I am deeply grateful for Joshua Davis’ response to my frank acknowledgement that I did not understand his work. I feared my response might be read as glib and dismissive. When I read an important work and do not understand it I usually assume it could be one of (at least) three possibilities. First, I do not have sufficient background to make sense of the argument. Second, the argument is profound but is not yet fully developed. Third, the argument obfuscates because there is nothing going on. It masquerades as profound, but in the end it says nothing, and falls prey to something like Harry Frankfurt’s analysis of some philosophy in his 1986 essay, “On Bullshit.” Let me say that my inability to “get” Davis’ argument has to do with the first and second points above. It has nothing at all to do with the third. I feebly attempted to make that point by asking for more context and, as Davis noted, acknowledging something profound is going on here, which made it all the more frustrating for me that I did not yet get it.

Davis’ response clarifies the argument for me at certain points. I overestimated the influence of Hegel. There is no “hegelian grid.” I was wrong about that. Of course, addressing the convoluted nature/grace debates with Hegel’s concept/intuition distinction means this book has a difficulty factor that few theologians could pull off. It is, as several have noted, an “ambitious” project. Such a project cannot be finished with one slim volume as I am sure Davis would admit. I see this book as a promissory note on future work, both theoretical and practical, that I look forward to reading and digesting.

I would like to hear more about the other means by which the same theme could be “inflected.” Is the point that our depictions of grace too often are “reifications?” Is this where the fantasy and illusion lie? If so, I am confident Davis is correct, but I continue to wonder about the specificities by which we do this as theologians, and especially how the theologians Davis identifies do it. I assume there are distinct differences in their manner of doing so – the extrinsicism of the neoscholastics is not the same as the collapsing of the concept and intuition among the nouvelle theologie. Davis sees something here that is important. I too want to se it, but my vision still remains cloudy – I think I see people walking but they look like trees (to use a biblical image).

I found this explanation by Davis very helpful: “So what I want the book to do is lead the reader to an encounter with that abstractness. To see that there is no move outside of these bourgeois conditions that will not always already have been produced by them.” Here is where I begin to see more clearly. It appears to be something like MacIntyre’s claim that every ethic assumes a sociology, and in turn confirms the social relations emerging from it. Theology and its grace/nature debates do the same. So if we assume we have resolved them without attending to that sociology, we are mired in abstraction. If I am correct about that then it also helps me make sense of his final paragraph in his response to me as well as his quotation from Wittgenstein. I take it the point is this: As long as we have a self constituted by its current social conditions, we will be incapable of viewing grace as something other than a fantasized projection of freedom and power on to a realm of grace that finds salvation but does so by overlooking the social fragmentation occurring around us. If that is correct, then I think Davis could have responded to me by saying that we do not know how to go on is itself a gift. In other words, if we think we know how to go on, without of course the actual social conditions changing, then our going on is no going on. We will know how to go on when in fact we can go on. So part of the “solution” is waiting on a solution, but this is in no sense quietism for the waiting that is necessary is one that attends to the actual “being” surrounding us. Am I getting closer to getting it?

I made several mistakes in reading Davis’ difficult but intriguing book. I read it in conversation with the “apocalyptic turn” in theology that tends to eschew ecclesiology. I find that turn potentially avoiding the hard work of the kind of social mediation Davis calls for here. I am glad to see that he does not neglect ecclesiology as a key component in the social mediation he calls for. Mind you, I get as discouraged with the state of the church as anyone else, but it is one of the only places I know where something like Davis’ project could be worked out. I now see him calling us away from any illusory satisfaction that we worked it out simply because we attend the Eucharist or participate in other ecclesial practices. That is an important reminder, although I would caution considering that any theologian would be unaware of the reminder. Throwing a wrench into such an ecclesial machine is nonetheless salutary.

I also assumed he was more indebted to Hegel than the work requires.

I think there is a difference between Davis and me that I should still confess. I don’t think I am looking for a “revolutionary politics.” Maybe I should be, but it does not drive theological work for me in the way I think it does Davis. I am uncertain the task of theology is revolution: truth, goodness, faith, justice, peace . . . , yes, but revolution? Should we as theologians directly intend to produce a revolutionary politics? Will it produce habits that prevent us from seeing the beauty in those who came before us? I confess I may be wrong here and am open to being corrected. Perhaps this is one reason I do not get it as well, one of my own abstractions?

I am in Joshua Davis’ debt for his patience with my lack of understanding. He read my response with generosity and charity for which I am grateful. I hope his response, and now my continuing desire to “get it,” helps clarify matters.

Stephen,

Thank you for continuing to question the work and, in particular, for the issues you’re pressing me on. I think you’re really touching on the ones that are key for me, but which this forum has taught me I am going to have to spend a considerable amount of time thinking through more effective ways to present in the future. There is a certain precision to the intuition/concept framework, but precision is not the same as communicative, explanatory, or illustrative.

This leads to some thoughts in response to your question about how this could be “inflected” into a different idiom. I tried to do a bit of this in my initial reply to Beattie, by putting things in “Lacanese.” And I can elaborate on the other idioms I mentioned in my response. However, having mentioned ‘Oedipalization,’ as I have written it out with reference specifically to the repressive and dominating role of the nuclear family in Deleuze and Guattari, it reads too fraught and jargony, unhelpful for clarification. I will just focus on Marx and MacIntyre and perhaps some of these other issues will emerge if the conversation develops (or I can develop them in an essay).

On commodity fetishism: I am thinking of the way that the social labor involved in the production of a goods and services is concealed and misrecognized when those products are commodified in market exchange. Their relativity of their value as commodities is wrongly assumed to be the objective realization of their value—that is, that its value is determined absolutely by the relativity of market exchange.

Though I may have to do more work than I can here to substantiate the claim, I think MacIntyre is making the same basic point. At root, I take his point to be that our public ethical discourse is simply commodity exchange. All of our af-filiations, our movements toward commonality, are not even the parochial interests of “clans” or “tribes,” but of the incoherent attempts to conceive of the unity of the whole of ethical and political life from to the common right of “mutual exclusion, our unique, non-totalizable differentiation from the whole (private property). (MacIntyre doesn’t lay it out specifically in these terms, but it seems to me that arguments like these from Marx and Hegel have had a significant influence on him.)

What I want to do is to begin to think the reality of grace in its irreducibly social dimension, an aspect that has been occluded by the struggle to adequately distinguish willing from “intellection” and “desiring.” It is the specifically social dimension that the will brings into view in a distinctive way. In fact, I want to think through how it is that grace is a particular kind of creative social act, one into which we are caught up, and which is realized through our own cooperation, an act that unites us in a common life that is not premised in any way on the negation of the positivity of difference or desire, but is the irruption of unheard of creative possibilities in and through our relation to Jesus of Nazareth. (In this sense, there is something “apocalyptic” that I want to maintain in my work—but you are right to see that there are some other distinctive elements that I want to bring to that conversation.)

