The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism 0192866966, 9780192866967

Table of contents :
Cover
The Mysticism of Ordinary Life Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A New Vision of Christian Mystical Theology
Mysticism as the Grace of Divine Union
What Makes a Life Ordinary?
Comparable Studies
The Path Ahead
Part I: Catholic Mystical Theologians In The Twentieth Century
1 Grace in the Ordinary: The Mystical Theology of Karl Rahner
A Christian Theology of Universal Grace
An Ascetical Mysticism of Ordinary Life
A Gender-Neutral Theory of Mysticism?
A Prayerful Thinker at Heart
2. Obedience, Love, and Suffering: The Mystical Theology of Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar
The Relationship between Speyr and Balthasar
Gender Theory and Hagiography
Feminist Critiques of Speyr and Balthasar’s Gender Theory
Hagiography as Immanent Critique
Mystical Obedience
Mystical Marriage
Mystical Suffering and Death
Part II: Christian Mysticism And Postmodern Philosophy
3. Immanence and Alterity: The Mystical Styles of Michel Henry and Michel de Certeau
Mystical Immanence: Michel Henry
Henry’s Philosophical Interpretation of Christian Mysticism
Henry’s Other(s)
Henry on Suffering and Joy
Mystical Alterity: Michel de Certeau
Certeau’s History and Theory of Christian Mysticism
A Heterological Mysticism of Ordinary Life
The Prospects for a Christian Mystical Theology after Certeau
4. The Other Within: Constructs of Mystical Femininity in Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva
Remembered Origins
Early Irigaray: Mysticisms in Conflict
Early Kristeva: Dialectical Tensions
New Beginnings
Irigaray on Nature and Grace
Kristeva on Hatred and Love
The “French Feminist” Politics of Gender and Racial Difference
Gender Essentialism?
Traces of Race
Breathing, Writing, and Loving
Irigaray’s Practice of Yoga
Kristeva’s Text on Teresa
Seeking a Greater Love
Part III: Intersectional Feminism: Mystical Traditions from the American Side of the Atlantic
5. The Divine in Between: Gloria Anzaldúa, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, and Other Mestizo/a Mystical Sources
Mystical Mestizaje
The Mysticism of La Lucha and Lo Cotidiano
Mystical Encounters with La Virgen de Guadalupe
Via Crucis
6. Divine Darkness Revisited: Alice Walker, M. Shawn Copeland, and Other Womanist and Black Mystical Sources
Mystical Blackness: Between Being and Nothingness
The Graced Lives of Black Women
Mystical Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Evangelists
Mystical Characters in Walker’s Fiction
The Mysticism of Christian Womanist Theologians
Mystical Corporeality
Crucified Bodies
Erotic, Joyous Bodies
The Embodied Spirit of Freedom
A Return to Mystical Darkness
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism A N D R EW P R EVO T

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Andrew Prevot 2023 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2023 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022942785 ISBN 978–0–19–286696–7 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866967.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Limited Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Contents Acknowledgments Foreword Maria Clara Bingemer

Introduction: A New Vision of Christian Mystical Theology

vii ix

1

I .   C AT HO L IC M YS T IC A L T H E O L O G IA N S I N T H E T W E N T I E T H C E N T U RY 1. Grace in the Ordinary: The Mystical Theology of Karl Rahner

31

2. Obedience, Love, and Suffering: The Mystical Theology of Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar

63

I I .   C H R I S T IA N M YST IC I SM A N D POSTMODERN PHILOSOPHY 3. Immanence and Alterity: The Mystical Styles of Michel Henry and Michel de Certeau

103

4. The Other Within: Constructs of Mystical Femininity in Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva

139

I I I .   I N T E R SE C T IO NA L F E M I N I SM : M YS T IC A L T R A D I T IO N S F R OM T H E A M E R IC A N SI D E O F T H E AT L A N T IC 5. The Divine in Between: Gloria Anzaldúa, Ada María Isasi-­Díaz, and Other Mestizo/a Mystical Sources

183

6. Divine Darkness Revisited: Alice Walker, M. Shawn Copeland, and Other Womanist and Black Mystical Sources

222

Conclusion 267 Bibliography Index

271 295

Acknowledgments I am grateful for generous financial support from the Louisville Institute’s Sabbatical Grant for Researchers and from Boston College. I would like to thank the many scholars who have discussed this book with me or read it in whole or part, including Amey Victoria Adkins-­Jones, Steven Battin, Tina Beattie, Jeffrey Bloechl, Derek Brown, Daniel Castillo, Sarah Coakley, M.  Shawn Copeland, Elizabeth Dreyer, Nichole Flores, Peter Fritz, Mary Ann Hinsdale, Amy Hollywood, Willie James Jennings, S.  Kyle Johnson, Karen Kilby, Jennifer Martin, Kevin McCabe, Carlos Mendoza, David Newheiser, Nancy Pineda-­Madrid, Elizabeth Pyne, Brian Robinette, Chanelle Robinson, Michael Rubbelke, Kathryn Tanner, John Thiel, Linn Tonstad, Andy Vink, Todd Walatka, Nathan Wood-­House, and Byron Wratee. Special thanks are owed to my doctoral student, Sarah Livick-­ Moses, who helped me edit the manuscript and to the Catholic mystical theologian, Maria Clara Bingemer, for writing the Foreword. I remain indebted to Cyril O’Regan, Lawrence Cunningham, and J. Matthew Ashley, my doctoral committee. Much love to my parents, sisters, and extended family, both living and deceased, and to the fiercest feminist theologian I know: Elizabeth Antus. This book is offered in praise and thanksgiving to the unknown God of incarnate love.

Foreword

Maria Clara Bingemer

It is a joyful task to write this Foreword. After reading the author’s previous book Thinking Prayer, fruit of his excellent doctoral dissertation, it is fantastic to see how this young and at the same time very mature theologian evolved in his reflection on mysticism and spirituality as sources of theology. In his Introduction, Prevot already points to all of the good things he will bring to his readers when he declares, “Christian mystical theology learns from past contemplatives who experienced intimacy with the unknown God of incarnate love. But to be all that it promises to be, it must not only look to the past. It must also search hidden places in this troubled world for new forms of the grace of divine union.” The author, then, is exploring the ways in which mystical experience of God, with its specific grace of union of love, happens in contemporary times. And this is surely a very important topic in mystical studies today. I tried to offer something on this subject in a book written during a fellowship at DePaul University in Chicago and published in English in 2016.1 But there I explored mostly the secularized situation of the world and the challenge for any spiritual or mystical experience in a context that pretends to be rid of God or to have overcome every transcendence and belief. Prevot goes further with his investigation in this book. He explores contemporary concerns and new insights from theologians who have become crucially important for theological thinking in modern and postmodern times. He analyzes new syntheses done by those contemporary theologians and thinkers. He gives great importance to contemporary challenges, such as gender and race. And—­most important—­he builds new syntheses of his own. In Chapter 1, the author delves into the mystical theology of a figure whom scholars such as Harvey Egan and Bernard McGinn aptly call “the Doctor Mysticus of the twentieth century”: Karl Rahner. The German theologian wrote about many subjects during his lifetime, and there are not many areas of theology he did not explore in his writings. But he brought something innovative and definitive to theological reflection about mysticism: the experience of God within the reality of the world, which constitutes what he calls “the mysticism of or­din­ ary life.” Prevot begins the chapter with a comparison between the two great

1 Bingemer, Mystery and the World.

x Foreword theologians Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar, who have sometimes been seen as opposed to one another. But more significantly, Prevot presents a deep and sharp reflection on Rahner’s treatments of key subjects that have to do with mysticism: the doctrine of grace, the account of ordinariness, the question of gender, and practices of prayer. He makes an excellent retrieval of Rahner’s doctrine of grace, with deep scholastic discussions that ultimately show that “uncreated grace is available in this life and that it is, in various mysterious and complex ways, involved with human experience.” This reflection reaffirms the highly important Rahnerian effort to bring God’s action down to earth, to the “economic” level, which is the only way to reach the “­immanent” level, the inner mystery of God. The way our author treats Rahner’s thoughts about gender and mysticism deserves particular attention. He highlights the ­tremendous positive contributions Rahner makes to this delicate topic, while ­cri­tiquing some nuances of Rahner’s thought, for instance in his Mariology. Chapter 2 faces a delicate narrative in the Catholic Church: the story of the simultaneously theological and mystical relationship between Hans Urs von Balthasar and the physician Adrienne von Speyr, who was the Swiss theologian’s intimate friend. Adrienne von Speyr discovered in Catholicism and in her relationship with Balthasar a vital path that she had never experienced before. That was the beginning of a lifelong spiritual partnership with many fruits in writing and action. Prevot stresses the great significance—even calling it a “central role”—that both Speyr and Balthasar give to gender in their understanding of Christian mysticism. He reflects on Speyr’s and Balthasar’s ways of incorporating a binary account of sexual difference into the meaning of divine union. Although Prevot develops a positive perspective on some points of their experience and thought, his intention is to prioritize a more feminist line of questioning. Our author not only makes a very accurate description of Balthasar’s and Speyr’s mystical the­ ology and gender theory but also shows a deep knowledge of Balthasar’s vast and profound theological work, relating all of it to the gender questions raised by his relationship with Speyr. He reads both mystical theologians critically, on feminist and other grounds, always supporting his arguments for or against their claims. The critical synthesis brought to the reader at the end of the chapter is lucid and free and allows one to go even deeper into the central concern of the author, which is the mysticism of ordinary life. Chapter 3 reflects on the contributions of two great postmodern philosophers and thinkers: Michel Henry and Michel de Certeau. With this investigation, Prevot wants to call the reader’s attention to the shift that Western philosophy took in the twentieth century, mostly after the cultural revolution of 1968. He shows how the cultural and intellectual movements at this time had an impact on Catholic mystical theology, which until then, with Rahner and Balthasar, was still primarily shaped by Thomist and scholastic models. The author focuses on two

Foreword  xi postmodern thinkers who develop their own ways of reading Christian mystics while maintaining close but ambivalent relationships with theology and Christianity. Reflecting on Henry’s and Certeau’s philosophy, the author indicates that a rigor­ous feminist reception of Christian mysticism stands to benefit from their studies of immanence and alterity. As we read in Chapter  3: “Postmodern ­interpretations of Christian mysticism contribute to this feminist possibility by discerning something divine, or divine-­like, in ordinary life’s conditions of immanence and alterity.” The author states that while Henry sings a hymn of praise to immanence, the subjectivity of the flesh, Certeau praises alterity, the otherness of the other, even as he also raises the question of the “body” of the mystic. Prevot’s reading of Certeau accurately emphasizes the great influence being a historian had on his thought and especially his works on mysticism, even giving the impression—­in Prevot’s words—­of “seculariz[ing] Christian mysticism by translating it into an unlimited array of performances of alterity.” However, the author also reaffirms Certeau’s Christian identity in dealing with mysticism, invoking the support of theologians such as Balthasar and Henri de Lubac. He finds in Certeau an Ignatian approach to spirituality, which explains much of his style and position and shows the degree to which he remains Christian in all his “heterological” writings. While Henry prioritizes a retrieval of Meister Eckhart, Certeau focuses on the Jesuit mystic Jean-­Joseph Surin. Prevot shows how, through Surin, Certeau arrives at his conception of mysticism not so much as logos but as fable, an approach that comes to fruition in his more than important book, The Mystic Fable. Living with depression and working as an exorcist with nuns, Surin demonstrates, according to Certeau, that even in the midst of incredible psychological pain, it is possible to give a body to the Spirit. This means that it is possible to experience the extraordinary—­that is, God—­in ordinary life. Prevot emphasizes the importance of Certeau’s studies of other Jesuit mystics, including the Society’s founder, Ignatius. He calls the reader’s attention to the fact that Certeau’s interest is always turned to the experience of the mystic’s otherness and that this focus has a considerable impact on Certeau’s attention to gender and his studies of many female mystics. The author recognizes that, for Certeau, in a male-­centered society, church, and intellectual culture, “woman” is a major figure of otherness. The author’s reading of Certeau is more extensive in the chapter than the points we have highlighted here—­showing a rare intimacy with the French Jesuit’s writings. However, throughout the chapter, and especially at its end, Prevot affirms that it is best to read Henry and Certeau together. Finally, it is the conjunction of the two that offers theology a new perspective on the mysticism of ordinary life. Chapter 4 helps the reader to become better acquainted with two great European feminists: Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. According to the author, both make a very important point about mystical thinking, which is that motherhood is one of the primary and inescapable loci of mystical experience. Kristeva

xii Foreword treats this theme extensively in her writings. As a psychoanalyst, she offers a very deep reflection on the “other within” that is maternal experience, something women experience biologically. But the author also shows that both thinkers do not consider motherhood to be the unique and fatal destiny of all women. In his own words: “[They] do not merely construct mystical femininity as a return to, or return of, the maternal origin of life. More positively, they envision a process of women’s becoming; a path toward greater freedom, creativity, and flourishing; a therapeutic practice for body, soul, and society.” He does not fail to clarify the difference between these women. While Irigaray appears more focused on thinking mystical femininity as antidote to a toxic masculine culture that never allowed women to be themselves, Kristeva thinks about women and men as searching for themselves in a process of identity, while suggesting that women have a greater experiential sensitivity to this process. She chooses Teresa of Avila as the happy synthesis of that search and process. The author also remembers the many critiques both thinkers received from their feminist colleagues from other latitudes outside Europe. He acknowledges that their feminism is not in sync with all the approaches taken, for instance, in North American feminism. Irigaray believes that there is a “forgetfulness” of the mother in Western civ­il­iza­ tion, which helped the phallocentric culture build its discourse. This forgetting reached a new intensity with the Cartesian cogito. Resisting this culture, she reads women mystics from the perspective of a multiple and infinite “jouissance” in the body. This is at the center of her account of mystical femininity. While recognizing the importance of Irigaray’s thought on mysticism, Prevot makes a lucid critique of her attempt to conform mysticism to gender essentialism. The author presents an excellent analysis of Irigaray’s texts, showing how they touch on theological topics, such as the Incarnation and Mariology, and develop a perspective that goes beyond the critique of phallocentrism and the affirmation of women’s jouissance. Without abandoning Freud or Lacan, Kristeva rediscovers a therapeutic and liberating value in Christian mysticism. One of her preferred mystics, Bernard of Clairvaux, exemplifies her thoughts about how one can overcome narcissistic wounds while moving toward a positive relation with otherness. Prevot discusses Kristeva’s brilliant reflections on other Christian mystical writers and her engagement with central points of Christian theology, such as the Eucharist and especially Mariology. As in other chapters, so too here our author has a critical view of the two thinkers’ reflections, especially about politics and race. Their ways of doing feminist philosophy make positive contributions to Christian mystical the­ ology, but some shortcomings are evident. Their work poses challenges to ­scholars and calls for new dialogues. Prevot concludes that, like Henry and Certeau, Irigaray and Kristeva do not break with Christian mysticism in their postmodern reflections but develop it in new ways in relation to ordinary life. In Chapter 5, the author introduces a real novelty in mystical studies: the question of intersectionality between feminism and the critical analysis of race. Here

Foreword  xiii he presents what he calls a mestiza mysticism. Prevot draws the reader’s attention to the fact that “as feminists across the academy have become more attentive to the methodological demands of intersectionality, feminist interpreters of Christian mysticism have continued to prioritize gender-­focused studies of medieval and early modern texts of Western Europe, with little attention to race.” In this chapter, he reflects on how mysticism appears in new ways in bilingual Latino/a discourses. This is the “mestiza” way of being mystical: naming divinity in different ways inside such cultures and embodied experiences. Prevot addresses the thought and work of two female theorists: the Cuban American theologian Ada María Isasi-­Díaz and the Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa. The first is Catholic, the second non-­Christian. The author assumes as a point of departure that mestizaje involves a history of conquest, subordination, and violence of all kinds, particularly against women. The blend and mixture of cultures, languages, and identities now takes on a different form, reversing the colonial direction of movement with massive immigration from the global South to the global North. But the author makes clear that there are racial and gender oppressions inside this new phase of mestizaje, occurring between and among various oppressed groups. Anzaldúa proposes mestizaje as an interior experience, consisting of a perpetual state of self-­awareness and painful but productive conflict. To her, as Prevot puts the point, “the new mestiza . . . [is] a woman of the borderlands who responds critically to the multiple patriarchal cultures (Aztec, Latino, and Anglo; secular and religious) that seek to regulate her existence.” This rebellion is a mystical experience. It is a divine power within mestizaje that, through “its defiance of binary categories . . . [it] resembles the incomprehensible mystical summit of a Dionysian apophatic ascent.” It transforms consciousness and brings “unruly forces into language and culture in order to provoke a revolution in them.” Isasi-­Díaz coins the word “mujerista” to designate the female subject in the middle of her liberationist project, struggling against racism/ethnic prejudice, economic oppression, and sexism altogether. She argues that mestizaje happens when women act as agents of a “moral truth-­praxis” and are not reduced to passive victims of colonial or patriarchal domination. She has two central categories: la lucha and lo cotidiano. As a reader, I perceive here the concept of ordinary life (lo cotidiano) that was developed in a different way by twentieth-­ century European theologians and thinkers brought together with the liberating movements started with Liberation Theology in Latin America (la lucha), which spread all over the world. Isasi-­Díaz knows this synthesis well as a Latina theologian. While discussing the problems that immigrant communities face in the United States, Prevot draws on Isasi-­Díaz to describe the mysticism of ordinary life as inseparable from the everyday struggle for justice. The author finally turns his attention to the Virgin of Guadalupe, patroness of América and feminine face of the transcendental. Praising Anzaldúa and Isasi-­ Díaz and their contributions to this new kind of mestiza mysticism, he says:

xiv Foreword “Feminist studies of mysticism must consider what mysticism means in the lives of women who continue to struggle against the unjust patriarchal, colonial, and White supremacist norms that began to take root over 500 years ago in the conquest of the Americas. It must discern where and how the grace of divine union is operative in their quotidian stories, actions, and relationships and strive to understand what concrete transformations this grace demands.” Chapter 6 also brings a bright novelty to mystical studies. Prevot delves deeply into the mysticism present in womanist theology and other Black sources. Blackness has captured his attention and engagement for a long time, and it is very understandable that he gives this chapter a prominent place in this book. This subject has at its center a very weighty and terrible reality: slavery. So present in the U.S.  and in other countries of America, like Brazil, slavery necessarily shapes much of the thought and writing occurring nowadays. Highlighting the work of Alice Walker and M. Shawn Copeland, Prevot presents womanism as uniting feminism and Blackness. Drawing on Walker, he describes it as “a strong, defiant, spiritual, and embodied love that is rooted in Black women’s experiences and affirms people of various colors, genders, and sexualities.” He interprets it as a mysticism of ordinary life, arguing that “the union of the divine and quotidian flesh is its central theme.” It is the discovery “of the opaque mystery of God’s incarnate love in the opaque mysteries of an abused people’s corporeal strivings for wholeness and holiness.” What the author describes through the works of these scholars is the drama and the mystical experience of subjects—­Black women—­who are always on the border of nothingness. That is what a good part of Black studies is about. Many scholars in this field emphasize its apophatic nature. But in womanist theology the resistance to being reduced to nothing is what brings people closer to the divine. Is it not a Christian belief that God in person descended to hell to rescue humankind? Prevot connects this Christian insight with the hells of slavery and its aftermath. In addition to the novelty of Prevot’s discussion of the mysticism of Black women in the womanist movement and elsewhere, it is important to praise the fantastic dialogue he fosters between theology and literature. His literary hermeneutic—­especially his reading of Alice Walker, who is so well known all over the world for her novel The Color Purple—­helps in a very fertile way to illuminate this so rich universe of Black womanist mysticism. The presence of a great female theologian, M.  Shawn Copeland, also significantly enhances the discussion of ordinary life and its bodily dimensions. Copeland drinks from the well of James Cone’s Black theology and the whole Black theological tradition. Being corporeal is, according to Prevot, the core of womanist mysticism. Whether one turns to Copeland or Walker, one can find a positive reading of Christ’s Passion, despite all the dangerous traps this doctrine opens for women. Christ’s compassionate love not only accompanies them in their subordination but also helps them remember the oppression suffered by the

Foreword  xv ancestors, the community, and all others who are threatened with nothingness. This mysticism in the flesh also includes joy, pleasure, and erotic fulfillment. So bodies are no longer objects but living agents. Agents of life. This excellent book is a precious tool for mystical theology, bringing faithfulness to Christian tradition together with new challenges present today. It is an open path for future research to dare to go beyond classical studies and drink from new wells where the Spirit continues to refresh men and women and to touch them intimately so that they may give life to others.

  Introduction A New Vision of Christian Mystical Theology

Christian mystical theology learns from past contemplatives who experienced intimacy with the unknown God of incarnate love. But to be all that it promises to be, it must not only look to the past. It must also search hidden places in this troubled world for new forms of the grace of divine union. Not every life of practical holiness, radiant with acts of love, is necessarily an instance of such “uncreated” grace: an inner gift not merely from but of God. Even so, the presence of such grace in holy lives may be more common than many theologians assume.1 God unites with human beings in their everyday lives because God desires it. Christianity is grounded in the belief that God wants to be one with God’s creatures, even in the midst of their frailties and failings, but especially as a healing force of freedom and transformation. This is the mad wisdom revealed in Christ. This is the reason behind the Holy Spirit’s apparent whims. When the Syrian monk Dionysius first introduced the idea of “mystical the­ology,” in the short treatise that bears this name, he conceived it as an esoteric practice of praising God, through an ineffable union with God, which only the highest-­level initiates could access. It was a secret discourse, which, through af ­fi rm­ations, denials, contradictions, and silences, led its participants into the brilliantly dark source of all things.2 One and a half millennia later, Dionysius’s secret is out. Often without knowing his writings, many so-­called “ordinary” ­people know the sublime unknowing of which he speaks. They know, in their own diversely embodied ways, the union with God that is the living heart of the Christian mystical tradition.

1  Thomas Aquinas suggests that it is rare for a person to behold the essence of God in this mortal life. He agrees with Augustine that such a miraculous vision or “rapture” has occurred in the cases of Moses and Paul, but he does not think it is a widely available grace. Nevertheless, he argues that the absence of such rapturous union with the divine essence does not foreclose the possibility of a holy life shaped by the supernatural virtue of charity. Although Aquinas thinks of this virtue as a gift of the Holy Spirit, he also emphasizes that the Holy Spirit does not wield the soul as a passive instrument but merely inclines it toward the practice of love. In this argument, Aquinas contests Peter Lombard’s more boldly mystical thesis that charity is the immediate indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the soul. See Aquinas, Summa Theologica, part 1, q. 12, a. 11; part 2–2, q. 23, a. 2; and part 2–2, q. 175, a. 3. Such scholastic debates reveal a complex range of potentially legitimate theological views about how to understand the grace of divine union. 2  The Mystical Theology, in Pseudo-­Dionysius, Complete Works.

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism. Andrew Prevot, Oxford University Press. © Andrew Prevot 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866967.003.0001

2 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Many of these ordinary ones may not be very ordinary according to restrictive cultural standards that specify norms of gender, racial, or other bodily per­form­ ance. Many may not be Christian. Most probably are not recognized as mystics. Most do not belong to religious orders or hold advanced theological degrees. In some cases, the word “God” may obstruct rather than facilitate their articulation of the grace in their lives—­that is, if this word has come to them through violent interactions that are far removed from the powerful inner love that they seek to name. Christian mystical theology ought to be the sort of theological endeavor—­ the sort of thinking prayer—­that understands both how to hold fast to the best characteristics of its own ancient traditions and how to adapt to the changing conditions of quotidian existence. The present work of Christian mystical theology reflects my perspective as a Black,3 profeminist, and philosophically informed Catholic theologian. It ori­gin­ ated from a perception, formed in me several years ago, that feminist scholars were doing very important work on Christian mysticism, balancing respect for historical mystical sources with a rigorous analysis of newer questions related to  gender, desire, power, and the body.4 Although some of this work was both Catholic and theological, much of it was not, and I was interested in how to think through these themes in a Catholic theological vein. Perhaps more importantly, I believed that a Catholic model of relating theology and philosophy as distinct but complementary disciplines might provide theologians with a way to affirm the insights about mysticism that were being developed by feminist philosophers and theorists—­and by the mystically informed postmodern traditions of phe­nom­en­ ology, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis on which they drew—­while integrating these insights with theological teachings about grace, Christ, the Holy Spirit, prayer, and so on that remain vital to the Christian mystical tradition. To be clear, I do not claim to be a “feminist author”—that is, a producer of original feminist content who can speak from this precise subject position. Nevertheless, I take theological and political positions that are “profeminist,” by which I mean intentionally affirming of women’s lives and receptive to the diverse demands of women struggling for change in church and society. Following bell hooks, I understand feminism to be a heterogenous social movement, “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” This movement includes various forms of activist work, artistic expression, and intellectual production that call for serious interpretation by anyone with the will to do so. As hooks puts

3  Following emerging scholarly conventions, this text capitalizes “Black,” “White,” and other analogous terms when they are used in a racial sense. 4 Bingemer, Mystery and the World; Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self; Dreyer, Accidental Theologians; Farley, Thirst of God; Hall, Laughing at the Devil; Hollywood, Soul as Virgin Wife; Jantzen, Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism; Lanzetta, Radical Wisdom; Newman, Sister of Wisdom; Soelle, Silent Cry; and Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity.

Introduction  3 the point, “feminism is for everybody.”5 The arguments that follow, including those treating male-­authored works, draw on research conducted in feminist subfields of philosophy and theology. In this limited sense, this book makes a secondary contribution to feminist scholarship on Christian mysticism and seeks to normalize male theological engagement with it.6 My experiences as a Black man in the United States have made me sensitive to the bitter realities of oppression. I was first attracted to feminist scholarship on mysticism because of the ways it defies patriarchal power and discloses a divine love for women and other violated groups. Feminist scholars read mystical texts as discursive sites in which these types of conflicts are being negotiated. Often the texts in question are written by or about women who lived in medieval or early modern Europe. This is not just one historical context among others but the originating place of many of the theological, philosophical, and political norms that continue to regulate life and death in the wake of colonial modernity.7 As I studied feminist works on Christian mysticism, I began to ask what Christian mystical theology might say about the grace of divine union in the quotidian lives of poor women of color who suffer from and resist various forms of intersecting patriarchal and White supremacist domination.8 To this end, I began to take more seriously the fact that mestiza and Black women of North America (which is my own context) have experienced a strengthening, consoling, and liberating presence of the divine in their lives. Many Latina and African American women describe this presence as a powerful source of love for their bodily existence and as a firm, interior ground of resistance against the forces of oppression. Although this presence is sometimes interpreted in Christian theological terms—­precisely as an experience of union with Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and in some cases the Virgin Mary—­it also has qualities that indicate the influence of indigenous, non-­Christian traditions of Africa and the Americas. A tension similar to that between Eurocentric forms of theology

5 hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody, p. xii. 6  I distinguish male theological engagement with women mystics—­of which there are numerous examples such as Balthasar, Two Sisters in the Spirit; Bouyer, Women Mystics; Harmless, Mystics, pp. 59–78; McIntosh, Mystical Theology; McGinn, Flowering of Mysticism; Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian; and Rowan Williams, Teresa of Avila—­from the rarer practice in which a male theologian gives feminist scholarship on Christian mysticism a prominent place in his constructive theological work. Although passing references to such feminist scholarship sometimes occur—­e.g., McIntosh, Mystical Theology, pp. 63–4, 78, and 182 and McGinn, Flowering of Mysticism, pp. 16–19—it tends to be neglected or marginalized in male theological studies of Christian mysticism. 7  Sylvia Wynter clarifies the transition from medieval Christian to modern secular violence in “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being.” The term “wake” may be understood here in the polysemic sense, inclusive of mourning and possibility, that Christina Sharpe elaborates in In the Wake, pp. 1–22. 8  Kimberle Crenshaw introduced the metaphor of such an “intersection” into critical legal theory in the late 1980s (see Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”), but the practice of examining interrelated oppressions had been underway in Black feminist and other women of color-­led movements and intellectual circles for many years. See Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, pp. 53–69.

4 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

and philosophy reappears on the American side of the Atlantic, in materials seldom recognized for their theological, philosophical, or for that matter mystical significance. A Catholic way of relating theology and philosophy may help ­ Christian mystical theology capaciously retrieve the diverse ways of understanding and embodying the grace of divine union that are available in the quotidian lives of darkly hued women who struggle against the legacies of conquest and slavery. I have chosen The Mysticism of Ordinary Life as the title of this book in order to draw attention to the seemingly commonplace point that God is present in the here and now and is not the exclusive property of any elite class. This book offers a sustained discussion of this idea through studies of its appearance in recent theological, philosophical, and intersectional feminist sources that appropriate the Christian mystical tradition in relation to various accounts of the meaning of ordinary life.9 Although this book occasionally touches on non-­Christian mys­ tic­al materials as they arise in some of these sources, it remains throughout a work of Christian mystical theology, which purports neither to treat this field comprehensively nor to cover the whole scope of the world’s mystical phenomena. Although this book is focused on Christian mysticism, some readers might think it fits better in the disciplinary categories of systematic theology, philosophical theology, or political theology than mystical theology. Especially if they believe that a work of mystical theology must proceed as a first-­person account of the author’s own subjective experience of divine union, this book may not seem to meet the requirements. However, although I do not directly describe my own spiritual life in the following pages, the reader can be assured that I resonate deeply with the mystical sources I treat here and, in many undisclosed ways, seek and find myself in them. A Christian mystical theology need not be centered on the private adventures of an individual. It can be written as a chorus of voices. A systematic theological approach is necessary because the grace of divine union is, from one angle, a Christian doctrine, which must be understood in relation to other Christian teachings and traditions that give it meaning.10 A philosophical theological approach is desirable because Christian mystical theology uses ideas about language, embodiment, and other aspects of human existence that philosophy helps clarify and because, particularly in postmodernity, philo­sophers have offered innovative readings of Christian mysticism that call for a theological appraisal. A political theological approach is inevitable because discourses, whether theological, philosophical, mystical, or otherwise, carry power that affects the wellbeing of social groups and because the grace of divine

9  Although Karl Rahner may be credited with making “the mysticism of ordinary life” a recognizable phrase in Catholic theology, this book shows that strict Rahnerians are not the only proponents of some such idea. 10 Lossky, Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 9.

Introduction  5 union—­when truly present—­empowers loving, community-­building practices. If any persons claim to be united with God but fail to act in compassionate and just ways, it is necessary to question the authenticity of their mystical testimonies.11 This book enlists such systematic, philosophical, and political approaches in the service of an act of contemplation oriented toward the unknown God of ­incarnate love who desires to be one with the wounded and mysterious creatures that we human beings are.

Mysticism as the Grace of Divine Union Scholars of mysticism wrestle with challenging questions about its meaning, including its definition and the composition of its canon. Among the available options, I favor a theological definition that characterizes mysticism as a type of grace.12 Grace, the loving activity of God ad extra (particularly after the primary act of creation), would be distinctively mystical insofar as it draws the human being into some sort of experiential union, or at least profound intimacy, with God, and with other human and nonhuman creatures too, in this very life; that is, prior to the eschaton, though perhaps while also deeply anticipating it. According to this theological definition, mysticism is a historical possibility for radical, even identity-­blurring closeness with God that God offers to some or all persons, depending on which theologian one asks (the present argument supports the universalist position). It is something that Christians, on the fundamental basis of the incarnation of the Word and the sending of the Spirit and on the authority of biblical and postbiblical witnesses, should believe to be possible. Yet belief in the possibility of the grace of divine union does not entail a credulous attitude toward particular cases. It simply expresses a central Christian idea about who God is. By contrast, a definition that judges the presence of mysticism according to a subject’s altered states of consciousness does not require any doctrine of grace. As a result, it cedes considerable ground to philosophy, particularly in its modern 11 Drawing on the mystical-­ political lives of Catherine of Siena, Ignatius of Loyola, Evelyn Underhill, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day—­along with several Christian activists such as Beyers Naudé, Denis Hurley, Nelson Mandela, and Desmond Tutu who worked in apartheid South Africa—­ Susan Rakoczy argues that true Christian mysticism “radiates” in the fight for social justice (Great Mystics and Social Justice, p. 192). Although it may not be necessary to become a mystic in order to act in a holy manner that is consistent with the justice of God (though I wonder what else grounds such virtue), I agree with Rakoczy that only those who act in such a holy manner can be considered true mystics by Christian theological standards. A Christian mystical life does not necessarily involve being a public political figure, but it does mean doing courageous, loving deeds in solidarity with the vulnerable, as Christ himself did. 12  Henri de Lubac offers a good example of this sort of theological definition when he writes, “If ‘mysticism’ is to be understood as a kind of perfection attained in spiritual life, a form of actual union with the Divinity, then, for the Christian, it can only mean the union with the tripersonal God of Christian revelation, a union realized in Jesus Christ and through his grace” (“Mysticism and Mystery,” p. 39).

6 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

(as opposed to postmodern) formulations. William James offers a classic example of a consciousness-­based definition of mysticism.13 Although this type of definition does not require the denial of divine agency, it readily allows it. It makes mysticism a category of psychology or phenomenology, leaving open the question of whether the “same thing,” the same type of altered consciousness, awareness, or experience, can be reproduced with meditative techniques, psychedelic drugs, or other practices that may have little or no relation to Christianity or, for that matter, other religions. Although certain proponents of a consciousness-­based model, such as the prolific historian of Christian mysticism Bernard McGinn, affirm a Christian path to such mystical states of consciousness, this Christian approach does not necessarily overcome all the challenges that such a model poses for theology.14 To 13 In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James argues that mysticism consists of “states of consciousness” that are “ineffable,” “noetic,” “transient,” and “passive” (pp. 266–7). Writing not as a theologian but as a pragmatic philosopher, James does not attempt to settle the question of the natural or supernatural origin of such “states” but instead seeks to describe what is distinctive to them and to assess them according to their holistic effects. Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism (1910) gives us another noteworthy example. Although, like James, she defines mysticism as a modification of consciousness, her account of the marks that distinguish it is significantly different from his. For Underhill, ­mysticism is “active,” “transcendental,” “loving,” and “unitive” (p. 81). She is less interested in the mo­ment­ary experience of something inexpressible and more interested in a lifelong process of deepening connection with the absolute, involving standard stages of purgation, illumination, and union (pp. 169–70). In this regard, her understanding is closer to many of the Christian mystics whom she and James cite. Nevertheless, James and Underhill are both vulnerable to Denys Turner’s contention in The Darkness of God that a consciousness-­based definition of mysticism—­or what he calls “experientialism” (pp. 259–65)—relies on modern philosophical theories of the subject that distort the meaning of premodern mystical theological texts. Turner argues that from Augustine and Dionysius through Bonaventure, Eckhart, and even John of the Cross, what we now call “Christian mysticism” was not a consciousness of divine presence but a performative demonstration of the impossibility of such consciousness: a “self-­subverting,” “dialectical” use of language meant to critique its own pretensions. Yet this argument still leaves room to consider the “experiential feedback” (p. 250) that accompanies the radically incomprehensible grace to which such sources primarily attest. Indeed, Turner could stand to emphasize more strongly that the central preoccupation of this tradition is neither human experience nor human language, even in its modes of dramatic breakdown, but a promise of union with the gracious God that variously disrupts and affects both. A choice to ground mysticism in a doctrine of grace relativizes both experientialist and linguistic approaches to it and thereby moves beyond any apparent impasse between them. 14 In The Foundations of Mysticism (1991), McGinn associates mysticism with “a direct consciousness of the presence of God” (p. xvi), as well as with practices and ways of life that prepare for and follow from this consciousness. Although he draws this definition, with the exception of the word “direct,” from a passage in Teresa of Avila’s Life, his commentary on it owes more to his reception of Bernard Lonergan’s transcendental theory of cognition (pp. xiii, xviii, 283–5, and 425n96). Although McGinn’s definition has facilitated a theology-­friendly series of books on the history of Christian mysticism, he acknowledges that it is a “heuristic” (p. xv) device of a historian, not a properly theological concept. His references to “union,” “contemplation,” “deification,” “ecstasy,” “radical obedience,” “the birth of the Word in the soul,” and “the vision of God” (p. xvii) have more textual support than the term “consciousness” does in the Christian mystical tradition and are more closely connected to its doctrine of grace. Compared with a consciousness-­based definition of mysticism, a grace-­based one has an easier time incorporating aspects of life considered “ordinary” or “usual” because its meaning is not ­dependent on distinctions between altered and normal states of consciousness. Moreover, although a consciousness-­based definition has some value for interreligious scholarship (pp. 326–43), it risks

Introduction  7 the extent that it invests in a modern form of transcendental idealism, this way of defining mysticism risks alienating postliberal or ressourcement theologians who focus on Christian distinctiveness, as well as postmodern philosophers who associate mysticism with the body, the unconscious, and the historical subversion of oppressive powers.15 As a work of Christian theology, this book considers mysticism to be a type of grace, which may come with various psychosomatic features, but which is primarily an act of God on, or within, the human subject or community. It also recognizes as mystical those sources (lives, texts, groups, traditions, practices, etc.) that have credibly attested to some such grace and, by extension, the in­ter­pret­ations of these sources, even when such interpretations deemphasize that grace and focus on other features. However, as an interdisciplinary investigation, this book also seeks to understand how various nontheological approaches to mysticism, which are not devoid of value simply because they do not revolve around a doctrine of grace, relate to theological approaches for which such a doctrine is central. Some scholars, such as Denys Turner, mark the difference between a trad­ ition­al, theological, grace-­based and a modern, philosophical, consciousness-­ based approach to such topics by calling the first “mystical theology” and the second “mysticism.” Although this terminological choice has some merit, one should note that when the substantive form “mysticism” (la mystique) first appeared in the early seventeenth century, as Michel de Certeau argues, it did not refer merely to an altered state of consciousness, as it would later after William James, but still to the grace of divine union expressed by figures such as the author of the Theologia Germanica, the Jesuit contemplative Jean-­Joseph Surin, and the French Oratorian Pierre de Bérulle. This was the same grace that had for cen­tur­ ies been called “mystical theology.” The new substantive marked an increasing distance from ecclesiastically recognized theology, though not yet from the focus on a radical oneness with God attained through self-­abandon and the influx of divine love that also characterized the earlier tradition.16 In view of such historical relativizing the religions in question. Greater mutual understanding may be achieved if religions are not asked to exemplify a common mystical essence that transcends them all (e.g., “direct consciousness”) but are instead encouraged to dialogue about their own best definitions and intuitions of mysticism. 15  Such Christocentric theologians and postmodern philosophers might both be happier with a constructivist, as opposed to essentialist, theory of mysticism, insofar as they seek to affirm the his­­ toric­al, linguistic, and cultural particularities of certain mystical traditions. Yet constructivism alone does not suffice as a criterion of theological adequacy. There is an important difference between treating a particular mystical source as a constructed expression of ultimate reality and regarding it (also) as an instance of the grace of divine union. For the two sides of the essentialism–­constructivism debate, see Forman, Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness and Katz, “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism.” 16  See Turner, Darkness of God, p. 252 and Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 1, pp. 107–8. Leigh Eric Schmidt helpfully fills in the genealogical gap between the seventeenth-­century la mystique identified by Certeau and the post-­Jamesian study of mysticism resisted by Turner. Schmidt argues that “mysticism, as an actual term unto itself in the English language, first crystallized within the

8 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

precedents, it remains possible for theologians to use both “mystical theology” and “mysticism” to name God’s gift of union with the creature, while acknowledging that the term “mysticism” now also receives nontheological interpretations. The grace of divine union has been experienced, depicted, and theorized in many different ways. This book discusses thinkers who describe it as a fusion of subject and object in the act of knowing, a hylomorphic relation between form and matter, a spiritual touch experienced in or as the heart, a condition of radical obedience to the divine Word, a mutual self-­surrender suggestive of spousal love, a practice of solidarity in the midst of suffering, the auto-­affective immanence of the flesh, an otherness that evades control, a welcoming of the stranger, the ecstasy of erotic pleasure, a dialectical synthesis of psychological forces, an identity-­blurring mixture of cultures and histories, a deep familial bond, a hidden strength for survival and struggle, a nothingness beyond thought and being, a process of conversion and sanctification, and a gift of embodied joy and freedom, to name only a few. The interplay of such images and ideas creates a stunning sense of the meaning of divine union. Like the question of a definition, the question of a canon—­that is, a list of standard-­bearing representatives—­of Christian mysticism and mysticism more broadly is rife with difficulty. A theological definition of mysticism as the grace of divine union allows theologians to seek mystical content in a wider swath of materials than the Eurocentric conventions governing many canons of Christian mysticism would suggest.17 A source’s candidacy as a potentially normative representative of mysticism in a theological sense should rest on the question of mid-­eighteenth-­century critique of enthusiasm” (“The Making of Modern ‘Mysticism’, ” p. 277). This critique was advanced by Henry Coventry and other figures of the English Enlightenment against burgeoning charismatic groups such as the Quakers and Methodists. “Mysticism” accusatorily named the irrational, fanatical, feminine other of supposedly rational, moral, masculine religion. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the term, though still sometimes used disparagingly, acquired a more positive and universalist meaning. It was not limited to English religious sects but also pointed to transcendental experiences coming from the Orient, ancient Greece, European nations such as Germany and France, and most recently New England (e.g., Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller). Despite variations, these transcendental experiences were all thought to have the same essential identity. This was the milieu that informed James’s account. 17  One often encounters a broad distinction between the mysticism of the East and West, where “East” refers to materials coming from Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Asian traditions and “West” refers to Jewish and Christian texts from the ancient Mediterranean and medieval and early modern Europe. Islam appears on either side, depending on how one imagines the geography. Mestizo/a and Black/womanist sources in the Americas, whether Christian or not, are difficult to fit into this East–­ West framework. They are often marginalized or completely overlooked in canonized representations of mysticism, including those dedicated to Christian mysticism. For example, Paulist Press’s Classics of Western Spirituality series, which boasts nearly 150 volumes, currently offers two volumes highlighting non-­Christian indigenous spiritualities of the Americas and only one representing the mestizo/a Christian tradition, namely through Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Not a single African American source, whether Christian or not, is included. A similar type of omission is evident in Lamm, ed., Wiley-­Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, which features forty excellent chapters but not a single one focusing on mestizo/a or Black Christian mystical traditions. Likewise, Conn, ed., Women’s Spirituality, gathers together nearly thirty essays discussing different aspects of women’s experience of the divine but does not give any specific attention to women of color.

Introduction  9 whether the grace of divine union is manifestly operative in the lives that such a source describes, even if these lives are not always those of devout Christian believers. Whether these lives are racially “White,” by whatever anachronistic or dubious measure, should certainly not be a factor. The God of Christian faith loves with a universal and yet very particular love, showing special favor to the poor whom this violent world discards as “nonpersons.”18 Although certainly not everything arising from the colonized and racialized undersides of the modern West has, for that reason alone, a mystical (let alone commendable) character, some evidence of the intimate workings of grace in such spaces ought to be discoverable if, in fact, God is real and no mere mirror of European subjectivity. Many feminist theorists appreciate Christian mysticism because it is one of the few sites in the phallocentric history of the West where women’s voices are not only heard but endowed with authority.19 Increasingly, women in the Christian mystical tradition such as Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, and Teresa of Avila are recognized not merely as “mystics” and “visionaries,” people who have received special experiential graces, but as “vernacular theologians,” creative minds who, though denied full access to the Latin theology of medieval universities, used their local languages and lived wisdom to clarify the meaning of Christian doctrine in significant ways.20 The appeal of Christian mysticism for feminist theorists is not merely based on the inclusion of women. The very idea of gender is troubled, on some accounts queered, by the fluidity of positions, images, and practices adopted by mystical theologians with various types of bodies and gender performances. Hadewijch imagines God as a courtly Lady and herself as a courtly knight seeking to win this divine Lady’s favor; using another imaginative register, she reports an erotic union with Christ’s body, in which he is male and she female. Julian perceives Christ as a mother: he has an eternal womb that encloses her, birth pangs on the cross that give her life, and (Eucharistic) milk that feeds her. Bernard of Clairvaux, Rupert of Deutz, John of the Cross, and other male contemplatives depict themselves as brides. Although the Christian mystical tradition has been a purveyor of patriarchal norms—­including assumptions that women must submit to male authorities and are more bodily and sinful than men—­it also contains points of strangeness and creativity that support feminist efforts to subvert these norms.21

18 Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation, p. xxix. 19  Frohlich, “Authority”; Gatland, Women from the Golden Legend; Hilkert, Speaking with Authority; Irigaray, Speculum, p. 191; McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body; and Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity. 20 Corbari, Vernacular Theology, pp. 7–8; Dreyer, Accidental Theologians; Field, Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor, pp. 6–8; Lamm, God’s Kinde Love; McGinn, Flowering of Mysticism, pp. 19–24; McGinn, Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism; and Prevot, “No Mere Spirituality.” 21  Bynum, “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother”; Dailey, Promised Bodies; Hollywood, Acute Melancholia, pp. 149–62; Lanzetta, Radical Wisdom, pp. 49–60; and Newman, “Gender.”

10 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

The turn toward intersectional feminism in the humanities requires (pro)fem­ in­ist scholars of mysticism to question any implicit geographic, racial, socioeconomic, or other problematic criteria that may lead them to prioritize certain women above others in the formation of a mystical canon. Joy Bostic notes that “African American women’s embodied knowledge and action have not been widely considered as legitimate expressions within the larger tradition of Western mysticism.” She attributes this exclusion both to the long history of violence against African American women and to general Christian and Neo-­Platonic suspicions of the body. To address these problems, she includes African American women such as Jarena Lee, Sojourner Truth, and Rebecca Cox Jackson in the Western mystical canon and relates their experiences to those of Black women living today.22 These many factors related to race, gender, and class call not only for thoughtful expansions of the Christian mystical canon but also for critical analyses of its insides, outsides, and supposed boundaries. At stake in such discernments is the possibility of disentangling Christian mysticism from the violent proclivities in its history. The grace of divine union needs to be sought not only in the most conventional Euro-­Christian places and sources (with their gifts and problems) but also in solidaristic relationships with persons and groups enduring the hells of history, including hells that nominal Christians have made.

What Makes a Life Ordinary? At least as controversial as the definition of mysticism and the composition of its canon is the meaning of the word “ordinary.” In its broadest sense, this term points to universal conditions of finite existence such as temporality, corporeality, and relationality, which classical philosophical theology uses to distinguish creatures from their Creator. Neo-­Platonic mysticism seems to suggest that one must pass beyond such ordinary conditions in order to attain union with the divine (though Jean-­Louis Chrétien’s phenomenological exegesis of Neo-­Platonic texts reveals a more temporal, corporeal, and relational way to read them).23 By contrast, the discourse of the mysticism of ordinary life emphasizes that divine union is possible amid such conditions. While drawing from Neo-­Platonism, premodern Christian mysticism anticipates the mysticism of ordinary life by affirming the incarnation of the Word and the indwelling of the Spirit in the (communal) body.24 Even so, newer theological and philosophical works that associate 22 Bostic, African American Female Mysticism, p. 27. For a classic womanist account of the need for new theological canons attentive to poor women of color, see Cannon, Katie’s Canon, pp. 122–8. 23 Chrétien, Call and the Response, p. 12; Chrétien, L’effroi du beau, p. 43; and Chrétien, Unforgettable and Unhoped-­For, p. 19. 24  Rowan Williams, On Augustine, pp. 131–3 and Rowan Williams, Teresa of Avila, pp. 158–63.

Introduction  11 mysticism with history, flesh, and sociality seek a more decisive break from any Neo-­Platonic separation of divinity and finitude. How precisely Christian mys­ tic­al theology ought to position itself between traditional ambivalence toward creaturely ordinariness and postmodern celebration of it is an open question. Along with the basic constitution of finitude, the term “ordinary” introduces a messy web of more particular meanings. On the one hand, ordinariness suggests something “normal”; that is, something conforming to a given set of norms, whether these are grammatical rules, cultural expectations, natural laws, moral principles, civil ordinances, creedal statements, or other requirements thought to be binding and, in some cases, universally so. In this sense, something is ordinary if it is ordered, standardized, regulated, and well governed. On the other hand, ordinariness also refers to the “quotidian”; that is, the at once narratable and non-­ narratable lives of embodied subjects as they unfold each day, including both their individualized participation in norms and their more or less pronounced deviations from them. In this quotidian sense, the ordinary is dynamic, multiple, and more or less resistant to governance. It is hidden in the affective experiences of being flesh, the unpredictable traversal of places, and the uncountable uses of time. It is less like the rules of a language and more like the cry of a voice. It is qualitative, singular, and always a little “strange,” in the sense that no life is a mere reproduction of a supposedly ideal norm. The present study of the mysticism of ordinary life examines how mysticism relates to both of these connotative ranges of ordinariness: the normative and the quotidian. The argument is complicated by the fact that neither sense is wholly positive or negative. At its worst, the idea of normalcy functions violently. It establishes standards to which some do not or cannot conform (such as Whiteness, maleness, straightness, able-­bodiedness, propertiedness, and so on), and it imposes punishments on those excluded by the first set (whether these take the form of stigmas, stereotypes, subservient social roles, segregated spaces, “glass ceilings,” or outright acts of rationalized brutality). In both of these ways, the idea of normalcy attacks those whose lives count for little or nothing on the terms defined by dominant social imaginaries. By contrast, the quotidian sense of or­din­ari­ness points to an experience of freedom and joy in one’s living body, the power to resist oppressive social norms, the flexibility to live and think otherwise, and the creativity and self-­ expressivity of a life that ultimately cannot be controlled.25 25  Amy Hollywood points out that, in the Middle Ages, bodily actions were more likely to be governed by ideas of the “natural” (natura) than the “normal” (norma), since the latter concept came to prominence only with the nineteenth-­century rise of the interrelated practices of statistics and eugenics, which sought to identify the ideal human being with a rational average and to reduce the frequency or extremity of deviations in the human population. Hollywood’s argument builds on Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval, a text in which Dinshaw contends that the celibacy of Margery Kempe resists the heteronormativity of her context. See Hollywood, Acute Melancholia, pp. 163–9. For other accounts of norm-­subverting practices, see Butler, Gender Trouble; Julian Carter, Heart of Whiteness;

12 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Yet an existence without any norms whatsoever would be an impossible dream or nightmare. Even if it were achievable, such a condition of radical in­de­ter­min­ acy would offer little relief to the suffering masses whose quotidian lives are beset not only by normative constraints but also by chaotic forces within the self, the social context, and the natural world. Integral liberation cannot be achieved simply by means of a generalized anti-­normative politics. In an amorous world reflective of the universal love of God, the practice of formulating norms would not disappear. Instead, it would focus on discerning physiological, psychological, ethical, political, intellectual, and spiritual conditions of holistic wellbeing for diverse local and global communities. It would support comprehensive approaches to health, rigorous forms of distributive and restorative justice, harmonious relationships with others and with the environment, and respect for human rights and dignity. At an epistemological level, it would safeguard communicative practices of reasoning about what is the case and what ought to be.26 Although much postmodern theory appreciates mysticism for its defiance of normativity and its embrace of quotidian lives in their auto-­affective immanence and alterity vis-­à-­vis systems of governance, even this norm-­defying preference for subversive ordinariness relies on a sense that it is generally right and good, which functions like a norm even if it is not named as such. While evoking a range of questions about norms and their place in quotidian lives, the theological discourse of the ordinary also challenges the elitism, cler­ic­ al­ism, extreme asceticism, and desire for extraordinary psychosomatic phenomena that sometimes appear throughout the Christian mystical tradition. Theological proponents of the mysticism of ordinary life contend that, in order to experience the grace of divine union, one does not have to be a monk who has spent years on a path of tortuous self-­discipline and who has at long last been drawn into rapturous states of the soul. The appeal to ordinariness is a way to defend the dignity of a lay spirituality that follows other paths. As Maria Clara Bingemer puts the point: “Mystics are no longer found mainly inside the cloisters or in the religious orders. We can find them in the factories, in the midst of the noisy and stressful rhythm of machines and industry. Or in the streets with the poorest or those left behind by so-­called progress. Or in the prisons due to their activity and commitment considered dangerous by the established authorities. Or in the hell of labor camps and gulags of all kinds. In other words, in very secular situations.”27 Finally, ordinariness carries a set of negative connotations that associate it with boredom, dullness, toil, emptiness, suffering, depression, and the slow approach Crawley, Lonely Letters, pp. 24–6 and 130–1; Davis, Enforcing Normalcy; and Mbembe, Necropolitics, pp. 66–92. 26  For an example of such a comprehensive approach to positive norms, from a Christian ethical perspective that draws specifically on the tradition of sanctifying grace, see Cahill, “Global Health Justice.” 27 Bingemer, Mystery and the World, p. 221.

Introduction  13 of death. It names the agony of the mundane. It expresses the nothingness of each hour and day on the job, on the streets, in the fields, in one’s home, in a prison cell, or even in a war zone. It identifies life with a more or less quiet or pronounced misery. Conditions of sexual, racial, socioeconomic, and psychological precarity exacerbate this painful experience of life’s bleak ordinariness. Even nontheological scholars are increasingly turning to spiritual practices for ways of coping with such a persistently unhappy human condition.28 A theological account of the mysticism of ordinary life takes up this work in its own way by thinking about how the grace of divine union empowers and uplifts people in such circumstances. Feminist thinkers, including those using intersectional methods, resist the Christian tradition’s tendency to glorify suffering, particularly the suffering of women. They question various cruciform features, such as harsh forms of ascetical self-­denial, mystical immersions in Christ’s crucifixion, and associated theological theories of redemptive suffering—­ whether these theories attribute soteriological value exclusively to Jesus’s Passion or also extend it to those who voluntarily or involuntarily suffer “like” him. Feminist thinkers warn against patriarchal, sadomasochistic, necrophilic, and abusive aspects of theology and spirituality, which present divine union less as a communally shareable joy encompassing body and soul and more as a feminized experience of woundedness, abandonment, and annihilation. Although not all critiques of the Christian glorification of suffering focus on Christian mysticism per se, the identifications with the crucified Christ reported by some Christian mystics, including some women, give feminist critics cause for concern.29 To address this problem, some feminists find it necessary to move beyond Christianity altogether toward some alternative way of relating to the divine,30 whereas others seek a solution that remains confessionally Christian or at least deeply informed by Christian ideas. There are different strategies for preserving ties to Christianity. One strategy attempts to disentangle Christian life from the veneration of the cross and redirect its energy toward other doctrinal loci such as creation, incarnation, Jesus’s ministry, the activity of the Holy Spirit, and the mystery of divine love.31 Another strategy, sometimes coupled with the first, en­deavors to interpret the cross in a more life-­affirming manner, usually by understanding it as a symbol of God’s radical solidarity with suffering humanity, which demands a corresponding praxis of radical solidarity from those who

28 Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling, pp. 197–202 and hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody, pp. 105–9. 29 Brock, Journeys by Heart, pp. 53–7; Brown and Parker, “For God So Loved the World”; Jantzen, Becoming Divine, pp. 128–37; Pineda-­Madrid, Suffering and Salvation, pp. 86–95; Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet, pp. 98–9; and Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, pp. 161–7. 30 Daly, Beyond God the Father. 31 Irigaray, Marine Lover, pp. 164–90 and Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, pp. 164–7.

14 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

follow Jesus.32 This book advocates a combination of these two strategies—­that is, a type of Christian mystical theology that both recognizes a range of non-­ cruciform ways in which the grace of divine union is mediated and retains the solidaristic and, in this sense, partly salvific meaning of Jesus’s suffering and death.

Comparable Studies This book is not the first to theorize the relationship between Christian mysticism and ordinary life while employing theological, philosophical, and feminist forms of argument. It joins and draws on similar works by Grace Jantzen, Amy Hollywood, Catherine Keller, and Sarah Coakley. In terms of method, Jantzen and Hollywood follow similar paths from elaborating a historical theology rooted in the Christian mystical tradition to advancing a postmodern philosophical interpretation of mysticism, which emphasizes its life-­affirming powers while maintaining critical distance from theology. By contrast, both Keller and Coakley write as theologians, albeit in different ways. Although Keller draws con­struct­ ive­ly on the Christian mystical tradition, she also embraces postmodern philo­ sophers and other scientific and literary sources that help her weave this tradition’s apophatic doctrine of God into the natural processes and relations of the earth. By contrast, Coakley puts the Christian mystical tradition into a largely adversarial dialogue with postmodern philosophy, arguing that contemplative practices of antiquity are the best answer to contemporary intellectual and social woes. Theologians would benefit from deeper explorations of all of these thinkers. Their feminist interpretations of Christian mystics such as Julian of Norwich, Beatrice of Nazareth, and Nicholas of Cusa; their affirmations of bodily life, including features of queerness and eco-­relationality; and many other groundbreaking details of their works open up new possibilities for reimagining the mysticism of or­din­ ary life. Jantzen’s God’s World, God’s Body (1984) presents a theory of divine immanence that, though sometimes critical of classical Christian theologians, nevertheless regards their views about God’s omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, eternity, and supremacy to be normative. In this work, Jantzen strives for a balanced appreciation of both “nature (or extroverted) mysticism,” which she defines as “an existential awareness of God in the universe or some aspect of it,” and “spiritual (or introvertive) mysticism,” through which one has an interior “experience of divine transcendence.” This early understanding of God’s indwelling of the cosmos and the soul, which draws on what she calls the “peak” experiences of Meister Eckhart and Julian of Norwich but extends to “more ordinary religious

32 Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified, pp. 105–26 and Isasi-­Díaz, Mujerista Theology, pp. 31–3.

Introduction  15 experience as well,” neither undermines nor denounces Christian faith but seeks to develop it.33 Jantzen continues her anti-­dualistic retrieval of the Christian mystical trad­ ition in Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian (1987). Under the heading of Julian’s “theology of integration,” Jantzen emphasizes Julian’s view that union with God does not involve a rejection of the material conditions of ordinary life but a loving incorporation of them. A line from the eighth chapter of Julian’s Long Text, “God is everything which is good . . . and the goodness which everything has is God,” supports Jantzen’s claim that God permeates all things. However, this saying also prompts Jantzen to defend Julian against a potential charge of pantheism. At this point in her career, Jantzen strives to give Julian’s identification of God and entitative goodness an orthodox sense by drawing on distinctions (though not separations) between Creator and creature and the soul and body. No matter how radically Julian grounds the human in the divine substance, Jantzen argues that Julian still acknowledges the difference between them. Although many of Julian’s visions depict Jesus’s tortured body, Jantzen does not critique Julian for this potentially life-­negating focus on the crucified Christ but instead explains that these visions reveal God’s compassionate response to a suffering world, a response that seeks to right its wrongs and make all things well. In sum, Jantzen reads Julian as an authoritative Christian witness to a merciful God who is not aloof from the world but actively present in it and intimately bound to those who endure it.34 With Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism (1995), Jantzen offers what may be, for theologians, her most methodologically significant work. For the first time, she expresses clear feminist commitments and endorses a postmodern, specifically Foucauldian, analysis of power. These shifts in her methodology help her expose oppressive gender norms in the Christian mystical tradition. Yet they do not uproot her from this tradition. Instead, they give her a new way to appreciate what some of its representatives, especially certain women mystics, have achieved. By arguing that Anglo-­American philosophy of religion relies too uncritically on William James’s experientialist account of mysticism and thereby fails to engage the lives and contexts of the mystics themselves, she in fact demonstrates a need to return to the sources.35 Indeed, Jantzen’s attention to questions of gender and power enables her to read Christian mystics in a more theologically adequate way than she did before. These questions clarify the conditions under which a constructive retrieval of such mystical sources can become more consistently life-­affirming, especially for women today, which is also to say closer to the truth of any Christianity worthy of 33 Jantzen, God’s World, God’s Body, pp. 157–8. 34 Jantzen, Julian of Norwich, pp. 87, 132–49, and 167–219. 35 Jantzen, Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism, pp. 1–25.

16 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

the name. Her critical reading sheds light on misogynistic views of femaleness that associate it with inferiority, carnality, and sinfulness in both men’s and women’s texts. She finds evidence of this problem not only in the hierarchical mysticism of Dionysius, the intellectual mysticism of Eckhart, and the affective mysticism of Bernard of Clairvaux but also in the negative attitudes toward food and sex expressed by Catherine of Siena and Hildegard of Bingen, respectively. Jantzen’s critical analysis of gender and power compels Christians to acknowledge that such misogynistic views were not only exclusionary and demeaning; they also turned murderous in the church’s violent campaigns against heretics and witches. More positively, this type of analysis encourages Christians to value the ways women such as Hildegard, Gertrude, Hadewijch, and especially Julian not only claimed authority through their unions with God but also celebrated God’s closeness to creation, embodiment, and erotic love.36 Although Christian theologians might dispute this or that detail, they should appreciate the major methodological gains of Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism. By contrast, the post-­Christian, philosophical turn in Becoming Divine (1999) warrants a different theological assessment. Although Christian theo­lo­ gians might welcome certain philosophical contributions of the work, its turn away from theology makes it less suitable as a methodological model for them to follow. In this text, the Christian mystical tradition is mostly confined to a series of suggestive epigraphs before each chapter. The Foucauldian reduction of truth to power becomes more pronounced. The main reason Jantzen now gives for speaking of the divine is a “strategic” one: to shift the imaginary and symbolic registers of culture, as theorized by Jacques Lacan, so that they can be more conducive to the flourishing of “natals” (this is her name for living beings; it is a term she draws largely from her reading of Hannah Arendt). The “divine” in the title of this book is not God in any traditional Christian sense. It is a horizon or process of becoming for which human beings possess a “natural inner capacity.” Jantzen does not anticipate the grace of deification but a future of natural flourishing. Her newfound naturalism is supported by Ludwig Feuerbach’s projectionist theory of religion, which reduces God to an imaginative extension of human subjectivity, and Baruch Spinoza’s pantheism, according to which it does not matter whether one speaks of God or Nature, because they are the same.37 Jantzen’s Irigarayan critique of phallocentrism and her Levinasian ethics of alterity help her resist certain death-­obsessed, “necrophilic” aspects of Western philosophy and theology that any life-­affirming thinker would want to overcome. Sadly, Jantzen died before she could finish her planned multivolume exploration of necrophilia, which might have included further clarifications of her views on how it relates to Christian mysticism. Perhaps this work would have alleviated 36 Jantzen, Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism, pp. 86–192 and 216–77. 37 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, pp. 5, 12–15, 144, 161, 193, 254, and 272–5.

Introduction  17 some theological concerns about the binary opposition that Becoming Divine posits between Christian mystical theology, on the one hand, and life-­affirming feminism, on the other, an opposition her earlier books demonstrate is unnecessary.38 Regardless, Jantzen offers a lasting contribution to the study of Christian mysticism by prioritizing questions about what it does for the ordinary bodily lives of women and all living ones (“natals”). Amy Hollywood charts a similar path toward a more philosophical than theological interpretation of Christian mysticism. The Soul as Virgin Wife’s (1995) historical theological study of sources from the Christian mystical tradition—­in particular, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart—­ gives way to Sensible Ecstasy’s (2002) secularizing embrace of Francophone postmodern philosophical accounts of mysticism by the likes of Lacan, Irigaray, Simone de Beauvoir, and Georges Bataille. Despite certain formal similarities with Jantzen, the details of Hollywood’s arguments are quite distinctive. First, critical gender analysis is operative in her works from the start. Second, this analysis leads Hollywood to question gender-­essentialist trends in the study of Christian mysticism that imply that women mystics are necessarily more bodily and erotic than men, trends Jantzen is less careful to avoid. Hollywood warns against an overreliance on male-­authored hagiographies that may reveal more about men’s expectations for women’s mysticism than about women mystics themselves. However, even among women-­ authored texts, Hollywood distinguishes Mechthild’s account of spiritual suffering from Porete’s more apophatic mysticism of the annihilated will. Hollywood prizes Porete because she is further removed still from the problematic hagiographical depiction of cruciform female flesh. While noting that Jantzen’s favorite source, Julian, composes a visionary work of “autohagiography” that recounts intense bodily identifications with the crucified Christ, Hollywood favors those “speculative” aspects of Porete’s and Eckhart’s mystical writings that resemble Julian’s af ­fi rm­ ation of an uncreated divine substance in the soul. Hollywood argues that such a mysticism of radical interior oneness with God helpfully deemphasizes gendered norms that promote an extraordinarily tormented and ecstatic existence for women and instead permits a freer, more grounded, and sustainable “mysticism of everyday life” that is equally accessible to people of whatever gender identity. Whereas Jantzen critiques Eckhart’s theory of detachment for being oppressively masculine, Hollywood welcomes it as an authentic development of the most liberating feature of Beguine spirituality, namely an understanding of divine union that is decoupled from the expectation that women suffer as Christ did.39

38 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, pp. 128–40 and 231–48. See also Jantzen, Foundations of Violence and Violence to Eternity. 39 Hollywood, Soul as Virgin Wife, pp. 10, 22–5, and 196–201.

18 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Hollywood differs from Jantzen in another significant respect by taking a more critical stance toward Irigaray. Like many American works of postmodern fem­in­ist theory, Hollywood’s Sensible Ecstasy objects to Irigaray’s apparent gender essentialism, just as it does to that of male-­authored hagiographies. More particularly, in this text Hollywood argues that Irigaray (whom, following Jantzen, she largely interprets as a Feuerbachian projectionist)40 does not accept the sort of inner laceration (in Bataille’s terms) or the condition of being “not-­all” (in Lacan’s terms) that would help her resist the fetishistic longing for mastery that Bataille and Lacan contend constitutes human beliefs, desires, and projects as such, whether religious or not. In short, Hollywood suggests that Irigaray’s effort to “become divine,” even if taken in a naturalistic sense, leaves her susceptible to Bataille’s and Lacan’s suspicions regarding totalizing forms of thought, suspicions Hollywood adopts as her own. Although Hollywood does not seek to return to the thirteenth-­century hagiographical model of obligatory bodily suffering in imitation of Christ, and certainly not if such a vocation is meant specifically for women, she does begin to worry about any alternative models of deifying the self, whether medieval or modern, that would forget the vulnerability of women’s and men’s ordinary bodily existence. Whereas earlier she had defended Porete’s and Eckhart’s radically detached forms of divine union, she now points to Beatrice of Nazareth as a figure who, like Mechthild, does not renounce but instead interiorizes bodily pleasures, pains, and acts of imagination. Such interiorization contributes to Beatrice’s development of subjective freedom while keeping it connected (at least figuratively) to her human flesh, allowing her to achieve something like a proper balance. Yet even Beatrice remains problematic by Hollywood’s new, Bataillean-­ Lacanian standards insofar as Beatrice desires to be one with God and, therefore, something other than mortal. Although Hollywood appreciates the feminist philosophical turn toward natality that Jantzen represents, she contends that Christ-­identified mystics such as Mechthild, Hadewijch, Beatrice, and (Bataille’s favorite) Angela of Foligno remain valuable witnesses to the inescapable reality of loss, symbolized by the cross, and to certain quasi-­therapeutic efforts to incorporate such loss into one’s quotidian life. In this way, Hollywood shields such Christian mystical sources from Jantzen’s charge of necrophilia. At the same time, she treats their reports of oneness with God as, at best, signs of com­mend­able ego strength and, at worst, dangerous fantasies of totality. Having made feminist corrections to Bataille and Lacan, Hollywood lets their atheological use of mystics largely set her agenda going forward.41 Although Acute Melancholia’s (2016) questioning of the reductionism of religious studies and the hegemonic secularity of “critique” might suggest that 40  See Chapter 4 for a nuancing of this point. 41 Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, pp. 236–73.

Introduction  19 Hollywood remains a defender of something like theology, she is careful to mark her distance from any confessional form of it that would regard creedal teachings to be true and normative. Although she attends to features of everyday human life that are too mysterious to comprehend, she confesses only that “a different kind of thinker than I might call this grace.” Although she considers the word “post-­ Christian” to be “ugly,” she associates it with “secular philosophers and theo­lo­ gians deeply influenced by the Christian tradition, not unlike myself.” While she finds much to affirm in medieval Christian mystics, including provocative queerings of gender and practices of melancholically incorporating lost loved ones (whether Jesus or others) in ways that are productive and not destructive of subjectivity, she reads them for the most part with the scholarly reserve of a modern historian, such as Henry Adams.42 In short, with respect to theology, both Jantzen and Hollywood keep their distance. By contrast, Keller writes explicitly as a theologian. But this theological commitment does not prevent her from drawing on postmodern philosophy in positive ways that make her work resonant with Jantzen’s and Hollywood’s. Recognized primarily as a feminist scholar of apocalypticism and process thought, Keller also advances a constructive interpretation of Christian mysticism that warrants further discussion. In The Cloud of the Impossible (2015), she traces a Christian mys­ tic­ al genealogy from Gregory of Nyssa through Dionysius, through the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and finally to Nicholas of Cusa. She applauds this tradition’s reverence for the unknown divine while, like Jantzen, resisting its Neo-­Platonic inclinations toward detachment and immateriality. Cusa stands out among the figures Keller considers. Drawing on his account of the “enfolding” and “unfolding” connection between God and the world and his doctrine of God as non aliud (not other), she argues that of her mystical sources Cusa does the most to intertwine apophasis and relationality, which are her two guiding values. In other words, Keller highlights Cusa because he most clearly prefigures her effort to understand the divine mystery not as distant from the dynamic entanglements of creaturely life but as inseparable from them. Cusa does the sort of integrative work for Keller that, in different ways, Julian does for Jantzen and Beatrice does for Hollywood. Keller is aware of the contributions of such women mystics, particularly on questions of gender fluidity, but her eco­ logic­al sensibilities make her especially fond of Cusa.43 Keller’s approach to mysticism largely takes the form of a natural theology, one nourished by evolutionary theory and quantum physics and defiantly untroubled by Barthian demands for Christocentrism. However, Keller does offer readings of biblical scenes, such as the theophany at Sinai, the transfiguration at Tabor, John’s prologue announcing a Word made flesh, and Paul’s teachings on communal love. 42 Hollywood, Acute Melancholia, pp. 2–9, 15–16, 30, 84–6, 89–90, and 149–62. 43 Keller, Cloud of the Impossible, pp. 43 and 58–123.

20 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

For her, these sacred Jewish and Christian materials exemplify (without exhausting) an incomprehensible divine process that is enmeshed in the webs of finite ­reality, a more-­than-­Christian divinity that is both impossible and the source of possibility. Though informed by the same post-­Nietzschean tradition of atheological mysticism that figures prominently in the later works of Jantzen and Hollywood, Keller treads closest to the “anatheism” of Richard Kearney and the “weak theology” of John Caputo. She questions whether the philosophical “death of God” has really eliminated every trace of the infinite unknown that might be thought or desired in relation to the name “God.” She does not write theologically merely in order to shift the power of discourse or because the Middle Ages may still have therapeutic lessons to offer but because she believes there is something divine and Christic at work in the interconnected, material lives of the planet.44 In this sense, Keller does genuinely theological work that remains closer to the theological commitments of the Christian mystical tradition than do either Jantzen’s or Hollywood’s more philosophically styled projects. Among major recent feminist interpreters of Christian mysticism who sustain a robust dialogue with philosophy, Coakley is distinctive for her commitment to doing Christian theology “unambiguously and unashamedly,” as she says. Coakley proposes Christian mystical theology as a remedy for certain problems such as ontotheology, hegemony, and phallocentrism that she believes postmodern phil­ oso­phy rightly diagnoses. Making a similar claim, but orienting herself in a different direction, she also offers Christian mystical theology as a remedy for the overconfident rationalism and uncritical sexism she detects in much analytic philosophy of religion, which she notes has strong ties to the philosophical modernity that postmodern thinkers seek to move past. But above all, Coakley presents Christian mystical theology as a remedy for the perennial human problem of sin, which she attributes to the root issue of disordered desire. Although postmodernity is not the sole reason that there is such disordered desire in the world, she argues that its secular modes of thought exacerbate the problem by leaving one without the full contemplative resources one needs to purify desire, properly reorder it toward God, and thereby ultimately both satisfy and intensify it through an immersion in divine eros. In short, then, Coakley suggests that Christian mystical theology is uniquely well equipped to address the profound maladies that postmodern philosophy both resists and exemplifies.45 Coakley thinks that there are particular gains in the area of gender. She argues that as one ventures farther down the mystical path of Christian contemplation, stereotypical forms of male agency and female receptivity are rendered dynamic, fluid, and unstable—­with male contemplatives adopting the role of the bride from 44 Keller, Cloud of the Impossible, pp. 5, 8, 28–9, 39, 42, 127–67, and 285–305. 45 Coakley, New Asceticism, pp. 5 and 141–3; Coakley, Powers and Submissions, pp. xii–­xx; Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, pp. 42–52 and 313–18; and Coakley, “Dark Contemplation.”

Introduction  21 The Song of Songs; female contemplatives speaking with an authoritative, prophetic voice; and people of whatever kind of body being drawn into a pneumatological movement unconstrained by the corrupted gender norms of historical societies. The Holy Spirit, the primary agent of such contemplation, conforms the self to a Christic pattern of death and resurrection, of vulnerability (before God) and empowerment (in the world), or what Coakley sometimes calls “spiritual kenosis.” Accompanying and assisting human strivings for holiness, “groaning” along with them (Coakley often cites Romans 8), the Spirit draws the self into a dazzlingly dark yet multisensory participation in the trinitarian life that is, at the same time, a call to action. This transformative process can be painful. It involves the rigors of ascetical practice and apophatic disorientation. Yet its aim is to free one from the sinful desire to possess and dominate others and for the arduous work that is required to curb the violent, including patriarchal, effects of such a sinful desire on a local and global scale.46 While Coakley draws on medieval and early modern sources, including women mystics such as Hildegard, Julian, and especially Teresa of Avila, she differs from Jantzen, Hollywood, and Keller by prioritizing early Christian treatises on prayer from the likes of Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Evagrius, Cassian, and Dionysius. Despite certain misogynistic aspects of this patristic trad­ition, she interprets it charitably on matters of desire, gender, and embodiment. She embraces its understanding of a progression from beginning to advanced stages of Christian life, roughly following a trajectory of purgation, illumination, and union. She values its belief that practices of self-­discipline, love of neighbor, scriptural meditation, sacramental participation, and interior recollection are the ordinary means by which one ascends into closer relationship with God, and she underscores its claim that the highest state is at once trinitarian and radically unknown. However, she does worry about its potential elitism; that is, an apparent insinuation that the grace of divine union is meant only for a few. Adopting a Reformed theological emphasis on the sufficiency of the grace given to all believers, as well as the evidence of more recent witnesses—­including the Jesuit Jean Pierre de Caussade, the Benedictine John Chapman, the Anglican vicar Bill Vanstone, members of contemporary charismatic groups studied in her ethnographic fieldwork, and inmates with whom she interacted in her Boston-­ area prison ministry—­she “democratizes” the heights of contemplation and presents it as a gift that is broadly available to whoever pursues it, whether religious or lay.47

46 Coakley, Powers and Submissions, pp. 32–9 and 67 and God, Sexuality, and the Self, pp. 13–15, 55–9, 281–3, and 297–300. 47 Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, pp. 126–44, 163–86, 256, and 281–95; Coakley, New Asceticism, pp. 101–27; Coakley, Powers and Submissions, pp. 40–54; and Coakley, “Jail Break.”

22 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Coakley recognizes the attention that postmodern philosophers such as Derrida, Lacan, Martin Heidegger, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler give to apophatic modes of thought and that the later Foucault in particular gives to self-­ forming ascetical practices. She appreciates the psychoanalytic tradition’s understanding of the unconscious drives that undergird any possible subjectivity and the phenomenological tradition’s disclosure of the self as a living body (or flesh). As a feminist, she knows the practical power such ideas wield in the fight against gender essentialism, Enlightenment constructs of masculine autonomy, Romantic notions of idealized femininity, and the patriarchal domination of women in church and society.48 In all of these respects, Coakley can find considerable common ground with Jantzen, Hollywood, and Keller. However, unlike them, she puts more hope in a sympathetic reading of the premodern Christian mystical tradition than in a selective philosophical use of it, often presenting these two approaches in highly contrastive terms that suggest the tradition is the answer and postmodernity is the problem. This contrastive approach keeps her from acknowledging as fully as she might how much her acts of constructive retrieval depend on hard-­won fem­ in­ist and postmodern perspectives that were not available in the early Christian tradition and, correlatively, how problematic this tradition would be, especially for women, if it were repeated without significant adjustment. If Coakley is correct that Christian mystical theology remedies the ills of post­ mod­ern­ity (an argument this book develops in its own way), Jantzen, Hollywood, and Keller would nevertheless ask her to admit that, to some degree, post­mod­ ern­ity returns the favor by remedying the ills of Christian mystical theology. Contemplation alone, without a critical practice of thinking that tests its effects on ordinary life, is as prone to distorting the meaning of divine grace as to revealing it. Granted, such a critical practice was already in the making in antiquity (though still very far from adequate), and it shares the same roots as contemplation insofar as it proceeds from a simultaneous awareness of divine love and creaturely imperfection, but this does not mean that devotees of the Christian mystical tradition have nothing to gain by listening to well-­considered criticisms that appear to come from the outside. The case of Chapman is instructive. Although Coakley praises him for being a great model of Christian contemplation, she is compelled to admit that his practice of prayer never freed him from his dismissive attitudes toward women mystics, the body, and the emotions. If Chapman is right that we should not “admit any other criterion of prayer than its effects,”49 then the failure of his very trad­

48 Coakley, “Eschatological Body”; Coakley, “Introduction—­Re-­Thinking Dionysius”; Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, pp. 62–5; Coakley, Powers and Submissions, pp. xviii and 89–97; and Coakley, New Asceticism, pp. 11–14, 39–45, and 55–83. 49  Quoted in Coakley, Powers and Submissions, p. 47.

Introduction  23 ition­al practice of Christian contemplation to free him from such a patriarchal mindset ought to raise serious questions about the quality of that practice or its sources. In short, Chapman demonstrates that even a deeply contemplative way of receiving the Christian tradition is not always sufficient to yield the sort of feminist outcome that Coakley wants. A grace powerful enough to achieve the needed transformations may have to come at least partly through unexpected channels, such as works of feminist theory that seem more secular than not. The mystically inclined feminist philosophers and theologians we have been considering do not prioritize an intersectional understanding of mysticism. Although Jantzen, Hollywood, Keller, and Coakley are cognizant of the need to critically analyze other differences and power relations in connection with those of gender,50 they have not (by the time of this writing) published substantive accounts of the Christian and non-­Christian mystical traditions animating the lives of poor women of color. They have not, for example, given mestiza and womanist descriptions of intimacy with the divine the same level of scholarly attention that they offer the European Christian past and the continental philosophical present. In many cases, their recognition of racially marginalized sources is itself marginal, which is to say confined to footnotes or brief asides. If homophobia, transphobia, and ecological devastation are counted as part of the matrix of intersecting oppressions, as seems only right and just, then one must give Hollywood and Keller credit for making significant contributions to an intersectional feminist mode of mystical theorizing precisely on these issues,51 but their writings on mysticism leave room to desire a more thorough exploration of intersections of gender and race. On questions of race in particular, Keller and Coakley have done the most work, with promises of more to come. Both are intrigued by potential interpretive links between the divine darkness of the Christian mystical tradition and the pheno­typ­ic­al darkness of Black people (this is a connection we shall consider in the final chapter), but in the midst of this discussion neither treats Black sources as exemplary of the meaning of mysticism itself. Indeed, both theologians present mysticism as a European tradition that comes to racialized communities from the outside and that challenges either the supposedly rigid particularity of their “identity politics” (in Keller’s case) or their supposedly unquiet, non-­ contemplative style of spirituality (in Coakley’s case).52 Although a liberationist, anti-­ imperial, and anti-­ colonial agenda can be discerned in the writings of

50 Jantzen, Julian of Norwich, p. viii; Jantzen, Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism, p. xv; Jantzen, Becoming Divine, pp. 3, 122, 124, 126, 163, and 218; Hollywood, Acute Melancholia, pp. 68 and 121; Hollywood and Eleanor Craig, “Mysticism and the Politics of Theory,” p. 12; Hollywood, “Response”; Keller, Cloud of the Impossible, pp. 28 and 301–2; and Coakley, “Jail Break.” 51 Hollywood, Acute Melancholia, pp. 149–70 and Keller, Political Theology of the Earth. 52 Keller, Cloud of the Impossible, pp. 32–7; Keller, Face of the Deep, pp. 209–12; Keller, “Delores Williams”; and Coakley, “Jail Break.”

24 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Jantzen, Hollywood, Keller, and Coakley, there is room to develop this aspect of their mystical, feminist thinking further. The sources studied in the final two chapters of this book indicate several ways this might be done. Although this book supports Coakley’s view that the premodern Christian mystical tradition has a very particular promise that ought to be retained and revitalized, it differs from her work by envisaging a more congenial relationship between contemporary theological and philosophical accounts of the mysticism of ordinary life. In certain respects, its appreciative engagement with post­mod­ ern­ity and with various forms of “natural” mysticism and mystical theology, particularly in French, Latino/a, and African American contexts, is more resonant with Keller’s theological method, even though not identical to it. This book endorses Jantzen’s turn toward a feminist hermeneutic of Christian mysticism and especially her creative retrieval of women mystics in the service of wholeness, vitality, and bodily flourishing. Likewise, it countersigns Hollywood’s paradigm-­ shifting efforts to trouble the gender binary in the study of Christian mysticism and her rigorous use of medieval and postmodern sources to theorize the therapeutic value of various constructs of mystical subjectivity.

The Path Ahead This book updates a model of interdisciplinary scholarship practiced by twentieth-­century Catholic theologians such as Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar, who combine fidelity to the Christian mystical tradition with a critical use of the regnant philosophical and cultural resources of their context (which, in their case, mainly consisted of certain German-­language sources from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). Although a similarly conceived relationship between theology and philosophy remains attractive today, there is a need for mystical theologians to adapt their arguments to changing landscapes, such as those represented by the predominantly Francophone (but now also Anglophone) conversations of postmodern philosophy and by certain underappreciated U.S. Latino/a and African American discourses—­to name just a few possibilities. These diverse historical and intellectual contexts adjust, complicate, and expand the meanings of both ordinary life and mysticism. The task for Christian mystical theology going forward is not merely to think about how the Christian mystical tradition might offer a remedy for the woes of secularity. Christian mystical the­ ology must also consider whether important changes to its self-­understanding are warranted by its interactions with diverse takes on the mysticism of ordinary life arising after modernity and from beneath its ruins. The Catholic model of interdisciplinarity does not subordinate the Christian mystical tradition to philosophical readings, as Jantzen and Hollywood do in their later works. It does not intermesh theology and philosophy in such a way

Introduction  25 that the two become one “anatheistic” contemplation of the divine unknown in worldly relations and processes, which is Keller’s approach. It does not stipulate that the Christian mystical tradition one-­directionally addresses the problems of postmodern culture, as Coakley suggests. Rather, the Catholic model of interdisciplinarity upholds a distinction between theology (as prayerful thinking of God) and philosophy (as an exercise of critical reason that does not necessarily presuppose such a relation with God). It prioritizes theological norms of interpretation drawn from Christian scripture and tradition (such as doctrines about creation, grace, Christ, the Holy Spirit, and so on), and it uses these norms to engage and evaluate Christian and non-­Christian sources alike. In such interactions, it seeks to retain whatever is beautiful and true in philosophy and any other cultural products and religious traditions that do not adhere to Christian faith. It welcomes critiques, developments, and variations that come from such interactions, provided they support the most essential Christian and mystical theological norm of incarnate divine love. This book has a distinctly Catholic character, not only because it adheres to a Catholic model of relating theology and philosophy but also because its sources have explicit ties to the Catholic tradition. Rahner, Balthasar, and Adrienne von Speyr are obvious examples. But beyond them, this book’s main postmodern philosophical sources (Michel Henry, Michel de Certeau, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva) also have significant Catholic roots and inclinations, and several of its intersectional feminist sources (especially Ada María Isasi-­Díaz and M.  Shawn Copeland) are Catholic theologians. This contemporary Catholic focus is another feature that distinguishes this project from the comparable studies by Jantzen, Hollywood, Keller, and Coakley.53 While this book appeals to Catholic thinkers by offering a constructive theological discussion congruent with their own trad­ ition, it is not meant only for them but for Christian theologians in general and, indeed, for anyone interested in how Christian mysticism and related mystical traditions are employed in various efforts to affirm ordinary life. The argument is organized into three parts, each with two chapters. Part I, “Catholic Mystical Theologians in the Twentieth Century,” bridges a divide between Rahnerian and Balthasarian approaches to the mysticism of ordinary life by demonstrating that the two are closer than some commentators assume. It retrieves insights from these Catholic theologians regarding the grace of divine union, connecting it with topics such as Christology, pneumatology, Mariology, asceticism, obedience, love, and the paschal mystery. At the same time, it advances a feminist interpretation of their works that challenges aspects of their treatments

53  Although this book features Catholic styles of interdisciplinarity and mystical theology, it does not comment directly on Catholic magisterial teachings, because to do so well would require excursions into ecclesiological questions about the relative authority and best hermeneutical practices pertaining to various types of official documents, and this work lies beyond the scope of the project.

26 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

of gender and suffering. The chapter on Rahner defends the Christian theological status of his understanding of mysticism against charges that it is overdetermined by modern transcendental philosophy, clarifies what he means by “ordinary life,” questions his ability to offer a gender-­neutral theory of divine union, and concludes with a discussion of his sometimes-­neglected prayerful writings. The chapter on Balthasar is equally focused on his contemplative friend, Adrienne von Speyr. It considers the controversial question of how to understand their relationship, offers a feminist critique of their gender essentialism, reveals certain anti-­ essentialist features of their hagiography, and attempts a critical retrieval of their mystical accounts of obedience, love, and suffering. Part II of the book, “Christian Mysticism and Postmodern Philosophy,” turns to a series of thinkers who draw selectively on Christian mystical sources to advance revisionist phenomenological and psychoanalytic theories of ordinary life. It recognizes various ways in which these postmodern theorists contribute to both philosophy and theology, while offering a critical assessment of them from the perspective of Christian mystical theology. The chapter on Henry and Certeau distinguishes two postmodern styles of the mysticism of ordinary life, which, though not atheistic, are arguably more philosophical than theological. One style, represented by Henry, locates the divine in the auto-­affective immanence of the flesh. Another style, represented by Certeau, associates the divine with a condition of alterity vis-­à-­vis norms and structures. The chapter on Irigaray and Kristeva shows how these postmodern mystical styles of immanence and alterity are combined in “French feminist” constructs of mystical femininity. Although Irigaray’s and Kristeva’s understandings of “woman” as a potentially divine or quasi-­divine “other within” resist the masculine focus of much theological and philosophical discussion of Christian mysticism, they do not overcome the problem of gender essentialism and remain, like the sources featured in previous chapters, Eurocentric. Nonetheless, Christian mystical theology stands to benefit from this mystically aspirated postmodern literature in many respects. Among other things, it can embrace Henry’s praise for life as such, Certeau’s love for ­others who suffer from and escape systems of control, Irigaray’s affirmation of women’s jouissance and subjectivity, and Kristeva’s therapeutic care for the conflicted condition of human souls. Part III, “Intersectional Feminism: Mystical Traditions from the American Side of the Atlantic,” turns to a set of North American mestizo/a, womanist, and Black sources that are not always recognized as belonging to mysticism, let alone theology or philosophy, but that do indeed reflect the grace of divine union at work in quotidian lives and that do offer sophisticated interpretations of it in relation to Christian faith and other noteworthy intellectual and aesthetic traditions. This final part of the book discusses how the mysticism of ordinary life needs to be understood differently and what liberative ends it may achieve if it is approached through the interconnected matrix of gender, racial, and socioeconomic

Introduction  27 conditions that continue to be produced by the violent legacies of conquest and slavery. The chapter on Gloria Anzaldúa, Isasi-­Díaz, and other mestizo/a mystical sources discusses several topics, such as a mystical way of interpreting mestizaje (mixture or inbetweenness) that resists the colonial and patriarchal violence often associated with this concept, experiences of an empowering divine presence in the context of la lucha (struggle) and lo cotidiano (the everyday), popular devotion to La Virgen de Guadalupe (Our Lady of Guadalupe) and crit­ic­al feminist receptions of it, and mystical identifications with the crucified Christ in the midst of daily hardships and through communal celebrations of El Via Crucis (the Way of the Cross). The chapter on Alice Walker, Copeland, and other womanist and Black mys­ tic­al sources similarly highlights a range of distinctive contributions, such as a meditation on Blackness as a mystically charged symbol of both being and nothingness; an account of the grace of divine union in the lives of nineteenth-­century Black women evangelists and ordinary Black women struggling to survive and flourish; an account of mystical corporeality that unites bodies with one another in suffering, joy, and freedom (particularly in the crucified and risen Christ); and a reassessment of the meaning of divine darkness in view of the opacities of Black women’s lives.

