The following remarks are just by way of clarifying some of my initial comments on Tina’s book, and as such no doubt fall on the rational and analytic side of the oscillation that she notes in her own work, between “rationality and creativity, analysis and expressiveness, sober scholarship and imaginative fecundity” (Beattie’s response to Hannah Hofheinz). My remarks aim merely to suggest why the form/matter distinction might matter, why it might not be as irretrievably gendered as seemingly suggested, why Jacques Pohier may not have fallen into thinking God is in want, and why a Thomistic biology might be preferable to Jacques Lacan’s. I hope my remarks are more allusive than elusive, and still an engagement with Tina’s project of finding a new, more bodily and equitable language for speaking God’s word in the twenty-first century.

So, I will start with the form/matter distinction, which I must admit Tina’s work has done much to unsettle. But it is not for me an “elegant hypothesis”, let alone an “obsolete theory”, or even a “dualism”—in the sense of a Cartesian relationship between two kinds of stuff, as in Descartes’s extended body and non-extended soul. For me the distinction is not so much a description, open to test, as an articulation of a number of conceptual problems. Thus it answers to how we can both distinguish between objects and recognise that they are the same, non-identical repetitions of each other. They are distinguished through their matter but the same in virtue of the form they repeat (non-identically). This, surely, is the primary, Platonic, use of the distinction, but it is a use that might be more of a statement than an explanation of the problem it addresses, the problem of identity across difference. As such it is a conceptual tool, and possibly an ontological insight, but not a testable description, since “form” is not an isolatable thing. It appears only in the things it informs. This last point may become more evident when the form/matter distinction is shifted sideways, and the “forms” become “ideas” in the mind of God, and as such on the divine side of the creator/creature distinction, which the from/matter distinction now also articulates. Just as we encounter God in the world though God is not a worldly thing, so we encounter the forms in the things we are and with which we have to do.

The form/matter distinction also enables Thomas to articulate the difference between angels and humans. We are form and matter, and so individual members of a species, but angels, having no matter, are each a species. But with this example we can also see how Thomas uses his terms analogously, since he must distinguish between created and uncreated forms, and we must be aware when the form/matter distinction is used to articulate the creator/creature distinction and when it is used to articulate differences within the created realm (as between angels and humans).

An even more decisive shift in these analogous uses occurs with the distinction between essence and existence, which is the wonderful distinction by which Thomas articulates the difference between creator and creature, with the essence of the creator understood as existence (esse, “to be”), unlike the creature, which has no existence of itself, but must participate in that of the creator to exist at all, and whose essence (as human, wolf, or whatever) is also created.

The form/matter distinction may not be entirely stable as it shifts between its various uses, and may be most unstable when—as Beattie discusses—it is used to identify God as pure form. But this is a rare use and a shifted use and so perhaps one on which we should not put too much pressure (but see further Beattie: 318–21). Here my interest is merely to indicate what would have to be given up in abandoning the form/matter distinction, and so the need to ask if its undoubted gendering is such that it should be given up for a healthier theology.

It was in pursuit of a negative answer to the question just raised that I turned to Thomas’s musing on the conception of Christ. For there we seem to find a less resolute identification of manliness with form and of womanliness with matter, even though these are the prevailing associations when the form/matter distinction is used to think the conceiving and differentiating of the sexes. When the divine Charity, the Spirit, conceives Christ in the womb of the Virgin, it is she who makes him to be Jesus, rather than anyone else, and the Spirit who makes Jesus to be God among us: incarnate Charity. Moreover, if we were to press beyond Thomas, and identify the Spirit with Holy Wisdom, Sophia, then we would have a marriage (copula) of form and matter that was entirely feminine, though issuing in the boy Jesus. And we would not have to press very far beyond Thomas, for, as Beattie discusses, Thomas himself notes the identity of the Spirit with Wisdom in his commentary on Boethius on the Trinity (see Beattie: 359–61).

Tina asks if giving up the form/matter distinction would endanger our ability to speak of (and to) the God of Christian revelation, and presumably it would not. And yet, would theology not need to find a replacement? For it seems that something like the distinction, especially when it becomes that between essence and existence, and developed as between primary and secondary causation, is necessary for articulating the distinction between creature and creator while also maintaining the absolute dependence of the former on the latter. And this relationship of absolute distinction and dependence is vital if “Christian revelation” is not to become but one more mythology, the idolatrous worship of something in the world. And this is why Jacques Pohier can say that God does not want to be everything.

When Pohier writes that God does not want to be everything it is not—I think—to suggest a lack in God, as Tina supposes. The sense is rather that God wants to be just God, and not any of the things we want God to be, any of the things that we want to turn into God. At the same time God is not all because God creates that which is not God, that which while wholly dependent on God is wholly distinct from God. This is why the injunction to love is an injunction to love God and neighbour, and not God in the neighbour or the neighbour as God, and this even though it is in and through the neighbour that we encounter God.

There is now (again) much talk about nature and grace, and whether there can be a pure nature, to which grace is always an alien additive. I don’t suppose Thomas to have held this latter view, but I do suppose him to have insisted on a real distinction between creator and creature, such that the latter, while always dependent, is always itself. And it is this dependent independence that Pohier also wants to preserve, so that theology has limits and can genuinely learn from other disciplines. Thus Pohier wants to preserve the very thing Beattie presents: Thomas learning from Lacan.

Of course, I am less convinced than Tina about theology learning from Lacan, though on reflection I did wonder if it was right to place Lacan on the two-sex side of Thomas Laqueur’s distinction between one- and two-sex models of the human body. For as Laqueur argues, woman was negatively valued whether her body was understood as radically different from or but an inversion of the male body. I may also have erred (with Luce Irigaray?) in assuming that Lacan was doing more than merely expressing a certain cultural construction when he presented man as all and woman as not-all, as lack; that he was talking about “language” rather than the local language (culture) he inhabited. But on yet further reflection it does seem to me that insofar as Lacan’s account is proffered, we can read it as premised on a two-sex model of the body, and that such a construction is not possible on a one-sex model. For woman on the one-sex model does not lack what the man has, but is an inverted copy of the man. She is an imperfect man. This is the Galenic tradition, and it is not quite the biology of Thomas Aquinas, whose bodies are more Aristotelian, and yet also versions of one another. (This also, of course, answers to the text of Genesis, in which Eve is a non-identical repetition of Adam.) So I still think there may be a fundamental disjunction between Thomist and Lacanian biologies, and that if we had to choose we would be better with the Thomist, since it does not divide woman from man, and is reformable towards an equal mutability and mutuality between the sexes.

References

Beattie, Tina (2013), Theology After Postmodernity: Divining the Void—A Lacanian Reading of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Laqueur, Thomas (1990), Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)

Pohier, Jacques (1985), God in Fragments, translated by John Bowden (London: SCM Press)

Theology after Postmodernity makes a broad, wide-ranging, complex, interdisciplinary argument. The combined effect of multiple moving parts, sometimes difficult prose, and a large number of conversation partners is that it can be hard to find one’s footing. My response tried—and inevitably failed—to establish a place to respond in a work of such scope. So I’ll try again.

I want to lead by making clear how much I appreciate this sort of synthetic theological work. As I understood it, the book is above all a work of Christian theology firmly rooted in Christian tradition. Its focus: “the redemptive potential of the vulnerable, fertile and loving flesh as a site of grace.” The argument proceeds by a set of claims “about reading and writing, about language and the limits of meaning, and about the relationship between language and matter, culture and nature, as these are filtered through medieval Aristotelianism and its continuing influences on western culture.” Insofar as the book approaches these topics, the work is neither primarily secondary Thomistic scholarship nor Lacanian studies. It exceeds both fields even as it relies heavily, albeit differently, on sources from each to do the work of Christian theology. “A Lacanian Reading of Thomas” is only the subtitle.

I said less than I should have how refreshing I found Beattie’s approach—all in the genre of traditional scholarship, but no less impressive because of genre constraints. I thought its commitment to critical appropriation of traditional Christian sources methodologically refreshing—especially insofar as Beattie was willing (so to speak) to enter the belly of the beast and to confront major problems at their sources. And, of all the places to do so—Aquinas and Lacan! I can only applaud the audacity of not only taking on figures that are so formidable in themselves, but also whose writings have committed devotees whose responses, one fears, may derail and refocus the big questions of any work that engages their guy, redirecting all discussions toward the academic minutiae of a cottage industry. (For a time in graduate school, I immersed myself in parts of the Thomistic subculture. My friends and I developed a running list of common Thomist sayings: “the surpassing Thomistic synthesis”, “the Angelic Doctor”, the use of the label “Scotist” as an argument against a claim, etc.) As if that wasn’t enough, the book also takes positions that potentially place Beattie in tension with the Roman Catholic hierarchy, liberal feminist theologians, and more traditional theologians in ways that are bound to make life interesting. Quite clearly, Beattie is comfortable filling the role of (perhaps reluctant?) contrarian, and is an ambitious one at that. I imagine she does so out of conviction, adventure, and courage more than from a desire for comfort. I deeply admire the willingness to do so, as the costs can be real. So I can’t imagine that a critical response like mine was at all surprising. I just hope that any critiques or disagreements that surface don’t detract from my genuine appreciation.

Additionally, I’m deeply sympathetic to the kind of work this is and what it contributes to the field. I aspire to write theology that brings the most traditional of theologians and doctrines into critical dialogue with a range of theoretical and philosophical works in order to address pressing contemporary concerns. I write mostly about Augustine, whose thought entrances but sometimes repulses me. Augustine doesn’t hold quite the same official position in the Catholic Church as Aquinas, and the history of Augustinianism has shaped the discussions surrounding his legacy differently. Nevertheless, the secondary work on Augustine is vast and imposing. It makes the thought of joining a comfortable corner in the cottage industry very attractive at times. My reading of Augustine is at times idiosyncratic, but I try to root it in conversation with the best contemporary secondary scholarship in hopes of placing it in a more credible and fruitful dialogue with contemporary political and gender theory. I try to surround myself with other thinkers who can either play devil’s advocate or who will pull me out of my comfort zone and help me sharpen my arguments. Because I naturally lean left, I seek mentors and colleagues with different leanings than my own. In that way, I find myself taking contrary positions at times.

In retrospect, I think I wrote the kind of response to Beattie’s book that I often seek for my work: the response that played devil’s advocate, that reflected my argument back to me, that raised objections and alternatives and asked for a response. Frankly, I was disappointed in Beattie’s response to me because it suggested an unfortunate lack of confidence in the integrity of the discussion I thought we were supposed to have.