So when you say, “part of the ‘solution’ is waiting on a solution, but this is in no sense quietism for the waiting that is necessary is one that attends to the actual “being” surrounding us,” I want to say absolutely. And then I want to begin to spell out what attending to the being that surrounds us actually looks like, and that is where the other connotation of “waiting” comes into play—service. I am so glad that Tina mentioned Weil’s “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” because this passage in it is, I think, very relevant to what I am after (I can’t seem to get the block quote to recognize the paragraph breaks—sorry):

“In the first legend of the Grail, it is said that the Grail (the miraculous stone vessel which satisfies all hunger by virtue of the consecrated host) belongs to the first comer who asks the guardian of the vessel, a king three-quarters paralysed by the most painful wound: “What are you going through?”

The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labelled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way.

This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth. According to some legends the Grail was made of a single stone, in colour like an emerald.

Only he who is capable of attention can do this.

So it comes about that, paradoxical as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done wrong, may be of great service one day, provided we devote the right kind of effort to them. Should the occasion arise, they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help required to save him, at the supreme moment of his need. —Simone Weil, Waiting on God, trans. Emma Crauford (Fontana, 1959)

Out of this attending to God, to one another, to the world, comes a radical transformation of ourselves and our relations to one another. I am wanting to talk about the church as the actuality of the social relation sustained by this creative power of positive affirmation—resurrection, grace. I want to say that the church is not the realization of this social relation, but that the relation is truly actual within and for it. So the church is the place in which we are incorporated into this way of being, which takes root in us over time and transforms us into people for whom this “waiting” is a stable disposition for the way we live and act in the world.

I have written so much now at this point that I should likely not go on. But I have to address your query about “revolution.” My point is that, living according to such a social relation, and with a conscious awareness of shaping our lives according to a pattern of and desire for unity that is not in any simply a reiteration of private property relations, will be “revolutionary” by default. This word “revolution” is one that I’ve only recently begun to use to describe what I am up to, and I should have said so in my earlier response to Craig, who also asked about it—saying that he didn’t really see it there. When I use it, I am quite consciously doing so in the way Herbert McCabe does, specifically at the end of Law, Love, and Language. I won’t rehearse his argument here, but only say that in the context of describing the similarities and differences between the Marxist and the Christian, he notes that it must be admitted that the Christian is finally committed to something much more radical, if for no other reason that the Christian recognizes an irreducible ethical demand for a revolution not simply in our social relations, but in our bodies. This, he says, is what we mean by the grace of the resurrection, “the final revolution.” He then says, in one particularly salient passage:

“The christian will maintain that however attractive other movements may appear at the moment, and however important it may be to support them, in the end, because they settle for less than the final revolution, they will be found to betray their own purpose and fulfill a reactionary role. Christianity is, in a sense slightly different from Debray’s, ‘the revolution in the revolution,’ constantly calling the revolutionary to his own purpose. Christianity alone, because it is the articulate presence of Christ, the future of mankind [sic], cannot (however hard it sometimes seems to try) wholly betray its mission. As it seems to me, like St. Peter and the twelve, we remain christians because there is nowhere else to go: if christianity is not the revolution, nothing else is. (p. 172)

You’re working hard, Josh! Let me admit that I’m struggling to understand what you’re saying about theory and practice (and abstractness and concreteness) and why I’m finding it so unsatisfying, so far as I do understand it. Maybe it strikes me as overly clever to say things like “showing to abstract thought that its relation to [Jesus Christ] is absolutely unique and entirely non-abstract.” I may simply be missing something and I can’t really decide whether it is worth arguing the point further. Then again, the otherness of Jesus is something I’ve thought a lot about and written on at book-length, so I feel I should be able to understand what you’re getting at better. Hebrews say that Jesus is like us “in every respect” (2:17) so that he might do the things that are unique to his office. With that in mind, I can’t fathom holding onto either Jesus’s uniqueness or otherness apart from his narrative, nor can I see the use of an argument against an abstract-concrete binary that also spurns the concrete.

Stepping back from the discussions here (and you’ll have to forgive me for going here), I’m struck also by how much effort you’re putting into explaining yourself. This is not itself a critique, but I’d be interested to hear you reflect on being misunderstood so much. You make claims about your work: that it is radical (especially), revolutionary, and severe—these hadn’t really occurred to me. That has led me to think more generally about how our work is understood and received by others. For example, I was initially most drawn to your moving account of waiting and (although abstract) your emphasis on concrete others in the book. But it appears that what I liked best was actually a misunderstanding. I know that’s a very general comment, but I’d be interested in your thoughts about this process, considering that this back-and-forth can sometimes be a rare thing in our discipline.

Perhaps it is too clever, though it is a cleverness I cannot claim as my own. It is an argument made by others, to which I appeal on pp. 21-26—others who worked much harder at it than me and who continue to be misunderstood. They have convinced me, though. Perhaps the problem lies in my presentation of the argument. At the very root of this discussion, I have to admit that.

But let me make another attempt, and respond to your queries on both counts by quoting one of these people who’ve worked so hard to make this argument, a woman who’s earliest style and written voice are far more difficult and demanding than anything I have written here (though perhaps bled a bit too into my own)! This is taken from a later writing, and an essay that was originally spoken. I offer it because, though still difficult, it may be illuminating and/or spark some further discussion between us:

“. . . the presentation of otherness has a motility which the post-modern gesture toward otherness is unable to conceive. For the separation out of otherness as such is derived from the failure of mutual recognition on the part of two self-consciousnesses who encounter each other and refuse to recognize the other as itself a self-relation: the other is never simply other, but an implicated self-relation. This applies to oneself as other and, equally, to any opposing self-consciousness: my relation to myself is mediated by what I recognize or refuse to recognize in your relation to yourself; while your self-relation depends on what you recognize of my relation to myself. We are both equally enraged and invested, and to fix our relation in domination or dependence is unstable and reversible, to fix it as ‘the world’ [or, what is the same in these circumstances: “theory” and “practice”] is to attempt to avoid these reverses. All dualist relation to ‘the other’, to ‘the world’ [to “theory” or “practice”] are attempts to quieten and deny the broken middle, the third term, which arises out of misrecognition of desire, of my and of your self-relation mediated by the self-relation of the other.

Second, this dialectic of misrecognition between two self-consciousnesses yields the meaning of the law that is inseparable from the meaning of Bildung (education, formation, cultivation), inseparable from the processes by which self-consciousness comes to learn its investment in denying the actuality of itself and other as always already engaged in some structure of recognition or misrecognition, in some triune (triple) [and here is where I would begin to respond to you about Jenson] relation to its own otherness and to the self-relating of the other . . . The law is the falling towards or away from mutual recognition, the triune relationship, the middle, formed or deformed by reciprocal self-relation” (Gillian Rose, “The Comedy of Hegel and the Trauerspiel of Modern Philosophy” in Mourning Becomes the Law, 74-75).

