive power. In that respect, it would be cooperative power and thus cooperative conviction. This would preserve the genuine interagency of being convicted towards love. In this vein, Paul advises: ‘Do not quench (σβέννυτε) the Spirit’ (1 Thess. 5:19; cf. Eph. 4:30, Isa. 63:10). We may paraphrase that advice: do not resist co­opera­tive conviction from God. In this perspective, humans can be challenged by God to cooperate in their being convicted towards divine love, and they can 8  James McClendon and James M. Smith, Understanding Religious Convictions (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 7.

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188  Divine Hiddenness, Agapē Conviction (intentionally) settle on a decision by way of response. So, this is no matter of coercive impulsion. Talk of an ‘irresistible’ or ‘coercive’ source of conviction thus would miss the point.9 It is important to see, in particular, that divine hiding allows for human rejection of divine efforts to intervene redemptively, and thus that God works with a subtlety and an elusiveness that exclude divine coercion to redeem humans. If one perfectly exemplifies divine love for people, one will place no restriction on willing what is good, all things considered, for them, including forgiving them. Many humans, however, opt for restrictions in this area, owing to fear, insecurity, and selfishness, and then conflict in human relationships results. An intentional move beyond such restrictions can be a sign of divine deepening of the conviction of humans as co-­workers with God in loving others. Without such deepening when an opportunity arises, divine perfect love would not be guiding or leading human love. This deepening would be part of the perfecting of divine love in humans, as suggested by the writer of 1 John. One’s being led by God via perception in conscience figures directly in divine lordship for one. If humans are to know God as God, that is, as authoritative Lord over all of created reality, they need to allow God to be known as Lord over them and their lives. So, we would need to allow God to lead us, and thus to convict us in our experience, in God’s good ways bearing on human life. Otherwise, God would not be our God in being our Lord, from our motivational perspective. Seeking what is best for us, all things considered, God would lead us by convicting us uncoercively to exist and to behave in accordance with God’s moral character and will rather than our tendency to selfishness. If we are not thus convicted in conscience by God, God would not be Lord over us in a morally significant way, and therefore we would not be responsible children of God (as Rom. 8:14 states). So, we could block our knowing God as Lord, by not allowing ourselves to be convicted by God towards divine love for others. This lesson agrees with the aforementioned test for knowing God: ‘Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love’ (1 John 4:7–8). Such a test gains sharpness in conviction when it includes the divine command to love even one’s enemies. Divine convicting of humans in their perception in conscience can be self-­ manifestational on God’s part, even without a verbal or propositional accompaniment. God thus could manifest divine love de re in human conscience, thereby creating a contrast with and a challenge to a selfish human state. Such manifesting would include God’s de re expression of divine moral character in action towards a person. A verbal or propositional interpretation from God may or may not join this expression. This distinction is akin to cases where a human shows an act of striking kindness to an enemy without saying a word. A moral character 9  Contrary to Edgard P. Dickie, God is Light (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954) and Willem Zuurdeeg, An Analytical Philosophy of Religion (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1958).

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Paul K. Moser  189 presented in action can self-­manifest moral goodness and thereby the contours of a moral challenge and duty for a person. So, not all significant content in being convicted in the perception of conscience is verbal or propositional. Qualitative experiential content lies at the base, and it may or may not prompt verbal interpretation. This fits with God’s moral character being that of an intentional agent irreducible to conceptual or propositional information. In being convicted by God in conscience, one would face the basis of an indicative and of an imperative: the basis of a gift and of a duty. The basis of an indicative or a gift would be the perceived presence of divine love for oneself (and others), and the basis of an imperative or a duty would be the perceived volitional pressure on one towards loving others, even enemies, as God does. This twofold basis could serve as one’s experiential foundation for not only a theology but also a theological ethics. Arguably, it is the most resilient and meaning-­laden foundation available to humans, and it can underwrite the epistemic status of some testimony from others about God. This twofold basis can have an indispensable practical role in theology and theological ethics for a person, that is, in living in accordance with one’s theology and its ethics. It can bring theology and its ethics out of the domain of mere thought and talk into the domain of felt experience and moral struggle. The best historical model for the latter domain is Jesus in Gethsemane (see Mark 14:32–9).10 The reality of a challenging Gethsemane ex­peri­ence with God would be invaluable for humans open to lived meaning or  purpose in agapē.11 This conviction-­ oriented approach bears directly on divine hiding.

Discerning and Hiding My being cooperatively convicted in being led by God towards loving others would have evidential significance, at least directly for me. I thereby would allow what needs to be discerned (God’s moral character and will of perfect love) to enter saliently, if elusively at times, into my perception in a way that shows God’s moral character and will directly to me. In resisting cooperative conviction, I would disallow such entering of the perceived divine presence (given its redemptive purpose) and thereby disadvantage the discerning of God’s character and will from my perceptual perspective. My volitional perspective then would be unco­ opera­tive or oppositional in ways that block vital available evidence for me regarding God’s reality and will. This position assumes a distinction between the evidence available to one and the evidence one actually receives.

10  See also Paul Moser, The Severity of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 11  See Moser, The God Relationship.

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190  Divine Hiddenness, Agapē Conviction The writer of 1 John links one’s cooperating with the perfecting of divine love with grounded confidence towards God: ‘Love is perfected with us, in order that we may have confidence [before God]’ (1 John 4:17, my translation). The confidence is based on the unique perceptual evidence received directly from God in one’s allowing oneself to be convicted and thereby led by God towards loving ­others. We find a similar lesson about discerning God’s reality and will in Paul: ‘I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual  worship.    Do not be conformed to this world,  but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect’ (Rom. 12:1–2). Discerning God’s will calls for a transformation of one’s mindset, which comes by allowing God to be God in one’s experience. Paul also calls for cooperation as self-­sacrifice towards God: ‘Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.’ Here God’s unique moral power of self-­sacrifice can be ex­peri­ enced directly by humans. In allowing it to approach us directly, in our being cooperatively convicted towards divine love, we can gain salient access to it, despite our selfish tendencies. Humans do not have full control over such access, but a redemptive God promoting imitatio Dei would favour (even with self-­ manifestation) human pursuits that conform to the divine moral character and will, including its self-­sacrificial agapē. Paul acknowledges the evidential significance of experienced agapē in connection with an offering or gift from the Spirit of God: ‘Hope [in God] does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us’ (Rom. 5:5). Paul would say the same for faith in God: its evidential anchor is in something to be received cooperatively from God directly in perceptual experience, and that something is integral to God’s moral character: divine agapē. The cooperative reception of faith in God is no mere armchair reflection; it is, instead, the thoroughgoing resolve, under cooperative conviction, to allow God to lead one to love others as God does. This includes a profound transformation for ordinary humans, owing to the significant difference between perfect divine love and ordinary human ways. Such a trans­form­ ation would exemplify imitatio Dei, and thus be favoured by a redemptive God as a fitting avenue for perceiving and knowing God. The needed transformation for discerning God’s reality and suffering can bene­ fit from suffering, according to Paul (2 Cor. 4:6–8, 12:6–7, Rom. 8:17), by excluding boasting (or ultimately trusting) in oneself and acknowledging God’s unique sustaining power in agapē. Paul portrays God as hoping to nudge people towards agapē on a grand scale: ‘The creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the

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Paul K. Moser  191 children of God’ (Rom. 8:20–1). As noted, the ‘children of God’, according to Paul (Rom. 8:14), are people cooperatively led, and thus convicted, by the Spirit of God. In this perspective, ignoring or resisting the needed conviction will hinder one’s receiving salient evidence of God’s reality. In that case, important available evidence regarding God can be obscured or blocked from perception by an unco­ opera­tive person. Human discernment of God’s reality and will, in one’s cooperatively being ­convicted by God, does not entail anything near a full understanding of God’s purposes, including divine purposes in allowing suffering and evil. Even so, we need not concede scepticism about perceiving God’s character or will, because having salient perceptual evidence of God’s character and will does not require a  full understanding of God’s purposes in allowing suffering and evil. Having adequate evidence about God’s character and will, based in cooperative conviction towards agapē, does not require having full evidence about God and God’s purposes. Knowing in part does not require knowing in full. We still face the familiar question of why God’s reality is not more transparent to humans in general. Absence of relevant evidence for a person could come from two sources: a failure of God to supply the evidence to that person, and a failure of that person to be in a position to receive the divine evidence on offer. We have no reason to disregard either source. God could, and should, postpone giving evidence of divine reality to humans if they would only abuse it, to their own detriment. Still, that evidence could be available to them under certain circumstances, even if they do not actually have it. We should not suppose, however, that we are within reach of a full explanation of God’s purposes in hiding from some humans at some times. The acknowledgment of our explanatory limitations by the book of Job (chapters 38–42) still holds firm, but it does not undermine the reality of all human perception (or corresponding evidence) of God. A convictional approach to foundational divine evidence enables us to il­lu­min­ ate human failure to be in a position to receive divine evidence. It prompts the question of whether we are willing to be attentive to being convicted towards divine love. Perhaps we often resist being convicted by opting for opposing pri­or­ ities. If we thus resist, we qualify as being agapē-­resistant, with the result that salient evidence for us of God’s reality and challenge towards agapē will be elusive at best and perhaps altogether hidden from us by God. If we suppress or ignore convictional evidence of God in the perception of conscience, God can seem hidden from us, even if we are the agents responsible. In conclusion, divine hiding has a redemptive aim and therefore is compatible with human perception of God. If God intends the latter perception to be similarly redemptive, it will come with certain expectations for humans. In particular, how we value being convicted by God towards self-­sacrificial agapē can bear on our being in a position to receive such perception. We thus may block our

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192  Divine Hiddenness, Agapē Conviction perception and corresponding evidence of God by being out of focus, psy­cho­logic­al­ly or volitionally, with God’s moral character and will of self-­sacrificial agapē. If conviction by God directed towards agapē is part of God’s redemptive signature, we should look discerningly and cooperatively for similar conviction in the ­perception in our own conscience.12

12  Thanks to Frederick Aquino and Paul Gavrilyuk for helpful comments.

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12 Healed and Whole Forever Spiritual Perception in Nature Douglas E. Christie How can we learn to perceive the natural world more fully, more deeply—on its own terms, but also as part of a larger whole of which we are a part? Such a question does not arise in a vacuum but is itself a response to what has too often been lacking in our relationship with the living world: a sense that we are part of a l­iving whole that calls for our deepest moral-­spiritual engagement. What Pope Francis has called an ‘integral ecology’ points to the kind of holism that refuses to separate the concerns of our social-­political life from that which we generally refer to as the environmental or ecological. But how can we help bring into being—in our own lives and in the larger social-­political-­environmental sphere of which we are a part—an embodied practice of integral ecology? One part of the answer is to reflect more deeply on how we perceive the natural world and our place in it; to ask how our habits of perception shape, for better or worse, our attitudes and ethical responses towards the natural world. And to consider whether our cap­acity to perceive ourselves as part of an ecological whole and to live out of that perception can be deepened through more assiduous attention and practice. The light is slowly bleeding from the desert sky. Silhouette of mountains in the distance. Whispery mesquite branches tremor in the breeze. The pungent smell of  soil and sage, still damp from recent rains. Bats circling in and out of the ­darkness. It is quiet, still, open. I pause to locate myself here, to take in all that is unfolding around and within me. The whole of it. My senses are alive, my thoughts drifting. In this moment, I find myself thinking of the small community of Cistercian nuns who live over the next ridge, gathering at this moment in their chapel for compline. I call to mind also those hidden figures, unknown to me but even now passing through these mountains on their way north, skirting la migra and seeking shelter wherever they can find it. God help them. I hear a low rumbling sound from somewhere in the distance: mining trucks probably. And then silence. What a strange simultaneity. All of this and more present to me here in this fleeting moment, mediated through my senses, my consciousness, my soul. I struggle to take it all in, hold it, respond to it. The whole of it. One might well ask: what kind of whole is this? What kind of ecology? Who and what belongs to it? What does it ask of us? And how can we learn to sharpen Douglas E. Christie, Healed and Whole Forever: Spiritual Perception in Nature In: Perceiving Things Divine: Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual Perception. Edited by: Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802594.003.0012

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194  Healed and Whole Forever and deepen our own capacity for perception so that this sense of the whole can become more fully integrated into our lived experience and our ethical response to this experience? These questions arise for me in a particular way on this evening in the desert. But they are surfacing continuously and more broadly and with increasing urgency in the world we inhabit at the dawn of the twenty-­first century. They have become part of a shared global concern, what we might think of as an ecology of concern.1 Increasingly, we find ourselves facing serious moral questions about how we understand ourselves in relation to the whole and how can we learn to respond to it and live within it with care and respect. I have already alluded to the idea of ‘integral ecology’ that is articulated in the en­vir­on­ men­tal encyclical Laudato Si’—an ethical-­spiritual vision of the world that invites serious reflection about our relationship to and responsibility for all living beings—the whole fabric of life. These are among the most fundamental concerns of the ecological moment through which we are now moving, and they call for a serious, wholehearted response. To speak of the whole in this way is already to suggest that it is meaningful to think of life as possessing coherence and integrity, whether biological, social, or spiritual. This is not immediately self-­evident. Indeed some might dismiss it as romantic, idealistic, or naïve. How is it possible to speak in this way when so much of the fabric of life is so clearly broken and fragmented? I am not arguing here that the idea of the whole or its potential meaningfulness is in fact self-­ evident. The holism that is critical to ecological thinking points to a complex and still-­unfolding understanding of how particular species in the natural world are related to other species and to the larger ecosystems of which they are a part. The holism that emerges in artistic, poetic and spiritual discourse, often born of a simple but profound perception of one’s participation in a larger reality, connotes something at once more personal and more elusive. And the holism that underlies the idea of ‘integral ecology’ points to something whose primary meaning arises from a conscious ethical response to the larger reality of the living world. In what follows, I want to suggest that thinking more deeply about the meaning of holism and honing our perceptual capacities to experience the world more holistically can contribute something important to the work of realizing an integral ecology. Learning to think holistically can help open up an imaginative space in which the capacity to perceive oneself as part of the whole and to live from that deepened perception can be realized more fully. Thinking this way is perhaps best 1  Shierry Weber Nicholsen, The Love of Nature and the End of the World: The Unspoken Dimensions of Environmental Concern (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Nicholsen uses the terms ‘love’ and ‘concern’ in their strongest possible sense to frame an argument for a whole-­hearted spiritual-­ethical response to the deepening environmental destruction we are currently witnessing. She suggests that one of the primary needs in the present moment is ‘the effort to make oneself worthy of what one loves’.