PART I

C AT HOL IC M YST ICA L T HE OLO GIA NS I N THE T WE N T IET H C E NT U RY

1 Grace in the Ordinary The Mystical Theology of Karl Rahner

Theologians interested in twentieth-­ century Catholic mystical theology have noted a parting of the ways between Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Some prefer one approach over the other,1 whereas others adopt a more con­cili­ atory tone, emphasizing similarities in difference.2 The following argument belongs to this second camp. Although the Rahner–­Balthasar relationship is sometimes categorized using broad contrasts between, for example, the incarnation and the cross, anthropology and hagiography, modernity and tradition, and transcendental reason and aesthetic experience,3 each of these contrasts proves somewhat misleading upon closer inspection. Although differences remain, there are cruciform, hagiographical, traditional, and aesthetic aspects to Rahner’s mystical theology, just as there are incarnational, anthropological, modern, and transcendental aspects to Balthasar’s. Instead of favoring one theologian over the other, this book strives to receive what is best about each of their efforts, while clarifying their shared and respective limitations. To this end, the present chapter offers a close reading of Rahner, a Jesuit theologian who was a towering figure of Catholic thought preceding and following the Second Vatican Council. He is widely recognized, among other reasons, for promoting “a mysticism of ordinary life” (eine Mystik des Alltags).4 This idea is closely connected with his characterization of human life as always already super­nat­ur­ al­ly elevated by divine grace (the “supernatural existential”) and with his argument that this grace is present in the transcendental openness of concrete human experiences (that is, in “transcendental experience”). He contends that such grace is received not only within the believing Christian community but also beyond it (that is, among “anonymous Christians”).5 One often hears his claim that “the

1  For example, Mark McIntosh clearly favors Balthasar in his Mystical Theology, pp. 90–118, while Philip Endean sides more with Rahner in his “Von Balthasar, Rahner, and the Commissar.” 2  Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and Rahner” and Kilby, “Balthasar and Karl Rahner.” 3 Kerr, Twentieth-­Century Catholic Theologians, pp. 87–104 and 121–44. 4  Rahner, “Experience of the Holy Spirit” (1976), p. 205 and Rahner, “Erfahrung des Heiligen Geistes,” p. 53. 5 Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith (1976), pp. 126–33 and Rahner, “Anonymous and Explicit Faith” (1974), pp. 52–9. For a helpful account of the emergence and criticism of the term among Rahner’s contemporaries, see Bullivant, “Myth of Rahnerian Exceptionalism.”

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism. Andrew Prevot, Oxford University Press. © Andrew Prevot 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866967.003.0002

32 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

devout Christian of the future will be a ‘mystic’, one who has ‘experienced’ something, or he will cease to be anything at all.”6 Rahner draws on Christian mystical sources not only to think about rare cases of extraordinary psychosomatic phenomena (such as visions, locutions, raptures, etc.) but also, and more concertedly, to develop an account of life itself, including its most mundane or ordinary manifestations, in which the human and the divine are deeply united. Beyond applauding his decision to merge theology and anthropology or to “turn to the subject” (as some commentators are quick to do),7 a critical interpretation of his work needs to clarify what is at stake in his particular way of formulating a mysticism of ordinary life. As we shall see, it does not suffice to call his approach “transcendental Thomist.”8 This is only one aspect of his thought. Although many have discussed his mystical theology,9 a focused ­con­sid­er­ation of its doctrine of grace, its account of ordinariness, its treatment of gender, and its practices of prayer—­such as the one provided in this chapter—­has not yet been attempted.

A Christian Theology of Universal Grace Christian critics of Rahner, in company with commentators such as Balthasar, Mark McIntosh, and Patrick Burke, who may fear that a general philosophy of some blended scholastic and idealist variety overdetermines his mystical theology and thereby jeopardizes its Christian theological status, must contend with the considerable countervailing evidence.10 Likewise, any more philosophically or universally inclined readers who would like to celebrate a supposed relativization 6  Rahner, “Christian Living Formerly and Today,” p. 15. 7 Losinger’s The Anthropological Turn, especially pp. xxix–­xxxi, arguably gives too much in­ter­pret­ive value to Rahner, “Theology and Anthropology” (1966). Although this brief essay by Rahner indicates the unity of theology and anthropology in his thought, it does not explain the ways that he parses this unity in dialogue with the Christian mystical tradition or his efforts to protect the God–­creature distinction. For a classic treatment of Rahner’s “turn to the subject,” see Anne Carr, “Starting with the Human.” 8 For an overview of transcendental Thomism, see Sheehan, Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations, pp. 55–102. The most explicitly transcendental Thomist text in Rahner’s corpus is Spirit in the World (1936). 9 Endean, Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality, pp. 12–67; Egan, Karl Rahner: Mystic of Everyday Life, pp. 55–79; McIntosh, Mystical Theology, pp. 90–101; and McGinn, Foundations of Mysticism, pp. 285–9. 10 In The Moment of Christian Witness (1966), Balthasar critiques a change of “emphasis” in Rahner’s works from an early “love of the triune God” revealed in “the broken heart of the crucified Christ” to a later, generalizing, more or less Kantian doctrine of anonymous Christianity (p. 65). But whether Rahner ever really abandons or deemphasizes his Christological and trinitarian convictions is debatable. Following Balthasar, McIntosh worries that Rahner’s mysticism is too transcendental and, therefore, oriented toward an apophasis that has little need for the triune God of revelation (Mystical Theology, pp. 96 and 100). A similar concern drives Patrick Burke’s argument that an oscillation between universal and particular imperils the Christian credentials of Rahner’s theology (Reinterpreting Rahner).

Grace in the Ordinary  33 of Christian theological commitment in Rahner need to acknowledge how resistant his work is to such an interpretation.11 To the extent that he argues that divine and human life are deeply united, he does so primarily for Christian theological reasons and by drawing on canonical sources in the Christian mystical tradition. More specifically, Christian teachings about grace drawn from biblical texts, church fathers, medieval doctors, and various early modern saints are his most decisive guides in this matter. One cannot deny the role played by certain conceptual models and technical terms that, because of their abstractness and traceable philosophical pedigrees, may seem to be more nearly philosophical than ­theo­logic­al.12 Nonetheless, it is crucial to recognize that Rahner’s scripturally and trad­ition­al­ly supported doctrine of grace gives his assertions concerning the possibility and actuality of divine union a vastly different meaning from that which his philosophical apparatus would have on its own. To clarify how deeply Rahner’s account of mysticism is rooted in the doctrine of grace, and conversely how deeply his doctrine of grace is rooted in mysticism,13 there is no better place to begin than with his early 1939 article, “Some Implications of the Scholastic Concept of Uncreated Grace.” In this text, Rahner does not dichotomously oppose created and uncreated grace, as though he were asking theologians to choose merely one or the other. On the contrary, he presupposes that any relatively adequate Christian theology will appreciate both; that is, both the gift of “an absolute entitative modification of man” (i.e., created grace) and the supremely glorious gift of “the highest and most intimate union with God which is possible to a creature in the gaze of love” (i.e., uncreated grace). The question is how these divine gifts are related. Rahner argues that, for the New Testament texts attributed to Paul and John, as well as for writings by many church fathers such as Irenaeus, uncreated grace—­that is, the grace of divine union—­has a certain priority. These early Christian witnesses “see the created gifts of grace as a consequence of God’s substantial communication to justified men,” not the other way around. Although Rahner finds traces of this biblical and patristic prioritization, which he himself seeks to recover, in medieval scholastics

11  Dych, “Theology in a New Key.” 12  Rahner argues that there must be “philosophizing” in theology in order to assist in the clarification of Christian faith (“Philosophy and Philosophising in Theology,” p. 47). This “philosophizing” is not necessarily philosophy, in a strict modern sense that would imply autonomy from theology. Even Rahner’s early philosophy in Spirit in the World is teleologically oriented toward his theology and perhaps, then, not really convincing as “pure” philosophy. Sheehan confirms this point in his Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations, p. 3. On these grounds, Karen Kilby may be right to contend that a “nonfoundationalist” reading of Rahner is possible, even perhaps a reading that is inclusive of Spirit in the World. See Kilby, Karl Rahner: Theology and Philosophy. The mere presence of philosophy in Rahner’s thought, therefore, does not imply any diminishment in Christian theological status. To evaluate such a charge, one would need to investigate how Rahner’s use of philosophy affects his the­ ology, whether for better or worse, and the results may very well be mixed. 13  Endean helpfully speaks about a “mutual exchange” between grace and mysticism in Rahner’s theology. See Endean, Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality, p. 59.

34 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

such as Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, and even Aquinas, and in some modern Catholic theologians such as Matthias Scheeben, he contests what he takes to be a prevailing shift in emphasis starting with the Middle Ages. During this period, Catholic theologians, including Aquinas and his followers, start to see “the indwelling of the Spirit in the justified man by grace . . . as consequence of the bestowal of created grace.” Their reasoning is that certain acquired and infused virtues that beneficially modify the human being in this life prepare the human being for the total unifying grace of beatific vision in eternity.14 Rahner’s opposition to this scholastic reversal of Pauline, Johannine, and patristic priorities in the doctrine of grace is a clear indication of his desire to construe this earthly life as a site of uncreated grace, the very indwelling presence of God. In his estimation, human beings should not view themselves as merely waiting—­admittedly equipped with marvelous but finitely located gifts, such as those of faith, hope, and love—­for a divine union that is held in store for them beyond the grave. Instead, they ought to view themselves as in some sense already drawn into and animated by this union. He thinks that it is a real yet incipient mystery in the here and now. If human lives are conformed concretely to the virtuous practices that belong to created grace, then this will perhaps be because the very uncreated life of God is already there with and in them. If there is a gracious way of living that prepares one for everlasting glory (and Rahner does not dispute this scholastic contention), there is also a hidden glory that even now elicits and accompanies this preparatory process. Rahner recognizes that there is an im­port­ ant question here about how to distinguish grace in this life from the beatific vision, and he is careful to note that any union experienced in time is only a “commencement of glory.”15 Nevertheless, with these precautions in place, he is unafraid to model his account of the historical experience of uncreated grace on traditional views about what takes place ontologically, epistemologically, and volitionally in the beatific vision. It is at this point that certain philosophical constructs enter Rahner’s argument, in particular an Aristotelian account of formal causality and a related theory of hylomorphism (that is, composition through form and matter). Catholic scholasticism had already authorized the theological use of such conceptual m ­ odels. Rahner works with Aristotelian terminology that was expected at the time and familiar to his Catholic theological audience, even if he repurposes it. But there is also an innovative, idealist-­influenced reading of Aquinas at work here. Citing the fifth volume of Joseph Maréchal’s Le point de depart de la métaphysique (1926), as well as his own Spirit in the World—­which Peter Fritz has shown interprets Aquinas through lenses provided by Heidegger’s readings of German idealists, including Kant, Hegel, and especially Friedrich Schelling—­Rahner proposes what 14  Rahner, “Some Implications,” pp. 322–5 and 336–8. 15  Rahner, “Some Implications,” p. 326.

Grace in the Ordinary  35 he calls a “metaphysics of knowledge” that he believes is more or less faithful to Aquinas.16 The main tenet of such a “metaphysics” that Rahner employs in this context is the idea that what is known by a knower is not an external object that is  merely intended. Nor is it a mental representation or image. Rather, what is known is properly a “species”; that is to say, a real specification of the knower’s very being and self-­presence or, as Rahner expresses the idea, “an ontological determination of the knower as an entity in his own reality.” Through the species, Rahner says, “the knower and the known are really ‘the same thing’.”17 Subject and object are one. These philosophically weighted notions of formal causality, hylomorphism, and ontologically determined noetic-­noematic unity are tools that Rahner uses to clarify his understanding of what will take place in the beatific vision and, on this basis, to reflect about what the experience of uncreated grace involves in this life. They are instruments of his theological argument concerning grace, which he hopes will help him recapture Paul’s original insight regarding the Spirit’s indwelling of mortal flesh. Although the Thomistic notion of lumen gloriae suggests that some created grace remains operative in the eschaton, Rahner thinks Aquinas is right to put the eschatological accent on uncreated grace. The beatific vision is an eternal experience of oneness between the entitative being of the finite knower and the absolute being of God. In this experience, God does not act primarily as efficient cause by making something extrinsic happen in the creature but rather as “quasi-­formal cause,” acting as the essence or inner constitution of the creature. The creature in turn is merely the material cause of this union. The creature is the almost formless receptacle in which God’s very life is continually outpoured.18 “Vision” is a sensory symbol for a supersensible knowing, where God takes the place of the species, establishing the ontological sameness of the knower and known. Rahner expresses the point in this way: “the reality of the mind in the beatific vision, so far as such a reality in itself is due to a species as the means of knowledge, is the very Being of God.”19 Rahner speaks of a quasi­-formal cause because he does not want this ter­min­ ology to lead to a misunderstanding, where God would somehow need to become composite with creaturely matter in order “to be” in the fullest sense. Rahner explains: “All this ‘quasi’ implies is that this ‘forma’, in spite of its formal causality, which must be taken really seriously, abides in its absolute transcendence

16  Rahner, “Some Implications,” p. 327; Fritz, “Karl Rahner, Friedrich Schelling, and Original Plural Unity”; and Fritz, Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics, pp. 5–7. 17  Rahner, “Some Implications,” pp. 327–8. 18  As we shall see in Chapter 4, Luce Irigaray identifies the philosophical understanding of matter-­ as-­receptacle with a phallocentric construction of femininity, which treats it as both maternal and nugatory. She argues that the discourse of hyle genders mysticism and comes with problematic consequences for women’s lives (Speculum, pp. 147–79). 19  Rahner, “Some Implications,” p. 332.

36 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

(inviolateness, ‘freedom’).”20 For Rahner, God remains simple; that is, not composite. God is eternally actus purus. Nevertheless, Rahner does not want the “quasi” to discourage his readers from taking “really seriously” the hylomorphic relation that he believes expresses something true about the mystery of heavenly glory and—­this being his central concern—­about the mystery of uncreated grace in this transient and fallen world. Glory and grace are only one mystery. Although the fullness of this mystery lies in the absolute future, it is already a hidden constitution of life in the present. This doctrine of uncreated grace clarifies what it means, on Rahnerian terms, to view life as mystical. Although Rahner may be right to resist the typical scholastic prioritization of created grace, the scholastic approach may have one conceivable benefit that should not be lost, namely its sense of the important role played by preparatory practices, dispositions, and gifts in Christian life, which modify the creature’s habits of awareness and interaction in such a way that some eventually all-­ absorptive oneness with God is more recognizable and meaningful. In the scholastic model, there is no short-­circuiting of Christian mystagogy. Nonetheless, as we shall see, Rahner is not ultimately averse to such a suggestion. Even in this article, he grants that “the material and formal causes possess a reciprocal priority.”21 The “material” content of human and Christian lives is of great im­port­ ance to him. Rahner’s treatment of the nature–­grace relationship in his “Concerning the Relationship between Nature and Grace” (1950) develops additional ideas that are key to his grace-­centric approach to mysticism. In this text, he articulates his critique of neoscholastic “extrinsicism,” which is the view that grace is an external superstructure imposed by divine will on pure human nature. Rahner objects to the assumption that grace is “absolutely beyond consciousness” and “beyond the range of experience.” He argues, on the contrary, that grace is intrinsic to human consciousness and experience. It is always already there in human beings’ waking lives, whatever their circumstances. What in fact lies beyond human perception is any pure nature (natura pura). Of that Rahner acknowledges only a “remainder concept.” He explains that “man can experiment with himself only in the region of God’s supernatural loving will, he can never find the nature he wants in a ‘chemically pure’ state, separated from its supernatural existential.” The “supernatural existential” is Rahner’s shorthand way to express the idea that grace—­ primarily the uncreated being of God poured out in love—­permeates human existence as such (not merely the existence of baptized and believing Christians). It is a constitutive dimension of “man’s concretely experienced quiddity.” Parting ways slightly with Henri de Lubac, Rahner believes a remainder concept of pure nature is necessary to indicate the never experientially isolable ingredient of a

20  Rahner, “Some Implications,” p. 330.

21  Rahner, “Some Implications,” p. 341.

Grace in the Ordinary  37 positive human openness for union with God. Although this natural obediential potency is no mere “nonrepugnance” in Rahner’s account, it imposes no obligation on God’s freedom (such as a demand to be gracious) and in this sense is not “exacting.”22 As a Christian theologian, Rahner has no interest in any supposed divine union that would not happen as an event of grace; that is to say, as a divinely willed, supernatural, unexacted gift of God’s self-­communicating love. At the same time, some theologians may question whether his universalization of grace, in the form of a supernatural existential, undervalues the experiential particularity of the Christian mystical tradition. When considering this question, it is important not to overlook the Christian theological reasons that Rahner supplies for universalizing the doctrine of grace. Rahner argues that “God wishes to communicate himself, to pour forth the love which he himself is. That is the first and the last of his real plans and hence of his real world too. Everything else exists so that this one thing might be: the eternal miracle of infinite Love.”23 Rahner’s Christian faith is what compels him to claim that everything and everyone depends on, and is held within, the all-­embracing love of God. This love provides a strong Christian theological rationale for affirming a universal offer of grace immanent within human existence. Universality is, therefore, no proof of a nontheological, inauthentically Christian, or merely philosophical structure of thought. Rahner’s theological reflections on grace, including especially his prioritization of uncreated grace and his retention of pure nature as a remainder concept, guide his interpretation of mystical phenomena. In Visions and Prophecies (1958), an important work of his that has received too little attention, he refers frequently to “the classic Spanish mystics,” Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, and also draws significantly on Maréchal’s The Psychology of the Mystics. These sources lead Rahner to make a distinction between, on the one hand, a “more central and in itself purely spiritual process” often called “infused contemplation,” “the direct vision of the Godhead,” or “full mystical union” and, on the other hand, various secondary experiences that may “overflow” from this more substantial grace or “echo” it. Maréchal calls these secondary experiences “accessory” in order to distinguish them from the “essential” core of Christian mysticism, which is divine union.24 Teresa’s and John’s accounts of infused contemplation support Rahner’s idea that uncreated grace is available in this life and that it is, in various mysterious and complex ways, involved with human experience. Moreover, to the extent that

22  Rahner, “Concerning the Relationship,” pp. 298–9, 302–3, and 315. 23  Rahner, “Concerning the Relationship,” p. 310. 24 Rahner, Visions and Prophecies, pp. 13, 42n42, and 56–7 and Maréchal, Psychology of the Mystics, pp. 42 and 102.

38 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Rahner reads these saintly discalced Carmelites well, their authority as Christian theological and mystical sources may be extended somewhat to him. At the same time, Teresa and John, and perhaps especially Maréchal, enable Rahner to adopt a rather critical, though not dismissive, attitude toward subsidiary mystical phenomena, such as visions, prophecies, locutions, ecstasies, levitations, stigmata, and so on. He questions the extent to which any such apparent manifestation of divine union is actually constituted by grace, or perhaps also by nature, or perhaps even by an evil impulse of some sort. Although he recognizes the possibility of grace-­infused experiences, he treats the presence of grace in each particular case as an open question demanding discernment and even healthy skepticism. The remainder concept of pure nature functions here as a sober warning that not every experience that seems extraordinary and even beneficial is necessarily of a supernatural, divine origin. In other words, not all seemingly “mystical” events (from the standpoint of psychology, phenomenology, or the history of religion) are guaranteed to manifest the gift of divine union that is, nonetheless, always already intrinsic to human life, constitutive of its mystical character, and foundational to any valid Christian theological account of mysticism. Rahner’s argument in this text depends on some carefully defined technical terms, which must be appreciated if one hopes to grasp his meaning. Among seemingly mystical phenomena, he distinguishes between the “para­ psycho­ logic­al” (parapsychologisch), the “miracle” (Wunder), and an intermediate type that he considers the most “normal” (normal). He defines parapsychological phenomena in this way: “though extraordinary they do not imply a special intervention of God but derive from natural faculties, even if these faculties are not—­at least to any perceptible degree—­at the disposal of the modern man of today.” As examples, he cites “prophetic dreams, second sight, clairvoyance, foreknowledge of the hour of death, etc.”25 Parapsychological experiences of this kind are out of the ordinary but not necessarily supernatural—­though God may use them in this way; that is, to mediate grace. On the other end of the spectrum lies the miraculous. According to Rahner, a “miracle in the strict sense” is “a divine intervention which partly suspends the laws of nature (and therefore the normal laws of psychology as well).” In keeping with the Catholic fundamental theology of his day, Rahner contends that evidence of the miraculous is necessary to demonstrate the “divine origin” and “binding character” of any given revelation, whether public or private. But even with support of the miraculous, revelations that are officially and publicly approved as “private” revelations typically become merely permissible, not obligatory, for Christian belief. Rahner clarifies that, after Christ, “we may not expect anything more which would substantially alter the conditions of our salvation.”

25 Rahner, Visions and Prophecies, p. 92.

Grace in the Ordinary  39 That is, for Rahner, even miraculous mystical phenomena, should they appear, must be considered marginal in significance when compared with the definitive soteriological event of God’s becoming human in Christ, which is the primary reference point of the faith-­obligating public revelation that is communicated through Christian scripture and tradition.26 Rahner’s commitment to the normative weight of public revelation is undeniable. Between merely parapsychological phenomena (which, though occurring in the concrete world of grace and possessing certain unusual features, may largely be attributed to nature) and strictly miraculous phenomena (which, by violating natural laws, offer a more or less pure glimpse of the supernatural), Rahner identifies a category that has a more typical natural and supernatural composition that depends neither on parapsychological aberrations in the domain of natural psych­ology nor on miraculous breaks from the laws of nature. Rather, it depends only on a divine self-­communication that has become “bound up with a particular place and time, with a concrete word or command, with a finite reality or truth, and . . . [that] occurs with, or is connected with, the ‘apparition’ of an object presented to internal or external senses, which object represents and manifests God, his will, or the like.” Rahner thinks that, in most cases, the object in question will be presented to the “internal senses”; that is, the imagination. It will draw on the natural creative capacities, memories, and subconscious impulses of the one who receives it, but it will also localize in a new and unique way the very ­self-­giving presence of God.27 The parapsychological, the miraculous, and the normally graced are three categories of possible mystical experience, established largely by Christian theo­logic­al considerations regarding the possible relations between nature and grace. A fourth category that Rahner mentions, but does not develop at great length, is the “diabolical.” In a footnote, he warns that “natural physical and psychic occurrences, normal or extraordinary, which of themselves or at least in practice inhibit, threaten or destroy the religious and moral life of man can be called ‘diabolical’, even if things are correct in them.”28 Here Rahner argues that, beyond the relations of nature and grace, it is also possible for apparently mystical phenomena to function harmfully and destructively, to work against God’s will, and in this sense to manifest a very real evil operative in the world. Even when some visions and prophecies are not so odious as to be considered diabolical, they may contain an ample degree of “falsehood, theological error and distortion, and subjectivity (extending even to bad taste).” Rahner lists over twenty examples drawn from the lives of saints—­and, he adds, “if saints could err, we must not be 26 Rahner, Visions and Prophecies, pp. 24, 45, and 82. 27 Rahner, Visions and Prophecies, pp. 13, 41, and 44. 28 Rahner, Visions and Prophecies, p. 43n43 (translation corrected to eliminate pejorative uses of “handicap” and “queer” that are not in the original German; cf. Rahner, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 7, p. 233n43).

40 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

surprised to find deceptions occurring in the case of other visionaries whose sanctity is by no means established.” He then lists several examples of a non-­ saintly variety. He also argues that even if there is a genuine, divinely originate mystical experience, serious problems may arise in subsequent interpretation.29 Rahner, therefore, certainly cannot be accused of indiscriminately blessing all human experiences or treating each conscious or imaginative event as equally expressive of divine union. If the possibility of an experience of grace is universal in principle (at least as an offer or invitation), so too is the possibility of a mostly naturally determined experience—­and, for that matter, the possibility of a diabolical experience that deviates radically from God’s self-­bestowing love. None of these three variables (grace, nature, and sin) can be assumed from the start to be inoperative, no matter how unusual or commonplace the experience may be. As a Christian theologian, Rahner recognizes and distinguishes these possibilities but is hesitant to make judgments about actual cases or to suggest that any potential outcomes are necessary. His modal reasoning (that is, his differentiation of conditions of possibility from those of actuality and necessity) is a key feature of his argument, which demonstrates its theological rigor.30 While Rahner is duly skeptical of out-­of-­the-­ordinary mystical phenomena, he is rather more assured about the mystical significance of more ordinary avenues of grace. He argues that we must not “forget . . . (as often happens) that Christ appears to us most surely in the poor and suffering.” Moreover, he contends that “in the Sacrament and in the grace of the Holy Ghost, offered to every Christian, we have God’s most real presence.”31 In his forays into the visionary possibilities of graced existence, Rahner therefore does not lose sight of what is essential for ordinary Christian ethical, sacramental, and spiritual practices, which also manifest grace in very real and often more important ways. Rahner’s awareness of the many possible concrete modalities of grace keeps him from overestimating the value of abnormal states of body or mind. We have seen that Rahner’s mystical theology relies on Christian sources such as Paul, John, Irenaeus, Aquinas, the Spanish Carmelites, and Maréchal. To this list we must add Origen and Bonaventure, who, among several others, shape Rahner’s understanding of “spiritual senses.”32 From this patristic and medieval tradition, Rahner takes the idea that uncreated grace can be experienced not only through spiritual sight (as in the Thomistic account of beatific vision, which 29 Rahner, Visions and Prophecies, pp. 66–72. 30 Rahner repeats this modal reasoning in “Mystical Experience and Mystical Theology” (1974), p. 96. 31 Rahner, Visions and Prophecies, p. 85. 32  Rahner, “ ‘Spiritual Senses’ According to Origen” (1932) and “Doctrine of the ‘Spiritual Senses’ ” (1933). Brandon Peterson shows that Rahner began his career by researching mystical themes in patristic authors, as evidenced by his second dissertation, E latere Christi (1936) and by another text, Aszese und Mystik in der Väterzeit (1939), originally written by Marcel Viller, which Rahner translated and emendated. See Peterson, “Karl Rahner on Patristic Theology and Spirituality.”

Grace in the Ordinary  41 emphasizes a graced capacity for direct knowledge of the incomprehensible being of God),33 but also and most exaltedly through an ecstatic touch; that is, through a union of God and the soul that surpasses all rational and intellective knowledge. Rahner notes that “God is here the dark fire of love.” He explains that this divine fire (pure uncreated grace) is united with the deepest and most hidden “ground of the soul which supports the capacities of both understanding and will.”34 As we shall see, in other texts he calls this generative ground of the human being “heart.” The ecstatic union of spiritual touch occurs at a more primordial level than any bifurcation between acts of knowing and loving and, moreover, overflows into both domains. In Rahner’s account of spiritual senses, his transcendental Thomist metaphysics of knowledge has only a very limited role to play. It gives ontological specificity to just one of these senses (sight), and Rahner is clear that this is not the highest one. If anything is “foundational” to Rahner’s mystical theology, it may in fact be the Bonaventurean peak experience of spiritual touch (which he already articulates in 1933) and not, as too many assume, the metaphysics of knowledge he elaborates in Spirit in the World (1936), let alone Kant’s transcendental philosophy. However, the most convincing candidate for the role of foundational source of Rahner’s mystical theology is the founder of the religious order to which he belonged: Ignatius of Loyola.35 In Visions and Prophecies, Ignatius supports Rahner’s decision to focus on “prophetic” visions; that is, experiences of divine self-­communication that are primarily meant not to enrich the contemplative life but to reveal practical imperatives for a specific context. Prophetic visions do not give new information about the content of faith but rather “new commands” appropriate to present-­day circumstances, which could not have been sufficiently anticipated by abstract moral deliberations, however valid these moral de­lib­er­ ations remain. Rahner emphasizes that, in addition to transforming the creature through ecstatic touch, the grace of divine union offers ethical lessons for the church and its works of love in particular historical situations. He explains that prophecy is a charism, a special endowment of the Holy Spirit through which “one learns the divine will by God’s direct motion,” just as one does in the first two “times of election” in Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises.36 Rahner clarifies his understanding of the Ignatian “times of election” in The Dynamic Element in the Church (1956), particularly in the section called “The Logic of Concrete Individual Knowledge in Ignatius Loyola.”37 He departs 33  Rahner, “Investigation of the Incomprehensibility of God.” 34  Rahner, “Doctrine of the ‘Spiritual Senses’,” pp. 124–5. 35  A thorough treatment of the Ignatian roots of Rahner’s theology can be found in Endean, Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality. 36 Rahner, Visions and Prophecies, pp. 17 and 26–7. 37  Although some interpreters of Ignatius identify the mystical experience of a “consolation without preceding cause” (consolación sin causa precedente) exclusively with the first time of election, Rahner situates this experience in between the first and second times, associating some versions of it

42 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

somewhat from the letter of Ignatius’s text and develops a philosophically informed interpretation of it, focusing on a new way of understanding “the consolation without preceding cause.” He suggests that a very basic mode of this consolation—­that is, a transcendental experience of uncreated grace—­is implicitly given in the very structure of humanity’s supernaturally elevated consciousness.38 Working from this assumption, Rahner likens the Ignatian method of election to virtually everyone’s ordinary way of making serious choices. He argues that “nearly everyone in grave decisions makes a choice more or less exactly in the way Ignatius conceives it”; that is, insofar as he or she attempts to find some congruence between a holistic awareness of their existence (which approximates the consolation without preceding cause) and a particular course of imagined action.39 Rahner’s theological critics may reasonably worry that something is lost in such generalizing transpositions of Ignatian mysticism. However, these concerns may be alleviated somewhat by Rahner’s declaration that, when he seeks “to interpret in metaphysical, epistemological, and theological terms what Ignatius indicates so concisely,” he limits his claims to what he calls “the lowest conceivable level of such an experience.” Such concerns may also be partly addressed by Rahner’s claim that higher conceivable levels of this experience differ not only in degree but also in kind. To the extent that the experience becomes more “explicit,” “intensive,” and “mystical,” he argues that it “discloses a transcendence qualitatively different from the merely concomitant and implicit form.”40 In this way, Rahner acknowledges that a general account of graced transcendental experience and decision-­making is no substitute for Ignatius’s hard-­won, contemplative awareness of the gracious presence of divine majesty.

more with the first and others with the second. Ignatius says that a consolation without preceding cause happens when the Creator exercises an exclusive divine prerogative “to enter the soul, depart from it, and cause a motion in it which draws the whole person into love of His Divine Majesty.” Only God could bring about such a pure movement of divine love. Moreover, Ignatius explains that the first time of election is an occasion in which “God our Lord moves and attracts the will in such a way that a devout person, without doubting or being able to doubt, carries out what was proposed,” as Paul and Matthew do when they receive the call to follow Christ. The first time is thus characterized by in­dub­it­ able divine movement in the soul leading to immediate, decisive action. See Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises, paras. 175 and 330. Rahner identifies this first time with the possibility of “prophetic in­spir­ ation,” especially of a strictly “miraculous” character, and he contends that a consolation without preceding cause can sometimes, though perhaps only rarely, occur in this manner, as it does in scripture and in the lives of some saints. However, Rahner thinks there is another, not strictly miraculous, way of experiencing a consolation without preceding cause, which falls “within the limits of what is normal in a Christian life.” He places this more “normal” experience of direct divine movement in the second time of election, which involves a discernment of spirits based on rules for interpreting con­ sola­tions and desolations. In this case, although there is no indubitable divine movement of the will, there is a presence of uncreated grace that favors some choices over others. See Rahner, Dynamic Element in the Church, pp. 127, 135, and 154. 38 Rahner, Dynamic Element in the Church, pp. 124–5 and 144–5. 39 Rahner, Dynamic Element in the Church, pp. 163–7. 40 Rahner, Dynamic Element in the Church, p. 144n34.

Grace in the Ordinary  43 Such theological concerns may be further mollified by recognizing that Rahner’s main goal here is to use Ignatius to argue for the possibility of a Christian fundamental ethics that would take the singularity of the individual’s quotidian life and divine calling into account. He wants to leave room for prophetic callings that would deliver new, context-­ specific imperatives through an individual (whether this person happens to be religious or lay) to the larger Christian and human community. He seeks to advance such a prophecy-­affirming perspective without succumbing to the relativism of a pure situation ethics or, for that matter, the threat of what he calls “an uncontrolled mysticism,” which would defiantly disregard the moral norms articulated by the church’s teaching office. To the extent that such norms are not themselves corrupted by sin, Rahner believes that they do genuinely convey what is entailed by faith and reason and should be followed.41 Therefore, in keeping with Ignatius and the Catholic magisterium, Rahner is careful not to propose an antinomian or purely individualistic mysticism of or­din­ary life. His point is simply that Ignatius’s mystical experience of a directly communicated divine will is proof that general rules about how to act do not clarify all that must be clarified about the workings of God’s grace in human existence. Rahner never disputes the necessity of objective moral principles. He merely denies their sufficiency and offers the concrete individual’s openness to divine transcendence as an important supplement. Although he thinks a broad form of this graced openness is ubiquitous in human existence (at least as an unthematic structure), his decision to ground his argument for it in a reading of Ignatius suggests an abiding attachment to distinctive features of Christian contemplative practice. Philip Endean is certainly right to point out that Rahner does not develop his account of the Christological particularity of Ignatian mysticism—­that is, its constitution by the call to follow Christ in his life, death, and resurrection—­as clearly in this text as he does in several others.42 One must, therefore, avoid treating this section of The Dynamic Element in the Church as though it were a complete representation of Rahner’s views on Ignatius. In any case, Rahner emphasizes the universal possibility of the grace of divine union, not despite but precisely because of his deep sensitivity to the incarnate divine love that is the heart of the Christian mystical tradition. For the most part, his use of philosophical concepts serves this end and offers a model for relating theology and philosophy in ways that are theo­logic­ally productive.

41 Rahner, Dynamic Element in the Church, pp. 90, 101, 108, and 148. 42 Endean, Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality, pp. 183–99.

44 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

An Ascetical Mysticism of Ordinary Life Perhaps more than any other theologian, Rahner has been credited with advocating a mysticism of ordinary life.43 To grasp the nuances of his account, it is im­port­ant to consider more precisely what he means by “ordinary.”44 The term has many meanings and associations in his writings. It signifies a life of dis­ ordered attachments, an existence in conformity with the norms of bourgeois society, the opposite of an unacceptable spiritual elitism, a form of experience without either parapsychological or miraculous phenomena, a barely tolerable state of boredom and dullness, and a condition of creaturely vulnerability bound for death. Rahner’s arguments for the possibility of the grace of divine union in or­din­ary life and his accounts of the specific differences that this union is supposed to make vary depending on which conceptions of ordinariness he pri­ori­ tizes in any given instance. To the extent that ordinary life is characterized by disordered attachments, Rahner is hardly approving of it. On the contrary, he argues that the gift of divine union both demands and enacts a decisive break with such attachments. In other words, he contends that mysticism, even a mysticism of ordinary life, implies some sort of ascetical indifference to worldly things and desires. Similarly, the very fact that ordinary life involves tedium, pain, and mortality is what more often than not leads Rahner to embrace it as a privileged site of divine union. The very features that make life seem unworthy of affirmation are, in his estimation, the very reasons to affirm it as deeply and mysteriously connected with the passion and death of Christ. This is not what those who associate Rahner with a cross-­ evading transcendental Thomism would expect. Although it might be tempting to characterize a Rahnerian mysticism of ordinary life simply as a positive mediation of the universal by the categorical, his texts offer a more complex picture. By the same token, Rahner’s ascetical approach to mysticism is not easy to reconcile with the anti-­ascetical thrust of many postmodern and feminist efforts to celebrate ordinary life precisely because of its bodily, erotic, and

43 Egan, Karl Rahner: Mystic of Everyday Life, pp. 57–67; Kidder, “Introduction”; and O’Meara, God in the World, pp. 16–22 and 61–4. 44  Throughout his works, Rahner uses a family of German terms: alltäglich (everyday), gewöhnlich (ordinary), and normal (normal), which acquire particular meanings in the context of each of his arguments and are not always translated consistently. Some readers might find it helpful to distinguish his approach from that of Charles Taylor, whose account of ordinary life builds on early modern Protestant reactions to medieval forms of monastic, hierarchical spirituality. Taylor explains, “ ‘Ordinary life’ is a term of art I introduce to designate those aspects of human life concerned with production and reproduction, that is, labour, the making of the things needed for life, and our life as sexual beings, including marriage and the family” (Sources of the Self, p. 211). When speaking of the mysticism of ordinary life, Rahner does not concentrate on either production or reproduction. Moreover, his attitude toward medieval forms of monastic, hierarchical spirituality is rather complex, as we shall see.

Grace in the Ordinary  45 material features. Even so, the following analysis shows that there is much to commend his ascetical approach. A bourgeois conception of the ordinariness of life is something that Rahner sometimes seems to presuppose without much critical reflection, particularly in reference to his own upbringing.45 This narrowness of perspective is problematic. Nonetheless, there are signs that he does critically reflect upon this social status, particularly in later works.46 Moreover, it is significant that middle-­class customs are not integral to his arguments for a mysticism of ordinary life. They do not play the sort of substantive role that tedium and death do, namely in establishing an experiential closeness with Christ. As we have seen in the previous section, Rahner is somewhat reserved in his evaluation of supposedly parapsychological and miraculous phenomena, treating the former type of experience as mostly natural in origin and the latter type of experience as rare, difficult to prove, and hazardous to interpret. Nevertheless, he is not dismissive of their possibility. His mysticism of ordinary life does not, therefore, imply any total rejection of extraordinary features of mysticism. The criterion for the goodness of both ordinary and extraordinary experiences (the distinction here being that “extraordinary” ones include some parapsychological or miraculous elements whereas “ordinary” ones do not) is the same in each case—­namely, is this genuinely an experience of union with God? If not, then no apparent ordinariness or extraordinariness will save it. If so, then it is almost entirely a matter of indifference whether the concrete mode is phe­nom­eno­logic­ al­ly more ordinary or extraordinary. Likewise, Rahner opposes any spiritual elitism that would suggest that some vocations, often of the more overtly ascetical variety, are necessarily holier or closer to Christ than others. But he does not, on the one hand, thereby condone any simplistic aversion to monastic discipline or related notions of contemplative advancement. Nor, on the other hand, does he thereby deem evidence of anti-­ elitist ordinariness as a sufficient demonstration of the presence of grace. Once again, for Rahner, a deepening reception of the gift of divine union is the true criterion of progress toward Christian perfection. Whether this happens through 45  Rahner, “Perfectly Normal Christian Family” and Rahner, “Alltägliche Dinge.” Although not necessarily bourgeois, his sense that ordinary life normally consists of activities such as working, walking, sitting, seeing, laughing, eating, and sleeping suggests a condition of relative stability, leisure, and comfort. 46  Rahner, “Following Christ Today” (1978). In this interview, Rahner speaks approvingly of his student Johann Baptist Metz’s development of a “political theology,” which includes both a “mystical component” and a “societal component.” To clarify the latter, Rahner writes: “If a person truly wants to love his or her neighbor, that person must, to some extent, not only offer the intimacy of his or her heart up to a certain point, but that person is bound out of love of this neighbor to do all that can be done, so that the sociopolitical structures of society are such that they serve the neighbor’s freedom and development, that they do not enslave or exploit the neighbor, and do not lead to injustice toward the neighbor” (p. 184). Metz, for his part, speaks positively about his teacher in A Passion for God, pp. 92–120.

46 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

rigorous techniques, communities, and rules once considered spiritually superior or through more modest worldly means of various sorts is, in his judgment, mostly a matter of indifference. The ascetical character of Rahner’s mysticism of ordinary life finds early expression in “The Ignatian Mysticism of Joy in the World” (1937). Here Rahner insists that his understanding of a mysticism of ordinary life must not be confused with any philosophical affirmation of the “divinity of the world.” In the history of philosophy from the Greeks through Hegel, and simply in the human being’s unreflective perception “that God is nothing other than the primeval unity of those powers which hold sway throughout this world,” Rahner finds a per­sist­ent threat of idolatry, a temptation to mistake the creature for the Creator. Any mysticism of ordinary life that he would endorse must avoid such idolatry by recognizing that God transcends the world absolutely and enters it freely as an act of grace.47 This point is consistent with the grace-­centered arguments we con­sidered above. What this text adds is a clear statement that “Ignatian piety is a piety of the Cross.” Rahner argues that Ignatian spirituality must be understood in continuity with martyrial and monastic practices that make “dying with Christ” the very center of the Christian life. In this essay, he interprets cruciformity in the formal terms of Ignatian indiferençia, which he defines as “the calm readiness for every command of God.” The cross in this text means obedience to the divine will, whatever that will might be in any concrete case. It favors neither an extra­or­din­ ary “fuga saeculi” nor the ordinary “daily moderation of a normal style of life marked by good sense.” It demands readiness to accept either, if God so desires.48 Other texts make a stronger case for the ascetical character of Rahner’s mysticism of ordinary life by incorporating material participation in Christ’s passion as a more essential element of it.49 A good example of this is “The Eucharist and Our Daily Lives” (1962). Here, as elsewhere, Rahner resists the ordinariness of dis­ ordered attachments. He warns against the danger of becoming distant from God by letting the “things of everyday life . . . [take] possession of our hearts to the exclusion of all else.” But his main point about ordinary life is not that it is full of distracting worldly pleasures but rather that it is a condition of persistent suffering. He describes life’s “toilsomeness, the attitudes characteristic of it of indifference, lovelessness, unvarying routine, the stresses which it imposes on us, the 47  Rahner, “Ignatian Mysticism,” pp. 285 and 290. See also Rahner, Trinity: his assertion of an axio­ mat­ic unity between the economic and immanent Trinity (p. 21) does not prevent him from emphasizing the Trinity’s absolute, transcendent freedom (p. 86). 48  Rahner, “Ignatian Mysticism,” pp. 281–2 and 290–1. 49 Drawing on Rahner’s interpretations of The Spiritual Exercises, Lois Malcolm argues, pace Balthasar, that participation in the cross is at the heart of Rahner’s theology. At the same time, she notes that this may raise some feminist concerns. See Malcolm, “Rahner’s Theology of the Cross.” Maria Clara Bingemer argues similarly that “for Rahner the Christ event is central to all mystical experience.” See Bingemer, Mystery and the World, p. 191.

Grace in the Ordinary  47 unrewardingness of it, the monotony of our voices, the weariness of our nerves, our hearts, our spirits.”50 Anticipating the critical perspective of Lauren Berlant, Rahner concludes his description of ordinary life by suggesting that “all of this toilsomeness amounts to one thing: nothing else than a slow death.”51 This is not a rosy view of quotidian existence. The picture is quite bleak, almost even despairing. Although sacramentally participative Christians may want to separate this painful, death-­oriented everydayness, on the one hand, from the consoling gift of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, on the other, Rahner argues that the two must be held together. He claims that Christ’s death “represents the ultimate in what we mean by the everyday.” The cross is the culmination of Jesus’s experience of being a vulnerable, isolated, fatigued, and mortal human being in this sinful world. Rahner believes that, in their sacramental reception of Christ, Christians are receiving God’s loving union with the very deadening conditions of ordinary life that would seem to be very far removed from God. The everyday is an in­dis­pens­ able context for the experience of grace, but, for Rahner, this primarily means the grace hidden in the cross.52 Rahner formulates his understanding of the close ties between the cross and ordinary life in a more philosophical way in “The Passion and Asceticism” (1949). In this essay, he defines asceticism in Heideggerian existentialist terms as “the personal, free grasping-­ of-­ his-­ own-­ accord of [man’s] necessary being-­ unto-­ death.” Such “ascetical” acceptance of mortality becomes Christian, according to Rahner, when its anticipation of death involves not merely the resoluteness of a finite will (as in Heidegger’s Being and Time) but a God-­given act of faith in the saving mystery of the cross. To be clear, Rahner does not think one can earn divine union through extreme acts of self-­denial or self-­punishment. He ex­pli­ cit­ly rejects such a Pelagian, works-­righteousness type of “mystical asceticism.” However, by recommending a Christlike endurance of life’s hardships and in­escap­able mortality, he does posit an intrinsic connection between mysticism and asceticism. For him, mysticism is an experience of grace, not an achievement of self-­mortifying works. Nevertheless, he believes that this grace conforms one 50  Rahner, “Eucharist and Our Daily Lives,” pp. 213–14. 51  Rahner, “Eucharist and Our Daily Lives,” p. 214. Lauren Berlant uses the term “slow death” to introduce a sobering account of ordinary life that contests the modern philosophical fantasy of an individual sovereignty that is supposed to be able to resist and rise above what Michel Foucault calls “biopower”—that is, the racialized and gendered conditions of neoliberal labor markets and economic exploitation. Berlant’s point is that the constraints on biopolitically managed life are often such that those subject to them cannot realistically hope to overcome them. Instead, such non-­sovereign subjects are compelled to seek lesser forms of survival and endurance that are barely distinguishable from a gradual encroachment of death. See Berlant, Cruel Optimism, pp. 95–119. Although Rahner does not employ the term “slow death” with the same technical, post-­Foucauldian meaning it finds in Berlant, there is a striking resonance between their perspectives. To some degree, Rahner responds to the same phenomena of ordinariness in late capitalism that interest Berlant. 52  Rahner, “Eucharist and Our Daily Lives,” pp. 218, 223, and 225.

48 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

to Jesus’s radically obedient way of inhabiting the death-­bound conditions of or­din­ary life.53 When Rahner contests the elitism that he perceives in the Christian mystical tradition, he therefore does not do so at the expense of its ascetical character. Nor, for that matter, does he deny the belief, which generally goes together with trad­ ition­ al monastic and contemplative vocations, that some progress toward Christian perfection in the form of a deepening experience of divine union is possible in this life. His “Reflections on the Problem of the Gradual Ascent to Christian Perfection” (1944) demonstrates the care with which he considers these matters. He argues that “something like a way to Christian perfection, a way which is formed by or divisible into different stages” must be conceivable, especially given the numerous attempts made by normative Christian figures such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Evagrius, Dionysius, Augustine, Bonaventure, and Aquinas. At the same time, he confesses that he does not find any of these attempts to be “particularly convincing.” He is persuaded neither by progressive schemas based on categories of moral acts (avoiding mortal sins, avoiding venial sins, and finally following the evangelical counsels) nor by those based on types of prayer (discursive, affective, and finally simple). He also worries about tendencies to define the goal either too narrowly as some form of exalted mystical knowledge, perhaps accompanied by accessory mystical phenomena, or too broadly such that the idea of Christian perfection becomes hollow. Ultimately, Rahner wants an account of spiritual progress that can make sense of the variety of moral struggles and experiences of prayer that any individual may have in quotidian life. He wants an account that embraces the experience of divine union as a specific aim without overdetermining what this experience means phenomenologically, psychologically, or situationally. Finally, he wants an account that does not treat an ecstatic experience of such union as a substitute for practical holiness in the context of ethical and ecclesial life, which indeed ought to flow from it.54 Without the fixed schemas of spiritual progress that Rahner seeks to overcome, how can one discern that a life has been touched by uncreated grace? What are the signs of a mysticism of ordinary life that would distinguish it from mere or­din­ ary life? In “Religious Enthusiasm and the Experience of Grace” (1973), he considers whether certain charismatic phenomena such as glossolalia, immediate conversion experiences, and subjective certainties of salvation have some such probative value. Although he treats them as concrete evidence of a “mysticism in ordinary dress” and a “mysticism of the masses,” he also approaches them with the same critical circumspection he employs in his Visions and Prophecies. It is 53  Rahner, “Passion and Asceticism,” pp. 69–75. See also Rahner, On the Theology of Death (1961), pp. 56–80. 54  Rahner, “Reflections on the Problem of the Gradual Ascent,” pp. 6–10, 13, and 22–3.

Grace in the Ordinary  49 possible that any given charismatic phenomenon is an outward manifestation of divine union, but it is also possible that it is mostly of natural origin or even that it threatens to take one away from the real ethical and communal demands of a life of grace. One cannot judge the matter in advance but only after careful con­sid­er­ ation of each concrete case, and even then absolute certainty may remain elusive. One crucial lesson that Rahner takes away from his look at the worldwide spread of charismatic movements is that “the rational version of man found in the western world, especially amongst intellectuals, is not necessarily the model and paradigm for the whole of humanity.”55 In other words, his conception of a mysticism of ordinary life is not limited to what Sylvia Wynter would call “Man” but instead seeks to welcome, with a discerning and yet charitable hermeneutic, the mysterious array of connections between divine and human life that call the representative status of such an occidental, rationalist anthropology into question.56 The apparent Eurocentrism of his mystical theology is far from absolute, and it is challenged precisely by his Christian belief in a universal divine love. Nevertheless, he does not make the decolonial turn toward granting an epistemic or spiritual priority to such subaltern mystical experiences. The tension between colonizer and colonized positions is not a major axis around which his discernment of mystical authenticity turns.57 Although Rahner does not attempt to provide a comprehensive set of criteria in his “Experience of the Holy Spirit” (1976), this text does come closest to answering the question of how he thinks one can determine that true mysticism—­ that is, a real experience of uncreated grace—­is taking place. This essay adds an important pneumatological accent to Rahner’s mystical theology. He associates mysticism with the feast of Pentecost, a celebration of the coming of the Holy Spirit who, by inhabiting human hearts, gives them “a share in God’s love, truth, and freedom.” However, this pneumatological accent does not alter Rahner’s commitment to a Christological, and more particularly cruciform, mysticism. He insists that “there is an identity between experience of the Spirit and participation in the victorious death of Jesus.” This identity is evident in his list of possible experiences of the Spirit, which he gathers together here explicitly under the title of “a mysticism of ordinary life” and which he distinguishes from charismatic or other accessory mystical phenomena.58 Rahner’s list of possible cruciform experiences of the Spirit that reveal a true mysticism of ordinary life includes cases of surrendering to divine mercy as a 55  Rahner, “Religious Enthusiasm,” pp. 43 and 47. 56  Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being.” 57  Susan Abraham argues that, despite its Eurocentric limitations, Rahner’s account of the mysticism of ordinary life—­and particularly his Ignatian theory of indiferençia—­resonates with the Indian postcolonial theorist Ashis Nandy’s appropriation of Gandhi’s nonviolent, spiritually detached, and politically transformative practice of Ahimsa. See Abraham, Identity, Ethics, and Nonviolence, pp. 149–94. 58  Rahner, “Experience of the Holy Spirit,” pp. 189 and 205–6.

50 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

sinner, forgiving others without expecting reciprocity, doing one’s duty even when this means denying oneself, obeying one’s conscience in difficult circumstances, accepting loneliness without falling into despair, enduring a breakdown of clear ideas and previous certainties, remaining hopeful in the midst of the desert-­like banality of routine, interpreting the slightest experiences of love and joy as signs of infinite gifts that are to come, praying in silence and darkness without even the barest inkling of a response, and humbly accepting the inescapable reality of death. When we live our everyday lives in these Christic ways, characterized by a delicate balance of self-­immolating resignation and self-­sustaining hope, “then God is present with his liberating grace. Then we experience . . . the Holy Spirit of God.” Conformity with the death-­bound life of Christ is a clear thread running throughout Rahner’s illustrations of a pneumatological mysticism of ordinary life. In sum, then, although Rahner nuances and democratizes ascetical identification with the crucified Christ, he does not disavow it. Although he protests religious elitism and rigid schemas of advancement, he does not dismiss the practices of withdrawal, self-­discipline, or the ecstatic spiritual phenomena that are sometimes associated with them. To the extent that he locates the presence of God in humanity’s culturally diverse everyday existence in the world, he does so largely under the sign of the cross, which Christian monks and other professed contemplatives would recognize as governing their own seemingly more extraordinary and intentionally cruciform lives. Although many Christian theologians may welcome this ascetical in­ter­pret­ ation of Rahner’s mysticism of ordinary life as “good news,” insofar as it shows him offering a way to integrate modern ideals of universality and commitments to quotidian existence with ancient Christian practices and traditions that many Christians continue to hold dear, some readers, especially those more sympathetic to a Nietzschean style of life-­affirmation, a feminist argument for embodied self-­love, or some combination of the two,59 may recoil at it. Such critics may legitimately worry that Rahner’s mysticism of ordinary life belittles or maligns ordinary life by affirming it only as a slow dying with Christ, as a practice of total self-­surrender to a patriarchal divine will, or as a joyless preparation for a sup­ posed­ly compensatory eternal life to come. They may fear that it does not so much resist suffering as normalize it and that the consequences will be particularly disastrous for women and anyone who is oppressed. For the moment, it may suffice to make just two points on Rahner’s behalf. First, his account of ordinary life as painful, monotonous, and inevitably terminal may simply be a frank assessment of the human condition, one that suffering 59  Irigaray combines a Nietzschean and feminist form of such critiques, particularly in Marine Lover. See Chapter 4. Women theologians of color, such as Ada María Isasi-­Díaz, M. Shawn Copeland, and others studied in Chapters 5 and 6, have their own particular concerns about the cross and ways of resisting and incorporating it into their mysticisms of ordinary life, which, though different from Rahner’s approach, share some of its Christological commitments.

Grace in the Ordinary  51 masses might largely countenance. To his credit, he does not seek to evade these unsettling facts about life. He does not attempt to defend his faith in the grace of divine union by offering a bowdlerized account of human existence, reducing it down to a sample set of attractive moments (sunsets, flowers, experiences of joy) that supposedly demonstrate God’s involvement in it, while callously ignoring experiences of misery that do not support such a sanguine viewpoint. His argument for the possibility of experiencing uncreated grace prior to the eschaton does not depend on any “cruel optimism,” which would blame those who find themselves dissatisfied.60 Instead, Rahner fully takes the harshness of reality to heart and, only from this place of sober awareness, seeks some sense of consolation, or at least hope, in the idea that the transcendent God of love has freely entered into this very troubled human condition through Christ and remains present in it through the workings of the Holy Spirit. Rahner can be recognized as credibly affirming ordinary life if one admits that there is honesty in his description of the facts (“calamity, cancer, divorce, atomic war, being thrown on the scrap-­heap”) and if one recognizes that, in spite of these facts, he does not despair, as one very well could, but rather lives on courageously, clinging to the belief in God’s loving yet mysterious nearness. Second, Rahner’s retrieval of the tradition of Christian asceticism, particularly in the form of Ignatian indiferençia, should be taken seriously as a challenge to certain ways of ostensibly affirming ordinary life that only perpetuate humanity’s life-­draining servitude to the things of this world and to the fleeting affective responses they engender. Rahner’s mysticism of ordinary life promises to help people resist the totalizing capitalist consumerism that always leaves them wanting more and perpetuates cycles of suffering for others. To the unrelenting force of corporately manipulated bodily desires, Rahner opposes a doctrine of an embodied, solidaristic freedom.61 He envisions a fully corporeal life that feels and experiences concrete things but has learned how to make choices from a more holistic, indeed divine, vantage point. In the final analysis, his commitment to an unattached way of being is nothing other than an effort to cultivate an inner freedom to love, a readiness to welcome and serve others in whatever ways God may require. Whatever else needs to be said about the mysticism of ordinary life in order to clarify its judgment against oppression and to demonstrate its support for bodies and worldly loves that contribute to experiences of divine joy (and the following chapters begin to do some of this work), none of this erases the value of Rahner’s ascetical mysticism of ordinary life. As Dorothee Soelle emphasizes, asceticism 60 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, pp. 23–8. 61  Rahner, “Body in the Order of Salvation” (1967), p. 77. Fritz contends that Rahner’s account of embodied freedom is a helpful resource against neoliberalism, and Abraham similarly argues that, with some critical emendations, it can be given a postcolonial and decolonial interpretation. See Fritz, Freedom Made Manifest, p. 25 and Abraham, Identity, Ethics, and Nonviolence, pp. 164–75.

52 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

and resistance are not opposites.62 Resistance to the violence of this world depends on a willingness to acknowledge the daily experience of vulnerability to such violence and an arduous struggle to free oneself to accept a possibly prophetic divine calling in its midst. These tools of resistance appear in Rahner’s mysticism of ordinary life not despite its ascetical character but because of it.

A Gender-­Neutral Theory of Mysticism? Going beyond the question of asceticism, one might ask in a more open-­ended way how Rahner’s mystical theology fares on feminist grounds, which include concerns about whose experiences and discourses of divine union are taken ser­ ious­ly, what ideas about gender are operative, and what effects they have on the lives of women.63 In contrast to Balthasar and his close associate Adrienne von Speyr, whom we shall consider together in Chapter 2, Rahner mostly ignores the topic of gender in his account of the mysticism of ordinary life.64 At first, this contrast with Balthasar and Speyr may seem to augur well for Rahner. Instead of offering a gender-­essentialist treatment of the grace of divine union, he seeks a gender-­neutral treatment. His focus on the human as such in relation to God does not overtly favor either men or women, and it leaves his mystical theology largely unencumbered by the harmfully reductive ideas about what it means to be a man and a woman that structure Balthasar and Speyr’s mystical theology. Nevertheless, one may reasonably question whether there are any subtler gender constructs at play in Rahner’s mystical theology. If there are, further questions would then arise about how they affect his selection and use of sources and what concrete bearing they may have on women’s lives and possibilities. Rahner’s apparent neglect of gender may itself be the clearest sign of an implicit gendering in his mystical theology. As a man, and particularly as an ordained priest in a church that excludes women from this role, Rahner is in a position of power that enables him to disregard the question of gender, if he so wishes, while still being able to speak and to be heard, whereas this hardly seems possible in the case of women philosophers and theologians who must often take up the question explicitly in order to fight for a voice. His avoidance of the subject will not satisfy 62 Soelle, Silent Cry, pp. 218–22. 63  Anne Carr and Nancy Dallavalle discuss the connections between Rahner and feminist the­ ology, but they do not focus on his account of mysticism. Carr emphasizes Rahner’s recognition of “the creativity of human freedom, decision, and praxis.” Although she considers mysticism in feminist perspective, she turns to Soelle for this purpose, not Rahner. Dallavalle follows Carr by accenting Rahner’s theological anthropology, while adding some attention to his ecclesiology and Mariology, but again she does not concentrate on his mystical theology. See Carr, Transforming Grace, pp. 131–3 and 212 and Dallavalle, “Feminist Theologies.” 64  Fergus Kerr makes this observation but does not evaluate it on feminist theological grounds. See Kerr, Twentieth-­Century Catholic Theologians, p. 102.

Grace in the Ordinary  53 feminist interpreters of the Christian mystical tradition who do not want gender to be ignored but rather to be analyzed critically. Rahner advances some feminist-­adjacent views in one of the few texts he writes directly about women, “The Position of Woman in the New Situation in which the Church Presently Finds Herself ” (1964). In this article, Rahner supports the wellbeing and freedom of women by arguing that “women have equal value and equal rights with men,” that they ought to “share in the apostolate of the hierarchy,” that women should be left to work out their own theoretical and practical solutions to current problems in church and society, and that “what woman is or should be is a matter for woman herself to decide.”65 In addition to these basic points in defense of women’s dignity, authority, and self-­determination, Rahner explicitly incorporates women’s experience into his theory of the mysticism of ordinary life. He writes: In her religion she [i.e., woman] must discover the source within herself, the grace which from the outset her human heart has received into its innermost depths as life and love, and she will experience it there as a supernatural vocation to share in the life of God himself, though this is not incompatible with the fact that she will also experience and endure her habitual down-­to-­earth everyday life as well.66

Rahner’s general account of the experience of uncreated grace in the deepest part of the human being and in ordinary life finds clear expression here as a possibility for women. He does not suggest that women would have a diminished or essentially different version of this experience because they are women. Nevertheless, feminists may have some concerns about Rahner’s argument in this text. First, he does not entirely avoid gender essentialism. He refers in passing to “the special characteristics of the feminine nature”67 without reflecting crit­ic­ al­ly on the socially marginalizing functions of such an idea in the Western theo­ logic­al and philosophical tradition and in the contemporary church. The use of the singular, “woman,” reinforces a sense that women belong to a generic identity that can be discussed in abstraction and that may impose normative constraints on their lives. Although Rahner argues for women’s self-­determination, his rhet­ oric­al appeals to “feminine nature” and “woman” work at cross-­purposes with such a commitment. Second, the apparent gender neutrality of Rahner’s mystical theology proves insufficient. Although he incorporates women’s experience into his theory of the mysticism of ordinary life, he does so mainly at a formal level; that is, insofar as women are human. He avoids detailed discussion of particular

65  Rahner, “Position of Woman,” pp. 81, 84, 87, and 93, italics in the original. 66  Rahner, “Position of Woman,” p. 92. 67  Rahner, “Position of Woman,” p. 91.

54 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

women’s lives and their historical intimacies with God. While he acknowledges that some such quotidian details are important, he refuses to engage them in a concrete manner. Attention to actually existing women is, therefore, obstructed in this text both by Rahner’s residual gender essentialism and by his efforts at gender neutrality (despite the apparent contradiction between these two). What about Rahner’s Mariological writings, such as Mary, Mother of the Lord (1954)? In such works, he does not fail to acknowledge Mary of Nazareth’s existence as a real human woman. At the same time—­in part because of the scant biblical testimony about Mary, in part because his interests lie elsewhere—­he does not attempt a detailed historical reconstruction of her life, as one finds later in Elizabeth Johnson’s work.68 Instead, he focuses on understanding the Marian dogmas in the Catholic tradition. He argues that, from the moment of her immaculate conception, Mary’s life is saturated with grace—­in a special way, to be sure, which inaugurates a new creation, but also in a relatable way that reveals something about God’s loving plan for all of humanity. Mary is the “perfect Christian” and the perfect human being. By freely consenting to carry God within her womb (her fiat, which makes her theotokos); by showing herself to be entirely dependent on God’s grace (this is the theological significance of her perpetual virginity, according to Rahner); by remaining morally flawless throughout all her days; by immediately entering into the fullness of glory at her death (whether through assumption or dormition); and by extending love to all of God’s creatures through her heavenly intercessions for them, Mary offers a stunning image of total divine union. She represents the “fullness of grace” for which all persons are called to hope and pray, whether male or female. Although her role in the history of salvation is certainly unique, her absolute receptivity to the presence of God within her is a universal human vocation. For Rahner, Mariology is perfected anthropology.69 We can see here, once again, Rahner’s tendency toward a more or less gender-­ neutral style of theological argument. Although he recognizes that it is only because Mary has a female body that she can physically give birth to Jesus, he is otherwise uninterested in the fact that she is a woman. In his account, she is not explicitly symbolic of femininity. Rather, she is symbolic of humanity. She does not reveal what women should do or be as women but rather the life of graced oneness with God that all human beings are invited to share. Rahner’s decision to let Mary represent humanity without having first to represent femininity (as will be the case in Balthasar and Speyr) is an attractive aspect of his thought.

68 Elizabeth Johnson does, however, welcome many of Rahner’s grace-­ centered Mariological ­ roposals in her effort to recover a sense of Mary as a real woman. See Johnson, Truly Our Sister, p pp. 108–10 and 124. 69 Rahner, Mary, Mother of the Lord, pp. 36 and 69.

Grace in the Ordinary  55 Yet given Mary’s extraordinary, indeed absolutely unique, status as the Mother of God, along with the relative hiddenness of her actual life and thoughts behind the history of dogmatic pronouncements, Rahner’s praise for her does not indicate any serious interest on his part in the quotidian lives of women whose stories of mystical union (however remarkable) are more ordinary than Mary’s. Although there are many women in the Christian mystical tradition whom Rahner might have let figure prominently in his theology, he does not give them the sort of sustained theological treatment he gives Aquinas or Ignatius. As we shall see, Balthasar and Speyr are notably more inclusive of female mystical sources, as is, for example, the historical theologian Louis Bouyer.70 This more robust practice of inclusion is a good thing, even if the problematically essentializing in­ter­pret­ ations that these theologians provide is not. One exception to Rahner’s regular omission of women is Teresa of Avila, whom we have seen appears along with John of the Cross throughout Visions and Prophecies. Rahner also devotes a short reflection to her, “Teresa of Avila, Doctor of the Church” (1970). In this text, he argues that the Catholic Church’s recognition of Teresa’s “doctoral” status repudiates “the idea of woman being less gifted in an intellectual or religious sense” and demonstrates that women can do theology, since “a person who teaches something about mysticism is doing theology.” Although Rahner calls for her ideas to be translated into “a modern existential ontology and modern theological anthropology” and thereby, perhaps, moves too quickly away from a deep reading of her work on its own terms, he does praise her, in contrast to John of the Cross, for the imaginative and visionary character of her mystical theology and for her savvy interactions in the world even as a vowed contemplative.71 For the most part, however, Rahner does not give much space in his extensive bibliography to interpreting women mystics or vernacular theologians in the Christian tradition. Why are his categorical determinations of the transcendental primarily made by male theologians and philosophers? Some non-­neutral gendering power is at work here, at least behind the scenes. Nevertheless, among the men whom he discusses, there is one in particular that deserves a positive mention in this context, namely Friedrich Spee: a German Jesuit living during the early sixteenth century (1591–1635) who wrote many hymns and spiritual works, along with an important treatise critiquing the injustices of the witch trials.72 Rahner’s remarks on Spee can be found in his short tribute, “Against Witch Hysteria” (1983). Rahner clarifies that he is not primarily interested in Spee’s “spiritual bucolic poetry” or “bridal mysticism,” which have a certain noteworthy status in the history of German literature, but rather in the ways that Spee’s Ignatian mystical spirituality expresses itself in a socially critical resistance to the 70 Bouyer, Women Mystics. 71  Rahner, “Teresa of Avila.” 72 Langenfeld, Cautio Criminalis.

56 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

inquisitorial church’s murderous violence against women.73 Rahner’s unfortunate use of the pejoratively gendered word “hysteria” to name the mindset of those who are killing women may be forgiven in view of this essay’s liberating message. Rahner argues that Christians ought to imitate Spee’s courageous example today. He explains that Spee fought fearlessly against the inhumanity of his time, against stupidity and superstition, against envy and a frightful sadism that was on the rampage at all levels of society. He publicly exposed the untruthfulness and cruelty of the penal system of his time. He visited prisons. He rescued and nursed the wounded, and he shared the death pangs of the poor women who were to be burned alive. For him the experience of God’s nearness in ecstatic love was translated into looking for the poor and the sick in the city, buying a basket of white bread for the sick in the hospitals, paying for poor students’ schoolbooks.74

If Spee is a good illustration of what Rahner thinks an Ignatian mysticism of or­din­ary life looks like in practice, then one may fairly extrapolate that, for Rahner, the gift of an experiential union with God must, if genuine, be embodied through solidarity with the poor and oppressed. This would include, still today, action to free the vast number of persons (including a disproportionately high number of persons of color) who are unjustly incarcerated and a defense of the rights and bodies of women who are threatened even in societies that have abandoned explicit witch hunts. For his part, Rahner emphasizes the ways that Spee’s resistance to the “mass hysteria” about supposed witches might have helped twentieth-­century Germans better resist the National Socialist “mass hysteria” about Jews and other marginalized groups.75 But it would not be a stretch to suggest that the mystical-­political spirituality that Rahner finds in Spee could be developed in a feminist direction as well.76 All in all, there are some promising starts in Rahner’s essays about women, Mary, Teresa, and Spee, as well as considerable areas where further development would be desirable. His posture of gender neutrality—­that is, his effort to remain at the level of a general theological anthropology—­keeps him from giving problematic gender constructs a central role in his mystical theology, and feminist readers may be grateful for this. However, it also leaves women’s contributions to the understanding of divine union largely unexplored and, therefore, does not finally persuade as a real case of neutrality. Rahner affirms women’s capacities to do theology and to experience the fullness of God’s grace. He demands that their God-­ given freedoms be recognized and respected in church and society. Nevertheless, at a performative level, his work does not advance these goals as 73  Rahner, “Against Witch Hysteria,” p. 171. 75  Rahner, “Against Witch Hysteria,” p. 173.

74  Rahner, “Against Witch Hysteria,” p. 171. 76 Modras, Ignatian Humanism, p. 169.

Grace in the Ordinary  57 successfully as texts by feminist philosophers and theologians do. Perhaps one should not expect more from Rahner, who, one may assume, was limited in various ways by his context. Yet this contextual apology for Rahner does not change the fact that one ought to expect more from theology and philosophy now.

A Prayerful Thinker at Heart Rahner is the author of many texts that not only express his thoughts about Christian prayer but also reveal his lifelong practice of it. By studying this ma­ter­ ial, this final section of the chapter clarifies the role that mysticism plays in Rahner’s ordinary life. The prayerfulness of his experience of divine union demonstrates that this union does not abolish his sense of a difference between himself and God, in some annihilative or totalizing experience of sameness, but rather takes place through an intimate dialogue that presupposes and intensifies his sense of this difference. The heart of his theology and his life are disclosed in his prayers.77 At the same time, his writings about prayer illuminate what he means by “heart.” This is his name for human existence insofar as it is capable of receiving, giving, and finally becoming divine love. According to Rahner, prayer is the means by which the heart is transformed into the Christic and Spirit-­filled vessel of love that it is supposed to be. Rahner’s first published essay, written in his early twenties, is called “Why We Need to Pray” (1924). This text foreshadows the central motifs in his mysticism of ordinary life, which we have considered throughout this chapter. It announces his belief in the possibility of a gracious union with God’s very being, his cross-­ oriented Christology, his experiential pneumatology, his embrace of detachment as a means of embodied freedom, and what one might call his cardiocentric anthropology. He begins by posing the question, “What should your heart be like?” and he responds, “It should be like Christ’s heart, full of love, and of sacred, sacrificing power.” With the reasoning of an ascetic he warns that, “if we don’t pray, we remain attached to earthly things, we become small like them, narrow like them, we get pressured by them, we sell ourselves to them—­because we give our love and heart to them.” But with the confidence of a mystic he adds that in prayer God “makes the soul bright, enlightened, so that it can understand God’s will,” and “it becomes strong enough to accomplish all things and endure all things.” The text concludes with a pneumatological message: “The person who draws near to God—­they become one Spirit with HIM. But God’s Spirit is ‘love, 77  As Rahner’s friend Herbert Vorgrimler puts the point: “Karl Rahner’s experiences of God are expressed most clearly and in the most comprehensible language in his prayers and meditations; and as there are no experiences of God which are not at the same time experiences of oneself, it is from these writings that the man Karl Rahner emerges most clearly” (Understanding Karl Rahner, p. 2). See also Egan, Karl Rahner: Mystic of Everyday Life, pp. 80–104.

58 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

joy, patience, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-­control’ (Gal. 5:22–23). That’s what our heart becomes if we pray in the Spirit of God.”78 The prayerful, ascetical, Christ-­imitating, Spirit-­identified, agapic heart is the subject of Rahner’s first account of mystical union and the key to his theology as a whole. Another early, thoroughly prayerful, and very prescient work of Rahner’s is Encounters with Silence (1938; the German original is called Worte ins Schweigen—­ Words into Silence). Completed around the same time as Spirit in the World (1936) and Hearer of the Word (1937), it offers a clearer picture of the dialogical and doxological character of his thinking during this intellectually formative period of his life. It contains a series of ten prayerful addresses made to God under different aspects. The first, and perhaps most revealing, is “God of My Life.” This address is trinitarian and hymnic: “I give praise to You as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Its tone is humble: “I acknowledge You as someone Who has no need of me, Who is infinitely far exalted above the lowly valleys through which I drag out the paths of my life.” There is no transcendental idealism here, only the worshipful words of a person steeped in the daily practice of the Divine Office: “When I tell You all this, then I have given myself my true name, the name I ever repeat when I pray in David’s Psalter, ‘Tuus sum ego.’ I am the one who belongs not to himself, but to You.”79 Rahner’s act of adoration stokes a fiery desire within him to receive divine love, which is the very being of God: “Love such as this wills to possess You as You are—­how could it desire otherwise? It wants You Yourself, not Your reflection in the mirror of its own spirit. It wants to be united with You alone, so that in the very instant in which it gives up possession of itself, it will have not just Your image, but Your very Self.” In a state of spiritual abandon, Rahner finally receives the divine love he so fervently desires, and he recognizes it as the very substance of his existence: “When I abandon myself in love, then You are my very life, and Your incomprehensibility is swallowed up in love’s unity.” Yet even when this experience of incomprehensible unity with God has been received, Rahner suggests that it must be continually sought and requested. There is a need always to return to prayer, specifically to petition: “God of my life, Incomprehensible, be my life.”80 The second chapter in Encounters with Silence, which is called “God of My Lord Jesus Christ,” is equally prayerful, yet it goes beyond the mystical praise of God’s love and incomprehensibility to depict a more concrete meeting of human hearts, including Jesus’s, Rahner’s, and those of others. To understand what Rahner means by “heart,” it is helpful to refer to a later text on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which he calls “ ‘Behold This Heart!’ ” (1953). In this essay, he calls “heart” a “primordial word” that is no mere metaphor for something that could be named 78  Rahner, “Why We Need to Pray.” 79 Rahner, Encounters with Silence, pp. 3–4 and 7. 80 Rahner, Encounters with Silence, pp. 9–10.

Grace in the Ordinary  59 better in more direct terms but rather an indispensable, essential, and originary way of speaking without which the phenomenon of the human would not appear.81 According to Rahner, “heart” names the basic unity of the human being before or beyond any divisions into soul and body, intellect and will, knowledge and affect, and so on. It is no mere part of the human, a place of passions and feelings. It is rather the holistic ground and vital center of any human existence. It is a way of approaching this existence that gathers it together and reveals its potential openness to the divine. As such, it is the “point where man borders on the mystery of God.” However, the heart is not therefore a safe haven. It is a site of dramatic tension and struggle, in which the person either surrenders himself or herself completely into the abyss of divine love or, rather, refuses this calling and becomes devoid of such love.82 We can now return to the second chapter of Encounters with Silence and better understand Rahner’s decision to ask God for a closer relationship precisely with Jesus’s heart. Rahner prays, “Make my heart like that of Your Son. Make it as great and rich in love as His, so that my brothers—­or at least one of them, sometime in my life—­can enter through this door and there learn that you love him.”83 The theological presupposition behind this prayer is that God seeks to be united with human beings, not only as the overwhelming infinity of divine being they can barely behold but also in the more accessible form of Jesus’s heart, which is a perfect human image of divine love. Drawing out the ethical significance of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Rahner contends that persons whose hearts are transformed to be like Christ’s become “doors” through which others can receive God’s love. The heart is the human in the deepest possible sense, and the Christic heart is the human who has been empowered by grace not merely to receive God’s love but to mediate it, potentially setting off a limitless series of life-­changing, heart-­to-­heart encounters. Rahner’s cardiocentric mysticism is therefore not just a spirituality for his own individual enrichment. It is a means by which he strives to touch the lives of others. Whereas Encounters with Silence exemplifies Rahner’s inclination to do the­ ology while praying, indeed as itself a sort of prayer, The Need and the Blessing of Prayer (1946) offers perhaps his finest theological description of the nature of prayer. Originally delivered as a series of Lenten sermons in Munich amid the rubble left by the Second World War, this text takes this ruinous exterior situation as a sign of the silent despair, isolation, and torment that burden humanity on the inside. Rahner argues that prayer has a liberative role to play in these circumstances. Revealing a freedom-­ oriented dimension to his cardiocentrism, he 81  There are echoes of Heidegger’s “poetic thinking” here—­a connection that finds further con­ firm­ation in Rahner’s use of Rilke, Hölderlin, Goethe, and Nietzsche to support his argument for the primordial character of this word. See Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. 82  Rahner, “Behold This Heart,” pp. 321, 323, 327, and 329. 83 Rahner, Encounters with Silence, p. 17.

60 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

defines prayer as an activity in which “we open our hearts to God,” in which “we notice in the loneliness of our rubbled-­over heart that this poor heart bears infinity within itself,” and in which we thereby begin to experience ourselves as “freed into the infinite freedom of God.” At the same time, he notes that it is not only the human heart that prays. The Spirit of God also prays within it. He re­assures his audience that, although we often do not hear the Spirit, “we know in faith that he prays in us, prays with us and for us. And that his word echoes in the depths of our heart and in the heart of the eternal Father. We let the Spirit pray. And in trembling awe and in sweet love, we repeat his word to him.”84 Prayer is, then, not only a practice whereby the human heart asks to receive grace in the midst of the chaos of the world but also, as Coakley similarly avers, a properly divine act whereby the Spirit of God moves into and through the human heart in order to let it become a participant in trinitarian life.85 Rahner’s prayerful approach to mystical theology receives its most “paschal” articulation in Watch and Pray with Me (1949; the German original is called Heilige Stunde und Passionsandacht—­Holy Hour and Recollection of the Passion).86 This text gives Rahner’s readers a window into his practice of Eucharistic ad­or­ ation: “O Jesus, we adore You. / O eternal God, we adore You. / Our Redeemer, present here in this Sacrament, we adore You.” While glorifying Jesus’s presence in the sacrament, Rahner starts to meditate on Jesus’s experience of agony in the garden. He cries out repeatedly for mercy and deliverance in a litany of more than seventy petitions, such as “Jesus, in the anguish and sorrow of those hours, have mercy on us” and “From the sins that You wept for in the Garden of Olives, deliver us, O Jesus.”87 This is unrestrained, passionate, and tireless prayer—­a torrent of cries de profundis. In the midst of his adoration of Jesus’s sacramental presence and his supplications to Jesus in the hour of agony, Rahner begins to reflect on the presence of such agony in ordinary human lives now. He suggests that Christ’s passion is hidden not merely in the Eucharistic host, displayed in a monstrance before his eyes, but also in the experiences of suffering that humans endure every day. Continuing to address Jesus, he writes, “You wanted to live Your life in every age, in every situ­ation, among all peoples and generations . . . . But if Your life is to express itself anew in our lives by Your grace and by Your Holy Spirit, then this is true even of Your suffering, of Your blessed passion.” Rahner’s petitions for mercy that follow this (questionable) claim are different from those that precede it. Each highlights

84 Rahner, Need and the Blessing of Prayer, pp. xx, 3, 6, 13, 22, and 24. 85  Rahner’s argument here resonates with Coakley’s Romans 8-­inspired, “prayer-­based” approach to the Trinity in God, Sexuality, and the Self. 86  By “paschal,” I mean related to the Christian account of salvation through Christ’s suffering and death. This Western Catholic usage differs from the Eastern Orthodox practice of calling Easter “Pascha.” 87 Rahner, Watch and Pray with Me, pp. 15–16, 19, and 22.

Grace in the Ordinary  61 not an aspect of Jesus’s agony as it took place in the past, but an aspect of this very agony insofar as it finds new expression in human lives today: “When hope seems to be giving way to despair during our hours in the Garden of Olives, have mercy on us. / When God’s love seems to have died in us during our real ‘holy hours’, have mercy on us.”88 Through these prayers, Rahner suggests that his own moments of suffering and those of anyone praying with him (the “we” of this text) belong to the mystery of Christ’s passion to such an extent that they are one with it. They are its new expressions. At the same time, he shows that Christ and those who identify with him have distinct roles in this encounter. Praying Christians perceive themselves to be suffering with Christ while asking him to comfort them in their suffering and to deliver them from it. As a human being, Christ suffers with all of humanity and shares their mortal fate. Yet, as the divine savior, he has mercy on human beings in their suffering and promises them the sort of final liberation from it that they cannot provide for themselves. Although Rahner’s Watch and Pray with Me maintains these theologically important distinctions, its suggestion that Christ wants his suffering to be “expressed anew” in others’ lives is problematic: this statement appears to attribute a sadistic motive to Christ’s passion that it cannot possibly have. A more coherent, but still Rahnerian, claim would be that the divine love that Christ manifests in his humanity, including his agony in the garden, is available in a very particular way to those who are anguishing now. As Rahner presents it, the practice of Christian prayer enables ordinary people to seek and discover Jesus’s loving nearness even in their most desperate moments and thereby to gain a spiritually empowering vantage point on their lives. When, in the last pages of the text, Rahner speaks intimately with Jesus about the seventh of his final sayings before death, “Father, into Your Hands I Commend My Spirit” (Luke 23:46), Rahner tells Jesus, “Now You can put everything and Yourself into the hands of the Father. Everything. Those hands are so gentle and so sure. They are like the hands of a Mother.”89 In the freedom of prayer, Rahner’s imagination begins to welcome different ways of gendering the divine source in whom he places all his hope. His paschal mysticism does not center the demands of an abusive Father but the tenderness of a Mother’s love, which is ready to embrace the lives of the suffering who are gathered together in the heart of Jesus her Son. Rahner’s description of his commitment to the crucified Christ in Watch and Pray with Me shows a side of his thought that is not as apparent in his more philosophical works such as Spirit in the World. Consider the following passage:

88 Rahner, Watch and Pray with Me, pp. 27–8 and 32. 89 Rahner, Watch and Pray with Me, p. 62, my emphasis.

62 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

O Jesus, . . . where should I flee, where should I seek refuge, if not at Your side? For You are my brother in bitter moments, and You suffered for my sins. See, I come to You today. I kneel beneath Your cross. I kiss the feet which follow me down the wandering path of my life constantly and silently, leaving bloody footprints. I embrace Your cross, Lord of eternal love, heart of all hearts, heart that was pierced, heart that is patient and unspeakably kind. Have mercy on me. Receive me into Your love.90

This prayerful experience of kneeling down beneath a cross and kissing Christ’s wounded feet offers the clearest evidence yet of the particularly Christological and self-­surrendering character of Rahner’s understanding of divine union. He does not compose these lines as a dispassionate intellectual, content to reflect on universal structures of human experience. He writes them as a devout Christian who spends much of his days in prayer. This is the quotidian reality on which his account of the mysticism of ordinary life primarily rests. This is his heart laid bare. Any suggestion that Rahner moves away from prayer in his later works is contra­vened by his Prayers for a Lifetime (1984), a collection that was published shortly after his death and that contains a Christologically and pneumatologically accented prayer for Christian unity that he composed on his deathbed.91 Rahner remained a prayerful thinker to the end. His reflections on uncreated grace and its universal scope, his studies of Christian mystical sources, his ascetical approach to ordinary life, and his contention that divine union is most clearly manifest not in unusual psychosomatic states but in prophetic love for the poor and oppressed—­which we have explored throughout this chapter—­find their deepest wellsprings in this lifelong practice of Christian prayer. For Rahner, prayer and mysticism are one and the same. They are the heart—­the human being in its hidden essence—­drawn into the mysteries of divine life, both by its own efforts and even more so by God’s unfailing initiative. Although other accounts of the mysticism of ordinary life take up questions of gender, newer philosophical theories of immanence and alterity, and concrete experiences of life outside of the middle-­class European context that Rahner generally presupposes, his contributions remain undeniable and enduring. No theological understanding of the mysticism of ordinary life can afford to overlook his achievements.

90 Rahner, Watch and Pray with Me, p. 63. 91 Rahner, Prayers for a Lifetime, pp. 163–5 and 170.

2 Obedience, Love, and Suffering The Mystical Theology of Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar

It would be possible to devote a lengthy discussion to the relative strengths and weaknesses of Rahner and Balthasar as representatives of twentieth-­ century Catholic mystical theology, but this is not how this chapter proceeds. Instead it focuses on a different relationship: that between Balthasar and his close friend, spiritual partner, and mystical theological source, Adrienne von Speyr. The fact that one cannot adequately interpret Balthasar without considering Speyr’s influence on his works reveals one major difference from Rahner, who does not draw so heavily from any one contemporary figure and who certainly does not receive any visionary’s or, for that matter, woman’s voice with as much deference. But more significant still is the central role that both Speyr and Balthasar give to gender in their understanding of Christian mysticism. Whereas Chapter  1 raised doubts about Rahner’s effort at gender neutrality, this chapter interrogates Speyr and Balthasar’s ways of incorporating a binary account of sexual difference into the meaning of divine union. In order to prioritize such a feminist line of questioning, this chapter foregrounds the study of Speyr and Balthasar and lets the (sometimes exaggerated) contrast with Rahner on other theological topics recede into the background. There are, in fact, many reasons to concentrate on Balthasar and Speyr. First, if one merely wanted to understand Balthasar’s mystical theology, it would be advisable to take seriously his oft-­repeated claims that Speyr’s insights are crucial to it. Second, any such interpretive effort should include the goal of understanding Speyr herself. Ideas that she and Balthasar share but that originated with her are often unfairly credited merely to him. Although there are several notable exceptions,1 many defenders and critics of Balthasar either ignore Speyr or treat her superficially. Interpreters with feminist commitments should especially want to avoid silencing her voice as a matter of course, even if they disagree with her views about gender. Third, Speyr and Balthasar develop an approach to Christian

1  Kerr, “Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar”; Roten, “Two Halves of the Moon”; Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, pp. 91–183; Schumacher, A Trinitarian Anthropology; and Matthew Sutton, Heaven Opens, which offers a helpful literature review of non-­English sources: pp. 30–5.

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism. Andrew Prevot, Oxford University Press. © Andrew Prevot 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866967.003.0003

64 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

mystical themes of obedience, intimacy, and suffering that is sophisticated and influential enough to merit further study. Finally, a focus on Speyr and Balthasar allows for a much-­needed critical discussion of the use (and not mere avoidance) of gender in Catholic mystical the­ology. Feminist theologians have objected to the gender essentialism, androcentrism, hierarchical subordinationism, crude sexual reductionism, exclusive heterosexuality, and implicit sexual violence that they perceive in Balthasar’s theology, particularly in certain aspects of his ecclesiology, anthropology, and trinitarian doctrine.2 Some have also suggested that the Speyr–­Balthasar relationship is a troubling embodiment of these problems, a claim that this chapter partly contests. While expressing such grave concerns, a few feminist commentators have welcomed the relationality, the embodied aesthetics, and even the gender-­bending fluidity that they discern in some of Balthasar’s works (usually neglecting Speyr’s).3 Thus there has been some genuine critical reception and not merely indictment among feminist readers. But no interpreter has sufficiently clarified the extent to which such critiques of Speyr and Balthasar’s gender theory undermine or leave intact the Christian understanding of divine union that these Catholic mystical theologians also represent. Is it possible to overcome the gender problems in their mystical theology (which feminists rightly protest) while avoiding any illusory gender neutrality (as we observed in Rahner’s mystical theology) and while also holding fast to the core experiences and teachings of the Christian mystical tradition that Speyr, Balthasar, and for that matter Rahner endeavor to preserve? The present chapter shows that such a constructive act of interpretation is possible. To achieve this goal, this chapter closely considers numerous feminist theo­ logic­al objections to Speyr and Balthasar’s gender theory, such as those mentioned above. It finds these objections largely persuasive. Along similar lines, it presupposes the emerging consensus among Christian ethicists that just sexual relationships depend on particular norms, including especially a norm of fundamental equality between sexual partners, which implies that both partners must freely and actively engage in any sexual experience and not merely receive it or participate in it out of a sense of obligation.4 On such grounds, this chapter argues that Speyr’s and Balthasar’s decisions to blend relationships of obedience and 2  Crammer, “One Sex or Two”; Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, pp. 91–183; Kilby, Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction, pp. 123–46; Gardner and Moss, “Something Like Time”; Vasko, “Difference Gender Makes”; Tonstad, God and Difference, pp. 27–57; and Johnson, Truly Our Sister, pp. 57–64. 3 Ross, “Women, Beauty, and Justice”; Michelle Gonzalez, “Hans Urs von Balthasar and Contemporary Feminist Theology”; and Muers, “A Queer Theology.” 4  Margaret Farley, Just Love, pp. 220–3; Salzman and Lawler, Sexual Ethics, pp. 82–3; Hunt, “Just Good Sex”; Gudorf, Body, Sex, and Pleasure, pp. 145–8; and Cahill, Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics, p. 110.