Thanks for the reply here Josh. The moves you make here and in your reply to Beattie regarding the role of will fill out your aims in the book in some really helpful ways. I saw in the book how you are using will as a sort of bridge device to get us from what what/who we are to what/who we desire. I didn’t see then, as I am beginning to see now, how that was connected to the move regarding concrete social relations.

One of the places I think you misread Thomas—though whether it’s your reading or that of those historians you cite I couldn’t say, since you’re right: I don’t know them—is in considering “charity” to be an abstraction, and to take Luther’s Jesus as more concrete. I take them in just the opposite way. What Thomas accomplishes, in light of a long scholastic debate on whether charity is or is not the Holy Spirit, is an account of human interaction that participates in divine action, without either being or not being that action. When a friend loves me, she is doing a divine thing in a human way. This a kind of differential repetition of Christ’s charity, which is already a differential repetition of the Eternal Logos’s charity. What this gives us in an account of grace that perfects nature, rather than either replacing or dissolving itself into the nature it meets.

Now, the will is of course central to all of this. That scholastic debate centered on the question of whether my will needed to be involved at all, if the charity expressed through me is simply the Holy Spirit. But you only need the will to act as a radical bridge in your sense if you consider participation of this sort to compromise divine otherness. I think, it fact, you do. My notes on your book send me to page 126, but I don’t have the text with me at the moment to quote you.

Now, the distinction you make using Romans 7 between knowledge and desire on one hand, and will on the other, is really helpful. But I think you draw it a bit too sharply. Instead of saying Paul’s narrator here (whether it’s “Paul,” or “Saul,” or “Adam”) knows the good and desires the good but lacks the will to do what he knows and desires, I think Paul leads us to a place of seeing how all these faculties fold back on one another: in an important sense, I only know and desire a good action or a relationship with another when I find the will to act. And yet I am already anticipating that act when I know and desire it beforehand.

I’d put the matter like this: the absolute otherness of Jesus that our will leads us to affirm is in danger of being the “purest” of abstractions, if our willing is not anticipated by the way our knowing and desiring are already sharing in his life.

Thanks, Tony. I apologize in advance for the long reply.

Before responding directly, I want to flag in our discussion the important points Tina has made and make sure that I continue to feel their pressure on me as I respond to others. I don’t think I’ve done the job of really attending to the issues she’s raised, at least not in the way that I wish I had. In my eagerness to defend book against her very strong, and important critique—and with real excitement to talk with people I respect about ideas I am passionate about—my “defense” too easily slipped into defensive. I’m not happy with that, want to acknowledge it, and make sure to flag those issues for myself in my responses with others moving forward. I know that Tina will be replying soon, amidst all the other demands of life, and I hope at the outset of our exchange here to remain attentive to them.

The other initial point is one that I should have taken the time to acknowledge before now: though its true the focus on the will fell through the cracks, that could very well be because I didn’t make my case or make it well. Given the argument I’m making, it could be a point in its favor, or just a convenient ruse to insulate myself from critique. I’m committed to not using it as the latter. I just want to keep these things at the forefront moving forward as a way ensuring that I am appropriately honest, modest, and humble.

The reading of charity as abstract is my move. I completely agree with your assessment of what’s at stake here for Aquinas. And I really appreciate your pointing out that it is a distinctively human activity of loving — that it isn’t, as Augustine had it, just God’s love loving God in us, but our own love doing the loving (“…with God’s help”). Now there’s something right here that I’m not tracking with what you’re saying, because I think that it is just this that Aquinas gives us in the shift from the Prima pars to the Prima secundae. I think this is exactly what his recognition of the will as a distinct faculty makes it possible for us to think — and to thereby have a notion of freedom that isn’t reducible to an intellectual determinism or a Pelagianism. So I think I’m tracking with you completely.

Where I want to put a serious question to Aquinas is with the claim that charity is the form of the theological virtues. I don’t want to deny charity its place. I just think that, if it is truly a super-natural virtue, an infused rather than acquired habit, then we have to say that justification, right relation to God, is the actuality presupposed by the act rather than its effect. Aquinas on justification is really interesting on this because it is like the production of the charitable act and justification are perfectly coincident. I like this, but I think it ends up working like a regulative ideal, an intellectualist “ought” that must be perpetually imposed on reality. To put it in intellectualist terms: it means that our goodness (justification) is the result of our rightness (a point Keenan really drives home, though not with reference to Luther). I think Luther makes the right metaphysical point, then, in texts like “Two Kinds of Righteousness” or the “Heidelberg Disputation” when he insists that this gets things backward because even Thomas acknowledges that, with supernatural charity, doing the right action depends on the actuality of a prior goodness (i.e., God “operates” in us to produce our “cooperation”).

Even so—and if I’m following you, this is what you’re saying—making Christ rather than charity the form of faith reverts to Augustine and Lombard, effectively making that charity into simply a predicate of Christ’s. Our love isn’t ours; it’s God’s only. I came to school this morning without the book or I’d look it up (along with the passage you mention on p. 126), but I think this the point on which I want to end the fourth chapter, with this really fascinating situation where we can see Luther as a certain advance within the western tradition beyond Aquinas, but in a way that simultaneously reverts to the Augustinian-Lombardian tradition, which Aquinas had himself already moved beyond. So when I turn to the final chapter, I’m asking the question of what it would look like or mean to draw both of these together, and how does it mutually transform both and fulfill them.

It’s there that I really try to cut loose, feeling like having glimpsed this vista, the whole thorny, gordian-knottiness of it begins to slacken and the discourse can start to really come into its own by embracing what it had been internally constructed to exclude. And where I think some really interesting possibilities emerge in thinking through the integrally ethical—or maybe axiological is the better word here, as jargony as it is—nature of metaphysics.

Also, I failed to respond to this: “I’d put the matter like this: the absolute otherness of Jesus that our will leads us to affirm is in danger of being the “purest” of abstractions, if our willing is not anticipated by the way our knowing and desiring are already sharing in his life.”

Yes, I think you’re right about this. I don’t want to say something different from this, as far as I can tell.

Joshua, I have thought much about your book and gained much from reading it, despite also having reservations. I spent some time trying to summarise its key arguments and to say where I found these inspiring and engaging. Reflecting on your response to my comments, I feel we are a little like ships that pass in the night. I’m not sure either of us ‘gets’ what the other is saying, though I do say in my review (which isn’t a review really, since I was asked to write something more personal and provocative than a review), that we share fundamental concerns.