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Douglas E. Christie  195 thought of as having a prospective, or to speak theologically, an eschatological character. It is in this sense that Rilke is thinking when he speaks of learning to ‘See everything/and ourselves in everything/healed and whole/forever’.2 Still, this is not only prospective; it points to the possibility that we may, even now, be cap­ able of perceiving things this way. It suggests a way of seeing that may seem utterly unrealizable in practice, but which practice alone can help us to realize. A paradox perhaps. But helpful to us in a moment when many despair of ever being able to see anything whole. When biologists identify ecosystems that are healthy and thriving and ‘whole’, even if they exist amidst larger ecosystems afflicted by destruction and fragmentation and loss, this serves as a reminder that wholeness is real, that it still exists in the world, and that it might be reknitted through ecological restoration. When theologians speak of a vision of the world as whole, in God, in the way Origen and Gregory of Nyssa and others in ancient Christianity did in articulating the notion of apokatastasis ton panton—everything restored to wholeness in God in the end—this was understood as a reality both not fully realized and meaningfully present to us in hope. Already and not yet. Present to us and still waiting to be fulfilled. This is part of the challenge of thinking ecologically. It is also immensely challenging to hold in a single gaze the entire complex ecological reality within which we exist. But it is important to try to do so. Cultivating such awareness means in the first place deepening one’s capacity to notice and respond to the fundamental biological realities of plants, animals, and places, all existing in a complex, dynamic, ever shifting relationship with one another and with the larger web of which they are a part. It also means learning to see and understand the different social ecologies that shape our lives, those social, economic, pol­it­ ical, and cultural realities that impact and are impacted by the ecological complexity in which our lives are rooted; especially the slow violence (often hidden from view) that is so often inflicted on poor and often marginalized communities of colour by environmental degradation.3 And it includes, at least for many, the moral, spiritual, or contemplative ecologies within which we exist, the relationship between the deepest expressions of human philosophical or spiritual yearning and the systems of life that support, inform, and gives them meaning.4

2  Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies (Eighth Elegy). This version is cited by Pierre Hadot in his essay ‘The Sage and the World’, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, edited and with an introduction by Arnold I. Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 258. 3 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). For a thoughtful ethnographic account of the impact of such environmental practices on one community, see Javier Auyero and Debora Alejandra Swistun, Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). On the impact of race in thinking about environmental responsibility, see Lauret Savoy: Trace: Memory, History, Race and the American Landscape (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2015). 4  See, for example, Douglas E. Christie, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Leslie  E.  Sponsel, Spiritual Ecology: A Quiet

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196  Healed and Whole Forever To behold all of this, in the profound, encompassing, enlivening sense that c­ ontemplative practitioners have always understood that term to suggest, and to ask about our relationship to and responsibility towards this immense, intricate reality, is both enthralling and immensely difficult. But this has in fact become one of the great challenges of this historical moment—learning to see the whole and pla­cing what Timothy Morton calls ‘the ecological thought’ at the very centre of our spiritual and ethical practice.5 In what follows, I want to explore the character of this challenge, by considering, through select examples from the literary and poetic tradition, what it means to see and participate in the living world.

Becoming Painfully Aware The poet William Blake once observed: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to us as it is, infinite. For [we] have closed ourselves up, till [we see] all thro’ the narrow chinks of [our] cavern.’6 This koan-­like statement still retains much of its original power to provoke and challenge, and feels especially poignant in this moment of deepening environmental crisis. In the face of callous destruction of species, entire ecosystems and cultural traditions arising from them, the questions take on added weight and depth. Why have we closed ourselves up to the world around us? Why do we perceive so little of its complex beauty and immense power? And will we ever be able to cleanse the doors of perception and learn to see more clearly and deeply all that we are in danger of losing forever? The cost of not learning to see more deeply, the poet suggests, is staggeringly high: we will remain unable to see and feel the life of the world around us. And cut off from the infinite. And it will become even more difficult than it is currently to summon the necessary moral and spiritual energy to help us respond to all that is being lost, around and within us. Sitting in the quiet stillness of that desert night, I feel the force of Blake’s indictment. The poverty of my own capacity to see is so apparent to me. But so is my growing awareness of why it is so difficult to perceive things fully and deeply. It is more than impatience or carelessness, though these certainly play their part. It is the recognition that seeing things as they are in themselves and as they exist in  relation to one another and in relation to me is immensely difficult to do. How much complexity can the mind take in at once? How much can it hold? How much do we want to see and take into ourselves?

Revolution (New York: Praeger, 2012); Stephanie Kaza, Mindfully Green: A Personal and Spiritual Guide to Whole Earth Thinking (Boulder: Shambhala Publications, 2008). 5  Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 6  William Blake, Complete Writings with Variant Readings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 158.

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Douglas E. Christie  197 That night in the desert, I recognize the immediacy of light, touch, fragrance, and sound converging with other ways of perceiving—through thought, in­tu­ ition, and memory. Everything seems to move together, almost as if it were a ­single perception. Which, in a way, it is. There is immense pleasure in this. But experience has taught me that it requires attention and patience and skill to notice and take it all in. Even more than this it requires openness and empathy. As Aldo Leopold, the great pioneer of a new land ethic in this country, reminds us in his A Sand County Almanac, ‘We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.’7 Here we encounter the heart of the moral challenge of learning to see: the challenge of opening ourselves up to and participating deeply in the entire web of life and concerns within which our own lives are bound up. I recognize, for example, that I am bound somehow to those nuns entering into prayer (and they to me); just as I am bound to the lives of those migrants moving slowly through the darkness of the desert night, even though I do not encounter them or know them; and yes, I belong to these mountains, ancient, beautiful, and pulsing with life but also vulnerable to the effects of climate change and a proposed mining operation. The moral-­spiritual ecology that I am gradually coming to recognize so far transcends my own narrow concerns that it is hard to grasp; but it does concern and include me. And it is this entire complex reality I want to see and respond to. Learning to see in this way means becoming sensitive to and aware of this entire web and of oneself within it. And of the moral claims that this relationship makes upon us. Learning to see means thinking carefully about what the world is asking of us and what kind of response we are prepared to make. These concerns are becoming ever more critical to the work of those seeking to  live thoughtfully and responsibly in relation to the natural world. There is a growing recognition that without a deep transformation of awareness—born of a deepening commitment to see and respond to the presence of other living beings in our midst—there can be no sustained effort to alter our attitudes towards or ways of relating to the natural world. This simple, powerful idea is at the heart of many of the most thoughtful and moving efforts to heal and renew places that have been so grievously harmed by human neglect, carelessness, and greed. One of the most compelling articulations of this vision can be found in Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment Laudato Si’. Cautioning against the idea that our primary response to environmental loss and degradation should involve ‘amassing information or satisfying curiosity’, Pope Francis argues instead that: ‘our goal is . . . to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about

7 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 214.

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198  Healed and Whole Forever it’.8 Here we encounter an understanding of awareness that rejects the careless, objectifying and utilitarian gaze that so often characterizes our way of being in the world. Awareness in this sense collapses the distance between us and other living beings and creates the conditions for a deeply empathetic response to them. It calls for a more intimate, sensitive, and involving way of seeing reality. It is striking that so much of what Laudato Si’ advocates for in terms of en­vir­ on­ men­ tal responsibility hinges on the idea of cultivating this deeper, more ­empathetic and encompassing awareness. Still, what kind of awareness is this? And where does it lead? In this context, at least, it leads to a profound and costly moral-­spiritual awakening, a dawning consciousness that ‘what is happening in the world’ cannot be kept at a safe distance from those more personal and in­tim­ ate concerns that occupy our day to day lives. Rather, it must be seen and understood as having everything to do with us. This, I think, is what the Pope is alluding to with his exhortation to allow the larger reality of what is happening in the world to become part of ‘our own personal suffering’. Here again we encounter the notion of a moral-­spiritual ecology that invites us recognize how porous the borders are between our own lives and the lives of all other living beings. It is a call to live with greater awareness of the intimate bonds connecting us to others, and to recognize that we are called to participate in the life of the world. At its root, this is a contemplative practice that echoes the teaching of many ancient spiritual traditions on the need to pay attention, to become more deeply aware of oneself as part of the whole fabric of being. It extends and deepens these traditions in important ways, by inviting us to practice an awareness of the whole that attends carefully to the minute particulars of the living world. But it also draws deeply on the wisdom of these traditions in calling for a transformed awareness that can contribute to the healing of the whole. Learning to become ‘painfully aware’—becoming alert and sensitive to the presence of all living beings, to the ethical-­spiritual meaning of our relationship with them, and allowing ourselves to feel and struggle with the immense cost of losing these beings—is, it seems, one of the primary spiritual obligations of the present moment.

Seeing into the Life of Things What does such a contemplative practice look like? And how can we set about describing and reflecting upon it without reducing it to something that is too abstract to hold our attention and concern? It can help to listen carefully to those writers and poets whose fine-­grained reflections upon the natural world provide us with a diverse, varied and morally challenging grammar of perception. It is

8  Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On care for our common home (Washington, DC: USCC, 2015), 19.

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Douglas E. Christie  199 here, in the particularity of a given encounter with this place, this animal, this tree, this sky, or this eroded or flooded or poisoned landscape, and in the halting, always provisional efforts to bring such encounters into language, that this grammar begins to become intelligible. Sometimes such encounters unexpectedly open out onto something significant and profound. We are overcome by what Wordsworth has described as ‘the deep power of Joy . . . [by which] . . . We see into the Life of Things’.9 Here one senses the mysterious process by which our encounter with the minute particular can open out onto ‘the whole’—the very life of things. Perceiving the living world in this way and learning to incorporate such perception into a sustained spiritual practice can become the basis for a powerful ecological ethic. Still, what makes such perception spiritual? It is important to acknowledge here that this question can be answered in myriad ways. Religious or spiritual traditions and the language and symbol systems underlying them give us access to an understanding of spiritual perception that relies on a very particular notion of God or divine presence for its meaning. However, there is also a way of understanding spiritual perception that does not draw upon theistic ideas or language for its meaning, but is more open and expansive. I am thinking, for example, of the often implicit and inchoate sense of what William James has called ‘the more’. Or what poet Czeslaw Milosz calls simply ‘the real’.10 Such language—often wilfully indeterminate in relation to any specific commitment to theism—captures something important about the way many contemporary persons approach the question of spirituality and spiritual perception. In particular, it reflects a growing feeling that the language of spirituality needs to be continuously translated and reinterpreted if we are to find a meaningful way to express our own relationship with the sacred. In relation to the natural world, the efforts to name this new and still-­emerging sensibility are striking in their range and diversity. Allan Hodder, for example, calls attention to an attitude he describes as a ‘mindful naturalism’, a sense of oneself as so deeply immersed within the rhythms of the natural world that any notion of human identity separate from that larger reality becomes impossible to conceive. Fiona Ellis speaks of an ‘expansive naturalism’, a sense of nature as capable of revealing and making present to us a great immensity. Timothy Morton notes the importance of an ecological-­spiritual sensibility that will enable us to discover ‘the liminal space between things’. And Cathy Rigby

9 William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’, in Oxford Poetry Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 58. 10  William James, Essays on Radical Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 35; Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 25. On the dynamic relationship between spirituality and religion, see: Sandra  M.  Schneiders, ‘Religion vs. Spirituality: A Contemporary Conundrum’, Spiritus 3:2 (Fall 2003): 163–85.

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200  Healed and Whole Forever describes this particular historical moment as one in which we are learning to respond to the challenge of ‘rematerializating religion and spirituality’.11 Such language can, I think, help us to understand how our encounters with the natural world, even the smallest and most humble, can be understood as spiritually meaningful. And how these encounters, rooted in an understanding of spiritual perception that draws upon older, classical ideas of spiritual meaning while also recasting them in less theistic, more open and expansive terms, can help create the possibility of more encompassing and lasting ecological awareness. Often it is those who are sensitive to these small, seemingly insignificant things that can help us begin to see more clearly. ‘Have you noticed,’ Rainer Maria Rilke asks, ‘how scorned, lowly things revive when they come into the willing gentle hands of someone solitary? They are like small birds to which the warmth returns; they stir, waken, and a heart begins to beat in them, rising and falling in those hearkening hands like the utmost wave of a mighty ocean.’12 The solitary one, or perhaps anyone who is patient and still enough to notice things, contributes something significant to the world: the practice of attention, Rilke suggests, is itself enlivening. This stirring or wakening of things, even if the stirring and waken­ing is occurring primarily in our own consciousness and sensibility, makes possible a different kind of exchange among and between living beings, ourselves included. We are alive to one another. And aware of this aliveness. Something small and hidden perhaps, but significant. An exemplary case of intense, solitary noticing can be encountered in the notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834). Here one finds innumerable instances of close observation of ordinary things, and an effort to give expression in language to perceptions so dense and intricate and dynamic that they sometimes appear to defy such efforts completely. One also encounters here thoughtful reflections on the art of perception itself, what a small miracle it is to perceive anything at all: ‘To think of a thing’, he notes, ‘is [as] different from to perceive it as to walk is from to feel the ground under you’. What is it to perceive a thing, in the sense that Coleridge means it here? And how does it differ from thinking about that same thing? The difference, it seems, has primarily to do with proximity, feeling, intimacy. ‘To feel the ground under you’ requires sensitivity, openness, vulnerability—in this case to the ground under your feet. A sense that the moment is alive with possibility and that the physical reality within or upon

11 Allan Hodder, Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 66; Fiona Ellis, God, Value and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Timothy Morton, ‘The Liminal Space between things: Epiphany and the Physical’, in Iovino Serenella and Serpil Oppermann, eds, Material Ecocriticsm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). Cathy Rigby, ‘Spirits that Matter: Pathways toward a Rematerialization of Religion and Spirituality’, in Iovino Serenella and Serpil Oppermann, eds, Material Ecocriticsm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). 12  Rainer Maria Rilke, Diaries of Young Poet (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 123.

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Douglas E. Christie  201 which you are moving has some claim on you—whether aesthetic, moral, or ­spiritual. Certainly perception, understood in the sense that Coleridge is using it here, involves thinking. But it is something different from discursive thinking. It is closer to meditation, a kind of ruminative thinking that proceeds slowly, carefully, allowing sensory and imaginative experience and awareness to accrue gradually. It is thinking that has been pierced by the thing it is thinking about, that is already responding to the presence of the thing, that wants to enter into lively relationship with it, perhaps become immersed in it. In another of his notebook entries, Coleridge observes: ‘There have been times when looking up beneath the shelt[e]ring Tree, I could Invest every leaf with Awe.’13 Here, perhaps, one catches a glimpse of that cleansing of the doors of perception to which Blake alludes. But Coleridge adds an important note here: we see and feel things continuously, but often with little attention or investment; certain moments of perception, for ­reasons that are not always clear, hold us, speak to us and invite a response. And the response itself (‘I could invest every leaf with Awe’) becomes part of the perception, part of how it comes to live within us. Such response can be understood as a spiritual-­ethical gesture of respect, reciprocity, even reverence. Investing what we behold with meaning and significance, even if we also recognize that this gesture of meaning-­making is partial, provisional, and unfinished. Mystery remains. And if it is fleeting in character, such perception is nevertheless real, and can alter the entire way we inhabit our lives. Returning again to Wordsworth, we begin to notice that such perceptive experience can gradually become woven into a growing awareness of ‘the deep power of Joy . . . [by which] . . . We see into the Life of Things’.14 A detailed and important account of such seeing can be found in Coleridge’s journal from November, 1803, in which he describes what he beheld upon waking early one morning on a coach ride to London: It was a rich Orange Sky like that of a winter Evening save that the fleecy dark blue Clouds that rippled above it, shewed it to be Morning [–] these soon became of a glowing Brass Colour, brassy Fleeces, wool packs in shape/rising high up into the Sky. The Sun at length rose upon the flat Plain, like a Hill of Fire in the distance, rose wholly, & in the water that floodedd part of the Flat a deep column of Light.—But as the Coach went on, a Hill rose and intercepted the Sun—and the Sun in a few minutes rose over it, a compleat 2nd rising, thro’ other clouds and with a different Glory. Soon after this I saw Starlings in vast Flights, borne along like smoke, mist—like a body unindued with voluntary Power/—now it shaped itself into a circular area, inclined—now they formed a 13  Samuel Taylor Coleridge Notebooks: A Selection, ed. Seamus Perry (New York: Oxford, 2002), 35. 14  Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’.