Obedience, Love, and Suffering  65 intimacy and to identify the masculine with activity and the feminine with ­receptivity are highly problematic. At the same time, this chapter strives to provide a fair and charitable in­ter­pret­ ation of Speyr and Balthasar, which highlights their lasting contributions to mys­ tic­al theology. It draws on sympathetic assessments of their work and seeks to disentangle problematic aspects of their gender theory from otherwise insightful theological claims. In particular, it values their cofounded Community of St. John as a practical effort to institute a mysticism of ordinary life. It prizes their hagiographical texts, which not only include many women mystics but also feature quotidian lives that trouble the fixed norms of their gender theory. It affirms their conviction that true Christian mysticism involves a total obedience to God’s will and none other, which imitates Jesus’s relationship with the Father and Spirit. It welcomes their contention that, in addition to such Christic obedience, Christian mysticism also involves mutual love between the triune God and the human being, which resembles that between two spouses. Finally, it embraces their paschal mysticism insofar as it implies that Christ passionately loves and unites with human beings even in the torments and hells that sometimes characterize their ordinary lives.

The Relationship between Speyr and Balthasar Speyr’s and Balthasar’s gendered ideas about mysticism are forged in their quotidian relationship with one another and reflect it in some respects. However, the correspondence between their gender theory and their quotidian lives together is far from exact. The model of gender-­essentialist complementarity that they use as a structuring metaphor for the union between Father and Son, Christ and the mystic, and man and woman does not map neatly onto the actual dynamics of their relationship and would not predict them. In many ways, Speyr proves to be the more initiatory, agential, and ostensibly “masculine” partner. Two points must be held in tension here. First, the patriarchal intermingling of obedience and intimacy that shapes Speyr’s and Balthasar’s quotidian lives together risks violating important norms of right relationship recognized by Christian ethicists today, according to which these types of roles (director and spouse) should not be combined. Second, Speyr’s initiatory activity and Balthasar’s receptivity to it betray a type of relationship that deviates from the very norms regarding masculinity and femininity that they profess. These points show that their mysticism of ordinary life involves a complicated negotiation of conditions of normativity, which should prompt one neither to seek the abolition of norms altogether nor to treat Speyr and Balthasar as the surest guides regarding appropriate norms. To be clear, the goal of this brief study of their written accounts of

66 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

their relationship is not to psychoanalyze Speyr and Balthasar,5 to suggest any lascivious behavior on their part, or to impute any vicious motives to them. Rather, the sole purpose is to advance the search for a more viable Christian and feminist approach to the mysticism of ordinary life. The lives of these two mystical figures were intertwined from their first meeting in 1940, the year of Speyr’s reception into the Catholic Church under Balthasar’s catechetical guidance, until her death in 1967 following a prolonged period of illness. Speyr was a physician by training and had maintained a medical practice until 1954, when her failing health prevented her from continuing to serve others in this way. As a doctor, she had devoted herself to the poor. Balthasar, by contrast, was already a prolific theologian and spiritual director when he met Speyr. He was a member of the Society of Jesus until 1950, when his  collaboration with Speyr on the secular institute called the Community of St.  John, which they had started as a vowed, contemplative community for lay women in 1945 and which was ultimately to include branches for lay men and priests, impelled him to leave the Jesuits.6 The appealing idea behind the Community of St. John, much like that behind Ignatius’s program of retreats, was to bring some of the practices and benefits of a consecrated monastic life into the everyday reach of lay Christians. However, the Community of St. John’s method for expanding the grace of divine union beyond the monastery was not merely to use The Spiritual Exercises (though this was done) but also to take vows of obedience, virginity, and poverty while remaining active in the world. The members of this “secular institute” were supposed to keep their regular occupations as teachers, lawyers, manual laborers, or whatever the case may be, but, like the beloved disciple, focus their interior lives on a “loving contemplation of the depths of God’s Word.”7 Their vows were meant to purify their devotion to Christ and let it radiate in all corners of society. While Rahner’s mysticism of ordinary life emphasizes asceticism in an existential manner, Speyr and Balthasar foster the mysticism of ordinary life in a more explicitly social way by establishing a lay ascetical community. In addition to their creative work together as cofounders of the Community of St. John, they also developed other close ties. Balthasar served as her confessor and spiritual director from the beginning. Moreover, starting in 1944, Speyr began to dictate works to him, while he acted as amanuensis. These dictations, which often took the outward form of meditative biblical commentaries, were also efforts to put into language her conceptual, imaginative, and sometimes

5 Beattie’s interpretive method may err too much in this direction. See Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, pp. 165, 170, and 181. 6 Balthasar, Our Task (1984), pp. 14 and 81 and Henrici, “Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Sketch of His Life,” p. 19. 7 Balthasar, Our Task, p. 125.

Obedience, Love, and Suffering  67 ecstatic intuitions of heaven, hell, and everything in between.8 In 1947, Balthasar started a press, Johannes Verlag, in order to publish these dictated texts, along with some of his own works and those by other authors of a similar spiritual cast, though he refrained from releasing her most self-­ disclosive dictations (Die Nachlasswerke) until after her death.9 Balthasar insists that Speyr’s ideas and experiences had a decisive impact on virtually all of his writings after 1940. He observes, “It is quite pointless to try to disentangle what is hers from what is mine in these later works,” adding: “I received far more from her, theologically, than she from me, though, of course, the exact proportion can never be calculated.”10 There is more to their relationship beyond collaboration, confession, dictation, and theological influence, though it is somewhat difficult to describe what this “more” is. After leaving the Jesuits, Balthasar became the houseguest of Speyr and her second husband, Werner Kaegi, until the time of her death. Her first marriage was to a widower named Emil Dürr, who passed away in 1934. Her autobiographical description of these two marriages reveals that she loved both Dürr and Kaegi but did so generally with more compassion than attraction. From a young age, she felt a deep interior call to celibacy, but because she was not yet Catholic at the time of each marriage proposal, she did not see vowed religious life as a legitimate option. The result was two dutiful but apparently unerotic marriages in which she sought to do “what God wills, not . . . what I want.”11 Obedience, not desire, reigned. There is no public evidence that Speyr and Balthasar ever became sexu­ al­ly involved with one another. Any insinuations in this regard remain unsubstantiated and, thus, unjust and unkind to these two people, who seemed on the whole to be quite scrupulous about Christian vows, whether for married or religious life.12 Within the constraints of a fair and charitable interpretation, one must acknowledge the evidence of something like a “spiritual marriage” between Speyr and Balthasar; that is, a relationship characterized by a deep emotional closeness and interdependence unlike any other relationship in their lives and by a fruitfulness that combines their complementary gifts and brings them forth into a third reality, a figurative child. Reflecting on the nature of their relationship, Balthasar remarks that there are “ ‘double missions’, which complement each other like the ‘two halves of the moon’ . . . . The model for this is the Crucified Lord bringing

8  For bibliographic information about these works, see Matthew Sutton, Heaven Opens, pp. 245–9. 9 Balthasar summarizes these more self-­disclosive texts in his “General Introduction to the Posthumous Works” in Speyr, Book of All Saints (1966), pp. 1–19. 10 Balthasar, Our Task, p. 73 and Balthasar, First Glance (1968), p. 13. 11 Balthasar, Our Task, p. 30n38, which quotes Speyr’s mystical autobiography, Geheimnis der Jugend (mystery of youth), p. 241. 12  Although Balthasar’s abdication from the Jesuits may seem to challenge the idea that he respects the binding nature of vows, the torment this decision caused him corroborates it. See Henrici, “Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Sketch of His Life,” pp. 19–22.

68 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

together Mary and John to form the virginal first cell of the Church.”13 Although Speyr says that “there is no such thing” as a “ ‘John-­marriage’, the living together of virginal men and women in the religious state,” she believes that she and Balthasar were destined by God to live together and share a double mission in imitation of Mary and John. In many respects, her life with Balthasar resembles the very sort of “John-­marriage” that she theoretically rejects. By contrast, her self-­reportedly abstinent relationship with her husband Kaegi approximates a “Joseph-­marriage,” a condition of marital celibacy that she does think may be legitimate under certain circumstances.14 When she was fifteen, she received a vision of Mary together with a bodily wound on her chest that never healed. Drawing on her self-­ testimony, Balthasar explains that “when she saw me for the first time in 1940, she knew that I was the one for whom she had been waiting and for whose sake she had received the wound.”15 He does not dispute her interpretation of their supernaturally destined union but seems rather to accept it as his own. Speyr indicates the “fruitful” aspect of their spiritual marriage by frequently referring to the Community of St. John that they cofounded as “the Child.” After Balthasar becomes less attentive to the needs of this community for a time (he was often away on lecture tours), Speyr confronts him. She says that she feels “like a young mother in a labor ward. The medical students look at her and make cyn­ ic­al, indecent remarks. Her husband hasn’t the time. He’s busy somewhere else, perhaps with another woman . . . . Finally, the child arrives . . . . The mother nearly dies of shame. She feels violated.” Later Speyr summarizes the lesson of this vivid parable for Balthasar: “Carrying the child is naturally the woman’s role, but the husband ought to support her and take care of her. After all, the child is his as well as hers.”16 Speyr interprets their double mission in marital terms. She feels like a neglected wife when he does not give her enough support and like a beloved wife when the two are in sync, and she views their work as their offspring. The celibacy of Speyr and Balthasar makes the marriage “spiritual,” which is to say devoid of sexual physical contact. But “spiritual” here does not mean unreal. How to evaluate this peculiar relationship? Some commentators believe that it represents a complementary partnership between the sexes. Johann Roten, for instance, argues that the relationship between Speyr and Balthasar manifests the “complementarity of man and woman.” Following their lead, he distinguishes between a “masculine-­generative” role and a “feminine-­receptive” role. However, when Roten describes Speyr and Balthasar’s relationship in more detail, he almost cannot help but reveal how inverted this structure is in their case. First, while discussing the practice of dictation, he recognizes that it was Speyr who spoke

13 Balthasar, Our Task, p. 16. 14 Speyr, Handmaid of the Lord, p. 62. 15 Balthasar, Our Task, p. 23, which cites Speyr, Geheimnis der Jugend, p. 45 and her published diary, Erde und Himmel (Earth and Heaven), pp. 1637, 1645, 1680, and 1729–30. 16 Balthasar, Our Task, p. 78, which quotes Speyr, Erde und Himmel, pp. 121–2.

Obedience, Love, and Suffering  69 and Balthasar who listened. Balthasar received her words, incubated them, and let them bear fruit in his later theology. Similarly, with respect to the founding of a secular institute, Roten observes that “the principal initiative again originated with Adrienne von Speyr.” He sums up their complementarity by saying that “new insights, proposals, and initiatives were mostly Adrienne’s forte, whereas Balthasar acted as a theological filter.”17 This characterization of their relationship seems to match the facts, and it does indicate some ways in which they individually complement each other. At the same time, it flips the gender-­essentialist roles that they prescribe in their texts. If these two mystical thinkers were fairly ranked in terms of the generative agency that they show in their collaboration, Speyr would arguably be first and Balthasar second. Seen in this light, their quotidian relationship may be somewhat less pre­dict­ able in its gender performance than Tina Beattie suggests. Beattie worries that Speyr, in her life of obedience and agonizing death, became “the embodiment of Balthasar’s projected femininity.”18 There may be some truth in such an assertion. But without significant qualification, it also seems to underestimate Speyr’s initiative and agency. To be sure, Beattie is correct to point out that Speyr submits obedi­ent­ly to Balthasar as her confessor and spiritual director. But Balthasar also reports that his commands were always designed to curb her asceticism and reduce the suffering it caused, not to increase it. Her penitential excesses and certainly her mortal illness were not his doing. Moreover, he praises the “originality of her theology”—note: theology, not mere mysticism—­ and appreciates its “astonishing coherence.” He recounts times when she “rebuked” and “trained” him, casting him in the more obediential role.19 He disagrees with her mother’s opinion that “the physician’s profession was not for women” and instead celebrates the courage and intelligence she displayed by pursuing this countercultural vocation in the world and by managing the secular institute. Balthasar attributes to her “traits which could almost be called manly,” indicating that she was a source of some gender fluidity in his thinking—­though arguably it would be better to see these traits merely as signs of her God-­given strengths as a person and as a ­woman.20 All in all, one cannot take an honest look at this relationship and claim that it tightly fits Balthasar and Speyr’s stereotypical idea of a masculine–­ feminine binary. The theological and ethical problems that come with treating this relationship as a model have less to do with its supposed conformity to gender-­essentialist expectations (since any such conformity would be inverted or partial) and more to do with a blending of obediential and spousal types of relationship that transgresses the norm of equality between intimate partners. Developing a spousal 17  Roten, “Two Halves of the Moon,” pp. 66 and 72–3. 18 Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, p. 166. 19 Balthasar, Our Task, pp. 59, 63, and 77. 20 Balthasar, First Glance, pp. 23 and 48–9.

70 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

relationship, even of a spiritual kind that involves no sexual contact, with an authority figure to whom one owes obedience or with a subordinate over whom one exercises leadership dangerously combines a type of relationship in which there is supposed to be equality with a type of relationship that is inherently un­equal. This arrangement involves a potential for serious role confusion that could be damaging to one or both parties and easily turn abusive (if it is not intrinsically so). Although this blending of obedience and intimacy reflects a pattern of male superiority that is particularly harmful to women, it remains problematic regardless of the gender of each party. For these reasons, Balthasar’s double role for Speyr as spiritual director and spiritual spouse is not to be recommended, particularly in a church still learning to address persistent problems of clerical sexual abuse and a larger culture that normalizes rape and sexual assault.21 By the same token, the duty-­bound and largely desire-­free way in which Speyr claims she inhabited her two legally recognized marriages also falls short of current theological ideals regarding the unitive meaning of marital intimacy. While Speyr interprets her obediential relationship with Balthasar in spousal terms, she interprets her spousal relationships with Dürr and Kaegi in obediential terms. In neither case do we have an image of a marriage characterized by a non-­gender-­essentialist complementarity between two equal and erotically united partners. The norm of equality implies that, among human beings, relationships of obedi­ence and intimacy should not be merged. To be sure, married people can understand themselves to be dutifully obeying God when they remain faithful to their vows and strive to sustain love for their partners even when it becomes difficult to do so. In this way, obedience to God can have great significance for married life.22 But for one party to feel obligated to obey another in such a relationship compromises its status as an ethically normal model of spousal union, just as gestures of romantic love or other sexually suggestive behavior violate the integrity of legitimate obediential relationships such as teacher–­student, manager–­ employee, coach–­player, and so on. Although such obediential relationships typically involve some degree of unequally distributed power, they certainly should not include the sort of unconditional surrender that creatures owe exclusively to their Creator (a crucial difference between inter-­human and divine–­ human cases, to which we shall return). Furthermore, even if one assumes a supremely charitable and kenotic authority figure in such an obediential relationship, instead of a brutish tyrant, this does not make its combination with a spousal

21 Keenan, Child Sexual Abuse and McCabe, “Feminist Catholic Response.” 22 Rubio, Family Ethics, p. 104.

Obedience, Love, and Suffering  71 relationship acceptable. There is a structural incompatibility here, regardless of the stellar moral character of the one in a commanding role.23

Gender Theory and Hagiography When considering the gendered aspects of Speyr and Balthasar’s mysticism of ordinary life, it is important to distinguish their gender theory, which expresses their essentialist ideas about a supposedly normative sexual difference between man and woman or masculinity and femininity, from their hagiography, which paints a more complex picture of the quotidian lives of holy men and women. Although feminist theologians have critiqued their gender theory, mainly as voiced by Balthasar, they have not attempted a counter-­reading that draws attention to Speyr’s voice and to both hers and Balthasar’s less objectionable efforts to retrieve mystical theological wisdom particularly from women saints. While Speyr and Balthasar’s gender theory denies and threatens women’s subjectivity in numerous ways and for this reason must be opposed, their hagiography brings an extensive range of women’s experiences, ideas, practices, and contributions into Catholic theological consciousness. For these reasons, their work can be regarded as simultaneously more and less promising than Rahner’s on feminist grounds.

Feminist Critiques of Speyr and Balthasar’s Gender Theory Drawing especially on Balthasar’s discussions of sexual difference in Theo-­Drama, volumes 2 and 3, which are often seen as the key places to turn for this topic, Corinne Crammer provides a nuanced exposition of his gender theory. She notes that it is characterized by a tension between his affirmation of woman’s equal dignity as a human being created in the image of God and his account of a hier­arch­ ic­ al relationship between the sexes, which gives man priority over woman. Balthasar articulates this male priority in several ways. He describes woman as the “answer” and “face” that respond to man’s primary word and gaze. He treats woman as the “helpmate” of man who is meant to bring man fulfillment. On Balthasar’s account, man is not self-­ sufficient. He needs woman. However, ­woman’s defining purpose is to satisfy man’s need. Balthasar associates man with initiation, action, and the capacity for official representation and woman with a consensual and fruitful reception of man’s action. Woman’s status, therefore, is 23  One common way to defend male primacy in the Christian tradition is to argue that male “headship” is supposed to be Christlike (as Ephesians 5:25 insists). The problem with this argument is that obedience to a Christlike husband is still obedience and, for this reason alone, incongruous with the fundamental equality that a good and just sexual relationship requires. See Gelfer, “Evangelical and Catholic Masculinities,” pp. 40–3.

72 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

not merely passive, but it is subordinate to man’s. Crammer shows that Balthasar uses these ideas to support his claims about the masculine identity of the Father, of Christ as the Father’s representative, and of priests as ecclesial representatives of Christ. These ideas also lead him to attribute a feminine identity to the Son who is obedient to the Father; to Mary, the Son’s physical mother and spiritual bride, who symbolizes the church insofar as it is submissive to Christ; and to the whole of creation insofar as it depends on the Creator.24 Turning to his New Elucidations (1979), Crammer shows that Balthasar harbors a Heideggerian anxiety about modern technological civilization’s concealment of difference.25 Balthasar dismisses “feminism” (in his eyes an undifferentiated monolith) as a destructive, masculinizing capitulation to such a technocratic culture. The self-­giving masculinity that Balthasar identifies with man in his natural state and with the Father, Christ, and the ministerial priesthood differs drastically from the domineering masculinity that he finds rampant in modernity and that he accuses feminists of imitating. In short, there are two masculinities in Balthasar: one good and the other bad. Femininity has a similar duality in his works, as shown especially by his article “Casta Meretrix” (1961), which is central to Beattie’s critique of his gender theory.26 In contrast to the receptive feminine role that he equates with the Marian holiness that all Christians are supposed to emulate, there is the biblical and patristic image of the harlot who turns away from God and falls into promiscuity. As harlot, woman becomes a metaphor for all sinners. According to Balthasar, both forms of femininity and the bad form of masculinity can be found in persons of either biological sex. This suggests some degree of gender fluidity—­or flexibility vis-­à-­vis the social norms that are ­supposedly implied by the structures of male and female bodies—­though only up to a point. Balthasar thinks that the good form of masculinity can only be found in men and, transcendently, in God. If women try to claim it, he believes they act against the created order and thereby exemplify the bad masculinity of modern technocracy, which is only one variant of the bad femininity of the sinner-­as-­harlot. In Theo-­Drama, volume 5, Balthasar suggests that there is a transcendent “(super-)femininity” in the Trinity, expressed in the processional receptivity of the Son and the Spirit and even in the Father’s “subsequent” receptivity to them.27 God is, therefore, not exclusively masculine in Balthasar’s speculations. But Balthasar is clear that such inner-­trinitarian femininity remains secondary to 24  Crammer, “One Sex or Two,” pp. 93–101 and Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 2 (1976), pp. 365–82 and Theo-­Drama, vol. 3 (1978), pp. 283–360. 25  Crammer, “One Sex or Two,” p. 94 and Balthasar, New Elucidations, pp. 187–98. I explain how this appropriation of Heidegger’s understanding of modern technology shapes Balthasar’s critique of liberation theology in Thinking Prayer, pp. 101–4. See also Chapter  4 for Irigaray’s similarly Heideggerian argument for sexual difference. 26  Balthasar, “Casta Meretrix” and Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, pp. 173–9. 27 Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 5 (1983), p. 91.

Obedience, Love, and Suffering  73 inner-­trinitarian masculinity. Although the relations are eternal, the Father’s supposedly masculine act of self-­giving is always primary; the Son’s and Spirit’s coming forth and the Father’s reciprocal welcoming of them are answering and fulfilling gestures, and it is for this reason alone, obviously not because of any biological sex in God, that Balthasar deems them feminine. He sees femininity in the Trinity only because he sees secondariness in it and is accustomed to equating this with woman’s role and essential nature. Crammer concurs with other feminist critics that Balthasar’s gender essentialism is unacceptable. It does not do justice to the quotidian complexity of humanity’s gendered experiences and instead trades in harmful gender stereotypes. Moreover, Crammer joins Lucy Gardner, David Moss, and Beattie in their Irigarayan arguments that, despite Balthasar’s talk of sexual difference, he ul­tim­ ate­ly offers a “one-­sex model,” in which everything revolves around man’s actions and needs and woman is left without “substance, subjectivity, and a voice of her own.”28 Other commentators add further lines of significant criticism. Karen Kilby objects to the fact that Balthasar’s active-­receptive model of the sexes is rooted in a reductive view of heterosexual intercourse. She argues that he overlooks the full range of activities performed by men and women in their daily lives and in the midst of more holistically conceived romantic relationships. Although Balthasar is known for his recovery of beauty and drama as theological categories, Kilby points out that his gender theory lacks aesthetic richness. She contends that there is little depiction of courtship, attraction, heartache, lifelong commitment, or genuine personal connection, and she struggles to find any sign of the poetic vibrancy of The Song of Songs. She concludes that his approach is neither “nuptial” (i.e., expressive of wedding ceremonies) nor “erotic” (i.e., expressive of romantic love) but rather sexually reductionistic.29 Linn Tonstad’s critique has a different emphasis. She resists the proposals of Graham Ward, Gerard Loughlin, Rowan Williams, and others, who disavow Balthasar’s gender essentialism, on the one hand, while welcoming his contemplation of trinitarian difference, on the other. This reading strategy does not work, in Tonstad’s judgment, because it ignores the fact that what is most problematic about Balthasar’s construction of the difference between man and woman (i.e., difference-­ as-­ hierarchy) is similarly present in his account of the difference between Father, Son, and Spirit. This problematic structure of relations is there regardless of whether one accepts his use of gendered terms to describe it or “queers” it by accenting its gender fluidity. For Tonstad, Balthasar’s central problem is his assumption that relations and identities, whether among human

28  Crammer, “One Sex or Two,” pp. 102–3; Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, pp. 92–5; Gardner and Moss, “Something Like Time,” pp. 73–4. 29 Kilby, Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction, pp. 138–9.

74 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

beings or in the Trinity, must be formed according to a pattern of initiation and submission, first and second, higher and lower, and so on.30 Elisabeth Vasko offers yet another weighty objection. She argues that Balthasar’s essentialist statements about man and woman “mirror the reality of sexual ­violence.” She locates his gender theory within a larger cultural trend toward the eroticization of violence against women’s bodies. She draws particular attention to intimate partner rape and analyzes the ways in which it is rationalized as a performance of natural masculine and feminine roles of control and submission. Drawing on recent scientific studies and survivor narratives, she explains that the maintenance of this power structure is the goal of such violence.31 Although a supporter of Balthasar could attempt to defend him by citing his distinction between good (i.e., self-­giving) and bad (i.e., domineering) forms of masculinity and by recalling his emphasis on the soteriological significance of Mary’s consent, Vasko’s main point is unassailable. The idea of an ontologically determined male priority compromises the freedom of any such consent on the woman’s part. Under this gender theory, a woman is virtually compelled to consent, because this is the only available way for her to fulfill her receptive nature and be considered good. The idea of an ontologically determined male priority also compromises the moral standing of anyone who would seek to embody Balthasar’s “good” masculinity, which, even while making a gift of self, asks for obedience and dangerously mixes it with intimacy. In sexual relationships, justice demands real equality between the sexual partners. Balthasar’s gender theory grants this equality in one moment while taking it away in another. Vasko demonstrates that this amounts to a morally disastrous equivocation. In Theo-­Drama, volumes 2 and 3, Balthasar presents his gender theory as though its key features could be derived from a straightforward exegesis of scripture. Crammer shows that he favors Genesis 2:4–3:24 and 1 Corinthians 11:3–16.32 Resisting his hermeneutical choices, she and other feminist critics contend that these passages constitute only a small part of the biblical canon, that they were shaped in patriarchal societies that need to be critiqued,33 and also that he reads such passages through lenses provided by contestable postbiblical interpreters such as Matthias Scheeben, Karl Barth, Erich Przywara, Henri de Lubac, and Sergei Bulgakov. A charitable interpretation reveals that, to his credit, Balthasar avoids some of the more overtly misogynistic options in the Western tradition, such as the Greek philosophical conflation of the male with the intelligible soul and the female with the material body. Balthasar is adamant that men 30 Tonstad, God and Difference, pp. 27–29, 44, and 46–8. See also Tonstad, “Sexual Difference and Trinitarian Death”; Loughlin, “Sexing the Trinity”; Ward, Christ and Culture, pp. 129–58; and Rowan Williams, “Afterword: Making Differences.” 31  Vasko, “Difference Gender Makes,” pp. 507, 518, and 522–8. 32  Crammer, “One Sex or Two,” p. 106 and Kilby, Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction, p. 130. 33  Balthasar comes close to granting this point in New Elucidations, p. 212.

Obedience, Love, and Suffering  75 and women are equally spiritual-­corporeal composites, dwelling between heaven and earth.34 Yet even if his critique of Platonism proves that his gender theory is not as odious as it could have been, this does not make it satisfactory. What is not yet apparent in volumes 2 and 3 of Theo-­Drama but comes into full view in volume 5 is how thoroughly Balthasar’s thinking about sexual difference is shaped by Speyr’s ideas.35 He does not listen only to men’s perspectives about gender but also, in a very obediential way, to at least one woman’s. The best place to turn for an understanding of Speyr’s gender theory is her Theologie der Geschlechter (Theology of the Sexes, published posthumously in 1969). Speyr dictated this book to Balthasar in 1946–7, roughly three decades before he completed the volumes of Theo-­Drama expressing his gender theory (1976 and 1978). In this text, Speyr gives voice to the gender essentialism and male priority critiqued by Crammer, the sexual reductionism critiqued by Kilby, and the hierarchical trinitarian grounding of sexual difference critiqued by Tonstad. This work not only displays the same problems that characterize Balthasar’s gender theory. It also seems to be their most direct source. Speyr’s formulations are, by and large, more extreme than Balthasar’s. They reveal the extent to which he seeks to moderate her positions in his writings, even while agreeing with them. Speyr asserts man’s ontological superiority over woman without making even Balthasar’s insufficient efforts to counterbalance this claim with an affirmation of woman’s equality.36 In the first lines of her chapter “On Woman,” she writes, “God created Adam first, then Eve from the rib of Adam; the becoming of woman thus depends on the being of man; from the start she receives a participation in his essence.” Speyr adds that woman “should not be the questioning one, but the answering one [die Antwortende]. She answers to the love, the demand [die Forderung], the whole being of man.”37 Balthasar’s choice to define woman as “answer” appears to come from Speyr. In her chapter “On Man,” Speyr restates her views about the essential inequality of the sexes: “The spontaneous unveiling of man therefore demands the surrender [die Hingabe] of woman, while the unveiling of woman demands the demanding [fordert das Fordern] of man.” According to Speyr, to be a man is to demand; that is, to obligate, order, and lead. To be a woman is to surrender, give in, and abandon oneself to the other. If woman’s surrendering of herself also demands something of man, it is only that he be the demanding one that he 34 Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 2, pp. 365–70; Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 3, p. 286; and Jennifer Martin, “ ‘Whence’ and the ‘Whither’.” Jantzen discusses the ancient philosophical conflation of women with corporeality in Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism, pp. 28–30. 35 Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 5, pp. 15–16. 36  Schumacher notes that Speyr affirms the common human nature of man and woman, but this occurs in another text: Speyr, Das Wort und die Mystik (The Word and Mysticism), part 1, Subjektive Mystik (Subjective Mysticism), p. 20. This natural equality is not emphasized in Speyr, Theologie der Geschlechter. See Schumacher, Trinitarian Anthropology, p. 266. 37 Speyr, Theologie der Geschlechter, p. 78.

76 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

already is. Speyr’s explanation of this differentiation of roles tends toward the sexually reductive. She focuses on the heterosexual man’s penetrative act: “The erection reveals the gathering of the creative powers of man; he also needs this hardness to penetrate formingly [formend] into the softness of woman; he must be equipped with something so that his forming can happen. As soon as the semen is released, the member softens; that means, in the moment of total surrender the demanding of man ceases.” Speyr clarifies that man’s surrender at the instant of climax “answers” the woman’s surrender to his initial demand. A certain degree of mutual surrendering and answering thus comes into view, as Michele Schumacher correctly contends.38 But this mutuality does not prevent Speyr from defining man as the sexually creative and directive one and linking this with man’s “office” and “headship.”39 Speyr’s phallocentric thoughts about erection and ejaculation inform not only her sense of man’s primacy in sexual relationships but also her sacramental understanding of priests giving absolution to penitents and communion to communicants. These ideas also shape her Christology, which is gendered twice. In one respect, the Son is likened to the Father’s semen; that is, his divine masculine essence freely outpoured. In another respect, the Son is likened to the submissive woman, the receptacle of the Father’s will. These sides of Speyr’s Christology correspond somewhat to Christ’s divine and human natures, though not exactly, since the eternal Son is already secondary and receptive vis-­à-­vis the Father. In any case, Speyr interprets Christ’s saving mission in terms supplied by the bare facts of a (patriarchal) heterosexual encounter.40 Among the many dangers involved in this way of composing “a theology of the sexes,” perhaps the most objectionable is the denial of women’s subjectivity. Speyr makes the troubling remark that “woman can experience the will of God by receiving the will of man.”41 In this statement, Speyr’s spiritual advice to women seems to be not so much to turn inward to seek the loving presence of God within themselves but rather to give in to the demands of their male partners and authority figures as though they were necessarily divine mediators simply by virtue of their male sex. A union of wills with a man (husband, confessor, or whomever) seems almost to substitute for a union of wills with God, and this union is achieved through an eroticized obedience. Do women have any opportunity in this discourse to experience themselves as equally made in the image and likeness of God? Even more than Balthasar’s, Speyr’s thought seems to call for the Irigarayan intervention proposed by Gardner, Moss, Beattie, and others—­though, as we shall examine in Chapter 4 of this book, this intervention has its own theo­ logic­al complications. Although Speyr exercises agency in her relationship with 38 Schumacher, Trinitarian Anthropology, p. 272. 39 Speyr, Theologie der Geschlechter, p. 65. 40 Speyr, Theologie der Geschlechter, pp. 23, 64–5, and 132–3. 41 Speyr, Theologie der Geschlechter, p. 29.

Obedience, Love, and Suffering  77 Balthasar, these internalized patriarchal ideas prevent her from coherently ­the­or­iz­ing this possibility. Yet Speyr does offer something important that cannot be found in Balthasar’s works. She reflects on women’s experiences of anxiety surrounding sex and their sexual needs. She says that, in a sexual encounter, “woman knows a double ­anx­iety: about the ‘brutality’ of the act as such, which she never quite anticipates, even if she has sufficient theoretical knowledge of it. And anxiety in the estrangement after the act.” Speyr speculates that “hardly one in ten women come the first time to true satisfaction.” She argues, moreover, that men have a responsibility to alleviate women’s anxiety by genuinely loving them as persons and helping them “not feel just like a needed object.”42 It is unclear whether Speyr draws here on her experiences as a married woman or as a doctor consulting with women (she does not cite any source). Regardless, listening to her voice and not conflating it with Balthasar’s allows in this case for a greater awareness of the fears and desires many women may feel in their daily lives. Unfortunately, Speyr does not recognize that her essentialist theory of sexual difference potentially contributes to women’s anxieties by pressuring them to submit to men in order to be true, good women.

Hagiography as Immanent Critique To develop a feminist counter-­reading of Balthasar and Speyr, one must do more than highlight the few passages in Speyr’s Theologie der Geschlechter where she seems to convey a sensitivity to women’s experience and to affirm some reci­ procity in heterosexual love. A more effective strategy shifts the focus away from both her and Balthasar’s problem-­ridden gender theory and toward their more appealing discussions of individual women in the Christian mystical tradition. Although they sometimes try to use their hagiography to support their gender theory, their fine-­grained treatments of the diverse, powerful, and mysterious graces exhibited by women saints begin to unravel this theory and expose its limitations. Their living encounters with the saints compel Balthasar and Speyr to admit that one cannot know exactly what to expect, in terms of gender performance, from a woman who has been united with God. The problem is simply that they do not acknowledge how much this insight challenges their claims about a rigid gender binary. Whereas Rahner’s theology makes only a few mentions of Teresa of Avila, Speyr and Balthasar’s combined oeuvre overflows with discussions of women saints. Holy men are there in abundance as well, but the multitude of holy women is particularly significant for the present argument. Speyr’s The Book of All Saints

42 Speyr, Theologie der Geschlechter, pp. 83–4.

78 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

(1966) records visions of saints’ inner dispositions and styles of prayer that she received over several years. A distinctive feature of Speyr’s mysticism is that she experiences union not only with God but also with the communion of saints, both as a whole and individually. Sometimes she is merely “shown” a saint. Sometimes she finds herself “transported” into the saint’s historical context. On occasion there is a dialogical interaction. Some visions happen without her first knowing the identity of the saint, while others are elicited by a request from Balthasar.43 The breadth of individualized attention is staggering. Speyr’s visions shed light on the graced lives of Mary Magdalen, Monica, Scholastica, Hildegard of Bingen, Clare of Assisi, Elizabeth of Hungary, Margaret Colonna, Hadewijch, Christina of Stommeln, Bridget, Margaretha Ebner, Catherine of Siena, Joan of Arc, Catherine of Bologna, Stephana Quinzani, Lucy of Narni, Teresa of Avila, Catherine dei Ricci, Maria de la Visitación, Veronica Giuliani, Mary Magdalen dei Pazzi, Madame Acarie, Jane Frances de Chantal, Marie des Vallées, Louise de Marillac, Marie de l’Incarnation, Agnes of Jesus, Marguerite de Beaune, Margaret Mary Alocoque, Madame Guyon, Constante Maria Castreca, Crescentia of Kaufbeuren, Mary Frances of Naples, Dominica Lazzari, Palma  M.  Matarrelli, Bernadette, Teresa Higginson, Lucie Christine, Mary Baouardy, Louise Lateau, Marie Julie Jahenny, Marie de Jésus, Pauline Martin, Elisabeth Leseur, Marie-­Antoinette de Geuser, Josefa Menendez, Edith Stein, Therese von Konnersreuth, Elizabeth of Schönau, Christine Ebner, Julian of Norwich, Rose of Lima, Marie Lataste, Maria Celeste Crostarosa, Maria Theresia von Mörl, Louisa Jacques, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Mechthild of Hackeborn, Gertrude of Helfta, Angela of Foligno, Catherine of Genoa, and Elizabeth of the Trinity—­to name only those recorded in this one volume. Although surrendering to the will of God is a consistent theme throughout the text, Speyr’s visionary portraits show diverse ways in which such self-­surrender can take place. Speyr perceives each of these women as different and singular. Moreover, she values aspects of their spiritualities that gender essentialists typ­ic­ al­ly associate with masculinity: traits such as leadership, activity, reason, and strength. For example, describing her vision of Hildegard, Speyr writes: “In her professional activities, she proceeds in a very systematic way: she heals, and in doing so she uses the knowledge of her time; she does what is customary, making use of all her cleverness, circumspection, clarity, and calculation.” Speyr admires the way that Hildegard’s active life as an expert possessing worldly knowledge and skill becomes one with her mystical life of visionary prayer. Perhaps this unity is what the physician-­contemplative Speyr aspires to find in her life as well. Along similar lines, Speyr receives a vision of Joan of Arc as a young girl and remarks

43  See Balthasar’s introduction in Speyr, Book of All Saints, pp. 20–4.

Obedience, Love, and Suffering  79 with wonder that “there is a second person hidden inside this young girl: a little peasant boy who wants to fight.” When Joan “becomes a woman,” endowed with a mission from God, Speyr suggests that this “dual existence” of her inner boy and inner girl continues to shape her mystical-­and-­political life. In Speyr’s way of thinking, there is a “masculine aspect” to Joan’s natural manner of being and to the socially transformative grace that she receives, but one might just as easily interpret Joan as someone who is defiant of fixed gender categories.44 Heeding Rahner’s advice, one may decide to withhold judgment about the veracity of such visions.45 The need for some skepticism becomes increasingly apparent the more Speyr projects some of her own thoughts, feelings, and struggles onto the saints she sees. For example, Speyr says that Hildegard has difficulty interpreting her own visions because her mission lacks a second person who could serve as her spiritual director and interpreter (a clear allusion to Balthasar’s role in Speyr’s life). Similarly, Speyr extols the double mission of Francis and Clare of Assisi in a manner that mirrors her own cooperative relationship with Balthasar.46 Balthasar’s hagiography is not visionary, like Speyr’s, but rather thoroughly text­ual. He studies writings of and about women saints and weaves them into his scholarly interpretation of the Christian tradition. The canon of women that Balthasar engages is not as populous as Speyr’s, but it is considerable nonetheless, especially for a male theologian of his generation. Important here is not only the mere fact that he includes these women but also how significant their contributions are to his arguments. In the section called “The Metaphysics of the Saints,” in The Glory of the Lord, volume 5, Balthasar analyzes the late medieval and early modern mystical tradition (roughly from Meister Eckhart in the thirteenth century to Jean Pierre de Caussade in the eighteenth). He names many women and discusses a few at length, particularly Angela of Foligno, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Genoa, Joan of Arc, Teresa of Avila, Madame Guyon, and (in the most significant case) Catherine of Siena.47 All of the holy women and men that Balthasar examines in this section exemplify a Christian form of total self-­surrender that he associates with femininity: “The attitude of abandonment [Gelassenheit] is feminine.”48 The fact that such Gelassenheit, the letting-­be of God’s will, seems to appear with equal regularity among the women and men that Balthasar considers should perhaps have prompted him to question whether it is really a distinctively feminine posture at all and not, rather, just a universal feature of Christian sanctity. Such a strong 44 Speyr, Book of All Saints, pp. 59 and 91–5. 45  For his part, Balthasar largely affirms their truth value. He argues for the general legitimacy of such types of experience in Thomas und die Charismatik. 46 Speyr, Book of All Saints, pp. 60 and 69. 47 Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 5 (1961), pp. 48–140, at 82–8, 91–102, 115, and 127. 48 Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 5, p. 80.

80 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

identification of abandonment with femininity rests primarily on Balthasar’s sexu­al­ly reductive gender theory, not on the self-­surrendering spiritual practice itself—­which, again, is embodied no less intensely and consistently by male and female saints. Granted, some of the men Balthasar considers, such as Ruysbroeck and John of the Cross, read themselves into the figure of the bride from The Song of Songs.49 However, they do not primarily use such bridal imagery to make a point about either gender or obedience but to illustrate the ecstatic, joyous, and all-­absorptive quality of divine love. Moreover, to the extent that they do support Balthasar’s position, they may be vulnerable to similar sorts of feminist critique. These simultaneously gender-­bending and gender-­essentialist male mystics may not so much exonerate Balthasar’s elision of abandonment and femininity as reveal that he is not the first theologian to make such a problematic elision. The current Christian ethical norm of spousal equality frees theologians to read both characters in The Song of Songs as symbolic of either God or the soul. Indeed, a decision to flip the genders of the traditional allegorical interpretation may be warranted by the fact that the female character in these love poems is not just meek and receptive but rather agential and initiatory, arguably more so than the male character.50 No less than the men, the women in Balthasar’s account help him formulate his answer to the crises of modern metaphysics. Their practice of contemplative prayer is his preferred antidote to the bad masculinity of a titanic German idealism, which he calls “The Metaphysics of Spirit.” This is a falsely mystical system of philosophy in which the human spirit attributes divine being to itself, not by ­virtue of any genuine holiness on its part, but by virtue of its aspirations for an unrestricted intellect. Balthasar champions men and women saints as sources for the sort of doxological overcoming of modern technocratic nihilism that the later Heidegger and other romantic and classicist poetic thinkers desire. He does not marginalize women mystics, as though they were mere devotional figures irrelevant to philosophy and theology. On the contrary, he places them at the very center of his story about what Christianity and the West have lost and what they need to recover.51 Balthasar is not uniformly satisfied by all of the saints he examines. Some construe Gelassenheit in terms that are too abstractly philosophical and, therefore, distanced from the concrete revelation of Christ. This is a Platonizing danger, which Balthasar perceives in Eckhart and Fénelon, among others. Some ab­so­lut­ ize the dialectic between God’s all and the sinful creature’s nothingness to such an extent that little awareness remains of the creature’s freedom, agency, and

49 Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 5, p. 71 and Glory of the Lord, vol. 3 (1962), p. 119. Denys Turner provides a more extensive discussion of this phenomenon in Eros and Allegory. 50  Trible, “Love’s Lyrics Redeemed.” 51 Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 5, pp. 48, 130, and 408–596.

Obedience, Love, and Suffering  81 responsibility. Erich Przywara would call this a “theopanistic” danger. Although Balthasar senses it in Luther and the Theologia Germanica, he interestingly defends them both against this charge. And some draw too much attention to subjective experience, deemphasizing God’s objective glory. This is a psychologizing danger, which Balthasar associates with Teresa’s Interior Castle. Nearly all of the saints he assesses on these grounds seem to be vulnerable to them in one respect or another, except for two: Ignatius of Loyola and Catherine of Siena.52 It is hardly surprising that the longtime Jesuit Balthasar would give Ignatius a victory in his narrative, but his comparably strong endorsement of Catherine is striking. Discussing Catherine’s Dialogue, Balthasar writes, “The ‘dialogue’ that takes place here is the dialogue between infinite and finite reason, in Christian terms, between the triune God (whose voice resounds from the heights as the voice of God the Father) and the completely universalized soul.” Catherine represents God the Father’s voice, and indeed the entire Trinity’s voice, for the church and the world. In her “universalized soul,” infinite and finite reason converse.53 As Mary Catherine Hilkert argues,54 and as Balthasar in his own way recognizes, Catherine has a prophetic word that needs to be heard. Like Ignatius, she demonstrates that Christian mysticism is best lived as a unity of contemplation and action, not contemplation alone. On the problematic terms of Speyr and Balthasar’s gender theory, this means that Catherine integrates the masculine and the feminine. However, another way to make this point is to contend that, as a woman who powerfully represents both God and humanity, Catherine exposes the inadequacy of Speyr and Balthasar’s gender theory. One cannot evaluate Balthasar’s interpretation of women saints without considering his Two Sisters in the Spirit: Thérèse of Lisieux and Elizabeth of the Trinity (1970). This text reinforces the central claims of the present section, namely that women make major contributions to Balthasar’s mystical theology and that their contributions challenge his gender-­essentialist assumptions, whether he is cognizant of this challenge or not. Thérèse is, for Balthasar, no mere spiritual writer but a veritable theologian. Her doctrinal mission is to proclaim “the little way,” which is a transposition of the Discalced Carmelite experience of divine love into the minutest circumstances, practices, and hopes of everyday life. By distinguishing Thérèse from the more intimidatingly ecstatic Teresa and John, Balthasar presents her as an icon of his own approach to the mysticism of ordinary life. The quotidian, even diminutive character of her little way does not undercut its mystical status in Balthasar’s eyes. Rather, he sees her life, precisely in its unassuming smallness and accessibility to the church, as an important expression of the very deep intimacy with God that is available to all in the here and now. He concludes, 52 Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 5, pp. 50, 63, 115, 127, and 131–2. 53 Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 5, pp. 91–3. 54 Hilkert, Speaking with Authority.

82 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

“Thérèse has never heard the Lord speaking to her, yet she knows that he is dwelling within her.”55 Balthasar takes Elizabeth of the Trinity’s theological contributions equally ser­ ious­ly. He argues that “one must listen carefully to Elizabeth herself.” According to Balthasar, the primary gift that she offers is a Christological meditation on divine boundlessness: “Although Elizabeth’s mysticism is an explicit mysticism of infinity, it is just as unquestionably christological mysticism, since limitlessness invades finitude only at one place—­the Incarnation, Passion and Eucharist of the body of God in Christ.” While others in the tradition recognize that Christ reveals God to be “a livable and inhabited infinity,” Elizabeth’s words draw her readers farther into this mystery and gradually transform their mere discursive understanding into daily practices of adoration, praise, and service.56 Speyr and Balthasar’s interpretations of female mystical theologians such as Hildegard, Joan, Catherine, Thérèse, and Elizabeth reveal various ways in which women have experienced union with God in their quotidian lives. Although these women surrendered themselves to the divine will, this is no less true of their male counterparts such as Francis, Eckhart, and Ignatius. Such abandonment is a condition of Christian holiness regardless of one’s body type or gender performance. For this reason, it is not convincing as a marker of sexual difference. Moreover, it is only one aspect of the mysticism that such women display. Beyond mere Gelassenheit, their experiences of union with God are characterized by intellectual and artistic creativity, doctrinal developments, and social and ecclesial activism. Speyr and Balthasar do not merely concede these points. They celebrate them. Yet their gender theory does not reflect the nuances of their hagiography. In this respect, their work critiques itself. It displays its own missed opportunities. It comes right to the brink of recognizing that there is a contradiction between a mysticism of ordinary life that demands conformity to patriarchal norms of sexual difference and a mysticism of ordinary life that features embodied lives that are propelled forward in countless surprising ways by the innerworkings of divine grace. The latter approach, which has some representation in Speyr and Balthasar’s thought, has a much stronger claim to theological legitimacy, since it does not presume to govern the ways of God and since it has the saints as its clearest witnesses.

Mystical Obedience The remainder of this chapter offers a closer look at the obediential, spousal, and paschal aspects of Speyr and Balthasar’s mystical theology. It suggests new ways of 55 Balthasar, Two Sisters in the Spirit, pp. 233, 295, 298, and 334. 56 Balthasar, Two Sisters in the Spirit, pp. 388, 432, 436, and 438–92.

Obedience, Love, and Suffering  83 understanding these motifs, while overcoming their problematic features—­ starting with obedience. The sexist assumption that women are meant by their very nature to obey men is a social sin, and feminists are right to denounce it, along with other similarly unjust power structures. Theologians must combat such “kyriarchal” relations and acknowledge Christianity’s historical complicity in them.57 Unless it is clearly separated from oppressive uses of power, obedience will continue to be weaponized against the most vulnerable, just as it was in Nazi Germany and the antebellum South, and just as it continues to be in contexts of sexual abuse.58 Christian mystical theology cannot bring hope to this violent world if its subtext is “obey your masters.” Mindful of these dangers, theologians must also consider the indispensable roles that obedience plays in the Christian mystical tradition. Without some sense of obedience, the idea of divine union loses its vertical shape. Creator and creature are deprived of their radically asymmetrical identities. There is no almighty divine Word that deserves to be heard, and there are no humble human recipients to do the listening. The acts of self-­surrender on the part of Jesus, Mary, and the saints become unintelligible. The teachings of Benedictines, Carmelites, Jesuits, and other religious orders that emphasize obedience are subjected to modernizing transpositions or simply forgotten. One starts to glimpse what Christian mysticism becomes in the discourses of modern and postmodern philosophy: an absolutization of human spirit or flesh and an unrestrained apophasis unmoored from scripture, tradition, and ecclesial community. Christian mysticism needs a rigorous feminist critique of the ways in which obedience has served the ends of kyriarchy, and it needs a constructive understanding of a true mystical obedience—­the soul’s surrender to the triune God revealed in Christ—­which retains its theological and practical benefits. These two seemingly conflicting tasks are in fact mutually supportive. Conformity with Christ requires one to resist oppressive structures, and feminist analysis helps one do this by shedding light on such structures.59 Although Speyr and Balthasar do not sufficiently clarify all of these matters, their obediential account of divine union makes some helpful contributions. Balthasar works out his understanding of obedience in conversation with Przywara and Barth. Although theologians debate whether Przywara’s analogical metaphysics (God’s being “in” and “beyond” finite existence) or Barth’s dialectical theology (God’s absolute “no” and “yes” to sinful humanity) better expresses the

57  Schüssler Fiorenza, Transforming Vision, pp. 8–10. 58 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 21–2; Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, p. 517; and Bird, Abuse, Power, and Fearful Obedience, pp. 136–40. 59  Sarah Coakley and Kathryn Tanner argue, in different ways, for the compatibility of submission to God and prophetic social critique. See Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, pp. 296–300 and Tanner, Politics of God, p. 4.

84 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

obediential relation between God and creation,60 Balthasar values both approaches and holds them in tension. Analogy is what obedience looks like under the aspect of the creature’s natural—­and always already graced—­capacity to obey and, indeed, to refuse (potentia obedientialis). Dialectic is what obedience looks like when it is thoroughly realized; that is, when sin is obliterated and every­thing in one’s life flows from grace. The obedient saint (such as Ignatius or Catherine) freely consents to God’s will and is, at the same time, putty in God’s hands.61 For Balthasar and Speyr, there is no divine union without obedience. Ultimately, their reasons for holding this view are Christological. Divine union happens “in Christ” (en Christoi). It happens only to the extent that one follows Jesus and, in this sense, both obeys and becomes like him. But more than that, the Lord whom one obeys is himself perfect obedience. He is the Son sent by the Father and the Anointed One who is thoroughly led in his earthly life by the direction of the Spirit (what Balthasar calls “the trinitarian inversion”). One can hope to be united with God, therefore, only to the extent that one obeys Christ, who is himself obedience incarnate. As Speyr says in They Followed His Call (1955): “To be a child of God means to be obedient, to draw on an obedience that has its source in the obedience of the Son himself.”62 Tonstad might worry here that Balthasar and Speyr are reading hierarchical relations of the economic Trinity back into the immanent Trinity in a quasi-­subordinationist manner, and perhaps they should have been more cautious on this score, but one cannot deny the obediential role that Christ exhibits in the economy of salvation with respect to both Father and Spirit. This is the Christic form of obedience that Balthasar and Speyr urge Christians to imitate. Balthasar notes in Theo-­Drama, volume 3, that obediential union with God through the Son is rarely perfect. Although Jesus’s temporal existence is identical to his essence as the only-­begotten Son, Christian experiences of election, vocation, and mission in Christ are variable, subject to interruptions, and impaired by sin. Nevertheless, Balthasar believes that genuine participation in the Son’s trinitarian relations with the Father and the Spirit is possible in history. In Theo-­ Drama, volume 5, Balthasar draws on Eckhart, Mechthild, Suso, Ruysbroeck, and especially Tauler—­whose emphasis on discipleship is key—­to argue that following Christ leads one to participate even in the Father’s eternal begetting of the Son. The Son is “born” in the soul that is conformed to his obediential posture. Similarly, Balthasar draws on John of the Cross to argue that following Christ allows one to share in the eternal procession of the Spirit: “The breathing of the

60  White, ed., Analogy of Being. 61 Balthasar, Theology of Karl Barth, pp. 82–5 and Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 5, p. 106. See also Prevot, “Dialectic and Analogy.” 62 Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 3, pp. 149–259 and Speyr, They Followed His Call, pp. 39 and 44.

Obedience, Love, and Suffering  85 Holy Spirit by the Father and the Son also becomes a breathing on the part of the soul.”63 Not everyone who accepts Jesus as the highest norm for their lives will immediately experience these eschatological modes of inclusion in trinitarian life. But, for Balthasar, the ordinary Christian struggle for holiness is on a continuum with these states of divine exaltation. Along with Christ, Balthasar and Speyr revere Mary as a perfect model of obedi­ence. In the first volume of Das Wort und die Mystik (1970), Speyr says that Mary hears the voice of the Holy Spirit through the angel and responds freely and obediently with “her spirit, her intelligence, and her entire essence.” Speyr emphasizes the corporeal and spiritual completeness of Mary’s fiat and likens her to the prophets who similarly surrender themselves to the Spirit. In The Handmaid of the Lord (1948), Speyr emphasizes the “total freedom” of Mary’s act of assent. Like Rahner, she argues that, in this act, “Mary also says Yes to herself.” By accepting the grace of God, Mary is not immolating herself but rather choosing to let her life be taken in a radically new direction by the presence of the Spirit and the prenatal Jesus in her body.64 Speyr and Balthasar argue that such Christic and Marian obedience and the various sorts of participative union with the Trinity that it makes possible normally presuppose certain ecclesial mediations.65 Although they are right to recognize obediential relationships in the church, for instance between penitents and confessors or catechumens and catechists, they do not sufficiently emphasize that obedience confers the possibility of mystical union and has an absolutely binding character only when it is offered strictly to the triune God revealed in Christ.66 Such properly mystical obedience, which is nothing other than a grace-­filled discipleship, sometimes occasions tense relationships with church authorities whose personal struggles for holiness are far from perfect and who may not be aware of all the ways that God’s grace is at work in quotidian lives. In particular, feminist critiques of an all-­male clergy, which excludes women’s ministerial gifts, and of certain magisterial teachings on gender and sexuality, which underestimate the significance of divine love for diverse human lives, may be grounded precisely in obedience to Christ and reveal a more Christlike way of being church.67 Just as Balthasar and Speyr seek to avoid any strong opposition between mys­ tic­al theology and ecclesiology, so too they resist the modern dichotomy between mystical theology and biblical interpretation. Speyr’s Das Wort und die Mystik

63 Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 3, pp. 263–82 and Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 5, pp. 429–62. 64 Speyr, Das Wort und die Mystik, part 1, p. 61 and Handmaid of the Lord, pp. 10 and 14–15. 65 Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 5, pp. 462–87 and Speyr, Das Wort und die Mystik, part 1, pp. 23–7, 130–49, and 231–4. 66 However, Balthasar does make this point at least once, in “Christology and Ecclesial Obedience,” p. 161. 67 Watson, Introducing Feminist Ecclesiology, pp. 33–5; Agnetta Sutton, “Complementarity of the Two Sexes”; and Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, pp. 20–1.

86 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

may be read as a response to Emil Brunner’s Die Mystik und das Wort (1924).68 In Brunner’s text, the “und” (“and”) is largely disjunctive. He treats mysticism as a temptation, exemplified by Schleiermacher and the liberal Protestant tradition, which leads them to rely on philosophical understandings of subjective religious consciousness instead of surrendering to God’s objective commands and teachings in scripture. In Speyr’s text, by contrast, the “und” is conjunctive, even equative, in meaning. She associates mysticism with both the subjective practice in which the human being surrenders herself to the Word of God (Part 1) and the objective content of this Word that illuminates this practice (Part  2).69 Speyr traces this theme through biblical figures such as Adam, Ezekiel, Job, Paul, Stephen, John, Mary, and Jesus himself.70 Hence, for her, mystical obedience can be found not only in one’s living reception of scripture but also in the lives and stories described therein. As a work of Catholic mystical theology that takes Brunner’s concerns about biblical authority seriously, Speyr’s Das Wort und die Mystik is a significant ecumenical achievement. A similar linking of mysticism with the Word of God can be found in Balthasar’s Prayer (1955, original title: Das Betrachtende Gebet—­Contemplative Prayer). Although he admires Protestantism’s “earnest study of the word of God,” he worries that “too often it lacks something that could lift it to genuine contemplation and vision, namely the Word’s indwelling, in the order of being, in the eucharist and in the Church at large.” Conversely, although he thinks Catholics appreciate such modes of divine indwelling, he worries that they “often fail to manifest this constant attention to the word” that Protestants display. Seeking an ecumenical synthesis, he argues that contemplative prayer should be practiced as an active listening to the Word of God that reverberates in scripture and in cre­ ation, the church, and each individual soul.71 For Balthasar and Speyr, obedience does not mean passivity. Indeed, Balthasar’s account of contemplative prayer presupposes a mutual conversation in which the contemplative soul is free to speak boldly with God and to make requests. Moreover, Balthasar and Speyr treat obedience as the enabling condition for an active union with Christ and other human beings in the world. Ignatius and Catherine demonstrate this blending of contemplative and active lives, as does the Community of St. John. Balthasar articulates the point well when he says that mystical obedience “is a question of making room in us for the living praxis of

68  Another kind of response, which resists Brunner by defending Schleiermacher, can be found in Helmer, “Mysticism and Metaphysics.” See also Balthasar’s critique of Brunner in “Understanding Christian Mysticism,” p. 314. 69 Speyr, Das Wort und die Mystik, part  2, Objektive Mystik (Objective Mysticism) gives us the closest thing to a dogmatics Speyr ever composed. 70 Speyr, Das Wort und die Mystik, part 1, pp. 31–7 and 54–70. 71 Balthasar, Prayer, pp. 14, 28, 103, and 178. See also Balthasar, “Understanding Christian Mysticism,” pp. 324–6 and 332.

Obedience, Love, and Suffering  87 God.”72 To become pliant to God’s will is not to become inert but rather a living instrument of divine love. Speyr emphasizes the outward orientation of such love: “The person engaged in prayer, or in penance, or in self-­surrender, is, indeed, striving after God; but . . . [he] forgets about his road out of his love for his neighbor.”73 Speyr and Balthasar’s obediential mysticism of ordinary life is similar to the ascetical mysticism of ordinary life proposed by Rahner, who also argues that receiving the grace of divine union requires one to become a “hearer of the word.”

Mystical Marriage Although the mysticism of ordinary life could be parsed simply as a life of radical obedience to God’s incarnate Word, the Christian mystical tradition makes a more provocative claim. Christ’s incarnate existence reveals that God desires to be one with humans not only through their self-­surrender to God (even in imitation of Christ, which would look a lot like fidelity to the law and prophets) but also through God’s scandalous self-­surrender to them in eros, kenosis, grace, and mutuality. Although the requirement of creaturely obedience is not abrogated by such divine self-­gift, it is recontextualized by it. Beyond one-­sided submission of will, there is a reciprocal mode of union that Speyr, Balthasar, and others in the Christian mystical tradition call love. To describe such love, theologians might consider employing the image of friendship, as Elizabeth Johnson and, before her, Aelred of Rivaulx recommend.74 However, as stunning as the idea of being befriended by God ought to be, it is not as earthshattering as the idea of becoming God’s beloved spouse. In true friendship, there is reciprocity and commitment, but two friends do not ordinarily become “one flesh” and “one spirit.” Yet this is the startling claim that Christian mysticism makes about union with God in Christ.75 If theologians want to convey this type of love, marriage may remain one of the most apt, if imperfect, metaphors.76 Speyr and Balthasar reveal three benefits of the idea of mystical marriage that can be untethered from their problematic gender theory. First, they use a spousal model of divine union to draw attention to the beauty of both God and the creature, a beauty that sparks desire and produces joyful contemplation on both sides. 72  Balthasar, “Beyond Contemplation and Action,” p. 302. 73 Speyr, They Followed His Call, p. 80. 74 Johnson, She Who Is, pp. 217–18 and Aelred, Spiritual Friendship. 75  De Lubac, “Mysticism and Mystery,” p. 61. 76  Whereas “obedience” can be taken as a literal description of a relationship with God in which one seeks to do only God’s will, “marriage,” when applied to divine–­human relationships, appears to have a more figurative meaning. It acts as a metaphor for love. However, to recognize this figurative status is not to suggest that there is no truth in it. See Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, pp. 291–302.

88 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Second, they employ spousal imagery to make the case that the Trinity’s saving relationship with humanity and, indeed, the Trinity’s own interior life in which humanity is called to share are characterized by a mutual self-­surrender, which goes beyond a mere one-­sided obedience. Finally, they emphasize the fruitfulness of spousal union. Their concern here is not biological procreation. Rather, their point is that a mysticism defined by loving intimacy with Christ ought to manifest itself in social action, which is the proper “fruit” of such union. Of beauty, Balthasar writes, “Whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—­whether he admits it or not—­can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.” He understands beauty to be the shining of “splendor” through the contours of “form”; that is, the disclosure of the infinite in the finite. In a visual register, beauty is the manifestation of boundless light in a finite appearance. For hearing, beauty is the sound of God’s Word in a particular voice. For feeling, beauty is the palpable presence of God’s love in an individual touch. In all these cases, beauty hints at the dazzling divine excess through a single instance or figure. Together with the good and the true, beauty is “transcendental”—that is, interchangeable with being as such—­but this does not prevent it from finding expression in concrete experiences. Indeed, the concrete alone is where its infinite glory can be discovered.77 Balthasar considers marriage to be a form of human life through which divine splendor shines. More specifically, he discusses the way marital beauty appears in the mystical poetry of John of the Cross as a desirous meeting of lovers’ eyes. Commenting on John’s Spiritual Canticle, Balthasar writes, “It is only when the lover longs for the unique beloved’s eyes to open that his own eyes are opened to all of beauty’s reflected splendor.”78 In this passage, Balthasar uses a lover’s yearning for a unique beloved’s gaze (and not mere objectified body) as an image for the mutually loving relationship that God wants to cultivate with each human being. The “lover” in this poetic text is God. God longs for the eyes of the “unique beloved”; that is, each cherished soul. God wants these eyes to open—­that is, to become contemplative—­so that divine and human gazes can meet in love and so that God can have a new experience of “reflected splendor.” Desire and beauty are present on both sides of this relationship. The foregoing passage demonstrates the possibility of using spousal imagery theologically without any necessary ties to gender essentialism or sexual reductionism. If one grants that women can be lovers who actively desire the eyes of their beloveds—­and one must grant this—­then there is no reason to assume that the figure that stands for God in this scene must be a man or masculine. The focal point in this erotic imagery is not genital but rather ocular and contemplative.

77 Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 1 (1967), pp. 18, 20, and 27. 78 Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 3, p. 158.

Obedience, Love, and Suffering  89 There is no desire for an object but only for the gaze of the other, which is to say the other’s rapt attention, loving awareness, and mysterious subjectivity. Speyr takes the mutual beholding and desiring of God and creature that Balthasar finds in John of the Cross’s poetry and locates its eternal source and template in the reciprocal love of Father and Son, which generates the Spirit: The moment the Father sees the Son, the Son also sees the Father. And the Father’s love for the Son that he sees is perfectly simultaneous with the Son’s love on seeing the Father . . . . In their communion . . . they know of their ineffable, expectant love for the Spirit, who at this precise point is proceeding from them both as the expression of their common purpose and expectation.79

Speyr presents the Spirit as the eternal fruit of the mutual love of Father and Son. Her Trinity could almost be renamed Husband, Wife, and Child. But whatever one thinks of this trinitarian theology (which remains hierarchically gendered), one can appreciate Speyr’s idea that within God, from all eternity, there is a reci­ procity of adoring vision, which is not entirely unlike that between a happily married couple. Balthasar clarifies that this is the sort of trinitarian love in which the church is called to participate now, however provisionally.80 Speyr and Balthasar argue that this trinitarian love takes the form not only of mutual adoration but also of mutual self-­surrender. They describe it as a perichoretic exchange in which the three divine persons give themselves, as if ex­haust­ ive­ly, to each other.81 Speyr and Balthasar’s gendering of these perichoretic relations, like their gendering of everything in their theology, remains worrisome. Working from a reductive view of heterosexual intercourse, they suggest that the heavenly Father’s self-­surrendering is like a man’s insofar as it happens only after his initiatory action, whereas the Son’s self-­surrendering is like a woman’s insofar as it is responsive, answering, and logically (not temporally) second.82 A more honest and accurate view of human sexuality, which overcomes what Christine Gudorf calls “sexual dimorphism,”83 would allow a trinitarian theology of mutual self-­surrender to be freed from such fixed gender roles. Yet difficulties would remain. The first section of this chapter argued, in response to Speyr and Balthasar, that the merging of obedience and intimacy in inter-­human relationships should be avoided because it violates the norm of equality. A similar question must now be raised about the merging of obedience

79 Speyr, World of Prayer, pp. 37 and 39. 80 Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 5, p. 472. 81  Following both Speyr and Bulgakov, Balthasar describes this trinitarian love in terms of an “ur-­kenosis,” involving all three persons and taking place eternally prior to the sending of Son or Spirit. See Jennifer Martin, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation, pp. 185–94 and Matthew Sutton, Heaven Opens, pp. 103–25. 82 Speyr, Theologie der Geschlechter, p. 65 and Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 5, pp. 475–6. 83  Gudorf, “Erosion of Sexual Dimorphism.”

90 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

and intimacy in relation to God. At a minimum, the Christic titles of “Lord” and “Bridegroom” ought to be kept semantically distinct. The German Herr, which blends these titles in Speyr and Balthasar’s works, problematically suggests not just that they refer to the same person (namely, Christ) but that they mean the same thing: an ideal masculinity, governing both obediential and intimate relationships, that demands self-­surrender from others and reciprocates this gesture only within a hierarchical structure. Theologians can acknowledge that Christ incarnates both God’s law-­giving omnipotence and God’s kenotic, erotic, and ecstatic love without conflating these ideas in the dangerous manner that Speyr and Balthasar do. However, whether such a distinction overcomes the problem of theologically enshrining an obedientially compromised model of intimate love remains doubtful. After all, for the creature there can be no equality with God, even God incarnate. Any suggestion of a marriage-­ like relationship with God may seem unacceptable insofar as it appears to conflict with the radically asymmetrical power difference between God and humanity. Given such obstacles, one might think it best for Christian theology to present God’s love simply in parental (including maternal) terms.84 However ardent a father’s or mother’s love may be, it must be kept within certain boundaries that respect the power difference involved, if it is real love and not abuse. Yet the scandalous claim of the trinitarian tradition of Christian mysticism, which Speyr and Balthasar represent, is that God’s love for humanity is not only parental (as it remains from the Father’s perspective) but, through the sending of the Son and the Spirit, also carnal, reciprocal, and unitive to the point that it becomes figuratively spousal. Is it a violation for the almighty God to love drastically weaker human beings in such a manner? This act is extraordinary, boundary-­blurring, and unexpected—­ not the sort of behavior that should be taken as a norm for other relationships. Although the fact that God is not literally having sex with people might make the idea seem more palatable, the level of bodily and spiritual intimacy imagined here is in fact greater, not less, than in ordinary sexual encounters. Similarly, although the free consent that God empowers human beings to give or withhold (as in the paradigmatic case of Mary’s fiat) might be a mitigating factor, the level of inequality remains so high as to raise ethical questions about the meaning of such consent. Counterintuitively, this very inequality may be what saves such mystical marriage from the charge of being morally offensive, because the inequality in this case is absolute, beyond ontological, and foundational to every possible experience. It is so great that no other difference remotely compares to it. Speyr and Balthasar hold that the Trinity created human beings from nothing so that they 84  On the divine mother in the Christian mystical tradition, see Johnson, She Who Is, p. 255 and Bynum, “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother.”

Obedience, Love, and Suffering  91 might be drawn into its amorous fullness. The strictly sui generis quality of God’s love for creatures exceeds the competence of norms, such as those of equality, that rightly govern inter-­human relationships. Therefore, Christian mystical theology going forward should not only state, pace Speyr and Balthasar, that “Lord” and “Bridegroom” mean different things. It should also affirm, gratis Speyr and Balthasar, that God’s divinity does not ontologically or ethically prohibit God from cultivating an intimate, marriage-­like relationship with human beings but in fact uniquely allows it. However, because the norm of equality is only legitimately transcended in this unique divine case, theologians should be careful to insist that God’s difference from human beings is not in any respect similar to the difference between men and women. The only valid theological meaning in Christ’s title as “Bridegroom” could be equally conveyed by the gender-­neutral term “Spouse.” The point of a doctrine of mystical marriage must not be to uphold masculine power but to praise divine love. Although Kilby is right to suggest that sexual reductionism is characteristic of Speyr and Balthasar’s gender theory, Speyr’s commentary on The Songs of Songs, Das Hohelied (1972), demonstrates her appreciation for many aspects of erotic love aside from the merely genital and may occasion a slight nuancing of Kilby’s critique. This is another instance in which listening to Speyr’s voice proves instructive. Speyr reads this biblical text at two levels: literally with respect to the human lovers that are depicted and allegorically with respect to both God–­Israel and Christ–­church relationships. On each of these levels of meaning, she finds a contemplation of beauty, which involves a meeting of eyes and a joyful wonder before the whole bodily and spiritual existence of the other; a mutual, perichoretic practice of self-­surrendering; and a potential fruitfulness, which connects the love of two with the larger context of a living world (flowers, fruits, animals, surprising newness).85 Speyr’s account of what intimacy involves, both in inter-­ human and divine–­human relationships, is more appealing here than in her Theologie der Geschlechter. For both Speyr and Balthasar, “fruitfulness” (Fruchtbarkeit) does not refer only to reproduction. It refers to the whole gamut of ways in which a loving relationship (whether inter-­human or divine–­human) can generate new possibilities of life and togetherness. Their mystical theology is not characterized by a Plotinian flight of the alone into the Alone but by the social idea that the mutual love of two is realized in relation to a third. They affirm a “spiritual fruitfulness,” which is linked to the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit; that is, to the outward signs of an interior grace. They argue that loving intimacy with Christ, just like obedience to Christ, must bear fruit in action.86 Queer theologians who draw on the “antisocial” strand of queer theory and feminist theologians who reject the essentialist 85 Speyr, Das Hohelied, pp. 24–5, 40–2, and 90–2. 86 Speyr, Das Hohelied, p. 50 and Balthasar, New Elucidations, p. 223.

92 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

reduction of womanhood to motherhood may question such a Balthasarian-­ Speyrian emphasis on fruitfulness. Nonetheless, there are good reasons to embrace it, not only as a way to honor the wondrous processes by which every living thing comes forth into the world but also as a way to avoid turning any loving relationships (including those with God) into a self-­absorbed bubble for two. A fruitful mysticism is one oriented toward the flourishing of others.87 If one accepts that such a critically reworked account of spousal union as a contemplative, mutual, and fruitful mystery can be disentangled from Speyr and Balthasar’s gender theory, one might still worry that such imagery idealizes marriage in a manner that ignores the complexities of marriage’s quotidian reality: the daily toils and challenges, the prevalence of intimate partner abuse, and the suffering experienced in divorce—­along with the dignity of single life, which is too often overlooked. In response to such legitimate concerns, it seems important to connect the idea of a marital union with God more explicitly with this book’s pursuit of a mysticism of ordinary life.88 On the one hand, a spousal mysticism of ordinary life might suggest that the ups and downs in earthly loves point to similar vicissitudes in the everyday practice of mystical spirituality. Even if God remains a perfect, ever-­faithful spouse to human beings, they will almost certainly not be perfect because of their embeddedness in a violent world. Conversely, how often does God at least seem to be absent or disappointing? How often must one cry out in lament or start a difficult conversation with one’s divine partner? The often-­messy reality of marriage is a good image of the tribulations of prayer. On the other hand, there may be some consolation in the thought that, whatever utility marriage may have as a metaphor of divine union, no concrete marriage or romantic relationship among fallen human beings captures the total mutuality that defines inner-­trinitarian life. Human loves are not exhaustively perichoretic, and they should not be.89 There will be difficult stretches in the healthiest adult relationships, and the normal conditions for flourishing in them include more than mere self-­gift. There is a need for personal boundaries and for acts of communication across entitative, psychological, and somatic differences, which are not found in God. Hence, the disanalogy will always be greater than the analogy. One need not be married in order to find spousal imagery useful for describing the experience of divine union in quotidian life. The tradition of celibate commentary on The Song of Songs demonstrates this point, and Speyr and Balthasar acknowledge it. It also bears repeating that marriage is only one among many

87  See Tonstad, God and Difference, pp. 264–8 and 274–5, where she draws on Edelman, No Future. See also Ruether, Sexism and God-­Talk, pp. 93–115 and Margaret Farley, Just Love, pp. 226–9. 88 Mairs, Ordinary Time and Bennett, “Singleness as a Vocation of Love.” 89 Tanner, Christ the Key, p. 224.

Obedience, Love, and Suffering  93 images (such as friendship and parenthood) that may help one make sense of divine union as an experience of love and not mere obedience. Although mystical marriage in the Christian tradition has typically been reserved for the spiritually elite, Speyr and Balthasar persuasively argue that it can be received by ordinary lay Christians in various occupations, because the unitive love of the triune God knows no bounds.

Mystical Suffering and Death As a Christological phenomenon, divine union seemingly cannot only be a foretaste of heavenly bliss. It must also be paschal. The previous two sections argued that Christocentric practices of obedience and love can be rendered less objectionable by disentangling them from Speyr and Balthasar’s gender theory. But if, in the final analysis, these practices require a positive view of suffering and death, then how can they be tolerated, regardless of their relation to gender? To address this question, it is necessary to take a closer look at Speyr and Balthasar’s mystical theological engagements with Good Friday and Holy Saturday. First, a caveat: one cannot rescue the obediential and the spousal modes of divine union by disassociating them completely from the paschal. Suppose one attempted to do this by insisting on a pneumatological, as opposed to Christological, focal point in Christian mysticism. This gambit would work only if the Spirit could be separated from Christ, but that is impossible without dismantling trinitarian doctrine and disregarding biblical testimony.90 Similarly, suppose one accepted a Christological focal point but concentrated merely on union with God through the incarnation and the practice of following Jesus’s teachings and works of love.91 As vital as these aspects of Christian mysticism are, they cannot silence the persistent questions raised by the passion narratives or by the long history of mystical engagements with them. The fact is that Jesus suffered and died and that these events were, as early as Paul and the Gospels, deemed significant to the salvific meaning of his life. Christian mystical theology must in some way grapple with this reality. 90  In her reading of Balthasar and Speyr’s Holy Saturday theology in relation to trauma theory, Shelly Rambo seeks to evade certain problems by shifting from a Christological to a pneumatological paradigm. She writes, “I present here the model of witness that unfolds in their thought and then query its form, claiming that the distinctive message of Holy Saturday does not reside in a repetition of the Christ-­form but, instead, in a pneumatological witness that emerges between death and life” (Spirit and Trauma, p. 68). The problem here is that the Spirit, at least as disclosed in scripture and much of the Christian tradition, bears continual witness to the Christ-­form that Rambo wants to avoid. Henri de Lubac analyzes the dangers of separating pneumatology from Christology in La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore. 91  This approach is sometimes falsely attributed to Rahner, when his theology is deemed incarnational rather than paschal. We saw in Chapter 1 that this interpretation does not hold. For further confirmation, see Peterson, Being Salvation.

94 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

The best theological option is to seek a constructive interpretation of the ­ aschal mystery that can address concerns that have been raised about it from p fem­in­ist and other critical perspectives. Although some connections between the obediential, spousal, and paschal are unavoidable in such an interpretation, its success will depend largely on whether it can show that the paschal is not a necessary deduction from the obediential and the spousal but rather a contingent result of worldly violence and sin. If the paschal did necessarily follow from the obediential and the spousal, this would imperil the Christian God’s claim to true divinity by locating a thanatic drive in the Trinity’s innermost being. It would cast mysticism in necrophilic, sadomasochistic, and abusive terms. To retrieve theo­ logic­al insights from Speyr and Balthasar’s paschal mysticism, one must be very clear—­indeed, clearer than they are—­that neither obedience nor self-­giving love intrinsically requires suffering and death. Equipped with such a clarification, one can draw on their works to think about the comforting and liberating grace that God offers human beings by uniting with them even in their seemingly most Godforsaken experiences. Some of Speyr and Balthasar’s formulations make Christ’s crucifixion and descent into hell seem like intrinsically necessary features of his obediential and spousal relations with the Father and the Spirit. To his credit, Balthasar does resist Hegel’s trinitarian metaphysics partly because of its view that the becoming of the absolute depends necessarily on the concrete negation of the Son. Balthasar also explicitly denies that the Father in any sense “willed men to crucify the Son.” Nevertheless, he argues that everything that happens in the economy of salvation, including Christ’s passion, is grounded in the relations of the immanent Trinity. Citing Speyr, Balthasar writes, “Jesus’s death, even his most bitter death in abandonment, is the pure expression of his eternal, trinitarian life.”92 This use of the phrase “pure expression” could misleadingly suggest that Jesus’s crucifixion is not a product of a conflict between the Trinity and this violent world but rather an entailment of the Trinity itself. Balthasar makes other similarly concerning statements. Consider this one: “We begin to see how the ‘economic’ modes of relations between the Divine Persons are latent in the ‘immanent’ modes, without adding a foreign element to them as such. The only foreign element is sin, which is burned up within these relations.”93 The phrases “without adding a foreign element” and “the only foreign element” contradict each other. Which is it? And is not this particular foreign element, “sin,” however “burned up” or ontologically nugatory it may be, the decisive ingredient that coaxes the immanent Trinity’s life of reciprocal self-­surrendering love to be expressed in an economic mission of redemption that eventually involves the Son’s suffering and death? If not for the damnable contexts of 92 Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 5, pp. 251–2 and 264. 93 Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 5, p. 268.

Obedience, Love, and Suffering  95 violence and sin into which Jesus and all human beings are born, his obedience and love, and those of his followers, would have no relation to such suffering and death. Trinitarian life would not manifest itself in such a cruciform manner if it were given a more agreeable place to reveal itself. Recognizing that the contingent conditions of fallen existence are foreign to the ways of God’s inner life is enormously important. With this point firmly established, theologians can seek other insights from Speyr and Balthasar’s paschal mysticism. Developing an idea found in both Speyr and Bulgakov, Balthasar advances the controversial view that “the Son’s divine power and glory is ‘laid up’ with the Father” during Jesus’s earthly existence and especially in his final hour. His claim is that the Son’s acceptance of a bodily, vulnerable life separates him experientially, but not ontologically, from the Father; that is, from his eternal experience of being divine. Through such kenosis, the Son “has not only shared the general lot of mortals but has undergone their fate, including every possible remoteness and alienation from God.” This isolation from the Father is given voice in Jesus’s cry of dereliction from the cross and reaches its maximal point when he is in hell among the dead. Without ever sinning, the Son assumes the condition of sinful humanity and endures all its gravest consequences, so as to redeem even those farthest removed from divine life.94 When Christians consciously participate in Christ’s passion, their experience may be considered mystical to the extent that it unites them with the divine being that Jesus retains (even though it is “laid up”) in his suffering and death. However, given that the divinity in such a cruciform mystical experience lies hidden behind the scenes, the psychosomatic “content” of such an experience becomes difficult to distinguish from other experiences of human pain and isolation that do not necessarily have a mystical character. Both types of anguish (Christic-­mystical and ordinary-­human) occur at an extreme experiential distance from the eternal bliss of the divine nature. There is nothing unusual or otherworldly about suffering and death. In the Son’s embrace of these conditions, he enters into the excruciating realities that are already constitutive of quotidian lives in this world, which often receive no fanfare or mercy. What advantage does it give human beings to seek a share of Christ’s passion when it is their passion to begin with, their own human condition? What is the value of such circularity? How is mystical union with the crucified Christ different from the experiential disunion with God that would seem virtually inevitable in ordinary existence, with all its precarity and oppression?

94 Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 5, pp. 257 and 261. The Balthasarian-­Speyrian position is controversial because the traditional teaching of “the harrowing of hell” presents Christ descending as victor, not victim. Alyssa Pitstick explains this difference in Light in Darkness, pp. 30–85. The question that Pitstick leaves unanswered, though, is whether Balthasar and Speyr can be credited with achieving a genuine development of doctrine on this issue.

96 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

The right theological response to these questions cannot possibly be that Christ’s passion makes all worldly experiences of suffering and death redemptive and, therefore, instrumental to a closer relationship with God, whether for the persons enduring them or for others. The paschal aspect of mystical theology does not permit theologians to take cases of experiential disunion, in which someone or a whole group has been badly violated or feels Godforsaken, and deem them unitive just because Jesus’s similar experiences were part of his saving mission. This way of Christologically recasting quotidian suffering and death as good, meritorious, or salvific dangerously deemphasizes the need for resistance against the structures and persons that cause such afflictive situations. Moreover, it runs afoul of basic logic by incoherently presupposing that whatever pertains to the absolutely unique case of Christ pertains to other sufferers. Critics are right to reject such an attribution of divinely willed redemptive suffering to the “crucified people,”95 who differ from the second person of the Trinity quite simply by not being God. This point does not exclude the possibility of a type of union with the crucified Christ in which Jesus’s disciples would freely do things out of obedience or love that make them targets of the world’s violence. This is a common feature of true Christian holiness in the midst of morally corrupt societies.96 It is visible in the martyrs and saints of the church whom Speyr and Balthasar revere. Nor does the rejection of a doctrine of generalized redemptive suffering delegitimize the desire articulated by some Christian mystics (such as Ignatius, Catherine, Francis, Julian, and Speyr) to experience singular details of Jesus’s suffering and death in order to know and love him more deeply and thereby gain a greater awareness of God’s love for humanity. This seemingly macabre desire is most charitably interpreted as a longing for intimate connection. It is a desire to understand a friend’s or a spouse’s unique pain (in this case, Christ’s) and to become internally strong enough to bear it and reflect on its reasons. Although the dangers of such features of Christian mysticism should not be underestimated, one ought not leap to the conclusion that the only possible meaning of any voluntary, active, or experiential identification with the crucified Christ is pathological. Indeed, a close reading of Speyr’s texts reveals that her mystical participation in Christ’s suffering and death primarily functions to make her more keenly aware that God is lovingly present even in circumstances that outwardly seem to prove God’s absence. Her “visions” (which are really full-­body experiences) show her that God chose to endure the desperate conditions that ordinarily plague human 95  Although Ignacio Ellacuría deserves credit for introducing the idea of the “crucified people” (see his essay by the same name), his interpretation of this people in relation to Isaiah’s servant songs does run the risk of soteriologically instrumentalizing its experience of crucifixion. A less ambiguous account of Christ’s presence in the bodies of the crucified can be found in Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, p. 83. For a closer look at Copeland’s mystical theology, see Chapter 6 of the present volume. 96 Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, p. 36.

Obedience, Love, and Suffering  97 life; that is, to do without the privileges of beatific vision and to know the pain of a violently wounded body and soul. God chose to be hit by an unspeakable trauma, to be with human beings in that all-­too-­common torment that tears flesh and psyches apart, and to withstand even the radical loss of any experiential connection with his own innate divine life. In a word, God chose to go to “hell.” Although Speyr believes that the boundless love that God showed in this max­ imal­ly kenotic act is redemptive, she does not immediately attribute a similar soteriological value to other experiences of suffering and death. Interpreted sympathetically, Speyr’s claim that through Christ God’s love is present even in the depths of hell offers a message of comfort and hope to people who already find themselves in hellacious situations. Speyr’s Kreuz und Hölle (Cross and Hell, two volumes, dictated 1941–65, published 1966) contains a moving account of her mystical immersions in Christ’s passion. Every Holy Week after her formal reception into the Catholic Church she reported experiences of extreme physical and psychological suffering that she interpreted as direct, if very limited, intuitions of Christ’s own suffering and death. This was not primordially her own torment. It was Jesus’s torment taking place in her. Her body and soul became like a living mirror reflecting his crucifixion and descent into hell. During the week, and especially on Good Friday, she began to be physically afflicted. Her back hurt. Her hands and feet felt pierced by nails. Her head felt stabbed and weighed down by a crown of thorns. She found it difficult to eat or drink. At times the pain became so severe that it rendered her mute. Her body was drained of its power. But she says that “these bodily sufferings were almost a boon or a diversion compared with the inner sufferings,” which beset her most intensely on Holy Saturday. Mired in doubt, hopelessness, and fear, she found it impossible to pray. She lost all sense of connection with God and with others around her. She felt spiritually dead and utterly forsaken. Although Balthasar tried to console her, nothing helped. She received visions in which she perceived herself to be surrounded by a dark river of mud, filled with worms that could not be killed. On Easter morning, her bodily and spiritual composure were restored, and she rejoiced in the risen Lord.97 For Speyr, hell is not primarily a fiery place located beneath the earth where souls go after death. She does not dwell on such an image. For the most part, she describes hell as something we already begin to experience in the here and now. It is a hateful situation of sinfulness and extreme loneliness buried deep in each of us—­a distortion of our creaturely freedom that would, if not for divine grace, be the final condition of our existence. It is an experience of distance from God and forsakenness by God, which does not exist somewhere else unknown to us but rather in our everyday struggles and griefs. Christ’s descent into hell is the

97 Speyr, Kreuz und Hölle, especially pp. 17–30.

98 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

continuation of his coming into our lives and hearts. It demonstrates the radicality of his incarnation. Each year, during Holy Week, she found herself drawn into a deep, participative understanding of this mystery and was courageous enough to communicate her very personal experiences to others. Interpreted in this way, Speyr’s paschal mysticism does not justify abuse or oppression. It is neither necrophilic nor sadomasochistic. Its message is that God loves all of us, in all of our experiences and dimensions, even in the hells that we carry within us and that, at times, we impose on others. Although God does not love these hells, God does love in them, because we are in them and they are in us. Speyr’s mystical experiences of Christ’s suffering and death indicate that, even in circumstances where there are no longer any tangible signs of faith, hope, and love, still God remains present and hidden in the Son. God seeks to be one with us even in our moments of greatest doubt, despair, and coldness. When prayer fails, when even the worst bodily pains seem to pale in comparison with the wounded condition of the soul, when we find ourselves powerless and annihilated, whether because we are racked with guilt or because we are traumatized through no fault of our own, still God seeks union with us, through a self-­ surrendering love that knows no bounds. Theologians today might wish that Speyr had distinguished more clearly between a hell of sin and a hell of suffering, since a person’s suffering is often not a direct result of his or her own personal sin. Nonetheless, Speyr’s point would remain that Christ endures both out of love. Although Balthasar does not receive the sorts of mystically immersive experiences of Christ’s passion that Speyr does, his Heart of the World (1954) sheds light on his personal devotion to the paschal mystery. In words that resonate with Rahner’s cardiocentric anthropology, Balthasar argues that God’s efforts to unite with human hearts through the Son’s kenosis are ubiquitous and relentless: And then there’s my presence with the poor. Uncertain of the next day, they lie down in rags within their hovels, torn between complaint and surrender. At the moment before they fall asleep, I am there to caress their soul with an invisible hand . . . . And on stormy mornings, I accompany them on their way to the factory, on their way to a joyless workday, which in its rigor so closely resembles my own. I walk through hospital wards and visit my brothers who through their suffering cooperate in my work, though without knowing it. I pass over battlefields where life, as it is ending, is three steps away from Paradise and yet is all convulsed in the spasms of death. I traverse the breadth and length of sin’s underworld—­the sewers of depravity and despair—­and my passing soothes. Along the way I discover many a jewel that, covered with refuse, awaits the liberating fire.98

98 Balthasar, Heart of the World, pp. 170–1.

Obedience, Love, and Suffering  99 Balthasar proclaims the good news that the heart of the crucified Christ is present with the poor, the sick, the victims of war, the sinful, and the despairing. This divine heart in human flesh reaches out to become one with all hearts. It “caresses” and “soothes” them and promises to bring them a “liberating fire.” Balthasar could do more to explain how this liberating fire has already begun to mobilize political struggles. Doing so would not contradict his cardiocentric paschal mysticism but rather show the fruit that it could bear. Moreover, his claim that people suffering in hospitals “cooperate in [Christ’s] work, though without knowing it” suggests a generalized redemptive suffering that is theologically and ethically unsound. Nevertheless, the predominant function of Christ’s solidaristic nearness in this passage is not to normalize the suffering of ordinary human beings but to ameliorate it. Is it significant that the woman, Speyr, endures a psychosomatic experience of Jesus’s suffering and death, while the man, Balthasar, simply writes about it? This apparent division of roles may reveal something about the gendered expectations that each received in their respective formations. In that sense, one ought not ignore the question of how gender has affected their different ways of engaging the paschal mystery. Nonetheless, an anti-­essentialist perspective, which is true and just, prohibits theologians from turning any such gendered dichotomy into a norm that would regulate men’s and women’s contributions to Christian mysticism going forward. Heeding the advice of Amy Hollywood, theologians must resist the assumption that in order to be united with God through Christ women are meant, as women, to bear a greater share of Christ’s suffering or to do so in a more immediately physical or emotional way, while men are supposedly tasked only with articulating and evaluating such paschal phenomena from a safe distance. Nonetheless, this section has argued that there are positive insights to be re­covered even from Speyr and Balthasar’s controversial ways of associating mysticism with suffering and death. In short, their reflections on the paschal mystery hit the same chord as Saint Paul’s edifying lines: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.”99 They also resonate with Elizabeth Johnson’s account of divine Sophia’s compassion.100 Although obedi­ence, love, and suffering must be kept distinct from each other, this chapter has demonstrated that, with sufficient critical scrutiny, these motifs can continue to serve the goals of a mysticism of ordinary life. Although Speyr and Balthasar’s gender theory runs throughout their works, bringing serious theological and ethical problems wherever it goes, it need not discourage theologians from 99  Romans 8:38–9, from the New Oxford Annotated Bible. 100 Johnson, She Who Is, pp. 265–72.