I’m not advocating theology from experience, but nevertheless I find it interesting that so little of the personal and professional life you describe in your response finds any space in your book. I could only engage with what you chose to put in the book, and I struggled to locate the material and social contexts within which your criticism of the dominant tradition might seed itself to produce a new theological paradigm. I admit though, I was also making a more substantial point about the future of systematic theology in its present form, and perhaps it was unfair to use a comment on your book as a vehicle for doing that. Yet if, as you seem to suggest, your style is mimetic of that dominant theological discourse in order to expose it and rupture its coherence, I wonder if you fall into the trap that some have accused Luce Irigaray of: the mimesis becomes so convincing that it loses its parodic and critical edge.

I am not advocating ‘hysteria’ as a form of theological discourse. In fact, the opposition between the master and the hysteric is simply another way of perpetuating the ancient dualisms. I resist Lacan’s equation of mysticism with hysteria. We are not forced to choose between only two forms of discourse. The vernacular women theologians of the Middle Ages were just that – they were not hysterics but theologians using a different linguistic medium, emerging out of different social and intellectual contexts from their scholastic counterparts, but still doctrinally orthodox and capable of consciously crafting a theological style to communicate their ideas. (I stand by my claims about style and substance, but maybe others will agree with you). I am asking if we can find a language that is more expressive of materiality, including not only its desiring and positive aspects but also its violent and distorting aspects, but that at least reconnects the concepts we theologians deal in with the worlds we inhabit with other human and non-human creatures.

Nevertheless, I need to reflect more on your suggestion that your book performatively occupies the place of surplus desire, and seeks to take the position of the analyst. I wonder if the main problem is a lack of ‘flags’ which would help your readers to recognise moments of irony, parody, mimesis, etc. That is still a stylistic problem, but surely we have to give our audience some clues as to how we expect to be read? And if none of us picked up on your important thesis about the will and desire, that suggests we all needed just a slightly better road map to guide us through the text.

There is so much more going on in your response that I’m not engaging with here Joshua, because I hope others might take up some of these points and help both of us to see more clearly what the other is asking. I agree that there is commonality between us, and I said that in my reflection, but I still need help to really see what your project is about in a way that would make it something I could understand and engage with on a deeper and more insightful level than I feel I have done so far.

But the conversation is fun!

In my previous comment, I mentioned that I am still exploring the relationship of the book’s argument to its style. I had hoped that we might have a constructive exchange about that particular point — how the concerns I have in my argument might be best stylistically expressed. However, since your comment refers mostly to the original posts, perhaps it is better to table those concerns for now.

I mentioned Irigaray and Lacan only heuristically. I don’t think that what I am up to is either mimetic in her sense or analytic in his — only that it is closer to both of them on these points than you seemed to have recognized. So I really have no investment in defending a particular understanding of what is going on in them. I brought them into the conversation as a way of inflecting my argument into an idiom that is perhaps more familiar for you. And it is in this heuristic way, too, that I use the language of “hysteric,” since I recognize that you are opposed to conflating the “mystic” discourse you’re advocating for with “hysteric” discourse in Lacan’s sense.

But this is also where a peculiarity seems to arise, making it difficult for me to follow your point about the success of Irigaray’s mimesis and my own. I specifically have in mind the fact that the critics of Irigaray who make this point against her do so specifically from the conviction of the necessity of “hysteric” speech — that is of giving voice to the semiotic that the symbolic represses, and to do so, as you say, with a critical irony of “parody.” I have no interest at all in irony or parody, and I did not mean to suggest that’s what I was up to. What I I am urging, and believe I was doing in the book, is an earnest, critical inhabitation of our ecclesial (and in this sense theological) situation, one which seeks for an honest and courageous confrontation with its empirical reality, and which can produce through its intensity of commitment a suspension and transmutation of that situation from within. The trouble lies with the fact that, though I understand very well that you want a “theological” discourse that is not reducible to a “master’s” or a “hysterics” discourse, your critique of style only seems significant as an injunction to occupy the space of the “hysteric.” Rather, a better way of putting it might be that, I can only make sense of the overwhelming significance you’ve attached to style if what you’re encouraging with “mystic” speech is simply convertible with it. Otherwise, I don’t see why or how the the book’s “severe” style is problematic, and is not itself a form of mystic speech — which is exactly how I understand it and what I intend it to be. Of course, conceding me this point would mean allowing that mystic speech is something other in substance than a “form,” a style. But if you insist on its being principally stylistic, then I think it remains reducible to the form of speech that Lacan (unfortunately) called “hysteric.”

I am happy to join my voice with yours in declaring Catherine, with all her blood-drenched, desire-swarming, body-teeming prose, to be a theologian. I will relish doing so and join in the reverie myself. But, in this case, arguing in this way would have committed me to an entirely different argumentative premise. It would have prevented me from saying, for example, that the stylistic form you’re enjoining, the “plunge into the “watery medium” of the “turbulent waters of grace,” is substantially empty and purely formal. It would not simply have meant I was guilty of the same abstractness (admitting this is part of the strategy of the argument), but that I was invested in preserving it. It would have meant that I was discursively producing an illusory space of of authenticity, purity, innocence, excess, or exceptionality that is somehow meant to function as authoritative. What else can it mean to encourage theologians to “take the plunge” unless one is confident that she has “strip[ped] off and plunge[ed] into the turbulent waters of grace,” that she speaks from a position capable of “describ[ing] the world and our task within it differently.” I really don’t know how else to read the analogy of jumping into the Thames, except as an appeal to just this kind of authoritative authenticity.

What is more, you may be right — though I don’t know how we would know — that Catherine of Sienna spoke as she did because images, emotions, and metaphors she evoked were the “substance of her daily life,” that they flowed from her union with the “fleshy bodies of the poor and the suffering, the desperate and the dying.” What is key to my argument, though, is that this is not and cannot be true for us. Our social context and conditions are not hers, and this same language serves very different tasks and interests for us than it did for her. I am arguing that, for us, we can actually know this kind of language to be an expression and reiteration of our social alienation and fragmentation — a yearning for some reunion with the natural world, one another, and God that is not for us actual. In its social actuality, such language functions — precisely inasmuch as it promotes itself, through a self-exculpatory style of purity, as a “solution” — to perpetuate the fragmentations and alienations of our condition.

Really, this is exactly how de Certeau designates the significance of “mystic speech”: as a transitory, u-topic, peripatetic illocution, which advances as a parasitic and purely formal operation upon otherwise authoritative discursive structure (“the place of speaking for a speaking that has no place”). I don’t think this is what mystic speech is. I think it is an intensive habitation of reality, a way of life that is sustained by the actuality (however nascent) of an alternative, revolutionary social order. But I don’t know how to make sense of the weight your critique has put on style, except as inevitably commending just this u-topic, procedural formalism. And if that’s all mystic speech is for us, then it is merely the ironic reveling in the ecstatic anomy of the bourgeoisie.