Beattie’s response to me named and critiqued what I didn’t write. I don’t think she believes her book invited the response I offered—I didn’t engage Lacanian studies, I ignored most of the sources engaged in the book, I didn’t focus enough on the positive reading of Thomas, I didn’t understand the argument or take its concerns seriously enough. As a result, she ends with an appeal to incommensurability: mutual incomprehension. Obviously, no one in my position wants to hear from a well-established senior theologian whose interests converge at so many points that they are on distant sides of a wasteland, no matter how warm the greeting I receive from the other side! I had hoped for an invitation to cross.

I want my follow-up response to be simple. It consists essentially of two parts. The first part mainly asks clarifying questions, and I sometimes frame them with brief thoughts occasioned by Beattie’s response to me. There are probably too many questions. I offer them in a friendly spirit, and I put them out there because I think articulating them may help offer some clarity—maybe even a bridge across the wasteland. I offer the second part, which examines some of the rhetoric of Beattie’s response to me, in a more tentative key, mostly because I found it interesting and relevant to the discussion.

Part 1

The first questions focus on possible differences in the expectations Beattie and I may have had about the nature of this sort of interaction. What is an interaction like this for? Has my response violated any of the ground rules implicit in the purpose, played unfairly perhaps? Should a response to a book focus on its themes only as those themes were raised and mainly with reference to frequently cited sources?

I thought my response was supposed to focus on points of disagreement, so I described what I found problematic about the book. Of course, I did so from my particular location. Perhaps I should have emphasized more the limitations of my critique by drawing more reflexive attention to the way I picked up only a single (though important) strand of the book’s argument. I think this sort of move is possible. While it’s obvious that there can be no neat separation of Lacan, Thomas, and theology in Beattie’s book, surely distinctions can be made and strands can be isolated and discussed. One need not talk about all of it in order to address any of it. So I asked genuine questions and raised genuine concerns about where Beattie’s reading of Thomas didn’t square with what I understood. I was hoping for a response from Beattie that would somehow explain to me how her Lacanian reading addresses issues I bring to the discussion. I understand those issues aren’t Lacan’s, but not everyone’s will be. Doing so, I thought, would still be mutually beneficial: it would display the strength of the book’s theological argument as a whole while making the Lacanian reading of Thomas more plausible, thereby opening me further to a different reading of Thomas. I don’t think that such a response asks for a different book, nor does it re-situate the one written. As a reading of Thomas, I think it’s appropriate to raise objections to the reading and give the opportunity for a response. From my perspective, this honors the argument that was made by inviting Beattie to display the depths of persuasive power. And I regret that I felt I had to focus so much on Beattie’s critiques, but those are what troubled me, and the alternative reading of Thomas Beattie offers depends for its intelligibility on those critiques.

Beattie’s response raised questions for me about whether I understood her book’s argument, how it’s best to understand the nature of her project, what it means to be Lacanian, and what it means to engage a Lacanian reading of Thomas in general.

Beattie says that I “failed to get to grips with what the book is about.” It would be silly and distracting for me worry too much here about whether my subjective understanding of the book is accurate. So I’ll let the passages I was careful to cite stand as they are within arguments I made. After reading Beattie’s critique, I still think that my characterization of the book’s central argument about Thomas’s two gods was mostly accurate. So far, the summaries Beattie has offered of her thesis in her dialogues on this forum have been broad and vague. I found the thesis difficult to pin down as I was reading it. I grant that my characterization doesn’t fully do justice to all Beattie’s nuances, and it may suggest a tidiness that is not present. I risked that for the sake of clarity, as I had hoped to represent to Beattie and to myself how I understood the theological argument the book made. I welcome whatever more specific correction she offers. After reading Beattie’s response, I cannot tell whether Beattie thinks that my suggestion about her thesis and the four kinds of supporting arguments fundamentally mischaracterized what the book says. Or was it simply a problem of insufficient nuance?

Perhaps here another set of questions arises1 about the relationship between the Thomistic reading of Lacan and the book’s thesis. Should the reading of Thomas should be understood primarily as a constructive experiment in synthetic theological writing or as a description of Thomas using Lacan, meant to be taken as truly characterizing him? The use of Thomistic sources to support the Lacanian reading suggested the latter choice. But I can see how a Lacanian response that conceived itself as disconnected from all other conversations or sources might find the objections I raised intrusive.

This raises yet another problem: I’m not sure I’m clear on what exactly makes a reading of Thomas “Lacanian”? Are there certain non-negotiable dogmas or practices? Can the Lacanian Thomist be selective—maybe absorb some external critique from contemporary Thomistic scholarship—and still be Lacanian? I don’t entirely understand Beattie’s suggestion that I ought to have interacted with the Lacanian reading of Thomas from a Lacanian perspective. Can’t I raise a question or even an alternative and ask about the resources a Lacanian response might bring to bear? Or does one need to accept Lacanian premises in order to understand and properly question the Lacanian reading of Thomas? I found Gerard Loughlin’s response instructive because it so elegantly pushed against a Lacanian reading on some of the points I wished to make about divine form, language about God, and the created/uncreated distinction.

This raises an important set of questions about the sources of a critique, which seemed important to Beattie. I already took exception to the claim that my response attempts to re-situate “this study very squarely in the field of late twentieth century mainstream/malestream Catholic Thomism.” By adding that I appeal “to a range of [sources] I either don’t engage with at all or mention only in passing,” I think Beattie’s statement masks the extent to which she frequently draws from other readers of Thomas in order to support aspects of the Lacanian reading, just as it draws on historical works to support the Lacanian history. Beattie’s own reference to Patrick Quinn and Wayne Hankey shows how her execution of the argument consistently makes reference to works similar to the ones I cite. Because I think it important to argue from shared authorities, I chose interlocutors from the footnotes and bibliography of the book and related them to what I already knew. When I went beyond Beattie’s notes, I took care to draw on sources that were similar to Beattie’s. Was I wrong to think that Beattie’s own frequent use of similar kinds of voices to support historical and interpretive claims about Thomas shows that she felt some accountability to authors like Turner, Jordan, Kerr, Porter, and Stump? Is Beattie suggesting that the work should not be questioned by secondary sources it doesn’t engage frequently? Or that a work of theology that makes claims about Thomas and relies sometimes on secondary Thomistic scholarship of a certain sort can’t be subject to critique on the basis of that sort of scholarship?

This, then, raises an additional set of questions about the relation of the Lacanian reading of Thomas to the synthetic but more abstract theological questions about embodiment and desire that drive the book. Can the “linguistic and gendered concerns” be separated from the “desire to open up yet another of many possible readings of Thomas”? Can either be separated concretely from the specifics of the reading offered? If a reader were to take exception to a specific claim about Thomas made, would the reader be able to critique aspects of the execution of the reading? In a hypothetical world in which Beattie somehow intuited how I would respond to her book and anticipated all my concerns, even if some of her conclusions came out differently, would the nature of the theological goals she expressed for the project change?

Finally, I’m slightly unclear about what it means to be “fundamentally antipathetic” to Beattie’s project. Perhaps Beattie means the specific project of reading Thomas through Lacan as a means of engaging theological questions? Any objections I raise need not suggest fundamental antipathy to the type of project in general.

(I am still confused about the history: what is the nature of the “influence” Beattie describes? She has said it is non-causal, and “echo” is a metaphor that doesn’t say much. When a Lacanian claim is made about historical relations, how should a reader understand the relationship? Can a Lacanian “big story” ever be critiqued from the outside? Can it be supported? Does one have to assent to a Lacanian framework from the start?)

Part 2

Finally, I’d like to make some suggestions about some rhetorical observations I made. Throughout her response, Beattie made various suggestions that may relate to the reasons I responded as I did. They were usually diffuse and indirect. I think it’s interesting to juxtapose them and ask about the combined effect of the various suggestions: that my response tries to re-situate Beattie’s “not quite feminist” reading of Thomas into “mainstream/malestream Catholic Thomism,” that I am more concerned to defend influential readers of Thomas than to engage the questions the book does, that my response is “one sided” and seeks to hold the book accountable chiefly (if somewhat arbitrarily) to the aforementioned mainstream Thomist sources, and that as a result I misunderstand the book’s argument, to be greeted “across a wasteland of mutual incomprehension”?

I find the rhetoric of the juxtaposition extremely interesting because of how it functions as an argument for the final claim about incommensurability. The suggestions or insinuations are indirect and diffused throughout the text, and they often function to characterize or explain the response. The rhetoric is like the background music in a movie: signaling what is going on to the audience without having to say so directly. Such rhetoric works on the unconscious. Its assertions are more difficult to thematize and therefore less vulnerable to rebuttal. A reader may perceive a direct claim about a person as an attack. Diffuse and indirect insinuations are disarming; they set the terms of the response. They implicitly invite either silent admission or defensive rebuttal: but one does so at one’s peril. If he succumbs to the mood and tries to suggest that the insinuations are false by offering, for example, proof of feminist credentials or different social location, he only cements the redirection of the argument away from the matter at hand. It often backfires, confirms the suspicions of the reader, and establishes the relevance of the questioning of his position in that instance.

No junior scholar with a contingent faculty position finds it heartening when an established senior scholar publicly reads into silences and potentially imputes words and motives that may be unflattering. This is especially so when the motives and claims heard in the silences contradicts the junior scholar’s own self-description. Perhaps I’m being too sensitive to this sort of thing, too suspicious perhaps, but I found the pattern and rhetoric so interesting and potentially illuminating that I think it’s worth making it explicit. I want to be clear that I am in no way suggesting anything about Beattie’s motives or intentions. The question about the rhetoric of the claims I juxtaposed doesn’t imply anything to me about anyone’s motives. In Beattie’s response to Hofheinz, she said she anticipated critique from the “dedicated discipleship made up largely if not exclusively of male scholars untroubled by [the intrinsic androcentrism [of Lacan or Thomas].” So it’s worth asking: does the juxtaposition of the above claims slot anyone who makes the above sort of critiques in that role?

If so, it would make a lot of sense of the suggestion that “simplistic substitution of ‘she’ for ‘he’” can be “a way of placating feminist anxieties.” Note how the suggestion insinuates without claiming. Beattie doesn’t apply this suggestion directly to the response—but neither does she qualify the insinuation. It’s a suggestion, an open possibility. Juxtaposed with the other suggestions, it is probably enough to stick. And if it does, then so placating places the argument in the anti-feminist (or, perhaps worse, shallow and naive) slot described above.