100 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

appreciating their practical efforts to institute the Community of St. John, their detailed meditations on the graced lives of men and women saints, and their affirmations of obediential, spousal, and paschal modes of divine union. Taken together, this chapter and Chapter 1 demonstrate that leading figures of Catholic theology in the twentieth century dedicated themselves to promoting the mysticism of ordinary life and clarifying its conditions, whether these be the experience of uncreated grace, existential asceticism, and heart-­focused prayer in Rahner’s case or lay institutes, filial obedience, mutual love, and compassionate kenosis in Speyr and Balthasar’s. Although there are differences between these approaches, they are not as far apart as some commentators suggest. Although Speyr and Balthasar’s gender theory deservingly occasions more forceful criticism from feminist thinkers than Rahner’s work does, their hagiography remains an untapped resource for appreciating women’s contributions to Christian mysticism and the challenges that quotidian lives of grace pose to rigid gender norms. This hagiography, moreover, exposes the androcentric contours of Rahner’s mys­ tic­al canon. If identification with the crucified Christ were disqualifying, then neither of these Catholic theological approaches would be sustainable. However, such blanket disqualification would be unjust. When well understood, identification with the crucified Christ does not detract from but in fact strengthens the Christian mystical tradition’s affirmation of ordinary life. Finally, we have seen that both Rahner and Balthasar develop their forms of mystical theology in relation to certain philosophical traditions from antiquity to modernity. For the most part, Speyr does not write about philosophy, though it influences her indirectly through Balthasar. Although such interdisciplinarity might prompt some theological critics to question whether the use of philosophy negatively affects the theological exploration of distinctive features of the Christian mystical tradition, we have seen on the contrary that it can be and largely has been beneficial to this end. The more pressing question going forward is how a contemporary mystical theology that aspires to build on Rahner’s and Balthasar’s Catholic interdisciplinary efforts should adapt to the changing philosophical and theoretical landscapes of the present and future. Chapters 3 and 4 take up this question in one way by examining Francophone postmodernity’s perhaps surprising interest in retrieving Christian mysticism as a model for thinking about the conditions of ordinary life.

PART II

CHR IST IA N MYST IC I SM A ND PO STMODE R N PH I LOS OPH Y

3 Immanence and Alterity The Mystical Styles of Michel Henry and Michel de Certeau

The Western philosophy that Rahner and Balthasar embrace and critique in their Catholic mystical theology is classical, scholastic, and idealist in character. In cultural-­linguistic terms, it is Greek, Latin, and German. In temporal terms, it runs roughly from the fifth century bce through the middle of the twentieth century. Although this long philosophical lineage remains significant to theologians, a subsequent current of philosophy, sometimes called “postmodern,” has generated new possibilities for interdisciplinary dialogue. The word “postmodern” ­signifies a Eurocentric (or “continental”) philosophical culture that locates itself after metaphysics, after idealism, after structuralism, after the self-­certainty of the cogito, and after the May 1968 student uprisings in Paris. The philosophers and other theorists who adhere to this manifold “after” interpret it positively, as the beginning of an alternative way of thinking that is more attuned to the affective, linguistic, corporeal, relational, and incomprehensible dimensions of life. Although the predominant language of this pluriform posterity is French, it has a following in other languages. It ventures playful, skeptical, and revisionist readings of Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, and the Western tradition that gives rise to them.1 At the same time, postmodern philosophy makes provocative interpretations of many rediscovered Christian mystics. Its resistance to ancient, medieval, and especially modern forms of rationalistic philosophy is informed by apophatic ­features of the Christian mystical tradition. The postmodern philosophical reception of this tradition does not emphasize the theologically central idea of the grace of divine union, experienced through obediential and loving relationships with Christ and the Holy Spirit. Rather, it makes a highly selective retrieval of subversive or enlivening modes of thought that, though historically connected to such grace and the doctrines, practices, and communities that affirm it, also appear separable from them. Heidegger’s debts to the Gelassenheit motif in Meister Eckhart and Angelus Silesius reflect this trend.2 One finds a similarly 1 For an overview of postmodern philosophy and its connections to theology, see Ward, ed., Postmodern God. 2 Caputo, Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought and Davis, Heidegger and the Will.

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism. Andrew Prevot, Oxford University Press. © Andrew Prevot 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866967.003.0004

104 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

philo­soph­ic­al use of Christian mysticism among Francophone thinkers more closely associated with postmodernity. Consider Georges Bataille’s repurposing of Angela of Foligno’s annihilative spirituality, Jacques Lacan’s meditations on Teresa of Avila’s transverberation experience, and Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive engagement with Dionysius’s negative theology.3 Subsequent philosophers such as Michel Henry, Michel de Certeau, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, whom we shall consider in this chapter and Chapter 4, develop their own postmodern ways of reading Christian mystics while maintaining closer (though still ambivalent) relationships with theology and Christianity. Across its multiple generations and its more nearly phe­nom­eno­ logic­al or psychoanalytic, atheological or anatheological, non-­feminist or fem­in­ ist configurations, this newer type of philosophy represents a very different approach to the mysticism of ordinary life from what we considered in Chapters 1 and 2. A contemporary theological account of the mysticism of ordinary life needs to find its bearings in relation to both of these approaches. Although the postmodern shift in philosophy started during Rahner’s and Balthasar’s lifetimes, it gained prominence after the main conceptual parameters of their projects were set.4 Later generations of theologians are more deeply affected by such a shift, for better or worse. On the positive side, certain links between mysticism and postmodernity prompt some theologians to revisit the Christian mystical tradition with fresh questions and perspectives, which allow it to be retrieved in more life-­affirming ways. On the negative side, however, the influence of postmodern reading strategies can lead to an attenuation of Christian theology and its usurpation or distortion by philosophy. A Catholic approach to the theology–­philosophy relationship, which continues the type of interdisciplinarity modeled by Rahner and Balthasar but responds to changing intellectual contexts, seeks to embrace what is positive in such a postmodern philosophical shift without succumbing to its potentially faith-­denying effects. This chapter and Chapter  4 bring such a Catholic approach to bear on a carefully chosen set of philosophers who, despite being philosophers, think about Christian mystical sources and their relation to ordinary life in ways that could benefit Christian mystical theology. The present chapter takes Michel Henry and Michel de Certeau as its central figures. Unlike Heidegger, Bataille, Lacan, and Derrida, whose readings of Christian mystics are largely atheological, Henry and Certeau occupy a liminal space between theology and philosophy, similar to that occupied by Jantzen, 3 Bataille, Inner Experience; Lacan, Encore; Derrida, On the Name. 4  Some commentators draw on Heideggerian features of Rahner’s and Balthasar’s works to argue for their relevance in postmodernity. See Fritz, Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics and O’Regan, “Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Unwelcoming of Heidegger.” These interpretive efforts respond to intellectual currents that developed after Rahner’s and Balthasar’s intellectual identities were already formed.

Immanence and Alterity  105 Hollywood, and Keller.5 Although Henry and Certeau primarily write as philo­ sophers who want to persuade a secular academic audience (not just Christian believers), they contend that their accounts of mysticism are consistent with “Christianity,” in one sense or another. For this reason, it is legitimate to evaluate their works to some degree using Christian theological criteria. They also comment directly on the inner experience of living flesh (in Henry’s case) and the practice of everyday life (in Certeau’s). Philosophers and theologians interested in the meaning of ordinary life can find much to value in their mystically informed treatments of these topics. Although Certeau’s thought is more promising than Henry’s on questions of gender, neither gives it the full critical attention that feminist theorists argue it deserves. The bracketing of gender and minimal inclusion of women that we observed in Rahner and the hierarchical, binary gender essentialism that we found in Balthasar and Speyr are not problems unique to Christian theology or, for that matter, Catholicism. Rather, they trouble virtually the entire Western philosophical canon, including postmodern revisions of phenomenology (Henry) and psychoanalysis (Certeau). Even some postmodern approaches deemed “fem­ in­ist” (such as those of Irigaray and Kristeva) are not problem-­free on feminist—­ and especially intersectional feminist—­ grounds, as Chapter  4 demonstrates. Although Christian mysticism does not by itself overcome the gender problems that implicate both theology and philosophy (as Coakley seems to hope it will), a rigorous feminist reception of Christian mysticism may come close to achieving this goal. Postmodern interpretations of Christian mysticism contribute to this feminist possibility by discerning something divine, or divine-­like, in ordinary life’s conditions of immanence and alterity. It is only one step further to suggest, as Irigaray and Kristeva do, that a woman’s life has a certain divine quality insofar as it exemplifies such conditions. The merits of this strategy will be assessed in Chapter 4. The present chapter’s analysis of Henry and Certeau takes the preliminary step of distinguishing and clarifying these conditions. Although both Henry and Certeau think philosophically about Christian mysticism and ordinary life, their emphases could hardly be more dissimilar. Henry sings a hymn to immanence. He embraces life in its most immediate auto-­affection. He locates the divine in the subjective flesh that both undergirds and unsettles the transcendental ego of (Husserlian) phenomenology. By contrast, Certeau extols alterity. Following Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories, he mourns and desires the divine other. He seeks its disruptive force in various historical spaces and relationships. Henry’s 5  A trio of Catholic theological phenomenologists—­Jean-­Luc Marion, Jean-­Yves Lacoste, and Jean-­ Louis Chrétien—­may seem to occupy this liminal border-­region as well. However, I have argued elsewhere that, in fact, they largely belong on the theology side of the divide insofar as they follow Balthasar’s doxological manner of thinking (Thinking Prayer, pp. 122–61). Their works remain useful here as foils to Henry’s and Certeau’s.

106 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

speculative theory of immanence and Certeau’s diffuse writings on alterity disclose two dramatically different ways that human lives seem to border on the divine. These divergent emphases illustrate deep tensions in the postmodern reception of Christian mysticism and reveal some of its greatest achievements. Serious philo­soph­ic­al and theological problems arise on both sides of this fissure, but so too do conceptual and imaginative possibilities that promise to enrich both philosophy and theology. To say that immanence and alterity constitute two mystical “styles” is to suggest that they represent certain formal, abstractable ways of repackaging Christian mysticism that disconnect it somewhat from its traditional, theological content. One does not need Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Bible, the church, its teachings, its practices, its saints, or its religious or lay communities in order to experience either immanence or alterity, because immanence and alterity are inescapable features of human existence. If these two formal features were sufficient criteria for discerning God’s presence, their particular Christian expression would remain of only historical interest. There would be little need for the sort of Christian mys­ tic­al theology that this book proposes because philosophy would possess the only truths about mysticism that are worth retaining. However, recognizing this danger to theology should not deter theologians from thinking more deeply about the life-­affirming aspects of mystical immanence and mystical alterity that appear both within and beyond Christianity.

Mystical Immanence: Michel Henry In each of Henry’s major philosophical works,6 he is animated by a single idea or, if one believes it, a phenomenological intuition. He writes with unwavering confidence about the original, essential, transcendental, absolute, and supposedly undeniable truth of being, as well as about its dangerous “duplicity.” His central thesis is that the truth of being is life, immanence, subjectivity, auto-­affection, soul, flesh, and heart—­these are all virtually synonymous for him. This truth is disclosed through the fundamental affective tonalities of suffering and joy, which he suggests remain caught in an eternal, irreducible embrace. He warns that being is duplicitous whenever it leads one to think that it is most adequately manifest not in auto-­affective life, but in the horizons of the world and of representational consciousness that constitute exteriority. Henry is torn between suggesting more modestly that all of these “transcendent” phenomena are lesser forms of presence and claiming more forcefully that they are fatal, catastrophic, and nihilistic.

6  Henry is also the author of four novels, which we shall not consider here, but for a brief analysis see O’Sullivan, Michel Henry: Incarnation, Barbarism, and Belief, pp. 19–20.

Immanence and Alterity  107 Henry’s conviction that the truth of being is found in immanence gives him a critical hermeneutic that he uses to retell the history of occidental thought as a story of collective misperception. Like Heidegger’s comparable tale about the West, Henry’s is a rather unforgiving narrative in which most thinkers have gone badly astray, despite certain flashes of insight. He argues that they have mistaken the mere external appearance of being for its immanent reality, erroneously treating the two as one. In his most prodigious work, The Essence of Manifestation (1973), he names this problem “ontological monism.” In this text and others, such as Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body (1975), The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis (1985), and Material Phenomenology (1990), he turns his critical eye especially toward a modern canon of philosophers including Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Biran, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, and Merleau-­ Ponty, noting in each case where they pay due homage to immanent life and where instead they seem to betray it. The same hermeneutic guides his responses to issues in contemporary culture, ranging from questions of aesthetics, as in his Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky (1988), to his three books on political economy: Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality (1976), Barbarism (1987), and From Communism to Capitalism: Theory of a Catastrophe (1991). And especially in his last three monographs, sometimes called his “theological trilogy”—I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity (1996), Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh (2000), and Words of Christ (2002)—this same hermeneutic determines his account of the meaning of Christianity. Already in The Essence of Manifestation, a quintessential Christian mystic, Eckhart, comes to the fore as a nearly unquestioned authority.7 Every one of Henry’s wide-­ranging analyses in this and subsequent works appears to take its guiding principles from Eckhart’s mysticism or at least from Henry’s in­ter­pret­ ation of it. For this reason, although it is not incorrect to call Henry a phe­nom­en­ olo­gist, of some sort, he is more aptly designated as a contemporary theorist of mysticism and its oneness with everyday life.8 The life that he proclaims and uncovers everywhere is precisely the divine life that Eckhart teaches him to see—­or rather, because it cannot be seen, to feel. Who can deny a “theological turn” in Henry’s phenomenology?9 But what Henry gives his readers, more precisely, is a tireless declaration that both phe­ nom­eno­logic­al philosophy and Christian theology can find the truth they are seeking exclusively in one place, and that is in life. What is life, according to 7  Kevin Hart demonstrates this point in his “Inward Life.” 8  Joseph Rivera reads Henry in line with the Christian mystical tradition, particularly the legacy of Augustinian interiority, in The Contemplative Self after Michel Henry, pp. 219–35. 9 This claim was first popularized by Dominique Janicaud in The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology, pp. 70–86. It has since been reaffirmed by Benson and Wirzba, eds., Words of Life, pp. 135–77 and Gschwandtner, Postmodern Apologetics, pp. 125–42.

108 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Henry? It is the flesh feeling itself, and it is God. It is the union of the two. In some sense, it is their identity, their essential sameness. Given these presuppositions, it is reasonable for Henry to believe that the type of thought that is best equipped to understand life would be inseparably phenomenological and theological. At the same time, because Eckhart is so prominent, as the one who authorizes Henry to posit this union, Henry’s work takes on the character of a postmodern reception of Christian mysticism that may not satisfy the norms of either phenomenology or theology, depending on who defines them.

Henry’s Philosophical Interpretation of Christian Mysticism The basic components of Henry’s philosophical interpretation of Christian mysticism become clear in his discussion of Eckhart in The Essence of Manifestation. The first two divisions of the text present Henry’s critique of Western philosophy, particularly German idealism and phenomenology, which he understands as vari­ants of “ontological monism.” This is a somewhat misleading term. He uses it to name a way of thinking that both distinguishes the absolute from its outward manifestation and simultaneously identifies the two. For example, under this ­category, Henry includes the Hegelian idea that Geist realizes itself by alienating itself in concrete determinations, the Husserlian idea that the phenomenological reduction culminates in the transcendental analysis of intentionality and ob­ject­ iv­ity, and the Heideggerian idea that being is disclosed through the difference between the event as such and particular worldly appearances. Henry protests these and other similar ways of connecting the truth of reality with some concrete phenomenalization for consciousness because they seem, in his estimation, too focused on things that are “other” and “exterior” to being’s internal self-­ manifestation. “Ontological extrinsicism” may be a more accurate name for what Henry opposes here. Henry finds some support for his theory of ontological immanence in the very idealistic and phenomenological sources that he reproaches for thinking too extrinsically. He suggests that auto-­affective life “constitutes the foundation of ” and “determines” concrete modes of sensation, understanding, and action in the world. As the transcendental condition of worldly consciousness and agency, Henry’s pure self-­feeling subjectivity forges a connection with that exteriority from which he strives to distinguish it. In this respect, his proposal may be closer to the subject–­object correlations of the so-­called “ontological monists” than he lets on. Immanence would have a prior, but not absolutely exclusive, claim to being and truth.10

10 Henry, Essence of Manifestation, p. 488.

Immanence and Alterity  109 Nevertheless, although Henry finds valuable insights in the modern philo­ sophers he contests, his appreciation for Eckhart is unparalleled. Henry calls him “an exceptional thinker.” By this he means that Eckhart, and in a sense Eckhart alone, escapes the denaturing pull of an extrinsicist ontology. Henry ac­know­ ledges that Eckhart’s work is more homiletic than philosophical. He notes that “Eckhart preaches to the soul about its possible union with God . . . . Therefore, it is not the internal structure of the absolute itself or God, it is the relationship of man to the latter which constitutes the theme of his thought.” Nevertheless, Henry discovers an ontological message in Eckhart’s mystically oriented preaching. As Henry puts the point: “the relation to the absolute depends on the nature of the absolute and its internal structure or rather it is identical to them; the existentielle union of man with God is possible only on the foundation of their ontological unity.” Henry argues that Eckhart’s efforts to teach Christians about how they can receive union with God depend on an ontology in which this union is not conceived in relational terms but rather as “identical” to the divine essence itself.11 This idea of a prior ontological unity guides Henry’s interpretation of Eckhart. Under its influence, he does not seek to moderate Eckhart’s more theologically controversial views (as many Christian interpreters do)12 but rather to affirm them in their radicality. For instance, he embraces Eckhart’s audacious claim that “the essence of the soul is the very essence of God.” He welcomes Eckhart’s theo­ logic­ally problematic differentiation of the triune God that is relational in itself and active in salvation history from a hidden “Godhead” that “does not act” and that would exist absolutely “without distinctions.” Henry suggests that this notion of a Godhead lying beyond economic and immanent Trinity demonstrates Eckhart’s preference for immanence over transcendence. Moreover, although Henry acknowledges Eckhart’s Christian teachings that union with God depends on dispositions of love, poverty, and humility, Henry interprets these teachings in ways that diminish their concrete, practical meaning in favor of an abstract, ontological meaning. He equates love with being and does not primarily take poverty and humility to symbolize humans’ ascetical detachment from worldly objects but rather being’s detachment from them.13 Although Henry’s theological trilogy builds on this earlier philosophical reading of Eckhart,14 certain developments make it more theologically tenable. It offers an interpretation of scripture, accounts of trinitarian theology and theo­ logic­al anthropology that are more relational, and some discussions of Christian soteriology and ethics. Even so, the Christian theological status of Henry’s 11 Henry, Essence of Manifestation, p. 309, italics in original. 12 Harmless, Mystics, pp. 107–34; Turner, Darkness of God, pp. 137–67; and McGinn, Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart. 13 Henry, Essence of Manifestation, pp. 310–22. 14 Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 104; Henry, Incarnation, pp. 224 and 248; and Henry, Words of Christ, p. 112.

110 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

understanding of the mysticism of ordinary life remains compromised by a persistent ambiguity. To claim that there is no access to union with God apart from auto-­affective life is one sort of statement, which could allow Henry’s work to revitalize Christian mysticism by presenting it as a discourse concerned with affirming life in its innermost experiences and possibilities. However, to claim that auto-­affective life is the essence not only of the human being, and not only of the human being united with God, but also of God’s own internal reality is another sort of statement, which obscures the content of Christian mysticism and forces it into the procrustean bed of an ontologically interpreted phenomenal immanence. The latter claim has roots in Henry’s Eckhartian argument in The Essence of Manifestation, and it continues to influence I Am the Truth, Incarnation, and Words of Christ. Henry’s reading of scripture prioritizes certain statements that Jesus makes about human life and about himself, particularly in the Gospel of John, but also in other gospels. Jesus’s words have special authority, according to Henry, because they proceed from one who identifies himself as the very Word of God. Belief in Jesus’s self-­attestation is all that Henry can strictly rely upon in this argument, since no earthly tribunal can prove or falsify Jesus’s bold claim to be God’s self-­ expression. Yet the fact that Jesus’s views on human life seem consistent with Henry’s phenomenological findings also encourages Henry to believe that Jesus is telling the truth. Henry comments on Mark 7:14–23, in which Jesus teaches that evil does not come from the outside but from within, from the “heart.” He also discusses John 4:14, in which Jesus speaks about himself as the living water who satisfies all thirst and opens the way to eternal life. In these passages, and numerous others, Jesus seems to agree with Henry’s argument that inwardness is essential. For Henry, the truth of scripture, articulated most clearly in Jesus’s words, is life—­that is, life as human, as divine, and as one in Christ; life that is not of this world but from the heavenly Father; life that is found in the heart.15 In his theological trilogy, Henry turns away from the Eckhartian notion of a Godhead beyond the Trinity and instead starts to develop a relational trinitarian theology. He holds, in traditional Christian fashion, that the Father generates the Son and that they share one divine essence. He interprets this generation phe­ nom­eno­logic­ally; that is, as absolute life’s revelation to itself. This is the birth of the Son prior to history.16 Although Henry lacks a robust account of the procession of the Holy Spirit, mentioning the third divine person in passing only a few times, this discussion of the Father–­Son relationship is relatively standard, though it may purport to know too much about what eternal generation means. Henry’s ideas become more questionable when he considers the relations of human beings with the Father and the Son. He argues that, like the second person 15 Henry, Words of Christ, pp. 12, 50, 53, and 57.

16 Henry, I Am the Truth, pp. 56–61.

Immanence and Alterity  111 of the Trinity, whom he calls the “First Living” and the “Arch-­Son,” every individual living one (vivant)—that is, every human person—­is generated through life’s revelation of itself to itself in auto-­affection. He suggests that each of us is “born” outside of the world in God’s life and as a phenomenalization of this life. Like the Son of the Nicene Creed, we are begotten, not made. We differ from the Father insofar as we are not the origin of our lives but recipients of them. Each of us is a “me” before being an “I.” Moreover, we differ from Christ insofar as he is the living essence of sonship, the pure transcendental form of life’s immanent self-­ revelation, whereas we are individual living beings, individual “sons.” Although Henry preserves some distinctions and relations here, all of them are subsumed into a unitary essence, which is life-­as-­manifestation. This is the essence of Father, Son, and every human being. From this perspective, union with God seems to be a foregone, philosophical conclusion.17 Henry qualifies this point by discussing the Christian hope of a “second birth” and a “new life.” He acknowledges that, for the New Testament, “Son of God most often means not what man is but what he must become.” Henry laments that human beings, though originating in divine life and irrevocably united with it, too often go about their ordinary days as though this were not the case, living as if already dead, spending themselves in attachments to exterior objects that alienate and distract from the essential, squandering their lives like the prodigal son. Salvation, for Henry, means recovering a sense that “Christ lives in me,” as Paul says in Galatians 2:20. It means reconnecting with the absolute life that is immanent in the very fact that one lives. Henry associates this condition of salvifically renewed life not primarily with knowledge, but rather with praxis, with “the Christian ethic.” He suggests that this “ethic” consists not merely of following an external law but of living generously and joyously from within, just as Christ lived.18 He argues that his soteriological views have precedents in Irenaeus and Augustine, who both teach that God becomes incarnate so that humans can become divine.19 Although Henry expands his Christian sources beyond Eckhart, he does not offer anything approximating the detailed readings of Origen, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Ignatius, and John of the Cross that one finds in Rahner, let alone Balthasar’s still much vaster symphony. But even a very limited range of sources would be theologically acceptable if Henry’s interpretation of them were unproblematic, but we have seen that this is not the case. For his part, Balthasar argues against this very sort of modern philosophical use of Eckhart in The Glory of the Lord, volume 5, where he shows that the ontological monism of contemporary thought—­which, as Balthasar understands it, would include Henry, since the issue for Balthasar really is monism and not extrinsicism—­has certain precursors 17 Henry, I Am the Truth, pp. 94–151. 19 Henry, Incarnation, pp. 231–7.

18 Henry, I Am the Truth, pp. 152–90.

112 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

in late medieval and early modern Christian mysticism, particularly of the Eckhartian line. This is the dangerous link that Balthasar identifies between the “metaphysics of the saints” and the “metaphysics of the spirit.” Henry’s refusal of idealist and phenomenological preoccupations with being’s outward mani­fest­ ation does not rescue him from this Balthasarian critique. It simply shows yet another way that a theologically problematic monism can result from a philo­ soph­ic­al reading of Christian accounts of divine union. Henry’s later attention to scripture, the Trinity, soteriology, and ethics could alleviate some of Balthasar’s concerns, but the essentialism that runs throughout Henry’s treatment of these topics—­the univocity of his concept of life, which has its primary model in the self ’s feeling of itself (that is, in the foundational phenomenological structure of auto-­affection)—still seems, despite all the distinctions and relations that Henry builds into this concept, to present divine being and human being as fundamentally the same, rather than as wondrously united in their radical difference. A symptom of this problem can be detected in Henry’s theoretical neglect of the practices of prayer, which by contrast appear everywhere in Rahner’s and Balthasar’s works. As Henry describes them, infinite life and finite living ones are not so much united through intimate conversations with each other as they are joined together by means of a transcendental intuition. To be sure, Henry does argue that, in order to live in the truest sense and thereby to recover a living ex­peri­ence of union with God, it can be helpful to listen to the words of Christ. Perhaps this can be identified as Henry’s doctrine of mystical obedience. Nevertheless, it is difficult to discern in Henry what one is supposed to learn and hear from Christ that one cannot discover just as well, and perhaps by a more direct route, through reflecting on the affective conditions of one’s subjectivity. Henry seems to have shown that his particular type of phenomenology can find Christian theological expression but not that Christian theology adds anything to it that would transform or substantially go beyond what is available to human experience a priori. Another way to make this critical theological point would be to contend that Henry does not sufficiently distinguish between nature and grace. On this topic, Rahner’s thought has clear advantages. Whereas Henry attempts to clarify the difference between God and humanity by appealing to a Spinozist distinction between naturans and natura,20 Rahner argues that, in addition to such a nature-­ based distinction, Christian mystical theology needs to affirm God’s free gift of self to sinful creatures. God is not only that which “natures.” God is also the one who chooses to be poured out in love to those who have been “natured” and who have, in fact, turned away from this love in sin. Even if this divine self-­gift happens universally, as Rahner claims it does, there is still an important conceptual

20 Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 109. See also Henry, Le bonheur de Spinoza.

Immanence and Alterity  113 distinction between the structure of transcendental experience, understood as an openness to divine being that would be present even in a hypothetical “pure nature,” and the concrete reality of the “supernatural existential,” which is the ever-­present determination of human consciousness by uncreated grace. These significant nuances are absent in Henry’s philosophical mysticism of ordinary life, and, for theology, this is a significant shortcoming. Although both Rahner and Henry engage with the transcendental philo­soph­ ic­al tradition in such a way that they universalize the possibility of union with God, locating it in each and every life, however “ordinary,” Rahner does a better job at safeguarding the Christian theological character of his mysticism of or­din­ ary life by situating it within a doctrine of grace. Henry could certainly object to Rahner’s simultaneously idealist and phenomenological definition of the human being as “consciousness.” But Rahner, for his part, could question whether Henry’s transcendental account of life sufficiently values the categorical realm of worldly mediation, in which, especially through Christ, the life and saving will of God are communicated to conscious human beings. Nonetheless, these two thinkers could find common ground in Rahner’s cardiocentric anthropology, which is a way of thinking about the human being as centered in the heart. This sort of anthropology appears most vividly in Rahner’s writings of, and about, prayer. For this reason, one need not assume that Henry’s focus on immanence (that is, the heart) necessarily leads to a marginalization of prayer. On the contrary, Rahner shows how the two can arise together. A prayerful immanence is possible if auto-­ affective life is understood, not as the very essence of God, but as a sacred interior space in which one is called to meet God through an encounter with the human heart of Christ.

Henry’s Other(s) What should one make of Henry’s single-­minded concentration on immanence? Does respect for the divine and human other require resistance to this central preoccupation of his work? Critical interpreters of Henry argue that there is a need for scholars to supplement his thought with other sources that attend more diligently to questions of alterity.21 If there is such a need, as seems to be the case, this does not imply that he lacks a positive account of alterity. Indeed, he en­deavors to affirm various sorts of otherness from within his analysis of life’s interiority. As early as The Essence of Manifestation, Henry makes apophatic statements about life, which is to say for him also about God. He argues that although

21  Mercer, “Radical Phenomenology Reveals” and Falque, “Y a-­t-­il une chair sans corps.”

114 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

(divine) life phenomenalizes itself as the very essence of phenomenality, it does so invisibly. Its name is “Night.” Henry quotes a hymn by the Romantic poet Novalis, which praises “the holy, ineffable, mysterious Night.”22 Although theologians may be concerned about Henry’s identification of phenomenal life with God’s innermost essence, they may be reassured by the thought that, for Henry, this essence remains a dark mystery. It cannot be seen or understood (certainly not according to Kantian forms of sensibility or categories of understanding). But it can be in­tuit­ed as that which feels. It is not equivalent to any particular sensation or emotion, or even to a set of internal faculties that would sense or be moved. It is the pure affectivity that makes any such affective capacities or experiences pos­ sible.23 Does Henry respect the otherness of God? One must say “no” and “yes”: no insofar as auto-­affective life and God are essentially the same for him, yes insofar as neither of these can be brought before consciousness and made fully intelligible. Another sign of other-­respect in Henry comes in his argument for life’s individuality. Although he appreciates the fact that certain “vitalist” thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud attempt to reclaim life for philosophy and insist that life is hidden from objective consciousness, he critiques their tendency to interpret life as “an absurd, blind, unconscious power.” Henry suggests that this self-­negating concept of life is responsible, directly or indirectly, for all “the atro­ ci­ties, monstrosities, and genocides” of the twentieth century.24 For Henry, life may be invisible, but it is not blind. Why? Because it reveals itself to itself. It thereby participates in, and indeed constitutes, truth. It is impossible for this self-­ revelation of life to happen abstractly. It can only happen in each individual living one, who must therefore be respected as a singular, irreducible site of life’s manifestation. Henry argues this point most forcefully in From Communism to Capitalism. He contends that communism and capitalism are “only two figures of the same death” insofar as they both kill life by replacing it with abstractions, whether Marxist ideas of history, society, and class or neoliberal constructs of money, profit, and value. Henry maintains that the early Marx of the 1840s differs radically from later Marxist theory insofar as this early Marx locates life not in macro social forces but in living workers.25 According to Henry, to affirm these singularities, these unrepeatable auto-­affective laborers, is not to fall prey to capitalist ideas about the consumerist individual. Rather, it is to remember, against capitalism and communism alike, that the only true worth is found in the quotidian lives of the living. Each one of these living ones is an other. Although they share an essence, this essence is infinitely variable in its immanent fleshly self-­revelations. 22 Henry, Essence of Manifestation, pp. 438–43. 23 Henry, Essence of Manifestation, p. 462. 24 Henry, I Am the Truth, pp. 48–9. 25 Henry, From Communism to Capitalism, pp. 11 and 16.

Immanence and Alterity  115 In Incarnation, Henry weaves these ideas about life’s unified essence but individualized existence into a reflection on the “mystical body of Christ.” He argues that, as the “First Living,” Christ is the head of all living ones. Provided that they do not alienate themselves from their inner lives, they are mystically united in his body—­or, more precisely, his flesh.26 In keeping with the phenomenological trad­ ition, Henry uses “flesh” (French: chair, German: Leib) to name the embodied self insofar as it subjectively experiences itself as a living thing capable of touch. By contrast, he uses “body” (French: corps, German: Körper) to name the objective body that is extended in a visual field.27 He argues that a difference-­respecting communion is possible among human beings because each is a singularly enfleshed yet essentially connected living one. For him, “the mystical body of Christ” is not the church per se but the fact of being related with others through a shared condition of auto-­affective life. Henry’s dichotomous use of the corps/chair distinction presents some problems. For example, he argues that union with another through bodily sexual encounter will inevitably be a “failure,” because it is a union of bodies, not of flesh in the strict phenomenological sense. On the one hand, this claim may respect each individual sexual partner by recognizing that connecting erotically does not deprive him or her of a unique personal interiority. Sex does not erase difference. Nudity does not abolish hiddenness. On the other hand, the “flesh” sometimes seems to function in Henry’s thought as the name of an incommunicable, solipsistic core of a person, which the visible body has very little, if any, power to express truthfully.28 How then is meaningful, embodied relationship possible? How is love possible? In this context, Henry makes some remarks that are problematic on feminist grounds. It is telling that “woman” appears here, almost for the first time in his thought, precisely as a sexualized other. Henry relies on gender-­essentialist tropes that associate femininity with sensuality and a loss of initiative (tropes drawn in this case from Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety), and he shows no critical awareness of their dangers: The woman’s body is much more marked [than the man’s] by sexual de­ter­min­ ation. The paradox of the synthesis of the body and soul in the spirit thus takes on an infinitely greater tension in her. She is more sensual than the man, and because she is more sensual, she is more anxious. Her anxiety is more “fem­in­ine” than his, if the feminine character of anxiety denotes not the fact that it is a

26 Henry, Incarnation, pp. 245–52. 27  This distinction goes back to Edmund Husserl, Ideas, book 2, pp. 151–69. For a discussion of its subsequent development, see Kearney, “Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics.” 28 Henry, Incarnation, pp. 208–17.

116 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

woman’s but the moment proper to all anxiety, where overwhelmed by it the Self loses all initiative, breaks away, and surrenders to the temptation.29

Like Rahner, Henry typically forgoes gender analysis in favor of transcendental anthropological claims. But more like Balthasar and Speyr, he tends, when he does mention gender, to think of woman phallocentrically as the object of man’s desire and to define femininity in terms of passivity, anxiety, and lack of agency. However, unlike Balthasar and Speyr, Henry does not let the subjectivity of individual women appear in his thought. Women mystics are not named. Women’s voices are not heard. Although it may be possible to do a mimetic reading of him, like the one Irigaray makes of other philosophers in the Western tradition, including phe­ nom­en­olo­gists such as Maurice Merleau-­Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas,30 this would not so much save his thought from feminist critique as reveal its possible contours. Irigaray might appreciate the fact that Henry affirms the mysterious things that he associates with femininity—­namely, flesh and affectivity—­and that he is wary of masculine efforts to govern objects in the world, but she would want the implications of such gender differences to be named, questioned, and analyzed. Similar gender problems might be noted in other mystically informed theo­ logic­al phenomenologists such as Jean-­Luc Marion, Jean-­Yves Lacoste, and Jean-­ Louis Chrétien.31 However, they do focus on alterity more than Henry does. Marion argues early on, in The Idol and Distance (1977), that the nihilistic crises present in modern philosophy can be overcome not through ontological immanence, but rather through nonpredicative praise of transontological divine distance; that is, a doxological speech act directed toward the God of charity, revealed in Christ, who loves beyond (or “without”) being. Marion continues to recommend this mystical (because Dionysian) doxology even when, in later works, he gives more attention to immanence: for instance, in his studies of sat­ur­ ated phenomena, in which he draws on Henry’s phenomenology of flesh but concludes with another essay on Dionysius, and in his explorations of Augustinian interiority as constituted by the confession of praise. Marion appreciates Henry’s recovery of life’s invisibility but does not countenance Henry’s essentialism, which 29 Henry, Incarnation, pp. 206–7. 30 Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, pp. 151–217. 31  The main thinkers associated with the “theological turn” in French phenomenology (including Heidegger, Levinas, Ricoeur, Henry, Marion, Lacoste, Chrétien, and Falque) do not adopt a critical perspective on gender. Although Irigaray, as we shall see, develops her feminist project in relation to both phenomenology and Christian mysticism, her contributions are neglected in Janicaud’s polemic, in the theological phenomenologists he critiques, and in the conversation surrounding their work. At a greater remove from theology, some theorists draw on phenomenology, particularly its discourse of “flesh,” to advance feminist arguments. See, for example, Fielding and Olkowski, eds., Feminist Phenomenology Futures; Ortega, In-­Between; and Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology. The text that has done the most to integrate phenomenology, Christian theology, and intersectional feminism is Mayra Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh.

Immanence and Alterity  117 by Marion’s standards would seem to risk reconfiguring ontotheology in affective terms. Could Henry’s auto-­affection be another name for Heidegger’s causa sui?32 For his part, Lacoste is not convinced that experience, however immanently interpreted, can escape its emplacement in the temporal existence of the world and earth, as Heidegger understands these topoi. Although Lacoste agrees with Henry that divine parousia is not discoverable under such mundane modes of presence, he does not agree that life as we know it and live it now can become a pure refuge from such modes of presence or a site of unambiguous plenitude. Lacoste, therefore, looks expectantly toward an unknown eschatological future, which alone would deserve to be called absolute. “Night,” for Lacoste, is not a metaphor for life’s immanent invisibility but a time for liturgical vigil: a compline service. Although the prayerfulness of Lacoste’s thought is clear, we might ask whether he is sufficiently open to the experiential features of the Christian mys­ tic­al tradition, in which the eschaton seems to break into time. But even if his argument became more mystical in this sense, his claims regarding the constitutive worldliness of life and, therefore, its non-­definitive status would remain difficult to contest. Henry’s theory of mystical immanence needs more of Lacoste’s eschatological reserve.33 In The Call and the Response (1992), Chrétien critiques the central argument of Henry’s The Essence of Manifestation: “Sensation does not send us back to an autarchic life of self-­feeling and self-­gratification; rather, it opens the realm where life risks itself and ventures out.” Chrétien’s aim in this text is to recover all of the senses of the body as sites of a dialogue of call and response that reveals the self ’s porosity to the other and constitutes phenomenality as such. This dialogue extends into the mystical realm of visual, auditory, and tactile union with God, especially through the wounding experiences of a divine “touch,” as in John of the Cross.34 Chrétien’s phenomenology resonates with Rahner’s writings about the “spiritual senses.” In L’espace intérieur (2014), Chrétien again refuses Henry’s oppositional way of constructing the relation between interiority and exteriority. At the same time, he develops his own account of immanence within the Christian mystical tradition and distinguishes it from modern philosophical forms of immanence, with which Henry’s work is more aligned. Drawing on patristic, medieval, and early modern witnesses ranging from Augustine to Teresa of Avila, Chrétien focuses on “the chamber of the heart” as a place of prayer, “the temple of the Holy Spirit” as a locus of oblation and praise, and “the house of the soul” as a context of hospitality and love. He argues that these diverse modes of Christian interiority share several characteristics: they are places from which humans are estranged through sin; to enter them is to begin a journey that takes one back into the world; in them one 32 Marion, Idol and Distance, pp. 139–95; Marion, In Excess, pp. 82–103; Marion, In the Self ’s Place; and Marion, “Invisible and the Phenomenon.” 33 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute. 34 Chrétien, Call and the Response, pp. 98 and 130.

118 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

does not primarily encounter oneself in one’s fundamental structures but rather the free and unexpected grace of God; they do not isolate one from others but rather draw one into community; and they are, therefore, not strictly a type of enclosure but rather “the condition of the highest opening.”35 Of all of these theological and phenomenological interpreters of Christian mysticism, Henry is the one most devoted to immanence and also, perhaps not surprisingly, the least convincing advocate of alterity, despite his efforts to honor both. By contrast, Chrétien seems to be the most successful one at arguing for the mutuality of immanence and alterity in the Christian mystical tradition, while Marion and Lacoste have strengths in this area as well. As we shall see later in this chapter, Certeau advances a heterological project that is the polar opposite of Henry’s immanentist project, even though both proceed as postmodern receptions of Christian mysticism. Certeau will have to address critiques coming from Henry’s direction: does Certeau give enough attention to immanence in his mysticism of ordinary life? But Certeau will also show most clearly still why Henry’s immanentism is insufficient.

Henry on Suffering and Joy Before considering Certeau, however, we must confront one last significant question about Henry, namely how he understands divine union in relation to suffering. In The Essence of Manifestation, he defines suffering and joy as the two fundamental tonalities of affectivity. He is not concerned here with particular painful or pleasurable experiences produced by an external stimulus or situation but rather with a duality in the very essence of affectivity. He equates suffering, in this transcendental sense, with life’s intrinsic passivity; that is, with life’s powerlessness to feel differently from how it feels. He argues that one cannot successfully will oneself to feel a certain way. Feeling, whether of sensation or emotion, is just given. To be a self is to suffer oneself and to suffer as oneself. It is to endure whatever befalls one and however it befalls one. Nevertheless, Henry also declares that the experience of life is joy, and that is because the self ’s feeling of itself is the condition for the possibility of the self ’s presence, power, and action. The “me” makes possible the “I can.” Joy is not defined by momentary, externally conditioned experiences of delight but rather by a fundamental awareness of the very life that one is. Because passivity and agency seem to be given together transcendentally, Henry makes bold claims about their indivisibility and even indistinguishability: “Suffering and joy together and without distinction comprise and

35 Chrétien, L’espace intérieur, pp. 8 and 16–23.

Immanence and Alterity  119 designate that which originally phenomenalizes itself in Being and constitutes it, viz. the effectiveness of the Parousia.”36 One problem with this absolute identification of suffering and joy with life and with each other is that it seems to devalue human beings’ understandings of the worldly circumstances that occasion particular experiences of suffering and joy. To this objection, Henry responds that, in order to recognize such concrete events as events of suffering or joy, we must have some internal knowledge of their fundamental possibility, and that is what he wants to disclose. If one concedes that there is some limited value in a transcendental philosophical method, then it seems one must give some ground to Henry on this issue, even if one also insists on the need for concrete social, historical, and psychological investigations. But, regardless, it would remain possible to question whether Henry’s transcendental commitments in this case unduly narrow his labor of phenomenological description. Can affectivity really be so drastically reduced to one or two possibilities without a serious undermining of its variable textures, shades, and nuances? Graver still, however, is the theological objection: if life is equated with God, would not this imply, for Henry, that the divine essence is composed of suffering and joy and, indeed, “without distinction”? If so, would such a composition be recognizable as God? Although an emphasis on divine compassion encourages some contemporary theologians to nuance the traditional doctrine of divine impassibility, namely the view that God does not suffer, by contending that through Christ God lovingly suffers with the victims of history, this argument for some sort of divine passibility would not justify Henry’s still more daring prop­os­ ition according to which God would be defined from all eternity, and in equal measure, by both passivity and activity. The troubling claim implied by his arguments is not that God suffers as a human being within the economy of salvation (which can be given an orthodox sense) but that the innermost being of God is suffering, just as much as it is joy, because God is life. Although Henry does not offer an explicit trinitarian response to this objection, he gives himself some resources to do so. In standard, creedal terms, he affirms that the Son is “begotten.” This Nicene teaching could make some sense of his attribution of suffering to divine life if by “suffering” he intends to refer to the Son’s passive begottenness from the Father. The Son is a “me” before being an “I” (though this “before” must be taken in an ontological, not temporal, sense), and in this respect the Son “suffers” transcendentally as all living ones do.37 Although Henry acknowledges that the incarnate Son suffers and dies as a human being on the cross,38 he does not focus on this paschal event. More clearly than Speyr and Balthasar, Henry recognizes that Jesus’s external passivity to the life-­negating

36 Henry, Essence of Manifestation, p. 661, italics in original. 37 Henry, I Am the Truth, pp. 53–68. 38 Henry, Incarnation, p. 234.

120 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

forces of the world is what condemns him to die, whereas Jesus’s internal passivity to the infinite life that generates him is what assures his victory over death. However, the problem resurfaces—­and more devastatingly than in Speyr and Balthasar—­because Henry takes the ordinary human phenomenalization of life as his model for thinking about what life means as such, even in the case of God. He takes those basic tonalities that humans experience as suffering and joy and uses them to define the essence of life that humans and God share. In this way, he lets fundamental structures of human feeling become determinative, not just of the economic, but of the immanent Trinity. Insofar as the Son is the passive form of trinitarian life’s passive–­active affectivity, the Son represents not merely an ontological condition of being-­begotten. The Son represents an experiential condition of feeling oneself to be unfree, powerless, and determined by another. Henry characterizes the Son in this manner irrespective of the cross and, indeed, the entire economy of salvation. In the Balthasarian-­Speyrian mystical theology, there is more emphasis on the Son’s free acceptance of his mission from the Father and on the mutually self-­surrendering relationship between them. Henry’s ideas about an essential unity of suffering and joy are clearest not in his trinitarian thinking but in his remarks on the Beatitudes, which he reduces to the troubling paraphrase: “Blessed are those who suffer.” He does not interpret this saying (his own) or any of the Beatitudes that it is supposed to summarize as meaning that those who suffer now will one day find joy, whether because they will be rewarded for their patient endurance or, as liberationist and feminist theo­ lo­gians would rather argue, because God has a preferential option for the poor and oppressed and promises to free them from their current agonizing conditions, both historically and eschatologically. Rather, Henry claims that the Beatitudes “express the original co-­belonging of suffering and enjoyment”; that is, “life and its internal structure.”39 In short, those who suffer would be blessed precisely because their suffering is a sign that they are alive, and life is nothing other than the divine oneness of suffering and joy. Although Henry mentions the possibility of a “transformation of suffering into joy,”40 he does not greatly develop this transformational theme in any of his works. His most direct elaboration of it comes in the final words of Incarnation: The more each of our sufferings happens in us in a way that is pure, simple, stripped of everything, and reduced to itself and to its phenomenological body of flesh, the more strongly the unlimited power that gives it to itself is felt in us. And when this suffering reaches its limit point in despair, the Eye of God looks upon us. It is the unlimited intoxication of life, the Arch-­pleasure of its eternal love in the Word, its Spirit, that submerges us. All who are brought low will be

39 Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 201, italics in original.

40 Henry, Words of Christ, p. 39.

Immanence and Alterity  121 raised. Happy are those who suffer, who perhaps have nothing left but their flesh. Arch-­gnosis is the gnosis of the simple.41

How is suffering transformed into joy, if it is? This passage suggests that concrete experiences of suffering can become occasions of joy to the extent that one recognizes them as revelations of the very fact that one is feeling, which is to say living, which is to say inescapably united with divine life. Henry contends that one does not need a special set of beliefs, objectively determined knowledge, or a struggle to be liberated from violent social structures in order to access God. One needs only to become aware of one’s flesh. This is “the gnosis of the simple.” Because Henry thinks the mere fact of a self-­aware ordinary life is a sufficient test of mystical union, what one has suffered, or why, or if it is ongoing, or what one is doing about it are largely irrelevant questions for his theory. On his account, divine life is present to every living one. There is a universal offer of something like grace, even in the most painful situations. This may be a source of some consolation for those in distress—­but also for those causing it. To receive this “blessing,” a person must bracket the content of his or her feelings and focus on the transcendental condition for their possibility. But this means accepting an amalgamation of suffering and joy, not merely as a means, but as the very meaning of deification. It means glorifying life as it is experienced in the here and now, regardless of its injustices. Although Henry protests the violence of both communism and capitalism through an insightful reading of the early Marx as a theorist of living labor, his transcendental account of divine life is insufficient to support the sort of prophetic, mystical-­political practice that many liberationist and feminist theo­lo­ gians advocate. To be sure, Henry’s God gives human beings the possibility of feeling and doing virtually anything. In this sense, it is empowering. But the historical circumstances and norms guiding their feelings and actions are of little consequence, because any sort of feeling or action whatsoever is, by virtue of its livingness, already essentially mystical. Henry has a mysticism of ordinary life, but unlike Rahner’s and Balthasar’s, it does not connect divine union meaningfully to the concrete details that might make a life holy. There is no requirement for active participation in Christic forms of obedience and love but only an appreciation for the mere fact that one is alive and affective. There is no point in trying to transform “the world.” Any dramatic change would occur at the level of sub­ ject­ive knowledge, and it would not free one from suffering but merely put it in a different light. In short, Henry reduces Christian mysticism to a transcendental self-­awareness that has no real need for the liberating features of Jesus’s life and death, either as

41 Henry, Incarnation, p. 262.

122 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

they are interpreted in scripture or as they have been experienced by Christian mystics and saints throughout history. Working at the borders of philosophy and theology helps him make a strong case that Christian mysticism, especially its affirmation of the divine life within each living one, resists the deadly objectifying forces of the modern world. For this key insight theologians can be grateful. However, a greater fidelity to Christian mystical theology would have enabled Henry to make his case without engendering as many serious problems.

Mystical Alterity: Michel de Certeau Turning now to Certeau, we find a very different way of retrieving Christian mysticism at the borders of postmodern philosophy and theology. Although he is known in some circles primarily as a historian, Certeau also does constructive theorizing on questions of politics, culture, language, practice, selfhood, and faith. This “philosophical” work, which includes his writings on the nature of history, takes many of its distinctive traits from the Christian mystical texts that he studies as a historian. At first, the continuities between his philosophy and such mys­ tic­al materials may seem to be only formal or stylistic. Yet he would urge one not to underestimate the significance of such features. Manners, modes, ways, forms, and styles constitute the very mystical “object” that he investigates. He suggests that this apparent outside of Christian mysticism provides the only meaning that contemporary culture can recover from it. When Certeau uses the word “mystical” (“mystique”), he does not usually refer to the grace of divine union, even though many of his sources do. He refers to a manner of relating, speaking, and acting enigmatically or subversively with respect to various structures (norms, institutions, places, bodies, languages, etc.). He uses “mystical” to name a way of proceeding in response to such structures, perhaps even while belonging to them, which is both their other and an expression of longing for the other. This alterity-­focused sense of the mystical runs throughout Certeau’s “heterological” studies. For theologians skeptical of his approach, he may seem to secularize Christian mysticism by translating it into an unlimited array of performances of alterity. He may seem to join other postmodern philosophers (like his teacher Lacan) who offer a non-­dogmatic alternative to mystical theology. However, there is another way to read Certeau, the Jesuit priest in the same religious order as Rahner, Balthasar, and his personal mentor Henri de Lubac. Certeau never disavowed this Ignatian “place” from which he spoke. One could argue that, for him, diverse procedures of othering oneself from worldly powers, desiring the other that escapes their grasp, and welcoming the other’s arrival in the poor and the stranger are not secular practices but spiritual means of uniting with God. The mystical would, on this reading, remain theo­ logic­al and even Christian in Certeau’s work.

Immanence and Alterity  123 Henry and Certeau agree that the retrieval of Christian mysticism provides some much-­needed critical distance from the technocratic rigidities and deadening forces of modernity, but they disagree about how to understand Christian mysticism’s resistance. This disagreement is reflected by their choice of mystical sources: Eckhart, for Henry, and Jean-­Joseph Surin, for Certeau—­but one must immediately add that Certeau’s preference for alterity leads him to pluralize his canon far beyond Surin, even if Surin retains a certain exemplarity for him. As in Speyr’s and Balthasar’s thought, so too in Certeau’s, the named witnesses proliferate. Whereas Henry discovers a transcendental ontology in Eckhart, Certeau perceives a terrifying or enticing madness in Surin. Certeau gravitates toward the abnormal and the strange rather than the philosophically foundational. He is less interested in the logos, which philosophers have sought in the luminosity of the “said,” and more in the fable, the orality of a “saying” that may or may not have decipherable meaning. We have seen that, following Eckhart, Henry identifies the immanence of human experience with the being of God by positing life as the common essence of the two, instead of treating such immanence more plausibly as a condition of intimate relationship with God. In Certeau’s case, the danger is slightly different. He does not exactly identify alterity with God through a common “essence.” He rarely writes in such ontological terms. Nevertheless, he treats whatever is signified by the name “God” as just one among many examples of alterity. Otherness per se would seem to matter more to his account of mysticism than does the Christian theological understanding of the grace of divine union. Yet his insights about otherness remain valuable. Christian mystical theology stands to benefit from Henry’s and Certeau’s contributions to a postmodern mysticism of ordinary life, even while it guards against their perils.

Certeau’s History and Theory of Christian Mysticism To understand Certeau’s status as both a historian and theorist and his relation to Balthasar, who also develops an inseparably historical and theoretical approach to Christian mysticism, it is helpful to highlight both thinkers’ debts to Henri Bremond. Bremond’s multivolume Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, especially volumes 7 and 8, which form a unit that Bremond calls “Métaphysique des saints” (published in 1928),42 inspires both Balthasar and Certeau to construct their own theory-­laden histories of late medieval and early modern Christian mysticism. Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord, volume 5, particularly the section called “Metaphysics of the Saints,” and Certeau’s The Mystic Fable,

42 Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux.

124 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

volume 1 (1982), both take cues from Bremond’s work.43 Although these three texts are dedicated to clarifying the historical specificity of Christian mysticism, they do not treat it merely as a historical artifact. Rather, they search within it for some greater understanding of the modern epoch that it presages, as well as some forgotten but renewable responses to the theological and philosophical dilemmas that this epoch represents. Bremond, Balthasar, and Certeau all maintain that this is a history with vital lessons for the present. Nevertheless, these three accounts of Christian mysticism differ in significant ways. Although Balthasar and Certeau do not dispute Bremond’s critiques of spiritual hedonism and semi-­Pelagian asceticism (in which mysticism would be reduced to a self-­gratifying pursuit of extraordinary graces or distorted into a self-­centered effort to deify oneself), both thinkers distance themselves from Bremond’s suggestion that mysticism has a universal essence that consists of an objectless, and thus purely subjective, union with the divine. Whereas Balthasar, in harmony with Speyr, emphasizes that “subjective” union takes place only through the “objective” (albeit sublime) glory of Christ, Certeau stresses that Christian mysticism is a historical discourse that defines a field of variable relations between an immemorial other and concrete social structures and practices. Certeau argues that this discourse takes on a definitive form in the seventeenth century, becoming for the first time identified with a substantive term “mysticism” (French: la mystique). Certeau recognizes, as Balthasar does too (and both cite de Lubac),44 that the adjective “mystical” (French: mystique, Latin: mysticus, Greek: mystikos) had been in use since antiquity. But Certeau underscores the point that only at the dawning of modernity—­with the rise of the nation state, the breakdown of medieval social hierarchies, the splintering of Christian identity, the multiplication of religious movements, the refashioning of knowledge in the wake of nominalism and voluntarism, and so on—­does the mystical become hypostasized as a specific mode of speech and behavior, even as its own “science” distinct from medieval scholastic theology and the new positive theology of the Renaissance humanists.45 Although Certeau tells a macro-­level story about la mystique, in which he attempts to sketch its general features and chart the major epochal shifts that generated them, like Bremond and Balthasar he also allows certain characters to enter the story and give it literary texture. His main protagonist is the Jesuit exorcist, poet, and mystic Jean-­Joseph Surin (1600–65). Certeau credits Surin with

43 Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 5, p. 51n2 and Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 1, p. 153. Although Certeau never completed his planned second volume of this work, Luce Giard edited some of his writings together to form a second volume that approximates his intentions. See Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 2. Certeau clarifies his relation to Bremond in Certeau, Le lieu de l’autre, pp. 59–88. 44 Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 1, pp. 82 and 94 and Balthasar, “Understanding Christian Mysticism,” which both rely on de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum. 45 Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 1, pp. 79–112.

Immanence and Alterity  125 proposing the idea that mysticism is a “science completely separate from the others.”46 More than that, Certeau reflects on the subject-­shattering and subject-­ forming experiences of alterity that characterize Surin’s mystical life. Certeau concentrates on three episodes, which are worth summarizing here because Surin may not be well known to some readers and because they illustrate Certeau’s alterity-­focused hermeneutic: an early crisis during Surin’s novitiate that is followed by a transformative encounter with a young “angelic” boy (ca. 1630); Surin’s ministry to the demon-­possessed Ursuline sisters of Loudun, which results in his own possession (ca. 1635); and Surin’s final transition from a tortured condition of madness and damnation to a restored state of peace and productivity (ca.  1645–55). In each of these episodes, Surin comes forth as a figure whose extraor­din­ary bodily and discursive practices not only express unsettling yet constitutive relations with the other but also thereby epitomize Certeau’s understanding of la mystique. In the first volume of The Mystic Fable, Certeau presents his own critical edition of a letter written by Surin in 1630, in which Surin recounts his meeting with “a young boy of eighteen or nineteen, simple and extremely crude of speech, totally unlettered . . . but in all other respects filled with all manner of graces and such lofty inner gifts as I have never seen the like.” During the few days that they spent together, this remarkable boy—­a mystic in ordinary life—­was in a state of nearly continuous prayer, except for several periods of conversation with Surin in which he discussed his experiences of perfect union with the Trinity and demonstrated the possibility that such union could occur without formal theological training. Surin, who had recently been dismissed from the place of his seminary education because of a mixture of physical and spiritual maladies, found new hope in this chance encounter. The boy was like an angel to him: a voice in the wilderness, an other voice intermingling with his own in which he heard the absolute other that is God.47 Surin has a very different experience of alterity when, in 1634, he is called to help liberate a community of Ursuline sisters, led by a mother superior named Jeanne des Anges, from their collective demonic possession. Certeau discusses this episode in his earlier work, The Possession at Loudun (1970). Because others’ attempts to compel the demons to come out through forceful exhortations, medicinal treatments, and even the public execution of an accused sorcerer (Urbain Grandier) seem not to be working, Surin tries a gentler approach. In order to “win the hearts” of the possessed sisters, he devotes himself to continual prayer and fasting; he converses with them in merciful and tender ways; and, in a Christlike act of redemptive love, he willingly takes their affliction upon himself 46 Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 1, pp. 10 and 108. Certeau notes that Surin made this claim in 1661, the same year that he composed an unpublished treatise entitled De la mystique. 47 Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 1, pp. 206–34, especially 207.

126 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

in order to free them from it. As the sisters gradually improve, Surin falls deeper and deeper into an agonizing state of double possession. He feels that his body is inhabited simultaneously by a devil and by the Holy Spirit. His daily existence becomes a maddening spiritual battlefield. Certeau concludes that the eruption of the other into history can happen through union with God, through demonic possession, and occasionally through both at the same time. These two forms of alterity—­which Surin suggests are so intermeshed that they can be manifest in the same bodily phenomena (“the same cries that leave my mouth come equally from these two souls”)—reveal the vast spectrum of Certeau’s formal definition of the mystical and show just how disconcertingly ambiguous it is.48 Nevertheless, Surin’s experience, like Speyr’s, can be read as a genuine participation in the paschal mystery—­not just because it involves terrible suffering but more importantly because it flows from his radically self-­giving, Christic love for another. After his work as an exorcist ends, Surin remains in agony. He is “locked away in the infirmary of the Bordeaux College” and is “practically incapable of talking, writing, walking, or controlling his ‘extravagances’,” which is a polite word for his many erratic and uncontrollable behaviors, including multiple suicide attempts. His soul is fractured in various ways, a fact that he indicates linguistically by referring to himself using first- and third-­person pronouns. Beyond the ex­peri­ ence of double (i.e., demonic and pneumatological) possession, he suffers from two types of inner torment: a psychological “madness,” which today one might call psychosis, and a condition of spiritual forsakenness, which makes him feel like he has been condemned to hell. He receives intense, alternating experiences of desolation and consolation through different spiritual senses. While watching a Eucharistic procession pass by his window he has an “intellectual vision” of Jesus angrily throwing lightning bolts at him. However, when on other occasions he receives the Eucharist, he claims that his tongue not only tastes bread (the “­accident,” according to the scholastic doctrine of transubstantiation) but also “senses God and tastes God just as it tastes a grape or apricot or melon.” His mystical sight beholds divine wrath; his mystical taste savors a healing divine sweetness.49 However unusual these experiences may seem, it is interesting to note how much they rely on the church’s regular sacramental activity. Certeau argues that Surin is restored to himself through a path of language and embodiment: first breathing (a respiration in the Spirit), then oral speech (beginning with songs and poems, then moving to dictated treatises), then writing with his own hand, and finally walking into town: a body-­language that gives his alterity-­ saturated existence a new mode of expression.50 For Certeau, this 48 Certeau, Possession at Loudun, pp. 199–209 and 227–8. See also Surin, Correspondance, pp. 263–5. 49 Certeau, Heterologies, pp. 101–15 and Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 2, pp. 144–60. 50  This path of Surin’s recovery, with its emphasis on breathing and writing, is similar to those proposed by Irigaray and Kristeva in their distinct accounts of the mysticism of ordinary life. See Chapter 4 of this volume.

Immanence and Alterity  127 communication of the experience of otherness into texts, bodies, practices, and spaces defines mysticism in close relation to ordinary—­in the sense of healthy, flourishing—­life. For Certeau, Surin’s itinerary symbolizes not only a variously constituted inundation of life by the extraordinary but also the always-­ephemeral possibility of incarnating the extraordinary in the ordinary; that is, of giving a body to the spirit. Besides Surin, Certeau studies other early Jesuit sources such as Peter Faber and Jerome Nadal.51 Moreover, like Rahner and Balthasar, Certeau embraces the mystical spirituality of the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola. More than Rahner and Balthasar, however, Certeau accents alterity in his reading of Ignatius. Certeau describes the “Principle and Foundation” that begins The Spiritual Exercises as a “non-­place” outside the text, which articulates both what the divine other desires and what the retreatant ought to learn to desire: praise and service of the absolute source of all things. Certeau takes the Ignatian imaginative practice of “the composition of place” as a metaphor for virtually everything that happens in the rest of the text: every week, exercise, rule, and moment of decision are concrete places in which the retreatant learns to welcome “the desire that comes from the Other.”52 Theologians may value Certeau’s inclusion of Ignatius as a witness to divine otherness while questioning, as some critics do with Rahner, whether Certeau underemphasizes the Christological features of The Spiritual Exercises. The same sort of appreciation and worry might extend to Certeau’s readings of his entire canon of Christian mystics. With each one, as with Surin, Certeau is most interested in thinking about how they experience otherness and how this otherness shapes their ways of relating, speaking, writing, and acting in particular contexts. As a reader of John of the Cross, Certeau is interested in the fact that his poems, written in prison, remain close to the orality of a “saying” and disclose a simultaneous exposure to suffering and beauty, whereas the prose works, written outside the prison, seek to clarify this dark night of love for a larger community by translating it into a “said,” an intelligible meaning.53 As a reader of Eckhart, Certeau differs considerably from Henry, the transcendental philosopher, but also from Balthasar who is at pains to bring Eckhart back into a Christological fold. Certeau follows neither of these paths but instead focuses on the linguistic form of Eckhart’s paradoxical idea that “I want ‘God to want in place of my will wanting’.” Certeau uses Eckhart to stress that mysticism is defined by a peculiar

51 Favre, Mémorial; Certeau, La faiblesse de croire, pp. 67–86; and Certeau, Le lieu de l’autre, pp. 155–94. 52 Certeau, Le lieu de l’autre, pp. 239–48. Certeau’s biographer, François Dosse, notes a close connection between Certeau’s reading of Ignatius and the similar efforts of Louis Bernaert to integrate Ignatian and Lacanian theories of desire. See Dosse, Michel de Certeau, p. 319. 53 Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 2, pp. 71–87.

128 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

way of speaking, which starts from the expression of a will that also denounces itself.54 Certeau refers to Dionysius mainly in the context of explaining how sixteenthand seventeenth-­century mystics cited him to legitimize their new discourses and practices. Dionysius is at the imagined origin of their construction of a Christian mystical tradition to which they would only belatedly belong. Certeau, for his part, traces his own account of mysticism back not so much to Dionysius as to several ancient figures of Christian madness: Simeon of Emesa, Mark the Mad, Andrew the Mad, and an anonymous Egyptian “idiot” woman from Palladios’s Lausiac History. These figures bear witness, in their derided bodies and silenced voices, to a condition of radical estrangement from the normal social order. They are “nothing” relative to this order. But the stories that preserve a faint memory of them demonstrate “the questioning power of this nothing.” These figures symbolize a purer hospitality to the other than one finds in the socially recognized virtuosity of monks and clerics. They represent a more authentic imitatio Christi.55 More like Speyr and Balthasar, and less like Rahner and Henry, Certeau gives women a significant place in his discussion of Christian mysticism. In addition to the anonymous madwoman from the Egyptian monastery and Jeanne des Anges (the once-­possessed prioress at Loudun who became a celebrated mystic in her later years, though both Surin and Certeau doubt her sincerity), Certeau ac­know­ ledges the contributions that Mary Magdalene, Hadewijch, Gertrude of Helfta, Teresa of Avila, Madame Guyon, and many other women make to Christian mysticism. Certeau values Teresa’s imaginative production of a space for the divine other in her Interior Castle and the community of language that she institutes among her sisters. He similarly honors Guyon’s account of her meeting with a poor dockworker, to whom she gives alms but from whom she receives much more: a life-­changing message about God’s desire for the perfection of her soul.56 Certeau’s account of Christian mysticism not only features many women. It also involves some critical gender analysis. Certeau argues that in a male-­ dominated culture and tradition, women symbolize otherness, just as the poor and the “mad” do in their own ways. He maintains that “woman” represents the desired other within a phallocentric eroticism. This eroticism sometimes substitutes for, and sometimes becomes entangled with, a desire for union with God. We have seen that Henry inadvertently confirms this point in his brief reflections on “woman,” whereas Balthasar and Speyr give it a central role in their theology without questioning it. Certeau, by contrast, treats this feminization of the other as a historical construct worthy of questioning. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, he associates “woman” with the “mother” and thereby with a primal 54 Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 1, pp. 164–76. 55 Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 1, pp. 31–47 and 102. 56 Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 1, pp. 188–200 and 239–40 and Certeau, Possession at Loudun, p. 226.

Immanence and Alterity  129 feeling of absorption and indeterminacy, but he does not subscribe to any strict gender essentialism. Indeed, he is attentive to the ways in which certain women in the Christian mystical tradition, such as Pelagia and Macrina, have disguised themselves as men, not (as he reads them) in order to become masculine but rather to point beyond a masculine–­feminine binary. For Certeau, the heterological character of mysticism allows equally for an “eclipsing of sex (male or female) and of logos (wise or foolish).”57 Although Irigaray, Kristeva, and their feminist critics offer a more thorough treatment of gender and Christian mysticism, Certeau is already on a promising, profeminist trajectory.

A Heterological Mysticism of Ordinary Life Does the fact that Certeau, the Jesuit scholar of Christian mysticism, also writes an acclaimed book of cultural studies called The Practice of Everyday Life suggest that his oeuvre, taken as a whole, constitutes something analogous to Rahner’s theological account of a mysticism of ordinary life? In this vein, Philip Sheldrake argues that, although Certeau’s mystical and cultural-­studies projects are often treated separately,58 these projects actually belong to the same overarching Ignatian practice of seeking God in all things. Certeau not only “uses similar language” to address mystical and cultural topics, namely a heterological style of discourse that emphasizes a practical relation to various modes of alterity. There is also, on Sheldrake’s account, “an ethical imperative, which . . . is also implicitly religious” even in the most secular works. Although God is not often mentioned in Certeau’s cultural-­studies writings, they do include “a counter-­blast to false gods” of panoptic rationalism and a theologically informed celebration of cre­ ation, history, and the singular.59 On the basis of Sheldrake’s argument, one might conjecture that Certeau and Rahner have similar aims. However, caution is needed here. First, Certeau’s mysticism of ordinary life is not as explicitly theological as Rahner’s. Readers of Certeau must contend with the possibility that he may merely indicate certain stylistic similarities between divine union and quotidian existence which by themselves contain no clear, theology-­affirming implications. Do these similarities show the ubiquity of God’s gracious presence? Or do they secularize mystical theology by pointing out ways in which ordinary life can be modeled after it without any need for its faith claims? Certeau does not settle the matter, and many passages favor the latter possibility. The second reason why caution is warranted is that Certeau’s account

57 Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 1, pp. 3–4 and 43–4 and Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 2, p. 154. 58 Highmore, Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture; Buchanan, Michel de Certeau: Cultural Theorist; and Ahearne, Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and Its Other. 59  Sheldrake, “Michel de Certeau: Spirituality and the Practice of Everyday Life.”

130 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

of ordinariness in relation to diverse expressions, practices, and spaces of other­ ness is not as cruciform, let alone homogenous, as Rahner’s is. Certeau’s criteria for discerning the mysticism of ordinary life differ. His argument for it must be understood on its own psychoanalytic, historiographical, cultural-­studies, and heterological (i.e., alterity-­focused) terms. Although Certeau distinguishes psychoanalysis from historiography, he connects them as two ways of relating the present to a past that each designates as “other.” For the psychoanalyst, the everyday of the present suffers from “a return of the repressed.” By contrast, for the historian, the everyday of the present is imagined as a site of scientific objectivity separated from the historical chaos and death that it seeks to understand.60 Certeau clarifies that these two ways of conceiving the other of the past have complex ties to Christian mysticism. In each discipline, Christian mysticism is not merely an object to be analyzed but a model for the discipline’s present manner of proceeding. While reading Lacan, and finding his texts replete with biblical and mystical references, Certeau suggests that one receives “the strange impression that the house is haunted by monotheism” and more specifically by a Benedictine Christianity.61 Similarly, Certeau argues that “the historian of the mystics, summoned, as they are, to say the other, repeats their experience in studying it.”62 Nevertheless, a great chasm yawns between classical mystical theology (including la mystique and its medieval and patristic predecessors) and these present mystically styled discourses of past otherness. The latter do not proceed from a hope that the God of Christian revelation would offer the grace of divine union in this life. If anything, these non-­confessional fields of psychoanalysis and historiography presuppose the absence of such grace and bracket the question of God’s existence. Certeau often locates his thinking on the modern, psychoanalytic, historiographic side of this divide. He says that The Mystic Fable “emerges from a mourning,” that “one who is missing moves it to be written,” and that “the One is not to be found.” With statements such as these, he echoes Lacan, who suggests that “the Other is there but we can expect nothing from it except the desire which is produced by being deprived of it.”63 Add to this the unsettling last words of the first volume of The Mystic Fable, which are meant to describe “contemporary culture” but which may also reflect Certeau’s own struggle with spiritual bereavement:

60 Certeau, Writing of History, pp. 3–5 and Certeau, Heterologies, pp. 3–16. 61 Certeau, Heterologies, pp. 58–60. Although Certeau was never a practicing psychoanalyst, he participated in Lacan’s l’École freudienne de Paris from its inception in 1964 and maintained ties with other Parisian intellectuals steeped in the psychoanalytic tradition. See Dosse, Michel de Certeau, pp. 317–57. 62 Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 1, p. 11. 63 Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 1, pp. 1–2 and Certeau, Heterologies, p. 50.

Immanence and Alterity  131 Of that self-­surpassing spirit, seduced by an impregnable origin or end called God, it seems that what for the most part still remains, in contemporary culture, is the movement of a perpetual departure; as if, unable to ground itself in a belief in God any longer, the experience only kept the form and not the content of [la mystique]. . . . Henceforth this desire can no longer speak to someone [does Certeau here decree an end to the possibility of prayer?]. It seems to have become infans, voiceless, more solitary and lost than before, or less protected and more radical, ever seeking a body or a poetic locus. It goes on walking, then, tracing itself out in silence, in writing.64

The hypothesis that Certeau offers a mystical theology hidden in the quotidian forms of contemporary psychoanalysis and historiography is challenged by his assertion that he and the culture in which he lives are exiled from mystical the­ ology. Hardly a clear expansion of the grace of divine union beyond the walls of the medieval monastery into the modern world, Certeau’s discourse seems to be rather a dirge from a deprived outside—­an elegy for the loss of a Lacanian “Other” (l’Autre) that perhaps never really was, since on Lacan’s terms its loss is a structural condition of every act of speech and desire. Does the grace of divine union appear in The Practice of Everyday Life? If so, it is heavily disguised. This work features a series of distinctions that Certeau uses to mark the relations between mystically styled modes of alterity and the established forms of power that they evade and disrupt—­distinctions between micro-­ level tactics (tactique) and macro-­ level strategy (stratégie), a city-­ dweller’s creatively “poached” space (espace) and the city-­planner’s hegemonically organized place (lieu), an act of speech (parole) and the structure of a language (langue), and the spontaneous orality of a voice (voix) and the modern economy of writing (écriture). Sheldrake notes that Certeau employs such distinctions to resist the idolatry of a panoptic rationalism—­a “solar Eye, looking down like a god.”65 There is a negative theological operation here. When it comes to the question of positive belief, however, Certeau argues that the role of making people believe has been transferred from the church to the realm of (leftist) politics. The “other world” of theology has become the “different future” of utopian imagination, and even in the latter case faith is on the wane.66 Although the title of the eighth chapter, “The Unnameable,” has a Dionysian ring to it, its subject is not the grace of divine union but his own death: “There is nothing so ‘other’ as my death, the index of all alterity.”67 It would be possible to read this as an atheistic text. Certeau’s recognition that mortality is part of the meaning of quotidian existence could suggest a point of contact with Rahner, whom we have seen relies on a 64 Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 1, p. 299. 65 Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1, p. 92. 66 Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1, p. 183. 67 Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1, p. 194.

132 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Heideggerian understanding of being-­toward-­death to formulate his account of the ascetical character of a mysticism of ordinary life. However, the dissimilarities in Rahner’s and Certeau’s treatments of the everyday are also important to bear in mind. First, showing more explicit critical awareness than Rahner, Certeau insists that the very idea of the “ordinary man” is a construct, a philosophical commonplace with no real, concrete referents. Claims regarding a standardized or­din­ari­ ness are, therefore, fictitious. This does not mean that the norms associated with this abstract individual are inoperative, but it does permit one to question them from the perspectives of multiple quotidian lives.68 Second, and consequently, Certeau is not inclined to pronounce on what is ordinary. He is not satisfied by an existential analysis of Dasein supplied by elite male philosophers. He proposes that understanding the lived experience of or­din­ari­ness requires a collaborative and empirical research project, of the sort made more evident in the second volume of The Practice of Everyday Life (coauthored by Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol), which investigates ways of proceeding in particular cities, neighborhoods, and even private homes. Although this research project discloses the roles that gender norms play in erotically charged social situations and in the distribution of domestic tasks, it rejects any notion of a “stable feminine nature” or “feminine essence,” preferring instead simply “to hear women speak.” In the pinnacle of its devotion to singularity, it merely reproduces an interview with a certain Inese, allowing her ordinary—­yet spontaneous, irreplaceable—­ voice to be heard.69 Certeau, Giard, and Mayol’s anti-­essentialist respect for such an existentielle life in the midst of socially mediated existential conditions has considerable feminist significance, particularly in relation to Rahner’s more generalizing theory of the ordinary. It opens discourse to women’s voices and lives, however conforming or deviant. If Certeau’s approach to everyday existence were to become, like Rahner’s before it, the basis of a Christian theological argument for a mysticism of or­din­ ary life, one would have to apply a theological hermeneutic to Certeau’s apparently nontheological texts that they do not expressly demand but do perhaps allow. The argument would go something like this. Ordinary experiences of other­ness dispersed in the local tactics, spaces, speech acts, and voices of real women and men could be understood to contest any abstract forms of the supposedly “ordinary man” symbolized in technocratic strategies, organized places, linguistic rules, and written laws. This contestation could be perceived as an eth­ ic­al­ly significant, negative theological act. Moreover, these heterological sites and events could provide an indefinite range of opportunities to desire and remember the incomprehensible God of historical Christian faith (or some other faith) as a maximal other who is radically different from the false gods of worldly 68 Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1, pp. 2–4. 69  Certeau, Giard, and Mayol, Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 2, pp. 24–6, 151, and 160.

Immanence and Alterity  133 ma­chin­ation. Such desires and memories of the truly divine God could con­ceiv­ ably be recognized as providing access to the grace of divine union even in largely secular milieus: a oneness with God experienced through the condition of being other. Without insisting on it, Certeau leaves open the possibility of such a theological interpretation.

The Prospects for a Christian Mystical Theology after Certeau Certeau’s transposition of Christian mysticism into a formal relation between structures and their disruptive others may, even when read theologically, leave theologians unsatisfied. His theory of alterity, which takes its stylistic cues from sources in the history of Christian mysticism (Surin, Eckhart, Teresa, Ignatius, and Guyon) but belongs equally to a breadth of secular heterological discourses (psychoanalysis, historiography, and cultural studies), also grounds his understanding of “Christianity” (le christianisme) as an effort to remain faithful to Jesus from the apostolic age to the present. The same theory of alterity governs his discussions of la mystique, heterologies, and now la foi (faith). Of these three areas of his writing, the third is, as Giard suggests, closest to a Christian theological practice of faith seeking understanding.70 Yet even here an overarching tension between “ ‘the same’ and ‘the other’ ” proves so determinative as to call into question the Christian theological status of the argument.71 In “La rupture instauratice” (“The Inaugurating Rupture,” 1971), and other similar essays, Certeau sketches a Christology that is so thoroughly conditioned by his theory of alterity that it becomes difficult to ascertain what points his Christology adds that could not be deduced just as well from this more general theory. Moreover, insofar as Certeau associates otherness with lack, loss, unfulfilled longing, and similar privative notions, his treatment of Jesus as a figure of such otherness minimizes the uniquely unitive role that Jesus typically plays in the Christian mystical tradition, namely as the Word made flesh who breaks through the ontological barrier of estrangement between God and sinful humanity and ushers in a new possibility of intimate connection even in this life. Certeau argues that, in relation to Christian believers, Jesus is a founding “event” or ­“rupture” that can never be recaptured. Jesus’s historical life and death “permit” followers to strive to retain and embody him, and in this sense they are “not without” him (a phrase that Certeau borrows from Heidegger’s On Time and Being). However, insofar as Jesus is other, he is, on Certeau’s account, only ever an

70  Giard explains that Certeau’s purpose in writing “La rupture instautrice” (which appears in his La faibless de croire, pp. 187–226) was to clarify his theological method. See Giard, “Cherchant Dieu,” p. 22. 71 Certeau, La faibless de croire, p. 210.

134 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

irretrievably past desideratum that allows a limitless plurality of attempted yet impossible fidelities.72 The effects of this alterity-­focused way of thinking extend into Certeau’s trinitarian theology. He suggests that Christianity’s inevitable failures to embody Jesus, insofar as he is other, are similar to those that Jesus supposedly has in relation to his own founding other, the Father. Although Certeau acknowledges that, according to the gospels, the Father “speaks in him [i.e., Jesus],” Certeau posits a Lacanian norm that stipulates that, in both Jesus’s case and those of his disciples, “the relation to ‘the origin’ is a process of absence.” Certeau interprets the Son’s coming into the world not as a saving revelation but as a departure-­in-­loss from which other privative departures will ensue.73 Thus even though Christians would be like Jesus precisely in their distance from their origin, this formal likeness would not so much support the idea that Jesus has given them a means of access to experiential union with God as suggest that no such union is possible in human life even for Jesus. The features of divine incomprehensibility and experiential cruciformity in both Rahner’s and Balthasar’s accounts of the mysticism of ordinary life indicate that the grace of divine union in history is, even for them, far from a transparent, beatific phenomenon. Nevertheless, their avoidance of a universally privative theory of alterity leaves them more flexibility than Certeau allows himself to engage aspects of the Christian mystical tradition that show how, especially in Christ, the transcendent God makes divine life available to be known and loved. Christ is no mere symbol of inaccessible otherness for Rahner and Balthasar. On the contrary, he is a glorious revelation demonstrating that, despite the de­priv­ ations of the world, the self and the other—­including the wholly other God—­may become one. Christ teaches Rahner and Balthasar to hope that no forces of sep­ar­ ation and destruction, however powerful, can finally defeat the almighty unitive power that is divine love. These Rahnerian and Balthasarian counterpoints to Certeau’s Christologically impoverished theory of Christian faith are made explicit by a third major Catholic mystical theologian of the twentieth century who was also Certeau’s Jesuit mentor and friend: Henri de Lubac.74 The two were close during the period of Certeau’s Jesuit formation in Lyon, and even near the end of his life Certeau acknowledged his debts to de Lubac by characterizing The Mystic Fable as a sequel to de Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum.75 Yet Certeau’s Lacanian turn in the mid-­1960s and the seismic events of 1968 undermined any sense that Certeau would remain de Lubac’s

72 Certeau, La faibless de croire, pp. 211–26; Certeau, “How Is Christianity Thinkable Today?”; and Certeau, “Weakness of Believing.” See also Heidegger, On Time and Being, p. 16. 73 Certeau, La faibless de croire, pp. 218–19. 74 Dosse, Michel de Certeau, pp. 47–58 and Prevot, “Henri de Lubac.” 75 Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 1, p. 79.

Immanence and Alterity  135 theo­logic­al heir apparent.76 The text that proved most disconcerting to de Lubac was “La rupture instauratrice.” In the second volume of La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore (1981), de Lubac cites this essay in support of his charge that Certeau’s thought offers a “perfect model” of “neo-­joachimism.” To de Lubac, Certeau’s interpretation of Christ as a non-­revelatory figure of an inaccessible past and his embrace of practices of alterity disconnected from the church seem to mirror Joachim’s belief that the age of the Son would be superseded by a new age under the guidance of a non-­Christic, non-­ecclesial “Spirit.”77 However, to be fair to Certeau, he does not characterize the contemporary era as an apocalyptic stage of world historical fulfillment, in which the Spirit would make God present in a new way, but rather as a moment in which God, the One or the Other of desire—­whether we call this Christ or the Spirit or some other name—­ is lost and mourned. Christology is not replaced by pneumatology. Rather, both Christology and pneumatology share the fate of an attenuated mys­ tic­al theology that has been reduced to a mere subversive style. There is no Hegelian narration in Certeau that would suggest that humanity is at the end of history. When he mentions Pentecost as an event of linguistic plurality after the death of Jesus, he proposes no Spirit-­focused eschatology.78 For these reasons, the accusation of “neo-­joachimism” may be misleading, even with the qualifier “neo.” Nevertheless, de Lubac seems right to suggest that the sort of mystical theology about which he would have liked to write a book,79 which would have been centered on scripture, liturgy, and a “union with the tripersonal God of Christian revelation,”80 is disallowed as a contemporary possibility by Certeau. More recent theological readings of Certeau develop de Lubac’s line of critique. Graham Ward contends that Certeau’s work is theologically problematic insofar as it relies on an equivocal, dialectical relation between the same and the other instead of a more sacramental, analogical imagination, discernible in de Lubac’s writings, which would emphasize the church’s participation in the mystery of Christ. Johannes Hoff argues that, under the influence of Lacan, Certeau retains a de Lubacian sense of human beings’ natural desire for the infinite but deviates from de Lubac by ceasing to hold this natural desire in tension with supernatural grace. Brenna Moore suggests that the fissure between Certeau and de Lubac stems from different conceptions of history: whereas de Lubac envisions continuous developments from the Old to the New Testament, from scripture to ­trad­ition, and from the past to the present, Certeau perceives ruptures and

76  Certeau embraces the cultural upheavals of 1968 in Capture of Speech, pp. 1–76. 77  De Lubac, La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore, pp. 447–9. 78 Certeau, La faibless de croire, p. 218. 79  De Lubac discusses his never-­realized plans to write a book about mystical theology in At the Service of the Church, p. 113. 80  De Lubac, “Mysticism and Mystery,” p. 39.

136 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

discontinuities.81 These arguments reveal that, even if one does not voice the charge of neo-­joachimism, one can raise questions about Certeau’s thought by contrasting it with de Lubac’s more sacramental, grace-­focused, and traditionally Catholic mystical theology. Among critics of Certeau who share de Lubac’s concerns, Frederick Bauerschmidt does the most to argue that there are salvageable theological insights in Certeau. He relies on two later essays: “The Look: Nicholas of Cusa” (1984) and “White Ecstasy” (1983).82 These texts focus on an all-­absorptive divine seeing that would be simultaneously other and not-­other (non-­aliud), transcending the dichotomies between the seeing subject and the seen object. While “The Look” locates this idea in an exegesis of Cusa’s De visione Dei, particularly in the preface that instructs monks to notice how the gaze of an icon reaches all those who move in its vicinity, “White Ecstasy” tells a fable about a fictional monk, Simeon, who receives a visitor from a foreign land called “Panoptie” and seeks to teach this visitor about the monastic quest for such all-­absorptive divine seeing. Bauerschmidt is right to note that these texts break from any one-­sided emphasis on alterity, which has been at the root of many Christian theological objections to Certeau. However, theological problems remain. The Cusa essay is a work of history, similar in style to Certeau’s other historical accounts of Christian mystics such as Surin, Teresa, Ignatius, and so on. If it is possible to bring the mystical theological insights of all of these figures into the present without a distortive philosophical transposition, then Cusa need not be singled out. He can simply join the chorus. But if this is not possible, because we are mired in a secular culture in which God is lost, then there is no reason to grant Cusa an exemption. Furthermore, crucial to the interpretation of “White Ecstasy” is the question of the identity of the unnamed visitor from Panoptie. Might not this character represent a scholar, such as Certeau, traveling from a modern place of panoptic rationalism into the historical spaces of monks and mystics in search of a desired other? If this in­ter­ pret­ation is sound, then the last lines of the text convey a sense of impossibility, melancholic resignation, and bleak irony: “I have known this in my country, said the visitor at last. . . . Everything there is already overcome by clarity. I traveled hoping to find a place, a temple, a hermitage, to house vision. . . . But your misgivings send me back to my shadowless plain. There is no other end of the world.” Seeking the other, perhaps seeking God, Certeau is thrown back into the very conditions of a world that he knows all too well, a world in which limitless sight and visibility have yielded no real beatitude. Although Bauerschmidt recognizes

81  Ward, “Michel de Certeau’s ‘Spiritual Spaces’ ”; Hoff, “Mysticism, Ecclesiology, and the Body of Christ,” p. 94; and Moore, “How to Awaken the Dead.” 82  Bauerschmidt, “Otherness of God”; Bauerschmidt, “Abrahamic Voyage”; Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 2, pp. 23–70; and Certeau, “White Ecstasy.”

