For several years, I’ve had a contract with Oxford University Press to write a monograph on themes of creation, desire, gender, and language, in dialogue with Pope Francis’s theology. Each year, I say I’ll deliver the manuscript by the end of the year, and every year I’m overwhelmed by the challenge of where to begin. I’ve decided that this year I must finally make good on that continuously deferred commitment, but I’m still at that stage in the research when my mind is swirling with ideas and possibilities. These must now be gathered together and rendered coherent. My aim is not so much argument and debate as dialogue and encounter. As a critical admirer of Pope Francis, I seek a style that can provoke and challenge as well as agree and engage, but always in a way that respects the other. In this, I follow Francis’s own guidelines for dialogue, set out in paragraphs 136 to 141 of his post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, but forming a thread that runs through all his writings.
Pope Francis’s creation-centred theology in Laudato’ Si’ and Querida Amazonia is the springboard from which I launch myself into a wide range of sources – theological, philosophical, psychological, scientific, literary, visual, musical – to explore the possibilities of language and meaning beyond the conventional styles of systematic theology. I ask if an exploration of the relationship between language, materiality, and desire might help us to reorientate ourselves in relation to the world around us, human and non-human, to bring about the kind of transformation of consciousness that is required if we are to change our ways of living – ‘to live simply so that others might simply live’ (to borrow a slogan from a Cafod campaign that I was involved with some years ago).
The question of gender shapes this conversation, but this is not intended to be a book about identity politics. Themes of gender and sexuality have been a consistent focus of nearly all my theological research and writings, but in recent years I’ve become increasingly troubled by the ways in which fundamental philosophical, ethical, theological, and scientific questions are being crowded out by claims and counterclaims relating to sexed identities. Academic rigour has yielded to censorship and sloganeering, reducing vastly complex challenges to rhetoric and polemics. As a result, part of me would like to set aside the whole issue of gender, in order to concentrate on other aspects of Francis’s theology.
This is not possible, however, because there is no way of exploring deep questions about nature, God, desire, love, and violence, without acknowledging the extent to which the western intellectual tradition is gendered through and through. This includes Laudato Si’, which uses maternal feminine language throughout to refer to the earth as our mother and sister, while ignoring the work of ecofeminists and feminist theologians which could have enriched many of its insights and shown that women scholars are invited into the dialogue.
No matter which sources I turn to in order to understand the intellectual hinterland of Francis’s ideas, or to expand my own understanding of the questions he raises, I find gender is always hidden in plain sight. To begin to see this is to be compelled to ask how gender influences the ways in which we relate to and experience the worlds of culture and nature betwixt and between which we swim.
To be human is to inhabit a quasi-angelic medium of consciousness that makes us believe ourselves to be caught in the gaze of God, suspended in an incomplete metamorphosis between animality and divinity. Eleonore Stump uses the expression ‘metaphysical amphibians’ (p. 17) to describe Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of what it means to be human. The word ‘liminal’ is over-used today, but we are creatures of liminality, inhabiting the borderlands of matter and spirit, haunted by a sense of homelessness and alienation, by a yearning for the fullness of love and belonging that eludes us, even though we are animals with characteristics, instincts, and needs in common with all other living creatures.
I’ve decided that one way to proceed as I navigate this intellectual/existential terrain is to keep a research diary that I share with others, in the hopes that those who are interested might join the conversation. My intention is to write as I read – not through a logical process of building an argument, but through allowing my own desires and fears to lead me through associations and connections, creating a complex web of ideas in my quest for forms of expression that in some way reflect the ways in which my own mind works. Influenced as I am by Luce Irigaray, I’m tempted to ask if these web-like patterns of thought might be expressive of a ‘feminine’ approach to knowledge, in contrast with the more linear and logical trajectory of ‘masculine’ thought. I’m going to leave that question open for now, because in the very process of writing it’s a question I’m asking.
This process entails a certain amount of mimesis. No academic book nor indeed any other work of human creativity can be produced as a stream of consciousness, for communication entails capturing the drift of thought, imagination, memory, and desire and crafting it into an expressive medium. But what would it mean to write with a sense of gendered presence beyond the conventions of academia? This is a question that Irigaray herself poses in the style she adopts, and which motivated the so-called écriture féminine movement of the late twentieth century. Perhaps at this stage, I can say I’m attempting a form of écriture féminine, in setting myself up as a feminised partner in dialogue with Francis’s theology, but open to many other voices and influences.
Reading and writing are two sides of the same coin, for as we read so we write, and texts read us as much as we read them. In the words of Jennifer Reek (one of several scholar friends to whom I owe a debt of gratitude in my current research), ‘being read, I write’ (p. 5). This raises the question of whether even the act of reading is gendered, not in terms of any sexual essentialism, but because at the deepest levels of our psyches we unconsciously conform to the models that society offers us. This question is of course the cornerstone of the work of gender theorists such as Judith Butler and Irigaray (though they are very different theorists), who seek to demonstrate that our sexual identities are constructed through and through by oppressive socio-sexual hierarchies, and we can in a sense out-perform the gendered roles we have been cast in, to expose their lack of substance.