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202  Healed and Whole Forever Square—now a Globe—now from complete orb into an Ellipse—then oblongated into a Balloon . . . now a concave Semicircle; still expanding, or contracting, ­thinning or condensing, now glimmering and shivering, now thicken­ing, deepening, blackening!15

It is difficult to miss the growing sense of amazement at what the poet beholds, or the unguarded, ecstatic joy that begins to well up within him. At times, he seems to carry in his own consciousness the fluid, dream-­like world unfolding before him. Still, his mind is sharply focused, intensely alert to the intricate shape and texture of things, to their strange beauty, to their wondrous power. One senses an effort to perceive in all these different elements moving together the very dynamism and life of the world. Such intense preoccupation with seeing and describing things is at the same time an effort to perceive the world, and to reflect on that perception in a way that allows one to feel and understand the world and one’s place in the world in a new way. It is a dynamic, creative process in which perception and reflection move together to open up new possibilities for life in the world. The immediacy and force of the original perception is palpable. But the reflective work of inquiring into the meaning of such perception, and to the things one perceives (individually and in relation to one another), remains open, unfinished, potentially endless. A compelling and meaningful practice of paying attention to the natural world. But is it a spiritual practice? Is Coleridge’s perception of the natural world spiritual? The answer one gives to these questions will depend on how one understands the character of thought and practice under consideration. Does the immersive, ecstatic, relational character of Coleridge’s thought express what we might describe as an experience of self-­transcendence? Does it yield a greater sense of intimacy and reciprocity between oneself and the ‘life of things?’ Does it open up a more encompassing awareness of that relationship? Of course, it is also important to consider such questions in light of the historical particularities of Coleridge’s situation and the world of which he was a part. But for the purposes of this chapter, it seems sufficient to notice the quality of attention and what that attention yields: a more complex, intricate, dynamic sense of the living world and one’s place within it. Joy. Awe. Intimacy. The capacity to see into the life of things. Everything appearing to us as it is: infinite. Here are elements of a grammar of contemplative practice that point to a fuller and more adequate way of seeing and living in the world.

15 Coleridge, Notebooks, 39.

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Douglas E. Christie  203

Dissolved in the Haze: Subjectivity Subsumed in Matter One senses here a dawning awareness of how fluid and porous the boundaries between and among things in the world are; and an awareness of how permeable the boundaries of our own consciousness are, how we can come to know ourselves as living within and touched by the life of another. It is not easy to grasp or express the experience of this fluid, shifting movement of life around and within us. To say anything at all is already to risk putting into language something can never be contained or encompassed by it—not only because of its ephemeral character but also because of its endlessness. Here one draws close to those apophatic traditions of spiritual thought practice that freely acknowledge the limits of our abilities to articulate fully the meaning of our spiritual perceptions. There is something analogous, I think, to the challenge of becoming sensitive to those boundary regions where life insistently emerges and moves, where light and wind and birdsong course together and enter into us, where one thing cannot be sep­ar­ ated from another, ever. Henry David Thoreau’s journals offer an exemplary case of one person’s efforts to trace the impact of the natural world on his consciousness, what we can understand as a deepening spiritual perception of the natural world and his place within it. His journals describe in minute and obsessive detail encounters with places and other living beings that invite a continuous deepening of his capacity to perceive and describe what he perceives as part of an encompassing whole. The sense of being drawn into the world, of feeling one’s desire quickened by its sensual beauty, its music, its touch, spills over into a language of excess that reflects the density and encompassing intensity of the experience. Here, the idea of self and world as distinct realities that can be simply and easily distinguished from one another begins to recede from view; instead, there is a growing perception of immersion, of disappearing into a shared world of boundless immensity. Thoreau’s careful and assiduous attention to these moments of ecstatic awareness is, as Allan Hodder has demonstrated, central to his emerging understanding of what it is to know ourselves as stitched into the fabric of the living world.16 Ecstasy begets intimacy, an intimate knowledge that can come to us only through relinquishment of a narrow, bounded self and an openness to an ever emerging sense of participation in a larger whole. Attention to those moments when such ecstatic expansion occurs can quicken and deepen one’s sensitivity to the world, can open one to the possibility of a continuous and ever-­more encompassing exchange of life. Still, what kind of exchange is this? And who is acting upon whom? Consider these two passages from Thoreau’s early journals:

16 Allan D. Hodder, Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

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204  Healed and Whole Forever Drifting in a sultry day on the sluggish waters of the pond, I almost cease to live—and begin to be. A boat-­man stretched on the deck of his craft, and dallying with the noon, would be as apt an emblem of eternity for me, as the serpent with his tail in his mouth. I am never so prone to lose my identity. I am dissolved in the haze.17 The eaves are running on the south side of the house—The titmouse lisps in the poplar—the bells are ringing for the church—while the sun presides over all and makes his simple warmth more obvious than all else.—What shall I do with this hour so like time and yet so fit for eternity? Where in me are these russet patches of ground—and scattered logs and chips in the yard?—I do not feel cluttered.—I have some notion what the johnswort and life-­everlasting may be thinking about—when the sun shines on me as on them—and turns my prompt thought—into just such a seething shimmer—I lie out indistinct as a heath at noon-­day—I am evaporating airs ascending into the sun.18

These journal entries reveal a concern, one that Thoreau never lost, to describe that particular moment of perception when a previously-­clear boundary between the self and the wider world begins to dissolve and becomes permeable; but they touch on different dimensions of this experience. In the earlier passage, suggests Hodder, ‘[A]ll of matter, the creation itself, is subsumed in an ocean of consciousness; [in the second passage], on the contrary, subjectivity is almost entirely subsumed in matter’.19 The distinction is significant, especially as one tracks the changes in Thoreau’s sensibilities over time, from a transcendental idealism that favours human consciousness as the primary subject (into which the natural world is absorbed) towards what Hodder describes as a ‘mindful naturalism’ in which the natural world begins to emerge as the primary subject, or in any case as a rich, complex reality with its own claims on the human subject. Gradually, the idealism that is so prominent in the early years gives way to a vivid, proto-­ ecological understanding of the relationships between and among all living beings. Thoreau’s unfinished Calendar project, which represents his most intense and sustained effort to catalogue the intricate relations among and between species across time reveals the extent of his commitment to understanding what would later come to be known as the ecological character of the natural world. But his steady and growing attention to this concrete ecological reality never led him to abandon his fundamental concern with that mysterious boundary region across which the self is sometimes drawn in its encounter with the living world. ‘I lie out indistinct as a heath at noon-­day—I am evaporating airs ascending into 17  Henry David Thoreau, Journal, Vol. I, 69–70. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Volume 1: Journal, Volume 1: 1837-­1844. Ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell, Robert Sattelmeyer, Thomas Blanding (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982), 69–70. 18 Thoreau, Journal, I. 256. 19 Hodder, Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness, 65.

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Douglas E. Christie  205 the sun.’ For Thoreau, this indeterminate ever-­shifting space between the self and the world and the mysterious ecstatic movement by which one is drawn into and beyond it possesses an almost endless spiritual and ethical significance. Thoreau helped to establish a vocabulary of spiritual yearning rooted in a sense of deep intimacy with and knowledge of the natural world within the tradition of American natural history writing. But he did more than this. As Branka Arsić has demonstrated in her brilliant study of Thoreau’s work, he also helped to show that it was possible to practise an orientation towards other living beings rooted in a true sense of reciprocity. This was in part because of how consistently and deeply he questioned the ideology of human exceptionalism. Arsić argues that one of the most enduring and important aspect of Thoreau’s work lies in his clear insistence that ‘no living form is more accomplished than another, and life doesn’t therefore unfold hierarchically and progressively but, more democratically, moves sim­ul­ tan­eous­ly in a variety of directions’.20 And we along with it. Taking this idea ser­ ious­ly, as Thoreau certainly did, involved removing himself more and more from his own reflections on the natural world, in deference to those life forms towards which he was directing his gaze. His practice of perception gradually became purer, more disinterested, more open—a gesture of ascetic relinquishment undertaken for the sake of the world itself.

Immersion, Reciprocity, Regard Others also took up this challenge, though in different ways. I think here of the work of Mary Austin (1868–1934), a writer who lived and worked for many years in the desert country of California and whose work The Land of Little Rain became an American literary classic. Consider her account of the subtle, exchange of light and sound in the vast, beautiful landscape of California’s Owens Valley: In quiet weather mesa days have no parallel for stillness, but the night silence breaks into certain mellow or poignant notes. Late afternoons the burrowing owls may be seen blinking at the doors of their hummocks with perhaps four or five elfish nestlings arow, and by twilight begin a soft whoo-­ooing, rounder, sweeter, more incessant in mating time. It is not possible to disassociate the call of the burrowing owl from the late slant light of the mesa. If the fine vibrations which are the golden-­violet glow of spring twilights were to tremble into sound, it would be just that mellow double note breaking along the blossom tops.21

20  Branka Arsić, Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 129–30. 21  Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974), 96–7.

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206  Healed and Whole Forever This account is noteworthy for its reticence regarding the effect of such subtle movements on the observer. All of Austin’s attention is on the shifting movement of life within the place itself. Yet there is tremendous delicacy in her observation, especially regarding the way stillness and light and song move and flow into and through one another. The stillness is itself something palpable. But it is open, dynamic, and receptive to sound, to which it occasionally yields. That ‘soft whoo-­ ooing’ of burrowing owls, whose song can hardly be distinguished from the ‘late slant light of the mesa’. There seems to be something kindred between them. Or perhaps it is simply how they rise and move together, how difficult it is to discern where one begins and the other ends, how light and sound coalesce and resonate continuously in the senses and in the imagination. Austin makes no attempt here to suggest what it might mean for us to notice and feel this rich movement of life around and within us. But it is difficult to miss the sense of intimacy and participation that her account of the dance of light and sound and stillness on the mesa invites and makes possible. Significant also is her sense of the porousness of the perceptive process through which the life of things enters into us and takes hold of our affections, lifting and carrying us out beyond ourselves into the immensity. The senses are alive and attuned to the living world—with such sensitivity that, for a brief moment, light and sound and subjective awareness of oneself as part of this whole, pulsing, complex reality flow together in a single, rich synaesthetic perception. Austin does not ascribe any explicit spiritual meaning to this moment of perception. But here, as elsewhere, she points to a remarkable possibility (one that she believes too often eludes us but sometimes becomes real): the ability to open oneself to this immensity and enter into it. Becoming part of the life of the world in this way entails learning to relinquish one’s place as the central subject and opening oneself to a more intersubjective way of being in the world. For this to happen, the mind and the senses must become more deeply attuned and responsive to the simple elements of the physical world—sensitivity to sight, sound, texture, fragrance, and taste guiding us towards a more encompassing awareness of our identity as persons alive within the world. It can come as a relief, Austin suggests, to know that the self is not so constrained, that it is capable of living within a larger, more capacious reality. The feeling of utter immersion. The sense that the reality in which you are moving is simultaneously around and within you—analogous in some ways to what mystics sometimes speak of in terms of absorption into or union with the divine. The sense that one can no longer easily discern the edges of the self against the horizon of such immensity. The awareness that the very idea of the self must be re-­examined in light of one’s experience of living within that larger whole. Here as with much mystical discourse, there is a fundamental tension or paradox that cannot be entirely overcome: the employment of language to suggest that the old boundaries between self and other have disappeared entirely is nonetheless the expression of a subject attempting to evoke that very experience. Subjective

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Douglas E. Christie  207 experience remains, although it is sometimes stretched to such an extent that the very meaning of subjectivity itself is being called into question. This is an im­agina­ tive project, an effort to find language to convey the sense of boundlessness in one’s encounter with the mysterious Other, whether God or the natural world. What characterizes this imaginative project in so many writers in the modern era is the sense that the distinctive elements of the living world with which one seeks a relationship should never be reduced to a generalized sense of ‘nature’. Instead, the particular character of a given place and distinctive character of the life forms within that place must be allowed to speak on their own terms. There is an ethical obligation to listen, to open all the senses to this complex reality and to respond in kind. Spiritual perception of the living world is rooted in this ethic of reciprocity. The work of French writer Jean Giono (1895–1970) is exemplary in this regard. Here, long familiarity with a particular place—the rugged, beautiful country surrounding Manosque in the Haute-­Provence of southern France—shapes and gives life to an extraordinarily intimate perception of the natural world. In works such as Blue Boy (1932), Song of the World (1934), and Joy of Man’s Desiring (1936), one encounters an intense, playful, and open-­hearted mysticism of the natural world that is at once cosmic and utterly local. In his autobiographical novel Blue Boy, Giono evokes a moment from his childhood that helped initiate him into this encompassing awareness: ‘The sap came up from the root hairs and pushed through the trees to the very tips of the leaves. It passed between the claws of the roosting birds. The bark of the tree, the scale of the food, that was all there was between the blood of bird and tree. There were only these barriers of skin between. We were all like sacks of blood one touching the other. We were the world.’22 To see and feel the world so fully and deeply, to understand oneself to be the world; is this the child’s prerogative alone? Or does it also belong to those who have passed on from this place of innocence and perhaps entered into a second naiveté?23 Giono’s work probes these questions endlessly, asking whether it is possible for those who have long since stopped believing the world is alive in this way to be reborn, reawakened—to themselves and the wild world. It certainly seems possible for Antonio, the protagonist of The Song of the World, who has long inhabited the forest near the Grémone plateau in the Haute-­ Provence, and whose knowledge of the place is intimate, fine-­grained, and deeply sensory (even sensual). Giono takes great care to introduce this character to us in the early pages of the novel, focusing almost all of his attention on Antonio’s ­sens­ibil­ity, his perceptual genius. Or simply the immense sensitivity of his body:

22  Jean Giono, Blue Boy, trans. Katherine A. Clarke (San Francisco: North Point, 1981), 134–5. 23  Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 361.

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208  Healed and Whole Forever Every morning Antonio stripped off his clothes. Usually he began the day by slowly crossing the large black branch of the river. He drifted along with the currents; he felt the swirls of each eddy; with the quick of his thighs he touched the long sinews of the river, and, as he started to swim, he felt with his belly whether the water buoyed him up, pressing in on him, or whether it tended to sparkle. From all that, he knew whether he had to take the net with the wide or small mesh, the hand-­set, the netting needle, the rod, or whether he had better go off and catch fish with his hands in the pebbled shallows of the ford. He knew whether the pike shot out of the banks, whether the trout swam upstream, whether the fry shoaled down from the upper river; and sometimes he let himself sink, slowly treading water in the depths, to try to touch that huge red-­and-­ black fish which was impossible to catch and which, every evening, came and blew across the stillness of the waters a long jet of foam and a child’s moan.24

Contemporary readers who encounter this description may well feel such a sens­ ibil­ity and knowledge to be so remote from us as to beggar belief. Has anyone ever lived in the world this way? Still, here is Antonio, someone Giono has conjured into being through his imagination, but who would almost certainly have been a familiar figure in that region, standing before us. And a figure who, against all expectation, has the capacity to speak to us still. Not because he fulfils some need we feel for an ideal, romanticized, rustic sage of the forest. Rather because he reminds us of a certain kind of knowledge that many of us have lost access to: a knowledge that comes to us through an embodied awareness of place. This is an idea whose meaning we grasp intuitively but whose power and significance we cannot always explain or account for. He knew. With this simple phrase, Giono signals his awareness that Antonio understands the world and carries knowledge of the intricate relationships that comprise the world in his body. Or rather that his body mediates this knowledge—an idea that has long been cherished within indigenous cultures and that has also been important to the phenomenological philosophical tradition, and that is now being retrieved and reimagined in an ecological context. Still, it requires some effort to say what such knowledge consists of. For Antonio, it is above all a knowledge of a place. It is intricate and delicate and particular. The mind is at work, but the knowledge and understanding of things arises through feel, something that does not refer in this context primarily to affective experience, but to what comes to us through the senses. What you feel in your body, what you perceive through your senses that tells you where you are. Also, perhaps, who you are, in relation to the whole. Here, I would suggest, is another way of understanding contemplative practice and awareness: deeply 24  Jean Giono, The Song of the World, trans. Henry Fluchère and Geoffrey Myers (San Francisco: North Point, 1981), 18.