Immanence and Alterity  137 “a tragic dimension” to Certeau’s theology in these texts, his positive theo­logic­al evaluation of them seems to underestimate their consistency with the rest of Certeau’s corpus.83 Nonetheless, Bauerschmidt’s appropriation of the Cusa essay raises the im­port­ ant possibility of retaining more from Certeau’s historical studies of Christian mysticism than a mere content-­less style. One can—­why not?—continue to learn from the theology in such sources and from their various ways of presenting the grace of divine union. Moreover, Bauerschmidt draws the following ethically significant conclusion from his reading of Certeau: “although God is not the Other [because God is also transcendently non-­other], it is only through the other [i.e., the neighbor, the foreigner, the plurality of a community] that I can encounter God.”84 This relational requirement for accessing God, this clear sense that the mysticism of ordinary life cannot happen without others, is the primary insight that Certeau offers contemporary mystical theology and the principal way in which he helpfully counterbalances Henry. In “La rupture instauratrice,” Certeau persuasively argues that one cannot follow Jesus without joining with other disciples, who will have different gifts and different ways of speaking, interpreting, and acting.85 To receive the divine it is necessary not only to seek a living body for this presence in oneself, in the manner of Henry’s account of “flesh,” but also to seek relationships, communities, and diverse social bodies in which this presence might appear. If a theological mysticism of ordinary life could be recovered from Certeau, it would be, as he suggests in an early theological work, L’étranger (1969), virtually indistinguishable from a practice of radical hospitality “to the prisoner, to the refugee, to the poor, or to the stranger.”86 Elsewhere he clarifies: “This work of hospitality in regard to the stranger is the very form of Christian language.”87 Union with God would demand a departure from one’s narcissistic self-­enclosure, a life in intimate relation with the oppressed, and a generous welcoming of those who are unknown—­like the resurrected Jesus on the road to Emmaus who was greeted warmly prior to being recognized (Luke 24) and like the needy in whom Christ secretly dwells (Matt. 25).88 Certeau’s prioritization of alterity does not foreclose a thinking of prayer. On the contrary, it enables him to appreciate its external manifestations. The fact that Christian prayer takes place as a “discourse of bodily gestures” suggests to him that, although the prayerful may find God within, their God also remains beyond, ever greater, above, outside—­such that they are inclined to orient their physical bodies symbolically toward this transcendent divine listener.89 If one embraces Surin’s practice of prayer not merely as a historical datum but as a model for 83  Certeau, “White Ecstasy,” p. 158 and Bauerschmidt, “Otherness of God,” p. 360. 84  Bauerschmidt, “Otherness of God,” p. 356. 85 Certeau, La faibless de croire, pp. 214–16. 86 Certeau, L’étranger, p. 16. 87 Certeau, La faiblesse croire, p. 259. 88 Certeau, L’étranger, pp. 14 and 204. 89 Certeau, La faibless de croire, pp. 31–40.

138 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

contemporary mystical life, then one may come to understand, thanks to Certeau’s research, that prayer is not only addressed verbally to the other but offered in love for the other. Oneness with Christ may mean, as it does for Surin—­ and as it does for Speyr and Balthasar too—­willingly entering into the hells that others suffer, offering one’s body as a vessel for their healing, accepting torment if this means that others are set free. Surin’s prayer is not mere auto-­affection but rather extroversion and kenosis. And yet, when the work is done, his prayer becomes a struggle through voice, words, and movement to return to himself, to inner peace and joy. To read Henry well, one must also read Certeau. And to discover the mystical theology in Certeau, one must let the mystical theology of his sources come back and find new life in quotidian bodies and relationships. These nested forms of reading would encourage a mysticism of ordinary life not unlike Rahner’s, though enriched by a greater array of “others”—including actual women, including the so-­called “mad,” including persons deemed “nonbeings” by their societies, including their real voices and practices, however mundane or hidden they may be. Such a mysticism of ordinary life would not simply mourn the absence of God, as if this absence were an unavoidable and universal fact of psychosomatic existence, but rather seek the God who may still live and be experienced in such encounters and relationships. Lacan would not overdetermine it. It would be an invitation to discover grace through practices of self-­awareness and hospitality. This mysticism of ordinary life is what Christian theology might become if it learns from postmodern philosophical interpretations of its own mystical sources while retaining its Christological, pneumatological, and communal bearings.

4 The Other Within Constructs of Mystical Femininity in Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva

The “French feminists” Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva construct femininity—­ that is, the meaning of “woman”—in ways that blend and reconstitute the postmodern mystical styles of immanence and alterity discussed in Chapter  3. To some extent, their accounts of such mystical femininity focus on prenatal and early childhood connections with the mother that, though forgotten, remain operative in the psyches of adult women and men. The unconscious memory of the mother is an inescapable site of mysticism, or something like it, buried deep inside each subject, carrying both joyous, life-­affirming and sorrowful, annihilating possibilities. This “other within” generates feelings similar to those that mys­ tic­al theology attributes to a supernatural agent: the bliss of union with one’s source and the excruciating desire for it in its absence, the indistinguishability of self and other and the pain of their separation, the unnamable fullness and unbearable emptiness of life. However, Irigaray and Kristeva do not merely construct mystical femininity as a return to, or return of, the maternal origin of life. More positively, they envision a process of women’s becoming; a path toward greater freedom, creativity, and flourishing; a therapeutic practice for body, soul, and society. Irigaray and Kristeva do not think that women need to become mothers in any literal or fig­ura­tive sense in order to access an empowering mystical proximity to the divine. Indeed, to the extent that motherhood has been used as a patriarchal instrument for the phallic reproduction of the same, Irigaray and Kristeva argue that it may alienate women from the divine other whom they can and should discover within themselves. The other within, therefore, is not only the mother. It is, in a more liberative sense, a cultivated intimacy with the divine that enables women to be infinitely more than the helpmates of male subjectivity. Irigaray and Kristeva formulate their accounts of mystical femininity in strikingly different ways. Irigaray construes mystical femininity as both antithesis and antidote to a toxic masculine culture that has afforded woman no meaning of her own. She seeks to restore equal dignity and relative autonomy to each side of her binary account of sexual difference, so that each gender can develop to its full potential. By contrast, Kristeva emphasizes that all human beings are caught in an

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism. Andrew Prevot, Oxford University Press. © Andrew Prevot 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866967.003.0005

140 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

internal tug of war between the body’s semiotic drives and the prohibitions of the symbolic order and, therefore, between the feminine and the masculine, roughly as Lacan understands them. Although Kristeva believes both women and men are trying to find their footing as subjects-­in-­process between these poles of their identity, she suggests that women have a greater experiential sensitivity to this dialectical process and that one woman in particular—­Teresa of Avila—­achieves a near-­optimal synthesis. Given these differences between two of the most-­ cited representatives of “French feminism,” one must acknowledge that it is far from a univocal ­discourse.1 Indeed, this term is problematic in more ways than one.2 Irigaray’s and Kristeva’s relations to France warrant some commentary, given their association with other national identities—­Belgium and Italy in Irigaray’s case, Bulgaria in Kristeva’s—­ though they do mostly write in French. Their supposed feminism is the more questionable part. Neither wholeheartedly embraces the label “feminist,”3 and both subscribe to a form of (not merely “strategic”)4 gender essentialism that many feminists find objectionable, perhaps even disqualifying. Nonetheless, compared with other theorists of the mysticism of ordinary life we have con­ sidered (Rahner, Balthasar, Speyr, Henry, and Certeau), one could safely say that both Irigaray and Kristeva are more feminist. They think critically about the meaning of gender in male-­dominated societies, even if not critically enough, and they celebrate the achievement of women’s subjectivity. Following a more or less chronological order, this chapter clarifies the roles that the Christian mystical tradition plays in Irigaray’s and Kristeva’s (somewhat) feminist intellectual endeavors. Although both thinkers were raised Christian, neither writes explicitly as a Christian theologian. Irigaray talks about losing her faith and then regaining a very different version of it, whose Christianness might be debated. Kristeva confesses to being an atheist but a very particular one who finds much to praise in Christianity, arguably more than Irigaray does. Like Henry and Certeau, Irigaray and Kristeva draw extensively on Christian mysticism when doing their philosophical work. Although they critique it as an oppressive or delusional tradition, they also revere it as a storehouse of images and concepts that they can use for their own purposes, which may or may not be agreeable to Christian theologians.

1  For the mystically related arguments of other “French feminists,” see Hollywood, “Mysticism, Death, and Desire.” 2  For critiques of the term “French feminism,” see Joy, O’Grady, and Poxon, eds., French Feminists on Religion, pp. 1–12 and Meltzer, “Transfeminisms.” 3 Irigaray, Thinking the Difference (1989), p. xiii and Kristeva, Revolt, She Said (2002), p. 29. 4  On “strategic essentialism,” see Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology, pp. 22–48.

The Other Within  141

Remembered Origins Early Irigaray: Mysticisms in Conflict Irigaray’s early engagements with mysticism occur in her “mimetic” readings of the Western philosophical tradition from Plato to Freud in Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) and related essays in This Sex Which Is Not One (1977). Through a series of imitative and powerfully interrogative studies, she uncovers a persistent “phallocentrism” at the heart of occidental metaphysics. In part, her claim is that male philosophers’ sexual desires, revolving around their penises, have determined the content of their thinking more than they would like to admit. Although she knows that, for Lacan, the phallus is a signifier in, and of, discourse, not merely a body part, she also knows that his use of this image is not merely arbitrary.5 This signifier of Western language and culture represents the male sex organ and its interests. What are these interests, exactly? In addition to carnal pleasure, she argues that the phallus represents a more fundamental desire to possess, and become one with, the source of one’s being. The phallus is an “emblem of man’s appropriative relation to the origin.”6 To the extent that this origin is very precisely one’s mother, phallic desire is an incestuous desire. It gives rise to the Oedipus complex, which is supposed to be resolved for the young boy by the threat of castration and the sublimation of his desires into socially ac­cept­able forms. Irigaray is dissatisfied by this standard psychoanalytic solution to the Oedipus complex in part because it prioritizes a male perspective. However, she also objects that, in addition to incest, there is another crime committed by phallic desire, even or especially in its sublimated forms of philosophy, theology, science, and psy­cho­ analy­sis. This is the crime of debasing, nullifying, instrumentalizing, and in a sense “killing” the mother, reducing her to the nothingness of a passive receptacle of male agency. This symbolic matricide takes many forms: Plato’s chora, Aristotle’s hyle, Plotinus’s materia, Descartes’s res extensa, Kant’s and Hegel’s Natur, Freud’s “dark continent,” Lacan’s “not all.” Psychoanalysis, whether in its Freudian or Lacanian variations, does not mitigate this problem. It exemplifies it. Irigaray argues that, throughout the history of Western philosophy, there is an almost forgotten memory of the mother that is repressed and refracted through elaborate systems of speculation or what she calls “specularization” (mirroring). To compensate for his denial of his mother’s generative contribution to his existence, the phallic philosopher constructs a fictional series of mirrors that purportedly show that his mind is a reflection of an exalted divine source (and  vice versa), that the two are in their deepest essence the same, and that 5 Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 61 and Lacan, “Signification of the Phallus.” 6 Irigaray, Speculum, p. 42, italics in original.

142 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

therefore his existence is a (possibly perfectible) image of an abstract ideal: the Cause, the One, Truth, Being, Goodness, Reason, Spirit—­in short, the God of the  philosophers. Irigaray sums up this phallic strategy by declaring, “Finally the fiction reigns of a simple, indivisible, ideal origin.” The procreative, bodily copulation of parents is replaced by the philosophical copula: the “is” as such. Irigaray notes that this ideal source of all things, in order to maintain its oneness in multiplicity, must ironically be “mirrored at least twice.” After Plato, truth becomes a “trinity” composed of pure simplicity, intelligible forms that mirror it, and concrete particulars that mirror them. The phallic philosopher posits a theology and ontology, which together form a logos that is supposed to ground the self, hence an “onto-­theology” in Heidegger’s sense.7 Although this metaphysical fantasy of sameness and resemblance conceals the material reality of one’s intrauterine gestation, it never does so completely. Traces of the mother hide in philosophy’s metaphors and dialectics. These traces do not exonerate philosophy. They give evidence of its symbolic matricide and its association of the mother with nothingness and death. This speculative operation lays the foundations for a world in which women’s lives will not matter except as tools of male self-­gratification and self-­replication. It turns women into half-­dead objects, depriving them of any culturally recognized paths toward their own subjectivity. It denies any meaningful future or happiness to the precocious “little girl,” who causes problems for Freud’s gender theory and in whom Irigaray perceives an image of herself.8 Irigaray’s critique of the phallocentrism of Western metaphysics can be read as a critique of a particular sort of mystical masculinity (is this the only possible kind of mystical masculinity?) according to which the philosophical mind would unite with its ideal source and forsake its maternal, bodily, and earthly origins. The Neo-­Platonic contemplative ascent to the One that is appropriated and revised by Dionysian and Augustinian traditions of Christian mystical theology is one of Irigaray’s major targets here. She argues that the post-­Cartesian reproduction of the universe on the basis of the ego cogito intensifies a phallocentric practice of mirroring that was already at work in antiquity.9 Therefore, Christian theologians (like Marion) who may echo some of her concerns about modern transcendental philosophy’s egocentrism and idealism do not thereby render themselves immune to her more radical interrogations, which start much farther back, even prior to Socrates, and which implicate much of the classical philosophy presupposed by early Christian writers and their medieval and postmodern inheritors.

7 Irigaray, Speculum, pp. 166, 275, and 355. See also Heidegger, “Onto-­Theo-­Logical Constitution.” 8 Irigaray, Speculum, pp. 22, 24, 133, 228, and 354. 9 Irigaray, Speculum, p. 182. For a study of Irigaray’s interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory, see Miller, Diotima at the Barricades, pp. 68–103.

The Other Within  143 Yet Irigaray does not repudiate mysticism or even mystical theology per se. Rather, she critiques one apparently dominant version of it and starts to construct her own mystical alternative, a mystical femininity that would recover the memory of the mother and give women a path toward their own subjectivity.10 She contrasts a view of God that seems only to reflect a phallic desire for the possession of the origin with a different experience of God that would lie hidden for woman in “the indefinite possibilities of her jouissance.” She differentiates the abstract infinity of being that is contemplated by philosophers from the joy of a bodily self-­ touch that more decisively exceeds comprehension and may in some paradoxical (because invisible) way better “reflect” the divine. She suggests that women have their own concave mirrors, which transform light into fire, sight into touch, and which result in different types of speculation regarding the source and destiny of things. “Their ‘God’ is quite other, as is their pleasure.”11 Irigaray’s understanding of this other God, and this other possibility of union with God, partly comes from her reading of certain Christian mystics, including women such as Angela of Foligno, Teresa of Avila, and several unnamed others (does Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls hide in the background here?).12 Irigaray describes their mysticism as “the only place in the history of the West in which woman speaks and acts so publicly.” However, her emphasis on female speech and activity does not prevent her from drawing on male mystics such as Ruysbroeck, Eckhart, and John of the Cross, who, in order to access the divine, imitate woman and “follow ‘her’ lead.”13 The chapter of Speculum called “La Mystérique,” in which these allusions occur, does not provide a detailed historical interpretation of particular mystics, as one finds in Speyr and Balthasar, but rather an eidetic (or mimetic) reduction of mystical experience: an itinerary of the soul. Nevertheless, its features of self-­surrendering love and cruciformity resemble those in Speyr and Balthasar’s mystical theology. The journey begins with a passage beyond sight, reason, and self-­identity into epistemic darkness. What the soul finds in this dark ecstasy is no mere abstract unknowing but an experience, a touch, which brings an oscillation of un­speak­ able torments and delights. Not only the understanding but also the will, with all its projects, calculations, and values, is enveloped in this secret, deep, fiery, and watery abyss. This is a hidden place of mutual self-­surrender and intimate union between the virginal soul and the kenotic God: “the ‘soul’ surrenders only to one who also freely offers the self in all its nakedness”; only to the “ ‘God’ [who] . . . has renounced modes and attributes”; and only “in the abolition of all power, all ­having, all being, that is founded elsewhere and otherwise than in this embrace.”

10  Irigaray’s thought here inspires Beverly Lanzetta’s proposed “via feminina.” See Lanzetta, Radical Wisdom, p. 22. 11 Irigaray, Speculum, pp. 144–5, 231, and 236. 12 Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, p. 195. 13 Irigaray, Speculum, p. 191.

144 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

God and the soul are comingled in a “cauldron of identification,” in which “I am to you as you are to me.” They mirror each other with a paradoxical kind of invisible, tactile mirroring.14 The mystical itinerary sketched in “La Mystérique” becomes more explicitly Christological at this point. The feminine soul identifies in excessive and sometimes punishing ways with the crucified Christ and his bleeding wounds. The question of what such identification means both for Irigaray’s account of mysticism and her gender theory is complex. Amy Hollywood argues that Irigaray’s “Cosi Fan Tutti,” which is included in This Sex Which Is Not One, shows her departing from “La Mystérique” in at least two significant respects. First, in “Cosi Fan Tutti,” Irigaray places greater importance on the female body as a site of mys­ tic­al jouissance, moving away from the more flexible feminine subject position of discourse or performance implied by the inclusion of male mystics in “La Mystérique.” This shift toward the female body allows Irigaray to resist Lacan’s negative, phallocentric definition of woman as lack, which he develops in his 1972–3 seminar Encore, a definition that renders women’s bodies and the particular “geography” of their pleasures irrelevant. But this shift also moves Irigaray one step closer to gender essentialism, insofar as it suggests that gender must be tied to binary, anatomical difference. Second, Hollywood argues that after “Cosi Fan Tutti” Irigaray articulates a mystical femininity that avoids “the sacrificial logic of Christianity,” whereas in “La Mystérique” she “participates in a phallic rhetoric that sees the vagina as a wound” and that elides femininity with cruciformity.15 On Hollywood’s reading, the Irigaray of Speculum appears beholden to a paschal construal of Christian mysticism and femaleness, for better and worse.16 But exactly what sort of “participation” in “phallic rhetoric” and “sacrificial logic” does “La Mystérique” endorse? The text displays some interesting nuance on this point. In one passage, Irigaray reproaches the mystic for neglecting the dignity of the body: “Her ‘soul’ is at fault vis-­à-­vis the body because in its elevation and revelation of her, it seems not to have understood that physical ills are always an obstacle to the highest good.” Here Irigaray states in her own voice, or at least with critical distance from her sources, that bodily affliction is an impediment—­not a means—­to “the highest good”; that is, the joy of divine union.

14 Irigaray, Speculum, pp. 196–7. 15 Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, pp. 203–5; Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, pp. 86–105; and Lacan, Encore. 16  Hollywood is ambivalent on this point. On the one hand, she worries that Irigaray’s later rejection of this cruciform aspect may undervalue the at once Christian-­mystical and Lacanian construction of a subjectivity that is “not all,” that accepts its vulnerability and does not indulge in totalitarian fantasies, including about the meaning of gender (Sensible Ecstasy, p. 206). On the other hand, Hollywood shares the later Irigaray’s concerns about the “sacrificial logic of Christianity,” especially insofar as its violence targets women’s bodies. We can see this in Hollywood’s account of the difference between Beatrice of Nazareth’s treatise and the more crucifying, male-­authored vita (Sensible Ecstasy, pp. 247–53).

The Other Within  145 This is an argument against brutal forms of corporal asceticism or masochism. In a similar vein, Irigaray distances the contemplation of Christ’s passion from any sort of sadistic valorization of pain. Imitating the voice of the mystic, she writes, “And if in the sight of the nails and the spear piercing the body of the Son, I drink in a joy that no word can ever express, let no one conclude hastily that I take pleasure in his sufferings.” The value is not in Christ’s agony but in the loving purpose of such divine kenosis, such radical incarnation. Irigaray continues, “If the Word was made flesh in this way, and to this extent, it can only have been to make me [become] God in my jouissance, which can at last be recognized.”17 In “La Mystérique,” therefore, Irigaray neither applauds nor denounces Christian mysticism because of its supposed sacrificial logic. Rather, she gives an interpretation of Christian mysticism, to some degree even including its identification with the crucified Christ, which distinguishes it from such sacrificial logic and instead associates it (at its best) with the divinizing motives of the incarnation and with a holistic, mutual, and jubilant experience of divine-­and-­human intimacy. Already in this early text, Irigaray does not construct mystical fem­in­in­ ity as a path of destruction but as a relational opportunity for the woman (and the man who is “like” her) both to love herself and to receive love from God. With the last line of the text she emphasizes this point: “The one doesn’t rule out the other.”18 We are not far here from Rahner’s sense of a direct proportion between grace and human flourishing. There can be no question that, at this point in Irigaray’s career, she attributes this liberating possibility to Christian mysticism, even while contending that the  classical and modern philosophy on which the Christian tradition relies is not  only phallocentric but also a kind of mysticism, a deadly mysticism of the ­phallus.19 Therefore, the fight for women’s subjectivity going forward will not be waged for or against mysticism but between mysticisms, and the Christianness of any given mysticism will not be a sufficient basis for either approval or disapproval. More precise questions about its relation to the phallic desire will need to be asked. What about the identity of “woman” in this early work? Is Speculum gender essentialist? To the extent that Irigaray avoids this charge here, as some contend,20 it is because she writes about “woman” using discursive methods similar to those found in mystical theology. Analyzing the language games of Christian mystics, Denys Turner distinguishes two strategies of self-­subverting speech: a litany of negations so thoroughgoing that it negates itself (as in Dionysius’s Mystical Theology and The Cloud of Unknowing) and a positive practice of naming that

17 Irigaray, Speculum, pp. 198 and 200, both my emphasis. 18 Irigaray, Speculum, p. 202. 19 Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 67. 20  For efforts to distinguish an earlier, less essentialist phase of Irigaray’s work from a later, more essentialist phase, see Schwab, “Reading Irigaray (and Her Readers).”

146 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

introduces such an excessive proliferation of images that it overwhelms one’s efforts at comprehension (as in Dionysius’s Divine Names and Julian’s Showings).21 Both strategies are discernible in Speculum’s discussion of “woman.” The first, which involves a surfeit of denials, occurs in passages such as the following: “Woman is neither open nor closed. She is indefinite, in-­finite, form is never complete in her. She is not infinite but neither is she a unit(y), such as letter, number, figure in a series, proper noun, unique object (in a) world of the senses, simple ideality in an intelligible whole, entity of a foundation, etc.”22 Here properties are not only denied of “woman.” A discussion of her prompts the questioning of the naming power of language. Should this hieratic dismantling of language be reserved for God, in keeping with Dionysius’s theological intentions? Interestingly, Turner makes no such restriction. Instead, citing Eckhart’s intuition regarding the essential union of God and the soul, Turner calls for an “apophatic anthropology.” His point is that language cannot adequately determine the meaning of an embodied existence insofar as this existence is (united with the) divine.23 The second strategy, in which a multiplication of images makes conceptual grasp impossible, can be found in Irigaray’s description of the female body: “Body, breasts, pubis, clitoris, labia, vulva, vagina, neck of the uterus, womb . . . and this nothing that already gives pleasure by setting them apart from each other: all these foil any attempt at reducing sexual multiplicity to some proper noun, to some proper meaning, to some concept.”24 This second, descriptively cataphatic but performatively apophatic strategy of pluralization does not seem as effective as the first in overcoming the ontological pretenses of language. Although this way of speaking does not allow one to reduce the female body to a single object, it does associate it with a set of images—­precisely the most dynamic, open, and “fluid”25 ones—­and this still gives a kind of definition, a way to distinguish “her” from “him,” with constant reference to types and parts of bodies, which are supposed to affect how one lives. This would not be a phallocentric gender essentialism. It would revolve around the plural and amorphous female body. But it would nonetheless seem capable of functioning like a gender essentialism to the extent that it legitimizes gendered norms of speech and behavior. Although the apophatic power of a mystical theology and anthropology that Irigaray begins to channel in Speculum could disrupt her trajectory toward gender essentialism, what happens instead, as we shall see, is that she conforms mysticism to her gender essentialism without acknowledging—­as Speyr and Balthasar similarly fail to do—­the incompatibility of these commitments.

21 Turner, Darkness of God, p. 34. 22 Irigaray, Speculum, p. 229. 23 Turner, Darkness of God, p. 168. Michael Sells draws on Eckhart and Porete to make a similar apophatic critique of gender categories in Mystical Languages of Unsaying, pp. 180–205. 24 Irigaray, Speculum, p. 233. 25 Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, pp. 106–18.

The Other Within  147

Early Kristeva: Dialectical Tensions Two of Kristeva’s early works, Revolution in Poetic Language and About Chinese Women, appear in the same year as Speculum: 1974. They show that Kristeva shares Irigaray’s interest in studying the place of mysticism and femininity in the Western intellectual tradition and its contemporary reconfigurations. These works reclaim the mother as the origin of the psyche’s signifying powers (its “­signifiance” [sic]) and thereby, like Speculum, offer at least some resistance to phallocentrism. However, this resistance takes a different form in Kristeva. Rather than reject the patriarchal order of philosophy, theology, language, and culture in hopes of installing a woman- and jouissance-­centered alternative, Kristeva ­the­or­izes this very practice of “rejection” as a maternal operation and expresses her ambivalence toward it. She does not propose another world oriented by the fem­in­ine. She proposes a dialectical process within the gendered world as she knows it. She strives to hold the tensions between mother and father, pleasure and law, body and language, art and religion, the semiotic and the symbolic, the chora and the thetic, and so on.26 Although it may be tempting to extol the liberative potential in Kristeva’s ­theory of the semiotic, celebrating it as an infusion of a feminine dimension of language that is rhythmic, musical, playful, and subversive,27 this is only one side of the story for Kristeva. She also issues grave warnings about the semiotic, arguing that it reactivates oral and anal phases of early childhood development that, if left unchecked by the subject–­object distinction of the mirror stage (Lacan) and the Oedipal fear of castration (Freud), may inhibit the stabilization of the ego and generate dangerously regressive practices of sadism or masochism.28 Therefore, while Kristeva welcomes the use of the semiotic by avant-­garde literary figures such as “Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Joyce, and Artaud,” suggesting that their texts do for the subject what political revolutions do for society, she also insists that the meaningfulness of such semiotic irruption, and any hope of productive trans­ form­ation through it, depends on the strength of the symbolic order. Without its norms, such literature risks devolving into “a pulverizing irrationalism . . . ‘romantic’ folly, pure madness,” or “a mystical ‘inner experience’.”29 The last phrase, “mystical ‘inner experience’,” is a clear allusion to Bataille’s text by the same name. Unlike Hollywood,30 Kristeva treats Bataille as a cautionary

26  For a discussion of these Kristevan terms, see Grosz, Sexual Subversions, pp. 42–63. 27  On the promise of the semiotic, see Anne-­Marie Smith, Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable, pp. 14–29; Fisher, “Kristeva’s Chora and the Subject of Postmodern Ethics”; and Margaroni, “Lost Foundation.” 28 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, pp. 24–28, 46–8, 63, and 148–51. 29 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, pp. 15, 82, and 182. 30  Hollywood offers a sympathetic interpretation of Bataille’s atheological mysticism in Sensible Ecstasy, pp. 60–110.

148 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

tale. She sees his orality and anality, his absorptive ecstasies and eviscerating ­torments as hallmarks of a pathological mysticism that has been divorced from the­ology: a stylized return to the early stages of mother–­child attachment and detachment. To be clear, Kristeva the atheist does not think Bataille needs to believe in God in order to avoid a descent into some sort of psychosis. However, at a minimum, she does think that, in order for his text to be significant, whether subjectively or socially, it needs to participate, as it does to some degree, in a ­linguistic structure that checks and sustains its negativity and maintains some ­differentiation of subject and object, signifier and signified. If Bataille goes too far toward the fetishizing of absorption and loss, Kristeva argues that other thinkers such as Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Derrida, Feuerbach, Marx, and even Lacan (with his emphasis on the mirror stage) do not go quite far enough. They remain too certain about the constitution of the subject, too disinterested in the drives that emanate from the (m)other within, and too idealist in their strategies of negativity. Although they engage the powers of “rejection,” they do so in ways that are insufficiently materialist, feminine, or ­mys­tic­al (these being virtually synonymous in this text).31 Revolution in Poetic Language locates religion, monotheism, and Christianity on the castrating side of Kristeva’s dialectic. They represent “the prohibition of jouissance by language,” the founding “sacrifice” that violently repressed a still more ancient violence (think Freud’s Totem and Taboo), the paternal law that makes society possible. By contrast, this text locates mysticism on the other, maternal side of Kristeva’s dialectic. She identifies mysticism with avant-­garde literature’s “introduction of jouissance into and through language.”32 This gendered division of a structurally masculine Christianity from a structurally fem­in­ ine mysticism may seem to render Christian mysticism unthinkable. However, another possibility is that this apparent contradiction at the heart of Christian mysticism will allow it to become a vehicle for the very dialectical synthesis that Kristeva wants. This possibility starts to come into view in About Chinese Women when Kristeva briefly discusses two Christian mystics: Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena. Kristeva claims that there are “two ways by which a woman may participate in [the] symbolic Christian order,” namely an ecstatic way exemplified by Teresa and a melancholic way exemplified by Catherine. Although at this point Kristeva remains unconvinced that either approach embodies the precise dialectic she wants, because they supposedly remain too forgetful of the mother, she returns to these very mystics in later works and, at least in Teresa’s case, revises her assessment. In About Chinese Women, she explains: “In the case of the ecstatic, the mother is denied and her attributes are displaced onto the symbolic father. 31 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, pp. 109–46. 32 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, pp. 74, 80, and 82.

The Other Within  149 The  woman then submits herself to a sexually undifferentiated androgynous being.” Teresa’s praise of the divine father’s “breasts” illustrates such displacement. By contrast, “in the case of the melancholic . . . submission to the father is experienced as punishment, pain, and suffering inflicted upon the heterogeneous body.” In lieu of a nurturing divine androgyne, Catherine surrenders herself to an unambiguously paternal figure, who seems to demand bodily mortifications. However, a neat division of the ecstatic and the melancholic is not easy to sustain: “often evidence of both types exists in one act or individual.”33 How strange, then, is Christian mysticism? How illegible vis-­ à-­ vis expectations regarding gender? Kristeva does not tarry on this question yet.

New Beginnings In the early 1980s, Irigaray and Kristeva reshape their accounts of mystical fem­in­ in­ity by searching for the deepest and most anterior conditions of its possibility. Irigaray accompanies Nietzsche and Heidegger in their journeys back to pre-­ Socratic Greek culture and its experience of (mother) nature. At the same time, she excavates Christian origins (Genesis, the New Testament) to rethink the meaning of grace. While these adventures carry Irigaray beyond psychoanalysis in any strict sense, Kristeva’s contemporaneous strivings take her deeper into the psychoanalytic description of primordial conditions of union and separation, self and other, love and hatred prior to the Oedipus complex and even the mirror stage.34 Without abandoning Freud or Lacan, Kristeva offers her own account of these conditions, connecting them with the perhaps startling therapeutic value of Christian mysticism. These new beginnings sought and attained by Irigaray and Kristeva merit a closer look by Christian mystical theologians.

Irigaray on Nature and Grace Many scholars who write about Irigaray’s views on religion prioritize her essay “Divine Women” (1984). Her references to Ludwig Feuerbach in this text lead many to read her as a Feuerbachian projectionist. Irigaray supposedly wants women to “project” their own gods or divine ideals. According to Grace Jantzen, “what Irigaray advocates . . . is that women begin deliberately to project the divine according to our gender, as men have always done according to theirs.”35

33 Kristeva, About Chinese Women, p. 27. 34  On the difference between Irigaray’s and Kristeva’s relations to psychoanalysis, see Grosz, Sexual Subversions, p. 103. 35 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 15.

150 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Elizabeth Grosz makes a similar argument, though she clarifies that Irigaray’s goal is to project a new kind of divine for both sexes.36 Other commentators such as Serene Jones, Ellen Armour, Tina Beattie, and Amy Hollywood similarly read Irigaray as a Feuerbachian projectionist but critique her for it. They contend that Irigaray’s “uncritical acceptance of the Feuerbachian claim that religion is a ­projection” (Hollywood) implicates her argument for a female divine in the very “economy of sameness” (Armour) she had so successfully uncovered in Speculum.37 Jones and Beattie emphasize that this causes problems for Christian theology: Feuerbachian projectionism undermines divine transcendence, whether conceived in Barthian (Jones) or Balthasarian (Beattie) terms. It is a religious naturalism, Pelagianism, or Prometheanism that reduces grace to a product of human will.38 But is Irigaray’s thinking about nature and grace this straightforwardly reductive? In addition to its adverse consequences for Christian theology, Armour and Hollywood emphasize that such Feuerbachian projectionism unhelpfully moves Irigaray closer to gender essentialism by positing an ideal (divine) womanhood that conceals material, historical, and psychological differences among women. Nevertheless, Armour and Hollywood also maintain that other, later Heideggerian—­ that is, poetic, post-­ metaphysical, and mystical—­ motifs in Irigaray’s writings of the early 1980s complicate her apparent allegiance to Feuerbach. Armour draws on Irigaray’s The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (1983), while Hollywood connects Irigaray’s Silesian meditation on the whyless rose in “Belief Itself ” (1980) both with Heidegger and with her own sympathetic readings of Bataille and Lacan. Interpreted in this way, Irigaray contributes to an understanding of a mystical union between divinity and materiality that is conceived beyond metaphysics and, therefore, without gender essentialism. A Heideggerian Irigaray can help one theorize a “sensible transcendental” (Irigaray’s term, repeated by Armour) or a “sensible ecstasy” (Hollywood’s term) that does not fall prey to Speculum’s mimetic deconstruction of ontotheology.39 Although Armour and Hollywood shift the conversation in an auspicious direction, two points would strengthen their arguments and help address the Christian theological concerns raised by Jones and Beattie. First, despite the apparent consensus on the matter, Irigaray does not straightforwardly endorse Feuerbachian projectionism in “Divine Women.” The meaning of this text is more complex. Second, Irigaray’s most theologically significant work from this period (roughly 1980 to 1985) is not “Divine Women” but Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (1980).40 This innovative response to Nietzsche, which owes something 36 Grosz, Sexual Subversions, p. 152. 37 Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, p. 211 and Armour, “Divining Differences,” p. 30. 38  Jones, “This God Which Is Not One,” p. 139 and Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, p. 97. 39 Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, pp. 220–9 and Armour, “Divining Differences,” pp. 29–40. 40  Some Irigaray scholars recognize the theological importance of Marine Lover. See, for example, Alison Martin, Luce Irigaray and the Question of the Divine, pp. 169–217 and Rine, “Maria Redux.”

The Other Within  151 to Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche as the culminating point of metaphysics-­ as-­nihilism but goes beyond it,41 establishes the elemental theory of nature, the crit­ic­al engagement with ancient mythology, and the creative reinterpretation of Christianity that Irigaray elaborates in Elemental Passions (1982); The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (1983); An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984); and several chapters of Sexes and Genealogies such as “Body Against Body” (1980), “Belief Itself ” (1980), and “Divine Women” (1984). All of these works reflect the groundbreaking decisions made in Marine Lover. This book’s final line is an invocation of grace: a “grace that speaks silently through and beyond the word.”42 This grace hovers somewhere between Heidegger’s es gibt and something like Rahner’s grace-­centered Christian mystical theology. Marine Lover consists of three parts, each rich with mystical theological significance. The first, “Speaking of Immemorial Waters,” is an absorbing, fluid, ­epigrammatic address to Nietzsche in which the speaker—­the “I”—voices the intermingled perspectives of the forgotten mother, the ocean, and Irigaray herself. The tone is both indicting and loving, like that of a merciful divine judge. While this speaker finds Nietzsche guilty of the same phallic, matricidal desire for the appropriation of the origin that Irigaray traced up through Hegel in Speculum, the speaker also expresses concern about the grave suffering that this desire causes Nietzsche. This desire drives his hubristic will to power; his identification with the Greek god Dionysos; his efforts to rise above everything (“overcome, overpower, overman”); his doctrine of the eternal return of the same; his “contempt,” “greed,” and even “evil” (Irigaray’s words). At the same time, it fuels his grief over the “death of God,” his sickness of body and mind, and his parodic imitation of Christ, which culminates in his self-­crucifixion and descent into madness.43 If Irigaray makes her voice nearly indistinguishable from a merciful divine judge in this opening part of Marine Lover, she does not do so in a simplistically “projectionist” way, as if she sought only to magnify her own attributes. This section of the text displays both her creative efforts as a thinker and her rapturous reception of some deep, ancient source of life before and beyond her, which enables her to speak with great insight and compassion. Nature and grace are not in a competitive relationship here. The second part of the book, “Veiled Lips,” presents Irigaray’s critique of Nietzsche’s phallocentric construction of “woman,” including his disgust at female bodies and his reduction of women to the status of mere appearances. Drawing on Greek myths and tragedies beloved by Nietzsche, Irigaray demonstrates the antiquity of such a phallocentric imagination. She discusses the goddess Athena, who is born of the mind of Zeus and sides with the masculine Apollo against the feminine Furies, and she also highlights Ariadne, the feminine double and 41  Heidegger, “Word of Nietzsche.” 42 Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 190. 43 Irigaray, Marine Lover, pp. 8, 15, 19, 26, 52, and 72.

152 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

subordinate partner of Nietzsche’s favorite god, Dionysos. Irigaray uses these examples to reveal a bitter irony: Nietzsche is supposed to be the champion of the bodily and the apparent, against the Platonic ideal and its supposed truth, yet when thinking about “woman” as body and appearance, he gives her the same subordinate role she was assigned by Plato. His myths and tragedies do not undo his misogyny. Moreover, this misogyny keeps him tied to the nihilistic operations of metaphysics.44 The most explicitly theological part of the text is the last, “When the Gods Are Born,” which comments on the origin stories of three gods: Dionysos, Apollo, and Jesus. The chapters on Dionysos and Apollo reinforce Irigaray’s critique of Nietzsche’s phallocentrism and her claim that, in making a choice between these two phallic deities, he does not get to the root of his problems.45 By contrast, the chapter on Jesus develops the disambiguation of Christian mysticism Irigaray began in “La Mystérique.” On the one hand, she exposes negative aspects of Christianity that implicate it in the phallic power plays of resentment, repression, and cruelty against which Nietzsche rails but in which he also participates. On the other hand, she highlights positive aspects of Christianity that validate Nietzsche’s desire for a life-­affirming union of body and divinity and that more specifically support her search (begun in Speculum) for a mystical femininity grounded in memory of the mother, touch, jouissance, and love. Siding in this way both with and against Nietzsche, Irigaray disentangles negative and positive meanings of particular Christian doctrines such as the incarnation, Mary’s motherhood, the Edenic beginning of life, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Other Irigarayan texts from this period echo, condense, and expand these mystically feminine, quasi-­ Nietzschean, and biblically inspired arguments. Irigaray’s refrain throughout this chapter is “What does it mean that the word was made flesh?” She argues that a phallocentric interpretation treats the incarnation as an event in which the Father sends (an image of himself as) the Son, in which the material conditions of human existence (“flesh”) are castrated by paternal law (“Word”), and in which disciples are taught to obey and suffer in order to attain salvation (the “ascetic ideal” excoriated by Nietzsche). However, she does not think this phallocentric interpretation adequately conveys the meaning of the incarnation. She writes, “Et incarnatus est. Must this coming be univocally understood as a redemptory submission of the flesh to the Word? Or else: as the Word’s faithfulness to the flesh?” And, again, she asks, “Et incarnatus est. Does this presuppose crucifixus? Or has accident supplanted event? Negation supplanted af­fi rm­ation? Death, life?”46 By suggesting that the crucifixion is an “accident,” she avoids construing it as a necessary entailment of the incarnation and thereby

44 Irigaray, Marine Lover, pp. 77–119. 45 Irigaray, Marine Lover, pp. 123–63. 46 Irigaray, Marine Lover, pp. 165, 169, 171, and 179.

The Other Within  153 upholds an important theological distinction between love and suffering that Chapter 2’s discussion of Speyr and Balthasar’s paschal mysticism emphasized. However, by accenting “the Word’s fidelity to the flesh,” she also seems to reverse the direction of obedience in a way that could be problematic for Christian theologians. Yet her stance on obedience is somewhat complicated. Although she argues that the flesh should be made word and, in this sense, that it should dictate its own mysteries and values against any jouissance-denying asceticism, she does not thereby endorse a carnality without limits.47 She welcomes Jesus’s ministry of touch precisely for its respectful and healing restraint, especially when compared with the rapacious acts of Nietzsche’s Greek gods: [Jesus’s] miracles are usually based on touch. Even his words aim to touch rather than to prove or convince. His teaching . . . converts or heals by touching. A touch that is not a violent attack, like that of Dionysos. That does not strike from afar—­like Zeus or Apollo, or even Dionysos. That is respectful of bodily space, of sensual space, of openings in the skin.48

Irigaray does not want to invert the standard hierarchical ordering of word and flesh in pursuit of some Bacchanalian frenzy but rather to take Jesus’s ministry of touch as revelatory of a radical unity of flesh and word in the intimacy of such healing, face-­to-­face encounters. Something like Speyr and Balthasar’s obediential dimension of Christian mysticism remains intact in Irigaray’s quasi-­ Nietzschean interpretation of the incarnation. She advocates a practice of listening, not to a word that would crucify the flesh, but to a word that would be one with it in order to heal and love it, like Jesus does. She does not ask her ­readers to follow Nietzsche’s Dionysian “anti-­Christ.” Instead, she calls for a better imitatio Christi.49 In “Divine Women,” Irigaray resumes her meditation on the incarnation by asking, “Does respect for God made flesh not imply that we should incarnate God within us and in our sex?” Although Irigaray notes that “certain women mystics” have experienced “the infinite that resides within us and among us, the god in us, the Other for us,” she worries that they have defined holiness in terms of “suffering and chastity” and thereby denied the divine that is an affirming presence in their flesh. Irigaray is also mindful of the problem that Jesus has a male body. He is a son, not a daughter.50 In Marine Lover, she addresses the challenge of Jesus’s maleness in one way by considering Mary as a possible model for an incarnation 47 Irigaray, “Belief Itself,” p. 52; Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, pp. 16, 148, and 217; and Irigaray, Elemental Passions, p. 92. 48 Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 181. 49 Emily Holmes connects Irigaray’s positive reinterpretation of the incarnation with medieval women’s mystical experiences of identifying with Jesus. See Holmes, “Writing the Body of Christ.” 50  Irigaray, “Divine Women,” pp. 63, 66, and 71.

154 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

of the divine in the flesh of a woman. In addition to creating doctrinal difficulties, this idea of a Marian incarnation runs into an obstacle that is more concerning to Irigaray, namely phallocentric Christianity’s tendency to reduce Mary to an ideal maternal function and to recognize other women only as “virgins or repentant sinners.” To Irigaray, Mary’s fiat seems less like the act of freedom that theo­lo­ gians such as Rahner, Balthasar, and Speyr acclaim it to be and more like a dangerous act of self-­repudiation: “Although [Mary’s] ‘yes’ subtends Christian culture, which would not exist without her . . . her ‘yes’ is equally a ‘no’: a no to her own life. To her conception, her birth, her generation, her flowering. No to everything except the Word of the Father.”51 However, as with Jesus, so too with Mary, Irigaray advances another possible interpretation. She wonders about Mary’s unknown bodily and spiritual experiences of God within; that is, Mary’s mystical jouissance. On this basis, Irigaray imagines a different type of Mariology that would open a path toward a different type of theology: And what if, for Mary, the divine occurred only near at hand? So near that it thereby becomes unnameable. . . . [A] relationship within a more mysterical [sic] place than any proximity that can be localized. An effusion that goes beyond and stops short of any skin that has been closed back on itself. The deepest depths of the flesh, touched, birthed, and without a wound. This divine is still to be revealed.52

Irigaray maintains that such a Marian experience of jouissance is an “insistent latency” in the Christian tradition, something present yet repressed and unrecognized. It is a way for Mary, and anyone who follows her, to say “yes” both to God and to herself, to be full of grace and one with her bodily nature.53 Irigaray rescues Eve from a phallocentric reading too. Instead of describing her as the product of Adam’s body (his rib) and as the cause of sin, Irigaray imagines Eve and Adam living peacefully together in the garden, enjoying a reciprocal, perichoretic union with God. She claims that, in the beginning, “they were ‘in god’, with man and woman sharing heaven and earth. In the midst of nature. Feeling no need for any shelter but a garden where they lived naked. . . . Then God did not exist in front of or above human beings. He was in them as they were in him.” This Edenic image of the mutual indwelling of God and humanity, humans and nature, one sex with another, without sin or suffering, is paradigmatic of Irigaray’s mysticism.54 This critical reinterpretation of Genesis gives her an icon of the new beginning she wants: a renewal of origins that affirms bodies without shame, that 51 Irigaray, Marine Lover, pp. 165 and 167. 52 Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 171. 53 Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 186. 54 Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 173 and Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, p. 93.

The Other Within  155 envelops all the elements and creatures of the natural world, and that finds the divine in all of this. Finally, Irigaray tests out a new way to understand the Holy Spirit or rather “holy spirit” in lower-­case letters and without a definite article (as she prefers). For her, this spirit is not the hypostasized connection of Father and Son but the cosmic, fleshly omnipresence of the divine, which may usher in a new era of flourishing beyond patriarchal institutions. Marine Lover concludes on this pneu­ mato­logic­al note: “The spirit? Not, this time, the product of the love between Father and son, but the universe already made flesh or capable of becoming flesh, and remaining in excess to the existing world. Grace that speaks silently through and beyond the word?”55 The spirit would be “in excess of the existing world” and in this sense transcendent. And yet it would also be deeply incarnational, “the universe already made flesh or capable of becoming flesh,” and in this sense immanent. Its scope would be universal, leaving nothing out. And perhaps—­ Irigaray leaves it as a question—­this spirit would retain its identity as grace. If so, this grace would seemingly be both uncreated and created, to use Rahner’s terms, insofar as it would involve both the fullness of divine life and a transfiguration of nature. This grace would be experienced as a paradoxical type of voice that “speaks silently through and beyond the word,” something like John of the Cross’s silent music, something present in Jesus but not limited to him alone. The charge of “neo-­joachimism” that Henri de Lubac levels against Certeau is arguably more applicable to Irigaray, who alludes to Joachim’s “third age” of the spirit while discussing the spirit’s mystical union with the bride.56 Joachim’s supersessionist historicization of the Trinity is problematic on Christian theological grounds. Nevertheless, there can be no question that Marine Lover and related texts show Irigaray not merely critiquing Christianity but also developing her own positive, mystical interpretation of it, which includes many points that contemporary theo­lo­gians could find appealing.57 In addition to refashioning such Christian motifs, Irigaray also embraces features of Heidegger’s later (post-Being and Time) philosophy. Both of these streams

55 Irigaray, Marine Lover, pp. 171–2 and 190. 56  Irigaray, “Divine Women,” p. 62 and Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, p. 148. Irigaray’s critical remarks about the priesthood and the Eucharist in “Body Against Body,” p. 21, and “Belief Itself,” p. 46, also display an aversion to the institutional church that might be considered “neo-­joachimite.” However, the basis for her reasoning in these essays is not Joachim but an argument against the Catholic Church’s practice of excluding women from the ordained priesthood while simultaneously appropriating imagery of “the body and the blood” that she considers distinctively maternal. 57  Although it remains possible to question how traditional Irigaray’s interpretation of Christianity is, theologians must also avoid a too-­narrow understanding of “traditional.” For example, Roland de Vries argues that Irigaray refuses “the traditional Christian view that God is a being or entity wholly other than the human.” Depending on how this entitative standard of a supposedly traditional Christian doctrine of God is interpreted, it may exclude not only Irigaray but also many revered Christian mystics who emphasize divine immanence, such as Teresa, Cusa, and even Augustine. See de Vries, “Sharing Air,” p. 145.

156 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

influence her thinking about the divine and distinguish it from Feuerbachian projectionism, but they are not the same. Behind Heidegger’s poetic thinking of Ereignis—­the event of appropriation whereby each phenomenon comes into its own as a “thing,” in the “fourfold” of earth, sky, mortals, and gods—­Irigaray detects a phallic pattern of denying, desiring, and appropriating the mother. Heidegger’s forgetting of air as a necessary element for life on earth reveals that he has also forgotten his birth, his passage from the fluid home of the womb to the outside abode in which, deprived of umbilical connection, he must breathe in order to survive. Before “it gives” (es gibt), “she gives.” However, as far as philo­ sophers go, Heidegger at least does orient thought toward a contemplation of an originary nature (physis), a coming-­ forth-­ of-­ things beyond all technocratic reduction to the status of objects. His problem, according to Irigaray, is that he does not recognize this nature as “mother-­nature.”58 He thinks of it only as an earth on which man dwells and dies, not as life-­giving water, air, and fire. A nature composed of all four elements, and not merely Heidegger’s fourfold, is the rich, plural context in which the rose blooms “without why,” as Angelus Silesius (one of Heidegger’s favorite mystics) says. Although the maternal quality of this elemental nature threatens to reduce woman to a nurturing “envelope” of man’s worldly ambitions, Irigaray hopes instead that it will allow woman to flourish like a rose, to commune with an environment larger than herself and yet to become her own within it.59 Heidegger not only prompts Irigaray to develop her elemental theory of nature. He also influences her Rilkean reflection on angels traversing between heaven and earth and her Hölderlian expectations of a saving god to come.60 Heidegger’s “contributions” to Irigaray’s philosophy are therefore not merely naturalistic. They incorporate (something like) the divine, albeit in a largely post-­Christian, neo-­ pagan sense. Irigaray’s employment of reinterpreted Christian and Heideggerian themes, which are not in perfect agreement, leaves the question of God under- or over-­determined in her work. As a result, her thinking seems simultaneously too theological for some philosophers and too philosophical for some theologians. Regardless, Feuerbachian projectionism does not adequately name the liminal space it occupies. To the extent that Irigaray embraces Feuerbach in “Divine Women,” she does so largely by striving to bring him in line with the Christian and Heideggerian—­ and in either case post-­metaphysically mystical—­theories of the divine that she develops in other contemporaneous works. However, her reading of Feuerbach also exhibits some early signs of the metaphysical, and more exactly Hegelian, type of reasoning that will appear in full force in I Love to You (1992) and ground 58 Irigaray, Forgetting of Air, pp. 12, 33, and 69–70. 59 Irigaray, Elemental Passions, p. 34; Irigaray, Forgetting of Air, p. x; Irigaray, “Belief Itself,” p. 47; and Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, p. 10. 60  Irigaray, “Belief Itself,” p. 39 and Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, pp. 128–9.

The Other Within  157 the more rigid gender essentialism of her later writings. Irigaray critiques Feuerbach’s phallocentrism by arguing that, for him, “God is the mirror of man” and woman is nothing but a mother.61 Although she appreciates his sense of the unity of theology and anthropology, she refuses his atheistic reduction of the­ ology to anthropology and instead, more like Rahner, seeks to elevate anthropology by means of theology. Her primary aim is not so much projection as divinization. As in Marine Lover, so too in “Divine Women,”62 she draws on the Christian mysteries of the incarnation and the Marian experiences of divine indwelling to support her belief that women and men can become divine. She wants to feminize this process so that women can participate more fully in it, and this may take some human initiative, but her point is decidedly not the Feuerbachian thesis that the human subject is all that matters and that the divine is a mere reflection of it. To be sure, Irigaray sometimes expresses her idea of becoming divine in Feuerbach’s anthropocentric terms of “goal” setting, “horizon” reaching, and “project” making. However, she also describes the process of becoming divine in the more ecologically textured, post-­Heideggerian terms of her elemental theory of nature: “Rooted in the earth, fed by rain and spring waters, we grow and flourish in the air, thanks to the light from the sky, the warmth of the sun.” Although she says that “every woman . . . must imagine a God” and that this includes “positing new values,” these recommendations need not be theologically detrimental. Is not imagination, including mystical vision, an important mode of theology? Does not the obvious violence of patriarchy demand a significant shift in values? In any case, Irigaray nowhere explicitly asks women to “project” a new deity, as if on a blank screen or by sheer force of will. What she says, modifying Hölderlin or Heidegger, is that “a female god is still to come.”63 What sort of god is this, exactly? No doubt it remains mysterious and largely unknown, especially to male philo­ sophers and theologians who have not internalized her critiques of their traditions. Yet one cannot deny that Irigaray approaches it through meditations on Jesus’s healing touch, Mary’s secret jouissance, the Edenic paradise of love without shame, the holy spirit of the universe united with the bride, and a hidden grace that suffuses but does not destroy nature.

Kristeva on Hatred and Love Kristeva’s new beginning is called “primary narcissism.” Although, like Irigaray, she returns to ancient Greek myth (in this case, Ovid’s account of Narcissus), she locates her theory squarely within psychoanalysis, drawing on Freud, Lacan, 61  Irigaray, “Divine Women,” pp. 67 and 69. 62  Irigaray, “Divine Women,” pp. 62, 66, and 71. 63  Irigaray, “Divine Women,” pp. 67 and 69.

158 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Donald Winnicott, and Melanie Klein, along with stories from her own clinical work. She explains that primary narcissism is a stage of profound ego-­fragility prior to the existence of the ego, which can remain operative and threaten the ego’s future wellbeing. It consists of an annihilating sense of emptiness and various efforts to protect oneself from it through identifications with, or expulsions of, the other. It is experienced first by the infant in its initial separations from its mother (Lacan’s “real”); that is, before any clear distinction of subject and object that would allow for the secondary narcissism of the mirror stage (Lacan’s “im­agin­ary”) and the Oedipal drama of illicit desires and castration (Lacan’s “symbolic”). In Powers of Horror (1980), Kristeva describes how primary narcissism generates violent practices of “abjection,” whereby one treats others and oneself as filthy, disgusting, or vile, repeating both the initial break from the mother and the maternal authority governing the anal phase of development. Abjection combines the violence of mother-­fusion and superego. In Tales of Love (1983), Kristeva appears to turn in a more positive direction by talking about how love is possible even under the lasting effects of such primary narcissism. However, this is a love that is closely associated with hatred. She employs the neologism “lovehate” (hainamoration) in this context. Finally, her trilogy of works on primary narcissism concludes with Black Sun (1987), a study of depression and melancholia that ties these maladies to the primordial experience of a narcissistically wounded self.64 The more schematic In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (1985) belongs to this time period as well. Although it touts the “therapeutic and epistemological value” of Christianity, it also accepts Freud’s claims that religion is an illusion and that the time for theology has ended.65 It is not surprising that some Christian readers of Kristeva object to her work. Ann Astell, for instance, alleges that “there is something sinister” and fundamentally anti-­Christian in Kristeva’s reduction of Bernard of Clairvaux’s account of Christian love to primary narcissism.66 While Astell’s antagonism is understandable, it may be un­neces­sar­ily sharp. Kristeva’s theory of primary narcissism may help theo­lo­gians employ Christian mystics, such as Bernard, to address serious psychological and social crises in ordinary life. Her clinically informed question of how best to acknowledge and soothe primary narcissism enables her to distinguish between pathological and therapeutic forms of mystical femininity within and beyond the Christian tradition, and these insights do not require one to reject Christian faith, as she does.

64 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 2–3, 12–13, 71, and 138; Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 21; and Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 12. 65 Kristeva, In the Beginning Was Love, pp. 1, 11, 21, and 59–63. 66  Astell, “Telling Tales of Love,” p. 134.

The Other Within  159 Kristeva interprets secular literary figures such as Louis-­Ferdinand Céline (the anti-­Semitic author of Journey to the End of the Night), Marguerite Duras (author of Hiroshima, My Love), and once again Bataille (author of the pornographic Ma Mère) as examples of a primary narcissism or mystical femininity in pathological, sadomasochistic, or nihilistic form.67 By contrast, she interprets Christian mystics such as Augustine, Symeon the New Theologian, Francis of Assisi, Angela of Foligno, Bernard of Clairvaux, and even Aquinas as examples of a primary narcissism or mystical femininity that has found a more life-­affirming way to inhabit the psyche and the social order. Confession, the Eucharist, and an idealized Marian devotion represent this therapeutic possibility too, as does Dostoyevsky’s literature. However, not everyone related to the Christian mystical tradition satisfies Kristeva. For example, Plotinus and Madame Guyon miss the mark, though not for the same reasons as the aforementioned secular writers.68 The ostensible motives behind Kristeva’s hermeneutic are practical, not doctrinal. She does not evaluate her sources on the supposed correctness of their beliefs but rather on how well they manage the fearsome conditions of primary narcissism. Her non-­ doctrinal criteria just happen to favor Christian mystics and authors of a rather “ordinary,” in the sense of theologically orthodox, type and not, as one might expect, more subversive “heretics”69 or atheists. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva theorizes primary narcissism in relation to the abject(ing) mother and the repressive father, recasting the semiotic–­symbolic distinction from her earliest works. However, she also departs from these works by arguing that there is a form of “religion” or “the sacred” (used interchangeably in this text) that belongs to the maternal side of the psyche, a place she once reserved only for “mysticism” and “art.” Her new, two-­gendered account of religion/the sacred continues to associate it with violence. She now simply clarifies that this violence does not only have a paternal character but may also be maternal.70 A more decisive change occurs with Tales of Love. Kristeva redefines primary narcissism to include not only the mother–­infant dyad but also an indistinct object or “nonobject” of identification that Freud names the “father in individual prehistory” and that Kristeva also calls the “imaginary father.” This is the infant’s primitive sense of a third, a “not I,” that the mother wants and that the infant therefore wants to be in order to protect its union with the mother and to avoid the painful emptiness of its loss. This is a “strange father” who is actually “both parents,” since at this primal stage of development “there is no awareness of sexual 67 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 133–206; Kristeva, Tales of Love, pp. 365–71; and Kristeva, Black Sun, pp. 221–59. 68 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 118–27; Kristeva, Tales of Love, pp. 105–09, 151–83, and 297–314; and Kristeva, Black Sun, pp. 175–217. 69 In “Stabat Mater,” Kristeva calls for a “heretical ethics separated from morality, a herethics,” which would rely on the not-­ merely-­ semiotic contributions of women. See Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 263. 70 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 17 and 58.

160 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

difference.”71 The gendering here is, therefore, somewhat artificial. What we have is the emergence of a powerful identification with a desirable other, an identification that is supposed to make one feel loved, safe, and whole. All of this occurs before Lacan’s objet petit a and the tumultuous events of adolescent and adult desire, but Kristeva thinks such an imaginary father is the first step in this erotic direction. Without the imaginary father, there would never be the repressive father of the symbolic order, yet the two are distinct.72 This Freudian idea of “the father of individual prehistory” is the key to understanding Kristeva’s new appreciation for the “therapeutic and epistemological value” of Christian mysticism. At its best, Christian mysticism quiets the violence of primary narcissism, forestalling its murderous rejection of others and its melancholic introjection of death, by reactivating the early childhood identification with the imaginary father. This identification mitigates the chaos of fusion with and abandonment by the mother, while softening the destructive power of paternal repression. At the same time, this identification allows the ego to retain a certain intimacy with the mother, including the body and its drives, and a certain degree of stabilization by a gender-­ambiguous or feminized father—­that is, a source of love and alterity. Even if Christian doctrines are mere fantasy, as Kristeva thinks they are, she is impressed by the emotional intelligence that she perceives in certain lives that are oriented by these doctrines. Although she does not ask her fellow practicing psychoanalysts to become Christian, she does urge them to let the interplay of transference and countertransference in the analytic situation channel the healing power of identification with the imaginary father, as Christians have done in their mystical traditions.73 Accordingly, when Kristeva reads Bernard, she does not imply that he is a self-­ absorbed narcissist in some pathological sense, as if thereby hoping to discredit Christianity. Rather, she argues that his mystical theology brilliantly incorporates the “feminine” features of human flesh and desire—­symbolized by the bridal position from The Song of Songs and concretized in the natural condition of carnal love—­while reorienting these energies toward identification with the im­agin­ ary father (God) who provides a narcissism-­soothing love that frees one to love others. Kristeva’s praise for this achievement is effusive: “No philosophy has equaled the philosophical success [of Bernard’s mysticism] that could give satisfaction to drive-­impelled narcissism while raising it above its own realm to give it an extension that could reach the other, the others—­a divine extension, to be sure, and a social one in passing.”74 Her arguments in favor of other Christian mystics run along similar lines. 71 Kristeva, Tales of Love, pp. 26, 37, and 41. 72  For a closer look at Kristeva’s account of the “imaginary father,” see Oliver, Reading Kristeva, pp. 69–90. 73 Kristeva, Tales of Love, pp. 379–82. 74 Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 167.

The Other Within  161 Even in Powers of Horror, and thus prior to her explicit incorporation of Freud’s theory of the imaginary father, she already sees Christian mysticism providing a similar response to the problem of abjection. She explains that through the practice of confession (especially in the sense of Augustine’s Confessions) and through the reception of the Eucharist, Christians experience their bodily selves in two ways simultaneously: as abject, sinful flesh and as redeemed, Christic flesh.75 Kristeva’s understanding of the Eucharist resonates with the Catholic phe­nom­en­ olo­gist Emmanuel Falque’s contention that the sacrament affirms our animal corporality while metamorphosing it.76 Kristeva’s reading of Dostoyevsky in Black Sun focuses on the “forgiveness” that his writing extends to his narcissistically wounded characters, whether they be suicidal (Kirillov) or murderous (Raskolnikov). Kristeva attributes a very particular meaning to “forgiveness,” hence the cautionary quotation marks. It is not pardon for a transgression. It is, rather, another name for the healing power of identification with the imaginary father: “Forgiveness does not cleanse actions. It raises the unconscious from beneath the actions and has it meet a loving other—­an other who does not judge but hears my truth in the availability of love.”77 The practice of “forgiveness,” in this sense, distinguishes Dostoyevsky’s literary productions from the more nearly nihilistic works of Céline, Duras, and Bataille. Kristeva traces Dostoyevsky’s “forgiving” practice of writing back to his Orthodox Christianity (with a capital “O” indicating the Byzantine and Russian East). She reflects on this tradition’s pneumatologically centered trinitarian the­ ology, according to which “the Spirit descends from the Father through the Son [per Filium].” This pattern of descent is matched by a corresponding pattern of mys­tic­al ascent, whereby the Spirit elevates the soul through the Son back to the Father (a point Sarah Coakley similarly emphasizes).78 In a psychoanalytic reading of this trinitarian process, Kristeva likens the law-­giving Father to Lacan’s symbolic, the incarnate Son to Lacan’s imaginary, and the mysterious Spirit to Lacan’s real. She argues that Dostoyevsky’s Orthodoxy prepares him to integrate these levels of the psyche. The Spirit teaches him how to embrace our primary narcissism (the “abyssal, breathtaking, and certainly also sexual depth, where the psychological experience of loss and ecstasy finds its place”) and transfigure it, turning hatred into love, life into deification.79 Although Kristeva finds much to value in the Christian mysticism of Bernard, Dostoyevsky, and many others, she remains wary of some figures, such as Elizabeth of Hungary who, “though a great princess, delighted in nothing so

75 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 118–26. 76 Falque, Wedding Feast of the Lamb, pp. 177–217. 78 Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, pp. 100–51.

77 Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 205. 79 Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 210.

162 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

much as abasing herself.”80 Elizabeth’s display of abject maternality mirrors Catherine of Siena’s submission to a repressive divine father-­figure in About Chinese Women. Are these the same “type” of experience? In any case, such debasement is not the only way for a Christian mystic to go astray. Kristeva also worries about an overidentification with the imaginary father, which would amount to an excessive “idealization,” a rejection of the mother, human nature, bodiliness, and the other within. She finds this problem in Plotinus. Although his experiential oneness with the One contributes an important sense of interiority to the Western mystical tradition, its price is a “loss of otherness.”81 A similar problem occurs in Guyon’s Quietist spirituality of “pure love.” Whereas Certeau cele­ brates Guyon’s encounter with the dockworker as an epiphany of the other, Kristeva warns that her absolute identification with the imaginary father involves a dangerous erasure of psychic space: a mystical annihilation.82 Feminist thinkers, including Irigaray, might worry that Kristeva’s theory of ­primary narcissism associates the mother with hatred (as both its object/abject and its primal energy: the death drive), while saving the father, converting him from cruel tyrant into love itself. However, Kristeva’s much-­ discussed essay “Stabat Mater” (1976), which appears in revised form in Tales of Love, shows the complexity of her gender thinking by giving Mary the role of imaginary father. This essay juxtaposes two columns of text: a more poetic one depicting pregnancy, childbirth, and other maternal experiences and a more discursive one offering an idealized Mariology, which presents her as the bearer of God, a celestial queen, a nurturing breast, a compassionate sob, a listening ear, a radically unique woman without sin or normal bodily death. Kristeva argues that this idealized Mary is a  transcendently loving other with whom one can identify in order to soothe ­narcissistic wounds. At the same time, Kristeva uses the other column to demonstrate that, to the extent that such lofty Mariology is separated from women’s embodied experiences, it threatens to become overly idealized, like the Neo-­ Platonic One or Quietist “pure love,” and thereby cause a dehumanizing loss of the mother and the self. To avoid this danger, she says that “one needs to listen, more carefully than ever, to what mothers are saying today.”83 Her therapeutic form of mystical femininity appears only when both columns are held together. Kristeva thinks that this Mariological dialectic provides an argument against feminism (at least against “some avant-­garde feminist groups” that favor only one side of it: the semiotic) and simultaneously for cultural conditions conducive to women’s mental health and empowerment that seem consistent with feminist 80 Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 5. 81 Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 120. 82 Kristeva, Tales of Love, pp. 297–314. 83 Kristeva, Tales of Love, pp. 256–8. Marilyn Edelstein notes that, “unlike most psychoanalytic theorists, who focus on the mother as object for the child, Kristeva here emphasizes the mother as subject, the mother’s own experience of her maternity and of her relation to her child and her own body (and to her own mother).” See Edelstein, “Metaphor, Meta-­Narrative, and Mater-­Narrative,” p. 29.

The Other Within  163 goals, taken more holistically.84 Although Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater” affirms that love can be maternal and that mothers can be loving, her views remain questionable on feminist grounds. She does little to challenge the essentialist reduction of “woman” to relational roles of mother, daughter, and wife, a reduction that Irigaray suggests inhibits women’s subjectivity and jouissance. Moreover, because Kristeva affixes the label “feminist” mainly to positions she rejects, she does not encourage her readers to explore more congenial forms of feminism, including those that would incorporate her psychoanalytic and Christian mystical insights. Yet some feminist theorists, such as Judith Butler, locate the anti-­feminist drift of Kristeva’s work precisely in her attachments to psychoanalysis and (something like) theology. Butler contends that both sides of Kristeva’s dialectic serve the interests of culturally specific discourses and powers that construct the “normal” gendered meanings of bodies and styles of speech, accord them an unmerited metaphysical status, and thereby inhibit revolutionary political practice. She worries that the main effect of Kristeva’s supposedly subversive inclusions of the semiotic in the symbolic is in fact to pathologize those who do not sufficiently conform to the symbolic (i.e., the law of God/the father), whether they be women, gay and lesbian persons, or anyone else.85 Christian mystical theology does not have to subscribe to the gender essentialism that Butler discerns in Kristeva’s thought. Indeed, one of the burdens of this chapter’s critical investigation of “French feminist” readings of Christian mystics is to show that a different conceptual route and a greater love are possible. In the end, Kristeva’s trilogy on primary narcissism arguably does more justice to Christian mysticism than to feminism, while leaving room to desire a more adequate and integrated affirmation of both.

The “French Feminist” Politics of Gender and Racial Difference From its inception in the “Psych et Po” movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s,86 the “French feminism” of Irigaray and Kristeva has been related to pol­it­ ics, specifically to a Marxist feminist critique of the commodification of women as tools of male pleasure and reproduction.87 This early period demonstrates Irigaray’s and Kristeva’s awareness of the intersections of gender and class, though not so much race. Although their political interests become less explicit in their early 1980s explorations of elemental nature and primary narcissism, these 84 Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 234. 85 Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 80–91. 86  “Psych et Po” is the shortened form of “Psychoanalyse et Politique,” a group of theorists in Paris associated with the May 1968 uprisings who critically appropriated psychoanalytic concepts for the purpose of revolutionary political, especially feminist, struggle. See Joy, O’Grady, and Poxon, eds., French Feminists on Religion, p. 5. 87 Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, pp. 170–91 and Kristeva, Julia Kristeva Interviews, pp. 95–112.

164 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

interests resurface and take on new forms in the late 1980s and early 1990s, continuing into the new millennium.

Gender Essentialism? Let us begin by considering the gendered aspect of this politics. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Irigaray remained an active participant in feminist organizations (in particular feminist branches of Italy’s Communist and Social Democratic ­parties). Although she was involved in some intergenerational conflicts,88 her commitment to feminist activism at this time was more pronounced than Kristeva’s. To some degree, their divergence on this score can be traced back to their experiences of sexual violence outside of, and within, such contexts. While commenting on the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights, Irigaray confesses, “I was assaulted in the rue du Commerce a few steps from my house.” She adds, “And I am not even subjected to the sexual ‘torture’ . . . suffered by some of my sisters.” Because the U.N. declaration has insufficient political power to protect women from such violations, she concludes that it “means virtually nothing in terms of my everyday reality as a woman.”89 The prevalence of rape and sexual assault, which Tarana Burke’s “Me Too” movement continues to battle, is why Irigaray lists women’s “right to physical and moral inviolability” as her top priority.90 By contrast, Kristeva distanced herself from feminist groups because of the violence she witnessed in one. She recalls, “Although many women found shelter and provisional encouragement there, sexual abuse and corruption scandals quickly erupted.”91 Irigaray and Kristeva share a desire to overcome the structural conditions that enable rape and other forms of violence. Yet how these realities showed up in their lives gave them conflicting perspectives on the promise of feminism to do this work. Despite Irigaray’s greater allegiance to feminist activism, the rigid gender essentialism she adopts as early as I Love to You (1992) makes her vulnerable to anti-­essentialist feminist critiques. Irigaray’s effort to institute gender-­specific laws correlates with her newfound appreciation for Hegel’s account of the dia­lect­ ic­al overcoming of subjective immediacy through the mediation of objective spirit. Her thinking here has a family resemblance to Rahner’s argument that the transcendental experience of grace must be mediated categorically and Speyr’s idea of an objektive Mystik. However, Irigaray’s specific point is that women’s subjectivity requires its own process of becoming, which, going beyond a hidden,

88 Irigaray, I Love to You, p. 4. 90 Irigaray, I Love to You, p. 132.

89 Irigaray, Thinking the Difference, pp. x–­xi. 91 Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, p. 29.

The Other Within  165 subjective jouissance, must involve “objective determinations proper to the female gender.”92 Irigaray contends that there must be two parallel paths of self-­actualization, one proper to each sex: male and female. The irreducible difference between these paths prevents the emergence of any omnicompetent absolute spirit, such as Hegel phallically desired. Irigaray sides with Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics against Hegelian totality. The “to” in “I love to you,” which grammatically indicates an indirect as opposed to direct object, marks Irigaray’s effort to rescue woman from being a mere instrument of man’s becoming. In this way, Irigaray renews the arguments against appropriative sameness she made in Speculum. She also continues her creative reinterpretation of Christianity from Speculum and Marine Lover.93 Although some sense of mystery and mysticism remains, Irigaray’s reconnection with Hegel precipitates a return of metaphysics or something like it: a mode of thought that aspires to its power, its “universality,” its “History” (with a capital “H”), its ability to dictate what is required by nature. Irigaray no longer asks her readers to be faithful to an ineffable divine presence within their auto-­affective flesh (like Henry) but more problematically to be “faithful to their gender” as something objectively determined. She reduces the freedom of the spirit she once praised so beautifully to the constraints of heterosexual relationship: “The wedding between man and woman realizes the reign of the spirit. Without it, there is no spirit.”94 Although she makes these shifts because she believes they are necessary for women’s liberation, she fails to perceive how harmful they are to people who have more complicated relationships with gender (whether trans, nonbinary, or simply nonconforming, like many mystics) or who experience love, including divine love, outside of heterosexual partnerships (such as people who are gay, ­lesbian, bisexual, asexual, or celibate).95 Whereas Irigaray’s newfound appreciation for Hegel leads her to objectify ­sexual difference and elevate the heterosexual couple as its paradigm, Kristeva’s af­fi rm­ation of the maternal–­paternal “bisexuality” and narratival singularity of each subject’s psychosomatic life mitigates, without erasing, her gender essentialism. For Kristeva, this so-­called “bisexuality” is not a sexual orientation. Rather, it is the inescapable dialectic of mother- and father-­functions in one’s inner life. Based on her reading of Freud, she attributes such “bisexuality” to all human beings. However, she is also interested in particular (mystical) cases of it that defy 92 Irigaray, I Love to You, p. 4. References to Hegel occur throughout: pp. 5, 12, 46–7, 62, 67, 106–7, and 144. For a comprehensive analysis of Irigaray’s engagement with Hegel, see Joy, Divine Love, pp. 83–101. 93 Irigaray, I Love to You, pp. 106, 109, 124, and 140 and Irigaray, To Be Two (1994), pp. 1–16. 94 Irigaray, I Love to You, pp. 143 and 147. 95  For critiques such as this, see Murphy, “Beyond Performativity”; Bergoffen, “Irigaray’s Couples”; and Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, p. 191. However, for a more sympathetic queer reading of Irigaray, see Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave?, pp. 37–40.

166 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

binary cultural expectations, for example when men such as Bernard of Clairvaux identify more with femininity and women such as Catherine of Siena identify more with masculinity.96 Because Kristeva’s idea of “bisexuality” not only blurs but also presupposes a binary understanding of gender difference, her non-­essentialism may be more clearly attested elsewhere, namely in her respect for singularity. To some degree, she learns the stakes of such respect by raising a son with intellectual disabilities whose unique experiences of life are not easily communicable.97 But she also applies the idea of singularity to women in particular when she suggests that the therapeutic goal “in every situation and for every woman” is to try to find a “proper articulation of these two elements [the maternal and paternal].” She explains that by “proper” she means precisely “that which best fits the specific history of each woman, which expresses her better.”98 What is ordinary, normal, and healthy may therefore vary considerably from one person to the next. For a woman, the question is not what is objectively required by her gender but what is best expressive of her life in view of its singular psychological, corporeal, and ­historical circumstances. Nonetheless, Kristeva hazards a hypothesis that “women, perhaps, stand at that intersection [of the maternal and paternal] in a more dramatic, more symp­tom­ at­ic manner” than men do.99 Kristeva’s qualified gender essentialism thus appears both in the structural “bisexuality” that she attributes to the psyche and in a possible differentiation of men and women vis-­à-­vis this “bisexuality,” according to which women would perhaps be more dramatically or symptomatically associated with it. Although Kristeva’s approach to gender difference does not fully escape gender essentialism, the politics of gender that follows from it is less re­ified than what one finds in Irigaray’s work of the same time period.

Traces of Race The politics of “French feminism” is not race-­neutral, but its particular ways of  remembering and forgetting race are complex. Although both Irigaray and Kristeva focus on the political structures of the European Union, they favor a  multicultural Europe that would be welcoming of immigrants.100 Kristeva’s Bulgarian origins make her particularly sensitive to East–­West tensions internal

96  Kristeva and Clément, Feminine and the Sacred (1998), pp. 58–9 and 117. 97 Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness, pp. 29–45 and Kristeva, “Tragedy and a Dream.” 98  Kristeva, “Interview with Elaine Hoffman Baruch,” p. 373. 99  Kristeva and Clément, Feminine and the Sacred, p. 178. 100 Irigaray, Democracy Begins Between Two (1994), pp. 60–105 and Kristeva, Intimate Revolt (1997), pp. 255–68.

The Other Within  167 to the meaning of “European,” a term she sometimes crosses out.101 Moreover, both thinkers draw on their experiences of traveling in Asia, but this Far Eastern influence does not rule out the possibility of a Eurocentric, orientalizing gaze.102 Above all, critics question the apparent “French feminist” view that racial difference is secondary in importance to sexual difference.103 Irigaray states this opinion directly: “The problem of race is, in fact, a secondary problem—­except from a geographical point of view?—which means we cannot see the wood for the trees, and the same goes for other cultural diversities—­religious, economic and political ones.”104 By contrast, for Kristeva, the question of priority is more difficult to answer. While she would agree with Irigaray that the difference between mother and father is a more primordial structure of the psyche than race, many of her writings during the 1990s and beyond emphasize her experience as an immigrant. If we interpret the question of gender or racial priority not with reference to Kristeva’s theory of the universal subject but with reference to her singular life, then questions of race—­or something like it: ethnic and cultural belonging—­are more to the fore. Beginning with Strangers to Ourselves (1988), Kristeva argues that the key to a more hospitable society is the recognition that, because of the unconscious within each of us, we are all foreigners to ourselves. Although she associates such an ­ethics of hospitality with the biblical prophets’ concern for the poor, the widow, and the orphan, she does not identify it with mysticism. On the contrary, she alleges that violent forms of inhospitality and xenophobia, including Nazism, arise from a “mystical idea of the nation” that activates the unmitigated primary narcissism of its adherents.105 Yet Kristeva’s judgments about the political implications of mysticism are not wholly negative. In Crisis of the European Subject (2000), she contends that the Western European (specifically Kantian) ideal of freedom-­as-­agential-­control must be held in dialectical tension, not exactly with Herder’s mystical Volkgeist (as it is in Hegel’s thought), but with a differently mystical, hesychastic, feminine, Eastern European understanding of freedom as an experience of the heart that is divinized by grace. She believes that, despite its potential nationalist and totalitarian excesses, such Orthodox, cardiocentric spirituality has an important role to play in balancing European subjectivity. She concludes that mysticism—­indeed, the mysticism of her people, specifically her father—­is a necessary ingredient in a nonviolent, inclusive Europe.106 101 Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject. 102  Spivak, “French Feminism in an International Frame”; Deutscher, “Between East and West”; and Joy, Divine Love, pp. 132–9. 103 Armour, “Questioning ‘Woman’,” pp. 143–69; Deutscher, Politics of Impossible Difference, pp. 164–5; and Hom, “Between Races and Generations.” 104 Irigaray, I Love to You, p. 47. See also Irigaray, Democracy Begins Between Two, pp. 46 and 152. 105 Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, pp. 68, 176–80, 187, and 191–2. 106 Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, pp. 111–62 and Kristeva, Je me voyage, p. 31.

168 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

The study of Blackness adds an extra layer of scrutiny to the “French feminist” politics of difference, which reveals the insufficiency of its multicultural emend­ ation of Eurocentrism and the problematic ways in which its discourses of race and gender intersect.107 To the extent that both Irigaray and Kristeva inherit a Freudian account of the “dark continent” of femininity, their theory of gender remains tethered to a colonial fantasy of Black Africa as maximal other and as a founding metaphor of difference as such, including sexual difference.108 The unconscious is the mother is darkness is Africa, but the last of these linkages is often left unspoken. In this sense, despite claims to the contrary, race may be as fundamental to their politics as gender is, perhaps even more so. Although Kristeva revises and Irigaray opposes Freud’s statements about woman as “dark continent,” they do not interrogate the racial and colonial entailments of his word choice. The praiseworthy multiculturalism that each promotes must, therefore, be held in tension with their racialized forgetting of the Black people whose lives and deaths made their philosophical projects possible. While prioritizing gender over race, Irigaray also draws analogies between them. These analogies substitute for serious inquiry and leave the specific meaning of racial difference largely unthought. For example, Irigaray argues that civil rights are necessary “so that woman does not remain the daughter—­nor the mother—­of the husband, and the Black does not remain the son of the white man.” Many of her other texts clarify her critical views on mother and daughter roles in patriarchy but never do the same for the father–­son relationship that here she suggests is characteristic of race. This filial image is not remotely accurate to the centuries of murderous violence, forced labor, forced sex, forced reproduction, legal disenfranchisement, extralegal lynching, economic deprivation, cultural stigmatization, and unjust incarceration suffered by Black people. In a similar vein, Irigaray writes an essay called “Women’s Enslavement” that denounces the ways that patriarchal society treats women like slaves without ever discussing women who actually were slaves.109 For her part, Kristeva’s continuing search for a therapeutic path between the violent extremes of maternal revolt and paternal repression leads her to feminize and chastise the French racial justice movement, SOS Racisme, led by the 107 Lloyd, Black Natural Law, pp. 152–3; Spillers, Black, White, and in Color, pp. 376–427; and Sheppard, Self, Culture, and Others, pp. 81–110. 108  Ranjana Khanna argues that, when Freud identifies woman with the “dark continent” in his “The Question of Lay Analysis” (1926), he alludes to H. M. Stanley’s colonial travelogue Through the Dark Continent (1878), which details Stanley’s fascination and horror at certain African peoples whom he feminizes. When studied together, Freud and Stanley demonstrate the reversibility of fem­in­ in­ity and darkness for a patriarchal, colonial culture. See Khanna, Dark Continent, pp. 48–50. See also Irigaray, Speculum, pp. 19–22, where she mimics Freud’s elision of light with man and darkness with woman, and Kristeva and Clément, Feminine and the Sacred, p. 21, where Kristeva approvingly cites her own favorite colonial travelogue texts such as Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa (1909) and Michel Leiris’s Phantom Africa (1934). 109 Irigaray, Democracy Begins Between Two, pp. 40–8 and 59.

The Other Within  169 Afro-­ Caribbean Frenchman Harlem Désir. In her book Nations without Nationalism (1990), which includes an open letter to Désir, Kristeva both rejects the xenophobia of the right-­wing “National Front” and questions Désir’s call for solidarity among the racially marginalized by suggesting that such a solidarity similarly constitutes a dangerous form of Herderian mystical nationalism. Here her desired dialectical synthesis takes the form of a cosmopolitan nationalism based on Montesquieu’s esprit général—­a supposedly “optimal” arrangement in which cultural differences would be welcomed so long as they remain private, and the public sphere would be governed by supposedly shared interests.110 The problem with Kristeva’s response to Désir does not have to do with her hope for a diverse and inclusive society but with the false equivalence she draws between populist movements of the oppressors and the oppressed, as if each were merely an expression of primary narcissism, the abject(ing) mother, or a pathological form of mystical femininity (all synonymous). Although she notes that slavery causes a problem for national unity in the United States,111 she does not come close to appreciating the massive scope of slavery-­forged anti-­Blackness that Désir’s movement, and others like it, aim to address. Kristeva’s psychoanalytic use of the mother-­relation as the primary explanation of social phenomena minimizes the decisive role played by historical realities of racism and colonialism. Her immigrant experience leads her to look at Black experience through an immigration lens that distorts it. She says that the United States “offered a new religious and economic faith to uprooted people who all found themselves in the same boat.” This unfortunate metaphor obscures the fact that the ancestors of most African Americans arrived in very different boats, with very different pol­it­ ical, spiritual, and ontological consequences.112 When Kristeva recounts her perceptions of Black women in New York City whom she casually observed on her many visits to Columbia University, she praises them for their “indelible serenity,” “professional competence,” and “unfailingly solid nerves,” while claiming that they “behave like ordinary mothers.” In Kristeva’s eyes, they represent—­ unlike their supposedly more “violent” and “worked up” (her words) Black male and White feminist counterparts—­a serene form of mystical femininity, a graceful way of being in the world consistent with psychological health and social wellbeing. She distinguishes them from Catherine Clément’s example of certain Senegalese women who scream and fall into trances during a Catholic Mass in honor of the Black Virgin of Popenguine. To Kristeva, these ecstatic Africans represent a pathological, unintegrated form of mystical femininity (or “the sacred”), which Clément celebrates but Kristeva resists. None 110 Kristeva, Nations Without Nationalism, pp. 13–15, 31–2, 40, and 52–5. 111 Kristeva, Nations Without Nationalism, p. 9. 112 Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, p. 194. Powerful accounts of the significance of the slave ship can be found in Sharpe, In the Wake; Glissant, Poetics of Relation, pp. 5–7; and Jennings, Christian Imagination, p. 176.

170 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

of these Black women, in Africa or its diaspora, are cited by name or allowed to tell their own stories. No works by Black women authors are mentioned. Interpretations are hazarded from a distance. Kristeva acknowledges to Clément that “we find ourselves fixated on a ‘sacred’ that is increasingly ‘black’! Black women, black religions: our journey continues to link the three enigmas—­the feminine, the sacred, and the various fates of Africanness.” Yet this recognition does not lead Kristeva to open any archive of Black literary, philosophical, or theological texts.113 Once asked if she read Frantz Fanon, she replied, “I have never read anything by him. He isn’t part of the mainstream of Psychoanalytic Studies.”114 The investigation of mestizo/a, womanist, and Black forms of the mysticism of ordinary life in Chapters 5 and 6 reveals a better way forward.

Breathing, Writing, and Loving Irigaray’s Practice of Yoga Although Irigaray’s and Kristeva’s approaches to a politics of gender and racial difference leave much to be desired, their most recent engagements with mystical spirituality open new opportunities for dialogue with Christian mystical the­ology, which should not be overlooked. In Irigaray’s case, yogic breathing gives her thought a new center of gravity and vitality that draws it closer to theology. An injury from a car accident in 1973 first prompted her to try yoga as a rehabilitative practice. It became a daily routine and gradually began to influence her intellectual work. At first, this influence went unnamed. However, her texts from the mid-­1990s onward make it explicit. She recalls a visit to study yoga in India that she made at Christmas in 1983. She credits this trip with inspiring her essay “Divine Women” (1984), particularly its sense that the divine is accessible here and now. Although, as we have seen, “Divine Women” includes an uneasy blend of Christian motifs from Marine Lover, poetic thinking from The Forgetting of Air, and a few controversial references to Feuerbach, yoga was evidently another very important, though hidden, source. One should not conclude from this that Irigaray’s mysticism of ordinary life is entirely non-­Christian or un-­Christian. On the contrary, she explains that practicing yoga helped her return to her once-­ abandoned Christian faith tradition (Roman Catholicism) in a new way.115 113  Kristeva and Clément, Feminine and the Sacred, pp. 5–7, 11–12, and 21. Clément mentions Billie Holiday’s “sacred music” in passing (p. 136) and cites the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop, though she accuses him of reverse racism (p. 157). In any case, Clément’s views are aligned enough with the “Third World” for Kristeva to feel the need to resist them in the name of “our Western merits” (p. 135). 114 Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, p. 110. 115  Irigaray and Marder, Through Vegetal Being, p. 25; Irigaray, Le soufflé des femmes, pp. 215–17; and Irigaray, Key Writings, p. 145. Irigaray exemplifies the mutual learning between religions that many comparative theologians advocate. See Makransky, “Buddhist Critique.”

The Other Within  171 In her engagement with Far Eastern mystical sources, Irigaray seeks to avoid the disembodied, phallocentric, necrophilic, and egological appropriations of the Orient made by Schopenhauer and other Western philosophers. Instead, she emphasizes a practice of cultivating breath, which is supposed to channel bodily energies into more subtle, spiritual centers that permit higher levels of communication with nature and with others.116 She continues to call this heightened or enlightened state “grace,” while insisting (in a statement redolent of Aquinas and Rahner) that such grace “never separates itself from nature, but transforms it, transubstantiates it without ruining it.”117 Although she opposes the way certain Christian mystics valorize suffering, she views the cultivation of breath as a non-­ sacrificial type of asceticism: a training of the body under the instruction of a teacher, which takes time and self-­discipline but is ultimately life-­affirming and liberating. Of course, everyone must breathe in order to survive, even if philo­ sophers such as Heidegger forget this fact, but Irigaray is interested in more than mere respiratory survival. For her, yoga is a learned practice of deep, concentrated breathing that divinizes the body and activates it as a temple of the spirit. It is a way not merely of living but of “taking charge of one’s life,” developing freedom in cosmic and interpersonal relationships.118 Irigaray’s yogic writings breathe new life into her earlier ideas. If she were to revise the final part of Marine Lover on Dionysos, Apollo, and Jesus, she would likely add a meditation on the Hindu god Shiva—­a god of love and trans­form­ ation who embodies the four elements, dwells in the forest, practices yoga, meditates, dances, and cultivates energy through romantic partnerships.119 But this addition would not prevent ongoing contributions to Christian thought. Irigaray continues to develop her incarnational, Mariological, Edenic, and pneu­mato­ logic­al reflections, only now in explicit dialogue with the East. Jesus becomes a “master of energy.” Mary’s virginity becomes “the existence of a spiritual interiority of her own.” The garden becomes the place where the divine first breathed into creation and where the innocence of bodily love blossomed. The “third age” of the spirit becomes an “age of breath.”120 Following Rilke and Hölderlin, the post-­ Heideggerian Irigaray expresses her daily experiences of communion with nature in poetry: “To breathe: / An extreme poverty / Becomes beatitude, / Renouncing all / But not life, / Of the body, / Of the soul. / Nothing / Apart from this happiness / That grows, / Flowers, / Blooms.”121 116 Irigaray, Between East and West, pp. 8, 26–48, and 62. Although Irigaray’s affirmation of a divine life within auto-­affective flesh reminds one of Henry, her turn toward breath brings her closer (among contemporary male philosophers) to Chrétien, particularly his chapter “Souffle” in Pour reprendre et perdre haleine, pp. 11–27. 117 Irigaray, Key Writings, p. 167. 118 Irigaray, Between East and West, pp. 9, 50, 57–8, 61, and 76. 119  Irigaray and Marder, Through Vegetal Being, pp. 69–73. 120 Irigaray, Key Writings, pp. 151–2 and 167–9. 121 Irigaray, Prières quotidiennes/Everyday Prayers, pp. 29–31 and 140. This collection of poems, which Irigaray calls “prayers,” is perhaps the best window into her daily contemplative practice.