The insinuation about “placating” works if it hides other possibilities. At least three alternative explanations were available: the text discusses, repeatedly cites, and may have been imitating Mark Jordan, who sometimes uses feminine pronouns to describe Thomas’s implied reader. Second, despite Beattie’s own pronoun usage, using a feminine pronoun is fully consistent with the point the response was making. Third, women can and frequently do find their voice in the text of the Summa because the clarity of writing and dialectical structure open a space for women to call misogyny into question. So why make the suggestion if a plausible alternative explanation is available? If Beattie wanted to defend the claim, why not just come out and say so more directly?

But, it makes sense to suggest the response might be “placating feminist anxieties” if the interlocutor is being represented as the “dedicated discipleship” whose critiques Beattie says she anticipated. Such a discipleship, in thrall to twentieth century Thomism, would be unable or unwilling to understand what she seeks to do. The placating, faux feminism involved in using “she” only underscores the extent of the incomprehension.

And this all ends in mutual incomprehension—a position that makes it easier for everyone to move on without absorbing and responding to genuine, good faith questions. It may in fact be that the interlocutor is unable to comprehend. But the invocation of incommensurability seems too easy and too early in this case. I wonder if the indirect and diffuse use of suggestion or insinuation as a rhetorical device serves a claim about mutual incomprehension, which ends up blocking the need to respond to substantive critique. What should we make of this sort of rhetoric—if it is indeed present? How do such arguments work in theological persuasion? How have they been deployed in the history of Christian theological discourse, and by whom? In what sense can such rhetoric be considered a form of theological writing?

I would like to close again by underscoring my appreciation for Beattie’s book and her willingness to engage with me. I am sure she has much better uses of her time than trying to persuade someone like me. I hope she will overlook some of the faults in my response to her and read both it and this as good faith attempts to engage on subjects I care about deeply.

I have spent the last few days trying to write a response to Sean Larson’s response to me—‘like a circle in a circle, like a wheel within a wheel’, . . . etc. I have tried to present myself as a serious theologian (a ‘senior scholar’), who can hold her own along with the best of them in order to have a scholarly conversation about Thomas Aquinas. I know that I can hold my own with Denys Turner—one of the sources Sean recommends to me—because not only was he one of my lecturers at university but he is also a personal friend, we have engaged in many affectionate sparring matches, and I can outdrink him at theology conferences. But I know his work—I even quote him approvingly in my book—and I have to say that, when it comes to gender theory, he knows sweet f.a.

Sean thinks I shouldn’t let these personal irritations show. Why the hell not? Gilles Emery, theologian par excellence in the Thomist cottage industry (I love that expression by the way), writes about motherhood being incorporated into the fatherhood of God as if nearly forty years of increasingly nuanced, prolific and diverse feminist theology and gender theory had never happened. The fact that the vast majority of established male Thomists continue to complacently theologise as if these scholarly conversations were not even happening is surely a symptom of either fear or wilful ignorance? Yet the fact that this slightly pisses me off is less of a problem than the fact that I am not sufficiently nuanced in my distinction between created and uncreated form. Really Sean? I mean, really?

Let’s focus on this for a while. For those who haven’t read my book (it’s a good read, honestly, and it has a great cover—it makes a very attractive doorstop), I’m going to quote at some length. In the introduction to Chapter 18—‘The Maternal Trinity’, I say that my intention is to ‘suggest alternative ways of approaching the question of maternal language in Thomas’s account of the Trinity, rendering his Aristotelianism more problematic than Emery acknowledges, but also I hope opening the way to future readings of Thomas that might require a radical reassessment of his Aristotelianism and its social and ethical implications.’ (p. 344) Here is the sum total of my engagement with Emery in the book, quoted in full:

Emery urges his readers to pay the same meticulous attention to language that Thomas himself did, reminding us that Thomas appropriates Jerome’s ‘ancient warning’ that ‘careless words are a slippery slope to heresy’.1 But one can also reveal vast and problematic assumptions in texts by focusing on highly significant words that are used as if they lack significance so that they are carelessly applied, insufficiently analysed, or picked up and then dropped. In Thomas as in some of his later interpreters (including Emery), there is no attempt to explore the textures of meaning and possibility within the language of motherhood and to ask how this might deconstruct the language of fatherhood when applied to God.

In analysing Thomas’s account of the Trinity, Emery argues that ‘the unswerving direction of Thomas’ argument is already clearly in view: the name Father must take priority over every other aspect’.2 But then he continues by suggesting that

Divine paternity includes the features which belong to mothers, in creatures: conception, childbirth, caring for the child. In accordance with Scripture, maternal traits are ascribed to the Father: the Word is born ‘from his womb’ (ex utero), and he remains ‘in the heart of the Father’ (in sinu Patris). And it is ‘for a mother to conceive and give birth’. In line with Scripture, St Thomas accepts maternal expressions like this, but, nevertheless, keeps the name Father for God. The ‘things which belong distinctly to the father or to the mother in fleshy generation, in the generation of the Word are all attributed to the Father by sacred Scripture; for the Father is said not only “to give life to the Son”, but also “to conceive” and to “bring forth”.’ Likewise, he uses the maternal image of childbirth to describe creation. And he also uses the image of the wise-woman to describe the providential activity of God, who does not just create the world, but cares for his creatures by leading them where they will flourish. These maternal features are integrated into the description of the name Father.3

I wonder if Emery believes that this will console mothers as to their sacramental significance within the life of God? Or might he be persuaded to recognize that this is a devastating indictment of Christian theology for those informed not only by the insights of feminism but, more importantly for my purposes here, by those of Lacanian psychoanalysis? The human longing for maternal love, revealed as much in Thomas’s theology as in Lacanian psychoanalysis, finds no expression in a religion that always and everywhere can only speak in terms of God the Father, by men unable to recognize the patriarchal ideology that they are promoting. The same is true if we turn to a later section in which Emery deals with the fatherhood of God. Emery writes:

From one perspective, human fatherhood is a participation in the paternity of the Father. And although St Thomas does not put it in these words (he is in this respect a child of his times, and depends on antiquated ideas which are now outdated), the same participation primarily effects human maternity, since ‘Scripture attributes to the Father, in the generation of the Son, all of that which, in the physical generation of children, belongs to the father and the mother.’ This applies to parental paternity and maternity, and also extends, by analogy, to spiritual paternity and maternity: ‘someone who leads someone else to an act of life, such as acting well, knowledge, willing, loving, deserves to be called “father”’. In all of the areas of what we today describe as the progress of human dignity, or concern for life, St Thomas invites us to find a participation in the Father’s paternity.4

Theological arguments such as these provide an excellent illustration as to why feminist theologians might throw up their hands in despair at the obtuse obstinacy of the dominant theological tradition with regard to its ideological commitment to the fatherhood of God. As Janet Martin Soskice points out:

Feminist criticisms of classical formulations of the doctrine [of the Trinity] vary from simple rejection of what sounds like a three-men club, to more nuanced critiques of the way in which, despite best efforts, the Father always seems to be accorded a status superior to the other two Persons, with the Holy Spirit as a distinct third. The Trinity appears still hierarchical, still male—maleness, indeed, seems enshrined in God’s eternity.5

Let’s consider the passage from the Summa Contra Gentiles to which Emery is referring. Here, Thomas argues that ‘the fleshy generation of animals is perfected by an active power and by a passive power; and it is from the active power that one is named “father,” and from the passive power that one is named “mother.”’ (SCG IV, 11, 19) This makes clear that sexual difference is quantitative, not qualitative. The female is not a genuine other but the ‘other of the same’ (to refer to Irigaray),6 the negative against which the man represents himself as positive, the passive against which the man represents himself as active, the lack against which man represents himself as perfection. The naming of a woman as mother and a man as father derives not from any fundamental difference between the two nor from any human relationship of love, commitment, and fidelity to one another and the child they bear. It derives only from their biological functions as active and passive in the act of conception and gestation, which in turn derives from the copulative ontology of the pagan cosmos.

The above quotation comes from a chapter in which Thomas discusses the relation of God the Father to the Son, and this is a clear example of where he struggles to reconcile the relational significance of the divine fatherhood in trinitarian theology, with its inseminating significance in Greek philosophy. Thomas argues that, whereas in animal procreation different roles pertain to the active power of the father and the passive power of the mother—the former gives ‘the nature and species to the offspring’, while the latter conceives and brings forth ‘as patient and recipient’—in God this conceiving and bringing forth are, Thomas insists, active and therefore paternal:

in the generation of the Word of God the notion of mother does not enter, but only that of father. Hence the things which belong distinctly to the father or to the mother in fleshly generation, in the generation of the Word are all attributed to the Father by sacred Scripture; for the Father is said not only ‘to give life to the Son’ (cf. John 5:26), but also ‘to conceive’ and to ‘bring forth.’ (SCG, IV, 11, 19)

The father has more of what it takes to be than the mother—he is more of a mother than she can ever hope to be. This is what Mary Daly calls the ‘sacred House of Mirrors’, presided over by ‘anointed Male Mothers, who naturally are called Fathers’, and who take from mothers all the natural functions of birthing and nurturing and transform these into sacraments that only male priests—‘revered models of spiritual transsexualism’—can administer.7 Even if we can make some grudging allowance for Thomas on the basis of his times and culture, what excuse can we make for the failure of theologians like Emery to offer even a passing engagement with feminist theologians and theorists who have something to say about motherhood and God? (pp. 346–349)

Now I admit that this is not exactly forelock-tugging in my engagement with a scholar who is much more senior than I am, but I hope it suggests why Emery’s complacent reiteration of Thomas’s gendered theology is so problematic.

An argument running through the book—an argument that uses Lacan as a method of reading Thomas but that in my view proves Lacan to be profoundly insightful—is that the medieval gendering of form and matter, deriving from Greek philosophy and disseminated throughout western culture by way of the Aristotelian university and its ecclesial outlets, can be unmasked as the primordial structure within the modern symbolic order. Moreover, the association of God with form (and tell me how and why you think a distinction between created and uncreated form would help me here), has reinforced this in such a way that patriarchy has ordered western society from the late Middle Ages until the rise of postmodernity, when—as Lacan and Irigaray argue in different ways—it was replaced by phallocentrism without anything significant changing in the order of power and knowledge.