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Douglas E. Christie  209 embodied and geographically and ecologically specific. And, at the same time, fluid, expansive and open to mystery.

Towards Healing: Thinking Like a Mountain What is this mystery? And what does it mean in the present moment to seek the presence of mystery in the natural world? The accounts above are suggestive of a deep and pervasive longing to rediscover our own capacity to enter fully into the life of the world, to know the world more intimately and intricately and to live in the world with greater regard and responsibility. But it is impossible to escape the awareness that much of the force of this longing in the present moment is due to our growing sense of distance and alienation from the natural world, and our deepening awareness of our complicity in its destruction. Whatever ‘cleansing the doors of perception’ might have meant for Blake, for us it will necessarily involve recognizing that we are called to become more aware of our part in and responsibility for the whole. The simple, personal desire to become more sensitive to the living world (in this or that place) will need to become woven into a larger fabric of concern that allows us to be more aware (and yes, more ‘painfully aware’) of the whole. And to consider what it might mean for us to participate in the healing of the torn fabric of the whole. To address this question, here at the end of this chapter, I want to enlist the help of Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), one of the great pi­on­ eers of mid-twentieth-century ecological thought. In a justly famous section of Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac called ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’, he recounts a painful experience as a young man that provoked in him a profound examination of conscience and brought him to the threshold of a new awareness of who he was in the world and of his own relationship to the whole. He was travelling with friends in the rimrock country of Arizona, when a wolf with several cubs suddenly appeared below them crossing a river. ‘In those days,’ he says, ‘we had never heard of a passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second, we were pumping led into the pack . . . when our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide rocks’. This was business as usual for the young Leopold and his friends. But what happened next was not. And it changed everything. We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-­itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunter’s paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

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210  Healed and Whole Forever The significance of this experience upon Leopold’s emerging ecological awareness was profound. In what follows this brief account, he articulates the birth of his growing understanding of the intricacy and delicacy of ecological relationships and of the blindness that had prevented him and others from seeing and respecting them. He had dreamed of a hunter’s paradise. Instead, he came to see that the policy of extirpation of wolves throughout the West had led to the rapid, unchecked growth of deer populations, the subsequent defoliation of entire mountains, and the impoverishment of whole ecosystems. He would devote much of his life to drawing out the implications of this insight, asking what it might mean to rethink not only our individual relationships with the natural world but also the values underlying our shared economic and political life. The ‘land ethic’ that emerged from these reflections has become one of the most influential and enduring expressions of how a transformed awareness of our relationship with the world can lead to a different and more mindful way of living. Leopold’s own experience suggests how important the transformation of one’s awareness can be to the work of cultivating a meaningful ecological ethic. Also how mysterious it is. The unexpected force of the ‘fierce green fire’ in the wolf ’s eyes seems to have unnerved him. But what did it mean? He could not say, at least not precisely. ‘There was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain’. Leopold takes care to honour the mystery of this encounter. And nothing in his subsequent reflections on the ecological significance of wolves in their environment undermines this sense of mystery. He wants to understand how the ecosystem works, and what intricate pattern enables wolves and deer and mountains to exist together. But there is something in this pattern that eludes and will always elude precise explanation, something to do with its wild character. ‘Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf,’ suggests Leopold, ‘long known among the mountains, but seldom perceived among men’. It cannot be fully known; it is too deep and mysterious. Still, Leopold makes it clear that we have a greater capacity to open ourselves to this mystery than we have acknowledged or expressed, and that until we learn to open ourselves more fully to wild world, until we learn to ‘think like a mountain’, we will have nothing but ‘dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea’.25 To ‘think like a mountain’. Few ideas have come to resonate more deeply in our emerging ecological consciousness than this one. The sense that we possess the capacity for cultivating a more encompassing awareness of the wild world and of living from the centre of this awareness is both alluring and exciting. Nor is it difficult to imagine how a deepening of such thinking might contribute to the work of repairing the world. The task of integrating such awareness into our i­ndividual and collective lives clearly remains unfinished. But as way of understanding what it 25  Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 129–32.

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Douglas E. Christie  211 might mean to inhabit the world more fully and thoughtfully and compassionately, Leopold’s vision remains compelling and important. It is, I believe, a fundamentally contemplative vision of the world. And its contemplative character is one of its most significant contributions to the ongoing work of engaging, responding to and perhaps helping to heal our broken, fragmented world. Leopold understood, as contemplative practitioners have always known, that the simple act of gazing, of paying attention—one of the most ancient and enduring ways of understanding contemplative practice—can open up a space in which we come to recognize how the lives of others live and move within us, and we in them. This contemplative vision is at the heart of Leopold’s hugely influential land ethic—an idea that has helped transform our understanding of the fundamental moral obligation that exists between us, the land and all living beings. And it is very close in spirit to the call in Laudato Si’ to become ‘painfully aware’—the call to open ourselves to an awareness of the depth of our relationship with and responsibility towards everyone and everything, especially the scorned and the lowly. As I think again about that night in the desert, and the challenge of opening myself to the whole in a more open-­hearted way, I take heart from the words of the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton who offers his own compelling vision of what it means to participate in a shared, communal reality: ‘my veins don’t end in me but in the unanimous blood of those who struggle for life, love, little things, landscape and bread, the poetry of everyone’.26 My veins don’t end in me: here is an image suggestive of the kind of intimate participation in the life of the other that is possible for everyone. It is, we might say, a kind of spiritual intuition that the illusion of separation within which we so often live cannot be sustained. It also points to an ethical obligation: a call not to stand aloof from the lives of others or the life of the world. A reminder that deepening our perceptive ­ ­capacity—learning to ‘See everything/and ourselves in everything/healed and whole/forever’—can become central to the restorative work into which we are all called.

26 Roque Dalton, ‘Como Tu’, in Small Hours of the Night: Selected Poems of Roque Dalton (Curbstone, 1996).

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13 Spiritual Perception and Beauty On Looking and Letting Appear Mark McInroy Despite recent interest in spiritual perception among theologians and philosophers,1 central questions remain: Why, exactly, does corporeal perception alone not suffice? What, precisely, is lacking in accounts of bodily perception such that one would be led to countenance a model of perception that goes beyond the physical? In response to these questions, this chapter advances two lines of argument, one phenomenological and one theological. First, I claim that beautiful phenomena have a special ability to expose the inadequacy of holding that the world consists of exclusively physically perceptible entities. Instead, the en­tran­cing features of beautiful objects teach one to perceive in a newly attentive manner that goes beyond the ordinary, and ultimately beyond the physical register. The total phenomenon of the beautiful, then, resists reduction to the phys­ic­al alone. In order to advance this view, this chapter builds on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, which relies upon spiritual perception for ‘seeing the form’ of beauty (paradigmatically, God’s revelation in Jesus Christ). Balthasar will be helpful for our task in that his central category of ‘form’ (Gestalt) possesses an immaterial component that shows itself to the viewer, despite its immateriality. This immaterial ‘splendour’, as Balthasar puts it, is perceived by the spiritual senses, which are given by God’s grace to the human being. Although Balthasar offers robust resources for developing the immaterial dimension of beauty’s manifestation, this constructive proposal offers a position distinct from his own. On Balthasar’s account, beauty strikes with formidable power, and the splendour of the form is unmistakable on his model. Correlatively, he offers little in the way of practices that can be used to cultivate spiritual perception. In this chapter I posit a more subtle form of beauty, in response to which certain forms of spiritual perception develop over time as a result of continued looking. On this model, the fascination beauty elicits encourages a practice of ‘looking and letting appear’, which invites and enables the viewer to investigate with patience, and eventually to see beyond the ordinary. 1  See especially Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley, eds, The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Mark McInroy, Spiritual Perception and Beauty: On Looking and Letting Appear In: Perceiving Things Divine: Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual Perception. Edited by: Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802594.003.0013

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Mark M c Inroy  213 In this effort, two recent treatments of ‘decentring’ serve our goals. First, using Günter Figal’s discussion of the ‘decentred order’ that beauty presents to the viewer, I suggest that the subtleties beauty manifests are too variegated to be  grasped in a single moment, and that they therefore require patient looking to be appreciated. Second, drawing from Iris Murdoch and Elaine Scarry, I suggest that beauty has an ability to ‘decentre’ the human being him- or herself, and in so doing to bracket the self, allowing beautiful phenomena to appear on their own terms. On this model, one perceives spiritually in the first instance not by having a set of faculties implanted within us from beyond ourselves (as Balthasar claims); instead a great deal of spiritual perception occurs when occluding habits of looking are exposed and undone. Perceiving spiritually, then, can result from an awaken­ing of something latent within ourselves. Ultimately, grace is required for those forms of spiritual perception that involve seeing the divine. However, even in such cases the practice of patient looking is rele­vant, as the openness it cultivates prepares the human being for God’s gift of grace. The second portion of this paper responds to the questions posed at the outset in a different way by arguing from certain theological premises for the necessity of spiritual perception. Especially valuable in this effort are the aesthetically charged arguments Theodore the Studite summons against Byzantine iconoclasts, who insist that the divine nature of Christ remains ‘uncircumscribable’ even in the incarnation. In opposition to this view, Theodore holds that a key implication of the communication of idioms, properly understood, is that the divinity of Christ shows itself through Christ’s person and can indeed be seen. Whereas Theodore deploys his Christological argument primarily for a defence of the veneration of icons, this chapter maintains that the logic of his position can be extended to claim that spiritual perception is required of Christian theology.

Defining the ‘Spiritual Senses’ As the chapters in this volume indicate, spiritual perception has been categorized in a wide variety of ways. In an effort at attaining clarity, this chapter adapts certain elements of the definition of the ‘spiritual senses’ initially articulated by Augustin Poulain (and later picked up by Karl Rahner) in his classic Des grâces d’oraison (1901).2 My interest here is not to be restrictive but instead to make clear 2  Augustin Poulain, SJ, Des grâces d’oraison (Paris: V.  Retaux, 1901). Published in English as The Graces of Interior Prayer, trans. Leonora L. Yorke Smith from the 6th edition, and corrected to accord with the 10th French edition (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1950). Karl Rahner adopts

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214  Spiritual Perception and Beauty the kind of phenomena this paper attempts to describe. To Poulain, the phrase ‘spiritual senses’ denotes a set of five ‘spiritual’ perceptual faculties that function in a manner analogous to their corporeal counterparts. In other words, just as there are corporeal senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell that apprehend physical objects, there are also spiritual senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell that perceive ‘spiritual’ entities in an extra-­corporeal register. Poulain posits five discrete spiritual senses, and he further insists that the language of sensation is used in a manner that is not ‘merely metaphorical’. Instead, Poulain claims that we observe in these descriptions a ‘stronger’, ‘analogical’ use of sensory terms.3 Of what, one might ask, does this close analogy consist? Poulain draws on the notion of ‘presence’ in order to outline the conditions required for a strong resemblance between the spiritual and corporeal senses. He explains, ‘The soul possess[es] intellectual spiritual senses, having some resemblance to the bodily senses, so that, in an analogous manner and in diverse ways, she is able to perceive the presence of pure spirits, and the presence of God in particular.’4 For Poulain, it is precisely when one speaks of detecting an immaterial presence that he or she is using sensory language in an ‘analogous’, ‘non-­metaphorical’ manner. Poulain’s fivefold criterion is less important for us than his idea that spiritual perception detects presences, and in so doing resembles corporeal sensation.5 Spiritual perception, as I am using the phrase, describes that capacity of the human being to discern the presence of entities or aspects of reality that are not physical objects or properties. It takes as a live option that the world is permeated with features that are imperceptible to ordinary sensation, but that nevertheless present themselves.6 Such a formulation distinguishes this constructive proposal from a view that locates the capacity to perceive spiritually in judgement. In other words, this proposal claims that the ability to recognize more than the physical in the world does not result from an inference drawn from data brought to it by the senses. Instead, I suggest that perceiving spiritually occurs non-­inferentially when one beholds something immaterial showing itself to him or her.

Poulain’s definition and uses it to examine a much broader set of patristic and medieval materials. Karl Rahner, ‘The “Spiritual Senses” According to Origen’, in Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. 16: Experience of the Spirit: Source of Theology, trans. David Morland, OSB (New York: Crossroad, 1979), 81–103; ‘The Doctrine of the “Spiritual Senses” in the Middle Ages’, in Theological Investigations, vol. 16: Experience of the Spirit: Source of Theology, trans. David Morland, OSB (New York: Crossroad, 1979), 104–34. 3 Poulain, Des grâces d’oraison, 90. 4 Poulain, Des grâces d’oraison, 88. 5  In fact, as will become clear below, this constructive model of spiritual sensation focuses on the role played by sight rather than all five senses. 6  To be clear, spiritual perception need not involve a negation of the physical. Instead, the account I develop below regards the spiritual senses as picking up on something more than the physical that can be located in the very midst of the physical world.

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Mark M c Inroy  215

Spiritual Perception and Form: Balthasar’s Contribution In his theological aesthetics, Hans Urs von Balthasar advances a notion of form (Gestalt) pertinent to our inquiry. Balthasar begins with the claim that beauty necessarily takes a form. In this assertion he makes two important points. First, beauty is evident to the senses; it shows up in the world. Second, when it does so, beauty does not appear in a haphazard fashion. Instead, beauty exhibits order, often to an extraordinary degree. There is, then, something within the form that gives it this order, a force of sorts that gathers up disparate elements so as to make the form a single entity. Form therefore has two distinct components in Balthasar’s aesthetics: the material aspect, which can be seen by the senses, and the immaterial principle of organization that is doing the form-­ing, which Balthasar describes as ‘invisible’.7 Balthasar’s foremost intellectual debt in this account of form goes to Goethe, but he also engages with the thought of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Goethe criticizes the ‘mechanistic’ view of nature pervasive in the eighteenth century by emphasizing the integrity of the living forms that can be found in the natural world. The mechanistic view, to Goethe, overlooks the fact that a living form is more than the sum of its parts. As he articulates this idea: I can certainly put together the individual parts of a machine made of separate pieces and in the case of such an object I can speak of composition. But I cannot speak of composition when I am thinking about the single parts of an organic whole which form themselves in living fashion and are permeated by one soul.8

Goethe draws a sharp distinction between machines built by human beings and living forms; the latter consists of a ‘productive unity’ that transcends the parts of the organic being. Michael Waldstein characterizes Goethe’s understanding of form as ‘able to see a principle of unity that is interior. It is able to see a principle of unity that does not lie in the same plane, so to speak, as the parts which it unites, but is superior to them in dominating them from within.’9 Goethe’s model is closely allied with Balthasar’s understanding of form as described briefly above. After explicitly referring to Goethe in his theological aesthetics, Balthasar describes form as having a transcendent centre that unites its different components, joining them in a distinct whole.10 This centre is something 7  Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, 7 vols, trans. Erasmo Leiva-­Merikakis et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982–91), (hereafter GL), vol. I, 151. 8  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gespräche mit Eckerman (Berlin: Knaur, 1924), Part III, 20 June 1831, 513. 9  Michael Waldstein, ‘Expression and Form: Principles of a Philosophical Aesthetics according to Hans Urs von Balthasar’ (doctoral dissertation, University of Dallas, 1981), 81–2. 10  GL IV, 30.