172 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Irigaray’s yogic, Christian, poetic mysticism remains inseparable from her c­ onstruction of femininity and her gender essentialism. She argues that women breathe differently from men, that their breath is “at once more linked with the life of the universe and more interior,” and that women are therefore the ones who will usher in a new era of spiritual growth for both sexes. She prizes the aboriginal religious traditions of India that include many female images of the divine. She calls for a sharing of breath and erotic desire “between two humans different by nature.” She writes in a particular way for the precocious “little girl,” the one so misunderstood and maligned by Freud (as Speculum argued). This is the little girl that Irigaray seeks to love in herself: the bright, school-­aged Luce who played with rabbits in the garden and suffered from scruples imposed on her by patri­ arch­al academic and ecclesial institutions.122 Although Irigaray’s mysticism offers an affirming message to young women, it does so precisely to build a cultural environment in which women of all ages can learn to be autonomous and world-­ transforming. A proper cultivation of their ordinary lives—­their breath, energies, bodies, and relationships—­is supposed to bring forth life itself in its cosmic, protological, and eschatological dimensions. Despite Irigaray’s problematic gender essentialism, there is something deeply consistent with Christian mystical the­ ology and contemporary feminism in her far-­reaching vision of a holistic renewal of life.

Kristeva’s Text on Teresa While Irigaray places her hope in yogic breathing, Kristeva focuses on the curative power of writing, including especially Teresa of Avila’s, but also her own. Although Teresa, My Love (2008) is called a “novel,”123 much of it reads like an argument. It is a work of theory embroidered by musical scores, visual images, stylized letters, a four-­act play with scene directions, and a fictional narrative based on real people and events from both the sixteenth century and today. All of these components marshal the central claim that Teresa has much to teach philo­ sophers, artists, clinicians, and culture writ large. Not merely a “hysteric,” as psych­olo­gists from Jean-­Martin Charcot to Lacan have alleged,124 Teresa is also a gifted healer of body and soul, with techniques that are potentially more effective than the psychoanalytic and psychiatric cures currently on offer. She is equipped

122 Irigaray, Key Writings, pp. 147 and 166; Irigaray, Between East and West, pp. 9–10; and Irigaray and Marder, Through Vegetal Being, pp. 9–14 and 86. 123  Kristeva is the author of several novels—­Samurai, The Old Man and the Wolves, Possessions, Murder in Byzantium, and The Enchanted Clock—­all of which are tied to her theoretical work, but Teresa, My Love blurs the lines between literature and theory in a uniquely bold manner. For critical treatments of the other novels, see Benigno, ed., Kristeva’s Fiction. 124  On Charcot and his legacy, see Evans, Fits and Starts, pp. 9–50.

The Other Within  173 to address nihilistic forms of both secularism and religious fundamentalism, which have eluded other remedies.125 Kristeva presents Teresa as the near-­perfect embodiment of the therapeutic form of mystical femininity she has been seeking throughout her career. The passing glance Teresa received in About Chinese Women has become a more than 600-­page magnum opus, a love letter, a hymn of praise.126 The protagonist of the novel, Sylvia Leclercq, is a Kristeva doppelganger: a practicing psychoanalyst who wrote a study of Marguerite Duras (as Kristeva does in Black Sun) and now finds herself obsessed with Teresa (as Kristeva does too). The title Teresa, My Love echoes Duras’s Hiroshima, My Love. Whereas both Kristeva and Sylvia express concerns about the depressive energy of Duras’s work—­Sylvia calls her a “witch who passes on to her female readers a boundless misery”—they place Teresa in a much more positive light. Like Dostoyevsky, Teresa does not merely display narcissistic wounds; she knows how to soothe them.127 Sylvia’s friends—­Bruno Zonabend, the publisher of her Duras book; Marianne Baruch, a Jewish psychiatrist who decides to undergo psychoanalysis; Jerôme Tristan, a self-­important Lacanian married to Aude Tristan, “a militant feminist”; Andrew, an ex-­Methodist, American deconstructionist and documentarian; and Juan Ramirez, a Mexican-­ born scholar of Cervantes—­ insist on pathologizing Teresa and do not comprehend Sylvia’s affection for her.128 Sylvia’s dialogues with these characters illustrate Kristeva’s critical distance from the postmodern academic spaces she inhabits. The postscript, which is framed as an epistolary response to Denis Diderot’s satirical book, The Nun, similarly marks this critical distance, as does Sylvia’s running commentary on Freud. However, the atheistic commitments of Diderot and Freud are harder for Sylvia to shake than those of the book’s other (fictionalized) skeptics. Although she considers Diderot to be too rationalistic, his enlightened rejection of religion dissuades her from fully embracing the believing Teresa.129 Likewise, Freud’s God-­denying psychoanalytic theories provide the grounds on which Sylvia affirms Teresa.130 We are not far from the logic of In the Beginning Was Love. Although Kristeva lauds Teresa in open defiance of the dismissive

125  Concerns have been raised about Kristeva’s choice to depict Muslims as fundamentalists and terrorists. See Bové, “Spain and Islam Once More” and Kristeva, Teresa, My Love, pp. 8 and 189. Although Kristeva mentions Islamic mystical figures such as al-­Nuri, Ibn Karram, al-­Hallaj, al-­Arabi, al-­Ghazali, and Rumi (pp. 39–40), she does not give any comparably positive depiction of con­tem­por­ ary Muslims. 126 Kristeva, Teresa, My Love, pp. 26, 61, 69, 156, 253, 255, and 273. 127 Kristeva, Teresa, My Love, pp. 226–7. 128 Kristeva, Teresa, My Love, pp. 14–15, 52–4, 377–86, 407–20, 550, and 591–2. 129  Kristeva characterizes “belief ” as a universal human need to hold something as true (even if this something is not called “God”) and yet also as a dangerous idealism indicative of an adolescent state of mind. See Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe, pp. 1–76. 130 Kristeva, Teresa, My Love, pp. 58–60, 552–60, and 568.

174 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

judgments of knowing academics, she continues to treat Teresa’s Christian faith as no more than a productive illusion. As in Tales of Love, so too here Kristeva’s key to a therapeutic form of mystical femininity is an identification with a loving father that incorporates maternal features without letting them reign unchecked. Yet Kristeva’s argument in Teresa, My Love differs slightly. She integrates her earlier concepts of the repressive symbolic father of the Oedipus conflict and the loving imaginary father of the individual’s prehistory into a polyvalent “ideal father” that serves both functions sim­ul­tan­ eous­ly. She argues that various figures in Teresa’s life represent this ideal father and help Teresa deepen her identification with it, including her father don Alonso; her brother Rodrigo; her uncle Pedro; Pedro’s favorite saint, Jerome; and Jesus’s (step-)father St. Joseph, after whom Teresa names her first Discalced convent.131 Above all, Kristeva highlights Teresa’s identification with Jesus himself, in both his “sacred humanity” and his consubstantiality with the heavenly Father. Reprising her discussion of the Eucharistic identification with Christ from Powers of Horror, Kristeva declares here that “the Host reconciles [Teresa] with the ideal Father while allaying her disgust at the maternal-­feminine.”132 Kristeva explains that although Teresa is “afraid of woman’s destiny as exemplified by her own mother,” and therefore strives for a greater proximity to the paternal, the orality of Eucharistic communion and her aquatic experiences of grace (detailed in her Life) keep the mother relationship operative. Teresa’s ideal father includes such maternal aspects without letting them dominate her psyche.133 Kristeva’s discourse on the ideal father culminates in an argument for the thera­peut­ic value of the paschal mystery. This argument distinguishes Kristeva from the anti-­sacrificial Irigaray (who, after Speculum, does not countenance any mys­tic­al identification with the crucified Christ) and brings Kristeva into the cruciform territory of Speyr and Balthasar’s mystical theology.134 In Black Sun, Kristeva cites Balthasar’s idea of a “hiatus” between Father and Son to support her claim that Christ’s death represents the distance from the origin that the psyche must pass through in order to gain a space for itself. She interprets Christ’s death as a productive “work of the negative,” in a quasi-­Hegelian sense. Whereas Balthasar offers a (perhaps insufficient) Christian correction to Hegel on this soteriological issue, Kristeva largely accepts Hegel’s dialectical logic and simply transposes it into the categories of psychoanalysis. For Kristeva, unlike Hegel, the crucified Christ does not symbolize the becoming of absolute spirit. Instead, this

131 Kristeva, Teresa, My Love, pp. 12, 133, 144, 146, 169, 174, and 283. 132 Kristeva, Teresa, My Love, p. 186. 133 Kristeva, Teresa, My Love, pp. 90, 99–100, 130, 184–6. 134  Jennifer Martin demonstrates that, despite Balthasar’s critique of Teresa’s supposed subjectivism, his kenotic understanding of Christian sanctity resonates with Kristeva’s account of Teresa’s “baroque”—that is, dynamic, ecstatic, other-­directed—­subjectivity. See Jennifer Martin, “Balthasar Avec Kristeva.”

The Other Within  175 figure symbolizes a process by which the subject both separates from the mother and retains her.135 In Teresa, My Love, Kristeva develops a similar line of reasoning by interpreting the paschal mystery in light of Freud’s essay, “A Child Is Being Beaten.”136 In this study, Freud observes that it is common for patients to dream of or picture a child being physically abused. In the sadistic form of this fantasy, the patient takes a certain rivalrous pleasure in imagining that this victim is someone else. In its masochistic form, the patient finds another kind of pleasure (mixed with pain) by representing himself or herself as the beaten child. In this case, the fantasy expresses a deeply felt sense of guilt, shame, or abandonment. If a woman im­agines the beaten child as a boy, this may indicate a sadistic impulse that is covering over a deeper masochism—­an unconscious feeling of being excluded from the scene altogether. Kristeva argues that when Teresa imaginatively and somatically identifies with the crucified Christ, she recognizes herself in the human Jesus who suffers. He is her alter ego, her body, her unruly desires, and her guilt. At the same time, Teresa believes that this suffering one is truly God, a perfect image of the ideal father who both lays down the law before which she is guilty and loves her so much that he sends himself (as his son) to take her place. This Christological reformulation of the Freudian fantasy of a child being beaten, which turns it into a fantasy of a “father [being] beaten to death,” allows Teresa to affirm herself simultaneously as abject flesh and as logos. It allows her to experience herself as an erotic, bodily woman and as someone capable of speech, thought, creativity, and power. Teresa’s mystical internalization of Christ’s two natures (which are doctrinally enshrined by Chalcedon and psychoanalytically gendered by Kristeva) helps Teresa overcome her sadomasochism while in some sense validating and forgiving it. Kristeva considers this a stroke of therapeutic genius. Although she attributes this accomplishment to Christian mysticism as such, she thinks that Teresa achieves a more effective integration of passion and idealization than do the Beguines and John of the Cross, who overidentify with passion, and Eckhart and Guyon, who overidentify with idealization.137 Teresa—­and perhaps Teresa alone?—gets the dialectical balance just right. Just as we might question Balthasar’s decision to isolate Ignatius of Loyola as a singularly well-­balanced representative of the “metaphysics of the saints,” we might similarly question Kristeva’s assertion of Teresa’s exceptional and “extra­or­ din­ary” status.138 The number of Christian mystical success stories may be much larger than either thinker suggests. However, more significant for the present 135 Kristeva, Black Sun, pp. 132 and 272n28. 136  This argument occurs in Kristeva’s chapter called “A Father Is Beaten to Death” in Teresa, My Love, pp. 387–406. See also Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten” in his On Psychopathology, pp. 159–94. 137 Kristeva, Teresa, My Love, pp. 95–7, 400, 518, and 580–7. 138 Kristeva, Teresa, My Love, p. 393.

176 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

discussion is the remarkable fact that Kristeva considers Teresa to be extra­or­din­ ary precisely because she achieves a happy ordinariness: a spiritual equilibrium. Teresa translates “outside time” into “ordinary time.” She transforms her once-­ anguished life of “tortured, erotic carnality,” supposedly predictable for a woman, not only into the bliss of mystical union with her divine Spouse but also into a daily conformity to “His Majesty’s” will. She does not remain trapped in hysteria, anorexia, or epilepsy but transmutes her body into writing and her writing into action. Beyond being a desirous daughter and joyous wife, she becomes a highly effective symbolic mother: foundress of the Discalced Carmelites and institutor of new communal norms. She forges a livable life for herself and others.139 None of this would be possible for Teresa without her practice of “mental prayer”; that is, without her sustained attention to the presence of God in the depths of her soul, her “interior castle.” Kristeva acknowledges the importance of this prayerful relationship with God for Teresa but wants to refashion it into something else more amenable to her postmodern sensibilities: a “new humanism” in which otherness and love are retained but God and prayer are not. Kristeva grants that “an irreducible otherness is conceivable, which, being plural, and the blazing pole of singular desires, makes us speak, reflect, enjoy,” and she concludes that “therefore it exists.” This existent otherness functions like God for the psyche but need not be called “God.” Although Kristeva has fallen “out of love with love,” because it most often manifests itself as sickness on her clinical couch, she adds that “there is no way to treat the lovesick except by listening lovingly.” Therefore, something like love survives for her. It appears in her recommended practices of countertransference and political hospitality. Although she does not believe that Teresa enjoys any bodily life beyond the grave, she does think Teresa’s writings make her “immortal.”140 Yet Teresa had already tasted a different type of eternity. In the end, although Kristeva confesses love for Teresa and means it sincerely, she disavows the very things—­prayer and union with God—­that Teresa loved the most and that made her most herself.

Seeking a Greater Love Christian mystical theology can welcome Irigaray’s and Kristeva’s loves. It can celebrate Irigaray’s hospitality to elemental nature and its animal and vegetal life, the joy she finds in her erotic relationships, the tenderness she shows to the “little girl” within herself and within others, and the empowerment she offers men and women in their living, breathing bodies. It can agree with her that there is something divine, Christic, Marian, Edenic, spiritual, and gracious in all of this. It can 139 Kristeva, Teresa, My Love, pp. 47, 279, 303–5, and 310. 140 Kristeva, Teresa, My Love, pp. 62–6, italics in original.

The Other Within  177 similarly honor Kristeva’s arguments for the therapeutic value of certain Christian practices of love, her ecumenical appreciation for Catholic and Orthodox traditions, her sensitivity to sacramental theology and trinitarian theology, her clarity regarding the violent forces at war in the soul, and her search for a process of dynamic integration. By engaging Christian mystical sources, Irigaray and Kristeva teach Christian theologians many things about their own traditions that they might otherwise have missed. These two mystically attuned philosophers offer love to a wounded world—­gifts of insight that may change the way many people experience their ordinary lives and open up possibilities for greater flourishing. However, if divine love is distinguished by a criterion of maximal desirability (something like Anselm’s “that than which nothing greater can be thought”), then it remains necessary to seek a love still greater than that which Irigaray and Kristeva profess. Breaking free from Irigaray’s Hegelian theory of objective sexual difference, this love would hold dear the amazing variety of human bodies and nonviolent intimate relationships. Moving beyond Kristeva’s Hegelian employment of the negative, it would reassure the world’s countless survivors of abuse that their suffering was not a necessary instrument of some grander process of becoming. In addition to rescuing the mother from symbolic matricide, this greater love would be careful not to say too much about “her,” so as to avoid overdetermining the meanings of women’s bodies and desires. And if it extended to the father too, as it must, this love would not generalize too much about “him” either. It would not rest content with constructs of an ideal or repressive father but instead attend critically to the singular, quotidian lives of fathers. This love would not mention darkness without entering into deep solidarity with the darkly colored peoples of the world who, after centuries of colonialism, slavery, de­priv­ ation, and violation, still cry out for a better possible future. This love would not accord the privileges of singularity and narrative voice only to those nearest at hand. This love would revere life from its oceanic beginnings to its last breaths and hold out hope for an unimaginable life still to come. Above all, this love would be greater because it would be unequivocally divine. Not merely the horizon of the subject’s or the cosmos’s becoming; not merely the psychoanalytic mother or the unconscious drives that reveal her presence and loss, or for that matter the psychoanalytic father and his castrating law; not merely auto-­affective flesh or the decentering relation with the other; hence, neither simply immanence nor alterity nor just their combination as the other within; more than the body and its discourse; more than breath and text; more than jouissance and subjectivity; alive before the earliest beginnings; a revolutionary energy in­fin­ ite­ly greater than 1968; known and experienced by countless Christian mystics and others too as the extraordinary heart of their ordinary lives, as that which makes a clear distinction between extraordinary and ordinary impossible;

178 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

condensed in Jesus’s touch, dispersed through the Spirit’s caresses; the nameless and endlessly nameable desideratum of Christian mystical theology. The “French feminist” construction of mystical femininity sheds light on this unknown love but is far from mastering it. More broadly, the philosophical reconstruction of Christian mystical theology along the phenomenological and psychoanalytic pathways of postmodern intellectual culture that we have studied in this chapter and Chapter 3 must be regarded, at least by theologians, as having both positive and negative outcomes. The beneficial emergence of inter­dis­cip­lin­ ary conversations that clarify the significance of mysticism for quotidian existence must be held in tension with a web of theoretical and practical problems. These problems include some that implicate the Catholic theologians considered in Chapters 1 and 2 but affect these philosophers in an equally or more serious manner, as well as some that are distinctive of these philosophers. One major shared problem is the attribution of a positive meaning to human suffering. This problem is evident to some degree in Rahner, Certeau, and Kristeva; to a greater degree in Speyr and Balthasar; and above all in Henry. Although this tendency to treat suffering positively comes from attending to the paschal aspects of Christian mysticism, new ways need to be found to experience and express union with the crucified Christ that do not normalize needless human misery and that affirm God’s healing and divinizing, as opposed to sadistic, motives. Irigaray’s argument in “La Mystérique” is exemplary in this regard. Another area of shared problems revolves around gender. On the one hand, there is the problem of naively bracketing gender, as one witnesses (for the most part) in Rahner and especially Henry. On the other hand, there is the problem of reductively objectifying gender, which happens to some degree in the Lacanians Certeau and Kristeva but especially in the more insistently binary Speyr, Balthasar, and later Irigaray. The critique of phallocentrism that Irigaray (more than Kristeva) develops has the power to subvert many such bracketing and objectifying approaches to gender, but the critiques of Irigaray’s idealized femininity by other feminist theorists demonstrate that resisting phallocentrism is not a sufficient goal. One must avoid every sort of gender essentialism, even those that cele­ brate “woman,” while remaining mindful of the effects of gender constructs in culture and society. The best way to do this is to study particular and singular features of quotidian (mystical) lives. We began to see this sort of individualized attention in Speyr and Balthasar’s hagiographical writings (as opposed to their gender theory) and in some of Certeau’s heterological and cultural studies. Kristeva’s Teresa, My Love provides another impressive, though not un­ques­tion­ able, example. Problems that theologians would regard as distinctive of such philosophical transpositions—­ but which can be, and have been, associated with Speyr, Balthasar, and especially Rahner, because of their own philosophical entanglements—­have to do with perceived diminishments, distortions, and even

The Other Within  179 rejections of significant Christian doctrines, practices, and sources. As we have seen, Henry, Certeau, Irigaray, and Kristeva do not break from Christian theology completely. Although they write more nearly as philosophers than theologians, they offer positive interpretations of many Christian materials, especially mystical ones. Yet they do not always treat them with the levels of nuance or fidelity that many theologians would want. Theology is supposed to be the language of a greater love—­a love that belongs to, and is, the unknown, incarnate God. Yet we must acknowledge that theology regularly fails in this task. Who can deny it? Although a form of theology that is explicitly Christian and mystical may have much to recommend it, Irigaray is right to insist as early as Speculum that these are not sufficient criteria. To embody the highest love, Christian mystical theology must overcome its historical ties to phallocentrism—­which is to say, it must become feminist. However, to be fem­in­ ist in a way that harnesses the full liberative power of its own mystical sources, Christian mystical theology must also overcome the metaphysically funded (Hegelian and Freudian) politics of gender and racial difference that limits the viability of “French feminism.” This politics is incompatible with the grace of divine union that is revealed in the quotidian lives of poor women and men of color. It is time for such lives to be afforded the theological and philosophical attention they deserve.

PART III

IN T ER SE C T IONA L F E M I NI SM Mystical Traditions from the American Side of the Atlantic

5 The Divine in Between Gloria Anzaldúa, Ada María Isasi-­Díaz, and Other Mestizo/a Mystical Sources

Women scholars of color who analyze interlocking gender, racial, and ­socioeconomic conditions of everyday existence, particularly in the aftermath of the Atlantic world’s twin evils of conquest and slavery, also think about experiences of divine union that occur in the midst of these circumstances. Often these mys­tic­al experiences inspire opposition to such violence and provide strength for interior and communal transformations. In some cases, a sense of God’s nearness becomes a key to basic survival. It sustains a belief in one’s love-­worthiness despite the hatred or indifference of the world. It communicates the sacred truth that one is not nothing but rather beautiful and graced. Yet it is rare to see scholars of Christian mysticism consider this sort of intersectional feminist literature or its primary sources—­whether these be writings, oral testimonies, works of art, or communal practices—­to be normative for their research. As feminists across the academy have become more attentive to the methodological demands of intersectionality, feminist interpreters of Christian mysticism have continued to prioritize gender-­focused studies of medieval and early modern texts of Western Europe, with little attention to race. Without denying the value of such (de)constructive forays into the occidental past, feminist scholarship on Christian mysticism must broaden its geographical scope, interpretive tools, and range of concerns. It must strive to understand the presence of God in the terrorized yet resilient lives of women on the undersides of colonial modernity. The contested theology–­philosophy relationship that we have investigated in the works of German-­speaking twentieth-­century Catholic theologians (Part I) and French-­speaking postmodern philosophers (Part II) appears in new ways in the bilingual Latino/a and Anglophone African American discourses studied next (Part III). Although these discourses do not always label this inter­dis­cip­lin­ ary relationship explicitly, one finds it wherever mysticism (under whatever name it passes, including prayer, spirituality, religious experience, popular religion, personal devotion, and more) is characterized more nearly as a type of grace that brings about an intimate connection with the triune God of Christian faith or as an endogenous feature of human existence determined by variations of

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism. Andrew Prevot, Oxford University Press. © Andrew Prevot 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866967.003.0006

184 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

consciousness, embodiment, language, culture, and so on. The former char­ac­ter­ iza­tion of mysticism is theological, and the latter is philosophical, in broad senses of these terms. Distinguishing these approaches helps one appreciate their diverse operations and interactions even in sources which, because of their condition of gender, racial, and socioeconomic subordination, might be wrongly assumed to represent neither theology nor philosophy, and perhaps not even mysticism. Intersectional feminist authors wrestle with familiar tensions between normalizing and quotidian aspects of ordinariness. In the Americas, it has become “or­din­ary”—in the sense of structural, regular, and all too predictable—­for poor women of color to suffer from a range of interconnected oppressions. Such systemic violence is a socially constructed norm that governs and destroys countless lives. It is a long-­lasting effect of conquest, slavery, and all the symbolic and ma­ter­ial arrangements that rationalize such evil and protect its beneficiaries. From a theological viewpoint, this norm must be regarded as egregiously sinful. The everyday struggles by persons and communities who bear the brunt of such intergenerationally devastating crimes center on practices of resistance and cre­ ativ­ity, which sometimes result in astounding victories: moments in history when incarnate love finally prevails. But there are also staggering defeats and losses that cannot be undone, which must be grieved and remembered with defiance. Diverse kinds of union with God take shape amid such joys and sorrows. Various modes of psychosomatic contact, ritualized expression, and theological and philo­soph­ic­al interpretation can be discerned in the quotidian—­and in this sense also “or­din­ary”—lives of the conquered, the enslaved, and their still aggrieved progeny. The divine is present with and in them, working both to subvert violent norms and to forge new community-­building ones. This chapter discusses the Cuban American mujerista theologian Ada María Isasi-­Díaz and the Mexican American Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa together with a host of other representatives of mestizo/a mysticism. One might call these sources “Latino/a” (or “Latinx,” if one wants not merely to acknowledge but ex out the gender binary implied by the Spanish suffixes “o” and “a”), but the term “mestizo/a” (or “mestisx”) may be preferable insofar as it does not only name the European cultural-­linguistic roots of such communities (Latin) but emphasizes the fact of mixture (mestizaje) with native peoples of the Americas, along with other groups transported from Africa and Asia. The word “mestizo/a” acknowledges the contributions of such racially subaltern communities. However, it remains an object of critical scrutiny from indigenous, decolonial, and anti-­ racist directions because of the problematic power relations involved in the history and discourse of mestizaje. Although both Isasi-­Díaz and Anzaldúa offer intersectional feminist accounts of the mysticism of ordinary life, prioritizing the perspectives of politically and economically marginalized mestizas, Isasi-­Díaz does so as a Catholic Christian theologian, whereas Anzaldúa does so as a non-­Christian writer. Anzaldúa is a

The Divine in Between  185 postmodern philosopher of sorts, influenced by the likes of Nietzsche and Freud,1 but she is most deeply inspired by indigenous cultures foreign to the Western philosophical canon. This chapter pairs Isasi-­Díaz and Anzaldúa in order to crystallize the theology–­ ­ philosophy relationship in the context of mestizo/a ­mysticism. It ventures the sort of appreciative yet theologically critical reading of Anzaldúa that previous chapters gave to Henry, Certeau, Irigaray, and Kristeva, while asking what Isasi-­Díaz, like Rahner, Speyr, Balthasar, and other theologians before her, stands to gain from further dialogue with nontheological approaches to the mysticism of ordinary life. In addition to Anzaldúa and Isasi-­Díaz, this chapter engages with other sources to give a fuller picture of mestizo/a mysticism and broaden the mystical canon.

Mystical Mestizaje Before it takes on cultural, political, and theological meanings, the Spanish word mestizaje refers to the mixture of peoples that resulted from reproductive sexual intercourse between Spanish colonizers and American Indian women, beginning with the rapes that occurred during Columbus’s voyages.2 Wars of conquest and European diseases destroyed up to 90 percent of the indigenous population in certain regions of the Americas and the Caribbean. During this early period of genocidal violence, “many native women were accosted, abused, beaten, and raped.”3 Many were enslaved. Some were taken by force. Others were “given away” by the patriarchal rulers of their own communities in efforts to establish political alliances with the Spanish. In subsequent generations, from the sixteenth century to the present, rape has continued to be used as an instrument of colonial dom­in­ ation. Native and mixed women, whether they actively resisted European settler communities or made efforts to assimilate into them, remained targets of such dehumanizing attacks, because male colonizers considered their racialized bodies to be “dirty” and “rapable.”4 In the midst of such coercive circumstances, some Spanish–­Indian, and later Spanish–­mestiza, sexual relationships did take on mutually beneficial, durable, and even romantic forms.5 Although mestizaje emerged from the freedom-­ denying horrors of rape and conquest, it also reflected some women’s efforts to adapt to changing circumstances by seeking the advantages that could be gained from forming intimate ties to colonial elites. Such choices, when they occurred, 1 Anzaldúa, Borderlands (1987), pp. 48 and 277. 2 Bergreen, Columbus, pp. 142–4. The term “mestizo” appears as early as 1530. See Rubén Medina, “El mestizaje a través de la frontera,” p. 102. 3 Socolow, Women of Colonial Latin America, p. 35. 4  Andrea Smith, Conquest, pp. 10 and 25. 5 Socolow, Women of Colonial Latin America, pp. 37–40.

186 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

both demonstrated women’s agency and revealed the violent limits that were imposed on it. With declining native populations, Spaniards imported increasing numbers of African and, to a lesser extent, Asian slaves into their American col­ onies. This resulted in new consensual and nonconsensual mixtures combining genetic materials from four continents.6 In addition to procreative miscegenation, there were clashes, interactions, and annihilations at the level of culture. Languages were translated, blended, and suppressed. Rituals, stories, beliefs, norms, and ways of life were dismantled and reconfigured. The violence of Spanish cultural imperialism was in many respects as devastating as the murderous and rapacious violence against living human bodies, and it obeyed the same dominative patterns.7 Yet its power was not total. Just as some indigenous women used their limited agency in such a coercive situation to seek means of survival and flourishing through relationships with col­on­ iz­ing men, so too the bearers and producers of indigenous culture found ways to preserve some of its elements in the form of new cultural syntheses.8 None of this should suggest a rosy view of the events that led to such biological and cultural mestizaje. The creative resilience on the part of some of the victims of the c­ onquest does not in any way justify its unspeakable cruelties, which must be condemned unequivocally. Virgil Elizondo distinguishes this first phase of mestizaje, associated with the Spanish conquest, from a second phase that began with the 1848 Guadalupe Hildalgo Treaty at the conclusion of the Mexican–­American War. This treaty transferred roughly half of Mexico’s land to the U.S., including present-­day California, New Mexico, and Arizona and parts of Texas, Colorado, and Utah. The mestizo/as living in these places were crossed by the border. The violence they suffered, and continue to suffer, as a racially oppressed minority in a White-­ dominant, English-­speaking country echoes that of the Spanish conquest and occasions new experiences of biological and cultural mixture.9 These Mexican American borderland experiences are connected in complex ways with exilic experiences of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and other Latino/a communities living in the U.S.  Puerto Rico was claimed as a U.S.  colony at the end of the Spanish–­ American War in 1898. Many Cubans migrated to the U.S. during and following the Cuban Revolution, which took place from 1953 to 1959. Immigration from other Latin American countries increased dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century. The interaction between these groups and their coming together to form an internally diverse Hispanic or Latino/a community might be considered a third phase of mestizaje.10

6 Vinson, Before Mestizaje, pp. 6–8. 8 Elizondo, Galilean Journey, p. 10. 10  Isasi-­Díaz, En la Lucha, p. 33.

7 Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 75. 9 Elizondo, Galilean Journey, pp. 13–16.

The Divine in Between  187 In 1925, the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos introduced an influential yet highly problematic understanding of mestizaje as both a racial and mystical phenomenon. Like Kant and other modern European philosophers and race ­the­or­ists, Vasconcelos presupposed “four racial trunks: the Black, the Indian, the Mongol, and the White.” However, departing from the White supremacist philo­ soph­ic­al mainstream, he argued that the four races would be synthesized into a  fifth, final raza cósmica and that the mixture of Spanish and Indian peoples ­heralds this transformative—­indeed, eschatological—­process.11 Whatever biogenetic diversity there is among human beings, scholars now agree that it cannot be adequately categorized in such racially reductive terms. There were no homogenous or “pure” races before or after the Spanish conquest about which one could credibly make the sorts of generalizations that run throughout Vasconcelos’s book, and there is no warrant for the moral, intellectual, and ontological racial hierarchy that he posits.12 He assumes that the four races that will be combined by the coming universal mestizaje are inferior to the new one that will emerge from it. He claims that they represent imperfect, earlier stages of human development. He reserves his most disparaging remarks for “the Black,” whom he describes as “eager for sensual joy, intoxicated with dances and unbridled lust.” He is convinced that the time of “the Indian” is over: “The red men, the illustrious Atlanteans from whom Indians derive, went to sleep millions of years ago, never to awaken.” By contrast, despite other criticisms, he says that “the White” possesses a “clear mind . . . that resembles his skin and his dreams” and that the col­ on­iz­ing efforts of Europeans were a necessary “bridge” to the future.13 Among Europeans, Vasconcelos draws a sharp distinction between “Anglo-­ Saxons,” whom he contends are fixated on racial purity, and “Latins,” such as the Spanish, the Portuguese, and to some extent the French, whom he suggests are open to comingling with other races. Arguing that the Latins have a greater “sympathy for strangers” and “an abundance of love,” he reinterprets their conquest of the Americas as an act of fidelity to their God-­given “mission of fusing all peoples ethnically and spiritually.” In romantic, neo-­joachimite fashion, he associates this racial fusion with a third age of spiritual freedom, love, feeling, and beauty. He says that its participants will live “a godly life” that obeys only norms of “taste”; that is, erotic preference. The genocidal anti-­Blackness of Vasconcelos’s vision of the future is undeniable: “In a few decades of aesthetic eugenics, the Black may disappear, together with the types that a free instinct of beauty may go on signaling as fundamentally recessive and undeserving, for that reason, of ­ perpetuation.”14 In Balthasar’s terms, Vasconcelos offers an “aesthetic theology,” 11 Vasconcelos, Cosmic Race (1925), p. 9. See also Boxill, “Kantian Racism.” 12 Elizondo, Future Is Mestizo, p. 101 and Isasi-­Díaz, En la Lucha, p. 33. 13 Vasconcelos, Cosmic Race, pp. 9, 16, and 22. 14 Vasconcelos, Cosmic Race, pp. 9, 17, 19, 29, and 32. See also Rubén Medina, “El mestizaje a través de la frontera,” pp. 107–8.

188 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

not a “theological aesthetics.”15 Instead of loving the divinely reflective beauty of all creatures, as the God of Christian faith calls everyone to do, Vasconcelos ties God to a false, worldly standard of beauty—­one that loves mixture but hates Blackness. Although Vasconcelos opposes the Anglo-­Saxon politics of racial purity, his thesis that “the Ibero-­American race [must] permeate itself with its mission and embrace it as a mysticism” dangerously associates mysticism with a different type of racist politics.16 Vasconcelos believes that a racial mestizaje, however violently it is achieved, is a sign of union with God or at least of progress toward that end. His fusionist views were informed by various mystical traditions beyond Catholicism, including Hindu teachings on Vedanta, the Neo-­ Platonism of Plotinus, the vitalist philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the esoteric doctrines of French Spiritualists and Theosophists. These streams coalesced with the social Darwinian and pseudo-­scientific race theories that were in vogue in the first half of the twentieth century and merged with Vasconcelos’s nationalist and pan-­ Latinist political ambitions in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. The idea of a mystical mission for mestizo people helped him find meaning in his experience growing up on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border. It reframed his interstitial existence as a crucial stage in universal history. It is not surprising that the Chicano/a movement later found inspiration in his work.17 However, understanding this confluence of factors does not give one license to accept their results. If mestizaje is to be accorded mystical significance, this must be done in a way that avoids Vasconcelos’s pitfalls. Elizondo makes many of the needed adjustments. Although he mentions the idea of a “cosmic race,” he shifts the focus of mestizaje from racial mixture to an open-­ended intercultural dialogue. Instead of a universal fusion of identities, he argues for a loving communion that maintains respect for local differences. In place of an antinomian philosophy of aesthetic oneness, he proposes a Christian theological aesthetics and liberative praxis normed by popular Catholic devotions to Our Lady of Guadalupe and the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.18 Despite these important revisions to the theory of mystical mestizaje, critical questions remain about Elizondo’s approach. How does his hope for an all-­embracing intercultural mestizaje function with respect to Black and indigenous groups who continue to be racialized? Moreover, does his positive vision of mestizaje conceal the sexual violence that historically underlies it?19 15 Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, pp. 79–117 and Goizueta, Christ Our Companion, pp. 109–25. 16 Vasconcelos, Cosmic Race, p. 21. 17  See Didier Jaén’s introduction to Vasconcelos, Cosmic Race, pp. ix–­xxxiii and Guerrero, Chicano Theology, pp. 122–6. 18 Elizondo, Future Is Mestizo, pp. xii, 92, and 107. 19  In addition to the colonial history of sexual violence, scholars who engage Elizondo’s work must also acknowledge that he was accused of kissing and fondling an orphan boy who had been abused by another priest and approached Elizondo for help. Elizondo died by suicide on March 14, 2016, shortly

The Divine in Between  189 Although Elizondo corrects glaring problems in Vasconcelos’s racial account of mystical mestizaje, he does not acknowledge that even his proposed intercultural mestizaje could function racially in ways that are harmful to Black and indigenous communities. Manuel Vásquez argues that the Latino/a discourse of mestizaje has become the preferred instrument of a new cultural imperialism. As wielded by political and economic elites, it legitimizes “the destruction of the indigenous Other, those at the margins of post-­ nationalist Latin American countries.” Vásquez notes, moreover, that the power relations involved here are gendered. The dominant rhetoric suggests that “male = power = mestizo = progress = nation, and women = impotence = Indian = primitive = tribe.”20 In a similar vein, Rubén Rosario Rodríguez describes the complex web of racial identities embedded in the idea of mestizaje: In my own Puerto Rico one finds a spectrum of racial types that include blanco (white), indio (dark skinned and straight haired), moreno (dark skinned with a mix of black and white features), negro (black or African American in appearance), and trigueño (wheat-­colored), reflecting both the biological diversity of our ancestry (mestizaje) and that part of our Spanish cultural heritage that elevates white/European traits, culture, and lineage to the detriment of all things African and Amerindian.21

To overcome racist aspects of the discourse of mestizaje, it is not sufficient to assert, as many do, that mestizo/a identity embraces different races or that it is defined by culture and language instead of race. One must also interrogate the hidden racial patterns that in some cases exclude Black and indigenous peoples from mestizaje and in other cases include them on lower rungs of a social order that resembles the casta system from the colonial period.22 Anzaldúa and Isasi-­Díaz resist the racist politics associated with mestizaje more effectively than Elizondo does but still not as forcefully as is necessary.23 before he was scheduled to be deposed. Although he made no admission of specific wrongdoing, it is possible to read his suicide note as a thinly veiled confession. Such abuses of clerical power participate in patterns of domination similar to those in the Spanish conquest. See “Priest’s Suicide Note Begs Forgiveness.” 20  Vásquez, “Rethinking Mestizaje,” pp. 146–7. 21  Rubén Rodríguez, Racism and God-­Talk, p. 17. 22  Vinson argues that, prior to the nineteenth- and twentieth-­century ascendancy of mestizaje as a supposedly all-­inclusive paradigm of Latino/a identity, Latin America was characterized by a complex system of racial mixtures and social castes that he calls “castizaje.” The more overtly racialized power relations of this earlier period have not simply disappeared. See Vinson, Before Mestizaje, pp. 35–69. 23  In his Mestizaje: (Re)Mapping Race, Culture, and Faith in Latina/o Catholicism, Néstor Medina questions the ways mestizaje has been used uncritically even by critically minded thinkers such as Anzaldúa and Isasi-­Díaz. He argues that Anzaldúa risks turning mestizaje into an abstract, postmodern disruption of fixed identities that retains only tenuous relations to historical contexts and struggles (pp. 76–80). Similarly, he contends that Isasi-­Díaz’s effort to remake mestizaje-­mulatez into an interactive moral truth-­praxis conceals the genocidal racism that gave rise to such terms (pp. 56–8).

190 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Although Anzaldúa acknowledges some anti-­Black discrimination in mestizo/a culture—“we hardly ever own our Black ancestry”—she offers a largely sympathetic account of Vasconcelos’s philosophy that ignores its anti-­Black elements. She states without qualification that “his theory is one of inclusivity.”24 Despite this too-­charitable reading, Anzaldúa does revise Vasconcelos’s concept of mestizaje in important ways by thinking constructively about its psychological, spiritual, and gendered aspects. Instead of a largescale blending of races or even cultures, Anzaldúa presents mestizaje as an interior experience, something concerning “the inner life of the Self.” On the one hand, this interior experience involves deep unrest. The mestiza is “in a constant state of mental nepantilism, an Aztec word meaning torn between ways.” This can be a painful state to endure. On the other hand, the suffering of being torn in two gives rise to a “new consciousness,” a new way of thinking and living that increases “tolerance of ambiguity.” Unlike Vasconcelos, Anzaldúa does not attribute a divine purpose or mystical meaning to historical events of rape and conquest. On the contrary, she associates the mystical dimension of mestizaje—­or, as she calls it, “spiritual mestizaje”—with a transformation of consciousness that disrupts the binary power relations that constitute oppressive structures of both race and gender. She defines mestizaje as “a massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness,” and she hopes that it will ultimately “bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war.”25 Anzaldúa centers a subject whom she calls “the new mestiza”; that is, a woman of the borderlands who responds critically to the multiple patriarchal cultures (Aztec, Latino, and Anglo; secular and religious) that seek to regulate her existence. By prioritizing this rebellious mestiza vantage point, Anzaldúa demonstrates her intersectional feminist methodology. Her commitment to such a project is evident not only in her writings but also in her groundbreaking work as an editor and curator of stories, essays, and poems by women of color. Although she understands that some mestizo men appropriate toxic forms of masculinity in order to cope with their conditions of racial subjugation, she declares that “we do not excuse, we do not condone, and we will no longer put up with it.” Being mistreated as a mestizo man in an oppressive U.S.  context does not justify sexist behavior. Nevertheless, Anzaldúa opposes using the term “machismo” because it is an Anglo construct, a racist fiction that conceals the complex forms of strength and struggle in mestizo men’s lives and seeks only to shame and disempower them.26 However, Medina’s critiques do not dismiss Anzaldúa and Isasi-­Díaz but instead encourage a more discerning interpretation of their works. 24 Anzaldúa, Borderlands, pp. 85 and 99. 25 Anzaldúa, Borderlands, pp. 19 and 99–103. 26 Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 105. See also Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back, a collection Anzaldúa first proposed in 1979 (p. xxiii).

The Divine in Between  191 Equally central to Anzaldúa’s project is her extension of the nonbinary logic of mestizaje to queer sexualities. Just as border thinking blurs racial and geographic lines, so too it upends heteronormative gender roles. She argues that queerness constitutes a border region between traditional expectations for men and women. Moreover, she emphasizes that queer people exist in all cultures and build bridges between them: “We come from all colors, all classes, all races, all time periods. Our role is to link people with each other.” Her personal experience growing up as a lesbian in a socially conservative Catholic household in rural South Texas shapes her thinking on these matters. Anzaldúa’s rejection of any model of sexual difference that would require women to submit to men indicates a principled refusal to stay in a fixed place or acquiesce to a prescribed identity. In this sense, her intersectional feminism and queer politics are not adjacent to her theory of mestizaje but at the very center of it. For Anzaldúa, mestizaje means deep spiritual-­and-­corporeal rebellion against all forms of domination.27 Anzaldúa argues that these aspects of mestizaje reveal “the god in us.” This divine presence makes them mystical in a somewhat theological, though not specifically Christian, sense. Raised Catholic, she leaves this faith tradition as she comes of age. She calls herself “an unbeliever” and says that “the Catholic Church fails to give meaning to my daily acts.” The god that dwells within her hearkens back to the deities of her indigenous ancestors. Nevertheless, her Nahual spirituality has complex ties to Mariology and paschal Christology, which we shall consider in the later sections of this chapter. Furthermore, in its defiance of binary categories, the inner divine presence that Anzaldúa associates with mestizaje resembles the incomprehensible mystical summit of a Dionysian apophatic ascent. Anzaldúa’s account of mestizaje is also mystical in a nontheological sense, insofar as it brings about a mystically styled transformation of consciousness. Like Certeau, Irigaray, and Kristeva, Anzaldúa draws on psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious, which connect it to darkness, femininity, and sexuality; to im­agin­ ation and dreams; and to a subversive, unifying sense of life before or after the distinction of subject and object. Like Kristeva’s semiotic in particular, Anzaldúa’s mestizaje brings these unruly forces into language and culture in order to provoke a revolution in them. The poetic eruptions in her multilingual prose, along with the more poetic second part of Borderlands/La Frontera, demonstrate the subversive linguistic style of this new mestiza mysticism. What makes this form of thinking mystical, in a philosophical sense, is not merely its immanence or alterity, as in Henry and Certeau—­or the immanent alterity of a feminine unconscious breaking into a masculine symbolic order, as in Irigaray and Kristeva—­but a resolute inbetweenness, which questions even these conceptual oppositions.28

27 Anzaldúa, Borderlands, pp. 41 and 106–7. 28 Anzaldúa, Borderlands, pp. 39 and 57–9.

192 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Like Anzaldúa, Isasi-­Díaz acknowledges that racism can be a problem not only for Latino/a communities but also within them. She endeavors to address this issue not only by affirming African and Amerindian contributions to Latino/a culture, as Anzaldúa does too, but also by describing its hybrid identity in terms of both mestizaje and mulatez. Citing Fernando Segovia, Isasi-­Díaz applies the word mestizaje to Spanish-­ Native mixtures and mulatez to Spanish-­ African ones.29 Miguel De La Torre raises concerns about this strategy. Although mulatez may be an important signifier of mixed identity for some, he contends that there are problems when White Latino/as claim to be mulatez while enjoying the social privileges associated with their lighter skin and when darkly colored Afro-­Latino/ as are recognized only as mulatez, since this may conceal their Black experiences in Latino/a societies.30 Since many Hispanic people, including from Mexico, have Spanish, Native, and African roots,31 a clear demarcation between mestizaje and mulatez is untenable in practice. When interpreted sympathetically, Isasi-­Díaz’s hyphenated term mestizaje-­mulatez and her similarly conjoined phrase “racism/ ethnic prejudice” raise awareness about these issues and hold them in tension. Isasi-­Díaz’s work resembles Anzaldúa’s in another respect insofar as it advances an intersectional feminist view of mestizaje. The female subject at the center of her project is not named “the new mestiza,” as in Anzaldúa’s texts, but rather “a mujerista.” Isasi-­Díaz explains that “a mujerista is a Latina who makes a preferential option for herself and her Hispanic sisters, understanding that our struggle for liberation has to take into consideration how racism/ethnic prejudice, economic oppression, and sexism work together and reinforce each other.”32 Although Isasi-­Díaz does not queer the idea of mestizaje in the manner Anzaldúa does, the two thinkers do similarly argue for an understanding of mestizaje that is empowering to marginalized Latinas. Isasi-­Díaz develops this intersectional feminist argument by defining mestizaje as “a symbol of Hispanic women’s moral truth-­praxis.” In her way of using the term, mestizaje therefore refers primarily neither to racial and cultural mixtures that occurred through the freedom-­denying horrors of rape and conquest nor to a romanticized future beyond the struggles of history, as it does in Vasconcelos. Rather, it refers primarily to a critical, relational activity that is “happening now, being experienced now, in many different ways.” She is adamant on this point: “mestizaje . . . is not an abstraction or something that happened in the past. Mestizaje is a present historical reality being elaborated in our very lives.”

29  Isasi-­Díaz, En la Lucha, p. 62 and Isasi-­Díaz, La Lucha Continues, pp. 73–6. 30  De La Torre, “Rethinking Mulatez.” 31 Vinson, Before Mestizaje, p. 40. 32  Isasi-­Díaz, En la Lucha, p. 23. María Pilar Aquino critiques the term “mujerista theology” and prefers the term “Latina feminist theology” because she believes this word choice better reflects the naming practices of grassroots social movements. She worries that the term “mujerista” suggests a niche academic community separated from the people, though this is clearly not Isasi-­Díaz’s intent. See Aquino, “Latina Feminist Theology,” pp. 138–9.

The Divine in Between  193 It  does  not occur against women’s wills but rather in, through, and because of their cre­ative efforts. They are not its passive victims but rather its agents and subjects. Although Isasi-­Díaz emphasizes women’s contributions to this active mestizaje-­of-­the-­present, particularly their moral clarity about the sins of patri­ archy, she does not think of mestizaje as a process in which only women can participate. Latino men are called to share in it too, again not by claiming it as a reified identity but by dialogically exercising their moral agency.33 The hyphenated phrase “moral truth-­praxis” expresses Isasi-­Díaz’s belief that in order to discern the truth about the common good and to achieve it one must engage in reflective social practices such as “evaluating existing moral norms of our communities, adapting them, and producing new ones in order to survive.” She does not understand truth to be a cognitive object in an individual’s mind but a living process manifest in the bodily acts of interconnected human beings. She defines mestizaje as the dynamic intermingling that brings together the material, ethical, epistemological, cultural, and spiritual histories and practices of an in­tern­al­ly diverse community, consisting of women and men from various racial backgrounds and economic statuses. For her, mestizaje is nothing other than this active, relational togetherness. Although Isasi-­Díaz focuses on mestizaje in the Hispanic community, especially among Hispanic women, like Elizondo she also envisions a truly global mestizaje among the “commonwealth of nations.” She does not endorse Vasconcelos’s theory of the cosmic race but instead calls for an intra- and inter-­communal truth-­praxis that has universally liberative goals.34 Isasi-­Díaz writes as a Catholic theologian who finds herself somewhat alienated from the church and what she calls its “traditional theology.” However, as we shall see later in this chapter, this sense of estrangement does not prevent her from engaging with Christian scriptures, liturgies, and doctrines in creative and appreciative ways. When she says that mujerista theologians believe there is an “ongoing revelation of God in our lives” and that “the kin-­dom of God can become a reality in our lives,” she refers to the God of liberation who is proclaimed in the prophetic texts of the Old Testament and the gospels of the New Testament. Likewise, when she embraces mestizaje-mulatez as her “locus theologicus,” she does not thereby imply that everything that occurs in Latino/a cultures is consistent with the liberating will of God but rather only that this is one historical context in which a divinely powered struggle for liberation can and must take place.35 Biological miscegenation and even intercultural dialogue do not by themselves guarantee a mystical closeness with God. Mestizaje per se does not suffice as a criterion. On the contrary, mestizaje becomes mystical for Isasi-­Díaz only to the extent that it takes on the character of a liberative truth-­praxis—­that is, only 33  Isasi-­Díaz, En la Lucha, pp. 203–5. 34  Isasi-­Díaz, En la Lucha, pp. 203–4 and 216n14 and Isasi-­Díaz, La Lucha Continues, pp. 70–2. 35  Isasi-­Díaz, Mujerista Theology, pp. 64, 72–5, and 107.

194 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

insofar as it involves quotidian participation in what she calls la lucha. In sum, although Anzaldúa’s and Isasi-­Díaz’s arguments differ, both rethink the relationship between mestizaje and mysticism in ways that resist the potential violence of this conceptual pairing and reorient its energy toward intersectional fem­in­ ist ends.

The Mysticism of La Lucha and Lo Cotidiano According to Isasi-­Díaz, la lucha (the struggle) is not a contest of faceless political institutions. It is a personal battle, requiring inner strength and bodily ex­pend­ iture on the part of those who wage it. Whether one thinks of it in terms of broad social movements, such as the farmworker strikes of the late 1960s and more recent protests for the rights of undocumented immigrants, or in terms of micro-­ level efforts to foster safety and wellbeing in one’s family and local communities, la lucha is deeply self-­implicating. Isasi-­Díaz and others speak about the intimate sphere of micro-­struggles under the heading of lo cotidiano (the everyday). This term refers to the material, historical, contextual, cultural, and agential details that shape each life and life-­world. For Isasi-­Díaz, la lucha and lo cotidiano are closely linked. Their unity in mestizo/a life concretizes the feminist claim that “the personal is political” and indicates that details of great spiritual and social significance may be hidden in everyday places, practices, and stories. In short: “la vida es la lucha [life is the struggle].”36 Like mestizaje, and for that matter the immanence and alterity of postmodern mystical discourses, la lucha and lo cotidiano are “philosophical” concepts in the sense that they allow one to ascribe a mystical meaning to life without implying an explicit relationship of obedience, love, or union with the triune God. Those engaged in everyday struggle and those interpreting it have the option to embrace or refuse a Christian theological account of the life-­sustaining energy that animates it. To the extent that mestizo/as fight for the just treatment of workers and immigrants, the overcoming of colonial and patriarchal powers, and all the conditions for a livable life, these efforts are praiseworthy on both humanist and Christian grounds and do not present the same moral difficulties that the idea of mystical mestizaje does, with its historical ties to conquest, rape, and racism. To be sure, mestizo/as are not a homogenous group, and one must not assume that all share the same liberative goals. But those who do struggle for integral lib­er­ ation thereby demonstrate some proximity to the divine, whether they are Christian or not. Before examining Christian witnesses to the mysticism of la lucha and lo cotidiano, it may be beneficial to consider Anzaldúa as a striking non-­Christian 36  Isasi-­Díaz, La Lucha Continues, pp. 9, 23, and 92–106.

The Divine in Between  195 example. In Borderlands/La Frontera, she describes a quotidian struggle for wholeness that is linked to social movements, expressed in her writing, and imbued with mystical states of consciousness. She emphasizes its internal aspects: “la mestiza undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war.” Being torn between worlds is a difficult trial for the psyche. Although Anzaldúa hopes that “one day the inner struggle will cease and a true integration take place,” she recognizes that, “in the meantime, tenemos que hacerla lucha [we have to struggle].” She connects her search for interior peace with the Chicano/a movement’s fight for rights and recognition, including César Chávez and Dolores Huerta’s labor organizing, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez’s poetic manifesto “I Am Joaquín,” and the short-­lived political party La Raza Unida.37 These cultural and political events form the backdrop to her daily practice of writing. Through her poetry and essays, she endeavors to make sense of the disorienting traumas and heightened sensitivities that break into her “everyday mode of perception.” These interruptions in the ordinary have a mystical quality for her. Sometimes she finds herself descending into the “Coatlicue state,” a painful psychosomatic union with the Nahual “ ‘monster’ goddess” of life and death. At other times, she uses what she calls “la facultad,” a sixth sense that detects the interconnected spiritual presence in everything: “every cell in our bodies, every bone and bird and worm has spirit in it.”38 Anzaldúa develops her account of this mystical-­political struggle in the final chapter of her posthumously published dissertation, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro (2015). Although she writes in the second person, she seems to address both her readers and herself simultaneously. This literary device cultivates an in­tim­acy with her audience that draws them into her self-­reflective experiences. Here she emphasizes epistemological and ecological dimensions of la lucha: You struggle each day to know the world you live in, to come to grips with the problems of life. . . . Through creative engagements, you embed your experiences in a larger frame of reference, connecting your personal struggles with those of other beings on the planet, with the struggles of the Earth itself. To understand the greater reality that lies behind your personal perceptions, you view these struggles as spiritual undertakings.39

Although the goal of Anzaldúa’s struggle continues to include changes to political structures, she presents it as a quest for a greater knowledge or consciousness (conocimiento), which would have the power to transform and interweave diverse spheres of life. 37 Anzaldúa, Borderlands, pp. 85 and 100. 38 Anzaldúa, Borderlands, pp. 60, 61, 68, and 97. For a theological engagement with the concept of la facultad, see Aquino, “Latina Feminist Theology,” p. 149. 39 Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, pp. 118–19.

196 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Anzaldúa clarifies the details of this transformative process by charting a seven-­stage spiritual itinerary. This number suggests a formal similarity with other spiritual itineraries in the Christian tradition by the likes of Bonaventure or Teresa, though Anzaldúa’s lacks their explicit trinitarian and Christological references. The first stage of this itinerary is a “rupture” or “earthquake.” It could be any event that seems to turn the world upside down and leave one desperate for answers. Anzaldúa likens such an experience of cognitive upheaval to the story of the Aztec goddess Coyolxuahqui, who is murdered and dismembered by her brother Huitzilopochtli. The second stage is neplantla (or, one might say, mestizaje): a condition of inbetweenness, double vision, and deep inner tension that comes with not fitting into binary categories. This is followed, in the third stage, by the Coatlicue state, a crushing experience of isolation and mortality, and then, in the fourth stage, by an ecstatic breakthrough, a call to action that restores one’s sense of agency and purpose. The fifth stage consists of acts of language: poetry, stories, and new concepts that help one reassemble a sense of the world (putting Coyolxuahqui back together). The sixth stage tests these cultural productions by making them available for public discussion. Anzaldúa gives the example of bitter disagreements about the importance of class and race at an academic conference on feminism. She suggests that, having embraced an intersectional perspective as a means of connecting various aspects of her identity, she and others still must struggle to have this perspective take root in institutions and communities, even ostensibly feminist ones.40 Anzaldúa describes the final stage of this itinerary as a “ritual,” “prayer,” and “blessing” with the following stated intention: “to increase awareness of Spirit, recognize our interrelatedness, and work for transformation.” Her practice of this ritual takes place on the seashore. Its material objects are a feather, a bone, some incense, some water, a tortilla, and a foot-­drawn circle in the sand. Standing at the center of this circle, Anzaldúa turns toward each of the four cardinal directions (east, south, west, and north) and offers praises and petitions to the four elements (air, fire, water, and earth). Looking downward, she addresses the underworld and intercedes for the dead. Gazing upward, she prays for action and for the future. She concludes with a celebratory hymn, in which all voices are invited to participate: “Oh, Spirit—­ wind sun sea earth sky—­ inside us, all around us, en­liven­ing all / We honor tu presencia [your presence].” She expresses a readiness for change and evokes images of paths, doorways, and bridges, which she invites everyone to traverse “with grace” and to claim as their “home.” She echoes the slogan of Chicano/a activists: “sí se puede [yes it can be done],” and adds: “estamos listas, vámanos [we are ready, let’s go].” This is a prayer that sanctifies nature and motivates liberative praxis. Although neither Christian nor strictly

40 Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, pp. 121–56.

The Divine in Between  197 theological, it contains nothing that conflicts with the best of Christian mystical theology and is particularly redolent of Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of Brother Sun.” Drawing on indigenous spiritual traditions of the Americas instead of those of ancient Greece or the Far East, Anzaldúa’s ritual nevertheless has some features that make it resemble Irigaray’s elemental and yogic spirituality discussed in Chapter  4. For Anzaldúa, quotidian life is neither a profane nor reductively ma­ter­ial thing but a sacred struggle for greater mystical insight and holistic transformation. Mestizo/a Christians struggle in ways similar to Anzaldúa. To be sure, they may not understand the “Spirit” that empowers their quotidian strivings in the same way she does. Guided by their faith, many do not primarily identify this liberating Spirit with reinterpreted Nahual deities or the earth in its elemental fullness but rather with the God of Christian revelation. Nevertheless, their ex­peri­ences of an energizing divine presence and their goals of a holistic renewal of life resonate with her non-­Christian, indigenous mysticism. An appreciation for Christian approaches to the mysticism of la lucha and lo cotidiano can be gained by attending to the testimony of mestizo/a Christians who believe that grace is operative in their ordinary lives. For many, this grace takes the form of an intimate divine presence, which provides comfort in the midst of suffering, strength for the difficult personal or political work that must be done, greater connection with a broader community, and an expansion and deepening of consciousness. Non-­mestizo/a Christians living in active solidarity with the mestizo/a community may experience this grace in their own ways too. Because countless examples could be given, the following discussion is merely illustrative, not exhaustive. In the 1960s, Mexican and Filipino American farmworkers in California struggled against a system of labor exploitation that left them impoverished, disenfranchised, and exposed to the likelihood of premature death.41 These unjust working conditions prompted Chávez, Huerta, and other grassroots activists to organize a resistance movement. They established the National Farm Workers Association, which eventually merged with the Filipino organizer Larry Itliong’s Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to become the United Farm Workers Union. From 1965 to 1970, these labor leaders initiated strikes, marches, and national boycotts to pressure California grape growers to provide more equitable pay and safer conditions for workers. Although Chávez was a practicing Catholic, he was also influenced by the non-­ Catholic spiritual traditions and nonviolent direct actions employed by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Drawing on all of these streams, Chávez developed an ascetical practice of fasting. For him, fasting was a means of

41  Rose, “Delores Huerta: The United Farm Workers Union,” p. 5.

198 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

personal repentance and inner strengthening; an embodied act of solidarity with suffering farmworkers who, despite picking produce for others to eat, often go hungry; and a call to action, so that others might be inspired to join the struggle. As an additional benefit, Chávez experienced his fasts as a means of elevating his consciousness: “It’s like all of a sudden when you’re up at a high altitude, and you clear your ears; in the same way, my mind clears, it is open to everything.”42 His first of many public fasts occurred in 1968 at the height of the Delano grape strike and lasted twenty-­five days, during which time he was sustained only by water and the Eucharist. Stephen Lloyd-­Moffett argues that, in Chávez’s combination of voluntary inedia and Eucharistic devotion, he is “like many of the medieval female mystics” and, because of his profound experiences of God, ought to be considered a mystic in his own right.43 Although Huerta’s Catholic spirituality is less recognized than Chávez’s—­she is most often praised not for her religious practice, but for her personal tenacity and political effectiveness—­it remains important for her life. She explains that her activist efforts have been nourished by a habit of daily prayer (especially the rosary) and by her own less publicized experiences of fasting. A close relationship with God is central to her participation in the struggle: “Especially when you start doing things like organizing a union with no money and seven children. Talk about faith. It takes a lot of faith.” Huerta’s importance as a labor organizer, early leader of the Chicano/a movement, and advocate for the rights of women and LGBT persons should not be underestimated. Although her prophetic actions sometimes bring her into conflict with priests and bishops, her struggle against intersecting forms of oppression based on class, race, and gender grows out of her faith.44 Other early Chicano/a activists speak in similar ways about the energizing presence of God in their lives. For example, although Corky Gonzalez’s “I Am Joaquín” (1967) condemns the cruelty of Christian conquistadors, this revolutionary poem also acknowledges that Christian missionaries conveyed some useful messages, above all the “lasting truth that / Spaniard / Indian / Mestizo / were all God’s children.” Gonzalez continues, “And from these words grew men / who prayed and fought / for / their own worth as human beings, / for / that / GOLDEN MOMENT / of / FREEDOM.” Recognizing himself as a child of God, he offers a Christian rationale for Chicano liberation. Despite the masculine tenor of much of the poem, there is a fascinating gender-­bending episode, in which the narrator identifies with a sorrowful woman who prays her rosary “endlessly” and mourns for “her sons long buried / or dying, / dead / on the battlefield or on the barbed

42  García, ed., Gospel of César Chávez, p. 106. 43  Lloyd-­Moffett, “Holy Activist, Secular Saint,” pp. 109 and 120 and Lloyd-­Moffett, “Mysticism and Social Action of César Chávez.” 44  Huerta, “Dolores Huerta on Spirituality,” pp. 331 and 338–9.

The Divine in Between  199 wire / of social strife.” The narrator says, “I am her / and she is me. / We face life together in sorrow, / anger, joy, faith, and wishful / thoughts.” The text concludes with the memorable lines, “I am Aztec prince and Christian Christ. / I SHALL ENDURE! / I WILL ENDURE!”45 There is a mystical prayer in this militant cry from the depths. Consider, as well, the grassroots movement called Católicos Por La Raza, which arose in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and urged the Catholic Church to join the struggle against anti-­Hispanic discrimination and unjust labor practices. One of its leaders, Richard Cruz, recalls, “I was a super, super religious person in almost all those years. . . . I was very mystical. . . . It was my personal religion that made it clear to me that there was just no way on earth that the Church wouldn’t of course get behind Chávez once [it] understood what was happening with a little pressure.”46 Cruz’s mystical closeness with God convinced him of the deep compatibility between his Christian faith and la lucha. He knew that identification with Christ entailed identification with the poor. This awareness empowered him and other members of his Catholic social advocacy group to challenge church officials and other Catholics to embody divine mercy and justice more authentically. For other early Chicano/a examples of the mysticism of la lucha and lo cotidiano, one might reflect on the Christian Pentecostal background and mystical vision that inspired Reies López Tijerina’s land grant struggle in New Mexico47 and the prayers that accompanied the National Chicano Anti-­War Moratorium on August 29, 1970.48 Since the 1960s, struggles for mestizo/a life have not only focused on improving labor conditions, resisting racial discrimination, restoring stolen land, and preventing young men and women from being killed in Vietnam. They also challenged the dehumanizing treatment of immigrants. The Christian spirituality that informed the Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s deserves particular attention in this regard. Civil wars, death squads, economic insecurity, and other volatile conditions in Central America, which were fueled by overt and covert policies of the Reagan administration, displaced millions. Many refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala sought asylum in the U.S., but most were denied. A network of Christian and Jewish groups felt compelled by their faith and basic human decency to offer shelter, legal protection, and other forms of assistance to these refugees, so that they might avoid being deported back to contexts in which they were vulnerable to torture, rape, and murder.

45  Rodolfo Gonzalez, “I Am Joaquín,” lines 72–86, 412–17, 427–8, and 500–2. 46 García, Católicos, p. 137. 47  Busto, “Sacred Order, Sacred Space.” 48  Raul Ruiz, one of the Chicano activists present at the Moratorium, recalls the violence that broke out and his mother’s belief that he was kept safe thanks to her prayers. See García, Chicano Generation, p. 75.

200 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Although men such as the Presbyterian minister John Fife, the Claretian priest Luis Olivares, and the Quaker Jim Corbett49 are some of the most celebrated champions of sanctuary, Robin Lorentzen notes that women greatly outnumbered men in both the leadership and daily operations of the organization.50 Questions have been raised about whether the Sanctuary Movement merely mitigates the damage of unjust immigration policies by offering limited kinds of hospitality or more forcefully demands the abolition of such policies.51 However one navigates this tension practically, it is necessary to recognize that a struggle that proceeds from a true mystical theological center—­that is, from the indwelling divine love (1 John 3:17) that Corbett emphasizes—­cannot rest content with anything less than comprehensive justice for all immigrants and refugees.52 When not fleeing civil wars, migrants who cross the U.S.–Mexico border often do so to escape other forms of violence and life-­destroying poverty fueled by U.S.  agricultural subsidies, trade agreements, and global systems of economic domination. De La Torre argues that “these migrants do not cross borders hoping for a better future, they cross escaping desperate conditions mainly created by US avarice. They cross because staying means death. They cross because there is no other hope.”53 Because legal immigration from Mexico and other Latin American countries is capped at numbers that are insufficient to accommodate the flow of human beings struggling for their very lives, many are forced to accept the grave dangers associated with crossing the border without legal documentation, including life-­threatening desert conditions, mistreatment by smugglers, abuse and even murder by border patrol agents, family separations and incarcerations, and the risk of future deportations.54 Kristin Heyer notes that female migrants are especially vulnerable. Up to 90 percent suffer some form of sexual assault.55 Amid these harrowing circumstances, some migrants find strength through their faith in God’s abiding nearness. One man named Angel tells De La Torre a story about how he dropped his water jugs along his treacherous desert journey but found some replacements three days later. Although Angel interprets this event as a sign of divine presence, saying, “God is always with you,” De La Torre emphasizes that this life-­saving water was available only because humans brought it into the desert for the migrants and it had not yet been destroyed by border

49  In his memoir, Goatwalking, Corbett suggests that his detached, mystical way of life as a pastoral nomad in rural Arizona prepared him to overcome his greed and selfishness and be ready to welcome the stranger, in this case a Salvadoran hitchhiker who was picked up by a friend and then detained by border patrol agents (pp. 10 and 134). 50 Lorentzen, Women in the Sanctuary Movement, pp. 3–26; Guardado, “Just Peace, Just Sanctuary”; and García, Father Luis Olivares, pp. 248–389. 51  Paik, “Abolitionist Futures and the U.S. Sanctuary Movement.” 52 Corbett, Goatwalking, p. 118. 53  De La Torre, Embracing Hopelessness, p. 136. 54  Machado, “Unnamed Woman” and De La Torre, U.S. Immigration Crisis. 55 Heyer, Kinship Across Borders, pp. 62–4.

The Divine in Between  201 agents or anti-­immigrant militias, as is sometimes done.56 The material conditions of divine grace often depend on human beings’ willingness to embody this grace for others, through concrete acts of love and solidarity. Although some prayers of those suffering in the desert are not answered—­far too many precious human beings die of thirst, injury, illness, cold, or violence while in transit—­ many refugees continue to pray because they have nowhere else to turn. For example, a migrant named Maria recounts an experience of being caught by border patrol agents and beaten: “I fell down again, and they kicked me twice or three times. I thought I wanted to die.” She began to pray, asking “God that we would be OK, that they wouldn’t hurt us even more, that they wouldn’t send us back where we came from.”57 In addition to the actions of benevolent volunteers who help immigrants survive, divine love is also mediated by the actions of immigrants who offer food and water from their scarce supplies, even when this puts their own lives at risk,58 or provide other forms of physical and spiritual comfort. As Corbett puts it, describing his experiences near the border, “It was usually the poor who helped and the rich who put their faith in fences.”59 Consuela, an immigrant who is a survivor of domestic violence, participated in a program for Latina survivors in Atlanta called Líderes (Leaders), which is designed to promote self-­ empowerment. Psychologists researching this program shared excerpts from Consuela’s journal, including a prayer in which she asks for strength to help others: “Dear God, my desire/hope is to have the wisdom, enough love to listen, support, share, and comfort my peers. . . . Do not leave me alone, Lord, and provide me the desire to serve my community.”60 Consuela requests God’s presence—“do not leave me alone”—not simply for her own benefit but so that she might have the gifts and the will that she needs to care for the lives of others in similar circumstances. The personal agency that she develops in this program is prayerful and community-­ oriented. The intimate relationships that migrants such as Consuela cultivate with God give them hope and empower them to share divine love in their every­ day lives. For mestizo/as living in the U.S., whether they have recently arrived or belong to a family (like Anzaldúa’s) that has been here for generations, daily struggles do not disappear. Even if one has a safe place to stay, supportive relationships, and enough material stability to attempt a “normal” life by whatever questionable U.S. cultural or economic standards, one may still face painful feelings of not fully belonging or not being worthy of love. These interior challenges are often exacerbated for those with a more precarious legal status or life situation. Even if one

56  De La Torre, U.S. Immigration Crisis, p. 52. 57  Groody, “Jesus and the Undocumented Immigrant,” p. 306. 58  De La Torre, U.S. Immigration Crisis, p. 55. 59 Corbett, Goatwalking, p. 120. 60  Serrata et al., “Study of Immigrant Latina Survivors,” p. 215.

202 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

faces some level of rejection by the world, one may find some comfort through intimate encounters with divine love. The Valley Missionary Program, a Catholic initiative in Coachella, CA, organizes retreats for recent Latino/a immigrants with the goal of fostering their experiences of such love. Over a period of four days, retreatants are received with songs of celebration and joy; served abundant food and drink in the company of others; and given opportunities to confess their sins, receive communion, and lay their hearts bare before the Blessed Sacrament. One participant describes her experience in this way: “Before the retreat I felt inferior . . . but the retreat helped me realize that we are all the same, that we are all children of God, that I matter to God, and that God has called me to something important.”61 Although this sort of inner validation, which is sometimes facilitated by prayer and communal ritual, should not take attention away from much-­needed changes in U.S. policy and culture, it does serve a vital purpose. Both Anzaldúa and Isasi-­ Díaz affirm this point in their own ways. Exterior, political struggles are in­sep­ar­ able from interior, mystical ones. Because suffering occurs on both levels, healing and transformation must be sought on both as well. It is important to recognize that each life manifests this mystical-­political nexus in its own way. Since lo cotidiano is as plural as the set of singular lives that compose it, no series of canonical examples of la lucha can fully capture it. There is no one way to live a mestizo/a life, to confront what is fearsome in it, and to unite with a grace or love that transcends it. A Christian theological perspective insists only that the God of Christian faith is actively present in the ordinary lives of those struggling against injustice, in whatever form. Isasi-­Díaz’s reflections on the mysticism of la lucha and lo cotidiano draw on her personal experiences and those of other Latina women, especially certain members of a group called Las Hermanas (the sisters). Lara Medina describes this group as “a national religious-­political organization of Chicana/Latina feminist Catholics” and explains that it emerged in the early 1970s to work out the relationship between Catholic faith, the Chicano/a movement, feminist activism, and other liberation struggles.62 Isasi-­Díaz and Yolanda Tarango interviewed several women associated with this group about how they understood the divine, and the results confirm points we have seen in other mestizo/a sources. In short, the women interviewed experience God as a loving and empowering presence in their daily lives and struggles. Olivia, a Mexican American woman born in Texas, grew up in poverty, often without enough food to eat. In times of trouble, she turns to God for strength: “When something happens and I start to pray, the first thing I say is, ‘God, give me strength’. I ask for myself so that then I can help others.” Similarly, María, a 61 Groody, Border of Death, Valley of Life, pp. 45–54 and 61. 62  Lara Medina, Las Hermanas, p. 12.

The Divine in Between  203 Puerto Rican woman living in the U.S., says, “I am confident that God is with me always; the more down I feel, it is as if a supernatural force would lift me up; it gives me positive ideas on how to keep going; this force helps me to realize that I am not alone.” María talks about how, when her son went to prison, she felt like giving up but found strength in God to persevere. Lupe, a Mexican American woman from a working-­class family, describes experiencing God in her relationships with women survivors of domestic violence and other suffering populations with whom she works: “There is a lot of pain, and it seems to me that God is more where there is pain. God is there. I am not the one who is doing things for the people; it is God doing things for the people.” While comforting others, she senses that there is a divine presence doing more significant healing and transformative work than she could do on her own.63 Adela, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, emphasizes that God is love. She imagines God as a beautiful “garden of only red roses,” because this is how she pictures love. Yet when she elaborates on this image, she does not interpret it erotically but rather in terms of great care and generosity: “God takes care of me in all different ways, he has given me everything, everything, absolutely everything.” Although some of the women experience alienation from the institutional church and find ways to relate to God primarily at home or in other unofficial spaces, Margarita, a Cuban woman living in New York, discovers a comforting divine presence in her life precisely by going to daily Mass. This Eucharistic devotion does not prevent her from finding God everywhere but in fact encourages her to do so: “[God] is among us, but we cannot see him because he is so supreme, so infinite, that we do not see him.”64 For her part, Isasi-­Díaz recounts having her most intense and intimate ex­peri­ ences of God while doing activist work.65 She recalls a protest that took place on a cold, wintry day in the early 1980s outside the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C. She walked a picket line with about fifty other persons who had gathered to denounce the evils of apartheid. While marching, she found herself drawn into a mystical experience: Little by little I became aware of an immense peace washing over me. I felt myself to be where I was and in many other places at the same time. I felt I was being cared for by God, that the divine was with me and in me in a way different from my usual experience. This sense of the divine in me and I in the divine was a bodily one. I could feel, sense God, and I could wrap my arms around the divine. I was experiencing the divine in an unmediated way, unmediated by 63  Isasi-­Díaz and Tarango, Hispanic Women (1988), pp. 31, 35, 37, and 42. 64  Isasi-­Díaz and Tarango, Hispanic Women, pp. 22, 45, and 47. 65  Citing her teacher Dorothee Soelle’s The Silent Cry, Isasi-­Díaz sees no incompatibility between mysticism and activism but instead argues that they belong together (La Lucha Continues, pp. 35n1 and 35n2).

204 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

understanding or even faith. The intensity did not last long, and yet this sense of participating in the divine filled me in such a way that it remains with me today. The experience left me with an immense sense of joy beyond anything of my own willing. Verbal descriptions and explanations do not convey adequately what I experienced.66

Isasi-­Díaz’s encounter with God on the picket line is characterized by overwhelming feelings of peace and joy, as well as by relations of mutuality and tenderness: “the divine in me and I in the divine”; “I was being cared for by God”; “I could wrap my arms around the divine.” It exhibits typical mystical qualities of immediacy, intensity, and ineffability. The fullness of this experience was fleeting. Yet Isasi-­Díaz notes that something of it “remains with me today.” Although this experience took place in the midst of an ordinary situation—­ political protests happen all the time; they do not require special religious vows or advanced stages of contemplative practice—­Isasi-­Díaz indicates that there was something extraordinary about it when she says that “the divine was with me and in me in a way different from my usual experience.” She thus permits one to distinguish between two types of the mysticism of la lucha and lo cotidiano. One type would involve a sense of divine presence that is so dramatic and vivid that, although it occurs in the midst of ordinary circumstances, it also unforgettably alters one’s consciousness and takes one outside of oneself. This is what Isasi-­Díaz discusses here. The other type would, by contrast, not depend on any ecstatic break from ordinary modes of perception but instead merely consist of an every­ day awareness of God’s loving nearness to those who struggle for justice.67 For Isasi-­Díaz, the latter type of quotidian awareness is more important than any momentary ecstatic experience. As a theorist of mysticism, she is less interested in extraordinary psychosomatic phenomena and more interested in how one grows in relationship with God and others over the course of one’s life. She envisions a three-­stage mystical path in which one first “falls in love” with God and receives energy from this love to do and become more than one could have dreamed. The second step is to reignite this love continually through daily practices: “To fall in love with God again everyday requires seeing God in more and more places, in new and different ways.” Finally, this love, if genuine, must draw one into closer relationships with all the members of God’s family, God’s ­“kin-­dom”—relationships of justice and compassion. Isasi-­Díaz concludes, “To belong to the family of God means that we participate in the divine, that we are in touch with the divine in us.” The love of God that one receives, reciprocates, and 66  Isasi-­Díaz, La Lucha Continues, p. 24. 67  Although a consciousness-­based definition of mysticism might exclude such everyday awareness of God’s loving nearness or consider it to be mere faith, a grace-­based definition includes it as a type of mysticism and does not regard it as lesser because it lacks accessory spiritual phenomena. For more on this distinction, see the Introduction to this book.

The Divine in Between  205 renews daily becomes incarnate and active in one’s struggles with and for others, especially the poor and oppressed. She describes this whole process as “grace” and, like Rahner, associates it with both Orthodox traditions of theosis and the Thomistic account of beatific vision.68 In ways both similar and dissimilar to Anzaldúa, Isasi-­Díaz gives the mysticism of la lucha and lo cotidiano a ritualized expression. The mystical liturgy described by Isasi-­Díaz does not take place in solitude on the beach, as Anzaldúa’s does, but rather in the context of a Las Hermanas conference. The space is arranged to look like a home altar with candles, Marian images, holy cards featuring favorite saints, and pictures of loved ones. On the altar, there are bread and dates and cups with milk and honey. Participants gather in a circle which, like Anzaldúa’s circle in the sand, symbolizes wholeness and inclusion. They raise their voices in song and intone a litany celebrating powerful women. Someone is appointed to read a liberative passage from scripture. In lieu of a traditional sermon, there is a dialogical homily. The gifts on the altar are blessed not as inert objects, but as symbols connecting the earth, the sun, the farmworkers, and the whole community. In song, the participants acknowledge their prophetic callings. Each cuts a small piece of ribbon to take with her as a reminder that “we are not alone in the struggle.” The closing bilingual hymn exclaims the liberating works of God.69 Although Isasi-­Díaz suggests that this liturgy should be developed to in­corp­or­ ate more African and Amerindian elements (which would perhaps make it more closely resemble Anzaldúa’s), she maintains that it already communicates a profoundly healing and empowering experience of God in community. She calls this experience “a mística,” a mysticism.70 Although this liturgy is not a Catholic Mass, and does not purport to be, there is something sacramental and Eucharistic about it, insofar as it mediates the experience of divine grace through material signs of simple food and drink and collective acts of worship, blessing, and gratitude. Rooted in scripture and the veneration of prophets and saints, it is unmistakably Christian. Although it occurs in a time and place set apart, its aim is to sanctify the everyday struggles of mestizas, to help them recognize and claim their ordinary lives as sacred. Isasi-­Díaz would urge one not to overlook the political significance of such ritualized mysticism. This liturgy and other similar practices build the prophetic courage and relational bonds that help Latina women advocate for themselves in domestic partnerships, workplaces, churches, and grassroots social movements. Such rituals prepare mestizas to recognize the loving presence of God that abides with them as they march in picket lines, brave dangerous border crossings, or fight to put food on the table.

68  Isasi-­Díaz, La Lucha Continues, pp. 30–3. 69  Isasi-­Díaz, Mujerista Theology, pp. 174–87. 70  Isasi-­Díaz, Mujerista Theology, pp. 189 and 198.

206 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Mystical Encounters with La Virgen de Guadalupe The origins of mestizo/a mysticism can be traced to the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe’s appearance to Juan Diego at Tepeyac in the second week of December 1531. Although this mystical event is neglected by many Eurocentric scholars of mysticism, one is hard pressed to find a source in Latino/a theology or Chicano/a studies that does not emphasize its world-­changing significance. Even critics who question the historical value of the narrative, who worry about cultural imperialist and patriarchal aspects of it, or who fear that it encourages an unorthodox worship of Mary as a female deity acknowledge its centrality to the popular ­religion and culture of Mexican communities on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border.71 The story, which is contained in a Nahuatl text called the Nican mopohua, and the sacred image on Juan Diego’s tilma that now hangs in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City have received a wide range of interpretations. This section does not attempt a comprehensive summary of these accounts. Instead, it seeks to clarify how such Guadalupan devotion can become a source for an intersectional feminist form of the mysticism of ordinary life. Guadalupe is everywhere in the borderlands. “She is painted on neighborhood walls and on storefronts, emblazoned on sweatshirts and baseball caps; Her portrait hangs in living rooms and in every barrio church from East L.A. to El Paso.” She is tattooed on arms and backs. Statues of her are placed in home altars and adorned with flowers.72 From a theological perspective, her presence is not confined to the material objects that represent her but comes also as a loving, personal closeness in times of prayer and need. As Elizondo puts the point, “She is always present in the Tepeyacs of the world—­the barrios, the slums, the public housing projects, the ghettos, and other such places. . . . She is here among us where and when we need her; she is always present to rehabilitate the broken, uplift the downtrodden, console the afflicted, accompany the lonely, and give life to the dying.”73 Even skeptics sometimes pray to her.74 To account for the popularity of this Marian apparition, one might point to certain apparently miraculous features that are unique to it. The durability and chemical composition of the pigment of the original image, particularly given the coarseness of the fabric on which it appears, have baffled scientists. Magnifications have revealed hidden figures in her eyes, perhaps Juan Diego, a friar, and a darkly colored woman, which are difficult to explain on the basis of artistic techniques available in the sixteenth century. The constellations of stars on her mantle match those that would have been visible in the night sky above Tepeyac on the dates of 71  Rubén Rodríguez, Racism and God-­Talk, pp. 157–65. 72  Martínez, “Undocumented Virgin,” p. 99; Luis Rodríguez, “Forgive Me, Mother”; and Estés, Untie the Strong Woman, p. 31. 73 Elizondo, Guadalupe, p. 137. 74  Crussi, “Anatomy of a Virgin,” p. 13.

The Divine in Between  207 her apparition.75 Although “Mary’s appearances, cures, and miracles in Latin America are numbered in the thousands,” the Guadalupan image stands out for its “properly supernatural” qualities.76 However, many devotees are drawn to Guadalupe not primarily because of the inexplicable properties of her image but because of her mestiza or indigenous features (brown skin and black hair); her use of the local language, Nahuatl; and her revelation at a sacred site where the goddess Tonantsi had been worshipped. It is common for darkly hued people to distinguish between her and other “Virgins” who appear more European and, therefore, distanced from their everyday ex­peri­ ences of interlocking oppressions.77 With or without a strictly miraculous status, the racial and gendered solidarity conveyed by the image would be a significant draw. Jeanette Rodriguez avers that, by taking this particular form, Mary “offers God’s loving embrace for the rejected people of the Americas.”78 Roberto Goizueta argues similarly that “her olive skin tells the indigenous people of Mexico that she, la Morenita, is one of them. It tells all Latinos and Latinas that she is one of us.”79 Clarissa Pinkola Estés takes a slightly different approach by focusing on the appearance not of Guadalupe, but of Juan Diego. Estés contends that if one wants to imagine his face and thereby understand to whom this particular Virgin is inclined to appear, one ought to concentrate not merely on his physical characteristics but on the fact that he survived a brutal conquest and massacre: “Look at Holocaust survivors like Elie Wiesel; look into his face, his eyes. . . . Look at any war survivors still alive today who somehow have not collapsed into insanity.” These are the visages of those whom Our Lady is most likely to grace with her presence. She comes to the sorrowful, the violated, those hoping against hope for a better tomorrow.80 Insofar as mestizo/as continue to suffer harms and injustices perpetrated by a racist, neocolonial, and Anglo-­dominant society, it makes sense for them to trust that Guadalupe has a special commitment to them. In earlier chapters, we have seen Catholic theologians and postmodern philo­ sophers describe Mary as a model of the human being united with God. Rahner emphasizes Mariological dogmas that express the Catholic belief that she is full of grace and the image of a perfected theological anthropology. For Speyr and Balthasar, by contrast, Mary represents a form of self-­surrendering obedience to the divine Word that is specifically feminine. However, they do not treat her exclusively as a model for women. They argue that her type of mystical femininity 75 Crussi, “Anatomy of a Virgin,” pp. 10–11; Castillo, ed., Goddess of the Americas, p. xx; and Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers, p. 242. 76  Gebara and Bingemer, Mary: Mother of God, Mother of the Poor, p. 144. 77  Ferré, “Battle of the Virgins”; Randall, “Guadalupe, Subversive Virgin,” p. 116; and Castañeda-­ Liles, Our Lady of Everyday Life, p. 149. 78  Jeanette Rodriguez, Our Lady of Guadalupe, p. xxii. 79 Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús, p. 45. 80 Estés, Untie the Strong Woman, p. 29.

208 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

is something that all Christians are called to embody. Although Irigaray objects to phallocentric accounts of Mary that accent her subordination to a masculine deity (like that provided by Speyr and Balthasar), she develops her own Mariological type of mystical femininity centered on Mary’s interior, tactile ex­peri­ences of the divine—­a hidden jouissance. Kristeva, for her part, finds thera­ peut­ic value in the Catholic tradition’s idealization of Mary, especially when juxta­posed with semiotic expressions of female flesh. What these diverse Mariological proposals have in common, despite their various relations to theology, philosophy, and feminism, is an inclination to associate Mary with the human subject of mysticism. She exemplifies the one who ex­peri­ ences union with the divine. The Guadalupan tradition deviates from this trend by presenting Mary as a nearly or fully divine one who is experienced by the mystic. She is the “object” of mysticism. One could say that Guadalupan devotion “deifies” Mary, but this ambiguous claim could mean either that she is a human so thoroughly glorified by divine grace that she now shares in God’s salvific mission or that she is simply God herself, a female theophany.81 Either way—­and could it be both?—she is a cherished point of access to the divine, a conduit connecting this life to eternity. One can pray to her and seek her aid. This type of devotion is supported by the Nican mopohua, a Nahuatl text published in 1649 by the Spanish cleric Luis Laso de la Vega, who was then the vicar of the church containing Our Lady of Guadalupe’s image.82 The story unfolds as follows. Upon hearing the delightful song of birds, Juan Diego (originally Cuauhtlotoatzin)—whom the text calls “a humble commoner, a poor ordinary person”—ascends the hill of Tepeyac. Silence falls upon him, and he is greeted by a voice calling his name. This mystical locution is followed by a mystical vision. He beholds a woman whose radiance transforms the natural world around her: “Her clothes were like the sun in the way they gleamed and shone. Her re­splen­ dence struck the stones and boulders by which she stood so that they seemed like precious emeralds and jeweled bracelets. The ground sparkled like a rainbow.” A dialogue begins, in which she clarifies her identity and intentions: Know, rest assured, my youngest child, that I am the eternally consummate virgin Saint Mary, mother of the very true deity, God, the giver of life, the creator of people, the ever present, the lord of heaven and earth. I greatly wish and desire that they build my temple for me here, where I will manifest, make known, and give to people all my love, compassion, aid, and protection. For I am the 81  Jeanette Rodriguez, “Guadalupe: The Feminine Face of God.” 82 An English–­Nahuatl critical edition appears in Sousa, Poole, and Lockhart, eds., Story of Guadalupe, pp. 60–91. Although scholars debate whether this text reflects a reliable oral tradition or is simply a later construction, it has become the most trusted written source, surpassing the slightly earlier Spanish-­language account by Miguel Sánchez, Imagen de la Virgen María, Madre de Dios de Guadalupe (1648). See Sousa, Poole, and Lockhart, eds., Story of Guadalupe, pp. 1–2.