This is the reason, ultimately, any critique of the book’s style must give way, and in fact begin with actual engagement with its argument. And this is so specifically because of how integral they are to one another. (Perhaps you overlooked the roadmap of the argument on pp. 3–5.)

I’m afraid I didn’t make sufficiently clear that that last comment is intended to elaborate on the complex ways that our social circumstances condition our thinking for ALL OF US, and how easy it is to misrecognize what is at stake. Why it is, in other words, that making the argument in a particular register is not as easy as it might otherwise seem.

It is a very complex matter, because on the one hand, we can fall uncritically into a position that is framed in terms entirely devoid of contact with embodiment, emotion, etc, as you suggest. Yet, equally important, but in a fantastically more deceptive way, is the temptation simply to appeal to “materiality” and “bodies,” etc. What we miss in this though is how “materiality” comes to function abstractly, and in a way that, though unintentional, props us the separation. And does so by speaking from a linguistic register that is purports not to be implicated in the problem.

And this is not as simple a matter as changing the language, or even playing with its fluidity. The problem isn’t some intransigent theoretical “structure” we have to disrupt, but an actual social conditions—one that reproduces a form of thought that mis-takes itself to be sufficiently free from these social condition as to be capable of subverting them. I am working to say, on the contrary, that the resolution of this problem demands a certain vigilant attending to its formation of thought, and in such a way as to elicit an irreducibly ethical and social action that can transmute those conditions into conditions that are truly and concretely unifying, life-giving.

Hence, the appearance of the will and its significance.

The purpose of highlighting the profound confusion that surrounds the notion of “the will” in discussions of creation, grace, and human freedom (and the reason those doctrines are so fraught with significance for us in the present) is to show how the persistent separation of these doctrines belie the larger trouble we have with recognizing the ethical aspect of reality itself, the metaphysical significance of ethics. The union of the doctrines resides not in a transcendental structure of existence, but in a particular modality of action, which is itself enabled by the actuality of a unique and unsubstitutable social relation—the positive affirmation of otherness itself. Here is where I think all the really exciting stuff in the book really starts to open up—but all of that is at the end of this “analytic,” or therapeutic way that I am working through the issues to bring into relief where precisely it is that the mystery lies—that is, where it is that the matter slips through our fingers and summons us beyond what we are attempting to “grasp.”

Hello Joshua – or, to use the greeting I see at the top of this website – ‘Howdy, Josh’. Thank you for these rich responses and engagements, which I have been reading and thinking about over the last few days. My lack of a similar level of engagement has not been because of disinterest but because of time constraints. Rather than trying to address all the points you raise, I’m going to pick out a couple of issues from your August 6 post at 7.49 am.

You say that you are still exploring the relationship of the book’s argument to its style. As far as I understand the argument, I am completely in agreement with you. The theological tradition has perpetuated deeply damaging forms of dualism through its various representations of the relationship between nature and grace, and through its failure to ask what the Trinitarian relationality of the Godhead implies for our social relationships. These distorting dualisms pervade the dominant tradition in one form or another, even if they play out differently among and between theologians in different ecclesial and historical contexts. To revisit the doctrine of creation ex nihilo in order to reconfigure how we understand the relationship between the creator and our own creatureliness, to reimagine the dynamics of will and desire, and to reflect anew on what it means for our social relationships to say we are made in the image of the Trinitarian God, are vital insights in your book which really do call into question the most fundamental premises of the Christian theological enterprise.

However, having spent many years asking the same fundamental questions, I ask myself why I am baffled by some parts of your book and cannot engage with it as fully as I’d like to, given that I also find moments of deep inspiration and engagement. I come down to a question of style. I cannot engage with your theological sources because I am not familiar enough with their work, and I don’t find enough entry points to lead me in from where I am to where you are. Such differences are inevitable in any academic discipline, but if we are to engage with one another, then you need to show me the connections. What are the opportunities for cross-fertilisation between my project and yours? Do I have to reinscribe myself into a theological narrative written exclusively by the male heavyweights of the tradition in order to be able to speak with you? What language shall we use to communicate?

My own reading around these issues has taken me in a very different direction from yours – primarily in the direction of patristic and contemporary Mariology and subsequently in studies of two key Catholic theologians – Hans Urs von Balthasar and Thomas Aquinas. In each case, I have used Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, gender theory and feminist theology to help me in my task of excavating the unacknowledged repressions, distortions and contradictions in my theological sources, and they also help to shed light on those areas where the Marian tradition in particular, but also von Balthasar and Aquinas, can be salvaged to construct the kind of theological vision I think we’re both searching for.

I have chosen this method because the relationship between nature and grace/creator and creation is gendered through and through – implicitly in most modern theology, explicitly in pre-modern theology and in von Balthasar – and you elide that insight in your treatment of these issues. Sarah Coakley’s book, ‘God, Sexuality, and the Self’, is due for discussion in one of the forthcoming symposia, and she makes the point that ‘no cogent answer to the contemporary Christian question of the Trinitarian God can be given without charting the necessary and intrinsic entanglement of human sexuality and spirituality in such a quest … [T]he problem of the Trinity cannot be solved without addressing the very questions that seem least to do with it … questions of sexual justice, questions of the meaning and stability of gender roles, questions of the final theological significance of sexual desire’. (pp. 2-3). In neglecting these gendered and sexual perspectives, you not only elide one of the foundational philosophical concepts which feeds into the Christian doctrines of God and creation (i.e. the gendered relationship between form/mind and matter/body, spirit and flesh, divine and human), you also elide all the contemporary theologians who are asking these questions – and most of them are women theologians.

So stylistically, you position yourself in a very different area of academic theology from my own, and in posing these questions to you, I’m not playing by the rules of the game. I’m coming at you with questions from way outside the parameters and disciplinary boundaries of your book. Maybe I’m a totally inappropriate person to be reflecting on your book. Here is a little cautionary tale, before you take my questions too seriously.

I was recently talking to a highly respected and well-known theologian who was describing to me how a personal experience of caring for a suffering child had changed his theology. I asked him if he would say so in the introduction to his next book, and he seemed embarrassed. No, he replied, he couldn’t do that because people would stop taking him seriously. So now I sometimes ask young men embarking on theological careers, how much they are willing to bring their own vulnerability and desire into their theology. It is a question that seems to trouble them – but be warned, if you want to be taken seriously, don’t do it!

On the question of style, let me move to my next point, with a change of style.