That too is a significant question to which I shall return, but I’m not sure I want to discard all the conditioning that has made me who I am, even though much of it has been the result of confining sexual stereotypes. Freed as I am from the constraints of academic employment, having lived through and beyond the complex and often confusing demands of mothering young children, I enjoy the freedom to allow my reading and writing to be led by desire, and that desire is filtered through the relationships that weave me into the world. Some of these relationships are alive in all the complex dynamics of love and struggle that constitute the daily realities of life, others have in death grown larger than they were in life, because the deceased inhabit us with a persistent ache of loss and yearning, grief and regret. Then there are those painful lost loves and friendships that whisper in the shadows of consciousness, having been denied or destroyed through misunderstanding, fear, conflict, betrayal. These are metaphorical deaths and they too are intensified by loss, haunting our dreams and our waking hours with questions of ‘what if’ or ‘if only’.
When I’m not writing theology (which I define very broadly), I’m writing fiction. Both are a question of style and desire, of engagement and imagination. ‘God’ is always in some sense a fiction, and theology is a literary endeavour, for at the heart of every theological enterprise there is the awareness that we know not that of which we speak, for in the speaking or writing we betray the knowing that is on the far side of language. There is much debate about what Wittgenstein meant when he wrote that ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’, but there is a sense in which every theological text is an act of violation, a naming of the unnameable, a speaking of the unspeakable. Unless theology acknowledges its own transgressive nature, it is nothing other than a dangerous ideology – dangerous because it uses the name ‘God’ to validate its own authority and power, laying claim to a knowledge it lacks to mask its lack of mastery. That too is a topic for further reflection.
This then is an introduction to a research process that follows winding paths through the landscape of my own soul, as I experience lightbulb moments when I want to cry ‘yes’ to an idea, a phrase, an image, that catches my imagination, or when I’m grappling with an idea that I can’t understand, or when a writer sparks in me a sense of having found a kindred spirit, or sometimes when feelings of alienation and rage are triggered as part of the research process.
When I was reading Jacques Lacan for my last book, Theology After Postmodernity, there were many times when I came close to giving up. He was obscure, pedantic, arrogant, confusing, patronising, infuriating. He made me feel stupid, angry, distressed, alienated. It was only when I realized that these were psychological tactics by way of which he engaged his audience (many of his texts are written accounts of seminars and lectures), by stripping away the veneer of mastery which allows a thinker to seduce himself (sic) into thinking he has certain knowledge about his subject, when ‘subject’ refers both to the masculine subject as the ‘I’ who knows, and the object of this subject’s claim to expertise. Again, that’s putting down a marker to which I shall return, but reading Lacan unravels all pretensions that knowledge can be free from and not driven by the dynamic influences upon the soul of dread and desire, and that is I believe a helpful insight to bear in mind when doing theology.
In my next post, I’m going to reflect upon the ways in which Hélène Cixous has influenced my current approach to research. She expresses what it means to read and write by way of an intuitive quest for truth through labyrinths of desire and loss, knowing that the act of writing is always a postmortem process. It is a defiance of Nietzsche’s eulogy for God and for language and meaning. It is a dancing outside the tomb of modernity’s dead God, a weeping and wailing with Mary of Magdala in the garden of desolation, a wager on the belief that meaning can still step forward from the far side of silence, and enigmatically expose itself to those who keep a graveside vigil of mourning and hope. Cixous, Romano Guardini, Lacan, Heidegger, Matthias Grünewald, Josef Pieper, Simone Weil, Leonard Cohen – these are some of the wise seers and holy fools who will lead me in my quest for God’s tomb, taking a wager on the faith that there is a Word still to be spoken from the far side of that death to end all dying.
This first post in this series is public because it offers an introduction to what follows. If you would like to engage further as my research develops, please subscribe. And thank you if you’ve read this far. Please join me on the unmapped journey ahead.
Thank you for the invitation to join in this conversation.
We've interacted a bit on twitter (where I post as @magpiemixture). I'm intrigued by your project, but also wondering what I can bring to this conversation: a man in my late 50s, a lawyer with no theological training (but a chronic interest in theology nevertheless), a cradle Catholic turned Quaker, and with very limited knowledge of continental philosophy.
I'm interested in the contrast you draw between linear and associative modes of tninking. I've noticed this to some extent (but not universally) in men and women as conversation partners. Take my friends J and A, both academics. Conversation with J (a male economist) is Socratic, agonistic. Conversation with A (a woman who works on 17th century literature and religion) is like a co-operative game, encouraging each other to insights that we wouldn't have reached on our own. I would not want to give up either mode.
Of your "wise seers and holy fools", the only one I can claim to know much about is Simone Weil. There's a lovely discussion in Daphne Hampson's "After Christianity" of Weil's focus on attention - Hampson points out that the thinkers who have picked this up and worked with it are all women. I don't know why this is so, but the focus on attention is a gift I take from Weil and from those who have worked with her insights. Is this part of your project too?
Thanks for inviting me to join this adventure. Not sure how I might contribute, but always keen to explore unmapped territory ...