The Divine in Between  209 compassionate mother of you and of all you people here in this land, and of the other various peoples who love me, who cry out to me, who seek me, who trust in me. There I will listen to their weeping and their sorrows in order to remedy and heal all their various afflictions, miseries, and torments.83

Mary sends Juan Diego to the bishop, a Franciscan named Juan de Zumárraga, to request that a temple be built at Tepeyac. Juan Diego’s first two attempts fail to persuade. On his third and finally successful meeting with the bishop, he comes with his cloak full of “different kinds of precious Spanish flowers” that had been arranged in it by the radiant woman on the hill. When they fall to the ground her miraculous image is revealed. Although much of the dramatic tension in the story revolves around the question of whether the bishop will agree to build a church at a particular location, this plan for a new edifice is, according to the voice of Mary in the story, merely a means to an end. Her goal is to use this sacred site to manifest her love, to heal the afflicted, and to respond compassionately to those who cry out for help. What may seem a digression in the tale—­a brief episode in which Juan Diego’s ailing uncle reports that he was visited and cured by the same glorious woman—­aptly expresses its central message.84 The Nican motecpana, which follows the Nican mopohua in Vega’s text, details further miracles attributed to the Virgin, and the Nican tlantica that comes after it reiterates her preferential option for the poor: “Although she now helps all different kinds of people who in their affliction come to greet her in her home, let the local people, the humble commoners, be sure that it was for their very sake that their Queen condescended to house herself there.”85 In this mystical narrative, Mary is a powerful agent of divine compassion. She is not so much a model of graced existence to which mystics aspire as she is a divine source of blessings, healings, and comforts offered especially to those who are local, ordinary, and in duress. Here “ordinariness” is roughly synonymous with lowliness. These are the world’s unknown, uncelebrated, and unprotected masses, yet Guadalupe knows, celebrates, and protects them. She loves them with a mother’s love. It is challenging to state succinctly what gender politics follows from such Guadalupan mysticism. Even as an agent on the divine side of the mystical encounter, she may remain subordinate to the triune God, at least for Christian interpreters. Moreover, although this usage goes against the grain of the story, Guadalupe’s virginal maternity has been imposed on mestiza women as a re­strict­ ive, impossible-­to-­follow, body-­denying, and therefore cruel norm for their gendered behavior.86 Nevertheless, Guadalupe has been experienced by many women 83  Sousa, Poole, and Lockhart, eds., Story of Guadalupe, p. 65. 84  Sousa, Poole, and Lockhart, eds., Story of Guadalupe, p. 87. 85  Sousa, Poole, and Lockhart, eds., Story of Guadalupe, p. 121. 86  Jeanette Rodriguez, Our Lady of Guadalupe, pp. 70–86; Randall, “Guadalupe, Subversive Virgin,” p. 114; and Pineda-­Madrid, Suffering and Salvation, pp. 48–50.

210 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

as a source of help and encouragement.87 Seeing a reflection of themselves in her enables many to discover a reflection of the divine in themselves. As Sandra Cisneros says, “Blessed art thou, Lupe, and, therefore, blessed am I.”88 There is a non-­phallic practice of “specularization” at work here which, as Irigaray would suggest, resists a culture of male dominance. Although a psychoanalytic perspective might see devotion to Guadalupe as symptomatic of an unacknowledged nostalgia for the mother, which in the case of men participates in a phallocentric economy of desire, this is not the only possible meaning. The man Juan Diego’s deference to the female Guadalupe has feminist significance insofar as it inverts the agential-­receptive structure of a Speyrian-­Balthasarian gender essentialism and reveals, once again, that hagiography is not a safe harbor for binary gender constructs. To a large extent, the political meaning of the Guadalupe event depends on how exactly it is appropriated.89 To disrupt patriarchal uses of Guadalupe, some Chicana feminist theorists reclaim the powerful female deities in the pre-­Columbian and even pre-­Aztec pantheon that she both conceals and reflects. A critical reworking of indigenous theology opens the possibility for a fearless affirmation of Guadalupe’s femaleness and divinity. On this basis, Cisneros exclaims, “My Virgen de Guadalupe is not the mother of God. She is God.” Another option, often pursued alongside the retrieval of indigenous deities, is a creative reimagination of Guadalupe, whether through works of visual art, poetry, or short fiction, which portray her as more assertive, more sexual, rounder, tougher, or in some other way more closely reflective of the daily realities and aims of (perhaps especially young) mestiza women. Liliana Valenzuela composes a story involving a queer Latina character, Camila, who dreams of meeting an erotic Guadalupe, rising naked out of the water like a mermaid and addressing her with words such as, “Camila, I was a woman just like you, with desires, likes, with what they now call a natural desire quite in blossom.” Clara Román-­Odio discusses visual artists such as Ester Hernández, Juana Alicia Montoya, Marion  C.  Martínez, and Alma López whose works play with the Guadalupan image and seek to augment its liberative power. Natalia Imperatori-­ Lee argues for the theological significance of Yolanda López’s Guadalupe Triptych, a series of paintings that reimagine Guadalupe as an agential woman (of various ages) engaged in quotidian activities of sitting, sewing, and running.90 87 Jeanette Rodriguez, Our Lady of Guadalupe, pp. 106–7 and Castañeda-­Liles, Our Lady of Everyday Life, pp. 14 and 24. 88  Cisneros, “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess,” p. 51. 89  Nichole Flores discusses the range of revolutionary, activist, and socially conservative political interpretations that have been given to Guadalupe, while developing her own “political theology of Guadalupe and Juan Diego” that emphasizes an aesthetic approach to solidarity and justice. She draws on the play The Miracle at Tepeyac performed by the Denver-­based Chicano theater group Su Teatro and connects it with local struggles against gentrification and community displacement. See Flores, Aesthetics of Solidarity, pp. 20–1 and 37–43. 90  Cisneros, “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess,” p. 50; Valenzuela, “Virgencita,” p. 93; Román-­Odio, Sacred Iconographies, pp. 32–47, 113–17, and 125–36; and Imperatori-­Lee, Cuéntame, pp. 50–61.

The Divine in Between  211 Anzaldúa explains that the Nahuatl name, Coatlalopeuh, which Spanish col­on­ izers identified with “the dark virgin, Guadalupe, patroness of West Central Spain,” combines two roots that mean “serpent” (coatl) and “dominion” (lopeuh). Anzaldúa questions whether this name ought to be interpreted as “the one who has dominion over serpents,” as is customarily done. This standard translation supports Christian suppression of the ancient cult of the goddess Coatlicue (whose name means Snake Woman) and a related patriarchal repression of “the dark sexual drive, the chthonic (underworld), the feminine, the serpentine movement of sexuality, of creativity, the basis of all energy and life.” Anzaldúa prefers to render Coatlalopeuh as “the one who is at one with the beasts”; that is, as a goddess whose union with erotic forces of life and death is unrestrained. Although Anzaldúa affirms aspects of the protective divine mother Tonantsi or Tonantzin—­whom the Toltecs worshipped with animal sacrifices at Tepeyac, in opposition to the ruling Aztec practice of sacrificing humans to the male god of war Huitzilopchtli in the capital city—­Anzaldúa resists characterizing Coatlalopeuh merely as a benevolent, maternal deity. She insists, as Cisneros puts it, on “a duality of maternity and sexuality,” on the adoration of a “sex goddess,” “a sexy mama.”91 As a Cuban American woman, Isasi-­Díaz does not exhibit the abiding attachment to Guadalupe that Anzaldúa and other Chicana feminists do. Like many Cubans, she grew up venerating Mary under the title of Our Lady of Charity. She also reproduces several remarks by Inez, a Puerto Rican woman interviewee who expresses resistance to Our Lady of Providence, the official patroness of Puerto Rico: “The Virgin did not appear to us, she came from outside, from Italy. . . . The whole thing is very painful.”92 Although Guadalupan devotion is not limited to people of Mexican descent, Latino/as from other contexts may have other favored ways to address Mary and other stories about her involvement in their lives. Some, like Inez, may feel alienated from both Guadalupe and other Virgins. Inez’s reflections reveal, in a contrastive way, just how important Guadalupe’s in­di­gen­ ous roots have been. Details of language, place, ritual, narrative, music, and art are crucial for transforming what might seem a universal doctrinal locus (Mariology) into a locally vibrant mysticism of ordinary life. Isasi-­Díaz underscores this point by highlighting aspects of native spirituality in Guadalupan popular religion.93 Confronted with this range of interpretations and resistances, Christian mys­ tic­al theology must seek a suitable way forward. Timothy Matovina suggests four reasonable norms for theological engagement with Guadalupe: it should (1) offer a liberating message for the poor and racially oppressed, (2) express feminist views about the dignity of women, (3) be receptive to traditional Catholic 91 Anzaldúa, Borderlands, pp. 49–53 and Cisneros, “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess,” p. 49. 92  Isasi-­Díaz, En la lucha, p. 221n62 and Isasi-­Díaz and Tarango, Hispanic Women, pp. 17 and 48. 93  Isasi-­Díaz, En la lucha, p. 65.

212 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

doctrines, and (4) remain attuned to the sensus fidelium evident in popular ­religion.94 The challenge is that these four norms sometimes conflict in practice. For ex­ample, as Matovina indicates, the history of Catholic teachings about Guadalupe includes justifications of Spanish imperial violence, condemnations of indigenous spirituality, and various patriarchal and heteronormative positions on gender that run afoul of both liberationist and feminist criteria.95 María Del Socorro Castañeda-­Liles documents another challenging area of tension. Analyzing interviews she conducted with college-­aged, middle-­aged, and elderly first-­generation Mexican American women, she describes how they talk intimately with Guadalupe on a daily basis, praying to her as a hidden source of protection, comfort, and empowerment. Guadalupe is a mystical mother figure for them. Castañeda-­Liles observes that, “unlike the aforementioned Chicana feminists who disassociate Our Lady of Guadalupe from Catholicism and instead see her as a sex goddess (Cisneros) and a decolonized fierce, loving, sexual mother goddess (Anzaldúa), the women in my study see La Virgen de Guadalupe as the virginal Catholic heavenly mother they were introduced to by their mothers and grandmothers.” Many interviewees, especially in the older cohorts, respond negatively to Guadalupan works of art that sexualize her.96 Although this ethnographic research might seem to imply a conflict between Matovina’s norms of feminism and sensus fidelium, Castañeda-­ Liles argues instead that it reveals conflicts internal to both feminism and the sensus fidelium. There is a tension between a theological feminism, such as Isasi-­Díaz’s, which seeks to retain the Christian meaning of Guadalupe and a “philosophical” fem­in­ ism, such as Anzaldúa’s, which has no such commitment. And there is a related tension, within the sensus fidelium, between lay Catholic mestiza women who, even if they implicitly embody certain feminist values, are wary of any unfamiliar “philosophical” innovations and other lay Catholic mestiza women who find such innovations deeply helpful and are eager to incorporate them into their understanding of the faith. Although most of Castañeda-­Liles’s interviewees maintain a traditional Catholic view of Guadalupe, they do not equate this with female subordination. Rather, they perceive Guadalupe as a sustaining presence that helps them resist violence in the domestic and public sphere and to find strength in themselves. “None of them had ever been told that they had to be like Our Lady of Guadalupe nor did they perceive La Virgen as a role model for women that represents submissiveness, passivity, and  obedience for Mexican women.” Two participants, Rosario and Candelaria, credited Guadalupe with helping them fight back against their abusive partners and saving their children from harm.97 Although their Guadalupan devotion avoids any 94  Matovina, “Theologies of Guadalupe,” p. 90. 95  Matovina, “Theologies of Guadalupe,” pp. 68, 73, and 84. 96  Castañeda-­Liles, Our Lady of Everyday Life, pp. 43 and 192–205. 97  Castañeda-­Liles, Our Lady of Everyday Life, pp. 22, 169, 174, and 201.

The Divine in Between  213 explicit celebration of indigenous deities and erotic passions, it remains an indispensable basis for their quotidian lives and hopes. Nonetheless, such aversion to critical reimagining of Guadalupe does not characterize the sensus fidelium of the whole lay Catholic mestiza population. At least one participant in Castañeda-­Liles’s interviews, named Meche, finds solace in Alma López’s “Our Lady,” a more carnal portrait of Guadalupe, which many of the interviewees rejected for allegedly making her look like a prostitute. Meche, a forty-­two-­year-­old mother, was young and desperately poor when she had her first two children. Abandoned by her partner, and with nowhere left to turn, she became a sex worker. She tells Castañeda-­Liles, “I felt I had no other way out, my children were hungry, what else could I have done?” Sinking further into despair, she attempted suicide. She now attributes her survival to Guadalupe’s intervention, adding that “the women who have had a beautiful childhood cannot see La Virgen like I see her . . . they cannot relate to the painting because they have not suffered. I can see what Alma López is trying to say, and I completely agree.” As a Catholic woman, Meche is part of the sensus fidelium and her experience must be taken seriously by theologians.98 How many Meches are there in this violent world? What sort of Christian mys­ tic­al theology is prepared to receive their stories about how they have found divine comfort in their lives of corporeal and psychological vulnerability, whether through the presence of Guadalupe or in some other mysterious way? However one seeks to balance the rival criteria that are vying to establish an “ordinary”—in the sense of normative—­form of Guadalupan devotion, one must not forget the also very “ordinary”—in the sense of predictable, ubiquitous, yet concealed, silenced—­experiences of Meche and others with similar life circumstances. Her body, used and abused, yet the source of life for her children, has genetic and experiential ties to the countless natives who were raped and murdered in the Spanish conquest, the people to whom Guadalupe first appeared, the people who in some sense already knew her as Tonantsi and perhaps also Coatlicue. Meche’s story demonstrates that a Guadalupan mysticism of ordinary life can be intersectionally feminist in the most radical sense—­that is, affirming of the quotidian lives of despised, poor women of color—­and Christian at the same time.

Via Crucis In addition to Guadalupan devotion, the popular religion of mestizo/a Christians includes participative immersions in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.99 98  Castañeda-­Liles, Our Lady of Everyday Life, pp. 202–3. 99 In Faith of the People, Orlando Espín defines Latino/a popular religion as a “cultural expression of the sensus fidelium” (p. 64) and as a “socialization of the experience of the divine” (p. 93) and argues that interpreting it is central to the task of Latino/a theology.

214 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Such Christoform experiences and practices provide another avenue into the mysticism of ordinary life, which is more clearly Christian and less ecumenically challenging than those considered above. Some Latino/a theologians embrace Elizondo’s argument that the setting of first-­century Galilee demonstrates that Jesus endured a condition of marginalization and inbetweenness similar to that of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands.100 Although this argument encourages some identification with Jesus, the more visceral, all-­absorptive identifications that occur in mestizo/a life do not revolve around Galilee but Golgotha. One sees this connection especially in the Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) celebrations that take place on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, which we shall consider later in this section. First, however, a few remarks are in order regarding the contested meaning of union with Christ in the midst of suffering. Isasi-­Díaz joins other feminists in resisting any account of Christian mysticism that would identify it with a form of self-­inflicted or passively endured suffering in imitation of the crucified Christ. At the same time, she acknowledges that a certain readiness to suffer is required of anyone actively engaged in a Christlike struggle to overcome oppression.101 Other sources studied in this book exhibit a similarly complex view of the relationship between Christian mysticism and suffering. In his ascetical approach to the mysticism of ordinary life, Rahner associates the presence of Christ with everyday experiences of “slow death” suggestive of the crucifixion and with an Ignatian view of indiferençia. Rahner also gives his readers a glimpse of his personal devotion to Christ in the hour of agony. Yet Rahner generally affirms that Christ does not want his followers to suffer but rather to be free to love. For Rahner, the cross symbolizes Christ’s full embrace of the incarnate reality of the human condition and his loving closeness with those who endure it. Even Speyr and Balthasar are not as invested in the idea of redemptive suffering as critics might suppose. To be sure, several passages in their works problematically suggest that there are eternal grounds for suffering and death in the immanent Trinity; that those who follow Jesus ought to view their quotidian torments as instrumental to Christ’s salvific work; and that the mystical crucifixion of body and soul is a feminine experience. Nevertheless, the predominant point in Speyr and Balthasar’s paschal mysticism is in fact that God’s self-­surrendering love is boundless. No form of worldly violence or abandonment, even the max­ imal­ly forsaken condition of hell, keeps Christ from using his incarnate existence to unite with fallen humanity. Christ is a compassionate, liberating presence in the quotidian lives of the afflicted. He is there in the hells of suffering and sin that trap people prior to death. Speyr’s longing to experience some share of what he 100 Elizondo, Galilean Journey, pp. 49–53 and 100–2; Goizueta, Christ Our Companion, pp. 137–41; and Rubén Rodríguez, Racism and God-­Talk, pp. 86–7. 101  Isasi-­Díaz, Mujerista Theology, pp. 31–3.

The Divine in Between  215 endured can be interpreted as an act of contemplative empathy for Jesus rather than as a self-­destructive or self-­hating pathology. Given certain corrections, one can read Speyr and Balthasar’s works as profoundly life-­affirming. Henry’s approach is, by comparison, somewhat more troubling. His paraphrase of the Beatitudes as “Blessed are those who suffer” and his interpretation of divine life as composed of the transcendental affective conditions of suffering and joy leave him little theological or philosophical grounds on which to resist historical causes of suffering. Nevertheless, his affirmation of singular lives, including living workers whose material efforts are exploited by both communist and capitalist systems, reveals a critical edge in his thought that is perhaps not sufficiently supported by its larger conceptual edifice. For his part, Certeau is sensitive to the suffering of those whom various discourses and regimes of power regard as other. He is particularly attentive to Surin’s excruciating experiences of demonic possession and psychological disintegration, which Surin suffered as a consequence of his Christlike love for the Ursuline sisters. At the same time, Certeau points to certain bodily practices of speaking, writing, walking, and communal relating that restore Surin’s sense of normal human life and bring him out of the depths of his misery. Certeau, therefore, does not stop with an account of cruciform alterity but also describes behaviors that make for a livable existence. Despite being grouped together as “French feminists,” Irigaray and Kristeva approach the experience of suffering in strikingly different ways. Although Irigaray’s early work recognizes the place that suffering has occupied in the Christian mystical tradition, she does not offer any straightforward endorsement of it. As her thought develops, she clarifies her view that one ought to follow Jesus not by pursuing a self-­sacrificial existence but by imitating his ministry of healing touch and his respectful love for the bodies of others. By contrast, Kristeva argues that identification with the crucified Christ can facilitate healthy ego development. Such identification allows the subject to accept its condition as sinful flesh, which Kristeva associates with the abject mother, while internalizing the normative, forgiving power of the symbolic order, which Kristeva associates with the ideal father. Although the cross has a positive instrumental function in her work, which might seem to move it dangerously close to a generalized theory of redemptive suffering, her goal is in fact to free subjects from their sadomasochistic passions so that they can attain a more integrated and joyous sense of self. Although each of these sources recognizes that suffering is a major feature of both ordinary life and Christ’s incarnate existence, none of them claims sim­plis­ tic­al­ly that suffering is therefore good. They are most convincing when they interpret Jesus’s crucifixion as evidence of God’s solidaristic presence with the poor and oppressed and when they emphasize that Jesus’s disciples are called to embody, not the mortal lacerations of his flesh per se, but the praxis of divine lib­ er­ation that he reveals. While the mystery of the crucified Christ should prompt

216 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

theologians to seek God in the quotidian lives of the “crucified people,”102 it does not justify any obscene equation of Christian holiness with their suffering, as though this suffering itself were beautiful or salvific. Understood in the right way, a cruciform mysticism of ordinary life does not validate the death-­dealing forces of the world but decisively repudiates them. Isasi-­Díaz argues that one participates in the saving work of Jesucristo (her preferred name for him) through practices that build up the “kin-­dom” or familia (family) of God. In traditional fashion, Isasi-­Díaz describes union with Christ as a process of becoming an “alter Christus” through acts of solidarity that resemble his. More distinctively, she also describes union with Christ as a process of finding Christ in others through sibling-­like relationships with them. To Jesus’s question, “Who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:29), Isasi-­Díaz responds, “You are my big brother protecting me, and you are my little sister whom I protect. . . . You and I are family, Jesus. What more can you be for me?”103 This emphasis on relational, communal, and familial forms of union with Christ is a noteworthy feature of mestizo/a mystical sources, which tend not to focus on the individual’s ascent into God but rather on collective and interpersonal experiences of divine presence. Like other Latino/a theologians, Isasi-­Díaz has a special devotion to the crucified Christ. She interprets his crucifixion as a sign of God’s willingness to experience the pain of this violent world together with its victims. She argues that, while he is truly divine, “Jesus is also the very human Jesucristo suffering on the cross who touches our hearts and who understands our suffering because he too has suffered.” She adds that “this is the Jesucristo we turn to, the Jesucristo who walks with us.” Using a similar logic, Goizueta calls him “Cristo Compañero” (Christ our companion). The crucified Christ gives comfort to crucified people, and sometimes they seek to return the favor, as any loving family member would. After receiving communion, parishioners at Isasi-­ Díaz’s church touch the wounded feet of Jesus on a large crucifix. One woman tells Isasi-­Díaz that she is trying to comfort him. Such empathy for Jesus is part of what it means to see him as a brother or sister.104 As a non-­Christian writer, Anzaldúa does not share Isasi-­Díaz’s active love for Jesucristo and does not present the struggle for liberation in Christological terms. However, Anzaldúa’s account of the suffering she endures in her Coatlicue state, which is part of her seven-­stage spiritual itinerary, provides a vivid picture of what it can feel like to be one of the crucified. In addition to the oppressions she bears as a queer woman of color, she falls prey to a debilitating illness, diabetes, 102  Ellacuría, “Crucified People”; Gebara, Out of the Depths, pp. 110–21; Delgado, Puerto Rican Decolonial Theology, p. 122; Pineda-­Madrid, Suffering and Salvation, pp. 87, 132, 146, and 152; Rubén Rodríguez, Racism and God-­Talk, p. 203; and Goizueta, Christ Our Companion, pp. 36–40. 103  Isasi-­Díaz, La Lucha Continues, pp. 242–57. 104  Isasi-­Díaz, La Lucha Continues, pp. 260–1. See also Goizueta, Christ Our Companion, p. 109.

The Divine in Between  217 that ultimately claims her life. Upon first receiving her diagnosis, she experiences feelings of guilt, anger, and self-­pity. She becomes emotionally and physically isolated and succumbs to addictions. She is forced to confront the bitter reality of her situation: You swallow, tasting the fear of your own death. You can no longer deny your own mortality, no longer escape into your head—­your body’s illness has taken residence in all your thoughts, catapulting you into the Coatlicue state, the hellish third phase of your journey. You listen to the wind howling like La Llorona on a moonless night. Mourning the loss, you sink like a stone into a deep depression, brooding darkly in the lunar landscape of your inner world. In the night mind of the night world, abandoned to a maelstrom of chaos, you dream of your own darkness, a surrealist sueño of disintegration.105

In terms of its affective and psychosomatic content, this Coatlicue state is similar to Speyr’s mystical participation in Good Friday and Holy Saturday. The desolation is similarly all-­consuming. This “hellish” state, which overwhelms one prior to death, is the sort of quotidian experience in which a Christian mystical theologian would search for the hidden presence of the kenotic, forsaken Son. The Speyrian-­ Balthasarian argument (which Goizueta embraces) would be that, through Christ, an almighty divine love is available even in such circumstances, a love that promises victory over them.106 Anzaldúa’s hope does not rest on such Christological grounds but rather on an experience of union with the goddess Coatlicue, who holds the powers of life and death together in herself. For Anzaldúa, it is not by resisting what she calls the “darker aspects” of existence but only by accepting and passing through them that one can reach a higher level of integration. Reflecting back, she writes, “You’ve learned that delving more fully into your pain, anger, despair, depression will move you through them to the other side, where you can use their energy to heal.”107 The negative affects that a Christian might associate with the cross are, for Anzaldúa, features of an ambiguous divine reality (Coatlicue). Anzaldúa believes that, despite their destructive feel, they have a transformative divine power. In its essential duality, Anzaldúa’s Coatlicue state is not far from Henry’s account of life as a transcendental combination of suffering and joy. Both thinkers veer dangerously close to divinizing suffering. On this score, Christian mysticism’s fidelity to a God of life who defeats death may have a greater appeal. Nancy Pineda-­Madrid argues that, if Christianity is to make good on its salvific promise in the midst of suffering—­and particularly the rash of “feminicides” (murders targeting women) that have plagued the border city of Juárez, 105 Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, p. 130. 107 Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, p. 132.

106 Goizueta, Christ Our Companion, pp. 109–25.

218 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Mexico—­it must prioritize forms of practical solidarity and communal togetherness that go beyond the Anselmian theory of divine satisfaction. This influential theory holds that the God-­man Christ died on the cross in order to pay or ­“satisfy” the infinite debt that sinful humanity owes the Father. Pineda-­Madrid is concerned that such a soteriology promotes Christian inaction by suggesting to  believers that their salvation is guaranteed by Christ regardless of how they behave in history. She also worries that it encourages those who suffer to embrace their suffering as something good, Christlike, and potentially redemptive.108 As an alternative to Anselmian soteriology, she highlights grassroots movements such as Voces sin Eco and Ni Una Más, which protest the Juárez feminicides, and argues that they are soteriologically significant witnesses to Christ’s healing and transformative presence in history. While these activists’ use of black crosses on pink backgrounds sends a clear message that the victims of feminicide are “crucified people” with whom the crucified Christ is united, these activists’ daily struggles for a more just and safe community indicate their own (at least implicit) union with Christ’s Spirit-­filled mission.109 Unfortunately, Christ’s presence with the oppressed and all those fighting against oppression often seems insufficient to overcome the hellacious forces that keep such systems in place. Pineda-­Madrid explains that many victims of feminicide in Juárez are not just murdered but raped, tortured, and mutilated by their assailants. These experiences are so horrific that no words can do them justice. They constitute a hell on earth. Adolescent boys and girls caught in the violence of abuse, poverty, incarceration, and incessant gang warfare on both sides of the border are living through their own daily experiences of hell. Evil and pain take hold of innumerable lives, leaving them mangled and destroyed. For such persons, the quotidian is far from a condition of happiness or even neutrality. It is terror. Even if Christ is present in such circumstances, as Christian mystical theology affirms, it remains challenging to determine what practical difference his presence is able to make this side of eternity. In her research on gangs in Guatemala City, Deborah Levenson notes that the “lines between victim and victimizer, between ruler and ruled, have been blurred.” Many young gang members, still only children, have become hardened criminals and killers. Yet they did not arrive at this grim fate on their own. Powerful military, business, and state interests; civil wars fueled by greed and staggering in­equal­ity; inhumane immigration policies; rampant corruption; toxic constructs of masculinity; and prolonged periods of neglect and deprivation have created a web of evil from which such young people find it difficult to extricate themselves: 108  These practical problems are not strictly entailed by Anselm’s argument, since Christ’s saving gift of himself does not excuse sinful behavior and since Anselm is clear that only one who is both human and divine—­that is, Christ alone—­can make such a redemptive sacrifice. However, Pineda-­ Madrid is right to acknowledge their prevalence in Christian communities and to warn against them. 109  Pineda-­Madrid, Suffering and Salvation, pp. 11–19, 87, 100–4, and 149.

The Divine in Between  219 “One youth told me that he wished he could change, and his family wished he could as well, but ‘that’s life—­it’s evil, so it’s necessary to be evil’.” When sin and suffering are this entangled and extreme, life can appear hopeless. One teenage boy named Edgar finally found the courage to leave his gang. After making his way to the U.S., he was eventually deported back to Guatemala. He tried to survive by staying in hiding. He came outside one day to watch a religious procession and was gunned down.110 Tragic stories such as this demonstrate that, if Christ is present in and with the crucified, this does not ensure that they will be beacons of holiness or that they will successfully escape the crucifying forces in their lives. If Christ is present in and with those striving to help young people like Edgar, this does not mean that they will always have the power to save him and others in his situation. Victories over evil can seem vanishingly rare. Even so, the Christian theological claim that God chose to become flesh, suffer with human beings, and thereby mysteriously bring them liberation remains deeply meaningful to many mestizo/a communities that are struggling with life’s daily hardships. The fervor surrounding annual Via Crucis celebrations attests to this fact. The most well-­known communal reenactment of Jesus’s passion takes place in Iztapalapa, one of the poorest districts of Mexico City, whose people are “crucified daily” by deprivation and injustice.111 Tens of thousands of devotees and tourists attend the event and many more watch the television broadcast. Locals are cast in the coveted roles of Jesus, Mary, Pilate, the apostles, and more. The experience is immersive and emotional. “All one’s senses are drawn in.”112 Similar processions take place in Latino/a communities north of the border, including outside the San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, on the streets of the South Bronx, and in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Although the scripts used in these reenactments vary, some make explicit connections between the suffering of Christ and issues affecting the community, such as trouble with landlords, worker exploitation, racism, and violence. In 1977, Pilsen’s inhabitants began their Via Crucis tradition while mourning the loss of families and children killed in fires on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. Unsafe housing conditions and Spanish–­English language barriers between firefighters and those trapped in the blazes contributed to the tragedy. In recent years, El Viacrucis del Inmigrante, which draws participants from several boroughs of New York, protests the dehumanizing treatment of Latino/a immigrants.113 In San Antonio, at the conclusion of the Good Friday service, parishioners come forward to share their sufferings with Mary, la Dolorosa (the sorrowful one), who watched as her son was tortured to death. The community receives and holds the stories of its members: “the father whose son committed suicide, the 110 Levenson, Adíos Niño, pp. 93, 98, 129, and 138. 111 Trexler, Reliving Golgotha, pp. vii–­viii. 112 Goizueta, Caminemos con Jésus, p. 32. 113 Kanter, Chicago Católico, p. 131; Gálvez, Guadalupe in New York, pp. 112–13, 118, and 129–33.

220 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

young woman who has just been diagnosed with cancer, the mother whose son was killed in a drive-­by gang shooting.” Goizueta calls this an act of “collective grieving.”114 Karen Mary Davalos notes that women she interviewed in Pilsen similarly associated themselves with the suffering Mary and other female characters in the passion play.115 Like Goizueta, Davalos recognizes that such communal performances of the way of the cross are not singularly focused on Jesus but build up a web of relationships among those who are grieving and struggling. In addition to highlighting women’s experiences, Davalos’s work on the Via Crucis is remarkable for its argument that such processions sanctify the physical spaces of ordinary life: the street corners, storefronts, and public parks that one passes every day. Changes that Via Crucis rituals make to participants’ experiences of cities, relationships, personal traumas, structures of oppression, grassroots movements, and other aspects of quotidian life are difficult to measure. Although such reenactments are not mere theater, they rely on the subtler forms of power that belong to drama and the arts. They provide representations, images, and bodily experiences that alter consciousness. Although they happen out in the open, they work on inner depths that are largely hidden from view. They do not instantaneously usher in a new social order. Rather, they adjust one’s perspective on the world that already exists, with all its manifest cruciformity. Their message is that, although you may suffer, you do not do so alone. The community grieves together with you. Jesus and Mary are with you, even if—­or especially if—­you find yourself in a hell made by human hands, a building burning to the ground. Although the fullest mystical conformity with Christ demands the pursuit of what Gebara calls “everyday resurrections,”116 events and structural changes that save the crucified from their crosses, one ought not underestimate the comforting power of Jesus’s psychosomatic sharing of human agony and the communal remembrance of his paschal mystery. Although more could and must be written on mestizo/a mysticism—­its pathways are endless—­the goal of this chapter has simply been to touch on some significant points and integrate them into the larger argument of this book. This chapter has explored mestizo/a contributions to the mysticism of ordinary life in relation to “philosophical” themes of mestizaje, la lucha, and lo cotidiano and popular Christian devotions involving La Virgen de Guadalupe, Jesucristo, and El Via Crucis. Although many voices entered the conversation, Anzaldúa and Isasi-­ Díaz provided an interdisciplinary and intersectional feminist through-­line that united these various topics and re-­focused all of them on the graced bodies and souls of poor women of color. Although Anzaldúa writes as a non-­Christian the­or­ist and Isasi-­Díaz as a Catholic theologian, their perspectives on a particular 114 Goizueta, Caminemos con Jésus, p. 37. 116 Gebara, Out of the Depths, p. 121.

115  Davalos, “Real Way of Praying,” p. 51.

The Divine in Between  221 type of mysticism that animates and empowers the ordinary lives of mestizas and mujeristas are more compatible than not. Where their projects differ—­ for ex­ample, Anzaldúa’s queering of mestizaje and recovery of indigenous views of divinity and Isasi-­Díaz’s pursuit of a Christic “kin-­dom” and support of Christian prayer in the context of Las Hermanas—­they largely seem to be mutually beneficial. Scholars interested in mestizo/a mysticism, whether Christian theologians or not, will be in a better position to understand it if informed by both Isasi-­Díaz and Anzaldúa rather than one of them alone. Of course, the theology–­philosophy dialogue about the mysticism of ordinary life that these two thinkers represent on this American side of the Atlantic and on the undersides of colonial modernity points to a much wider set of textual and nontextual materials than this chapter’s small sample size could exhaust. Christian mystical theology and nontheological theories associated with it owe these ma­ter­ ials the same level of painstaking, critical attention that they have given com­par­ able sources from medieval or early modern Europe. Feminist studies of mysticism must consider what mysticism means in the lives of women who continue to struggle against the unjust patriarchal, colonial, and White supremacist norms that began to take root over 500 years ago in the conquest of the Americas. It must discern where and how the grace of divine union is operative in their quotidian stories, actions, and relationships and strive to understand what concrete transformations this grace demands.

6 Divine Darkness Revisited Alice Walker, M. Shawn Copeland, and Other Womanist and Black Mystical Sources

Building on Chapter 5’s consideration of mestizo/a mystical sources forged in the aftermath of conquest, this chapter retrieves comparable womanist and Black mystical sources that reckon with the lasting effects of slavery. Both chapters center the graced lives of poor women of color and their quotidian struggles on the American side of the Atlantic and the undersides of modernity. Both chapters draw on experiences of intimacy with God to contest normalized structures of interlocking racial and gender oppression. And both chapters include a range of voices, while featuring two that represent the philosophy–­theology relationship we have explored throughout this book. In this case, the featured voices are those of the poet, novelist, and theorist Alice Walker, who pens a highly influential ­def­in­ition of a “womanist” and is credited with founding this particular movement, and the Catholic womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland, who, like other woman­ist theologians, integrates Walker’s focus on Black women’s lives with a Christian practice of faith seeking understanding. Walker’s definition of a “womanist” can be found on the opening pages of In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983). It has four parts: 1. From womanish (Opp. of “girlish,” i.e., frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, “You acting womanish,” i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered “good” for one. Interested in grown-­up doings. Acting grown up. Being grown up. Interchangeable with another black folk expression: “You trying to be grown.” Responsible. In charge. Serious. 2. Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter), and women’s strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health. Traditionally universalist, as in: “Mama, why are we brown, pink, and yellow, and our cousins are white, beige, and black?” Ans.: “Well, you know the colored

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism. Andrew Prevot, Oxford University Press. © Andrew Prevot 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866967.003.0007

Divine Darkness Revisited  223 race is just like a flower garden, with every color flower represented.” Traditionally capable, as in: “Mama, I’m walking to Canada and I’m taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.” Reply: “It wouldn’t be the first time.” 3. Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless. 4. Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender.

Walker uses the folk word “womanish” (from which “womanist” is later derived) in her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970). Grange tells his granddaughter Ruth, “I never in my life seen such a womanish gal.” Walker employs the neologism “womanist” as early as 1981, in a review essay of Jean McMahon Humez’s introduction to the edited writings of the nineteenth-­century Black Shaker mystic Rebecca Cox Jackson, Gifts of Power. Resisting Humez’s speculation that Jackson may have been a lesbian, Walker instead names her a “womanist”: I can imagine black women who love women (sexually or not) hardly thinking of what Greeks were doing [on Lesbos]; but, instead, referring to themselves as “whole” women, from “wholly” or “holy.” Or as “round” women—­women who love other women, yes, but women who also have concern, in a culture that oppresses all black people (and this would go back very far), for their fathers, brothers, and sons, no matter how they feel about them as males. My own term for such women would be “womanist.”

These uses present womanism as a strong, defiant, spiritual, and embodied love that is rooted in Black women’s experiences and affirms people of various colors, genders, and sexualities.1 Womanism is not only a genre of literature, a field of interdisciplinary scholarship, and a practical way of being in the world. It is a mysticism of ordinary life. The union of the divine and quotidian flesh is its central theme. This final chapter brings this mystical interpretation of Walker’s thought into contact with mystical aspects of contemporary Black studies, mystical narratives of nineteenth-­century Black women evangelists, and the mystical arguments of Christian womanist theologians. Following Copeland, it emphasizes the grace of divine union that is experienced by suffering, joyous, and free bodies. In the process, it transforms the Dionysian tradition’s invocation of divine darkness. A Christian mystical the­ ology in womanist perspective discovers the opaque mystery of God’s incarnate 1 Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, pp. xi–­xii and 81 and Walker, Third Life of Grange Copeland, p. 230. Although some scholars use “womanism” and “Black feminism” interchangeably (and Walker links them in the first part of her definition), others distinguish them, and some prefer one term over the other. See Collins, “What’s in a Name” and West, “Is a Womanist a Black Feminist?”

224 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

love in the opaque mysteries of an abused people’s corporeal strivings for wholeness and holiness.

Mystical Blackness: Between Being and Nothingness Blackness and femaleness have each been used to represent an alterity that verges on nothingness. In contrast to mestizaje—­which, despite being maligned by Anglo-­dominant cultures, forges a path between binaries—­both Blackness and femaleness have been rendered as the inferior term of a binary racial or gender pair: White vs. Black, male vs. female.2 To have one’s life negated by the dialectics of the symbolic order would be the inescapable fate of Blacks, of women, and doubly of Black women if White supremacist and patriarchal ontologies reigned unchecked. Amey Victoria Adkins-­Jones exposes the overlapping forms of such negated Blackness and femaleness in her intertextual reading of Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir.3 Despite their historical power, such anti-­Black, sexist ontologies falter, and for at least two reasons. First, they cannot withstand the ontological (and not merely existentielle) meaning of Black women’s quotidian lives. The living flesh, the immanence that is the transcendental condition of each life’s daily actions, touches, desires, and relations—­ whether this life be Black, female, both, or otherwise—­announces its presence in ways that defy the assumptions of White supremacist patriarchy. Life cannot be, and will not be, defined by a negative structural positioning, at least not absolutely, not even if the most aggressive means of enforcement such as slavery, rape, and murder are employed (and they have been). Such is the liberative meaning hidden in Henry’s phenomenological account of life as the essence of manifestation occurring outside the logic of “the world” and in Irigaray’s theory of a jouissance that exceeds phallocentrism. Such is the intersectional feminist potential of the postmodern celebration of ordinary life precisely as mystical auto-­affection. This potential has been realized in womanist sources. For example, Emilie Townes argues for the ontological significance of Black women’s quotidian lives by speaking of their “is-­ness,” which she defines as “the very nature of our breathing in and out as human beings and the movement of creation itself.” She finds the presence of God in this “is-­ness”: “God’s presence [is] the very fabric of our existence. God is both immanent and transcendent. God’s presence is as close as

2  Blackness may sometimes share the binary-­defying characteristics of mestizaje, for example if one emphasizes, as J.  Kameron Carter does, the “middleness” of the Middle Passage (“Paratheological Blackness,” p. 595) or if one recognizes, with Brian Bantum, that Black life is inescapably mulattic: a blending of cultures, languages, and traditions (Redeeming Mulatto). 3  Adkins, “Black/Feminist Futures,” p. 706.

Divine Darkness Revisited  225 our breathing and as awesome as the universe.”4 Townes’s point is that there is a sacred, indeed divine reality in Black women’s lives that no White supremacist patriarchal negation can destroy. Anti-­Black, sexist ontologies are thwarted in a different, more apophatic way by mystical traditions that seek the divine in a sublime nothingness beyond being and knowing, a resplendent darkness, a womb-­like mystery, an abyss that shares characteristics with both Blackness and femaleness.5 If the divine is such a mys­ tic­al no-­thing (while being at the same time the source of all things), one may expect to find its generative power precisely in the lives of those whom this world, in some cases twice over, also treats as though they were nothing. Ascribed nothingness would be the basis for an associative unity between the illegibly human (Black/female) and the ineffable divine. According to this way of thinking, lives that call to mind the “dark continents” of Africa, woman, or both do not merely suffer from discursive and material negations but may also, through or despite this negated status, possess a mystical energy of resistance. As a postmodern precedent of such resistance, one might consider Certeau’s remembrance of “mad” figures who were considered “nothing” relative to the norms of their so­ci­ eties and his appreciation for “the questioning power of this nothing.” One might also consider the early Irigaray, insofar as she associates the negative position assigned to woman in phallocentric philosophy with woman’s greater proximity to mystical darkness. The postmodern inflected writings of the Christian feminist theologians Keller and Coakley similarly argue that the structural position of Blackness as negated other of the “enlightened” West justifies an effort to think Blackness and divine darkness together. Keller takes the polysemic title of Howard Thurman’s classic analysis of racial segregation, The Luminous Darkness, as an invitation to meditate on the relationship between the “epistemic darkness” of Dionysius, Eckhart, and Cusa and the “epidermal darkness” of the racially oppressed. She presents her argument as a “hunch,” namely that “unless Christianity unblocks the dark depths it froze in itself long before ‘racism’ existed, the subliminal habits of whiteness—­ engrained in liberalism as well as in reaction—­will persist.”6 Coakley makes a related point about the potentially transformative interplay of mystical darkness and racial Blackness. Reflecting on her time ministering to prisoners who were mostly people of color, she speculates that an “unleashing of 4 Townes, In a Blaze of Glory, pp. 48 and 140. 5  An Yountae finds such an abyss in Afro-­Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant’s poetic meditations on the oceanic Middle Passage, as well as in Plotinus, Dionysius, and Eckhart. See An, Decolonial Abyss, pp. 89–90. Mary Potter Engel similarly discusses the nothingness attributed to women by patriarchal culture in relation to annihilative motifs in the history of mysticism. However, her aim is not to elide but to distinguish the two. She emphasizes that the nothingness that frees the mystic for union with “Abundant Life” is something radically different from the structural nothingness that patriarchy imposes on women. See Engel, “No-­Self and the Calling,” pp. 148 and 153. 6 Keller, Face of the Deep, p. 201.

226 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

‘dark’, subversive divine power” through the practice of silent contemplation may be an “antidote to racist despair, marginalization and repression.” She suggests that this “unleashing” may happen in two ways: Black practitioners of contemplation may gain a greater awareness of a divine power operating within them, and White practitioners may find their sinful pretenses of moral purity, cognitive mastery, and political control upended.7 The effort to interpret Black nothingness mystically receives more intricate elaborations in contemporary Black studies. Fred Moten’s essay “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)” is a good example. Written as a generous response to Afro-­pessimist scholars such as Orlando Patterson, Frank Wilderson, and Jared Sexton, Moten’s piece concedes their point that Blackness is a “nothingness.” Borrowing from Nahum Chandler’s understanding of “paraontological” Blackness, Moten argues that Blackness is “ontology’s anti- or ante-­foundation, ontology’s underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontology’s time and space.” He notes that this outside of ontology, this Black nothingness, finds a searing expression in Nathaniel Mackey’s poetic account of “the hold of a [slave] ship.”8 However, Moten stresses that this racial ascription of nothingness “is, of necessity, relative.” It is relative to a contingent construction of the meaning of being by the likes of Kant, Hegel, and Thomas Jefferson, which passes for true ontology but is really a pseudo-­sovereign assertion of White subjectivity. The Blackness that is nothing relative to this “necropolitical” order (Moten alludes here to Achille Mbembe) has its own positive forms of quotidian life, “real presence,” and “aesthetic sociality,” which are audible in Black music, such as Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell’s track “Mutron.” Therefore, although Blackness may be subject to ontological erasure, it is not mere nothingness. Although Blackness may be sentenced to political death (which includes the deaths of many Black people), its fate is not “social death” in any strict sense (pace Patterson), because Blackness itself is a form of sociality.9 Moten is interested in the range of meanings that circulate in and around the sound “mu,” which joins together music, the mystical, Cherry and Blackwell’s “Mutron,” and the Japanese word for “no,” which occurs at the heart of the famous Mu Kōan (a cryptic Buddhist saying in which a Zen master, Jōshū, when asked whether a dog has a Buddha nature, replies “Mu!”). The multiple forms of nothingness harnessed by “mu” range from the relative, such as Blackness, to the absolute, such as divine emptiness or the eschatological unknown. Despite insisting on the relative status of the nothingness that Blackness is, Moten playfully puts it into apposition with other, less relativized senses of nothingness/“mu”

7  Coakley, “Jail Break,” p. 20. 8  Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” pp. 739, 743, 749, and 754. See also Chandler, X—­The Problem of the Negro, p. 23. 9  Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” pp. 740, 741, and 774.

Divine Darkness Revisited  227 in order to suggest that Blackness may be home to the generative energy of the absolute. For Moten, Black flesh—­the embodied, aesthetic sociality of Black people, whether in the hold of the ship, the jazz club, or “the little Negro’s church”—is mystical to the extent that it resists the violence of the world and shares in the “alternative planetarity” that is heard or desired in the sound “mu.”10 Jayna Brown similarly argues that, although Blackness has been excluded from standard ontological frameworks, and although Black people therefore often face dystopian terrors in their everyday lives, this very condition of alterity and neg­ ation has been fertile ground for envisioning other possible worlds, which Brown calls “black utopias.” Like Moten, she cites Black musicians, in her case Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, but she also draws on the witness of her father, a Black Panther turned clairvoyant; the science fiction author Octavia Butler; and nineteenth-­century Black women preachers whom she calls “mystics”: Zilpha Elaw, Jarena Lee, Sojourner Truth, and Rebecca Cox Jackson (we shall return to these mystics later). These concrete examples reveal Black ways of life and thought that point beyond normative conceptions of (human) being.11 They disclose a “freedom not to be” that “sends us into the unknown and the unknowable.”12 Ashon Crawley’s artistic, literary, and theoretical work belongs to this apophatic (but not merely apophatic) Black studies discourse as well. For Crawley, as for Moten and Brown, Black life is tactile, social, and sonic. It is an opaquely positive “nothing” that is both affective and subversive. Although he critiques the hypocrisy of the Black church and the broader Christian mystical tradition, especially insofar as they seek to norm and control the body, he finds much to value in the ecstatic, relational, and corporeal aspects of Black Pentecostal worship services. He argues that, “at its best, when not colluding with white supremacist cap­it­al­ist patriarchy, Black religiosity allows us to learn how to love our flesh.” It teaches us “that something from the outside’s gotta come and dwell with us, in us.” It reveals precious forms of prayer, noise, and breath that the dominant social order regards as “discardable.”13 In contrast to such apophatic projects in contemporary Black studies, woman­ist thought usually does not divinize the nothingness of Blackness or femaleness but rather, as Townes already showed earlier, emphasizes that God is present in the “is-­ness” of Black women’s lives. Although Walker’s womanist fiction recognizes the nothingness that this violent world doubly ascribes to Black women, it does 10  Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” pp. 750–7, 768, 775, and 778. 11  Whereas Sylvia Wynter argues for including Black and indigenous peoples’ life ways as new “genres of being human,” and thereby seeks to overturn the dehumanizing effects of the overrepresentation of “Man,” Brown opts for the more audacious strategy of questioning the very category of the human in favor of “new genres of existence,” by which she means alternative ecologies and ways of life that overcome anthropocentric pretenses of autonomy and superiority. See Jayna Brown, Black Utopias, p. 9 and Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being,” pp. 273, 318, and 331. 12  Jayna Brown, Black Utopias, pp. 19–20. 13 Crawley, Lonely Letters, pp. 24–6, 108, 121, and 249.

228 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

not treat this nothingness as a paradoxical path toward mystical vision or wholeness. On the contrary, her characters’ refusal to let themselves be called “nothing” or to perceive themselves in such terms is what draws them closer to the divine. For example, in The Color Purple (1982), Mr. speaks in an abusively racist and misogynistic manner to Celie and calls her a “nothing”: “Look at you. You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam . . . you nothing at all.” Celie replies defiantly, “Until you do right by me, I say, everything you even dream about will fail.”14 Celie’s discovery of God within does not happen because of any supposed affinity between the nothingness that is violently attributed to her by the likes of Mr. and the nonbeing of God but rather because of Shug’s insistent affirmation of the divine loveworthiness of Celie’s embodied life and its natural pleasures. Shug has an apophatic view of God, as a mystery existing beyond binary constructs of gender and beyond images: “God ain’t a he or a she, but a It. . . . Don’t look like nothing, she say. It ain’t a picture show.” Yet Shug does not draw a parallel between these mystical denials of God and the destructive powers arrayed against Celie and other Black women. When, in The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Walker writes about the nothingness that Brownfield becomes through the domination he suffers as an abandoned child and a poor Black sharecropper and through his fateful descent into homicidal rage (Brownfield kills his wife Mem), Walker finds no reason to glorify this condition or liken it to the divine: “To Grange his son [Brownfield] was as dead as his son’s murdered wife. . . . [He was] a member of the living dead, one of the many who had lost their souls in the American wilderness.”15 This destruction of Brownfield’s soul, this nothingness, is not mystical for Walker. The mystical is that which overcomes such nothingness. The fact that her character Meridian, in the novel by the same name (1976), has an experience of mystical ecstasy that feels like dying16 does not prompt Walker to suggest that the living dead—­like Brownfield or, to take a character from Meridian: the racially oppressed rapist Tommy Odds—­are, by virtue of their tragic state, better able to connect with the divine. Nothingness appears in Walker’s fiction almost exclusively as an evil force that is combatted—­sometimes victoriously, sometimes not—­by the divine presence that her characters find in themselves and in nature. Unlike recent Black studies theorists, she does not link nothingness to aesthetic, social, and life-­giving experiences in the Black community. Hers is rather a mysticism of Black female being. Copeland largely favors the ontologically affirmative approach to Blackness, femaleness, and mysticism that we have seen in her fellow womanist theologian, Townes, and in Walker. The subtitle of Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being suggests this orientation. Copeland acknowledges the annihilative effects of the 14 Walker, The Color Purple, p. 205. 16 Walker, Meridian, p. 53.

15 Walker, Third Life of Grange Copeland, p. 185.

Divine Darkness Revisited  229 racist ontology—­or what she calls a “white, racially bias-­induced horizon”— propa­gated by modern philosophers such as Hume, Kant, and Hegel and enforced by long histories of anti-­Black violence. Drawing on Black theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Lewis Gordon, Emmanuel Eze, and bell hooks, she argues that “massive, negative, transgenerational assault on black bodies has ontological implications. In such a society, blackness mutates as negation, nonbeing, nothingness; blackness insinuates an ‘other’ so radically different that her and his very humanity is discredited.” However, Copeland does not immediately offer a mystical in­ter­pret­ ation of this negative condition. She does not suggest that living as a nothing is a way to be divine or divine-­like. Instead, she develops a kataphatic theological anthropology that affirms “black-­human-­being as a particular incarnation of universal finite human being.” She argues for practices of compassion and ­solidarity that will cultivate “a world of goodness and beauty and truth and justice in which Being is at home.”17 Although Copeland, therefore, tends mostly toward a positive ontological account of mystical Blackness, her essay, “Blackness Past, Blackness Future—­and Theology,” reveals another layer of her thinking. She builds on Walter Mignolo’s thesis about the “darker sides” of the Renaissance; Charles Long’s research into the “opacity” of Black religion; and Eulalio Baltazar’s and James Noel’s analogies between Blackness and divine darkness. From these sources, she concludes that the future of Blackness and the future of theology may depend on a new, ­apophatic approach to the intertwined mystery of the two: Perhaps a route theology might take side by side with the symbol of blackness to a future with authentic and luminous possibility emerges from the ancient mys­ tic­al tradition of apophasis, the via negativa or negative theology. In this posture, rather than attempting to overcome the opacity of the symbol, theology draws near to it and into its meanings, its agonies, and its ecstasies.18

Copeland suggests that the opacity of Blackness exposes “the failure of Western metaphysics and ontology” but opens new possibilities for mystical theological reflection. She presents Blackness as a “divinely revealed phenomenon” that ought to teach theology something about the wisdom of God, but she stresses that this is a “dark wisdom” hidden in the interior strivings, sorrows, and intimacies of the enslaved.19 Although Copeland remains certain that union with God involves a refusal of the annihilative designs of White supremacist societies, she suggests that Blackness may accomplish this divine act of refusal through its characteristics of both being and nothingness. In this way, Copeland models a womanist 17 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, pp. 9–22. 18  Copeland, “Blackness Past, Blackness Future,” p. 635. 19  Copeland, “Blackness Past, Blackness Future,” pp. 632, 634, and 637.

230 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

theological approach to the mystical interplay of kataphasis and apophasis, which may get the balance just right. Nonetheless, any argument that uses the association of Blackness with nothingness and the association of nothingness with mysticism to confer a mystical status on Blackness involves significant dangers. The idea of “nothingness” is highly equivocal: there is a radical difference between God per se, anti-­Black violence, and Black communal feeling, though all bear this strange (non-)name. To the extent that the hold of the slave ship, that unromantic place of torture and death, prefigures the annihilative conditions under which lives marked as “Black” will be forced to exist in the African continent and diaspora—­conditions of dehumanization, economic and sexual exploitation, and outright killability, along with attendant psychological and intergenerational traumas—­this sort of nothingness is hardly suggestive of the divine, that mystery of infinite love whose excess beyond entitative speech is a sign of sublime greatness. Rather, this nothingness that appears in or as the hold of the slave ship is suggestive of hell. If there has been, in spite of everything, an experience of the divine in the midst of such hellacious circumstances, then, even so, it is not the racialized nothingness that accomplishes such a feat but rather a type of grace for which such nothingness is no absolute obstacle. The Christian mystical tradition’s meditations on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, for example in Speyr and Balthasar, indicate how such an experience might be understood theologically. Divine ken­ osis brings God into the hells of the world to be with those who suffer them. As we shall see later, womanist and Black theological sources attest in their own ways to the fact that God is present with Black people despite the evils of their situ­ ation. Yet it is important to recognize and state clearly that the hells inflicted on such people are not by themselves divinizing. If finding mysticism in Black women’s and men’s quotidian lives is not best accomplished merely through the attribution of nothingness to them, for the ­reasons just mentioned, something similar can also be argued about the attribution of being. These nonontological and ontological ways of connecting mysticism and Blackness may inadvertently suggest that such a connection can be established without considering what happens concretely in any given Black lives, for example what sorts of spiritual practices they endeavor (if any) and whether they are receptive to the transformative workings of divine love. The claim that Blackness and femaleness are symbols of being, nothingness, or both and are, therefore, mystical could be taken as a statement that Black women’s lives are proximate to the divine regardless (as Walker might say).20 Interpreted in this way, a being- or nothingness-­centered approach to the mysticism of Black women’s lives helpfully affirms the ineradicable sacredness of such lives. However, the

20 Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, p. xii.

Divine Darkness Revisited  231 apparent abstractness of this approach has the disadvantage of suggesting that the quotidian manners in which Black women live—­the choices they make each day, indeed their freedoms as subjects—­are irrelevant to the question of where they stand in relation to God. It is as though, as a Black woman, one would not have to participate in the human struggle against sin and for liberation in order to be divinized, because it would suffice simply to be located in these gender and racial categories of body-­objectification. To avoid giving such an impression, the affirmation of mystical Blackness/ femaleness through its being or nothingness must be held in tension with a more discerning study of the quotidian lives of Black women, which reveals how they become mystical according to other, more specific criteria—­whether experiential, aesthetic, ethical, theological, or whatever they may be—­that go beyond the mere “facts” of gender and race. A close reading of Moten, Brown, Crawley, Walker, Townes, Copeland, and other Black and womanist thinkers considered in the preceding discussion demonstrates their use of many such criteria. In apophatic Black studies, “nothingness” names subversive practices of aesthetic joy and eth­ ic­ al togetherness that carry their own alternative normativity. In womanist thought, “being” names a particular way of being centered on love of God, neighbor, and self. What follows is, therefore, not a critique of any of these theorists but a complementary interpretation of Black women’s mystical lives, which, as these scholars already know, are not limited to abstract ascriptions of being or nothingness.

The Graced Lives of Black Women Mystical Narratives of Nineteenth-­Century Black Women Evangelists Sue Houchins argues that the spiritual autobiographies of Black women preachers who lived and worked during “the Second [Great] Awakening (1795–1830) and the Holiness Movement (1835–1930s)” in the United States belong to a Protestant, more specifically Wesleyan, literary genre. This genre recounts a person’s progress from a state of grievous self-­doubt as a sinner, through a dramatic conversion experience wherein one finds forgiveness and the assurance of justification through faith in Christ, toward a final gift of sanctification that involves a new birth in the Holy Spirit, a perfection in love, and a sharing in the divine nature. Houchins contends that the Black female evangelists who describe their lives according to this structured spiritual itinerary ought to be situated in a longer Christian mystical tradition that goes back to Augustine (if not before) and includes medieval visionaries such as Julian of Norwich and Counter-­Reformation saints such as Teresa of Avila. In a word, they are mystics. Their lives are organized

232 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

by “the belief in the profound union of God with humanity, which is a reflection of that essential, central Christian teaching of the incarnation.” Houchins underscores the ways that their struggles for freedom amid the oppressive racial and gender norms of their societies are sustained by their experiences of union with God. For them, mysticism is not a flight from the world but a source of empowerment within it.21 In a similar vein, Jean Mahon Humez notes that nineteenth-­century “lib­er­ ation­ist movements like abolitionism and feminism were deeply rooted in the successive layers of religious enthusiasm that spread out over the northeastern United States in the first four decades of the century.” William Andrews discusses the ways that intimacy with God enabled Black women to resist the “cult of true womanhood,” which promoted servile domesticity, and to claim authority in ecclesial spaces traditionally dominated by men, including fledgling independent Black churches. Joy Bostic adds that the mystical experiences of African American women “empowered them to reject culturally circumscribed roles” and to become “religious and social activists” who were seeking “social change and transformation.”22 The primary source materials offer a more complex picture. Although the fact of mystical empowerment is undeniable, certain Black women preachers describe the condition of union with God in ways that reflect some level of acquiescence to harmful cultural norms about race and gender. For example, shortly after her conversion experience, Maria Stewart (1803–79) addresses a number of mixed-­ race, mixed-­gender audiences in Boston in the early 1830s—­becoming the first widely known Black female orator in the country. She exhorts her Black listeners to demonstrate their merits according to White standards of value. She embraces a binary aesthetics that associates darkness with ignorance and sin and brightness with the true and the good. She says, “Prove to the world that, / Though black your skins as shades of night / Your hearts are pure, your souls are white.” Stewart’s image of a people with a Black exterior and a White interior racializes the Pauline distinction between flesh and spirit and conflates the mystical process of divinization through divine love with a process of “becoming like white men” and gaining “respectability in this country” (her words). Yet Stewart’s voice is also one of prophetic resistance. She protests the “horrors of slavery.” She prays to God to “let the oppressed go free.” She turns her own respectability politics on its head by suggesting that, “if no one will promote or respect us, let us promote and respect ourselves.” She ultimately puts the burden of proof on White Americans: “Prove that ye have human feelings, / Ere ye proudly question ours!” Finally, drawing on the witnesses of women in scripture and the Christian tradition, she argues that 21  Houchins, “Introduction,” pp. xxix–­xli. 22  Humez, “Introduction,” p. 2; Andrews, ed., Sisters of the Spirit, pp. 13–14; and Bostic, African-­ American Female Mysticism, p. xxi.

Divine Darkness Revisited  233 their gender in no way inhibits their reception of powerful intellectual and moral virtues through God’s grace.23 Zilpha Elaw (ca. 1790–1873), another free woman of color in the North, shares Stewart’s binary light–­dark aesthetics. For Elaw, darkness represents a fearful ­condition of estrangement from God, while both light and whiteness symbolize holiness: “I clearly saw by the light of the Holy Ghost, that my heart and soul were rendered completely spotless—­as clean as a sheet of white paper, and I felt as pure as if I had never sinned in all my life.” More concerning on feminist grounds, Elaw endorses a hierarchical relation between men and women. She denounces female “pride,” “haughtiness,” and “independent arrogance” as “the worst vices of humanity,” while arguing from scripture that women are “formed . . . by nature for subordination,” first to their fathers, then to their husbands. Nevertheless, these demeaning constructs of darkness and femininity are counteracted by other passages in her text. A positive experience of darkness may be found in Elaw’s account of praying while walking at night: “these nocturnal walks were to me seasons of sweet communion with my God.” Moreover, although she believes she owes obedience to her husband, she is clear that she owes a higher obedience to God. When her husband urges her not to become a preacher out of fear that she would be made a “laughing stock,” she explains, “I was very sorry to see him so much grieved about it; but my heavenly Father had informed me that he had a great work for me to do; I could not therefore descend down to the counsel of flesh and blood.” Elaw follows a spiritual calling that overrules her husband’s carnal decrees and the supposedly normal gender hierarchy that they assume. She becomes a preacher because God commands her, “thou must preach the gospel.”24 Elaw’s experiences of conversion and sanctification involve accessory mystical phenomena such as visions and locutions, as well as the theologically essential characteristic of any Christian mysticism: an obediential, loving union with God through Christ and the Holy Spirit. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, Elaw learns from her parents how to sing the praises of God. When her mother passes away, she is placed with a Quaker family as a live-­in servant. She does not connect with their style of silent devotion and describes herself drifting into sin during these early adolescent years. However, a terrifying dream of judgment day, which she takes to be a divine revelation, prompts her to examine herself and to begin attending Methodist prayer meetings. One day, while milking a cow and singing a hymn, she has a vision of Jesus, which gives her a feeling of assurance in God’s love. She is filled with “the peace of God which surpasses understanding” and “joy in the Holy Ghost, to a degree, at last, unutterable by my tongue.” She is tempted to disbelieve her eyes, but the cow she is milking acknowledges Jesus’s 23 Stewart, Productions (1835), pp. 4, 15, 26, 37, 51, 72, 75–8, and 84. On the problem of light–­dark aesthetics, see Prevot, “Divine Opacity.” 24 Elaw, Memoirs (1846), pp. 56, 60, 61, 67, 82, and 84.

234 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

presence too and bows down before him. Elaw identifies this as her moment of “conversion.”25 Over the next several years, Elaw develops an increasingly intimate relationship with God. She attends “camp meetings”—multiday ecumenical gatherings in the wilderness, which involve preaching, praying, singing, and charismatic ex­peri­ences typical of the Second Great Awakening—­and it is at one such meeting that she experiences the gift of “sanctification”: God was pleased to separate my soul into Himself, to sanctify me as a vessel designed for honour, made meet for the master’s use. Whether I was in the body, or whether I was out of the body, on that auspicious day, I cannot say; but this I do know, that at the conclusion of a most powerful sermon delivered by one of the ministers from the platform, and while the congregation were in prayer, I became so overpowered with the presence of God, that I sank down upon the ground, and laid there for a considerable time; and while I was thus prostrate on the earth, my spirit seemed to ascend up into the clear circle of the sun’s disc; and, surrounded and engulfed in the glorious effulgence of the rays, I distinctly heard a voice speak unto me, which said, “Now thou art sanctified; and I will show thee what thou must do.”26

After this mystical ecstasy, which moves her body and elevates her above it, Elaw feels a renewed calling to do the works of God. She begins to visit the sick, to minister to families in their homes, and to take up an apostolic life of service “like another Phoebe,” a female deacon of the early church who worked closely with Paul (see Rom. 16:1–2). Although Elaw’s union with God reaches a new height with her ecstatic experience of sanctification, it subsists after this ephemeral event in her quotidian efforts to live and proclaim the gospel, during which time she reports “[not] a single cloud intervene[d] betwixt God and my soul.”27 Jarena Lee (1783–1864) tells a similar autobiographical story of her progression from sin, to conversion, to sanctification, to a public life of service and preaching, yet her account of this spiritual itinerary has several distinctive features worth noting. Unlike Elaw, Lee is raised by nonreligious parents. Her first inkling of spirituality comes in the form of a tormented conscience, which she suffers after lying to her mistress (like Elaw, Lee, though legally “free,” works as a domestic servant as a girl). Her painful self-­ recriminations intensify at a Presbyterian prayer meeting. Her feelings of guilt become so weighty that she is tempted to drown herself. Wracked with anxiety, she sinks into an illness for three months. Some relief finally comes during a service at Richard Allen’s African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) church. Feeling moved to forgive a person against

25 Elaw, Memoirs, pp. 53–7.

26 Elaw, Memoirs, p. 66.

27 Elaw, Memoirs, p. 67.

Divine Darkness Revisited  235 whom she held a grudge, she suddenly experiences God’s forgiveness for all her sins: “That moment, though hundreds were present, I did leap to my feet and declare that God, for Christ’s sake, had pardoned the sins of my soul.”28 For four years after this experience of conversion, Lee remains in a state of spiritual unrest and unhappiness. She is tempted again to kill herself, either by drowning or by hanging. She has a vision of “Satan, in the form of a monstrous dog” and of “the awful gulf of hell [that] seemed to be open beneath me, covered only, as it were, by a spider’s web, on which I stood.” She again falls into a condition of perhaps psychosomatically induced illness. A fellow Methodist encourages her to pray for sanctification, and she begins to do so every afternoon at four o’clock, in a “secret place.”29 On one such occasion, her prayers are granted: That very instant, as if lightning had darted through me, I sprang to my feet and cried, “The Lord has sanctified my soul!” There was none to hear this but the angels who stood around to witness my joy—­and Satan, whose malice raged the more. . . . The first I knew of myself after that I was standing in the yard with my hands spread out, and looking with my face toward heaven. I now ran into the house and told them what had happened to me, when, as it were, a new rush of the same ecstasy came upon me, and caused me to feel as if I were in an ocean of light and bliss. During this, I stood perfectly still, the tears rolling in a flood from my eyes. So great was the joy, that it is past description.30

Like Elaw’s ecstatic experience of sanctification, Lee’s is followed by a call to preach the gospel. Her mystical union with God is verified in her actions. Like Stewart and Elaw, Lee argues for women’s God-­given ability to preach and do other public works by appealing to examples of women in scripture. Lee draws particular attention to Mary Magdalene, the first evangelist of the resurrection.31 Although Sojourner Truth (ca. 1797–1883), like Stewart, Elaw, and Lee, comes of age in the North during the first half of the nineteenth century, she is born into slavery and is only freed (through a change in New York state law) when she is approximately thirty years old. Her name at birth is “Isabella,” and her first 28 Lee, Religious Experience and Journal (1849), pp. 3–5. A first, shorter edition was published in 1836. 29 Lee, Religious Experience and Journal, pp. 5–9. Bostic associates Lee’s image of the spider web with indigenous African and American traditions that value spiders and their webs as metaphors of interconnected divine, natural, and social worlds. Bostic argues that Lee’s spider web vision constitutes an “emancipatory mystical space in which the human soul is enabled to recognize and contend with destructive forces and at the same time engage in a self-­reflective and critical assessment of her own relationship to these forces” (African-­American Female Mysticism, p. 120). Bostic interprets these forces not exactly as “the awful gulf of hell,” as Lee does, but as powers of gender and racial oppression. 30 Lee, Religious Experience and Journal, p. 10. J. Kameron Carter interprets Lee’s outstretched arms in connection with patristic teachings on the process of becoming Christlike in the Spirit, particularly those of Maximus the Confessor (Race, p. 335). 31 Lee, Religious Experience and Journal, pp. 10–13.

236 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

language is Dutch. She lives with her parents and younger brother in a cold, dark, muddy cellar with other slaves of both sexes and various ages until she is nine. Then she is sold to a series of slaveowners, just as ten or twelve of her older siblings had been. At the hands of some of her masters, she suffers psychological, physical, and sexual abuse. One whips her with a bundle of rods that had been heated in a fire. Another sexually molests her, though the narrator of the text—­ Olive Gilbert, Truth’s White, female, abolitionist coauthor—­chooses to pass over such “unnatural” acts “in silence.” Isabella has a forbidden romance with an enslaved man, Robert, from a nearby farm, who, as a consequence of this affair, is beaten nearly to death before her eyes. She is compelled to marry another slave, Thomas, with whom she has five children, one of whom, Peter, is illegally sold to the South.32 The soul- and body-­murdering violence Isabella endures is similar to that suffered by other Black women who have left narratives of their trials in slavery, such as Mary Prince and Harriet Jacobs.33 Before Isabella experiences anything resembling conversion, sanctification, or a call to preach, her mother teaches her to believe in God as an invisible being in the sky who would answer her prayers, including prayers to avoid being beaten by her master. Yet young Isabella also “looked upon her master as a God; and believed that he knew of and could see her at all times.” This contradictory the­ ology, according to which God works against the slaveholder’s cruel deeds and yet the slaveholder possesses the power of a god, provides at least some basis for Isabella’s interior resistance against slavery. She fashions a private sanctuary on “a small island in a small stream,” beneath some willow branches. Here she speaks freely with her God—­not her worldly master but the one in the sky who helps her escape her master’s lashes. Her prayers empower her to survive, to express her desires, and to feel heard and loved by a being greater than all that oppresses her. Although she sometimes recites the “Our Father,” she mostly “talk[s] to God as familiarly as if he had been a creature like herself,” using “tones and [a] manner” of speech that Gilbert says cannot be conveyed in writing.34 Truth’s story begins to take on the familiar features of Elaw’s and Lee’s narratives of conversion only in the last year of her bondage. Having fled with her infant Sophia from the house of her master John Dumont, she arrives at the house of Isaac Van Wagener, who agrees to purchase her for twenty-­five dollars and treat her not as a slave, but as a human being. After a few months of relative tranquility, she begins to miss the company of the other enslaved persons at Dumont’s farm and considers going back. However, right when she intends to depart, she is stopped in her tracks by a mystical vision that expands her understanding of God 32 Truth, Narrative, pp. 10, 18, 20, 23–5, 36, 56, and 248n34. 33 Prince, History of Mary Prince (1831); Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861; note that Harriet Jacobs published her text under the pseudonym “Linda Brent”); and Copeland, “Wading through Many Sorrows.” 34 Truth, Narrative, pp. 12, 18, 22, 40, and 41.

Divine Darkness Revisited  237 and convicts her of her sinfulness: “God revealed himself to her, with all the suddenness of a flash of lightning, showing her, ‘in the twinkling of an eye, that he was all over’ . . . She became instantly conscious of her great sin in forgetting her almighty Friend and ‘ever-­present help in time of trouble’.” Her new sense of God’s awesome majesty—“Oh God, I did not know you were so big”—makes her regret all of her past broken promises to God. During this moment of self-­ scrutiny, she receives another mystical vision, this time of a friendly mediator between God and herself, whom she both does and does not recognize. She asks, “Who are you?” and she hears a voice reply, “It is Jesus.” At the sight of this loving friend, whom prior to this point she had known only through the stories of others, her heart is filled with “joy and gladness,” and the world around her is transfigured: “the very air sparkled as with diamonds, and was redolent of heaven.” She ­perceives a “union existing between herself and Jesus,” which is so intimate and personal that she thinks for a time that Jesus loves no one else with such passionate intensity. This is Truth’s moment of conversion.35 As in Elaw’s and Lee’s narratives, so too in Truth’s, there is a difficult temporal hiatus between the gifts of conversion and sanctification. In Isabella’s case, this arduous time lasts roughly sixteen years. She moves to New York City and suffers from poverty and social isolation. Although she attends some Black Methodist and Zion churches, she ultimately joins the “Kingdom of Matthias,” a short-­lived, misogynistic apocalyptic movement led by two men, Elijah Pierson and Robert Matthews (“Matthias”), who believe themselves to be mystical emissaries sent to establish the kingdom of God on earth. According to Gilbert, Matthias identifies himself as God the Father made flesh. He holds that ordinary Christian sacraments and prayers are useless, that women are evil by nature (“woman is the capsheaf of the abomination of desolation—­full of all deviltry”), and that it is sinful to teach women anything other than obedience to patriarchal rulers. Pierson’s and Matthias’s claims to be guided by the Holy Spirit attract Isabella to them, but in the end their “kingdom” brings her nothing but spiritual confusion and economic ruin. This episode in Truth’s life exemplifies the dangers of a false mysticism and the need for a theologically rigorous discernment of spirits. Not every style of spirituality that emerges from the Second Great Awakening deserves acclaim. Isabella begins to listen more attentively to the Spirit of God working within her, rather than rely on the dubious authority of other self-­declared ­prophets. This Spirit within calls her to leave the city and to head out on an itinerant lecture tour, in which she would call sinners to conversion. For her, conversion means simply to love Jesus and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. On Pentecost, 1843, she leaves New York City and her slave name “Isabella Van

35 Truth, Narrative, pp. 44–5.

238 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Wagener” behind and becomes “Sojourner Truth”: a sanctified Black woman on the move, bearing the word of God within her.36 Rebecca Cox Jackson (1795–1871) is a free Black woman like Stewart, Elaw, and Lee, and her story resembles theirs in its Wesleyan theological and literary conventions (sin, conversion, sanctification, ministry). That she adheres to this structure is not surprising given her early ties to the A.M.E. church, in which her brother (with whom she and her husband live) serves as a minister. Her story begins on July 1, 1830. She is roused from sleep by a severe thunderstorm. She fears that she will die and is overwhelmed by the memory of all her sins, which she does not specify other than to say they are “like a mountain [that] reached to the sky, black as sackcloth of hair . . . and everything above my head was of one solid blackness.” Once again, we find a problematic metaphorical elision of darkness with sin. In distress, she prays, “Lord, I never will rise from my knees till thou for Christ’s sake has mercy on my poor sinking soul or sends me to Hell,” and suddenly “the heavens were clear, and the mountain was gone. My spirit was light, my heart was filled with love for God and all mankind. And the lightning, which was a moment ago the messenger of death, was now the messenger of peace, joy, and consolation.” She has a vision of Jesus pleading on her behalf before the Father. This is her moment of conversion. The next year, while at a prayer meeting, she receives a divine locution that promises her sanctification. She falls prostrate on the ground, then leaps up and begins shouting and praising God. She does this for an hour at the meeting, then continues out into the streets and late into the night at her home.37 These dramatic moments of conversion and sanctification are followed by many other visionary, locutionary, and ecstatic experiences that persuade Jackson of her calling to be an active servant of the Holy Spirit in the world, healing the bodies and souls of others. She receives “gifts” such as an ability to read scripture despite being illiterate and a capacity of foresight, which enables her to predict and avoid her husband’s efforts to harm her. Although she has many dreams that she interprets as mystical visions, her aim in life is not to seek such extraordinary experiences but to be holy: “to do [God’s] will in all things” and to “live in perfect obedience every day.” Her self-­surrender to God compels her to defy worldly authorities and conventional gender roles. She leaves her husband, her widowed brother, and her brother’s children behind. She visits the sick. She holds prayer meetings and exposits the divine word. She brings her message of holiness to ­others through her travels, and she is persecuted by Methodist church leaders 36 Truth, Narrative, pp. 61–4, 66, and 68. Carleton Mabee argues that, although Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth follow similar paths from slavery to public activism, Douglass adopts a more humanistic outlook, attributing emancipation to the actions of human beings, whereas Truth emphasizes God’s active intervention in ordinary human affairs, including abolition and women’s rights. See Mabee, Sojourner Truth, pp. 239–40 and 246. 37 Jackson, Gifts of Power, pp. 71–2 and 76–7.

Divine Darkness Revisited  239 who disapprove of these activities. Eventually she joins the Shakers—­a millenarian Christian sect that practices celibacy, values simplicity and gender equality, and worships God as a gender-­ambiguous mystery who they believe became incarnate for the first time in Christ and for the second time in Ann Lee (1736–84). Together with Rebecca Perot, Jackson establishes her own Shaker community, which unlike other such communities at the time, consists largely of Black women and focuses on the needs of her people.38 Like Jackson, Henriette Delille (1812–62), the Black Catholic founder of the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans, is moved by the Holy Spirit to create a religious community in which Black women could cultivate intimacy with God, care for the poor and sick in their midst, and be free from the condition of sexual servitude. Unfortunately, we do not have the sorts of detailed spiritual autobiographies of nineteenth-­century Black Catholic women that we have for some of their Methodist, Shaker, and nondenominational counterparts. Nevertheless, in the absence of a full mystical vita, the pieces of information we do have about Delille’s life suggest that she, too, has what Cyprian Davis calls a “religious experience of some intensity” that empowers her to change her life and build up a community dedicated to love and holiness.39 Copeland explains that Delille lives in a context where Black women and mixed women of color are expected to submit their bodies to the sexual and procreative desires of wealthy White men. Delille’s great, great grandmother is born in slavery and is forced to have several children with her master before acquiring her freedom in middle age. Her female descendants, including Delille’s grandmother and mother, though legally “free,” have few options for earning a living except participating in the system of plaçage, which “allowed a more or less permanent sexual agreement between a white man of financial substance, often a planter, and a free woman of color.” Copeland interprets Delille’s decision to found the Sisters of the Holy Family as a repudiation of this corrupt cultural norm of Black female concubinage.40 As a Catholic, Delille experiences union with God primarily through her reception of the Eucharist. It is in such a sacramental context that she seems to have a mystical experience that might be likened to sanctification: On May, 1836, Henriette Delille inscribed a motto or resolution in the opening pages of a spiritual book by the Comtesse de Carcado. This devotional work, The  Soul United to Jesus Christ in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar, first ­published in 1830, presented a series of meditations and conversations with 38 Jackson, Gifts of Power, pp. 10, 85, 87, 88, 103, 105, 108, 127–9, 142, 145, and 171. Walker mentions this community (In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, p. 78), and it may influence her depiction of Shug’s “prayer band” (Temple of My Familiar, p. 299). 39 Davis, Henriette Delille, p. 35 and Copeland, Subversive Power of Love, p. 3. 40 Copeland, Subversive Power of Love, pp. 6–7 and 25.

240 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Christ to be read while attending Mass. This is what Henriette Delille wrote: “Je crois en Dieu. J’espère en Dieu. J’aime. Je v[eux] vivre et mourir pour Dieu.” The translation: “I believe in God. I hope in God. I love. I wish to live and die for God.”

In the same year that Delille confesses her commitment to live and die for God, she drafts her first plans for a community of “sisters”—though the first members were lay women—­that would “care for the sick, assist the poor, and instruct the ignorant.” They minister to slaves and free people of color in the city, educate children, tend to widows and orphans, and gather for communal prayer and study.41 The grace of divine union experienced by Stewart, Elaw, Lee, Truth, Jackson, and Delille empowers them to resist the racial and gender norms of their his­tor­ ic­al contexts, which discourage Black women from speaking publicly, traveling independently, and taking leadership roles in church and society. Their mystical experiences liberate them from inner anguish, unhealthy and violent relationships, and in some cases certain death. Their daily practices of prayer and ­frequent receptions of spiritual gifts give them a deeply felt sense not only of God’s love for them but also of God’s power to love and transform others’ lives through them. Conformed to Christ, filled by the Holy Spirit, these Black women mystics belong in the canon of Christian mystical theology. They reflect the Rahnerian ideal of Ignatian indiferençia and the Balthasarian-­Speyrian doctrine of mystical obedience. Their proximity to the divine is not demonstrated by the mere fact of their Blackness or femaleness, whether construed ontologically or nonontologically, but by their grace-­based striving for holiness.

Mystical Characters in Walker’s Fiction Walker’s “The Welcome Table” is a short story about a poor, elderly Black woman who visits a White church on a cold Sunday morning. The reverend, ushers, and congregants perceive her as an unwanted intruder. She sits in the back pew, singing a hymn silently in her mind, before the White men of the church, prompted by their White wives, physically escort her out. As she walks away from the church, she has a vision of Jesus. His appearance resembles an image she had taken from a White woman’s Bible and hung above her bed. He approaches her with a “sad but joyful look to his face” and says simply “follow me.” She eagerly follows him. At first, they travel together in “deep silence,” but then she begins to talk with him about her years of serving White folks. She sings spirituals and feels elated to be with him. As they walk, their path becomes like clouds, they see over

41 Copeland, Subversive Power of Love, pp. 27–8.

Divine Darkness Revisited  241 the trees, and they move toward the sky. She is later found dead on the side of the road.42 This story illustrates the complexity of Walker’s attitude toward Christianity. She sees churches as places rife with hypocrisy. She worries, moreover, that Black Christians have become attached to a religion tailored to the needs and desires of a White ruling class. This worry finds expression in the main character’s dependence on an image of Jesus taken from a White woman’s Bible. Yet Walker has profound respect for Black Christian spiritual traditions. She writes reverently about ancestors who found love and strength through an intimate relationship with Jesus. She celebrates their songs of lament and praise, their moments of interior contemplation, and their mystical experiences. The character in “The Welcome Table” stands for countless real people, perhaps including Walker’s parents.43 Walker explains: “As a college student, I came to reject the Christianity of my parents, and it took me years to realize that though they had been force-­fed a white man’s palliative, in the form of religion, they had made it into something at once simple and noble.” Walker studies the lives of nineteenth-­century Black women preachers such as Truth, Lee, and Jackson and affirms their Christian faith insofar as it helped them access a divine voice within themselves. She argues that many ordinary Black Christian women in the South—“our mothers and grandmothers some of them”—had mystical dreams and visions; made works of art such as songs, quilts, and gardens; and labored every day from sunup to sundown, all thanks to the “creative spirit” that moved within them.44 In these ways, Walker acknowledges that Christianity can mediate “the Spirit” that is included in the third part of her definition of a “womanist”: “3. Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless.” At the same time, Walker is clear that Christianity has no exclusive rights to the Spirit and, in many cases, stands as a barrier to its manifestation. Many of her characters access the Spirit through traditions indigenous to Africa and the Americas,45 through experiences of nature, and through loving relationships with themselves and others. For example, although Meridian sings hymns in church with her parents as a child and returns to church as an adult for its music, stained-­glass windows, and

42 Walker, In Love and Trouble, pp. 81–7. 43  Walker draws on the stories of extended family members and her personal experiences for many of her characters and plotlines. See Tillet, In Search of The Color Purple, pp. 26–31. 44 Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, pp. 18, 72, 79, and 231–43. 45  Karla Simcikova highlights the prevalence of indigenous, holistic perspectives in Walker’s fiction, especially later novels. However, she treats it as a sign that Walker moves “beyond womanism” later in her career (To Live Fully, pp. 9–25). This argument underestimates the role Native American spirituality plays in Walker’s earlier works, such as Meridian, and the “traditionally universalist” part of her definition of womanism.

242 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

communal solidarity,46 her most transformative experience of divine union does not occur in church but in a pit at the center of an ancient Indian burial ground called “the Sacred Serpent.” When Meridian’s great grandmother Feather Mae enters the pit, she has a mystical experience that makes her renounce “all religion that was not based on the experience of physical ecstasy—­thereby shocking her Baptist church and its unsympathetic congregation.” Decades later, Meridian watches her father return from the same pit “radiating brightness like the space around a flame” and attributes his compassion for Indians to the mystical ex­peri­ ences he must have had in this place. When she ventures into the pit herself, she undergoes a similar ecstasy: From a spot at the back of her left leg there began a stinging sensation, which, had she not been standing so purposely calm and waiting, she might have dismissed as a sign of anxiety or fatigue. Then her right palm, and her left, began to feel as if someone had slapped them. But it was in her head that the lightness started. It was as if the walls of earth that enclosed her rushed outward, leveling themselves at a dizzying rate, and then spinning wildly, lifting her out of her body and giving her the feeling of flying.47

Walker associates the spiritual power of this sacred burial ground with another sacred site in nature: a tree called “the Sojourner” on the campus of Meridian’s college, which had the magical ability to conceal slaves who hid in its branches. This capacity to provide refuge seems to have come from the tongue of a West African storyteller Louvinie that was buried beneath it. Meridian and her friends hold a memorial for a deceased Black girl, the “Wild Child,” at the site of this tree when they are denied entrance to the chapel.48 Walker’s point seems clear: there are deep mystical connections that do not depend on the church. As one reads about Meridian’s quotidian struggles with difficult friendships and romantic relationships, unwanted pregnancies, physical illnesses, feelings of guilt and depression, her work registering Black voters in the rural South, and the conflicts she experiences in activist groups (including, above all, the question of whether violent means of Black liberation are justified), one cannot forget the stories of her ecstasy in “the Sacred Serpent” and her love of “the Sojourner.” These mystical episodes haunt the entire narrative and seem to account partly for  Meridian’s unusual moral courage and her persistent alienation from the “normal” conventions of her world. Her one-­time lover, Truman Held, asks rhet­ oric­al­ly, “How can you not love somebody like that!” and the old Black man with whom he is conversing replies, “Because she thinks she’s God . . . or else she just

46 Walker, Meridian, pp. 16 and 211–19. 48 Walker, Meridian, pp. 31–9.

47 Walker, Meridian, pp. 51–3.

Divine Darkness Revisited  243 ain’t all there. I think she ain’t all there, myself.”49 Meridian is either divine or mad. Regardless, she “loves the Spirit,” “loves the Folk,” and gradually learns to love herself. She is an icon of Walker’s womanist mysticism.50 Walker’s other novels take up similar mystical themes. Her 1992 preface to The Color Purple describes this novel as a “theological work examining the journey from the religious back to the spiritual.” The book charts the path that both Walker and Celie, her main character, take from imagining God as a “patriarchal male supremacist” to communing with the divine in “trees, stars, wind, and every­thing else.” Walker’s theology is centered on a deity whom she calls “Nature itself,” “the Great Mystery,” and “That Which Is Beyond Understanding But Not Beyond Loving.”51 Like the young Sojourner Truth, the young Celie thinks about her abuser—­in her case, not a White slaveowner but her Black stepfather “Pa,” who rapes and impregnates her—­as a “God,” while simultaneously understanding God to be a celestial being who listens to her prayers, accompanies her, and promises to save her. Yet even this God-­on-­her-­side has a fixed racial and gender identity for her imagination: “God all white too, looking like some stout white man work at the bank.”52 For much of the book, each chapter is styled as a letter from Celie to this God. The format changes when Celie discovers letters from her long-­lost sister, Nettie, which had been concealed from her by her abusive husband, Mr. Celie decides to write to Nettie instead of God. In her second letter to Nettie, Celie recounts a pivotal conversation she had with her love interest, Shug, about who God is and what God wants. This conversation illustrates Celie’s (and Walker’s) discovery of a womanist mystical theology. At the start of the conversation, Celie laments that the White male God, instead of answering her prayers, only gives her suffering: “a lynched daddy, a crazy mama, a lowdown dog of a step pa and a sister I probably won’t ever see again.” She has tried to please this God by going to church and financially supporting the minister, but she is feeling increasingly incredulous and unloved. Shug urges Celie to imagine and worship God differently. She tells Celie about her own spiritual journey toward a profound sense of oneness with the mysterious All, including an affirmation of her bodily pleasures and an appreciation for beauty: My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it was. In fact, when it happen,

49 Walker, Meridian, p. 7. 50  The Black Jesuit scholar Joseph A. Brown offers a powerful reading of Meridian as a “mystical journey” (“All Saints Should Walk,” p. 310). 51 Walker, The Color Purple, pp. xi–­xii. 52 Walker, The Color Purple, pp. 2 and 91.

244 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

you can’t miss it. It sort of like you know what, she say, grinning and rubbing high up on my thigh . . . . God love all them feelings. That’s some of the best stuff God did. And when you know God loves ’em you enjoys ’em a lot more. You can just relax, go with everything that’s going, and praise God by liking what you like . . . . God love everything you love—­and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration . . . . I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.