Let me quote at some length again, in order to show that my arguments are developed and substantiated throughout by a close reading of the Summa:

Thomas considers the argument that a man (homo) ought to love his mother more than his father, because he owes his body to his mother but his soul to God and not to his father. (ST II-II, 26, 10). Moreover, a mother loves her child and suffers for it more than the father does. Thomas responds that the primary debt of love is not to the mother but to the father. He quotes Jerome’s commentary on Ezech. 44:25, which says that ‘”man ought to love God the Father of all, and then his own father,” and mentions the mother afterwards.’ In individual relationships the capacity to love is influenced by the vices and virtues of the persons involved, but in principle:

the father should be loved more than the mother. For father and mother are loved as principles of our natural origin. Now the father is principle in a more excellent way than the mother, because he is the active principle, while the mother is a passive and material principle. Consequently, strictly speaking, the father is to be loved more. In the begetting of man, the mother supplies the formless matter of the body; and the latter receives its form through the formative power that is in the semen of the father. And though this power cannot create the rational soul, yet it disposes the matter of the body to receive that form. (ST II-II, 26, 10).

This is an illuminating example of the phallocentrism that informs the logic of Thomas’s natural law theology. The biological facts of reproduction—as understood by Aristotelian science—provide the blueprint for ethical principles. Yet this account, rooted as it is in definitions of fatherhood and motherhood which derive from biological laws of nature as understood by Aristotle, sits uneasily alongside Thomas’s more relational and linguistic account of fatherhood in his Trinitarian theology.

We have seen that, in his account of relationships within the Trinity, Thomas insists that fatherhood derives its meaning from God’s relationship to the Son. This is a non-phallic understanding of fatherhood in relational rather than inseminating terms, and the language is that of conception and birth, not of insemination. There is a hiatus between this account, and the Aristotelian account in which love of God the Father translates into a duty of the child to love the biological father because the inseminating function of the penis belongs within the copulative order of form in relation to matter, which in turn has to do with the fatherhood of God in relation to creation. So from the role of the semen in sexual intercourse flows a whole system of divinely commanded duties and loyalties, beginning with the requirement for the child to abandon its first love for the mother to whom it owes its bodily origins and its earliest experiences of love, and to transfer these onto the father because of a formal phallic principle of generation. As we shall see in the next chapter, Daniel Boyarin refers to the symbolic phallus losing the biological penis.8 By a theological sleight of hand, Thomas makes the brief experience of sexual ejaculation the cornerstone of the social order, so that the symbolic phallus acquires a mighty power that can scarcely be imagined in relation to the bodily organ that bestows upon it such significance.

So, whether in Thomist or Lacanian mode, the infant relationship entails a process of denial and paternal intervention into the maternal relationship, subjugating the child’s desire for the mother to the religious duty to love God the Father and the ethical duty to love the human father. This results in a linguistic order—in Thomas no less than in his distant postmodern interpreters—in which there is no language for the expression and cultivation of maternal desire, nor for the formation of female subjectivities and genealogies exemplified by the relationship between mothers and daughters and inspired by a maternal divine.9 This blights not only the maternal relationship but also the relationship between culture and nature with a threatening and consuming otherness, so that the female body and nature come to be seen as a voracious and dangerous force (‘formless matter’) that must be controlled by the rational masculine subject (the ‘formative power’) of the linguistic order.

Thomas sets in motion all these forces in his rationale for privileging the father over the mother in terms of the loyalty of the child. The subject of the western social order is formed through the repression of the bodily, desiring relationship to the mother by way of a codified set of principles in which patriarchal social hierarchies are underwritten by the fatherhood of God. From a Lacanian perspective, the symbolic and the real now occupy the position of form and matter, but the former continues to be paternal/male and the latter continues to be maternal/female.

Yet this rationalization and ordering of filial love runs contrary to Thomas’s privileging of desire as the dynamic orientation of creation towards God. If the most natural and fundamental experience of desire is that of a child for its mother, one might surely argue that this is the original source of our longing for God and the primal relationship that informs our understanding of divine love, nurture, and compassion?10 If this were so, a different language would be needed than that of Aristotelian natural theology, and the maternal God of the Christian faith would pose a significant challenge to the patriarchal order of the ancient world. This would be a more coherent development of Thomas’s Trinitarian theology than his capitulation to the Aristotelian social order, but it is the road not taken by the Christian tradition.

The suppression of infant desire in order to follow the dictates of virtue and reason forms the western soul with its conscious and unconscious dynamics of duty, desire, and transgression, all played out in the name of the Father and the unconscious yearning for the mother. If a man is to fulfil his vocation to cultivate the life of the intellect as the highest expression of the imago Dei, and if he is to privilege his rational soul over the inferiority of his body, then he must resist his desire for his mother in order to love his father more, because it is his father, not his mother, who predisposed him to receive his soul from God. (We must remember that Thomas is writing for his male students—he is not remotely concerned with the mother-daughter relationship). (115–18)

So, Sean, explain to me how a distinction between created and uncreated form would require me to fundamentally revise this argument, but also explain to me how, if it is so important to make such a distinction, the whole Christian and secular ordering of western culture did not make that distinction in its institutions and values. This extended section from my book goes to some lengths to demonstrate the way in which Thomas associates patriarchal primacy with the fatherhood of God on the basis of biological insemination rooted in his concepts of form and matter. To magic all this away with a sleight of hand—as Emery and you both do in different ways—is to invite a robust retort from those whose consciousness is alert to such strategies—and I really don’t apologise for appealing to ‘consciousness’ because that is what is at play here.

You suggest that we need to find common scholarly ground if we are to have a conversation across the wasteland I delineate, but in order to do that we have to find a shared interest (though in fact, here we are having a conversation that I’m really enjoying, and I hope you are too.) I could meet you in that no-man’s land if we were coming from our different ways of reading and interpreting in order to talk about the gendering of theological language. I welcome robust criticism and I entirely agree about playing devil’s advocate. However, you introduce suggestions into our conversation about theologians who as far as I know have nothing to say on the topic of gender (though Denys tends to put the odd ‘she’ into his books to show that he can do feminism along with the rest of us), and you want to challenge me on subtle philosophical distinctions that obscure rather than illuminate my point about the pervasive influence of gender in Thomas’s cosmology and ontology. Yet you don’t help me to see how all this might help me in relation to my gendered reading of Thomas’s Aristotelian theology and the ways in which this ripples out through the western history of ideas. Unless I go away and study all those names you mention to analyse and explain to you their gender blindness, how can I offer you a response on the grounds you delineate in your questions?

Also, playing devil’s advocate is fine, but what about allowing me to play devil’s advocate to them? I have been confronted many times by male theologians who jump to their feet to tell me why I’m wrong about Thomas, but I long for the day when people jump to their feet and tell various male Thomists that they ought to be reading Tina Beattie. (Ah, a glass or two of cold white wine lets the narcissistic demons out.) So, Sean, if I read the sources you recommend, how will they help me to develop and/or correct my understanding of the ways in which gender structures Thomas’s thought, and in what ways might my work provide a critique or corrective to their genderless interpretations? If you can’t guide me in that direction—if the condition of my engaging with your sources and questions is that I muffle the question of gender—then why should I be interested? I’ve written a book about gender, and I say at the outset that it is intended to suggest a new possibility in Thomist studies. I have no desire to contribute to the vast ancient and modern libraries of established Thomisms—though of course I agree that scholarly conversations have to start from shared sources, which is why so much of my book engages with primary sources from the texts of both Thomas and Lacan.

My interest in Thomas is of course partly theology for theology’s sake, but it is primarily to understand how key Catholic ideas that were gestated, nurtured and disseminated with the rise of the medieval universities became the conceptual, linguistic structure through which western culture has continued to filter its concepts of gender, nature and God. You rightly point out that Thomas was first and foremost concerned with preaching and with teaching monks how to do that—but that preaching became a potent vehicle for the dissemination of popular Aristotelianism through all levels of medieval life and culture (see my argument in Chapter 8—‘The Rise of the Universities’).

This had far-reaching consequences for women, not least because their exclusion from the medieval universities meant that the ordering of knowledge around rational paternal form and receptive maternal matter, sexually and socially projected onto male and female human bodies, became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I quote Prudence Allen in my book:

The University of Paris, founded in the early thirteenth century, excluded women from its ranks of students and masters until 1868. This resulted in women being isolated from the centre of all significant philosophical activity. In addition, the new trend to founding religious orders with a specific separation of women and men meant that even within the monastic setting, women became limited in their access to information and teachers of the highest rank in philosophy. Consequently, the side-effect of the institutionalization of Aristotelian sex polarity was the exclusion of women from the philosophic endeavour. Aristotle had argued that women could not be wise in the same way as men; European society became structured in such a way that this theory inevitably became true.11

Still today, Thomisms in all their manifold forms bear the hallmarks of that division, which is why simply saying ‘she’ instead of ‘he’ doesn’t begin to address the problem. The issue is not what kind of biological characteristics a reader has between his/her legs, but what kind of psychological conditioning—what gendering of the soul—that reader brings to the task of understanding and living the Christian faith. Lots of women, including those women Thomists who get included in the curriculum, read and write as ‘men’—i.e. as subjects whose gender is not relevant for the task of being a scholar. They are happy to belong within the generic ‘man’. Lots of gay men read and write implicitly if not explicitly as ‘women’, because they read and write from the margins of inclusion. As I argue in my book, liberal twentieth century Thomisms elide questions of gender, and in neo-orthodox Catholic theology and doctrine Thomist Aristotelianism translates into the essentialisation of an ontological difference between the sexes projected into the Trinity—pace Hans Urs von Balthasar and Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, which I have written about in depth in New Catholic Feminism: Theology and Theory (Routledge 2006).

Now, through a century and more of struggle and resistance, women have finally made it through the gated walls of the academy. (Yes, this is not about being a biological woman but about the gendering of scholarship, but as Allen implies in the above quote, though she would be far more polite in the way she says it, having a vagina—or should I say, lacking a penis—does in fact have quite a lot to do with how one comes to be socially constructed and conditioned in terms of gender). Since the 1960s women scholars motivated by feminist or gendered consciousness have been excavating historical texts, reclaiming forgotten voices, deconstructing androcentric ideas, constructing women’s theologies, following Emily Dickinson’s advice to ‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant’. We don’t yet know what difference this might make to the ordering of western knowledge, but we surely know that it will make a difference in the order of power and knowledge with its subtle encryptions of gender and desire. It seems to me an act of wilful ignorance or shoddy scholarship to simply plough on as usual as though these voices had never existed, had nothing to say, and can be assumed to be wrong without even giving them a hearing. That is why I am impatient when a scholar like Emery sets out to write about the motherhood and fatherhood of God, from a perspective that simply ignores gender theory and all that it might have to offer to his thinking.