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216  Spiritual Perception and Beauty more than the individual parts. And, although this ‘more’ is not obviously visible to the senses (the corporeal senses, at least), the centre is nevertheless fully a part of the form. Indeed, without it, one would not have a form in the first place. For Goethe, this principle of unity dominates to varying degrees depending on the quality of the form in question. As he succinctly expresses this hierarchy, ‘The subordination of parts points to a more perfect creature.’11 In other words, the greater the unifying power exerted by the form, the ‘higher’ its position. A pile of stones, for instance, does not exhibit a terribly high degree of organization or subordination of its parts. Such a haphazard collection of individual components does not demonstrate any particular, necessary relation among those parts. Its shape is simply imposed from without, and it has no noteworthy inner principle of unity. The pile of stones therefore occupies a low position in the hierarchy of forms. A plant, however, has a structure that requires a certain harmony among its members; it must function as a whole. Animals are governed even more thoroughly from within, and a greater diversity of parts is overcome in the unity of the animal. They therefore score higher still. Human beings, as yet more diverse and yet more self-­governed, rank above animals. The principle of unity in humans is therefore the most dominant. Balthasar endorses Goethe’s hierarchy of forms, as demonstrated in the following: ‘Every really existing thing that meets us takes on form in analogous degrees and the “height of the form” is judged according to the greater power of the unity to gather together equal varieties’.12 In fact, this notion of hierarchy is an im­port­ ant ingredient in Balthasar’s own efforts at resisting the ‘mechanistic’ view of the world mentioned above. This mechanism, on Balthasar’s reckoning, attempts to ‘dissolve all phenomena horizontally-­ quantitatively, in order to make them approximately intelligible and reconstructable’.13 Whereas Goethe’s morphology is able to account for this hierarchy and develop its significance, the mechanistic view of the world, by contrast, flattens any notion of a given, objective structure to the world. It looks to disassemble and reassemble at will. In addition to Goethe, Balthasar also draws upon Aristotle’s model of the relationship between form (εἶδοϛ) and matter. Form for Aristotle is that which combines with matter in a particular thing. Form, on this understanding, gives structure to prime matter.14 Form can therefore be considered a principle of inner

11 Goethe, ‘Morphologie’, in Ferdinand Weinhandl, Die Metaphysik Goethes (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1965), 100. Waldstein, ‘Expression and Form’, 82. 12  GL IV, 31. 13  Hans Urs von Balthasar, In the Fullness of Faith: On the Centrality of the Distinctively Catholic (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 14. 14 Aristotle, Metaphysics VII, 2 (1028b 8–33). Sir David Ross helpfully indicates the range of meanings associated with the term ‘form’ for Aristotle. ‘“Form” for Aristotle embraces a variety of meanings. Sometimes it is used of sensible shape, as when the sculptor is said to impose a new form on his ma­ter­ial. But more often, perhaps, it is thought of as something which is an object of thought rather than of sense, as the inner nature of a thing . . . On the whole, μορφή points to sensible shape and εἶδοϛ

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Mark M c Inroy  217 organization similar to that described by Balthasar. Aristotle also holds a hier­arch­ic­al understanding of form similar to that developed above. As Waldstein characterizes Aristotle on this point, ‘The greater the power of a form, the more the dispersion of matter is overcome. At the same time however, the greater the power of a form, the more such a form is spiritual and removed from matter.’15 Among living things, to Aristotle, the least complex forms are found in tissues, which provide material to create organs, which in turn furnish more complex material for complete living entities. Among these living entities, human beings are the most ‘formed’, so to speak, since they overcome the greatest diversity of elements. Many aspects of this Aristotelian view are taken up by medieval figures such as Thomas Aquinas, for whom forma performs a similar function as that which brings together diverse components.16 And, as is true for Aristotle, Aquinas also holds that the power of form increases with its ability to overcome disparate elem­ents. Aquinas makes this point explicitly: ‘To the extent to which a form is nobler, it dominates bodily matter more, is less immersed in it and exceeds it more in its operation and power. . . . The more one proceeds in the nobility of forms, the more one finds that the power of the form exceeds elementary matter.’17 Goethe, Aristotle, and Aquinas all advance understandings of form as the inner principle that gives structure to things in the world, and they all understand forms as hierarchically arranged. Although Balthasar is indebted to these figures, he takes his own treatment of form further. Balthasar views the ‘transcendent’ portion of the form as more than simply an organizing principle that brings together the form’s disparate components. Instead, the transcendent, ‘spiritual’ component of form is itself also shown. On numerous occasions Balthasar indicates that an ‘invisible’, ‘spiritual’ light shines through matter to the human being as he or she witnesses the form. This crucial feature of Balthasar’s thought tends to be underemphasized among commentators on his texts, yet Balthasar goes to great lengths to make the point. In his aesthetics he explains, ‘In order to read even a form within the world, we must see something invisible as well, and we do in fact see it.’18 The invisible aspect of the form makes itself known to the senses. In a similar manner, elsewhere in his aesthetics Balthasar discusses a ‘light’ within the form that must be ‘seen’. He explains, ‘For this particular perception of truth, of course, a “new light” is expressly required which illumines this particular form, a light which at the same time breaks forth from within the form itself. In this way, the “new light” will at to intelligible structure, and the latter is the main element in Aristotle’s notion of form.’ Aristotle (London: Methuen, 1964), 74. 15 Waldstein, ‘Expression and Form’, 86. Waldstein refers the reader to Aristotle’s Physics I.7; De Anima III; Metaphysics XII. 16  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, II, 54, 6. 17  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, 76, 1, c. 18  GL I, 444 (emphasis added).

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218  Spiritual Perception and Beauty the same time make seeing the form possible and be itself seen along with the form.’19 Given our above discussion of Balthasar’s understanding of form, we can see that this ‘new light’ corresponds to the ‘transcendent centre’ that shines forth as the invisible splendour of the form. And, most importantly for our purposes, this light must itself be perceived.20 In Balthasar’s aesthetics, then, the form consists of both sensory and supersensory dimensions (both visible and invisible aspects), and this supersensory component—even though it is invisible—appears. Balthasar attempts to rehabilitate perception for his theological aesthetics, but corporeal perception alone clearly will not suffice for the task he has given himself. Instead, as he puts it, ‘eyes are needed that are able to perceive the spiritual form’.21 In order for the supersensory ‘splendour’ of the form to be perceived, a notion of perception that exceeds the corporeal realm must be developed. It is precisely here that Balthasar makes his appeal to the doctrine of the spiritual senses.22 He describes the need for a ‘spiritualization’ of the perceptual faculties of the human being as follows: ‘In Christianity God appears to man right in the midst of worldly reality. The centre of this act of encounter must, therefore, lie where the profane human senses, making possible the act of faith, become “spiritual”.’23 Physical perception requires a transformation if the subjective conditions for the receipt of revelation are to be fulfilled. As Balthasar memorably captures this transition, ‘Our senses, together with images and thoughts, must . . . rise unto the Father in an unspeakable manner that is both sensory and suprasensory.’24 The spiritual senses, then, lie at the very centre of the encounter between the human being and God in Balthasar’s thought. Although its significance is easily overlooked, one finds textual evidence for the importance of the spiritual senses throughout Balthasar’s aesthetics. In the volumes treating the history of metaphysics (4 and 5), Balthasar speaks of the moment at which, ‘for the religious person, Being becomes theophanous . . . “spiritual (geistliche) senses” make him capable of hearing and of seeing the mystery of Being as a whole’.25 He also describes the perception of forms as follows: ‘All the forms that can be spiritually seen [alle geistig erblickbaren Gestalten] refer over

19  GL I, 120 (emphasis added). 20  Additional examples may be adduced in support of this point. For instance, in a passage from the first volume of his Theo-­Logic [TL] that describes the relation between the form (which is simply described as the ‘object’ here) and the viewer of the form (the subject), Balthasar holds, ‘Just as, on the side of the object, the boundary between the immanent measure of the morphe and the transcendent measure of the idea [Idee] can never be drawn too sharply, so, too, on the side of the subject, there can be no definite separation between the two modes of vision’. TL I, 60 (emphasis added). In this early work, then, Balthasar has begun to develop a notion of vision that sees not only the morphe, the outward shape, but also the transcendent aspect that lies within the object. 21  GL I, 24. 22  Balthasar titles as ‘The Spiritual Senses’ the concluding, sixty-­page portion of ‘The Subjective Evidence’ (i.e. the first half of volume I of The Glory of the Lord), thus gesturing toward its significance as the final word on the theological anthropology he develops in that volume. See GL I, 365–425. 23  GL I, 365. 24  GL I, 425. 25  GL V, 608.

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Mark M c Inroy  219 above themselves to the full and perfect being . . . the light which shines forth from the form and reveals it to the understanding is accordingly inseparably light of the form itself (Scholasticism speaks therefore of splendor formae) and light of being as a whole.’26 It is precisely the splendor formae, then, which gives itself to be spiritually seen. The importance of spiritual perception becomes even clearer when the divine is perceived. In volume 6 of his aesthetics, in which the Old Covenant is examined, Balthasar flatly declares that normal human vision cannot see God’s glory: ‘The natural eye does not see the kabod [i.e. glory]. In order to perceive it, in the natural eye there must emerge the supernatural glance.’27 In the introduction to volume 7, in which the ‘New Covenant’ is treated at length, Balthasar prepares his reader for the task before him or her: ‘But here most of all do we need the “vision of the form” with the “eyes of faith” (Augustine), the oculata fides (“faith that has eyes”, Thomas Aquinas), the “enlightened eyes of the heart” (Eph. 1.18), because only a “simple eye” (Mt 6.22 par.) is able to perceive something of the simplicity achieved by all multiplicity in the final form of revelation.’28 In another reference to the form of Christ, Balthasar straightforwardly states, ‘This form is unique, not graspable by worldly vision, evident only to the eyes of faith.’29 For all of Christ’s resplendence, his glory is easily missed. Indeed, natural vision alone will not suffice. One must perceive spiritually if Christ is to be seen for who he is. In sum, the spiritual senses lie at the very heart of the encounter between the human being and beauty in Balthasar’s thought. They function as the in­dis­pens­ able means through which the human subject perceives the splendour of the beautiful form and the glory of God. Before turning in the next section to points on which Balthasar’s model could be amended, we should first note its strengths. Returning to the questions posed at the outset of this paper, we can recognize that Balthasar issues a formidable rejoinder. Indeed, if the question is ‘Why does physical perception alone not ­suffice?’, Balthasar answers by insisting that visible reality cannot be explained ad­ equate­ ly without postulating an invisible element that shapes the visible. Without such structure, the world would be a formless mass. The invisible on this  understanding lies everywhere present throughout reality, tying all things

26  GL IV, 31 (translation emended). 27  GL VI, 35. 28  GL VII, 14. In similar fashion, Balthasar holds, ‘The measure which Christ represents and em­bodies is qualitatively different from every other measure. This fact need not be deduced; it may be read off the phenomenon itself. To be sure, for this an “eye for quality” is required . . . In a certain sense such an “eye” may be acquired (Heb. 5.14), but in essence it must be bestowed along with the phenomenon itself.’ GL I, 481. The reference to Hebrews 5:14 is significant; this biblical passage is one of the two upon which Origen most directly relies for his development of the spiritual senses. 29  GL I, 480. Balthasar also refers to the Christmas preface, which reads, ‘Because through the mystery of the incarnate Word the new light of your brightness has shone onto the eyes of our mind; that knowing God visibly, we might be snatched up by this into the love of invisible things.’ GL I, 119–20 (emphasis added).

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220  Spiritual Perception and Beauty together in ordered forms. Physical perception does not suffice, then, because it picks up on only a fragment of the whole that is continuously before us. Crucially, too, one does not arrive at an awareness of the insufficiency of phys­ ic­al perception through a mere chain of reasoning, simply as a conclusion that follows from the claim that an invisible structure must underlie the visible for anything to be ordered. Instead, such an awareness is aesthetically driven. That is, Balthasar suggests that in experiences of beauty one detects something extra-­ physical within the object of one’s perception that shines forth to the human observer. The ‘highest’ forms are particularly prone to displaying this extra-­ physical splendour, as the tremendous exertion required to keep the form united actually manifests itself, on Balthasar’s understanding. It is as if the strain that results from joining disparate elements draws the invisible out of hiding. Balthasar thus gives sophisticated expression to what may be a frequent experience of beauty: namely, the intuitive sense that one is witnessing more than the phys­ ic­al alone.

Looking and Letting Appear: The Practice of Spiritually Perceiving Balthasar’s account of spiritual perception stands out as one of the most thoroughly developed among modern theological treatments of the topic. However, certain aspects of his position invite re-­evaluation. Most importantly, for Balthasar beauty is typically an overwhelming force, and the splendour of the form is unmistakable. Balthasar offers a model of aesthetic experience in which one is overpowered by beauty.30 To Balthasar, the human being is enraptured by the form, and even ‘crushed’ by beauty.31 This certainly describes one way in which beauty operates on the human being. However, other possibilities present themselves for both the objective form of beauty and our subjective response to it. Precisely because of the power with which beauty strikes us, Balthasar offers remarkably little in the way of practices that can be used to cultivate spiritual perception. Throughout his aesthetics and elsewhere, he inveighs against hier­arch­ic­ al­ly structured ladders of ascent in the Christian life.32 Balthasar is wary of those models, such as that found in Origen, in which one progresses in one’s ability to perceive spiritually. He does this, in part, in order to democratize the spiritual

30  ‘The doctrine of the beholding and perceiving (Wahrnehmen) of the beautiful . . . and the doctrine of the enrapturing power of the beautiful are complementarily structured.’ GL I, 10. 31  GL I, 321, 442. 32  See Werner Löser, ‘The Ignatian Exercises in the Work of Hans Urs von Balthasar’, in Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work, ed. David L. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 103–20.

