Reviews
The New Asceticism: Sexuality, gender and the quest for God
Mark Vernon
Sarah Coakley
Bloomsbury, 208pp
Desire has always been a problem in the church, perhaps the main
problem. And yet, implies Sarah Coakley, this should come as no
surprise. Christianity is, at heart, about the human desire for
God. Her new book, which weaves together a series of talks and so
provides a readable introduction to her theology, finds its focus
in the flourishing of desire expressed in the Trinitarian
understanding of God. It's a basic theological dynamic that Coakley
argues individual Christians and church leaders alike repeatedly
lose sight of when the desire for God is unleashed.
As it must be, because becoming a Christian begins with the
yearning to know God called Father - the verb 'know' meant in the
Biblical sense: the most basic sense of knowing has always implied
a union with what is known. As Paul intimated in the crucial eighth
chapter of the letter to the Romans, this yearning is discovered to
actually be God's because, as Paul puts it, the Spirit groans
within us with a desire too profound for words. It is God's longing
for cosmic rebirth and renewal. But there's a crucial step that
must now be taken. Desire must be purged if it is truly to know
God. In particular, its inclination towards possessiveness must be
converted into the kind of self-emptying that follows the pattern
of Christ. In short, in coming to know the Father by the energy of
the Spirit, we become like Christ. At least, that is, when the
transformation is going well.
A key figure for Coakley is Gregory of Nyssa. This fourth
century Greek bishop offers an approach to desire that is radically
different from those typically adopted in the western church. The
latter has tended to faintheartedness in the face of the desires
that the Spirit stirs. It has wanted to control and contain, within
ecclesiastically enforced limits; it has been nervous of the sexual
imagery that the exploration of desire inevitably requires because
the desire for God is an erotic desire for more from life. But in
Gregory, Coakley finds a fascinating figure who never recoils with
distaste. And moreover, offers an approach to the transformation of
desire that offers crucial leads for us today.
Take his first treatise, On Virginity. It is an arresting choice
of subject because Gregory was married at the time he wrote it. The
question arises as to how or why he so celebrated this virtue? The
answer is that literal virginity is, for Gregory, the least
interesting form of virginity. At its most developed, it is a state
of mind in which all desires intentionally channel towards God.
This means, for example, that simply being celibate is not nearly
enough. In fact, the celibate who keeps his vow but turns to the
bottle or becomes overbearingly churchy may be being less true to
the Christian vocation than the married person who, through an
exploration of desire in a faithful relationship with another,
comes to a rich often painful understanding of the ups and downs of
love.
Gregory had the advantage of being Greek and, therefore, of
reading Plato. Plato realised that the palace of wisdom is found
via the road of excess, as William Blake was subsequently to put
it. In fact, the experience of falling in love may be a crucial
first intimation of the path towards God. Think of what falling in
love is like, Plato advises. It's wanting what is beautiful and
good. At first, that's mistakenly over-identified with the newfound
beloved, as becomes apparent in any relationship that matures. But
that's not the important thing early on. Rather, it's that the
individual has fallen for the alluring power of what's beautiful
and good - the desires that can carry them to God.
It's a journey through the narrow gate, for sure. The shadow of
love's dream is a nightmare, because it continually runs the risk
of not getting what it wants, and so forcefully taking what it
wants. That's why, in Christian terms, the possessiveness of love
must be transformed into the pattern of Christ's love. But again,
married life offers helpful models here. After all, what is the
desire to have children if not the moreness of the love that
originally wanted only the beloved, evolving into a kind of
over-spilling of love that wants to share its love with the
offspring of that love? If that has a Trinitarian feel to it - love
over-spilling in love to share with the offspring of love - then
that's because Trinitarian desire energies reality.
Discipline is crucial in all this, hence the new asceticism of
Coakley's title. Without the purging, there is no fulfilment. But
perhaps we need new resources to inspire the discipline, as the old
ones so easily feel as if they are closing life down, not opening
life up. Take the medieval notion of courtly love. The point of
these romances is almost inconceivable today, when the goal of love
is so quickly aligned with sexual consummation. But courtly love
sought the more patient goals that asceticism at its best aims for
too. The knight fell in love with an unavailable lady so that the
love would be indefinitely delayed. It had to be borne so that, as
the poems put it, he was transformed, becoming gentle, aware, kind
- more Christlike. Love nurtures experiences and, then, capacities
of which the knight was previously unaware.
Coakley's work is important because it goes to the heart of what
we need to address in Christianity today - not just the problems
faced by the church, but what might make Christianity attractive in
a culture that yearns for the spiritual dimension and yet doesn't
consider that the church has anything substantial to offer it.
That's because, in many of the church's current manifestations, it
doesn't. But the deep wisdom about desire that's in the tradition,
and is always longing to be reawakened, can stir us all anew.