To say that God, Sexuality and the Self is an ambitious book is not intended, as is so often the case, to flatter to deceive, but to suggest something of the depth and diversity of this paradoxically ‘new type of case for the doctrine of the Trinity’. In the first of four projected volumes of ‘unsystematic systematics’, Professor Sarah Coakley, who self-identifies repeatedly as a feminist theologian, engages with a quartet of Patristic authors – Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius – who have often enough been indicted in sometimes wearyingly unsophisticated accounts of the allegedly baleful effects of developing Christian ‘orthodoxy’ on the status of women. Instead, she finds in them resources to freshen and nuance contemporary debate about both gender and the Christian doctrine of God precisely by recovering the connections perceived by the Fathers themselves between sexual desire and contemplative prayer seen as the privileged matrix for the emergence of Trinitarian consciousness.
In addition to this unabashed – and, as she implies, profoundly traditional - linking of themes now more conventionally assigned discretely to the history of ‘spirituality’ and to that of the development of doctrine, Coakley excavates in two fields even less routinely expected, perhaps, to yield theological treasure.
First, she uses the social anthropological tools of qualitative research, in critical dependence on Ernst Troeltsch's sociological typology of ecclesiological form, to interrogate the continuing validity of her own provisional conclusions drawn from the Patristic sources, by means of fieldwork undertaken in two worshipping communities – one Anglican, one an independent Protestant fellowship group - shaped by their involvement in Charismatic renewal.
Secondly, she offers for our reflection a gallery of Trinitarian images, ranging chronologically from the Roman catacombs to late 20th-century London. Her purpose in so doing is, strikingly, not simply to provide visual aids to illustrate an achieved doctrinal position, but rather to suggest how art can itself be the irreplaceable catalyst for theological insight, in ways inaccessible to verbal articulacy.
In less assured hands, the sheer variety of these resources might have led to a somewhat sterile bittiness. Each of the book's 7 substantial chapters can, as Coakley readily acknowledges, be viewed as a more or less self-contained unit, and, to some extent, therefore, the reader can choose their sequence ad lib. In whatever order they are read, however, they do not simply rattle around incoherently like so many units in a badly designed course of ‘religious studies and theology’, but rather build a cumulative case for the doctrine of Triune God as the guarantor of gendered human dignity. Paradoxically, however, this case turns on a conviction of both the inevitability of the apophatic dimension in authentic Christian spirituality and its necessity in theologically – and socially - responsible discourse. To that extent it is a plea not only for the continuing relevance of systematic theology, but also for its reconfiguration. This is required, Coakley suggests, both in the light of contemporary criticisms of the intellectually and politically abusive use to which, it is alleged, any such system can be put (and which is, on some accounts, inherent within them all) and as a response to what is discovered in prayer about the penultimacy of all human speech about God.
The particular conclusions for which she argues about the inter-relationship of dogmatic developments and political (including gender-political) pressures in the third and fourth centuries inevitably share the common fragility of all historical and literary judgement, though they will rightly send many readers back to the Patristic texts with a renewed sense of excitement. This is so especially in the case of her subtle comparative analysis of the place of desire and the nature of gender in Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa. Similar intrinsic limitations apply to social scientific findings, whilst perhaps not all will be equally convinced by Coakley's bold plea for the acceptance of at least partly non-rational responses to works of art as bona fide theological raw materials.
Coakley's fundamental conviction, however, that the spiritual, doctrinal and moral should be brought together into a kind of methodological perichoresis, in which dogmatic precision, sought and purified in prayer, becomes, at least potentially, a source of healing and peace, not least from the wounds of fallen sexuality, is a proposal that might be expected to find theoretical acceptance from many vantage points along the Christian spectrum. Secular interlocutors, too, who do not labour under undue prejudice about the role of religion in the academy and public square, might be given pause by Coakley's sketch of the expansion, rather than the denial, of rationality that her theological vision enables, and by the suggestion that, in its chastening of the idolatrous pretensions of human knowledge, the practice of contemplation allows the praying subject to be truly open to the other in a way for which entirely this-worldly post-enlightenment anthropologies might struggle to make room.
This is an extraordinarily rich book, then, raising as many questions as it answers, perhaps particularly for the Catholic commentator. In the first place, Coakley's ‘incorporative’ pneumatology, according to which the Spirit catches us up into the life of an ‘expanded’ Christ, opens the way for a potentially refreshing renewed emphasis on the Mystical Body, which might do much to revivify contemporary Catholic ecclesiology. Her insistence that such incorporation is inevitably into the Christ of Gethsemane and Golgotha immediately draws the sting of the triumphalism which has sometimes – perhaps somewhat lazily - been assumed necessarily to attend this model of the Church. Secondly, however, there seems one curious absence from Coakley's sensitive and provocative account of the relationship between human sexual desire and its divine archetype. Perhaps due to understandable nervousness about apparent capitulation to stereotypical accounts of feminine spirituality, there is notably little reflection here on how the human experience of parenting and being parented might be rooted in, and give us language to speak of, the reality of God as Trinity. In such a theologically fecund work, that seems a surprising omission.