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Mark M c Inroy  221 senses such that they are not granted exclusively to a sort of high-­achieving ­mystical elite. Although his motivation may be laudable, Balthasar’s alternative portrays God as almost whimsically offering grace to the human being. In the section of his aesthetics devoted to the spiritual senses, he emphatically proclaims, ‘With what freedom the Lord comes and goes! . . . no achievement, no amount of training, no prescribed attitude can force God to come to us!’33 For Balthasar, the spiritual senses are granted solely through God’s grace, and practice is ineffective on his understanding.34 I propose that Balthasar’s model would benefit from an account of spiritual perception developing over time as a result of continued looking. Beauty can indeed overcome us in moments of unmistakable rapture, but it often operates on us much more subtly, and the fascination it elicits can inspire periods of sustained attention that only bear fruit with the passing of time. Beauty, according to this way of thinking, stimulates a form of spiritual practice that eventually yields an ability to see beyond the ordinary.35 I want to suggest that, when this practice of patient looking has been taught to us by beauty, it allows a new level of ‘letting appear’ to occur such that beautiful phenomena are seen on their own terms in their depth and richness. To look with sustained attention is to bracket one’s preconceived ideas about how the world appears, and it is to allow things to be shown as they will. All things may merit such patient looking, but beauty has a special ability to elicit such an attitude from the viewer. To place this idea in conversation with Balthasar’s views as described above, patient looking allows one to observe subtle features of the form that are not recognizable at first glance. The intricacies of beauty, on this understanding, take time to discern; knowledge of them involves a process in which depth slowly unfolds. Indeed, the very reason that beautiful things so often fascinate us is that their complexity exceeds our capacity to comprehend them in a single moment. Günter Figal’s recent work on aesthetics assists our inquiry along these lines.36 In Aesthetics as Phenomenology, Figal draws from and extends Kant’s aesthetics to claim that beauty presents a ‘decentred order’ to the human observer. In other words, the order beauty manifests to the viewer does not consist of a rigid, all-­ encompassing concept. Figal reminds his reader of Kant’s claim that ‘everything stiffly regular [has] something about it that is repugnant to taste’.37 As Figal characterizes Kant’s position, beautiful order is ‘more like a fabric than a firmly jointed construction’; it is never static, and the beauty of the thing is necessarily connected to the fluidity that it displays.38 The key claim for our purposes follows: 33  GL I, 418. 34  GL I, 249. 35  See Paul Gavrilyuk’s Chapter 2 in this volume. 36  Günter Figal, Aesthetics as Phenomenology: The Appearance of Things, trans. Jerome Veith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 37 Figal, Aesthetics as Phenomenology, 56. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, B 72; AA V, 242. 38 Figal, Aesthetics as Phenomenology, 56.

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222  Spiritual Perception and Beauty

Figure 13.1  Lewis Bowman, Transfiguration (2005).

beautiful order is so variable and irregular that no unifying concept can capture it. It is therefore ‘decentred’.39 On Figal’s reading of Kant, then, the object one finds  beautiful is manifestly more complex than the concept one might use to describe it, and it is precisely the object’s beauty that enables it to resist simple categorization. 39 Figal, Aesthetics as Phenomenology, 57.

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Mark M c Inroy  223 Crucially, Figal insists that one should not mistake decentredness for vagueness. A decentred order, in spite of its irregularity, is still an order. And, in keeping with our theme of patient looking, Figal holds, ‘It is simply a fact about decentered orders that they cannot be cognized at a glance, as it were. One only grasps them by getting involved with them and experiencing them—in a concentrated way and not without rigor—in the coherent multitude of their relations.’40 The fas­cin­ ation elicited by the beautiful leads us to inquire after the inexhaustible object of our perception. Beauty insists that we should not rest content with quick and easy categorization of our experience; instead, we must linger. Beauty demands time and commitment. Part of the problem, as intimated in Figal’s account, involves the ease with which we impose concepts on our experience of the world. In her essay, ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’, Iris Murdoch presents an encounter with beauty that addresses this very issue. Murdoch begins a brief auto­bio­graph­ ic­al account by describing herself, for an undisclosed reason, as being in an agitated state. As she explains, ‘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.’41 Murdoch regards this state as a frequent, if not pervasive feature of human existence: ‘Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, self-­pre-­occupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world.’42 However, her preoccupied self-­absorption evaporates when she beholds beauty. As she puts the change, ‘I observe a hovering kestrel [and] everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel.’43 In Murdoch’s account, the mental space she had used for self-­ preservation is freed up to be used in service of something else, namely, properly attending to the beautiful. Beauty, then, puts the preoccupied self on hold. Murdoch goes on to develop further the ‘unselfing’ of which she speaks in relation to art. To Murdoch, art ‘is a thing totally opposed to selfish obsession’.44 It involves ‘a perfection of form which invites unpossessive contemplation and resists absorption into the selfish dream life of the consciousness’.45 Art cannot be assimilated, according to this understanding, and precisely because of its intransigence, art draws the human observer out of him or herself. It will not budge, and so we must. In tones that intriguingly echo our treatment of Balthasar’s account of form, Murdoch maintains that, in this obstinacy, art ‘reveals to us aspects of our world which our ordinary dull dream-­consciousness is unable to see. Art pierces

40 Figal, Aesthetics as Phenomenology, 57. 41  Iris Murdoch, ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’, in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 363–85, at 369. 42  Murdoch, ‘The Sovereignty of Good’, 369. 43  Murdoch, ‘The Sovereignty of Good’, 369 (emphasis added). 44  Murdoch ‘The Sovereignty of Good’, 370. 45  Murdoch, ‘The Sovereignty of Good’, 370.

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224  Spiritual Perception and Beauty the veil and gives sense to the notion of a reality which lies beyond appearance.’46 Much lies beneath the surface-­level manifestations most immediately apparent to us as we go about our daily lives; art provokes us out of our somnolence such that we are aware of the depth that can be found in the world. As Murdoch pithily summarizes her view, ‘Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality.’47 In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry draws from Murdoch’s example of the hovering kestrel to claim that the encounter with beauty ‘decentres’ us, in her terms. In this confrontation with beauty, to Scarry, ‘it is as though one has ceased to be the hero or heroine in one’s own story and has become what in a folktale is called the “lateral figure” or “donor figure”’.48 Beauty moves us aside, and ‘we willingly cede our ground to the thing that stands before us’.49 Although we do not typically enjoy being decentred in such an unceremonious manner, when we encounter beauty we gladly suffer the demotion. This decentring sets the stage for a clearing out of our familiar habits of thinking and engaging with the world. In our ‘adjacent’ position, we see the world anew, from the perspective of someone less important, but more observant. Echoing Murdoch and Balthasar, Scarry explains that ‘when we come upon beautiful things . . . they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space’.50 Beauty entices us to give up our own concerns, and in so doing we are enabled to perceive beautiful phenomena at a new depth. Although the above figures do not develop models of spiritual perception per se, they do offer resources that can be extended to such an account. Building from the concerns of Figal, Murdoch, and Scarry, I suggest that the two distinct versions of decentring they advance expose the cost of overconfidence in our powers of recognition. Such epistemological bravado truncates the process of seeing. Beauty presents us with a finite form, but it also manifests an unfathomable depth, and it is not too much to say that in our ordinary perception of things we overlook an entire dimension of reality to which we are constantly being exposed. Beauty, then, prods our looking to go beyond the surface of things, and if we can open ourselves to what beauty has to offer, I maintain that we behold something more than the physical alone. Beauty presents a palpably superabundant reality to us, and its radiant plenitude is not adequately accounted for through the limited categories of corporeal sense perception. The model of spiritual perception as it has been developed here gives expression to this primal experience of beauty as exposing us to the ‘more’ that lies beneath surface appearances in the world. Spiritual perception, on this understanding, occurs less as a result of having a new capacity implanted into our sense faculties from without, and more by allowing something latent within us to grow. Beauty makes us drop more than just our 46  Murdoch, ‘The Sovereignty of Good’, 372. 47  Murdoch, ‘The Sovereignty of Good’, 373. 48  Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 113. 49 Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 112. 50 Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 114.

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Mark M c Inroy  225 guard, as the very cognitive structures with which we typically navigate the world are called into question and subdued. To a great extent, our capacity to perceive spiritually involves getting ourselves out of the way and simply tuning in to the reality that surrounds us. The growth of spiritual perception, then, occurs through an intricate interplay between the active effort of disciplined seeing and the passive ‘letting appear’ that is its goal.

On the Centrality of Spiritual Perception for Christian Theology As a second line of argument that responds to the questions posed at the outset of this chapter, we turn to a theological rationale for spiritual perception. In this case corporeal perception will be shown to be insufficient because the logic of the incarnation, when its aesthetic implications are fully developed, requires that the ‘invisible’ divinity of Christ be perceived by the human being. The Christian trad­ ition, of course, has historically maintained that there is an incorporeal realm in addition to the physical world. However, this proposal makes another level of claim in asserting that the incorporeal dimension shows itself to human beings despite its immateriality. In order to gain a sense of how far Christian theologians have gone to avoid the idea that Christ’s divinity appears to the human being, we look to Byzantine iconoclasm, specifically, the Christology expressed by the iconoclast emperor Constantine V (718–75). Constantine argues that even in the incarnation the divine nature of Christ remained ‘uncircumscribable’ (i.e. unable to be ‘written’ or encompassed), and that Christ therefore cannot be portrayed in his entirety because part of him, namely his divine nature, is categorically inaccessible to the senses. As Constantine puts the crucial point about Christ’s divine nature, ‘The fact that something is immaterial implies the consequence that it cannot be depicted, as it is without shape or form.’51 Constantine thus accuses iconophiles of the ‘Nestorian’ heresy of dividing Christ. In other words, according to the iconoclasts, any image of Christ would not be able to include the uncircumscribable divine nature, and only his human nature would be shown. Therefore, if Christ were depicted in an image, it would be as a mere creature, as though there were only a human nature in him. The issue carries over to treatments of spiritual perception, and it troubles our position with considerable sophistication: does only the human nature of Christ ‘show up’ in the world, giving itself to perception? If so, then Christ’s divinity would remain un-­manifested, with no possibility of being perceived.

51  PG 100, 232C. English translation in Christoph Schönborn, God’s Human Face: The Christ-­Icon (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 173.

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226  Spiritual Perception and Beauty In his efforts at refuting this argument, Theodore the Studite summons an a­ esthetically rich Christology that centres on the claim that the iconoclasts have misunderstood the communication of idioms. Specifically, Theodore holds that the locus of the communicatio is not in the natures themselves, but instead in the ‘connection’, as he puts it, of the natures: ‘In the body of the Lord, in virtue of the  connection of the natures, the divinity . . . is subject to the circumscription of the flesh. How else could it be, given that it is subject to touch, and apprehension, and sight?’52 In the incarnation, then, the Word has circumscribed himself in his union with the human nature. Thomas Cattoi helpfully expresses Theodore’s point as follows, ‘The locus of the communicatio idiomatum is the hypostasis, and as a result what we see in the icons is Christ’s hypostasis dwelling in a glorified humanity.’53 One sees Christ as a whole, and Christ is divine. One does not see divinity, therefore, except through the hypostasis of Christ. If not for the incarnation, the divine nature would remain inaccessible to the senses. As Theodore further reflects on the relationship between divinity and humanity he envisions: ‘Christ is depicted in images, and what is invisible is seen; he who in his proper divinity exists without circumscription accepts the natural circumscription of our body.’54 In the incarnation, Christ ‘remains on the pinnacle of his proper divinity’, as Theodore puts it, while condescending to the circumscription of the body. And yet, although he appears in a body, he is no mere man. As Jaroslav Pelikan mem­ or­ably expresses Theodore’s position: ‘The humanity of Jesus depicted in the icons . . . was a humanity suffused with the presence of divinity: it was, in this sense, the “deified” body of Christ that was being portrayed.’55 Theodore uses these intricate Christological arguments to insist that icons are not simply permitted; they are actually required by the logic of the incarnation. Anything less fails to appreciate the significance of the hypostatic union, for Christ’s hypostasis is undivided from his deified body, which can and should be depicted in images. I suggest that the logic of Theodore’s aesthetic Christology extends quite nat­ur­ al­ly to spiritual perception, and it lends a formidable theological rationale to the constructive position this chapter outlines. Indeed, if one claims that divinity remains categorically inaccessible to the senses (and that perception has only to do with the physical), Theodore would insist that this viewpoint fails to appreciate the union that was achieved in the hypostasis of Christ. In Christ’s person, divinity itself is shown. Given that Christ’s divine nature is made manifest, the next logical step involves claiming that a form of perception that exceeds the physical is required in order to pick up on this self-­showing divinity. 52 Theodore the Studite, Refutations of the Iconoclasts, I, 12, in Writings on Iconoclasm, trans. Thomas Cattoi (New York and Mahwah, NJ: The Newman Press, 2015), 45–119. 53  Thomas Cattoi, ‘Introduction’, in Theodore the Studite, Writings on Iconoclasm, 1–44, at 30. 54  Theodore the Studite, Refutations of the Iconoclasts, I, 2. 55  Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 92–3.

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Mark M c Inroy  227 Through this extension of Theodore’s Christology, then, we see that spiritual perception is best understood not as an obscure aspect of the Christian tradition, although it may have been relatively unknown at certain stages in the history of the church. Instead, Theodore’s Christology implies that spiritual perception belongs at the very heart of Christian theology. After all, as Theodore himself insists, God did not choose to be known merely as an abstract idea. Instead, the manner in which God chose to be definitively revealed is in the person of Christ, whose human and divine natures have shown up in the world to be perceived. There is necessarily an aesthetic dimension to Christology, and thus to Christian theology as a whole. In the person of Christ, God has become known to the senses, but the corporeal senses alone are unable to perceive the whole of Christ. Spiritual perception is therefore indispensable to God’s revelation being received by the human being.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that, for two different sets of reasons, beauty and aesthetic experience can be used to posit a spiritual aspect of perception that goes beyond the corporeal. With our treatment of Balthasar we saw that beauty involves bringing disparate elements of the form into a unity, and the forces or ‘ties’ that join the form’s material components together are displayed to the human being, despite their immateriality. As we turned to Figal, Murdoch, and Scarry, we noted that beautiful objects resist easy categorization, and that they encourage a practice of ‘looking and letting appear’, which invites and enables the viewer to look with patience and eventually see beyond the physical. Last, we noted that the aesthetically charged Christology presented by Theodore the Studite leads one to maintain that Christ’s divine nature manifests itself in spite of its incorporeality, thus situating spiritual perception in the very heart of Christian theology.