I have already acknowledged in my first response that Thomas was a man of his time, and far less misogynistic than many. But his time was a time of flux and possibility. Nothing was established, nothing was fixed. The Aristotelian synthesis was embryonic, open to many interpretations. We know what some of the arguments were by reading the objections in the Summa. I am asking what might have happened if Thomas’s intellectual daring had been less constrained by his social conservatism, so that some of the ‘objections’ and the sed contras might have changed places. Would the history of the Catholic Church and western culture have been different if those men of the medieval universities had admitted women to their ranks and affirmed the full equality in all senses of men and women, choosing to privilege Scripture over Aristotle? My answer is yes, it would, and that is no small claim to make.

Sean, I hope we are doing this as a conversation between equals. I don’t buy all this senior/junior scholar stuff. When I read your response to me I was bedazzled. I felt so stupid. I thought, I need to get out less and read more. I need to really grapple with this stuff about created and uncreated form and transcendentals, compositions, etc. And what do I mean about union when I speak of the incarnation? Well, there’s a mystery. Search me. I haven’t a clue. Thomas admitted he didn’t have a clue either, though sometimes he forgot himself and tried to explain it—but I don’t think we should take him seriously when he does that lest we lose sight of the mystical Thomas who did indeed produce a great deal of straw as well. Maybe one must always hide one’s nuggets of gold away in straw so that one day, they can be discovered and re(de)fined.

But I’m an ageing feminist grandma ready to hang up my CV, chill out with my friends, and keep looking for God in my ramshackle meanderings which include a little—but only a little—academic theology, and a great deal of looking at art, reading novels and poetry, going to movies, listening to music, dabbling on Facebook and the blogosphere, wining and dining with people I love or find interesting (not always the same thing), and long moments of idleness reflecting on whether or not a seagull knows that it’s really worshipping God when it does that thing of holding itself motionless in the upward currents of air blasting in from the wild Scottish seas (I’m in Scotland visiting my frail, beautiful and infuriating mother), and wishing I could be that bird for a while. (Tertullian said that’s what they’re doing—each species worshipping God in its own way when it moos or flies or quacks or does whatever it does. Do we worship as humans when we hold still in the uprushing gales of Trinitarian love blasting in from the ocean of eternity to disrupt our logic of time and place, and marvel at how good that feels? I wish I could hold still long enough to find out).

I’m trying to admit here that I really am quite useless at systematic theology, endlessly distracted and given to daydreaming, and I’m at an age and stage in life when I realize I no longer have to learn the rules of a game I don’t want to play. If I’m a senior scholar, it’s by way of serendipity and good luck—not by way of any master plan on my part. (These are always master plans, I guess because mistresses don’t make plans. They just make themselves available when needed.)

I find myself thinking that maybe, if I took up hang-gliding, I’d know what it would feel like to be that seagull, but that’s the other thing that’s been distracting me these last few days. Cowardice. No way would I do that. Nor would I go skiing or climb a mountain or go skidding down a rocky track on a bicycle. My adventures are all of the mental and emotional variety. In one way or another these are all adventures with God, which feels a bit like falling in love with and passionately desiring the wrong kind of bloke. Who are you, God, at times like these, and why the hell didn’t you make all your diverse and crazy followers in every religion a bit more intelligent, a bit more pacifist, a bit more like me? And who are these charlies who are suddenly breeding like cockroaches in the over-heated rhetoric of the western liberal intelligentsia? ‘Je suis Charlie’? Not bloody likely. If I ever (improbably) decided I was willing to sacrifice my life for a cause, it wouldn’t be to prove that the banal and defiant provocation of an angry, marginalised and murderous minority of religious extremists and the mocking humiliation of so many more of their peaceful co-religionists was the apotheosis of human freedom. If I ever die in the name of a cause, it will probably be because somebody has kidnapped me, bound me and killed me. (I don’t think Catholic bloggers and members of the CDF are that extreme, but I guess there are precedents in the glorious Christian tradition to which I subscribe). Which is why, if je suis anybody right now, je suis une suicide bomber. Two little girls, strapped to bombs and sent out to die in northern Nigeria, are being described as ‘suicide bombers’ in the western media. You might as well call a child victim of sexual abuse a rapist.

Oh dear Sean, all these distractions and diversions when I’ve been trying to prove that I really am serious about Thomism and am able to set aside my personal irritations and preoccupations to engage with the arguments as proper academics are meant to do. And as if all these distractions weren’t enough, I now discover that one of my theological heroes—John Howard Yoder—was a serial groper. What is it about these men of God? I mean, seriously, do you know how hard it has been to get real about Thomas and academic theology these last few days, without letting a hefty dose of Lacanian parody enter the scene just to make sense of it by revealing how nonsensical it all is? And then to top it all, my favourite theologian priest, cherished colleague and beloved friend of many years went and dropped dead in the street last Friday afternoon. Really, dearest Robert Kaggwa, you pick your moments.

So, writing this response to your response felt like a challenge. (I nearly called it ‘Venus calling Mars’, but I decided that was trite and this is a serious response). If I add to that the pile of essays I’m meant to be marking and the coursework I’m meant to be preparing, I realise something is going badly wrong with my time management. But I was getting there—really I was. I can send you three different drafts, if you don’t believe me. And suddenly, just when I thought I’d cracked it and could let go of all that messy subjective stuff, along comes Marika with her body piercings. Dear God, have you no mercy?

Dear Tina,

First, thank you for your reply, which opened a space for a dialogue that I didn’t initially sense.

Second, and more important: my deepest condolences about your friend Fr Robert Kaggwa. I read some of the things newspapers reported that you and others said about him, and I was saddened for all those who lost someone who was by all accounts a remarkable and irreplaceable friend, teacher, and pastor.

Third, Denys was my teacher, too. In fact, he was the first person who taught me to read Thomas. I have no comments about his knowledge of gender, since I only took courses on atheism and Thomas on nature and grace with him. But I’ll always be grateful for his generous and kind instruction.

Fourth, about Gilles Emery: insofar as his argument about Thomas’s use of Father language represents his own view, of course I think it’s inexcusable to ignore feminist critiques, and I share the frustration with those who ignore strong, well-established arguments that contradict their claims. I see the way in which this tendency to ignore is a product of self-reinforcing scholarly and ecclesial insulation. All this grates on some of my deepest scholarly sensibilities. But I suppose I wasn’t interested in trying to defend Emery but rather to suggest a different interpretation of what he’s doing. Maybe I’m wrong, but I didn’t think he was making a constructive argument in his own voice about the Trinity in the texts you cited. Instead, he was arguing for his description of Thomas’s trinitarian theology and perhaps trying to give Thomistic reasons for its plausibility (which I take to be the task of any serious historical interpreter). I read him to be showing how Thomas’s argument goes. If Thomas is right about the relationship of Fatherhood and uncreated form (and I argue below that he can’t be), then showing how human paternity and maternity participate in the (real, analogical) paternity of the Father is the only real avenue available to someone who wants to read Thomas as consistent. I’ve found Emery’s work helpful for trying to understand Thomas’s texts. I don’t think it’s a good contemporary constructive account of the Trinity, but I don’t expect it to be that. If I’m right about the nature of his work, then I don’t think it’s fair to critique him for not engaging constructive feminist readings of Thomas or the tradition, because that’s not the kind of work he’s doing. So maybe we still have a disagreement about how to read Emery or about the obligations a historical theologian has to engage constructive and contextual theologies.

Finally, I’ll respond briefly to your question about why I think the distinction between uncreated and created form is important for questions about gender. If I’m reading you correctly, you draw attention to the ways in which the Aristotelian distinction between form and matter functions in a social imaginary. Your analysis maps how the language was metaphorically and analogically extended from metaphysics to biology to social hierarchy. This extension has worked (still) under the surface of official discourse to demean and exclude women. This is a deeply unfaithful, un-catholic development. It not only unjustly discriminates, leads to political, social, theological, and ecclesial burdens for women, and serves to reinforce ideological structures that hurt everybody. But it also denies the whole Church important gifts, insights, arguments, and voices, and it pushes certain bodies to the margins of the Church. I grew up attending a church where the pastor used to say about women’s ordination: “if it’s a sin to bury your own talents, how much worse is it to bury someone else’s!” I hope this brief description of your analysis does it justice; I am in every way sympathetic to what I read you to be saying.

The point on which I think we disagree seems to be relatively minor but still important (for the academic but still productive task of interpreting Thomas). Sometimes I read you to be suggesting that any use of Aristotle’s terms ipso facto implies certain gendered social hierarchies and exclusions. I brought Mark Jordan’s work into my initial response because I don’t think we quite agree about how Thomas relates to his sources. I think Jordan’s argument implies broadly that Thomas often used the Aristotelian terms in service of ends that undermined some of Aristotle’s implications.

The claim Jordan helps me make doesn’t on its own go far enough to say much about the specific gendered implications of the language used. And to complicate things for my position further, you draw attention to the fact that Thomas himself applied the terms in similarly gendered ways. This supports the suggestion that Thomas also reinforced the social imaginary implied by the terms—even if he wasn’t so bad considering his time. Like you, I don’t really care much for “time and place” excuses. Christian theologians have no need to excuse Thomas. God has done better already: generously forgiven Thomas in such a way that he, upon seeing his error, felt true contrition. Nor does it help an argument to make excuses for it. Arguments aren’t primarily good and bad, but true and false. True or false arguments can be used in good and bad ways. But here we have an argument that is false, and it is often used in damaging ways. If someone excuses such an argument from rigorous assessment about its truth-value, then they aid the people who continue to use texts to deprive the Church of gifts and marginalize its members.

I drew attention to the Thomistic distinction between created and uncreated form because I think it is a case in which a central theological claim undermines the extension of an overly reified Aristotelianism into the social imaginary—even if Thomas himself argued for that sort of extension. The distinction between created and uncreated form is one way Thomas describes a point that lies at the center of his thought: because divine essence is identical to uncreated form, God is radically transcendent in a way that ultimately undermines a biological, political, or social extension of gender hierarchy.1 It not only relativizes all earthly hierarchies, however. It also reframes the meaning of the form/matter distinction in Thomas’s thought. I think this is partly what Gerard Loughlin was getting at in his responses, too.