He: ‘I am happy to join my voice with yours in declaring Catherine, with all her blood-drenched, desire-swarming, body-teeming prose, to be a theologian. I will relish doing so and join in the reverie myself. But, in this case, arguing in this way would have committed me to an entirely different argumentative premise. It would have prevented me from saying, for example, that the stylistic form you’re enjoining, the “plunge into the “watery medium” of the “turbulent waters of grace,” is substantially empty and purely formal. … [Y]ou may be right — though I don’t know how we would know — that Catherine of Sienna spoke as she did because images, emotions, and metaphors she evoked were the “substance of her daily life,” that they flowed from her union with the “fleshy bodies of the poor and the suffering, the desperate and the dying.” What is key to my argument, though, is that this is not and cannot be true for us. Our social context and conditions are not hers, and this same language serves very different tasks and interests for us than it did for her. I am arguing that, for us, we can actually know this kind of language to be an expression and reiteration of our social alienation and fragmentation — a yearning for some reunion with the natural world, one another, and God that is not for us actual.’

She: Before I ever wrote of God, I gave birth in blood and water, I fed my children at my breast and felt my soul aching with their vulnerability. My heart, my bones and my flesh pulsed with yearning for the one who mothered and loved these newborn creatures more than I did, who brought them into being in my womb and gave them breath and life. My blood-drenched, desire-swarming, body-teeming life led me to a journey of discovery along the pathways of theology. When my youngest child started school, I went to university. They wanted my theology to be empty and purely formal, but how could it be? My questions were not their questions. My yearning discovered no answering voice in the books they told me to read. My desire was muffled by the arguments they offered.

I had left school at fifteen. I knew nothing of the God of the theologians, but I knew much about the God of the Presbyterians who was my childhood companion, lover and comforter, and my adolescent cast-off. I came back in my late twenties, seeking that God anew in the turbulence of motherhood, and He was there, the Father, exhausting me with His demands, wearing me down with his rules, stifling my intellect with His scriptural commands that must be obeyed simply because He says so. I went in search of a different God, and I found myself kneeling in shimmering candlelight before a dusty, tear-stained Piéta in waxy, incense-laden air. I had come home, yet there was nobody there. He whom my heart desired was gone, and I went out into the streets of the academy looking for my Beloved and found him not.

Then I realised that this absence was my desire, my jouissance, my beloved. My theology must not seek to capture this elusive God but must allow the infection of my own desire to invite others to come and play in the space of yearning and vulnerability that is more about hope than faith, more about journeying than arriving, more about seeking than finding. I have also always had a passion for language, for poetry and literature, for the capacity of words to paint a world. And so my theology is linguistic creativity in the service of God, and language is all I have in this academic world in which I find myself. Outside of that world, I swim and I dance, I weep and I rage, I love and I despair, but books cannot contain such a bodily weight. So the body too must become an absence and a linguistic style, in prose that is loose enough for the body to appear in the gaps.

This is not the densely plugged language of liberal feminism, where the appeal to experience puts a strangely controlled and knowable self in the place of mystery and revelation. This is the body of the one who knows herself and her desire and experience only insofar as she knows God, and who must therefore accept that she truly knows neither. Her own experience is not a yardstick against which to measure theology but a turbulent dynamism of the soul as it flows between the polarities of matter and spirit, of immanence and transcendence, resting in neither but woven on the loom of separation between the two. How can theology express such an experience? How can it call itself incarnational theology if it does not?

You ask of Catherine how we would know if her language flowed from the substance of her daily life. We know because she tells us. She makes present those desiring, bleeding, suffering bodies in her theology. She spent her days in the streets of poor and plague-ravished Siena, and she insisted over and over again that the neighbour is the only medium through which we come to know and serve God. You say of her that this is not and cannot be true for us, but I ask why not? You say that ‘Our social context and conditions are not hers’, but we all have different social contexts and conditions. A different kind of theology emerges from the book-bound silence of a library occupied by celibate men from that which emerges from a kitchen table in the midst of family life. An angst-ridden male intellectual relates to God differently from a man or woman struggling to make a living and hold a family together in the midst of the ordinary concerns and demands of daily life. Where do we position ourselves as Christian theologians in the midst of these differences and desires in our postmodern world? Do theologians not also hold bodies and tend the wounded? Do we not also make love and nurse children? Do we not care for ageing parents and keep company with dying friends? Do we not celebrate the birth of children and participate in the exuberant couplings and mournful separations of life? Do we not watch from afar as people are bombed and tortured and starved and sent into refuge, and imagine those bodies in all their vivid visceral reality with the inescapable, impossible demands they put upon us? Can we not sing the body electric and find a space for it within our language? Do we not bring all this to the sacraments and translate it into the story of Christ and the Church – birthing, loving, eating, suffering, dying, rising, nurturing and wounding – in that sublime and muddied space of separation which is also the space of transubstantiation, of materialising God in the lacuna between words and the world? How are we to talk of the Word made flesh, if not in words that express the materiality of the world?

My language is not innocent, pure or authentic, and it is certainly not authoritative. It is simply the way I do theology, as literature, as prose, sometimes as argument and analysis. It is a style of writing that seeks to be gusted through by the absence that marks the presence of the mystery, the darkness, the infinite question which glistens from the life-giving heavens and oozes from the life-drenched earth. It is a language that refuses to march to the drumbeat of the men of God, but seeks a linguistic medium in which to swim and sing, to weep and mourn, to live and love, with Catherine’s God.

Catherine knew all about social alienation and fragmentation. She knew about absence and yearning. She died in despair over the state of the Church, and her union with God was something of the soul that she (‘I, Catherine’) claimed to know nothing about. She was an accomplished and orthodox theologian, as were so many women like her, and the absence of God and the body gape as an unanswerable presence within her writings. I find in her a mimetic style, across the unbridgeable void of time and space, which helps me to find a different voice from that which I discover in the books of those who count as ‘real’ theologians, while still speaking within a theological tradition.

It is all a question of style and context. Who does theology, where do we do it, how do we do it, and who do we do it for? Our response to those questions will determine our sources and our style. So back to my questions to you. I must take your word for it when you line up so many men before me and tell me they are all wrong. I must take your word for it, because like many others I have already decided that much of what those men offer is high and dry, and there are different waters to swim in, different theologians to play with, different media in which to do theology, different patterns of grace to explore within the fabric of the world.

A change of style, or a change of substance?

Above all, we should not take ourselves too seriously. I hope you read this as playfully as it is intended!

Me again! I’ve just reread this response, and I think it’s pretty much what I’m saying in my latest response—very much a question of style then. Your last observation in your response to Craig Hovey sums it up: “I think the only real alternative is sacramentally embodied in the way of life that is the Christian church, but I think really working through what this means will involve us in thinking from the standpoint of our involvement in sustainable patterns of resistance, even defiance—patterns, though, that we live out for the world and its life.” My reservation is this “we”. What is this “Christian church” that shares a sacramental embodied unity? American evangelicals are changing the world by funding homophobic missions of proselytization in Uganda. Are they part of the sacramentally embodied Church? What of the victims of HIV/AIDS stigmatisation propagated by these missionaries and the preachers they indoctrinate? We must be careful who we mean by “we” lest we lose sight of the tragedy of Christian separation which is not easily resolved. If we are to bridge the Protestant/Catholic gap, we have to keep worrying away about the question you and I agree is fundamentally important and always ignored—our theologies of grace and the deficiencies on both sides—but I think the exchange between us has shown that the resources for doing that are very different within our different traditions. How do we use these, and how do we cope with irreconcilable difference?