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Afterword The spiritual senses and human embodiment John Cottingham In whole swathes of our contemporary philosophical culture it is taken for granted that science provides the only serious intellectual grounding for our beliefs, and the ruling ­doctrine of ‘naturalism’ is liable to dismiss any talk of ‘perceiving things divine’ as ‘spooky’ and therefore beyond the pale. Against this background, one cannot but admire the ­courage of a ­volume that aims, in the words of the editors, to ‘restore spiritual perception to its rightful place in phil­oso­phy . . .’ (p. xvii). Yet what struck me above all in reading this rich and varied collection of papers is how far they belie the crude prejudices of many secu­lar­ists about what it is to subscribe to a religious worldview. To be sure, the reader will find ­frequent references to the divine, but the focus of detailed attention, again and again, is on how we experience the world—not how we apprehend some ‘spooky’ other realm, but how we encounter this world, the world around us, in all its mystery and wonder. The abiding impression from these essays is that the spiritual senses tradition, or at least a significant portion of it, is not about employing some ghostly faculty of the soul to contemplate an immaterial realm, but on how, in episodes of profound significance, embodied human beings make empirical contact with this world. ‘Empirical’ comes, of course, from the Greek word empeiria, experience, and one of the lessons from these papers is that experience is not the unproblematic passive reception of ‘sense-­data’ beloved of certain crude but mercifully now generally discredited philo­soph­ ic­al theories of perception, but rather is an engaged, attentive, encounter with reality, an encounter facilitated by rich, culturally embedded schemas of interpretation. John Greco in Chapter  1 points out that perceivers are ‘often equipped with religious schemas—­ religious scripts and personae that help them to interpret their world’ (p. 17). Are these schemas no more that distorting myths? Well, in some people’s eyes they might be. But, as Greco’s analogy with moral schemas shows, we should allow the possibility that such interpretative structures may enable perception rather than distorting it. Another relevant analogy here is with aesthetic and artistic perception, aspects of which are explored in several of these essays (chapters 2, 4, and 13). If I may venture an example of my own, in Rembrandt’s etching The Good Samaritan (1633) our experience of the work is mediated by our bringing with us a ‘script’ (to use Greco’s useful terminology) when we approach it. Rembrandt chooses to portray not the famous rescue of the robbed victim on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, but the later scene where the Samaritan hands over the wounded traveller to the care of an innkeeper. Our knowledge of the story, and no doubt prior reflection on its meaning, enable us to see reflected in the innkeeper’s face as he listens to the Samaritan (whose own face is occluded) something of the deep humanity and compassion of the protagonist. And at the same time we see on the somewhat fastidious face of a wealthy onlooker, casually leaning out at one of the windows of the inn, an implicit reproach for our own neglect in the face of the suffering that daily confronts

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230 Afterword

Rembrandt Van Rijn, “The good Samaritan” (etching). us (compare Moser’s acute insights in Chapter  11 on the ‘convicting’ role of spiritual perception). The aesthetic beauty of Rembrandt’s execution is here interfused with its moral beauty, and our perception, formed and shaped by our previous knowledge of the story, is now given an extra dimension which lifts it up to the sublime. But is it spiritual? Douglas Christie’s apt question in his discussion in Chapter 12 of a passage from Coleridge’s journal from 1803 presses upon us at this point, with what I take to be an implicit associated question as to whether the whole phenomenon of spiritual perception might be reductively translated into secular or humanistic terms. Well, the Coleridge passage in question is a description of the natural world, an ecstatic account of the the vividly chan­ ging morning sky seen on a coach ride to London. But crucially as Christie observes, ‘one senses . . . an effort to perceive the world, and to reflect on that perception in a way that allows one to feel and understand the world and one’s place in the world in a new way. It is a dynamic, creative process in which perception and reflection move together to open up new possibilities for life in the world’ (p. 202). The labels ‘aesthetic’, and even ‘moral’, now seem only part of the story; for what is glimpsed is a deeper meaning, a radiance that urges us to a profound sense of our dependency, and to joyful responses of gratitude and awe. Something that emerges here, and in many of these essays, is that the spiritual senses tradition is often not best understood in terms of some esoteric and specialized set of attributes and activities pertaining to pure spirit, but rather as referring to something

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Afterword  231 which (though it may resist reductive explanation in naturalistic terms, and may in an important way ‘go beyond the physical’, as McInroy argues in Chapter 13) is nevertheless very much part of our birthright as embodied human creatures. As Catherine Pickstock points out in Chapter 8, in her exploration of liturgical practice as one of the most im­port­ ant vehicles for spiritual perception, our embodied nature, our corporeality, is crucial to how liturgy operates: ‘worshippers are regarded as making a response of incarnate souls—a response of the heart—to the incarnate God. This response is immediately inscribed in their bodies and requires no extrinsic interpretation’ (p. 131). Or as Boyd Coolman puts it in Chapter 9, commenting on the intensely sensuous representations of Christ traditionally accompanying Eucharistic worship in the Latin West, ‘Spiritual perception is often contrasted with physical perception, but the mode of perception advocated here is not a ­distinct, non-­physical mode of perception. Rather, it is a mode of perception that strives for, and ultimately requires, a disposition and posture on the part of one experiencing the body of another that could well be called spiritual, in that it is compassionate, intimate, mutual, and vulnerable, that recognizes the sacred beauty of the human body, as something to be cherished, fostered, even revered as the holy creation that it is’ (p. 152). But if the spiritual senses belong to us not qua angelic creatures, but qua human beings, embodied creatures of flesh and blood, what is also true is that, because of our human weakness and corruptibility, a long process of askesis, of training, is characteristically required if our capacity for spiritual perception is to develop properly and to flourish. As Mark Spencer points out in Chapter 4, spiritual perception is not simply a ‘cognitive act in which one gains some information about God’, but involves ‘not only knowledge but all aspects of persons, including our emotions, bodies, and ethical relations’ (p. 51). This in turn links up with an important point to which Frederick Aquino draws attention in Chapter 3, namely that ‘what and how we perceive is grounded in the formation of a stable and properly disposed habit of mind’ (p. 42). To be sure, spiritual perception can be ­transformative, and indeed that is surely the hallmark of authentic spirituality, but the trans­ form­ation is not, as it were, a one-­way process, automatically imposed from without. Hence (Aquino again) ‘in the case of Cassian’s account of spiritual perception, purity of heart plays a key role in fostering a stable and discerning habit of mind, and so it is not surprising that various degrees of perceptual judgements correspond to the level of perceptual readiness’ (p. 50). The precious fruits of such perceptual readiness are thrown into sharp relief when we reflect, as Sarah Coakley does in her powerful contribution (Chapter 10), on its opposite, the perceptual blindness or darkness of vision that may lie at the root of certain kinds of unconscious and systemic racism—a darkness (in Shulamith Firestone’s phrase) ‘so deep as to be invisible’. In her earlier study for a predecessor volume on the spiritual senses, Coakley underlined how sense perception is ‘a precious and indispensable bridge between soul and body’;1 what her new essay invites us to consider, drawing on texts from John of the Cross, is how the effects of sin may affect us ‘all the way down’, not only in respect of the clouding of intellect and debilitating of the will familiar from Augustinian accounts of the Fall, but even contaminating ‘the perceptual senses, visual, auditory and tactile’ (p. 163). The results of this analysis should provide a challenge to what can often seem rather blandly optimistic secular accounts of virtue, rooted in the Aristotelian notion of proper habits of upbringing. What is suggested instead by Coakley’s reading of John of the Cross is the need for something altogether more radical, a wholesale purgation or purification of

1  ‘Gregory the Great’, Ch. 2 of Paul Gavrilyuk and S. Coakley (eds), The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving. God in Western Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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232 Afterword the sensual realm. Yet here again the indispensability of the bodily dimension is reaffirmed, for the sought-­after goal is one where the human sensorium is ‘not decried or rejected . . . but destined for the fullest and most joyous transformation’ (p. 168). To return, finally, to the editors’ goal of offering a philosophical rehabilitation of the spiritual senses tradition, I would venture to suggest that this is accomplished in this volume not through any formal vindication of the epistemic credentials of spiritual perception, at least if epistemic credentials are understood in terms of the kind of ‘spectator evidence’ (to use Paul Moser’s term)2 of the kind that might appeal to any detached observer. The methodology, rather, is one that aims to engage the reader on many levels, laying out in all their rich detail manifold examples of the transformative power of spiritual experience, and examining how such experience is underpinned by the systematic cultivation of the relevant sensibilities, through liturgy and praxis, habit and training, bodily comportment and mental attentiveness. We do well here to recognize the value of the later Wittgenstein’s insights into how meaning cannot be grasped in abstraction from the form of life that sustains it. If we approach the phenomenon of spiritual perception from the outside, as detached scrutineers (as perhaps a certain kind of anthropologist might), it will be no surprise if our findings fuel scepticism about the very idea of a divine reality that is tracked, or glimpsed in spiritual perception; indeed, in so far as ‘to perceive’ and ‘to sense’ are success verbs (to use Gilbert Ryle’s terminology),3 the very appropriateness of such verbs may be questioned, unless accompanied by caveat terms like ‘purportedly’. But to enter the form of life, to allow oneself to be ‘porous’, in Martha Nussbaum’s apt epithet,4 to reflect attentively, as the chapters in this book do, on the many layers of engagement and involvement that have come down to us in the spiritual senses tradition—emotional and intellectual, moral and aesthetic, behavioural and meditative, attentive and receptive—is to become acquainted with a vast body of rich experience whose deep significance for the participants cannot easily be denied. Those involved in the tradition are in no doubt that what is discerned in such experiences is divine. But the discernment in question is radically different from the kinds of process whereby scientists clinically assess their data. Spiritual perception, as the tradition attests, is not straightforwardly activated by an external stimulus after the fashion of catching sight of a red traffic light, but is itself the fruit of a process of moral and spiritual change in the perceiver. So the final moral of this collection may be that, for all that academic research loves to wear the mantle of neutrality and impartial assessment, the principal and perhaps the only definitive way to evaluate the epistemic credentials of the spiritual senses tradition will be to follow the prescribed path of askesis, and to open oneself, in love and humility, to the possibility that what is not yet seen may finally make itself manifest, ‘in so far as the eye of the darkened intellect can bear it’.5

2 See Paul Moser, The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 47. 3  Gilbert Ryle, Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954). 4  Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 282. 5  quantum caligantis ingenii . . .acies ferre poterit. The phrase is René Descartes’s, from the final para­ graph of the Third Meditation (Meditationes de prima philosophia, 1641).

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Index Aavitsland, Kristin Bliksrud  121 Adams, Marilyn McCord  159 aesthetics  29, 59, 62, 132, 164, 212, 215–223 Abraham, William J.  48, 57, 68 Agamben, Giorgio  121–122 Albert the Great  133 Alcoff, Linda  171–172 Alexander Essebiensis  90 Alexander of Ashby  90 Alexander of Hales  87, 90, 143 Alston, William  3, 17, 46, 51, 69, 102, 106, 110, 178 analogy  3, 11, 20, 104, 214, 229 angels  35, 70, 90, 103, 123, 125, 128 anthropology  72, 77, 92, 98, 122, 218 Aquinas, Thomas  66, 117–118, 121–123, 126, 129, 148, 215, 217, 219 Aquino, Frederick D.  8, 59, 231 Ardens, Ralph  83–84 Aristotle  117, 122, 131, 215–217 Arsić, Branka  205 asceticism  34–50, 60, 62–65 Astell, A. W.  127, 133 Athanassakis, A. N.  124 attention  9–10, 14, 25–26, 33, 39–43, 49, 52, 59, 72, 130–131, 171–179, 197, 200, 202–204, 211, 221, 224, 229 Audi, Robert  40 Augustine  83–87, 92–94, 126, 129–130, 144, 163, 219 Auyero, Javier  195 Austin, Mary  205–206 Baehr, Jason  47 Bailey, Cass  154 Baldwin, James  154, 174 Balthasar, Hans Urs von  28, 32, 62, 212–227 baptism  34, 58, 124, 127, 142–145 Bartlett, Bruce  155 Battaly, Heather  174 Bayne, T.  12 beauty  20, 22, 25, 29–33, 46, 52–53, 57, 84, 95, 127, 133, 152, 212–227, 230–231 beatitude  45, 47, 81–98 Beecroft, Julian  23

Bergquist, Anna  39 bias  14, 33, 38, 47, 153–156, 160, 169–172 Blake, William  196, 201, 209 Block, Ned  13 Blum, Lawrence A.  40 Blumenfeld, B.  125 Bodenhausen, Galen  39, 48 Bonaventure  84–87, 90, 121 Boosalis, Harry  69 Bossuet, Cardinal  68 Boulnois, Oliver  126 Brandom, Robert  102, 110 Brewer, William F.  8 Brogaard, Berit  12 Brownstein, Michael  160 Buc, Phillipe  121 Burkert, W.  124 Bynum, Caroline Walker  92 Calvin, John  161, 165 Canetti, E.  135 Casel, O.  124–125, 127 Cassian, John  37–50, 231 Catholicism  60, 70, 83, 141, 146, 165 Cattoi, Thomas  226 causation  4, 12, 178, 187 Chaucer, Geoffrey  127 Chrétien, Jean-Louis  120, 129–136 Christie, Douglas E.  195, 230 christology  91, 97, 225–227 church  33–35, 60–61, 74–77, 82, 86–87, 119–120, 124–127, 129–145, 150–154, 204, 227 Clark, Austen  12–13 Clark, J. G.  127 Clark, Kenneth  20 Clarke, Katherine A.  207 Coakley, Sarah  3, 45, 49–50, 166, 212, 231 cognition  7–10, 12–15, 19, 39, 71–72, 88, 90, 95–96 cognitive penetration  7–12, 26, 159, 162, 172 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  200–202, 230 colour  4, 8–10, 21–25, 30, 52–53, 106, 154–155, 159 communication  21, 91–92, 97, 213, 226 community  60–61, 65, 70, 112, 134, 141, 151, 172, 182, 187, 193, 195

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234 Index consciousness  12, 24, 39, 59, 125, 167, 172, 175, 193, 200, 202–204, 210, 223 contemplation  30, 34, 42–47, 89–90, 94, 103, 116, 119, 126–127, 131, 148, 153–176, 223 contemplative practices  43–50 Coolman, Boyd Taylor  61, 63, 140 Coombs, Marie Theresa  45 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille  25 Cosmopoulos, M. B.  124 Cottingham, John  49, 166 Council of Trent  142, 144 Courbet, Gustave  21–22, 30 Cowan, Robert  39 Crane, Tim  166 Crawford, Matthew B.  38–39, 41 Crawford, M. T.  159 Curran, Tim  40 Daston, Lorraine  172 Davies, Oliver  62 Davis, Caroline Franks  8, 37, 41, 48, 79 demons  70–74, 180 Descartes, René  68, 79–80, 232 desire  7–8, 36, 43, 45, 47, 75, 84, 129, 141, 144, 146, 159–164, 167–168, 203, 209 Detienne, M.  133 Dickie, Edgard P.  188 discernment  33, 38, 41–48, 67–68, 80, 101–120, 137, 177–192, 232 divine hiddenness  166, 168, 177–192 divine self-manifestation  178–186 Dretske, Fred  12 Drayson, Zoe  6 Dunlop, Francis  63 Dunn, James  184 early stage of perception  15, 25 ecology 193–210 Edwards, Jonathan  32, 80 education  40, 153, 155 Ellis, Fiona  199–200 embodiment  90–92, 98, 117, 135, 193, 208–209, 229–232 emotion  12, 28–29, 39–40, 51, 77–78, 138, 169–170, 172, 231–232 epistemology  3–4, 15–17, 40, 42, 45, 47, 67–69, 72, 79, 98, 102, 162, 166, 170–176, 189, 232 Ervine, Simon J.  68 eschatology  45–46, 63, 81–98, 125, 151–152, 195 Eucharist  58, 118, 121, 127, 132–133, 142–151, 231 Evagrius Ponticus  43, 94 evil  33, 67–80, 127, 141, 159, 161–162, 191, 207 evaluative attitude  177, 180

Farmer, H. H.  180 faculties  50, 72–74, 77, 79, 102, 104, 163–164, 213–214, 218, 224 Fan, Jin  39 feeling  17, 52–66, 76, 88, 186, 200, 203, 206 Feminist Epistemology  156, 171–172 Figal, Günter  213, 221–224, 227 Fingarette, Herbert  175 Firestone, Chaz  7–8 Firestone, Shulamith  156 Fitzmyer, Joseph  184 Flynn, Gabriel  83 Fricker, Miranda  18, 173–174 Gadamer, Hans-Georg  119 Gaissmaier, Wolfgang  14 Gallagher, Timothy M.  80 Gallison, Peter  172 Gavrilyuk, Paul L.  3, 58, 212, 221, 229 Giono, Jean  207–208 Girard, René  160 God perceiving  3, 37–38, 44, 46, 48, 57, 63, 101, 177–183, 190–191, 229 presence of  20, 31–34, 40, 45, 47, 58, 189, 214, 226 Giono, Jean  207–208 Gigerenzer, Gerd  14 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  215–217 Goldie, Peter  39–40 Goldstone, Brian  112 Goldstone, Robert L.  38, 40 grace  34–36, 43–44, 50, 63, 69, 80, 86–88, 93, 97, 127, 132–133, 141–144, 150–151, 164, 166, 170, 212–214, 221 Greco, John  18, 20, 25, 37, 40, 59, 72, 108, 229 Gregory of Nyssa  195 Guardini, R.  125, 128, 131–132 Guilielmus Durandus  129 habits  37, 41–45, 64, 78, 109, 112, 121, 139, 167, 174, 193, 213, 224, 231–232 Hamilton, George Heard  31 Häring, Bernard  186 Harmless, William  43, 45 Hauerwas, Stanley  112 hearing  17, 21, 31, 36, 40, 83–90, 103–109, 112, 119, 130, 148, 214, 218 Hector, Kevin  109 Helm, Paul  161 Heidegger, Martin  108 Herveus of Bourg-Dieu  86 heuristics  14–15, 72 Hildebert of Lavardin  86