To explain the logic of this argument further, the created/uncreated form distinction relates to gender because it presses the form/matter distinction in a way that makes the sort of metaphorical or analogical extension that worries you unintelligible on its own terms. On the one hand, it means that God can’t be gendered or embodied, because “uncreated form” translates into divine simplicity and radical transcendence. On the other hand, if “uncreated form” means radical transcendence, Thomas has also in effect rewritten and relativized the language of form. I like that Thomas does this, because I think the internal rewriting of the term gives stronger internal resources to argue against the unjust extensions into the social imaginary I wish to avoid. For example, when I took a seminar on Thomas Aquinas with Prof. Reinhard Huetter, we were discussing the point that Thomas’s argument for the use of the term “Father” makes “Father” an analogical and not a merely metaphorical term. If Father means “principle” and “principle” means “active/male role in reproduction,” then God, who is pure act, must be the true form of Father/Male. But Thomas can’t say this. First, as you point out, this argument relies entirely on a gendered extension of the form/matter distinction to human biology and the reflexive gendering of the distinction from biology. We know now that Thomas was wrong about the biology. If we still used the language, we’d say that both parents are equally form and matter. Second, and more determinatively, because Godhead is simple and radically transcendent, i.e., uncreated form, “principle” or “pure act” can’t mean male or inseminating any longer, nor can it mean female, nor can it mean both. The first person of the Trinity can’t be more like a man than a woman or vice versa in any way. As Gene Rogers has pointed out that in both his biology (lacking a Y chromosome, yet circumcised) and symbolically, even Jesus is intersex.2 The trinitarian relationship relies on a claim about divine simplicity for its intelligibility, and so Thomas wrongly gendered that relationship. Prof. Huetter said that the only option left to Thomas was to say that “Father” can only be one possible metaphor. Prof. Huetter then suggested that a Thomistic reason to use Father instead of Mother would be scriptural usage in divine naming. But because God is identical to uncreated form, and partly because Thomas rewrites the language of form, this is a significant concession from the Thomistic position. It decisively moves the conversation into a different realm, and it shows how none of Thomas’s social extensions of form/matter into the priority of fathers or anything else can be intelligible given his own most basic claims about what Godhead is like. “Uncreated form” means “identical to the transcendentals.” But uncreated form cannot mean “Fatherhood.” Fatherhood cannot be a transcendental. Thomas may have thought so, but on his own terms he is wrong. Form and Father have therefore been disconnected by the concept “uncreated,” which is essential to Thomas’s account of deity. So it follows that there can no longer be a principled reason to suggest that Scripture depicts God as gendered at all, nor to prioritize either Father or Mother in descriptions of Godhead or the first person of the trinity, nor to prioritize human fathers or mothers in obedience or affection, nor to think that somehow our animating principles are more male and the way we take up space-time is more female. By refusing to identify God with gender in any real analogical way, Thomas’s thought allows for a more judicious, prudent, and pastoral use of metaphors for Godhead in theological (if not liturgical) language.

Methodologically, I think both of us read Thomas on gender by way of immanent critique. 3 We prioritize certain aspects of Thomas’s thought, and we then use the aspects we prioritize to show how Thomistic thought productively undermines itself at certain points. You use Lacan to highlight an interpretation of Thomas’s trinitarian theology in order to critique his use and social application of the form/matter distinction. I focus on Thomas’s rewriting of form through the created/uncreated distinction and on its implications for claims about radical transcendence, simplicity, analogy, and metaphor. When combined with his commitment to making sure theology is true to life, then there can be powerful, internally consistent Thomist arguments about form and gender that proceed from the center of Thomas’s thought. You’re right that my argument pulls me more toward mainstream Thomist readings of his thought, which is why I think you initially took me to be opposing your project of immanent critique in principle. Far from it! My critiques were trying to suggest that I didn’t find the Lacanian reading helpful, mostly because I thought the Lacanian reading placed an external ideological grid on Thomas’s thought that ended up distorting the texts. I didn’t recognize the Thomas I’d read in the Lacanian interpretation. Additionally, I disagreed with some of your assumptions about language, the nature of authorship, and the interpretation of texts. I tried to respond in a way that engaged your book showing why the foundations of an immanent critique which accepts the same concerns (about gender, hierarchy, etc.) could be framed in a way that is internally more devastating for mainstream Thomists who don’t seem to care about the gendered and sexual implications of Thomas’s theology. In my view, the strength of this approach is that it doesn’t require that external Lacanian grid, which adds another moving part to the analysis. Since Thomists and others who are indifferent to concerns about gender think that Thomas’s account of radical divine transcendence is pivotal to everything else Thomas says, then they shouldn’t be able to extend the use of form language to social hierarchies on their own terms. If they continue to do so, I don’t think it’s possible any longer to use these sorts of Thomistic arguments to serve that agenda.

Still, I am not sure there is much hope of persuading ideologues or people whose intellectual commitments are set by a decision. People usually find ways to believe what they want. I take it that intellectual work of this sort is one piece of a larger persuasion. That persuasion is always primarily directed at moving hearts. For me, the argument can’t move someone’s heart. But an argument can help someone who is already moved or interested to think more clearly and thereby love better. I tend to start with pretty traditional positions partly because I think a lot of people start there, too. Either way, for our discussion, I think it’s possible to distinguish your concerns about gender, sexuality, and embodiment from your use of Lacan as a critical conversation partner.

Once again, thank you for your reply. I hope I’ve answered your questions satisfactorily.

There’s so much in here that I don’t have much hope of making an adequate response. But I want to respond to two things, which seem to me to touch on two key points: first the question of bodily modification, and second the question of revolutionary violence.

In response to the question of bodily modification, I want to strengthen my argument and say that it is not simply fallenness which means that we struggle with and against our bodies to transform them, but something in the nature of material being itself. Nature has never been a static, solid ground on which to build. Everything natural, everything that is, is always in the process of changing, transforming itself. To be human is, by extension, to likewise engage in a process of self-transformation. I don’t deny that some of that transformation is motivated by a hatred for the body, and clearly all of it is entangled in both patriarchy and the capitalistic commodification of human life. But I love my piercings, the most straightforwardly violent thing I have done to my body, in a way that doesn’t seem to me to be reducible to an internalisation of the male gaze or a hatred of my body. There is a curious sort of eroticism to the fresh wound that results from forcing steel through skin (Lacan would have plenty to say about that, no doubt). I find pleasure in the things I do to my body, the things I do with my body, the ways I am able to transform myself. I don’t know that it has much to do with transcendence (but then isn’t transcendence part of the problem, when it comes to bodily hatred?). It doesn’t even have that much to do with the desire to be pleasing to the gaze of others. What do we do, theologically, with the desire to be tattooed, to be pierced, to colour our hair, to paint our faces, to be strong, to acquire physical skills, to work on our bodies to transform them? How much is really new and how much is a reflection of new technological possibilities made available to a very old and very human desire? Is there a way of valuing what is good and beautiful here even when it is not—explicitly—related to the desire for God?

And then, the question of revolutionary violence. What I was trying to say, I think, was that it seems to me that we cannot love what is good and what is beautiful in our lives and in the bodies which constitute the world around us without hating that which would destroy them and committing ourselves to fight for their destruction in the name of something better. I don’t know how helpful the category of violence is here for deciding what tools are appropriate in the fight. We so easily focus on the wrong things and see violence where it is not, and miss it where it is (Angela Davis and Assata Shakur spring to mind here, as women who thought that new life would come forth precisely out of revolutionary transformation, and whose radical opposition to the existing order was seen as physical violence even where there was none). The question is this: do we accept the horizons of the existing order as those we are compelled to work within, so that we believe what we are told, that there is no alternative, that all we can do is work within the constraints of the existing order; or do we enact a more radical refusal in the name of those bodies we love, and insist that another world is possible.

Marika, now we’re doing theology! Piercings and revolutions—oh yes. After all, piercings once redeemed us (‘he was pierced for our transgressions’), and that was some revolution—though actually, I think the revolution really happened with the virginal conception of God incarnate which involved no piercing at all, though later a sword would pierce her maternal soul. And haven’t we seen, in that golden moment between the near-simultaneous ending of apartheid and communism, and the rise of Marketolatry, that velvet revolutions do not always involve violence? One can after all end opposing regimes defended by the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction with nothing more than people holding candles through the night—though many died or were imprisoned to keep those candles of hope alive in the long, long night. Today it seems that we would prefer to curse the darkness than light the candle of hope. If you ask me, it’s better to light a candle than to draw a cartoon.

(I’ve already confessed I do theology by daydreaming and association, which is why I’m not a systematic theologian. So let me get back to the point—piercings—because that set up so many penetrating insights that I don’t know where to begin.)

I do have two piercings—one in each earlobe—but that’s it I’m afraid. However, having once had an episiotomy, I’m familiar with the feeling of ‘the fresh wound that results from forcing steel through skin’. In fact, when I attended my first philosophy lecture at the age of thirty six, I was amazed to find a module on ‘episiotomy’. When I looked more closely, it was ‘epistemology’. My epistemological credentials are better now than they were then (though some people reading this might dispute that), but I still think that people who have had episiotomies have something vital to contribute to epistemologies. So what follows are some episiotomical wanderings in theological epistemologies. This is not very radical—in fact, it’s quite orthodox—but those who don’t know their orthodoxy might think it’s radical.

I realise this is getting a bit near the bone, (bad pun), but this is where Lacanian Butleresque parodies of gender run into the buffers of the body. There are some things one can’t do or be made to endure with the symbolic phallus and the lack thereof. I wonder if the eroticism of slicing through skin is a way of cutting through all those vacuous postmodern parodies to get to the real stuff, in order to feel more real, to reconnect word and flesh, to carve the will’s command into the obstinate resistance of the flesh.

I ask this because the next association I made was to wonder what it would feel like to experience the kind of power over one’s own body that your response implies. Is it a desire to resist the power of nature, to tame the animal flesh by harnessing its eroticism and indeed its violence? Is it about autonomy—this desire to do things to one’s body that are ‘not about the gaze of others’ and ‘not—explicitly related to the desire for God’? (Thomas Aquinas said we shouldn’t get too hung up about these things—sometimes enjoyment is just enjoyment, or words to that effect.)

Is it the ultimate masturbatory experience, with the knife taking the place of the phallus or the vibrator? Does a woman’s self-pleasuring always require penetration? The first academic essay I ever published was about why God created the clitoris.1 I like to think it’s the laughter of God in the face of the power of the phallus. A virgin can conceive a child and even have an orgasm without penetration in the Kingdom of God. Maybe that’s what Augustine is getting at when he says of the risen female body that

[Ext]A woman’s sex is not a defect; it is natural. And in the resurrection it will be free of the necessity of intercourse and childbirth. However, the female organs will not subserve their former use; they will be part of a new beauty, which will not excite the lust of the beholder—there will be no lust in that life—but will arouse the praises of God for his wisdom and compassion, in that he not only created out of nothing but freed from corruption that which he had created.2

The truth is, I never thought to ask questions about autonomy and bodiliness until it was too late. I had bonked away my virginity before I discovered that, like money in the bank, it might have gained interest with keeping. (I had a Presbyterian upbringing so I hadn’t been raised on a spiritual diet of Catholic virginal purity. I’m not sure Presbyterians do virginal purity, figuratively speaking). By the time I began to read feminist theories about embodiment, autonomy, ‘my body my self’ etc., I had been married for close on fifteen years and had four little children, who one way and another were rather dependent on my body. So in some way I’ve always experienced my body as ‘for’ others, and the idea of doing quite radical things to my own body for pleasure—I’m talking out of the ordinary things here, not to go into too much detail—makes me question my assumptions and my boundaries.