Tina — YES!!!! Thank you for this!

Your challenge here cuts right to the heart. I welcome it. I write now only to say that I am sitting with this.

Tina,

My response here is not as playful as yours, but these are the thoughts that your wonderful reply provoked in me and I wanted to share them. I also trust that you will appreciate that I don’t relay any of it as a way of taking myself too seriously.

I completed my bachelor’s degree at a denominational liberal arts college that, at the time, was much smaller than it is now. I believe I started the process of transferring the first week I was there, but because I’d received a good scholarship and the money my mother and grandmother put up for my studies was already too much for them, it was really never feasible for me to leave. And by the time I had reached my final year, when I was no longer plausibly naive, and I’d already skipped too many classes and spent too much of their money not to finish, I decided that, despite some significant underperformance on my transcript, I was going to make the whole thing meaningful by writing a thesis that would earn me a degree “with honors.”

Interestingly, it had been theology that made it so hard to be there. I don’t mean the oppressive daily chapel or the school’s Evangelical identity. I never paid attention to either of those, anyway. When I say it was theology that made it hard to be there, I mean: because I loved God. Nothing pietistic or Transcendentalist, like I loved God and all that theology and “religion” got in the way. I mean I was only there in the first place to study theology because I loved God, and there was nothing more I wanted to do.

My love for God was not something within my control, really, and it never has been. It is just the inevitable pattern of life that has taken shape, the desire elicited, in the wake of a very intense and vivid experience I had one afternoon of being caught up in God’s own life. There were no spiritual directors in my sleepy Alabama town (at least none that I knew anything of), and certainly none of the preachers could help. Good people taught me the Bible and gave me what passed for catechesis, but who was there that could help me make sense of that desire-swarming, body-teeming encounter with Life? What it did provoke was a promiscuous scouring of books—Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Richard Foster, Teresa of Avila, Max Lucado, Dallas Willard, Augustine, Rich Mullins (musician), Frederick Buechner, Alan Jones—anything, really, I could get my hands on that would shed light on this Life and help me have more of it.

I knew that in college, “Christian college,” they called this stuff “theology” and I went there to immerse myself in it. And, like you, what I got was purely formal. They asked me to separate the“theology” from the “love” in a way I just didn’t know how to do—in a way that I just didn’t want to do.

So I majored in literature.

And this brings me back to the thesis. What I wrote was this sprawling, poetic, and expressionistic “essay” in literary theory and theology. The thing is so embarrassingly pretentious (I may be misremembering, but I think a portion of it was written in two columns, like Glas) and hubristic that I will not say anything more about it except that I was in way over my head and that this was the iteration of my love, the attempt to speak that love into a discipline that not only had no place for it, but which literally excluded it from consideration—excluded the one reason at all that I could see that there was for studying theology. It was an ungraceful attempt to bring these two worlds, not so much into harmony, as into a mutually transforming dialogue.

I passed the defense and graduated “with honors.” But the intense struggle to justify the legitimacy of what I was doing, leading up to and within the defense, made it very clear to me that “theology” was much more of a disciplinary regime, eager to police its boundaries, language, concepts, and even the desires it elicits or allows to be expressed.

I learned the lesson. It was excruciatingly difficult. But, just as you say in your cautionary note, it was reinforced very quickly, again and again, that if I was going to be taken seriously I must speak a particular idiom and appeal to a distinctive set of authorities. I recall very intentionally approaching my graduate work in theology, once it began (I still had no degree in theology!), like a guitarist who was now going to have be forced to play scales and vigilantly check his posture and technique for the next seven years. And my hope at least was that, at the end of it all, I would be able to do, say, think, and create things that I couldn’t at the beginning.

The matter is even more complicated than this, though, because I also came to love these thinkers: Augustine’s passionate desire, anger, pastoral care, courageous intervention in conflict, peculiar mix of biography and metaphysics; Aquinas’ ravenous pursuit of insight and clarity, dogged and innovative defense of the scientific knowledge of theology, always animated by a yearning for God; Schleiermacher’s bold reconstruction of the faith in terms that are simultaneously affective, scientific, ecclesiocentric, and Christocentric; Barth’s unremitting advance to take all thought captive for Jesus Christ—I could go on with these, but in each case the yearning for knowledge of God coincides with a profound respect for the transformative, and even divinizing (even in Barth, despite himself) aspect of understanding. And what I love about them is that what they treat spans the whole of Christian doctrine, the whole of Christian experience, and is so much more complex and nuanced than our stereotypes and particular sets of critiques want to allow them to be. They force us to read and reread them in order to understand them better, glean some insight from them, because they are always straining the bounds of what the language will authorize them to say, straining the bounds of their own understanding.

This is, after all, what I understand “waiting” to be—the fact that all real knowledge is prayer—the result of giving oneself to an other, responding to what is given to you to hear, see, feel, read, think from that other, and to do so as a way that receives it as a communication—one that invites and enables a response, while spurring us on to seek recognition (understanding) and to act on behalf of that other’s flourishing (ethics). Such waiting inevitably provokes anxiety because it requires the disruption of egoic, ideological, or identifiable stability; it demands, without compromise, a willingness to undergo that loss for the sake of realizing the possibility of unity and freedom of action that is not now real for us. But it also means that unity and freedom may be real for us if we are willing to risk the stabilities of our self-understanding, willing to risk not only being misunderstood but of admitting our misunderstandings—admitting even that we may be the one’s who’ve misunderstood ourselves, willing to allow ourselves to slip from our positions. It is to do all of this for the sake of opening a space for the transformation of ourselves and our situation in as-yet-unforeseen and uncontrollable ways. This is what I mean when I say that I don’t want parody, but intensive inhabitation of the situation. It means I want to engage it in ways that transmute its coordinates in inescapable ways—coordinates of which I am always already one myself.

I suppose this is what I would want to say in response to your wonderful reply here: thank you for engaging in the dialogue, for allowing yourself to enter it, with all that animates your work and bringing it to bear on my work, and for demanding as much of me in return as a condition for transformative engagement. It is the reason that you are the right person to be responding to the book, regardless of whether you can speak to the sources directly. There are probably many aspects of this story that will tell you something about what this book is to me. What I hope you will see in particular is how it is that this love of God drives my work, and how I understand very clearly what the stakes are here. In fact, they are much higher now in many ways for all the reasons you point out about being “taken seriously”—these are very much a matter of livelihood for me now. So there is no small amount of risk involved simply in taking your challenge seriously. This book, for all the critiques of style that you’ve raised, is the product of this struggle to understand this Life that has so graciously taken hold of mine, made itself known to me, and begun to make me into someone who, though stammering and often defensive, can be some kind of communication of it. I may have allowed that desire too much to be hidden beneath the bushel of the idiom, the “rules.” I have confessed some uneasiness about that in my first comment, and I want to continue to explore that. Because, as I’ve said to those close to me when I talked about what I am doing here, I’ve said on more than one occasion that I feel like what I’ve done is just cleared my throat.