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Index  235 Hildebrand, Dietrich von  52, 59, 62–63, 65 Hodder, Allan  199–200, 203–204 holiness  32, 46, 53–66, 143, 145–146, 150–151, 185 Horowitz, Alexandra  172 Hugenberg, Kurt  39, 48 Hugh of St. Victor  86 humility  35, 50, 74–75, 232 hymns  83–84, 124 iconography  64, 70, 213, 226 Idealism  56, 59, 64, 204 identity  132, 141, 156, 163, 199, 204, 206 illumination  12–13, 34, 43, 45, 94, 119 Impressionism  22, 28 Incarnation, the  90–91, 121, 123, 126–129, 132, 213, 225–226 individuality  15, 33, 61, 118–120, 126, 133–137, 143, 150, 155, 174, 210 inference  4–16, 19, 68, 79, 102, 107–108, 214 information  6–7, 13–16, 38–41, 44, 48, 50–51, 55, 60, 69, 115, 189, 197, 231 intellect  75, 77–78, 90, 95, 126–127, 163, 231–232 intelligibility  28, 64, 70, 93, 97, 108, 114, 118, 199, 216–217 integral ecology  193–194 interpretation  4, 11, 16–20, 33, 43, 59, 79, 101–115, 134, 157, 173, 188–189, 229 intuition  11, 52, 65–68, 83, 197, 211 James, William  3, 17, 199 Jennings, Carolyn Dicey  39 John of the Cross  162–175, 231 Johnson, Galen A.  29 Jørgensen, Hans Henrik Lohfert  121–122, 129 Kahneman, D.  14 Kallenberg, Brad J.  166 Kandinsky, Wassily  20–36 Kant, Immanuel  11, 70, 221–222 Käsemann, Ernst  184 Kaza, Stephanie  196 Kelly, Christopher J.  43 Kelsey, David  101, 113–114 Knowledge  5, 9, 14–15, 19, 34, 36, 38, 42–47, 51, 67–69, 110–111, 127, 138, 165, 183, 185, 203, 205, 207–208, 221, 224, 229–232 Kuhn, Thomas  25–26 Kukla, Rebecca  171–175 Landry, David H.  40 Laudato Si  138, 194, 197, 198, 211 Laugerud, Henning  121

language  3, 70, 81, 101–102, 119, 123, 199, 200, 206 learning  39–40, 42–43, 59–60, 149, 174, 176, 195 Leopold, Aldo  197, 209 Lewis, C. I.  11 Lewis, C. S.  67, 72–74, 92 Lewis, David  106 liturgy  34, 117–152, 231–232 Livingstone, David N.  160 Logos  118, 126 Lombard, Peter  86–87 Löser, Werner  220 Lossky, Vladimir  36 Louth, A.  125 love  17, 43, 50, 54–59, 61, 63, 65–66, 76, 82, 85, 88–89, 96, 129–130, 134, 146, 151, 160, 164, 165, 167–170, 176 - 192, 194, 197, 211, 219, 232 Lubac, Henri de  119 Lyons, Jack  8, 48 Manent, Pierre  137 Malebranche, Nicholas  68 Maravall, José Antonio  128 Marion, Jean-Luc  26, 64, 114–115 Marsrour, Farid  12 McCandliss, Bruce D.  39 McDowell, John  105, 107, 109, 172, 174 McClendon, James  187 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  28–29, 58 meditation  43, 46, 90, 121, 123, 129, 136, 140, 146–147, 151, 201 metaphysics  62, 70, 109, 118, 123–124, 160, 216–218 McGuighan, Colin M.  166 McInroy, Mark  32, 231 McIntosh, Mark  48 McPherson, David  167 McWhorter, John  155 Medina, José  175 Mikalson, J. D.  124 mind  3–4, 7, 11–12, 29, 34, 36–37, 39, 41–50, 55–58, 65, 74–75, 77, 80, 82, 85–89, 93–94, 117–123, 126, 128, 132, 139, 144, 147, 172, 180, 190, 196, 206, 208, 210, 223, 231 mindful naturalism  199, 204 mind of Christ  82, 85–88, 139, 144, 150–151, 181 Moffett, Charles S.  24 Monet, Claude  20–36 morality  5, 7, 14, 16–18, 19, 32–33, 37, 44, 54, 58, 66, 68, 71, 73, 82, 145, 153, 155–156, 159–160, 162–176, 177–192, 194–198, 201, 211, 229–230, 232 Moroney, Stephen K.  161

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236 Index Morrow, Maria C.  139, 146 Morton, Timothy  196, 199–200 Moser, Paul K.  185, 189, 230, 232 Mulhall, Stephen  172 Mulder, Jack  163 Mullainathan, Sendhil  154 Murdoch, Iris  171, 213, 223–224, 227 Murphy, Larry G.  162 Murray, Paul D.  83 music  29, 35, 105, 119, 129, 203 mysticism  97, 207 Nanay, Bence  13 nature  21–22, 25, 30, 33, 46, 106, 132, 138, 193–211, 215 Nemeck, Francis Kelly  45 Neunhauser, B.  125 New Testament  32, 81–82, 140, 150, 179, 181 Nicholsen, Shierry Weber  194 Nietzsche, Friedrich  28 Nixon, Rob  195 Nisbett, Richard  15 Noon, Patrick  33 normativity  51, 53–56, 67–68, 81, 97, 106–108, 121 nous  82, 88 nouvelle théologie 83 Nussbaum, Martha  232 objectivity  55, 93, 172–173 O’Connor, Flannery  43 Oppenheimer, D. M.  14 Origen  83, 95, 117–120, 129–130, 195, 214, 219–220 Orthodox Christianity  34, 126 Paul, Pamela  138 Paul the Apostle  32, 68, 81, 124, 134–135, 139, 143, 181, 183–185, 187, 190, 191 Palamas, Gregory  66 paradigms  25–27, 103–105, 112, 116, 141, 149, 155 participation  88, 123–124, 135, 141–146, 152, 194, 203, 206, 211 Pascal, Blaise  123 Peacock, Christopher  12 Pelikan, Jaroslav  226 perception aesthetic  27–28, 30–33, 35–36 awareness 105–111 beliefs  6, 8, 13, 40, 47–48 bodily  97, 212 development/training of  20–50, 68, 169, 219

distortion  18–19, 21–22, 30, 116, 153, 155–156, 159–160, 162, 164, 169–170, 172, 175, 229 judgement  10, 15, 18–19, 38–42, 44, 47–50, 73, 231 moral  5, 7, 16–17, 20, 40, 167 of God  46, 48, 57, 177–183 physical  126, 137, 152, 218–220, 231 recognition  10, 38, 108–115 Perry, Lilla Cabot  23 personhood  57, 60 Peter the Chanter  120, 131 Petersen, Nils Holger  121–122, 134 phenomenology  51, 52, 55–57, 65–66, 107–109, 114–115, 221 philosophy  6, 11, 12, 68–69, 71, 162, 165, 172, 229 Pickstock, Catherine  122, 231 Plantinga, Alvin  161 poetry  90, 164, 170, 196, 199, 202, 211 pornography 138–152 Potter, Elizabeth  171–172 Platonism  28, 119, 134, 171 Pope Benedict XVI  145, 150 Pope Francis  138, 193, 197–198 Posner, Michael I.  39 Poulain, Augustin  213–214 power  21, 25, 28–34, 49, 53, 55, 62, 68, 82, 85, 93–94, 117, 121, 126–127, 151–156, 159, 162–163, 170–171, 173–175, 178–179, 184, 187, 190, 196, 199, 201–202, 208, 212, 216- 217, 220, 224, 232 practice  35–36, 38, 40, 46, 49, 52, 62, 106, 111–113, 115–117, 121, 136–137, 139, 141, 145–146, 149, 152, 172, 193, 195–196, 198–200, 202–203, 205, 208, 211–213, 221, 227, 231 prayer  32, 42–43, 46, 49, 74–75, 77–78, 122, 137, 164, 166–167, 197 prejudice  29, 159–161, 169, 172–173 Prevot, Andrew  164 Price, Richard  12 Protestantism  70, 141, 165 psychology  15–16, 25, 67, 72, 102, 156 purity of heart  37–50, 232 racism  153–176, 231 Rahner, Karl  213–214 Ratzinger, Joseph  145, 150 Raz, Amir  39 reality  4, 6, 7, 14, 19–22, 31, 48–49, 56–57, 64–65, 71, 74, 77, 80, 88, 118–119, 122–123, 131, 138, 140, 150, 188–190, 191, 194–196, 197–198, 200, 204, 206, 214, 219, 224–225, 229, 232

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 19/11/21, SPi

Index  237 reason  69–70, 94, 111, 118–120, 127 reconciliation  141, 145, 151 relationship  42, 88, 111, 134, 136, 139, 181–182, 184–185, 193–198, 202, 207, 210–211 religion  60, 73, 74, 124, 132–133, 165, 199–200 restoration  117–119, 125, 137, 152, 164, 195 resurrection  81–84, 92–93, 136, 141, 143–144, 152 revelation  17, 45, 57, 69, 71–72, 115, 124, 167, 212, 218–219, 227 Ricoeur, Paul  207 Rigby, Cathy  199 Roberts, Robert C.  39 Romanticism  33, 56, 194, 208 Roque, Dalton  211 Ross, Lee  15 Richard of St. Victor  89 Rilke, Rainer Maria  195, 200 Riopelle, Christopher  33 ritual  34, 117–118, 120–122, 124, 128, 131–133, 136 Rupert of Deutz  133 Ruskin, John  23–25, 36 Ryle, Gilbert  232 sacrament  34, 58, 120, 127–128, 130, 133–134, 141–142, 144–145, 148, 150–151 saints  35, 52, 54, 59–60, 62–65, 82, 86–87, 130 Savoy, Lauret  195 Sarisky, Darren  83 Scarry, Elaine  213, 224, 227 scepticism  79–80, 191, 232 Scheler, Max  51–66 schema  15–19, 25, 36, 73, 229 schema theory  15–16, 19, 25, 72–73 Schneider, Sandra  199 Scholl, Brian J. E.  7–8 Schönborn, Christoph  225 Schreiner, Susan E.  165 science  4–6, 9–12, 19, 155, 172, 229 Scott, Lisa S.  40, 71 script theory  15–17, 72–73, 229 scripture  20, 31–34, 46, 71–72, 101–116, 119–120, 130, 134, 141 Scruton, Roger  69–70 Searle, John  106 Second Vatican Council  141–142, 144–145, 150–152 Sellars, Wilfrid  102 self  166–167, 169, 171, 203–206, 213, 223 selective attention  26, 38, 48, 162 sex  63, 78, 139, 144, 146, 149 sexuality  76, 139, 143, 146

sensation  85–86, 92–94, 96, 102, 104, 117, 119, 120, 125–126, 128–129, 130–132, 136, 214 senses physical  85, 88–89, 91, 96, 117, 131, 140, 143 spiritual  84–88, 95–98, 117–118, 120, 129–130, 134, 137, 163, 212–214, 218–219, 221, 229–232 Shah, A. K.  14 shape  4, 8–10, 12, 21, 23, 106, 111, 122, 202, 216, 218, 225 Sheen, Fulton  147 Sherman, Nancy  40 Siegel, Lee  144 Siegel, Susanna  12, 13, 166, 172 Siewert, Charles  12 sight  21, 24, 30–31, 36, 82, 85–87, 96, 103–104, 122, 129, 132, 139, 148–149, 159, 206, 214, 226, 232 Silva, José Filipe  102 sin  34, 143–145, 147, 159–176, 186, 213 Skinnebach, Laura Katrine  121, 129 smell  84, 86, 95–97, 129, 214 Smith, James M.  187 Snyder, Jon  141 Sommer, Tobias  39 Son, Ji Yi  40 Sosa, Ernest  47, 174 sound  4, 21, 108–109, 197, 206 soul  70–71, 83–88, 90–92, 94–97, 120, 129, 130–137, 146, 163–164, 166, 167, 169, 182, 193, 214–215, 229, 231 Spencer, Mark K.  26, 36, 40, 63–65, 231 spirit  50, 63–65, 90–91, 93, 118, 122, 164–167, 230 spiritual body  81, 92–93 spirituality  41, 45, 48, 69, 74, 76, 78, 97, 135, 163, 199–200, 231 Sponsel, Leslie E.  195 Steinberg, Leo  143–144 Stewart, Columbo  42–43, 45, 46, 50, 135 Stump, Eleonore  19, 166–167 subjectivity  17, 22, 42, 48, 53–54, 77, 206, 218, 220 subject-object relations  3–19 Swistun, Debora Alejandra  195 synaesthesia  117, 120–122, 131, 133 Tanaka, James W.  40 taste  52, 83–84, 86, 90, 96–97, 133, 148, 206, 214 temptation  73, 77, 126–127, 147 Teresa of Avila  80, 163, 165, 168 therapy  140, 145–150, 169 Theodore the Studite  213, 226–227

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238 Index theological aesthetics  212, 215, 218 theology  56, 68, 81, 83, 98, 123, 159, 162, 164, 189, 213, 227 Thoreau, Henry David  204–205 thought  36, 45, 121, 123, 132, 189, 197, 216 touch  16, 84, 86–87, 90, 96–97, 122, 125, 133, 148–149, 167, 197, 214, 226 tradition  33, 68, 71–72, 77, 80, 93, 96–97, 117, 129, 131, 137, 143, 162–163, 165–166, 173, 225, 227, 229, 230–231 transformation  28, 35, 46, 49, 63, 94, 120, 127, 140, 163–168, 170, 190, 197, 210, 218, 232 transformative practices  49, 63, 121, 146 trinity  34, 165, 168 Tye, Michael  12 Tversky, A.  14 Tucker, Chris  40 value perception  51–53, 56, 59–60, 64 Vernant, J.  133 vice  44, 71, 75, 77–78, 162, 168, 170, 174–175 Vincens, Leigh  160 virtue  34, 37–41, 43–44, 47–50, 54, 59, 68, 74–75, 78, 121, 133, 167–168, 170, 174, 231 visio Dei  83, 91, 93

visions  35, 80, 103 vocation  55, 136, 151 Wainwright, William J.  58, 159 Waldstein, Michael  40, 63, 215–217 Watanabe, Takeo  39, 40 Watzl, Sebastian  39, 172 Webb, Heather  130 will  8, 74, 76–77, 130, 135, 161, 163–164, 167, 179–186, 188, 231 William of Auxerre  93, 95–96 William of St. Thierry  85–86 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  131, 158, 198 Wolterstorff, Nicholas  101, 106 Wood, William  175 worldview  55, 59–60, 62, 139, 239 worship  20, 34, 65, 117, 124–125, 128–129, 131, 133–137, 145–146, 148, 177, 179, 183, 190, 231 Wynn, Mark  29, 39–40, 46–47, 166 Yadav, Sameer  33, 106, 109, 115, 229 Yotsumoto, Yuko  65 Yrjönsuuri, Mikko  128 Zuurdeeg, Willem  188