But is any body truly one’s own? Don’t we always already discover ourselves within that condition of bodily dependence and vulnerability that is the inescapable shadow cast by the human flesh on the brightness of the soul, a shadow that men of God and men of reason have spent much of history trying to eliminate? Do ‘I’ (my will, my reason, my moral power), control this messy stuff of which I am made, so that I seek to determine its birthing and its dying, its conceiving and its aborting, its suffering and its delight? Or do I somehow struggle to keep up with where my body leads me, in the strangeness of its affections and desires (and its affectations too), in the rebelliousness of its illnesses and sufferings and slow decline into ageing and death? Am I always embodied with and for others, and must my will always seek to extricate itself from this entanglement of the flesh by doing its own thing, dragging the reluctant body along? Do I need to live and live again the primal alienation of the human condition that severs flesh from word, castrating myself over and over again by cutting myself off from that primordial union that I imagine to have been my first and ultimate place of rest, setting in motion an abysmal desire that I veil with the purpose and meaning of God? Can it be true that all our human longing—all spirituality, all mysticism, all our liturgical grandeur, all art, music and poetry—flow from that wound of separation and the body’s insatiable hunger for return and consolation? In her novel Housekeeping, Marilyn Robinson describes this better than any Lacanian theorist:

[Ext]The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory—there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.3

Theologians have forgotten how to play with time, but without such playfulness we have nothing much to say. That’s why we must abandon the systematic project and turn to literature, art, music and popular culture if we are to speak of God anew. The story of creation is, after all, far more about finding words to express the play of memory, desire and imagination upon the human soul than it is about scientific or temporal origins or debates about ontology and God. Lacan knows that, but so did Thomas:

[Ext]The activity by which God maintains things is no new activity, but the continued act of giving them existence, an act which is not a process in time. . . . Before things existed God had the power not to give them existence, and thus not to make them. So, in the same way, after they have been made, he has the power to cut off the inflow of existence, so that they cease existing; that is, he has the power to annihilate them. But there is no point in him doing it. For his goodness and power are shown better by eternally maintaining both spirits and matter in existence. (ST 1, 104).4

Cutting off the inflow of existence: is that not what falling and birthing are both about? Are we not always falling forward into that just created moment when curiosity slices us from the raw animality of innocence into the divided condition of human consciousness that recognises good only when it is lost? Do we not meander through time in constant elliptical movements of association, digression, memory, hope and forgetfulness? Isn’t that time-travelling capacity of the human soul what truly separates us from all other animals: not rationality, but freedom from the time-bound moment that we experience as imagination and memory (which is why this response to you comes when our conversation has already been relegated to the backlist).

Does this cutting into the self constitute an act of resistance to that first unavoidable cut that births us into language—and, as I’ve already suggested, the mother’s body too is cut and wounded along with the cutting away of the child (except in the case of Christ, who never wounded any body—which is why the virgin birth is eschatologically significant)? Or is it rather the way in which we women cry out against that continual attempt to merge us, to fuse us back into the maternal so that the erotic yearning of the flesh is tamed to serve the purpose of procreation, the engendering of the human? Is it better to experience the delight of being cut free over and over again, than to feel the dark inward pull of that maternal body who has never learned to let us go, who has taught us never to trust our own erotic desire, for we have only ourselves to blame if we are impregnated, seduced, raped. That’s what mothers used to teach their daughters. Maybe we still do, unwittingly and unknowingly, because we are too eager to protect them. When a woman cuts her own flesh, is she re-enacting over and over again the ecstatic anguish of curse and expulsion from Eden? But then, how are we to return, how are we to imagine that glorious redemption of our bodies when we arouse nobody but God—and how can we arouse God if we are not ourselves aroused from Eve’s long historical slumber of desire beneath the curse of domination and childbirth? Who told us that God would ever ask that we cut ourselves off from ‘the inflow of existence’, when even Thomas tells us that it would be pointless to do so?

There are also those piercings that go beyond the erotic—puncturing through the veils of imagination and desire to the sublime and awesome lure of the tomb—that other womb that is the mortal enemy of every mother’s love, the enemy that makes her want to suck her children back inside and keep them safe. Don’t let anybody tell you that mother earth and human mothers walk hand in hand. We are in constant battle for our children’s lives. A mother is not a force of nature but a force against nature. What freedom, what faith, must a woman have to set her child free along the path to Calvary? What dedication must she have to walk there with him, to watch as mother nature triumphs over the complex fragility of maternal love, as the virgin earth swallows the body of the virgin birth? No wonder Rilke has Mary cry out from the foot of the cross, ‘you suddenly reversed all nature’s course’. (‘Before the Passion’).

Yet in death, Christ’s body morphs—the tortured corpse becomes the maternal body, reversing nature’s course again. A double reversal, a reuniting of the maternal body with the earth after the wrenching of separation. In John’s Gospel, the wound in Christ’s side gushes blood and water—not something that dead bodies do, but this is a body in childbirth. That’s why medieval artists made the wound look like a bleeding vagina. One of my current intellectual curiosities is whether the phallic torso and the bloodied wound together are a kind of fertility symbol inscribed on the body of the crucified, with Mary at the foot of the cross symbolising the maternal Church—the crucified body metamorphosing into the maternal body of the Church—giving birth to the faithful, healing the wound that cut us off from the umbilical cord, ‘the inflow of existence’? Extra ecclesiam, nulla salis. No salvation outside the body of the mother.

But if we women are to become human, creatures of language set free from the suffocating silence of the maternal womb, must we always follow that crucified body, reversing nature’s course lest our mothers consume us, and resisting the healing that follows lest we too become consuming mothers? Is that what Holy Mother Church does to men—consume them with her voluptuous sensuality, so that the fragile penis must forego its tender pleasures and become instead the phallus that masks the site of castration and erects itself as the sword of banishment before the sacramental priesthood? For what symbolic loss would occur if it ceased to be the sword of division and became instead the organ of fecundity, union and desire? If it became for us ‘the inflow of existence’ rather than the barrier of prohibition? Better to keep cutting and cutting and cutting than to ask such questions.

Ultimately, the mortal mother always loses to mother earth, and our human will loses its fight against nature.We die, whether by an act of wilful defiance—like Antigone or Lucretia, or like every violent revolutionary propelled by the death wish?—or whether we simply surrender our sick and ageing flesh to the voracious earth, in the realization that‘Nature has never been a static, solid ground on which to build. Everything natural, everything that is, is always in the process of changing, transforming itself.’

Whew, Marika, time to come up for air. Yes, you’re right: ‘To be human is, by extension, to likewise engage in a process of self-transformation.’ I dye my hair, I paint my toenails, I even wax my chin (see below), but I don’t willingly do anything that forces steel through skin. But as you can see, I’m trying to imagine why I might. So let me dwell on this for a while by another association, which also has to do with changing and piercing.

I managed to catch the last day of the ‘Late Rembrandt’ exhibition at the National Gallery in London. I had to hang around for four hours for my timed entry, so I went and sat in a nearby café. I overheard a snatch of conversation between two young men sitting nearby. I have no idea what they were talking about, but one said to the other, ‘It was quite an experience. You would have hated it. All those naked women—they were old. It was disgusting.’ They fell about laughing. I wanted to hit him. Not really. I wanted to take all my clothes off and dance on the table, but as I’ve already implied, I’m not that free with my body (yet).

I know all about that mutability of nature you talk about. All that is solid melts into jelly (apologies to Marx). Everything wobbles, sags, droops, flops. Hairy places go sparse and smooth places grow hair (see above). The male body is not resistant to these processes, yet I never hear young women snorting with laughter in cafés, talking about disgusting old men with their dewlaps, farts and pot bellies. Anyway, I’m digressing again. Let’s talk about art.

When I went to the Rembrandt exhibition, I discovered female bodies painted from the inside out, so to speak. Not the male gaze, but a tender, wounded eroticism that saw the vulnerability in beauty and the beauty in vulnerability. Rembrandt was an old man by then. His self-portraits show us how he ages, year on year. One has to befriend the ageing flesh, in order to depict it in such visionary and translucent detail. And this is where I want to reflect on another question you pose, when you say, ‘it seems to me that we cannot love what is good and what is beautiful in our lives and in the bodies which constitute the world around us without hating that which would destroy them and committing ourselves to fight for their destruction in the name of something better. I don’t know how helpful the category of violence is here for deciding what tools are appropriate in the fight.’

As I’ve already suggested, to be a mother is to move to the frontline of that primordial battle against all that would destroy the bodies we love, though let’s not romanticise. A mother can fear the voracious need of the child as much as the child resists the voracious love of the mother. Psychoanalysis never has understood that side of things. Sometimes, it’s better to nip it in the bud than to live one’s whole life with the altered ego that comes about when the autonomous self splits by way of a cutting that never goes far enough, a cutting that never manages to sever the umbilical cord that attaches the maternal heart to the wandering child. Better to end it before it begins, in this culture of ours that no longer accepts that suffering is the other side of love, and if one refuses to suffer one must ultimately refuse to love. Even so, maternal love, like martyrdom, must be freely chosen. There is no law in love, no law that can force love, no love that is subject to law. Love is free, or it is not love.

So what god will free us to love, unless that god also reconciles us to death? How can we relinquish our terror, unless we also relinquish our mastery, unless we discover that between the iron chain and the severed cord there is a pulsing channel of life that flows between the placental god and the gestating world, and its name is ‘grace’—the ‘inflow of existence’ that creates us and sustains us in being? This transforms the wilderness of history into the gestation of eternity, the anguish of creation into the groanings of childbirth, the exile from Paradise into the homeward journey. How will we love unless we allow the umbilical cord to reach across the phallic wound? If Christ reconciles us only to death and not to birth, he has capitulated to the phallic god. That is why we must learn how to worship the newborn Christ before we can contemplate the crucified. We must learn how to be born, if we are to learn how to die. We must be reborn.