But there is something else that continue to press on me, and which makes it impossible for me to simply accept the challenge you’ve put to me in those terms. That is the fact that it was only because I allowed my language and concepts to be reshaped as I did that I was admitted to a PhD program to study theology at all. I suppose you could liken it to having to visit your beloved in prison. You want to be together free of these oppressive restraints, but you’ll still take all you can get. Of course, the important point is never to confuse the prison for the reality of a free relation, and this is exactly the point that I protested against in my original response. I may not have been successful in my attempt to share my love under these restrictive conditions, but it is the oppressive limits to which I am asking us to pay close and discerning attention. I am simply not content to allow us to mistake the prison for freedom, the separation for the union.

I may have, indeed, lost something—and, as I’ve already said, I have this uneasy feeling like some creative communication is still to be developed. But I don’t think that thing, this style, that I am looking for is just there for me to pick up and use, that it will do the work I believe it must do. It will have to be constructed. But, even if I have lost something, I still ask that you consider that, because I haven’t simply bought uncritically into the rules but am really seeking to inhabit them in a particularly intensive way, is it not possible that doing so has enabled me to see, think, and say something that I would not otherwise have been able? Is it not possible that doing this work in this way does introduce something creative and transformative into the discourse? Was it wrong for me to have allowed this discourse the sway I did? Is there no value in that does not reinscribe all the alienation to which you rightly point? Is there any way for this to be meaningful to the blood and water and sweat and vomit and flesh and violence and peace and tenderness that drives your work—and which I hope drives mine?

I will end by noting something about the title of the book. You are right that the book does not at all make explicit how its language is gendered—or racialized, or any of the other ways in which I assume unconscious privilege. All of these are shortcomings of the book. To object that my primary concern is to open up the discourse would not be disingenuous, but it would be to defend unfairly against what this costs my argument by not putting it at the forefront. I recognize that—and I know, as the situation in St. Louis here in the US shows, that failing to do so has real-world implications for bodies. I will continue to think through what this means for what I am working to say, with a particular eye on how it changes what I say and how I say it.

There is an experience that is captured implicitly for me in the title of the book that may speak, in some way, to this gendered dimension. The title of the book refers to Simone Weil’s use of the word “attendance,” which was a notion that was always very meaningful to me because of the light it shed on my experiences of God’s Life. But the notion took on a powerfully transformative dimension after the birth of our first child. At first, it was the experience of an-other entering my life who had, simply by virtue of his existence, a claim to priority in all aspects of mine. I don’t mean merely the inevitable disruption of my self-perception or the frustration of my desires, but the sheer factuality of the obligation to reorient everything that I am and all that I do to attending to him, to receiving all that his dependent, vulnerable life introduces into mine, and allowing him to reshape my pattern of living into one that served the flourishing of life in him. This was not a transformation in my own self-awareness, though it most certainly was this. It meant, literally, embracing the summons to be realigned at the core by the cry that awoke me fifteen minutes after I had fallen asleep. It meant learning not to resist the claim that this cry had over my me, who I was, and what I wanted. It meant finding myself in responding to that obligation and learning to love the person that I was becoming by attending to him.

All of this was happening to me as I was completing the book. I wrote, I comforted my crying son. I wrote, I fed my crying son. I wrote, I changed my crying son. I did this while my wife worked to complete her education for the priesthood and prepared for her ordination exams. I continued to be his primary caregiver for the three years that followed, as I taught where and when I could, publish when and how I could, and complete the revisions of this book for publication. There were a number of ways that this experience as a stay-at-home father transformed how I related to and perform “masculinity,” and the most important of these arose from within the complexly gendered situation that my wife and I together navigated as she began her priesthood as a nursing mother (and later, to everyone’s surprise, as a pregnant mother) and I assumed the role, as a man, of the unemployed clergy-spouse—the “preacher’s wife,” as the role was called where I came from—taking care of the baby.

So you may be right that these issues may result in the work not being taken seriously. But I am being honest when I say that these are the issues upon which I hope the work will open out. Who knows what such a thing may mean for a “career” as a theologian, and who ultimately can control how we are perceived or read? That is the anxiety that lay, I believe, at the root of truly ethical responsibility. It is the risk that must be taken—the risk of being misunderstood, as well of being fundamentally transformed, if we are to realize the union to which we are called, to realize the good that wants to take root in us.

That’s at least something more about what I’d hoped to say.

Josh, I am in awe that a conversation that started out in such mutual incomprehension has come to a place of such grace. Thank you for risking this. There is not a single word that doesn’t find an echo in me. Of course, echoes are sounds that resound across abysmal spaces, but even so, I’m grateful for what has happened here. It feels like a moment of grace.

Let me also admit that I was and am nervous about challenging you in this way, because of course I understand the rules and the need to play by them. I’ve reached a stage when I can afford to be a little cavalier about playing by the rules, but that’s a luxury that many in your situation can’t afford. Even so, I hope that others will read what you’ve written here, because it explains so much, and helps to shed light on some of the aspects of your book that all the commentators found baffling.

I remember Denys Turner once remarking how an undergraduate student had pointed out to him that apophaticism and cataphaticism are not so different. They both use words, after all, it’s just that the kind of words they use is different. So, after this exchange, I begin to see what I couldn’t see on my earlier reading—your book is an exercise in apophatic theology, which resists the lush fecundity of a cataphatic style, but which knows the cost of writing of that which cannot be said, in words that are not necessarily of your choosing. I guess the words we would choose to bridge the aporia await us in the eschaton, but in the meantime this is a fertile meeting in the broken middle.

I agree with you about the grand old men—Augustine, Aquinas, Barth, Schleiermacher and all the rest. Of course I read and love them, for all the reasons you say. As for Simone Weil, every time I have a new group of students, I try to find space to get them to read her ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God’. It is about patience and waiting, in all the ways you suggest. (Do you know Maggie Ross’s book, ‘Writing the Icon of the Heart: In Silence Beholding’? I recommend it).

Anyway, I don’t want to prolong this, because I think what you’ve written should be the last word—at least in our exchange. I suspect we’ve both broken any rules that this symposium might hope to maintain, but it was worth it! Thank you for being so gracious and for giving so much of yourself. Something deeply theological has happened here.