How would a reborn self recognise the world as the creation of the newborn and crucified God? Might it be a process of learning to recognise that ‘what is good and what is beautiful in our lives and in the bodies which constitute the world around us’ is what others see as bad and ugly? It is easy to hate that which destroys the beautiful and the good, it is harder to protect the bad and the ugly from those who commit themselves to fighting for their destruction in the name of the good. That’s where all crucifixion begins, all genocide. John Gray’s book, Black Mass, argues that every modern utopian revolution has ended in genocide. One cannot destroy the bad and the ugly unless one destroys the people one believes to be ugly and bad. That is why the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were slaughtered—not by mad men driven to bloodlust by an ancient religion, but by the most rational and sane of modern men who knew, as all modern tyrants know, that the rational end justifies the bloody means. The return to purity entails the elimination of the impure. If you want a transcendent God of beauty, truth and goodness, you must always pierce through and destroy the fleshy body of the incarnate divine.

Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena both said that love of neighbour entails love of self, because I am my own neighbour. That is why Lacan helps us to unmask the formless void that threatens to consume the empty formalism of Kantian ethics. If my capacity to do good entails waging war on my own desire and bodily pleasures, then to love my neighbour as myself is a deadly command. Freud saw this, but Freud remained too much on the near-side of the Kantian horizon. I cannot love all that is bad and ugly and desiring and confusing in my neighbour, unless I learn to love my own desiring, confusing and ugly self. I cannot live at peace with nature, unless I learn to live at peace with all that nature takes away from my beautiful, independent, autonomous self with the passing of time. Enough violent revolutions. When resistance demands violence, it has arrived at its limits—though Girard would remind us that to arrive at such limits entails a choice between becoming a victim or becoming a perpetrator.

The ageing Rembrandt sketched the sagging breasts and wrinkled midriffs of elderly women with the same compassionate eroticism that he used to paint the luscious thighs and rounded belly of Bathsheba. When we look at his painting of A Woman Bathing in a Stream, shift held high, legs apart, looking down at her reflection in the water, he invites us to contemplate the pleasure of a woman lost in the pleasure of watching herself, without a knife or a phallus in sight. The artist delights in but does not violate that private moment of the self-pleasuring of a woman’s gaze. This is indeed a woman whose ‘sex is not a defect’, a woman whose female organs are ‘part of a new beauty, which will not excite the lust of the beholder … but will arouse the praises of God for his wisdom and compassion’. This is a gentle self-pleasuring, a love of self that needs no wounding, no piercing. It is, dare I say, a virginal pleasure, which has nothing to do with whether or not the woman has had sex (she was probably one of the artist’s several mistresses, who caused him no end of trouble); it has everything to do with her capacity to surrender herself to a primordial nature in an imagined Eden. The eternal virgin occupies the sphere of liminality and mediation between heaven and earth, the undecidability which constitutes the fullness of grace in that in-between no-time of standing legs apart within the inward flow of grace in order to conceive (of) that which is beyond all human conception.

But of course this is an imagined Eden, a painted Eden. It’s not real. It’s not, and never can be, the ‘real’ for ours is a world of images and representations, or—to shift from that Platonic separation to the more umbilical relationship offered by Aristotle, Thomas and Lacan—ours is a world of graced echoes and intimations pulsing within the materiality of being.

If this painting of the woman in the stream is, as some interpreters suggest, an allusion to Susanna and the elders, then the artist offers us a moment of innocence before the impending threat of rape. The serpent is always already lurking in the shrubbery. The lusting beholder is always already there. The elders are watching. The male gaze is implied even as it is resisted, and the moment of solitary delight will soon become the moment of terror. What revolution must women bring about to change this story with its non-identical repetitions reverberating through our not-yet finished histories? Must it always be a history of violence? Must we always penetrate our own flesh, rob ourselves of our virginity, before it is taken from us?

How do we return to that primordial moment of rapture, lost in the goodness of the gaze that knows eroticism without violence, pleasure without pain? Must we always look back on it from the moment of violation, in order to know what we have lost, in order to recognise the cost of becoming human? And must we continue to slice, to cut, to wound, to separate, lest we begin to slide backwards into that state of nature, where we know neither good nor evil, neither past nor future? The difference between the human and the animal is freedom, they tell us, but is it not also the vocation to fall and fall again into the knowledge that must break us in order to make us? And with such knowledge always comes the memory of what was lost before we knew the pain of remembering and the solace of imagining.

Only when Susanna saw the elders and heard their threat, did she discover the rapture of that timeless moment of virginal pleasure in the river. Only when we have fallen can we recognise Paradise as our past and future imaginings, for imagination is the shuttle by way of which the soul weaves meaning upon the loom of time. Kant and his heirs take a dim view of the imagination, but for Thomas it is the necessary condition within which the dynamics of desire can operate, shuttling backwards and forwards between the object of experience and its conceptual interpretation. Thomas also ontologised memory, for without memory there is no ‘me’, there is no immortal self. But Lacan reminds us that the body too knows and remembers. Indeed, before the soul can know, the body must experience and remember. That’s why Lacan opens the door to a more radical Thomism.

I’m reading Giorgio Agamben’s The Open, and here is a paragraph that has transfixed me:

[Ext]What is man, if he is always the place—and, at the same time, the result—of ceaseless divisions and caesurae? It is more urgent to work on these divisions, to ask in what way—within man—has man been separated from non-man, and the animal from the human, than it is to take positions on the great issues, on so-called human rights and values. And perhaps even the most luminous sphere of our relationships with the divine depends, in some way, on that darker one which separates us from the animal.5

Is that what cutting one’s own flesh amounts to—woman’s desire to be man by slicing away the darkness of the animal flesh, the matter that is always maternal, always ‘she’, the mother whose soul is always pierced by the sword of love, knowing that the child too must be pierced by love, if he or she is to know God?

In ancient Rome, they would stab a virgin before they raped her, for fear of the awesome forces that would be unleashed by the sexual penetration of her virgin flesh. Is that what we do when we slice through our own flesh—master the powers of violence by inflicting upon ourselves what we fear others might inflict upon us, even if at its furthest extreme that is the power of commanding our own moment of death—like Antigone? Lacan is mesmerised by the thunderous silence of Antigone’s entry into the real, that liminal moment of the imaginary when, crossing over from the symbolic to the real, she steps across the threshold of mortality to join Schrodinger’s cat in the in-between. And why is Lacan’s real and Thomas’s God always silent, always separate? Catherine of Siena’s soul knew the union that Thomas would not allow or acknowledge, except in the rare case of rapture. Perhaps that’s because Catherine’s visceral plunging into the body of the risen Christ through the bodies of the poor and the suffering reconnected her to that source of life which flows from God’s body to my own through the body of my suffering neighbour, my hungry child, my desiring lover.

But really, Lacan needs to get real. Antigone does not mesmerise me. Somebody needs to tell her, ‘let the dead bury the dead’. What is mesmerising about a young woman forced to choose between law and love, and choosing to die for love of that which the law has already put to death? Better to love life, Antigone. Let go. Don’t cling to him, like some not yet ascended phantasm who might yet morph into a body you can take hold of. The earth has taken him, along with your mother. Go get a life, silly girl. Antigone is a religious fanatic, and we have no need of any more of those. We all have quite enough in our different traditions.

Unlike Susanna, Lucretia is not spared from rape. Rembrandt shows us two different interpretations of Lucretia, painted in 1664 and in 1666—a period during which his own life was spiralling out of control so that in the difference between these two interpretations of Lucretia it is tempting to see the artist’s inner world plunging into despair—though the very last self-portrait is not that of an artist in despair. Despair does not create art. Despair is the abject, the hopeless silence of the abyss. Art is always a reaching out to the other side, the determination to wrest meaning from futility and give it the kiss of eternal life.

In the earlier Lucretia, there is still a moment of defiant possibility. Perhaps she is Kierkegaard’s knight of faith at this point, though the association is, strictly speaking, anachronistic—but, as I’ve said, theologians should not be too bound by the rigours of time. Lucretia gazes into the distance, dagger in her right hand, her left hand raised in a moment of hesitation. Her hand is bruised and her sleeve is torn open. She has fought a mighty struggle against her rapist, and maybe she will still decide that life is worth living. Augustine insisted that it was. Writing about Lucretia, he argues at great length in defence of her innocence.6 (Anybody who says Christianity is misogynistic should read this passage. Rape trials might be more just today if they were informed by Augustine’s argument about Lucretia). Her suicide is a guilty act because she puts an innocent and chaste woman to death. (I don’t know what he’d say about your piercings, Marika, specially since you say they aren’t about desire for God. But maybe that was true for all those self-piercing, self-starving, self-mutilating medieval mystics too, though they belonged to an interpretative community when God was a more legitimate reason for doing something than the self. Today, they’ve changed places. You say that very lucidly in your doctoral thesis—which was an epiphany for me.)

By the time he painted the second Lucretia, Rembrandt’s life had spiralled out of control. Lucretia has become the knight of resignation. Her body has become her torn and bloodied vagina. A glistening smear of wet blood streaks the front of her virginal white gown. Is this the self-inflicted wound of suicide, or is it the consequence of the rape that has just happened? Her cloak gapes open, and the girdle round her waist draws attention to the wound and suggests the ruptured hymen. Her lips are swollen and bruised, her eyes gaze into the darkness, unfocused and brimming with tears. This Lucretia has been violently pierced, and she is about to slice through her own wounded flesh with the steel of the dagger she holds in her hand. She holds a cord in her other hand—the cord that will open the curtains around the bed when she falls, revealing the site of her violation. Like Susanna, eventually she will be made to succumb to the male gaze.

Penetration. Piercing. Wounding. Killing. Enough, surely? How much more steel must slice through flesh before we learn to inhabit our animality, to relinquish our drive towards mastery, and to be reconciled with the dependent and vulnerable creatures that we are?

So here’s another association—and now we’re getting to the meat of the question. My Presbyterian background didn’t have much to say about virginal birth, but it had a lot to say about the cross and vicarious suffering. Here’s the verse I’ve been thinking of since reading your response: ‘But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.’ (Isaiah 53:5)

What is the nature of this peace and this healing? How can we live ‘as if’ it were true—because surely, the Christian life is nothing more and nothing less than that ‘as if’? We are told that Christ still has the scars of his piercings in heaven. Maybe in heaven there will still be the necessary piercings of love, as part of the mystery of what it means to be made in the image of God. Does God ever stop suffering for love? Do we? Isn’t that more than enough suffering to be getting on with?

No more pierced bodies. Until we make peace with our own bodies, we will never understand the peace and healing that the prophet speaks of.

P.S. I think the foregoing is a response to Hannah Hofheinz, who wonders ‘what theological knowledge will become possible if Beattie’s writing incarnates that about which she writes.’ I wonder if it will catch on. I doubt it somehow.