Shug’s natural, erotic mysticism is all about union, love, and joy. Although her connection with the divine feels similar to sexual pleasure, it encompasses much more. In essence, it is an admiration of the goodness of all things. Shug gives Celie an understanding of divine love that transcends the heteropatriarchal structures that have made Celie feel ashamed of her body and its desires. By sharing her mystical itinerary with Celie, Shug helps her experience the love of God within herself, as she never had before.53 The Color Purple is a fictional, epistolary work of mystical theology, centered on the quotidian life of a poor, abused Black girl who becomes a strong and loving Black woman. Although it highlights ways that the theology of White-­male-­ dominant religion has been oppressive, it offers an alternative type of theology—­precisely a womanist mystical theology, which, though not specifically Christian, is also not necessarily anti-­Christian—­as the key to a liberated mind and body. This theology affirms the presence of God within Black women’s lives without, however, suggesting that their divinization consists in the mere fact of being Black or female. The experience of divine union that Shug shares with Celie involves a transformation in their lives, which frees them to love themselves, love one another, and love all the wonderful things in creation and to find God precisely in such acts of loving attention. How they live, and choose to live, matters. For example, had Celie murdered Mr. in retaliation for hiding Nettie’s letters, as she was tempted to do, this would have cut short his time to change and grow into a more reflective, compassionate person, which, through their shared love of Shug, he remarkably does.54 Such a vengeful act, even if committed with good reason by an oppressed Black woman, would have worked against the healing process that Shug and Walker profess. Shug’s womanist mystical theology reappears in The Temple of My Familiar (1989). Years after the timeline of The Color Purple, Shug has gathered together a “prayer band” of Black women and composed a pamphlet called The Gospel According to Shug, which consists of twenty-­six spiritual aphorisms based styl­is­ tic­al­ly on the Beatitudes, for example: “Helped are those who find something in Creation to admire each and every hour. Their days will overflow with beauty and 53 Walker, The Color Purple, pp. 191–6.

54 Walker, The Color Purple, pp. 143 and 280.

Divine Darkness Revisited  245 the darkest dungeon will offer gifts.” However, Shug is not the only mystical character in this novel. There is Lissie, who remains conscious of the countless lives she has lived throughout the centuries, including as people of different genders and races and even, in a few barely remembered cases, as animals. Lissie represents a certain universal manifestation of the soul. There is Fanny, Celie’s granddaughter, who has visions and interactions with persons long dead, many of whom are Black or Native American, and these “old ones” unlock mysteries inside herself: “They open doors inside me. It’s as if they’re the keys. To rooms inside myself . . . . [M]y heart starts to expand with the absolute feeling of bravery, or love, or audacity, or commitment.” Fanny’s mystical experiences are similar to those that Speyr has with saints. And there are even Catholic nuns, missionaries in Africa, who associate the European veneration of Mary with the ancient African worship of the Goddess: “She—­the spirit of Mothering, of Creating, of Blessing and Protecting All—­lives within us, and is confined neither to shrines nor to any particular age.”55 Mystics are everywhere in this novel. Indeed, mystics are a recurrent and central feature of Walker’s fiction, as is a genuine experience of the divine.56 Insofar as Walker’s approach to mystical theology is not limited by any strict doctrinal norms of Christian theology, it might be considered more nearly “philo­ soph­ic­al” than “theological,” in a certain postmodern rendering of these terms that does not require philosophy to be rationalist or wholly secular. Walker is a philosopher in the same way that Anzaldúa is: she is a thinker, working in diverse literary and academic genres, who draws on indigenous sources not only to critique oppressive religious and cultural structures but also to offer an alternative mystical vision of the lives of her people. This vision is not reductively anthropological. It is not merely about human consciousness. It is about a divine reality greater than any human being. This divine reality is so immanent in subjective experience and natural phenomena, and so independent of ecclesial mediation, that Christian theologians might overlook its relation to the one whom they call God, but this would be a missed opportunity. Although Walker does not maintain a clear theological distinction between nature and grace, of the sort one finds in Rahner, this does not mean that she espouses a reductive naturalism in which there would be no grace at all. Rather, her philosophy is similar to that expressed by Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake’s Natural Grace, which she cites in the front matter of By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998). The grace in which she believes is like Irigaray’s: immanent in creaturely life and relationships.57 Just as Kristeva reads Dostoyevsky’s work as a literary practice of “forgiveness,” so too Felipe Smith argues that Walker’s novels 55 Walker, Temple of My Familiar, pp. 114, 186, 268, 287–9 and 299. 56  Toland-­Dix, “Meridian and We Are the Ones” and Barnes, “Looking for God.” 57  Hemmati, “Irigarayan Sensible Transcendental.”

246 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

have a hidden Christological and soteriological function.58 The mystical theology in Walker’s womanist fiction invites a Christian theological reception.

The Mysticism of Christian Womanist Theologians Christian womanist theologians, including Protestants such as Delores Williams and Townes and Catholics such as Diana Hayes and Copeland, draw on Black religious and literary traditions to clarify the conditions under which Black women’s quotidian lives have been, and may yet be, made one with God. The criteria for a womanist mysticism of ordinary life that can be distilled from the works of such theologians are not limited to those of a Wesleyan conversion narrative, nor are they reducible to the central features of Walker’s post-­Christian spirituality. Christian womanist theology transcends and embraces both of these mystical traditions. Although Williams’s Sisters in the Wilderness (1993) does not use the word “mysticism,” it offers an account of Black women’s “God-­consciousness,” “absolute dependence,” and “religious experience” that is relevant to the present discussion. Williams stresses that she is interested in the lives of “ordinary black women,” that is, not only the most acclaimed figures such as Sojourner Truth or Harriet Tubman but also the “day-­workers, factory workers, teachers, etc. (usually church women) who do their bit day by day contributing to black women’s way of resisting and rising above the brutalities in [their] society.” Williams draws on an oral tradition of African American biblical interpretation that likens the experiences of such ordinary Black women, both during and after slavery, to those of the Egyptian woman Hagar, who was enslaved to Abram and Sarai; bore Abram’s son, Ishmael; and encountered God in the wilderness (see Gen. 16:1–16 and Gen. 21:9–21). Many Black women suffer from forces and circumstances similar to those that beset Hagar: “poverty, sexual and economic exploitation, surrogacy, domestic violence, homelessness, rape, motherhood, single-­ parenting.” Like Hagar, many also experience the intimate presence of God in the midst of such troubles. Williams argues that the God who meets them in their daily lives often does not immediately liberate them but instead shows them how to survive and have a better quality of life: “a way out of no way.”59 Williams meditates both on Black female preachers such as Jarena Lee and on Walker’s depiction of Celie’s conversion from a White patriarchal religion to a profound sense of God within. The “syncretized” character of African American religious experience—­the fact that it mixes European Christian and traditional African elements—­enables Williams to draw freely on whatever sources she likes, 58  Felipe Smith, “Alice Walker’s Redemptive Art.” 59 Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, pp. x, 5–6, 15, 108, 112, 159, 165, and 241n1.

Divine Darkness Revisited  247 so long as they express some aspect of this synthesis. The same openness that leads her to explore blends of Voodoo and Catholicism in the Black spiritualist communities of New Orleans also allows her to find commonalities between Black church women who pray every day to Jesus and Ntozake Shange’s character who exclaims, without any explicit reference to Jesus, “I found god in myself and I love her / fiercely.” For Williams, there is no separation between the sacred and the secular. Although she writes as a Christian theologian, her criterion for identifying divine grace in the lives of ordinary Black women is not the Wesleyan genre of conversion but the wondrous disclosure of conditions of survival and quality of life amid a violent world that seeks Black women’s servitude and death. She perceives God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit at work in such disclosures, whether they happen in explicitly Christian ways or not.60 Townes’s In a Blaze of Glory (1995) provides another important example of a Christian womanist theological approach to mysticism (though, once again, the word “mysticism” is not foregrounded). Like Williams, Townes situates herself in a syncretic spiritual tradition that combines elements of West African religion with Christianity and encompasses both nineteenth-­century Black Christian narratives and more recent, less specifically Christian forms of Black cultural production, including The Color Purple. While Williams champions a God of vision who promotes Black women’s survival and quality of life, Townes similarly affirms “a whole holy God,” whose holiness consists precisely in making each person and community whole through body-­and-­soul respecting practices of love and just­ice. In particular, Townes argues that the Black church needs to learn vital lessons from the stories of Shug, Celie, and even Mr./Albert about how to resist destructive forms of sexism, heterosexism, sexual violence, sexualized racism, sexual repression, and unsafe sexual practices. She contends, “The spiritual reimagining of God as Spirit that Shug challenges us with is a moral and spiritual call to do justice toward our bodies, our sexuality, and our gender.” Townes contends that, following Shug’s example, womanist spirituality introduces new ethical and social norms that disrupt the oppressive status quo and nudge the conditions of everyday life closer to the Bible’s “apocalyptic vision” of a “new heaven and a new earth.”61 Although Townes finds the loving presence of God in the “is-­ness” of Black women’s lives, as we have seen above, she does not thereby imply that every manner of life that Black women might adopt is equally consistent with this presence. She acknowledges a need for growth, healing, and sometimes dramatic change. As she puts the point, “The Black Church must become, where it is not, an active witness to the power of God working in life to change our is-­ness.” For Townes, such change, which one might call a “conversion” or “sanctification,” does involve 60 Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, pp. 7, 41, 55, 165, and 221. See also Shange, For Colored Girls, p. 87. 61 Townes, In a Blaze of Glory, pp. 19–29, 68–88, and 121–2.

248 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

a form of mystical union with God. She speaks of it as “the deep kneading of humanity and divinity into one breath, one hope, one vision.” Moreover, like the nineteenth-­century Black female evangelists considered above, Townes finds evidence of such union in the divine calling to do new, community-­oriented actions in the world. Where she differs from these Christian predecessors is in her clearer refusal of any hierarchal binaries between light and dark, man and woman, or soul and body and in her more robust, Walker-­inspired acknowledgment that God wants people to flourish precisely as their sexual, embodied selves. In short, Townes’s womanist mystical theology melds Wesleyan holiness with Walkerian wholeness.62 The mysticism of ordinary life that finds expression in Protestant womanist theologians closely resembles that formulated by their Catholic womanist counterparts. In No Crystal Stair (2016), a collection of Hayes’s spiritual writings, she draws on the same syncretized tradition of African American Christianity that informs Williams and Townes. She embraces their arguments for a God who promotes survival and quality of life, as well as holiness and wholeness, while speaking about this God in her own personal terms as “a wonder-­working God, a God of possibility and opportunity, a God who loved me into life and, despite all, continues to sustain and guide me to the present day.” She emphasizes that “woman­ ist spirituality is lived and experienced in the everydayness of life.” She says that life, through all its quotidian twists and turns, is like a “deep river” flowing from God and back to God. She speaks about growing up in the A.M.E. Zion church, but, like Walker—­and Anzaldúa and Irigaray too—­she finds the presence of God more abundantly in nature, specifically in “woods or mountains.”63 Nevertheless, Hayes’s natural mysticism does not prevent her from ex­peri­en­ cing a “direct and insistent call from God” to become Catholic and be trained as a Catholic theologian. She perceives no contradiction between Shug’s womanist mystical theology and the best insights of the Catholic faith, such as the belief in the imago Dei and related social teachings of the church oriented toward human solidarity. Although she recognizes the Catholic Church’s historical failings regarding women and Black people, she explains her decision to join by noting, “I felt nurtured, loved, and desired by God within that church and by the people I  was led to who helped me become part of that church.” The feeling of being nurtured, desired, and loved by God is precisely what Shug teaches Celie. Hayes discovers a very similar sort of divine intimacy, and a related ability to be and love herself, through her Black womanist approach to Catholicism. This faith community supports her voluntary practice of lay celibacy, which resembles that of the character Sue in Walker’s Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004). It also helps her navigate a spiritually difficult struggle with a debilitating physical illness.64 62 Townes, In a Blaze of Glory, pp. 11 and 141. 63 Hayes, No Crystal Stair, pp. xix, xxiv, xxvi–­xxvii, 12, and 31. 64 Hayes, No Crystal Stair, pp. xxi, 41, 42, and 77. See also Walker, Now Is the Time, pp. 45–8.

Divine Darkness Revisited  249 Born and raised in Detroit, Copeland feels more at home in the city than the woods or mountains. Nevertheless, she develops her womanist theology in an ecological direction65 and has her own ways of identifying a loving divine presence that does not depend exclusively on the church. She describes the amorous, apophatic practice of prayer that grounds her vocation as a theologian: “Prayer is reach and risk into the Unknown . . . . [It] is about love, about responding to love, about living in love, about being in love with God.”66 Like other womanist authors, she appreciates the African roots of Black religion that, prior to their forced conversions to Christianity, enabled Black people “to apprehend, experience, and surrender to absolute dependence on God.”67 She contends that God’s “luminous darkness” can also be encountered in that supposedly post-­Christian tradition of Black music known as the blues.68 In all these respects, Copeland’s theology is not only, as she insists it must be, “deeply mystical.”69 It also reflects non-­ecclesial aspects of Walker’s womanist mysticism. Yet Copeland’s Catholic Christian faith is essential to her womanist mystical theology. Many of her arguments rest on a particular Christology that, though informed by historical critical research on Jesus in the context of the Roman empire, emphasizes mystical forms of participation in his life, death, and resurrection and in the divine mystery that he embodies. One mode of participation occurs among those suffering from oppression, simply by virtue of their unjust suffering. Reflecting on a poor Black woman whom she saw searching through a dumpster, Copeland concludes that this woman “is no one other than Christ.” The crucified Lord is present in the crucified people. Furthermore, she argues that those who follow Jesus through practices of compassion and solidarity participate in a “mystical-­political” form of discipleship that is “the locus, the site, in which Christ makes himself present.”70 For Copeland, as for Delille, these passive and active modes of union with Jesus are mediated by the Eucharist. Copeland affirms the “real presence” of Christ in this sacrament and the community of believers who receive it, while arguing that this presence “transforms” them and “makes [them] one.”71 Copeland’s cruciform, solidaristic, and eucharistic Christology is supported by a prophetic, ecclesial, and intercultural pneumatology. She emphasizes the Spirit’s active role in inspiring Black theology: “What the Spirit showed James Cone and he showed us is that black theology is the daring deep black, blue-­black, black and

65  Copeland, “God among the Ruins,” p. 15. 66  Copeland, “Racism and the Vocation of the Theologian,” p. 26. 67 Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified, p. 34. Catholic womanist theologian Jamie Phelps makes a similar point in her essay, “Black Spirituality,” pp. 182–6. 68  Copeland, “Theology at the Crossroads,” p. 104. See also James Cone, Spirituals and the Blues, pp. 97–128. 69  Copeland, “Theology at the Crossroads,” p. 103. 70 Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified, pp. 106, 123–4, and 128. 71 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, p. 128.

250 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

blue protest of the God of the Oppressed!”72 Like Cone, Copeland maintains that the spirituals—­ those musical prayers at the heart of Black and womanist theology—­are “gifts of the Spirit” that empower Black communities to experience “joy and mysticism in the midst of survival and resistance.”73 According to Copeland, the same Spirit that makes Black folk remember and fight for their humanity also “knits” diverse communities together and draws them into a Christic praxis of love and resistance that makes them church. Like the nineteenth-­century holiness tradition, Copeland believes that the surest sign of an “inSpirited church” is “transformed moral and ethical behavior.” The community’s Spirit-­led conformity to Christ requires a dramatic change in quotidian practices and a rejection of the White, masculinist “standard of normativity.” The Spirit calls the church to affirm that all persons (not just Christians, not just men, and not just White people) are made in the image and likeness of God and that their cultural differences “are also gifts of the Spirit.”74 The Christian womanist theology represented in different ways by Williams, Townes, Hayes, and Copeland advances the present argument in several ways. First, it shows that the transposition of womanism from a practice of literature and theory that aspires to be independent of Christianity to a specifically Christian theological idiom occurs without loss to the mystical character of woman­ism, its connection with the self and nature, and its ties to African and other indigenous religions. Second, although Christian womanist theology broadly shares the faith commitments of its nineteenth-­century Black female evangelist predecessors—­particularly around doctrines of sin, grace, Christology, pneumatology, and holiness—­it develops these doctrines in creative ways that confront contemporary social issues and meet the new normative demands of intersectional feminism. Third, and finally, Christian womanist theology emphasizes the gracious presence of God in “ordinary” life. It finds this presence in Black women’s daily struggles for survival and flourishing amid racism, sexism, and poverty and in the contexts of churches and local communities that have sinful shortcomings and Spirit-­filled strengths. Above all, as we shall see presently, it locates this presence in Black women’s embodied experiences of sorrow, joy, and freedom. Womanist mysticism, in both its “pagan”75 and Christian expressions, is emphatically corporeal.

72  Copeland, “Living Stones,” pp. 186–7. 73 Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified, pp. 44 and 46. 74 Copeland, “Knit Together,” pp. 21–4; Copeland, “Thinking Margin,” p. 226; and Copeland, “Theology at the Crossroads,” p. 104. 75 Walker, The Color Purple, p. xi.

Divine Darkness Revisited  251

Mystical Corporeality Black and womanist thinkers do not adhere strictly to the phenomenological ­distinction between body (as objectively visible phenomenon) and flesh (as living, touching source of subjectivity), which is emphasized by Henry and traceable to Husserl. Nor do they fully accept the Pauline distinction between body (as structure for the mediation of the Spirit) and flesh (as sinful antithesis of the Spirit), which Mayra Rivera clarifies.76 Although some embrace Hortense Spillers’s distinction between body (as captive commodity of the transatlantic slave trade) and flesh (as tortured, lacerated, mutilated materiality of the enslaved person),77 Copeland uses both “body” and “flesh” to name the lives of human beings (Black, female, and otherwise) insofar as they are vulnerable to use and abuse by violent forces and insofar as they remain capable of action, love, and connection. Body/ flesh is a means by which persons are differentiated according to their race, sex, and other politically contested “marks” of identity. It is an objectifiable condition that makes one susceptible to regimes of control that purport to be normative. Yet body/flesh also gives persons their singular stories, experiences, relationships, and creative possibilities. Without it, there is no quotidian life. It is suffering and bliss, passivity and agency, selfhood and community. Body/flesh, therefore, spans the contradictory senses of the “ordinary” that we have considered throughout this book. The mysticism of ordinary life must be an incarnate mysticism. In order to receive the graced lives of Black women into the meaning of Christian mystical theology, which is a necessary task, theology must think with Black women about their embodied lives.

Crucified Bodies The Christian mystical tradition, as we have seen, invites those who suffer in their bodies, whether because of ascetical self-­deprivations or involuntary experiences of pain, to identify with the crucified Christ. Although this can be done in problematic—­because necrophilic, patriarchal, or oppressive—­ways, we have also noted that the awareness of a God who is so compassionate as to endure crucifixion and hell with suffering humanity may give comfort and strength to crucified people. We have encountered versions of this idea in Rahner’s prayerful reflections on Jesus’s agony in the garden, Speyr’s immersive experiences of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, Kristeva’s psychoanalytic readings of Teresa of Avila, and the Via Crucis celebrations of Latino/a communities. Here we consider the

76 Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, pp. 29–41.

77 Spillers, Black, White, and in Color, pp. 206–7.

252 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

ways that Walker and Copeland do and do not attribute mystical significance to the corporeal suffering of Black women. Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) is an artistic representation of her activist work against the practice of female genital mutilation.78 The novel revolves around the character, Tashi, the African girl from The Color Purple who chooses to have a clitorectomy as an act of identification with her Olinka people (a fictional African tribe) and as an act of defiance against Western colonial ­powers. The novel recounts the lifelong traumatic effects that this practice has on Tashi. She lives in a dissociative state of mind; is troubled by repressed memories of her sister dying from the procedure and her own excruciating experience of it; has difficulty maintaining relationships with others, including her husband Adam; and is ultimately executed by firing squad after she is found guilty for the murder of her tsunga, M’Lissa (“tsunga” is Walker’s Olinkan term for the role of ritual female circumciser). In addition to depicting the psychological and social effects of a violent op­er­ ation on women’s bodies from which thousands of Black women and other women of color continue to suffer, Possessing the Secret of Joy also connects this suffering to the crucifixion of Christ in several remarkable ways. For example, the imprisoned leader of the Olinkas is a Christ figure for them: “He was Jesus Christ to us, you know? . . . We thought him a god really.” By undergoing the procedure, Tashi obeys his instructions, proves her fidelity to him, and suffers along with him for her people, like a martyr or disciple who willingly takes on the cross. The Olinkan origin myth, moreover, rationalizes the practice of female genital mutilation by asserting that the clitoris is a disordered, masculine feature of women’s bodies that needs to be removed so that they can become “clean”—which is to say, more unmistakably female according to a strict gender binary and less threatening to patriarchal authority. This origin myth likens the “clean” woman to a termite queen with no wings, who cannot fly and whose only task is to produce and nourish children: “Ah, says Olivia. The termite as Christ!” Tashi, then, is Christlike not only because she follows the self-­sacrificial leader but also because she acquiesces to the self-­sacrificial role assigned to the traditional Olinkan woman.79 Finally, there is Tashi’s experience of listening to her husband Adam preach about Christ’s saving passion: I sat there in our church every Sunday for five years listening to Adam spread the word of Brotherly Love, which has its foundation in God’s love of his son, Jesus Christ. I grew agitated each time he touched on the suffering of Jesus. For a long time my agitation confused me. I am a great lover of Jesus, and always have been. Still, I began to see how the constant focus on the suffering of Jesus alone 78  See Walker and Parmar, Warrior Marks. 79 Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy, pp. 114–15 and 227.

Divine Darkness Revisited  253 excludes the suffering of others from one’s view. And in my sixth year as a member of Adam’s congregation, I knew I wanted my own suffering, the suffering of women and little girls, still cringing before the overpowering might and weapons of the torturers, to be the subject of a sermon. Was woman herself not the tree of life? And was she not crucified? Not in some age no one even remembers, but right now, daily, in many lands on earth?80

What are we to make of these various ways that Walker draws a connection between Tashi’s and Christ’s violated bodies? On the one hand, Walker denounces the patriarchal powers involved in both Christianity and African traditional religions. One of her characters, Tashi’s therapist Raye, may echo Walker’s own opinion when she says, “Religion is an elab­or­ ate excuse for what man has done to women and to the earth.” However, Walker also has a different, more positive view of the ancient, matriarchal, earth-­oriented religion of Africa that finds expression in the self-­pleasuring doll or idol that Tashi discovers and names Nyanda.81 There is a way to read Walker, like Irigaray and Janzten, as preferring a spirituality of holistic, relational self-­love over and against any mystical participation in the sacrifice of Christ or other Christ figure. On the other hand, it may be significant that Tashi remains “a great lover of Jesus” and perceives the violence that crucified him as in some way related to the violence that wounds her body and kills her soul. Although she resists an exclusive focus on Jesus’s suffering, she also likens his experience to that of “woman.” There are signs of a positive womanist Christology in this text. Walker’s understanding of the union between Black women’s suffering bodies and that of Christ takes a different turn in Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart. The novel describes several people of different genders and races who gather together in a South American rainforest to take Ayahuasca, a psychedelic plant that the indigenous people of this region consider a gateway to the divine grandmother and a healing experience of oneness with nature. One of these participants, Lalika, “a common, ordinary black woman no one would look at twice on the street,” tells her story: she and her friend Gloria, another ordinary Black woman, were the victims of an attempted rape. Although they killed their rapist in self-­defense, they were found criminally responsible and were incarcerated. In prison, they were raped repeatedly. They knew their “only hope was to pray.” Although they considered praying to Jesus because “he suffered,” they decided instead to pray to a Black woman named Saartjie Bartmann, the so-­ called “Hottentot Venus,” whose body and body parts had been the objects of Europeans’ lurid fascination. They discovered her image in a Jet magazine, then began to pray to her, dream of her, and identify with her, calling each other by her name. 80 Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy, pp. 273–4. 81 Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy, pp. 196, 229, and 270.

254 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

While they were being violated, she would appear to them, and they would fly into her clothing and merge with her. Lalika explains, “They did whatever they did to our bodies but we had flown into that voluminous grass skirt . . . . Into that big red round hat . . . . Into that rose-­colored cape that seemed to be made of thorns.” The thorns, which “felt as soft as flower petals,” reminded Lalika of Jesus, and she was not bothered by the connection. The point was that “we had found our savior. Someone to pray to. Someone who answered prayer.” They called each other Saartjie because they perceived themselves as “two expressions of that one loving and constant being.”82 Walker’s account of Lalika and Gloria’s shared experience of praying for and receiving a soothing mystical union with a suffering savior in the midst of the bodily torments they were undergoing as ordinary Black women both transcends the limits of a Christological structure and reveals the great flexibility of this structure. From a theological perspective, one can argue that, insofar as Christ is one with all those who suffer unjustly, he is one with Saartjie Bartmann and other Black women forced to endure similarly abusive treatments of their bodies. Union with him is union with them, and vice versa—­which is to say that God, by whatever name God is approached in prayer (and God is, of course, beyond all names), may appear as a compassionate presence in any such cruciform experiences. This essential truth of Christianity’s paschal mysticism neither requires that anyone who experiences it must be Christian nor implies that worldly forces of crucifixion—­whether female genital mutilations, prison rapes, or other dehumanizing horrors—­are remotely good, normal, or tolerable. Copeland’s discussion of the crucifixion of Black women relies on narratives and interviews of emancipated slaves such as Lizzie Williams, Louisa Picquet, Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs (who writes as “Linda Brent”), and Delia Garlic—­ who conveys the general sentiments of this group well when she declares, “Slavery days was hell.” This hell was the construct of a patriarchal, White supremacist, slaveholding culture that treated Black women’s bodies as objects of property, production, reproduction, and sexual gratification and abused Black women through physical assault, psychological torture, repeated rape, and sometimes murder. Copeland explains, “The libidinous economics of the plantation quite literally reduced black women to body parts: parts that white men used for pleasure; parts that white men manipulated and sold for economic profit; parts that literally were coerced to nurse the heirs of white racist supremacy.” Copeland stresses that the preaching of antebellum White Christians, which encouraged enslaved persons to submit to their masters in imitation of Christ’s humility and obedience, was a violent distortion of the gospel. Instead of identifying Christ as the reason to submit to abuse, she argues that theologians should perceive Christ

82 Walker, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, pp. 87 and 113–17.

Divine Darkness Revisited  255 in Black women’s resistance to the worldly agents of such abuse, whether this resistance occurs through sass, fugitivity, or open rebellion. She contends that “a theology of suffering in womanist perspective repels every tendency toward any ersatz spiritualization of evil and suffering, of pain and oppression. Such a the­ ology of suffering seeks . . . to clarify the meaning of the liberating Word and deed of God in Jesus of Nazareth.” Like Isasi-­Díaz, Copeland avers that Jesus’s bodyand community-­affirming praxis is the true criterion of mystical union with Christ.83 Although Copeland condemns any attempt to use the idea of mystical identification with the crucified Christ as a means by which to urge the oppressed to accept their oppression, she differs from Delores Williams by working out a positive meaning of the cross.84 Copeland argues that “black women under chattel slavery freed the cross of Christ.”85 What she means is that they rescued this central Christian teaching from its grotesque misuse by the planter class and interpreted it rightly as a sign of God’s exorbitant love for suffering humanity. The enslaved understood that, through Christ, God was with them in their troubles, that their wounded and broken bodies were gathered together in his, and that nothing could separate them from his love. Their intimacy with Jesus was life-­sustaining: They knew Jesus as a friend with whom they could share their secrets, a savior to whom they could entrust their hopes and fears, a companion with whom they could walk through life’s deep shadows, a healer who could make the wounded whole, a fellow sufferer who knew in his body the sting of the lash, enduring with them what was their daily portion. Bloodied and nailed to rough wooden planks, he was the One who went all the way with them and for them.86

Copeland herself knows and loves the crucified Christ through the embodied witness of her enslaved African American ancestors. She knows and loves him, not as one who causes or requires suffering, as though he were administering a sadistic test of virtue, but rather as one who, though truly divine, chooses to become corporeally united with suffering humanity. Copeland takes her Christological understanding of the bodies of Black women who have been crucified by slavery and its enduring structures of racial and gender “normativity” and extends this logic to think about Christ’s union with other 83 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, pp. 31 and 38 and Copeland, “Wading through Many Sorrows,” p. 152. 84  Williams contends that “the cross only represents historical evil trying to defeat good” (Sisters in the Wilderness, p. 165). Copeland’s view is closer to that of fellow womanist theologian JoAnne Marie Terrell who argues that, although it has been wrongly used to justify the suffering of Black women, “the cross is about God’s love for humankind in a profound sense” (Power in the Blood, p. 124). 85  Copeland, “Wading through Many Sorrows,” p. 153. 86 Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified, p. 26.

256 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

types of bodies that are similarly violated by an imperial world order. She challenges certain Catholic pastoral instructions that condemn “homosexual acts” without considering the love they mediate and that rationalize a heteronormative policy of gay and lesbian celibacy by arguing that this is a way for such persons to let the paschal mystery “become imprinted in the fabric of daily life.”87 Copeland notes troubling similarities between such pastoral guidance and the sermons of White Christian preachers who counseled slaves to be Christlike through obedience to their masters. She refuses any supposed paschal mysticism of ordinary life that equates quotidian participation in the crucified Christ with submission to unjust social norms that target specifically marked bodies, be they dark, female, queer, or, for that matter, disabled, religiously or culturally marginalized, elderly, afflicted with disease, poor, hungry, sex-­working, or any combination of the above. Copeland provides an alternative vision of an embodied, Christocentric mysticism of ordinary life by emphasizing Jesus’s “fearless love of ordinary people”; his inclusive table fellowship; his own historically marked body (as male, Jewish, and “queer,” by which she means norm-­defying); his anti-­patriarchal masculinity; and the amazingly diverse reality of his ecclesial body (mystici corporis Christi). She interprets Christ’s incarnation, ministry, and death at the hands of the Roman state as signs of God’s loving embrace of all “those bodies that empire abuses, negates, and crucifies.”88 She concludes: The body of Jesus the Christ, both before and after his death, radically clarifies the meaning of be-­ing embodied in the world. His love and praxis release the power of God’s image and likeness in our red, brown, yellow, white, black bodies—­our queer and heterosexual bodies, our HIV/AIDS infected bodies, our  starving bodies, our prostituted bodies, our young and old and joyous ­bodies . . . . The only body capable of taking us all in as we are with all our different body marks—­certainly, the queer mark—­is the body of Christ.89

According to Copeland, Christ’s suffering and liberating body is present in the bodies of those who suffer, whether from the racist, sexist sins that crucify enslaved Black women; from other sinful structures and deeds that target variously marked bodies; or, indeed, from any maladies that may befall a person. Christ’s body—­which is God’s own body, indeed God as body—­inhabits the hells of this world, not as a morally grotesque endorsement of them, but as the promise of their undoing.

87 Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified, p. 70. 88 Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified, pp. 63, 65, 73, and 79. 89 Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified, p. 79.

Divine Darkness Revisited  257

Erotic, Joyous Bodies There is a danger that, by focusing on the harms done to Black women’s bodies, even a mystical theology that seeks to articulate their union with Christ might perpetuate their objectification. The truth is that Black women are not, and have never been, merely the passive objects of interlocking structures of oppression. They have desires, they make choices about their relationships and actions, and they experience joy. All of this takes place in their bodies and reveals other dimensions of mystical corporeality beyond cruciformity. In the Christian mys­ tic­al tradition, divine union does not only happen through the cross but also, and more essentially, through ecstatic experiences of mutual love, whether occurring directly between the mystic and God or more indirectly through the loving relationships among creatures that channel a higher divine love. As we have seen, Speyr and Balthasar locate the origin of such reciprocally adoring and self-­ surrendering love in the interior relations of the Trinity. Their account of mystical marriage, once freed from gender essentialism, becomes a promising model for a Christian mystical theological treatment of eros, intimacy, and beatitude. To this theological picture one may add Irigaray’s theorization of a feminine jouissance that grounds women’s subjectivity in a hidden touch that is at once bodily and divine. Like Speyr and Balthasar, Irigaray understands this mystical love to be a Christic and Marian possibility. Womanist mystical theology takes up similar themes by arguing that Black women’s corporeal loves are modes of union with the incarnate God of love.90 Audre Lorde’s classic Black feminist essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978), characterizes the erotic as a “lifeforce” in women (though men have it too); a “depth of feeling” that gives meaning to many activities, not only those considered sexual; a connective power that one experiences through “deeply sharing any pursuit with another person”; and an energy that carries our “capacity for joy.” Lorde argues that patriarchal societies suppress the erotic whenever they discourage the expression of feelings, distort erotic love into an emotionless porn­ og­raphy industry, and wield its power abusively. She clarifies that although the erotic is an energy felt in one’s body, it is also profoundly “spiritual” and “pol­it­ical.” It is that unitive drive in human life that guides it toward some ultimate degree of fulfillment. Lorde notes that this goal of the erotic “does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.” In her estimation these names would overdetermine it, tying it too much to patriarchal expectations.91 Nevertheless, a ­mystical theology—­which reveres a divine mutuality beyond names, an eternal love that sparks joy in the here and now, a love made flesh—­may recognize itself in Lorde’s words about the erotic, including her denials. 90 Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church, p. 123.

91 Lorde, Sister Outsider, pp. 53–9.

258 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

Like Lorde’s essay, Walker’s womanist fiction affirms the psychological, social, and mystical significance of the erotic. The abuse that Celie suffers at the hands of  Pa and Mr. alienates her from her embodied capacity for joy and her sense of herself as a person worthy of love. Shug helps Celie revive these vital aspects of herself. This happens first simply through Celie’s desire to see Shug’s eyes (recall such ocular mutuality is central to a Balthasarian account of mystical eros). The erotic also emerges through Celie’s caretaking for Shug during a serious illness: “I wash her body, it feel like I’m praying.” Finally, when they make love, Celie reports, “It feel like heaven.” This interpersonal bodily communion reflects the divine love that is at the heart of Shug’s mystical theology. But Celie’s eros also goes beyond Shug. Celie has direct intimacy with God: “I feel like me and God make love just fine.” This sustaining closeness with God makes her less dependent on Shug’s fickle human affections—­though as a desirous, lovesick person, Celie cannot help but perceive her own body through Shug’s eyes.92 At the end of The Temple of My Familiar, two characters, a mestizo man named Arveyda and a Black woman named Fanny, make love in an idyllic natural setting. It is an ecstatic experience for both of them, which makes them think not only of divine things but also of the wonders of creation. Afterwards, while lying in each other’s arms, Fanny asks, “And did you also see the yellow plum tree and all the little creatures, even the fish, in its branches? And did you see and feel the ocean and the sun?” Arveyda replies, “Yes. And the moon as it moves over the ocean, and the lilacs, and mountain ranges, and all the colors of valleys.” Their experience was inseparably spiritual and carnal: “ ‘My . . . spirit,’ says Fanny, at last, her face against his chest. / ‘My . . . flesh,’ says Arveyda, his lips against her hair.”93 This sensuous, romantic scene is reminiscent of an Edenic paradise, perhaps as reimagined by The Song of Songs—­though Walker would have one read this type of text not allegorically (as much of the Christian mystical tradition does), but simply as a literal celebration of the interrelated beauty of God, nature, and human love. In Walker’s By the Light of My Father’s Smile, she continues her reflections on the spiritual importance of sexuality. The central conflict in the novel stems from an incident in which a Black man, Mr. Robinson, discovers that his adolescent daughter, Magdalena, is having sex with her “Mundo” boyfriend, Manuelito (the “Mundo” are a fictional, darkly colored Mexican people descended from a mixture of escaped African American slaves and American Indians). Mr. Robinson scolds and physically punishes Magdalena in a way that emotionally scars her and her sister, Susannah, who secretly witnesses the beating. Many of the chapters are narrated from Mr. Robinson’s perspective after he has died. From a spiritual plane, he watches his daughters; wants them to love and enjoy their embodied, 92 Walker, Color Purple, pp. 45, 48, 113, 219, and 257. 93 Walker, Temple of My Familiar, pp. 407–8.

Divine Darkness Revisited  259 sexual selves; and longs to atone for the damage that he caused them by trying to repress the erotic. After Manuelito dies, he becomes Mr. Robinson’s spirit guide beyond the grave and helps him find healing according to traditional “Mundo” beliefs that affirm that sex and forgiveness are means of accessing the divine.94 Walker does not condone every type of sexual behavior. As Townes demonstrates, Walker understands that sex is a serious ethical matter. Her normative criteria include avoiding abusive treatment of others and forming sexual relationships that are deeply fulfilling to their participants, in ways that connect them with their embodied selves, with each other, with the earth, and with the “Great Spirit.” Although she understands that there are ways to sin sexually, she thinks St. Paul’s disparaging views of the flesh, women, and homosexuality, which have influenced Christian teachings on sexual sins (and which support the gender-­ essentialist aspects of Speyr and Balthasar’s mystical theology), are not an ad­equate guide.95 Walker relies instead on the more holistic—­spirit- and flesh-­ affirming—­wisdom of certain real or imagined indigenous traditions. In this regard, she is not far from Irigaray’s embrace of ancient breathing practices native to Southeast Asia. The reconciliation of erotic drives with the “paternal,” particularly in By the Light of My Father’s Smile, also calls to mind Kristeva’s account of Teresa’s “ideal father.” Nevertheless, although Walker favors non-­ Christian sources and shares certain values with postmodern philosophers, something like the Pauline idea that the body is meant to be a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19) remains operative in her fiction. Copeland shares Walker’s sense that an embodied mysticism must affirm human sexuality while guarding against its abuses (whether these are experienced by the fictional Celie or the real-­life Harriet Jacobs). Copeland believes Coakley is right to recognize the intertwining of sexual desires and desires for God. Moreover, Copeland embraces Lorde’s insights about the creative, connective, and not merely sexual meaning of the erotic and weaves them into her Christology. Copeland argues that “Jesus of Nazareth is the measure or standard for our exercise of erotic power and freedom in service of the reign of God.” Jesus is the norm of mystical eros, both in the way he seeks proximity with others while giving himself bodily to them and in the way others of whatever social location, personal disposition, or body type are spontaneously attracted to his healing words and touch. Although his loving relationships with those whom he encounters in his earthly ministry are non-­sexual, they are tactile, intimate, and deeply transformative. Such ecstatic closeness with Jesus’s body takes on new dimensions in the Eucharist: “In the very act of nourishing our flesh with his flesh, we women and

94 Walker, By the Light of My Father’s Smile, pp. 14, 26, 31, 111, and 169. 95 Walker, By the Light of My Father’s Smile, pp. 148 and 177. For a more detailed discussion of the spiritual and ethical significance of this novel, see Keri Day, Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism, pp. 93–8.

260 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

men are made new in Christ.” For Copeland, Jesus’s body is not just an instrument of solidaristic suffering but also a context of reciprocal longing and enjoyment among human beings and between humans and God. It is the promise of resurrection joy.96 Seeking an image of the bodily, communal, and ecstatic love that Jesus teaches and practices, Copeland turns to the celebrated scene in the Catholic novelist Toni Morrison’s Beloved that depicts a group of Black women, men, and children gathered in “the Clearing” to hear the elderly Black woman Baby Suggs preach.97 Suggs invites them to laugh, dance, and cry. Although they have felt the horrors of slavery on their bodies, although this pain comes through their eyes as free-­ flowing tears, they also experience joy in this wild, fugitive togetherness. They move their bodies to the music that their own mouths, feet, and hands generate, and they listen to Suggs explain how to love themselves despite the hatred of the world. Mentioning each body part, as though in a sacred litany, Suggs calls for it to be loved unconditionally: Here . . . in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despite it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will seek it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don’t love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And O my ­people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver—­love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-­holding womb and your life-­giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.98

96  Copeland, “Wading through Many Sorrows,” p. 150; Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, pp. 64–5 and 82; and Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified, pp. 76 and 152. 97 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, pp. 51–3. 98 Morrison, Beloved, pp. 103–4.

Divine Darkness Revisited  261 Like Rahner’s, Morrison’s anthropology is cardiocentric. The heart is “the prize.” But this is no mere metaphor here. Suggs seems to mean quite literally the heart: the organ that pumps blood and sustains the life of the whole body. Like the nineteenth-­century Black female preachers and mystics studied above, Suggs speaks words that seem so deeply true, beautiful, and compassionate that they could have only come from a divine source. However, she does not urge a dis­cip­ lin­ing of the body, demand its self-­sacrifice or obedience. Rather, she understands that these particular bodies have suffered enough, indeed far too much. What they need is love, and more love—­adoring attention to each sacred feature. Admittedly, Suggs tells her audience “the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine,” and she eventually loses faith even in this imaginary grace after the disastrous event at the center of Morrison’s novel: Suggs’ daughter-­ in-­law Sethe kills her infant daughter (whose incarnate ghost is later called “Beloved”) to prevent her from being returned to slavery.99 Nevertheless, a mys­ tic­al theological reading of this sermon detects a very real grace in it, a divine love that seeks to make the wounded whole. The Clearing is a holy icon of Copeland’s account of Christological eros. It visualizes the love of bodies, the union of bodies, the ecstatic dance and healing that Christians can expect from the coming of Jesus’s kingdom, even in a world still marred by White supremacist patriarchal violence. In its eschatological form, as Copeland envisions it, there would no longer be any threatening “yonder,” no divisions of White and Black. There would only be a glorious gathering that welcomes everybody in each precious detail. In the meantime, her reading of Beloved shows us that communal experiences of bodily worship and love, whether in natural or ecclesial settings—­and sometimes in secluded spaces meant specifically for the racially abused—­provide a foretaste of heavenly glory.

The Embodied Spirit of Freedom Bodies are not mere objects. They are living agents. Even when many freedoms of the body are violently curtailed, as they are in the hells of slavery and racial and sexual oppression, the essential freedom of the body is not obliterated. A death blow may stop it cold. But as long as there is breath, this means some freedom remains in it, some capacity to feel and act (what Henry calls “life”). Unless there has been significant damage to the brain, this freedom includes a capacity to ­analyze one’s situation, to reflect on oneself, and to behave thoughtfully and virtuously in relation with others. The Black cultural and religious traditions of the United States call this bodily freedom “spirit” or “soul.” It finds expression in

99 Morrison, Beloved, pp. 103 and 105.

262 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

music, social activism, and narratives of struggle and triumph. Often this freedom is understood to be a gift from God, a meeting place with God, and a powerful means by which God acts in one’s quotidian life. As we have seen, Rahner’s mysticism of ordinary life does not simply affirm the categorical (i.e., sensory, bodily field of perception) as a mediation of the transcendental but more specifically draws on an Ignatian practice of indiferençia that frees the creature to receive individualized prophetic callings and to make con­ text­ual­ly informed choices consistent with the loving will of God. Rahner argues that, to participate in the saving meaning of Christ’s bodily existence, one must live according to his Holy Spirit—­that is, with a detached, humble readiness to follow divine instruction even when, like Christ on the cross, one lacks affective reassurance or faces severe internal or external obstacles. For Rahner, the body’s natural or supernatural pleasures are not the surest sign of the grace of divine union. Rather, the surest sign is an embodied spirit that has become free—­as, for example, those of Stewart, Elaw, Lee, Truth, Jackson, and Delile did—­to lead a Christic life of active, relational holiness. Howard Thurman, the great mystical leader of the Civil Rights movement, makes a related argument. At the end of his lecture series called “Mysticism and Social Change” (1939), he contends that, once one has glimpsed the infinite goodness of God in prayer, it is necessary to incarnate this goodness in the world. It is not enough to enjoy God’s presence. A true mystic “must bring his own spirit, those stubborn and recalcitrant aspects of it, under the domination of the God whom he has known in his mystical union.”100 Such inner self-­discipline—­that is, detachment, obedience, or indiferençia—­is the precondition of a practical struggle through which one seeks to build up a beloved community of persons who are ready to work together against the personal and collective sins that threaten to tear them apart. Thurman understands nonviolent resistance to the brutality of Jim Crow America not only as a demand for greater freedoms and rights for African Americans but also as an embodiment of the interior spiritual freedom that comes from an obediential union with God. Walker has a similar perspective. There is a pivotal scene in The Third Life of Grange Copeland that exposes the insidious logic behind the reduction of Black people to mere bodily objects of White supremacist violence and affirms the importance of claiming one’s soul and developing one’s moral agency as a Black person. Grange’s murderous son, Brownfield, blames his destructive actions on the abusive treatment he received from White landowners and from his emotionally neglectful father, who was also exploited and emasculated by them. Indeed, Grange had once rationalized his behavior by appealing to the same types of damaging forces. In his first two “lives,” he did not know how to cope with his

100 Thurman, Strange Freedom, pp. 121–2.

Divine Darkness Revisited  263 deep racial wounds and his extremely disempowered socioeconomic condition, and he did so in ways that hurt others, including his wife, his son, and several White strangers in the North. His “third life” is characterized by an awareness of his responsibility for himself and for his granddaughter, Ruth, who becomes the center of his world. Grange tries to share his hard-­won wisdom with his son: I know the danger of putting all the blame on somebody else for the mess you make out of your life. I fell into the trap myself! And I’m bound to believe that that’s the way the white folks can corrupt you even when you done held up before. ’Cause when they got you thinking that they’re to blame for everything they have you thinking they’s some kind of gods! You can’t do nothing wrong without them being behind it. You gits just as weak as water, no feeling of doing nothing yourself. Then you begins to think up evil and begins to destroy everybody around you, and you blames it on the crackers. Shit! Nobody’s as powerful as we make them out to be. We got our own souls, don’t we?101

Grange’s speech does not deny the body- and soul-­crushing evils of anti-­Black racism. Far from it. Rather, it argues that claiming responsibility for one’s actions as a Black person is a necessary means by which to resist such evils—­indeed, to save one’s soul from their deadly clutches. If one thinks, like Brownfield does, that Whiteness explains everything that is wrong in one’s life, absolutely and without remainder, then one concedes that it has the divine sovereignty it claims to have. One inadvertently worships a false, violent god who treats Black people like they are soulless nothings. One forfeits the ability to take charge of one’s embodied life and direct it toward relationships of greater love. One admits spiritual defeat. To be clear, Walker’s point is decidedly not that individuals such as Grange and Brownfield have total control over the quality of their lives and should, therefore, be held accountable for their suffering. Such a victim-­blaming perspective is contra­dict­ed by Walker’s searing depictions of the harms caused by their his­tor­ ic­al and social contexts. She argues the much subtler point that the structural assault on their racially marked bodies also threatens their embodied spirit of freedom and is bound to destroy it if they do not find some power in themselves to hold fast to it. That a soul survives—­or is resurrected, like Grange’s—­while under such extraordinary, yet all-­too-­ordinary duress is such an astonishing phenomenon that it verges on the miraculous. Walker believes in such miracles. In the final analysis, she attributes Grange’s conversion to a hidden grace, which his granddaughter Ruth perceives: he looks like “her idea of God.” Although Grange does not pray, because he is too repelled by the hypocrisy of the church to do so,

101 Walker, Third Life of Grange Copeland, p. 263.

264 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

he dies in a bodily position suggestive of prayer, having like Christ sacrificed his life for the sake of another.102 To be mystical in the most theologically meaningful sense, it is not enough to have a Black body that experiences pain and joy; it is necessary to unfurl the freedom of that body in a daily struggle against sin and a lifelong transformation in love. It is significant that the title of Copeland’s book is not Enfleshing Blackness but Enfleshing Freedom. As she writes about the bodies of Black women and men, she does not only recount the manifold ways in which they are objectified by White supremacy and patriarchy. She also emphasizes their retentions and acquisitions of subjectivity. She argues that enslaved Black women “fleshed out the words of the Spiritual: Oh Freedom! Oh Freedom! Oh Freedom! I love thee!” They did this by praying alone and together to “God as the Author and Source of freedom,” secretly educating themselves in defiance of plantation prohibitions, phys­ic­al­ly fighting their masters, talking back, fleeing from captivity, working extra hours to be able to “purchase” themselves and their loved ones, and developing other cultural practices of resistance.103 After emancipation, Black women’s efforts to “flesh out” their divinely given freedom continued under the exploitative conditions of sharecropping and low-­ paid domestic labor. Although quotidian life remained grueling, their new legally freed status came with many significant liberties: they could worship as they saw fit; they could more readily recognize their created humanity; they could marry without fear of their spouses and children being sold away; they could cultivate communities for the sake of survival and conviviality; and they could begin to find some healing from the traumas of slavery. Women whose bodies had been used as objects of the masters’ sexual gratification were given an opportunity to embrace their embodied selves in a new way: “Loving her body, the freed woman took control of her sex and sexuality, denying neither sexual pleasure nor desire, resisting both coercion and intimidation. Loving her body, the freed woman fleshed out autonomy, self-­determination, decision, and action.”104 Copeland draws on these experiences of Black women’s enfleshed freedom during and after slavery to support her broader theological anthropological claim that “the body is the medium through which human spirit incarnates and exercises freedom in time and space.”105 She shows that this function of the body—­ namely to mediate and incarnate the spirit of freedom—­remained operative even under regimes of power that sought to eliminate it. At the same time, she demonstrates that overcoming such evil systems of body-­objectification opened the body to greater levels of freedom in itself and in relationship with others. Although she recognizes that self-­determination, particularly with respect to 102 Walker, Third Life of Grange Copeland, pp. 304 and 310. 103 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, pp. 38–46. 104 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, pp. 46–50. 105 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, p. 39.

Divine Darkness Revisited  265 one’s body and sexuality, is crucially important, she does not reduce the meaning of freedom to the modern Enlightenment ideal of personal autonomy. On the contrary, she provides a nuanced phenomenology of freedom that unveils its interrelated spiritual, communal, psychological, political, economic, and cultural dimensions. Building on the twentieth-­century Catholic theological “turn to the subject” that Rahner represents, Copeland follows the lead of other political and liberation theologians (such as Rahner’s student Johann Baptist Metz) by advocating a “turn of the subject”; that is, a turn away from “the white, male, bourgeois European subject” who hides behind the allegedly universal claims of transcendental and existential philosophy toward the subjects of the oppressed peoples of the world. As a womanist theologian, she focuses on “poor women of color” and gives them the title of “the new anthropological subject.” Her argument is not that divine freedom is exclusively enfleshed in their bodies but rather that its fullest incarnation requires a global praxis of solidarity with them and all those who suffer from domination. For Copeland, solidarity is not merely an affective identification with another but a communal work that involves confronting structures of sin and bearing together the suffering they cause.106 As Copeland understands it, freedom is not the property of an isolated individual who has enough capital to do this or that arbitrary thing with impunity. This is not what freedom means even if such an individual happens to be Black and female. Rather, freedom is an eschatological mystery of bodily union with God in which one can already participate in history through solidaristic decisions. Drawing on Isasi-­Díaz’s account of lo cotidiano, Copeland argues that “the ordinary everyday [lo cotidiano] brings with it the choice of how to live in relation to oppression, whether to be consumed by it or to resist it.”107 Divine freedom—­ the eschatological freedom discovered in mystical union and enfleshed as holiness—­consists not in the abstract ability to make such a choice but in the Spirit-­filled, Christic, and solidaristic way of life that follows from a daily practice of making the right choice.

A Return to Mystical Darkness All in all, the intersectional feminist form of the mysticism of ordinary life that emerges from womanist sources goes beyond an abstract affirmation of Blackness and femaleness as interrelated symbols of being or nothingness in order to attend to the graced lives of Black women, whether they be sanctified evangelists or or­din­ary people struggling with life’s daily challenges. It welcomes the wisdom of 106 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, pp. 85–94.

107 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, p. 97.

266 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

African and American indigenous traditions that find the presence of God in nature, while developing Christian doctrines about Christ, the Holy Spirit, the church, and the human being. It glorifies the God of love who is united to Black women’s bodies in their experiences of suffering, joy, and freedom and who works in history to bring all bodily lives into relationships of greater justice and compassion. Walker’s “philosophical”—in the sense of non-­confessional, pagan, natural—­ theology has much to teach Christian mystical theologians about the gracious God in whom they believe. Copeland and other Christian womanist theologians make the mystical theological importance of Walker’s work undeniable. The God revealed in these sources is a dark God, in multiple senses. To seek and love this God is to enter into a mystery beyond comprehension. Dionysius’s ar­ticu­la­tion of this insight inaugurated mystical theology in the Christian ­trad­ition—­or, better, named the mystical theology that was at work in it from the beginning. But his mystical unknowing (situated as it is in a hierarchical, Neo-­ Platonic ascent beyond corporeal perception and intellection) is not identical to that which comes from contemplating God’s unknown workings in the lives of darkly colored women and men who have, for centuries, fought back daily against the annihilative violence that targets their bodies and denies their souls. Where was God in the hold of the slave ship? Even if one’s Christology permits one to say, “Right there, in the raped and mutilated bodies of the enslaved,” this leaves more questions than answers. When ecstatic joy radiates through a Black female body, because the person who lives by means of it knows she is loved, whether by another human being or by the Creator of all things or seemingly only by herself, this is a grace that theology must affirm and safeguard. When a Black female body, through its self-­determination and practices of solidarity, becomes a sacrament of eschatological freedom, this is an occasion for praise and worship. The dark God who was hidden and deadly quiet in the Middle Passage is revealed in such corporeal moments of beatitude and liberation, no less than in the mystical testimonies of medieval Europeans or the heroic lives of early Christian martyrs and monks. Yet who is this strange, frustrating, and wildly incarnate God? Although a “dark continent” body does not ipso facto make one more capable of answering this question, a positive knowledge of the lives of poor women of color provides more information about the particular forms and intensities of unknowing that Christian mystical theology must attain. To love the dark God, one must love such darkly hued people.

  Conclusion Although Christian mystical theology wants to speak with the words or silences of eternity, this does not change the fact that it has a history, indeed many his­tor­ies. We have seen that these histories are not limited to Europe or the Middle Ages and that they feature various gender performances and embodied identities in diverse contexts, which challenge simplistic binaries and closures. The communal work to excavate and interpret these histories is far from complete. Such work honors the testimonies of the dead (who may indeed now live in God), but it is not primarily for them. It is for those compelled to live in the present and the future, those who must struggle with the hardheartedness of the world and seek God in its midst. To some extent, it is for monks and vowed contemplatives who dedicate their lives to mystical pursuits, but it is also for the vast majority of human beings who do not have such formal vocations but may nevertheless ex­peri­ence the grace of divine union in their quotidian lives. It is for everyday people who, in their strangeness and singularities, are more or less resistant to socially constructed norms. At the same time, it is an effort to remember the ­mysterious and all-­important norm of incarnate love. One scholarly aim is to get the history “right,” to whatever extent this is pos­ sible. Another is to think with it in a constructive fashion, advancing immanent and intertextual critiques and formulating new proposals. Through its studies of twentieth-­century Catholic theologians, postmodern philosophers, and intersectional feminist thinkers as readers of Christian mystical sources, this book has prioritized the latter objective. It has not, for example, sought to establish new facts about what Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, Juan Diego, or Rebecca Cox Jackson did, experienced, or said. Rather, it has weighed the stakes of different theological and philosophical ways of using such sources to elaborate a theory of the mysticism of ordinary life. The purpose of this sort of theory is to show that what is called “mystical” is not foreign to the lives of so-­called “ordinary” people but rather deeply characteristic of them. To grasp how and why these phenomena go together, it is necessary to ask probing questions about various construals of mysticism, ordinariness, and their connection, recognizing that these terms do not mean the same thing to everyone who uses them. It would be possible to analyze the permutations of such a theory—­tracking distinct ways of framing and answering these questions—­ without endorsing any particular position or even the overarching idea of the mysticism of ordinary life. However, I have not taken such a neutral, distanced The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism. Andrew Prevot, Oxford University Press. © Andrew Prevot 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866967.003.0008

268 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

attitude toward my subject matter. In my hermeneutical efforts, I have been both analytical and evaluative. I have distinguished diverse instances of theological, postmodern, and intersectional accounts of the mysticism of ordinary life while seeking ways to adjust, integrate, and develop them. More specifically, I have embraced a Catholic model of interdisciplinarity, which welcomes the contributions of philosophy while incorporating them into a Christian theological perspective centered on the grace of divine union. I have stressed that the philosophy under consideration need not only be that of a Greek or Latin antiquity or even German modernity, since there is much to learn about the mysticism of ordinary life from philosophical texts in Francophone post­mod­ ern­ity (in its phenomenological and psychoanalytic streams) and from analogous materials produced within Latino/a and Black cultures on the American side of the Atlantic. I have discussed challenges associated with treating transcendental consciousness, obedience, marriage, suffering, immanence, alterity, femininity, mestizaje, and Blackness as sufficient grounds on which to attribute a mystical meaning to ordinary life. At the same time, I have highlighted ways in which these philosophically describable aspects of human existence can mediate a theologically recognizable intimacy with the unknown God of incarnate love. Following feminist authors, I have contested sinful norms of phallocentrism and gender essentialism that have shaped the construction of both mysticism and ordinariness. I have suggested that an abstract stance of gender neutrality, in which one would avoid stating or implying anything about this area of human difference, is neither desirable nor attainable. As an alternative, I have drawn specific attention to quotidian negotiations and subversions of such normative constraints and emphasized the ways in which union with God scrambles gender expectations. Following mestiza, womanist, and other intersectional theorists, I have argued that the feminist study of Christian mysticism needs to attend more rigorously to the mystical lives of poor women of color. I have suggested that ­gender and race must be interrogated together if we are to understand their effects on everyday existence and on the meaning of union with God. I have argued that, when interpreted in such critical-­contemplative ways, the mysticism of ordinary life becomes a wellspring of spiritual consolation and material empowerment for women and other persons oppressed by histories of conquest and slavery. Throughout this book, I have maintained that the God revealed in Christ and the Holy Spirit, in the goodness of the natural world, and in La Virgen de Guadalupe seeks to unite with human beings regardless of their status in any given social or religious hierarchies. This All-­Good, this abyssal mystery, this undying wisdom, this nameless power does not remain aloof. It enters into ­his­tor­ies and societies and supports only those norms that encourage holistic love, joy, and freedom. It is not a respecter of any other norms and, in fact, emboldens its recipients to resist them whenever they become harmful or overly entrenched. On my account, the mysticism of ordinary life is more precisely a

Conclusion  269 normativity-­critical mysticism of quotidian life, which celebrates the Christological, pneu­ mato­ logic­ al, and apophatic features of human bodies, psyches, and ­relationships. All in all, I have not merely presented a map of different theories of the mysticism of ordinary life. I have charted a particular course through such territory and given locally argued reasons for following this route. To be clear, my goal has not been to persuade nonbelievers to become believers or, for that matter, philosophers to become theologians. In this regard, I ac­know­ ledge that the truth of my account of the mysticism of ordinary life is not something I can prove. Perhaps virtue is only ever a product of human effort or, at most, an effect of created (as opposed to uncreated) grace; perhaps the divine is nothing other than nature writ large; perhaps the desire to unite with the divine is a psychological wound caused by the loss of early attachment to one’s mother; perhaps the evil of history shows that divine union is inaccessible in this life or even that there is no God. These objections and other argumentative or personal reasons might incline one more toward philosophy than theology, and I respect this possibility. To the extent that I have appraised philosophical sources from a Christian theological viewpoint, I have done so mainly for the benefit of Christian theologians who have an interest in understanding what can be gained from such an interaction, how much common ground can be found, and how certain theological traditions have been altered (for better or worse) through philosophical transpositions. Given the complexity, opacity, and variability of the mysticism of ordinary life, I believe that it makes sense to approach differences in the study of this phenomenon with a spirit of generosity and a desire for mutual understanding. Yet my confessional, theological perspective is meaningful to me and to others who share it. I am committed to the view that mysticism is not merely a variable historical construct or replicable modification of consciousness but a gift of God’s very life. When I read sources from the Christian mystical tradition, including from neglected racialized communities within it, they increase my desire for this grace and support my intuition that it is real and being poured out everywhere. In my moments of contemplative stillness, when I strive to perceive and bear the excessive beauty and violence of existence, I sense that there is a heart of love at the center of it, a longing for healing and connection that does not have its origin in finite things (however remarkable they may be) but in the infinite itself. This sense stays with me in my unexceptional daily habits and encounters. It sustains my experiences of wonder at the mysteries of the world. It guides my religious, intellectual, and political practices. I hope that the arguments of this book have persuaded Christian readers to think more deeply about the mystical dimension of their faith in Christ and the ways in which it troubles certain intersecting norms of gender and race that have corrupted the historical practice of Christianity. For Christians, Jesus of Nazareth is the most perfect icon of God’s desire to be one with humanity in all its precarity. He is the revelation of an uncreated grace that breaks into the hells of this

270 

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life

world, both deadly institutions and anguished bodies and souls, and promises a liberation as yet unconceived. In the context of overlapping sinful structures, such as White supremacy and patriarchy, quotidian practices of resistance, lucha, prayer, and community nurture possibilities of divine union. The Spirit of Christ breathes life into persons left for dead. It works in and through them, inspiring prophetic words and actions. It gives women levels of subjectivity and authority unanticipated by male-­dominated reason. It builds up intersectional feminist movements in history. Mysticism is political but not only political. It is the abundance of eternity in time and place. It is an ever-­greater love, which one can touch and embody but never capture.

Bibliography Abraham, Susan. Identity, Ethics, and Nonviolence in Postcolonial Theory: A Rahnerian Theological Assessment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Adkins[-Jones], Amey Victoria. “Black/Feminist Futures: Reading Beauvoir in Black Skin, White Masks.” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (Fall 2013): p. 697. Aelred of Rivaulx. Spiritual Friendship (Trappist, KY: Cistercian, 2010). Ahearne, Jeremy. Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and Its Other (Cambridge: Polity, 1995). Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, and Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). An, Yountae. The Decolonial Abyss: Mysticism and Cosmopolitics from the Ruins (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). Andrews, William L., ed. Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1986). Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed. (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute, 2014). Anzaldúa, Gloria. Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, edited by AnaLouise Keating (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, 5 vols., translated by The Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics, 1981). Aquino, María Pilar. “Latina Feminist Theology: Central Features.” In A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice, edited by María Pilar Aquino, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodríguez (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002), pp. 133–60. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 2006). Armour, Ellen  T. “Questioning ‘Woman’ in Feminist/Womanist Theology: Irigaray, Ruether, and Daly.” In Transfigurations: Theology and the French Feminists, edited by C.  W.  Maggie Kim, Susan  M.  St. Ville, and Susan  M.  Simonaitis (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), pp. 143–69. Armour, Ellen  T. “Divining Differences: Irigaray and Religion.” In Religion in French Feminist Thought: Critical Perspectives, edited by Morny Joy, Kathleen O’Grady, and Judith L. Poxon (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 29–40. Astell, Ann. “Telling Tales of Love: Julia Kristeva and Bernard of Clairvaux.” Christianity and Literature 50, no. 1 (Autumn 2000): p. 125. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. The Moment of Christian Witness, translated by Richard Beckley (New York: Newman Press, 1969). Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Heart of the World, translated by Erasmo Leiva (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1979). Balthasar, Hans Urs von. First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr, translated by Antje Lawry and Sergia Englund, O.C.D. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1981). Balthasar, Hans Urs von. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1, Seeing the Form, translated by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis and edited by Joseph Fessio, S.J. and John Riches (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1982).

272 Bibliography Balthasar, Hans Urs von. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 3, Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles, translated by Andrew Louth et al. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1986). Balthasar, Hans Urs von. New Elucidations, translated by Mary Thersilde Skerry (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1986). Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Prayer, translated by Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1986). Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 2, The Dramatis Personae: Man in God, translated by Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1990). Balthasar, Hans Urs von. “Casta Meretrix,” translated by John Saward. In Explorations in Theology, vol. 2, Spouse of the Word (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1991), pp. 193–288. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 5, The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age, translated by Oliver Davies et al. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1991). Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 3, The Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ, translated by Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1992). Balthasar, Hans Urs von. The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, translated by Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1992). Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Two Sisters in the Spirit: Thérèse of Lisieux and Elizabeth of the Trinity, translated by Donald Nichols, Anne Englund Nash, and Dennis Martin (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1992). Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Our Task: A Report and a Plan, translated by John Saward (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1994). Balthasar, Hans Urs von. “Beyond Contemplation and Action?” In Explorations in Theology, vol. 4, Spirit and Institution, translated by Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1995), pp. 299–307. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. “Christology and Ecclesial Obedience.” In Explorations in Theology, vol. 4, Spirit and Institution, translated by Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1995), pp. 139–67. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. “Understanding Christian Mysticism.” In Explorations in Theology, vol. 4, Spirit and Institution, translated by Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1995), pp. 309–35. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Thomas und die Charismatik: Kommentar zu Thomas von Aquin Summa Theologica Quaestiones II II 171–182; Besondere Gnadengaben und die zwei Wege menschlichen Lebens (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1996). Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 5, The Last Act, translated by Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1998). Bantum, Brian. Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity (Waco, TX: Baylor, 2010). Barnes, Paula C. “Looking for God: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day.” In Critical Insights: Alice Walker, edited by Nagueyalti Warren (Ipswich, MA: Salem, 2013), pp. 124–40. Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience, translated by Stuart Kendall (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014). Bauerschmidt, Frederick Christian. “The Abrahamic Voyage: Michel de Certeau and Theology.” Modern Theology 12, no. 1 (January 1996): p. 2. Bauerschmidt, Frederick Christian. “The Otherness of God.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 2 (Spring 2001): p. 349.

Bibliography  273 Beattie, Tina. New Catholic Feminism: Theology and Theory (New York: Routledge, 2006). Benigno, Trigo, ed. Kristeva’s Fiction (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013). Bennett, Jana Marguerite. “Singleness as a Vocation of Love.” In Sex, Love, and Families: Catholic Perspectives, edited by Jason King and Julie Hanlon Rubio (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2020), pp. 185–95. Benson, Bruce Ellis and Norman Wirzba, eds. Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). Bergoffen, Debra. “Irigaray’s Couples.” In Returning to Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy, Politics, and the Question of Unity, edited by Maria  C.  Cimitile and Elaine  P.  Miller (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), pp. 151–72. Bergreen, Laurence. Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492–1504 (New York: Penguin, 2011). Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Bingemer, Maria Clara. The Mystery and the World: Passion for God in Times of Unbelief, translated by Jovelino and Joan Ramos (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2016). Bird, Jennifer G. Abuse, Power, and Fearful Obedience: Reconsidering 1 Peter’s Commands to Wives (New York: T&T Clark, 2011). Bostic, Joy R. African American Female Mysticism: Nineteenth-Century Religious Activism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Bouyer, Louis. Women Mystics: Hadewijch of Antwerp, Teresa of Avila, Thérèse of Lisieux, Elizabeth of the Trinity, Edith Stein (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1993). Bové, Carol Mastrangelo. “Spain and Islam Once More: Fundamentalism in Sainte Thérèse d”Avila.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2018): p. 69. Boxill, Bernard. “Kantian Racism and Kantian Teleology.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, edited by Naomi Zack (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 44–53. Bremond, Henri. Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France depuis la fin des guerres de religion jusqu’à nos jours, vol. 3, new ed. (contains vols. 7 and 8 of the original), edited by François Trémolières (Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon, 2006). Brent, Linda [Harriet Jacobs]. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In The Classic Slave Narratives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Penguin, 2002), pp. 437–668. Brock, Rita Nakashima. Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2008). Brown, Jayna. Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). Brown, Joanne Carlson and Rebecca Parker. “For God So Loved the World?” In Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A Feminist Critique, edited by Joanne Carlson Brown and Carole R. Bohn (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 1989), pp. 1–30. Brown, Joseph A. “ ‘All Saints Should Walk Away’: The Mystical Pilgrimage of Meridian.” Callaloo 39 (Spring 1989): p. 310. Buchanan, Ian. Michel de Certeau: Cultural Theorist (London: Sage, 2000). Bullivant, Stephen. “The Myth of Rahnerian Exceptionalism: Edward Schillebeeckx’s ‘Anonymous Christians’.” Philosophy & Theology 22, no. 1–2 (2010): pp. 339–51. Burke, Patrick. Reinterpreting Rahner: A Critical Study of His Major Themes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002). Busto, Rudy  V. “Sacred Order, Sacred Space: Reies López Tijerina and the Valle de Pas Community.” In Mexican American Religions: Spirituality, Activism, and Culture, edited by Gastón Espinosa and Mario T. García (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 85–105. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

274 Bibliography Bynum, Caroline Walker. “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes in TwelfthCentury Cistercian Writing.” In Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 110–69. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987). Cahill, Lisa Sowle. Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Cahill, Lisa Sowle. “Global Health Justice: Love as Transformative Political Action.” In Love and Christian Ethics: Tradition, Theory, and Society, edited by Frederick  V.  Simmons with Brian  C.  Sorrells (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2016), pp. 274–89. Cannon, Katie Geneva. Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (New York: Continuum, 1995). Caputo, John. The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986). Carr, Anne. “Starting with the Human.” In A World of Grace: An Introduction to the Themes and Foundations of Karl Rahner’s Theology, edited by Leo O’Donovan (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1995), pp. 17–30. Carr, Anne. Transforming Grace: Christian Tradition and Women’s Experience (New York: Continuum, 1996). Carter, J. Kameron. Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Carter, J. Kameron. “Paratheological Blackness.” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (Fall 2013): p. 589. Carter, Julian B. The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Castañeda-Liles, María Del Socorro. Our Lady of Everyday Life: La Virgen de Guadalupe and the Catholic Imagination of Mexican Women in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Castillo, Ana, ed. Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe (New York: Riverhead, 1996). Castillo, Ana. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, updated ed. (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2014). Certeau, Michel de. La faiblesse de croire (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987). Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1, translated by Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). Certeau, Michel de. The Writing of History, translated by Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Certeau, Michel de. The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 1, translated by Michael B. Smith (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Certeau, Michel de. The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings, edited by Luce Giard and translated by Tom Conley (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Certeau, Michel de. “How Is Christianity Thinkable Today?”, translated by Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt and Catriona Hanley. In The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, edited by Graham Ward (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 142–55. Certeau, Michel de. “White Ecstasy,” translated by Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt and Catriona Hanley. In The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, edited by Graham Ward (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 155–8. Certeau, Michel de. The Possession at Loudun, translated by Michael B. Smith (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

Bibliography  275 Certeau, Michel de. “The Weakness of Believing: From the Body to Writing, a Christian Transit.” In The Certeau Reader, edited by Graham Ward (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 214–43. Certeau, Michel de. L’étranger ou l’union dans la difference, new ed. (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005). Certeau, Michel de. Le lieu de l’autre: Histoire religieuse mystique, edited by Luce Giard (Paris: Éditions du Seuil and Éditions Gallimard, 2005). Certeau, Michel de. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Certeau, Michel de. The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 2, edited by Luce Giard and translated by Michael  B.  Smith (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Certeau, Michel de, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol. The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 2, Living and Cooking, translated by Timothy J. Tomasik (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Chandler, Nahum Dimitri. X—­The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). Chrétien, Jean-Louis. L’effroi du beau (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1987). Chrétien, Jean-Louis. The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For, translated by Jeffrey Bloechl (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002). Chrétien, Jean-Louis. The Call and the Response, translated by Anne Davenport (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Chrétien, Jean-Louis. Pour reprendre et perdre haleine: Dix brèves meditations (Paris: Bayard, 2009). Chrétien, Jean-Louis. L’espace intérieur (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2014). Cisneros, Sandra. “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess.” In Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, edited by Ana Castillo (New York: Riverhead, 1996), pp. 46–51. Coakley, Sarah. “The Eschatological Body: Gender, Transformation, and God.” Modern Theology 16, no. 1 (January 2000): p. 61. Coakley, Sarah. Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002). Coakley, Sarah. “Jail Break: Meditation as a Subversive Activity.” Christian Century (June 29, 2004): p. 18. Coakley, Sarah. “Introduction—­Re-Thinking Dionysius the Areopagite.” Modern Theology 24, no. 4 (October 2008): p. 531. Coakley, Sarah. “Dark Contemplation and Epistemic Transformation: The Analytic Theologian Re-Meets Teresa of Avila.” In Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology, edited by Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 280–312. Coakley, Sarah. God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Coakley, Sarah. The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). Collins, Patricia Hill. “What’s in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond.” The Black Scholar 26, no. 1 (Spring 1996): p. 9. Collins, Patricia Hill and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). Cone, James  H. The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991). Cone, James H. The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011).

276 Bibliography Conn, Joann Wolski, ed. Women’s Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1996). Copeland, M. Shawn. “Racism and the Vocation of the Theologian.” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 2, no. 1 (Spring 2002): p. 15. Copeland, M.  Shawn. “Living Stones in the Household of God.” In Living Stones in the Household of God: The Legacy and Future of Black Theology, edited by Linda E. Thomas (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2004), pp. 183–8. Copeland, M. Shawn. “A Thinking Margin: The Womanist Movement as Critical Cognitive Praxis.” In Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society, edited by Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 226–35. Copeland, M.  Shawn. Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2009). Copeland, M.  Shawn. “Knit Together by the Spirit as Church.” In Prophetic Witness: Catholic Women’s Strategies of Reform, edited by Colleen  M.  Griffith (New York: Crossroad, 2009), pp. 16–24. Copeland, M.  Shawn. The Subversive Power of Love: The Vision of Henriette Delille, Madaleva Lecture in Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 2009). Copeland, M.  Shawn. “Theology at the Crossroads: A Meditation on the Blues.” In Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience, edited by M. Shawn Copeland, with LaReine-Marie Mosely, S.N.D. and Albert  J.  Raboteau (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2009), pp. 87–107. Copeland, M. Shawn. “ ‘Wading through Many Sorrows’: Toward a Theology of Suffering in a Womanist Perspective.” In Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader, edited by Katie Geneva Cannon, Emilie M. Townes, and Angela D. Sims (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2011), pp. 135–54. Copeland, M. Shawn. “God among the Ruins: Companion and Co-Sufferer.” In Violence, Transformation, and the Sacred: “They Shall Be Called Children of God,” edited by Margaret R. Pfeil and Tobias L. Winright (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2012), pp. 15–29. Copeland, M.  Shawn. “Blackness Past, Blackness Future—­and Theology.” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (Fall 2013): p. 625. Copeland, M. Shawn. Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2018). Corbari, Eliana. Vernacular Theology: Dominican Sermons and Audience in Late Medieval Italy (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013). Corbett, Jim. Goatwalking (New York: Penguin, 1991). Crammer, Corinne. “One Sex or Two? Balthasar’s Theology of the Sexes.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, edited by Edward  T.  Oakes and David Moss (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 93–112. Crawley, Ashon T. The Lonely Letters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): p. 139. Crussi, F. Gonzalez. “The Anatomy of a Virgin.” In Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, edited by Ana Castillo (New York: Riverhead, 1996), pp. 1–14. Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). Dailey, Patricia. Promised Bodies: Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women’s Mystical Texts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). Dallavalle, Nancy. “Feminist Theologies.” In The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner, edited by Declan Marmion and Mary Hines (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 264–78.

Bibliography  277 Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1985). Davalos, Karen Mary. “ ‘The Real Way of Praying’: The Via Crucis, Mexicano Sacred Space, and the Architecture of Domination.” In Horizons of the Sacred: Mexican Traditions in U.S. Catholicism, edited by Timothy Matovina and Gary Riebe-Estrella, S.V.D. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 41–68. Davis, Bret  W. Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007). Davis, Cyprian, O.S.B. Henriette Delille, Servant of Slaves, Witness to the Poor (New Orleans, LA: Archdiocese of New Orleans/Sisters of the Holy Family, 2004). Davis, Lennard  J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (New York: Verso, 1995). Day, Keri. Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism: Womanist and Black Feminist Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). De La Torre, Miguel A. “Rethinking Mulatez.” In Rethinking Latino(a) Religion and Identity, edited by Miguel A. De La Torre and Gastón Espinosa (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2006), pp. 158–75. De La Torre, Miguel A. The U.S. Immigration Crisis: Toward an Ethics of Place (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2016). De La Torre, Miguel A. Embracing Hopelessness (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017). Delgado, Teresa. A Puerto Rican Decolonial Theology: Prophesy Freedom (Cham: Springer, 2017). de Lubac, Henri. La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore, vol. 2, de Saint-Simon à nos jours (Paris: Dessain et Tolra, 1981). de Lubac, Henri. “Mysticism and Mystery.” In Theological Fragments, translated by Rebecca Howell Balinski (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1989), pp. 35–69. de Lubac, Henri. At the Service of the Church: Henri de Lubac Reflects on the Circumstances That Occasioned His Writings, translated by Anne Elizabeth Englund (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1993). de Lubac, Henri. Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages, translated by Gemma Simmonds, C.J., with Richard Price and Christopher Stephens (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). Derrida, Jacques. On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit and translated by David Wood, John P. Leavy, and Ian McLeod (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). Deutscher, Penelope. A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Deutscher, Penelope. “Between East and West and the Politics of ‘Cultural Ingénuité’: Irigaray on Cultural Difference.” In Returning to Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy, Politics, and the Question of Unity, edited by Maria C. Cimitile and Elaine P. Miller (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), pp. 137–50. de Vries, Roland. “Sharing Air: Becoming Two in the Spirit.” In Luce Irigaray: Teaching, edited by Luce Irigaray with Mary Green (New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 142–55. Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). Dosse, François. Michel de Certeau: Le marcheur blesse (Paris: La Découverte, 2002). Douglas, Kelly Brown. Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999). Dreyer, Elizabeth  A. Accidental Theologians: Four Women Who Shaped Christianity: Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, and Thérèse of Lisieux (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan, 2014).

278 Bibliography Dych, William, S.J. “Theology in a New Key.” In A World of Grace: An Introduction to the Themes and Foundations of Karl Rahner’s Theology, edited by Leo O’Donovan (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1995), pp. 1–16. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Edelstein, Marilyn. “Metaphor, Meta-Narrative, and Mater-Narrative in Kristeva’s ‘Stabat Mater’.” In Body/Text in Julia Kristeva: Religion, Women, and Psychoanalysis, edited by David R. Crownfield (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 27–52. Egan, Harvey, S.J. Karl Rahner: Mystic of Everyday Life (New York: Crossroad, 1998). Elaw, Zilpha. Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw, an American Female of Colour. In Sisters of the Spirit, edited by William L. Andrews (Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 49–160. Elizondo, Virgil. The Future Is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet (Bloomington, IN: Meyer Stone, 1988). Elizondo, Virgil. Guadalupe: Mother of the New Creation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997). Elizondo, Virgil. Galilean Journey: The Mexican-American Promise (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000). Ellacuría, Ignacio. “The Crucified People: An Essay in Historical Soteriology.” In Ignacio Ellacuría: Essays on History, Liberation, and Salvation, translated and edited by Michael E. Lee (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2013), pp. 195–224. Endean, Philip. “Von Balthasar, Rahner, and the Commissar.” New Blackfriars 79, no. 923 (January 1998): p. 33. Endean, Philip. Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Engel, Mary Potter. “No-Self and the Calling Given to Anyone: The Challenge of Mysticism.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 24, no. 2 (Fall 2008): p. 143. Espín, Orlando O. The Faith of the People: Theological Reflections on Popular Catholicism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997). Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Untie the Strong Woman: Blessed Mother’s Immaculate Love for the Wild Soul (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2013). Evans, Martha Noel. Fits and Starts: A Genealogy of Hysteria in Modern France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Falque, Emmanuel. “Y a-t-il une chair sans corps?” In Phénoménologie et christianisme chez Michel Henry: Les derniers écrits de Michel Henry en débat, edited by Philippe Capelle (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2004), pp. 95–133. Falque, Emmanuel. The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist, translated by George Hughes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). Farley, Margaret. Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2007). Farley, Wendy. The Thirst of God: Contemplating God’s Love with Three Women Mystics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2015). Favre, Pierre. Mémorial, translated and edited by Michel de Certeau (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1960). Ferré, Rosario. “The Battle of the Virgins.” In Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, edited by Ana Castillo (New York: Riverhead, 1996), pp. 79–87. Field, Sean L. The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor: The Trials of Marguerite Porete and Guiard of Cressonessart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). Fielding, Helen  A. and Dorothea  E.  Olkowski, eds. Feminist Phenomenology Futures (Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 2017).

Bibliography  279 Fisher, David. “Kristeva’s Chora and the Subject of Postmodern Ethics.” In Body/Text in Julia Kristeva: Religion, Women, and Psychoanalysis, edited by David  R.  Crownfield (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 91–106. Flores, Nichole  M. “Our Lady’s Legacy: How a 486-Year-Old Vision of Mary in Mexico Continues to Shape the Church Today.” America 217, no. 13 (December 2017): p. 26. Flores, Nichole  M. The Aesthetics of Solidarity: Our Lady of Guadalupe and American Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2021). Forman, Robert K. C. Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999). Fox, Matthew and Rupert Sheldrake. Natural Grace: Dialogues on Creation, Darkness, and the Soul in Spirituality and Science (New York: Image/Doubleday, 1997). Freud, Sigmund. On Psychopathology, translated by James Strachey and edited by Angela Richards (New York: Penguin, 1993). Fritz, Peter. “Karl Rahner, Friedrich Schelling, and Original Plural Unity.” Theological Studies 75, no. 2 (2014): p. 284. Fritz, Peter. Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 2014). Fritz, Peter. Freedom Made Manifest: Rahner’s Fundamental Option and Theological Aesthetics (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 2019). Frohlich, Mary. “Authority.” In The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, edited by Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 305–14. Gálvez, Alyshia. Guadalupe in New York: Devotion and the Struggle for Citizenship Rights among Mexican Immigrants (New York: New York University Press, 2010). García, Mario T., ed. The Gospel of César Chávez: My Faith in Action (Lanham, MD: Sheed and Ward, 2007). García, Mario T. Católicos: Resistance and Affirmation in Chicano Catholic History (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2008). García, Mario T. The Chicano Generation: Testimonios from the Movement (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015). García, Mario  T. Father Luis Olivares, a Biography: Faith, Politics, and the Origins of the Sanctuary Movement in Los Angeles (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Gardner, Lucy and David Moss. “Something Like Time; Something Like the Sexes—­An Essay in Reception.” In Balthasar at the End of Modernity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), pp. 69–137. Gatland, Emma. Women from the Golden Legend: Female Authority in a Medieval Castilian Sanctoral (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2011). Gebara, Ivone. Out of the Depths: Women’s Experience of Evil and Salvation, translated by Ann Patrick Ware (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2002). Gebara, Ivone and Maria Clara Bingemer. Mary: Mother of God, Mother of the Poor, translated by Phillip Berryman (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004). Gelfer, Joseph. “Evangelical and Catholic Masculinities in Two Fatherhood Ministries.” Feminist Theology 19, no. 1 (2010): p. 36. Giard, Luce. “Cherchant Dieu.” In La faibless de croire by Michel de Certeau (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987), pp. 7–24. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Goizueta, Roberto  S. Caminemos con Jesús: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995).

280 Bibliography Goizueta, Roberto S. Christ Our Companion: Toward a Theological Aesthetics of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2009). Gonzalez, Michelle. “Hans Urs von Balthasar and Contemporary Feminist Theology.” Theological Studies 65 (2004): p. 566. Gonzalez, Rodolfo “Corky.” “I Am Joaquín.” In Mexican American Literature: A Portable Anthology, edited by Dagoberto Gilb and Ricardo Angel Gilb (Boston, MA: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2016), pp. 63–77. Groody, Daniel G., C.S.C. Border of Death, Valley of Life: An Immigrant Journey of Spirit and Heart (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). Groody, Daniel  G., C.S.C. “Jesus and the Undocumented Immigrant: A Spiritual Geography of a Crucified People.” Theological Studies 70 (2009): p. 298. Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989). Gschwandtner, Christina. Postmodern Apologetics? Arguments for God in Contemporary Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). Guardado, Leo. “Just Peace, Just Sanctuary: Immigration and Ecclesial Nonviolence.” In A Just Peace Ethic Primer: Building Sustainable Peace and Breaking Cycles of Violence, edited by Eli  S.  McCarthy (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2020), pp. 77–92. Gudorf, Christine. Body, Sex, and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 1994). Gudorf, Christine. “The Erosion of Sexual Dimorphism: Challenges to Religion and Religious Ethics.” In Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflection, 2nd ed., edited by Marvin Ellison and Kelly Brown Douglas (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010), pp. 141–64. Guerrero, Andrés. A Chicano Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987). Gutiérrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, 15th anniversary ed., translated by Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005). Hall, Amy Laura. Laughing at the Devil: Seeing the World with Julian of Norwich (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). Harmless, William, S.J. Mystics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Hart, Kevin. “Inward Life.” In Michel Henry: The Affects of Thought, edited by Jeffrey Hanson and Michael R. Kelly (New York: Continuum, 2012), pp. 87–110. Hayes, Diana L. No Crystal Stair: Womanist Spirituality (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2016). Heidegger, Martin. On Time and Being, translated by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). Heidegger, Martin. “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God Is Dead’.” In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 53–112. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 2001). Heidegger, Martin. “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics.” In Identity and Difference, translated by Joan Stambaugh (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 42–74. Helmer, Christine. “Mysticism and Metaphysics: Schleiermacher and a Historical Theological Trajectory.” The Journal of Religion 83, no. 4 (October 2003): p. 517. Hemmati, Shiva. “Irigarayan Sensible Transcendental in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 61, no. 5 (2000): p. 545.

Bibliography  281 Henrici, Peter, S.J.  “Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Sketch of His Life.” In Hans Urs von Balthasar, edited by David L. Schindler (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1991), pp. 7–43. Henry, Michel. The Essence of Manifestation, translated by Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973). Henry, Michel. Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, translated by Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975). Henry, Michel. Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, translated by Kathleen McLaughlin (Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1983). Henry, Michel. The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, translated by Douglas Brick (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). Henry, Michel. I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford, 2003). Henry, Michel. Le bonheur de Spinoza (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004). Henry, Michel. Material Phenomenology, translated by Scott Davidson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Henry, Michel. Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson (New York: Continuum, 2009). Henry, Michel. Words of Christ, translated by Christina Gschwandtner (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012). Henry, Michel. Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson (New York: Continuum, 2012). Henry, Michel. From Communism to Capitalism: Theory of a Catastrophe, translated by Scott Davidson (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). Henry, Michel. Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh, translated by Karl Hefty (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015). Heyer, Kristin  E. Kinship Across Borders: A Christian Ethic of Immigration (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2012). Highmore, Ben. Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture (London: Continuum, 2006). Hilkert, Mary Catherine. Speaking with Authority: Catherine of Siena and the Voices of Women Today, Madaleva Lecture in Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 2001). Hoff, Johannes. “Mysticism, Ecclesiology, and the Body of Christ: Certeau’s (Mis-)Reading of Corpus Mysticum and the Legacy of Henri de Lubac.” In Spiritual Spaces: History and Mysticism in Michel de Certeau, edited by Inigo Bocken (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), pp. 87–109. Hollywood, Amy. The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995). Hollywood, Amy. Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Hollywood, Amy. “Mysticism, Death, and Desire in the Work of Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément.” In Religion in French Feminist Thought: Critical Perspectives, edited by Morny Joy, Kathleen O’Grady, and Judith  L.  Poxon (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 145–61. Hollywood, Amy. Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Hollywood, Amy. “Response—­ On Impassioned Claims: The Possibility of Doing Philosophy of Religion Otherwise.” In Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion, edited by An Yountae and Eleanor Craig (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), pp. 269–85. Hollywood, Amy and Eleanor Craig. “Mysticism and the Politics of Theory.” English Language Notes 56, no. 1 (April 2018): p. 7.

282 Bibliography Holmes, Emily  A. “Writing the Body of Christ: Each Flesh Becoming Word.” In Luce Irigaray: Teaching, edited by Luce Irigaray with Mary Green (New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 127–41. Hom, Sabrina  L. “Between Races and Generations: Materializing Race and Kinship in Moraga and Irigaray.” Hypatia 28, no. 3 (Summer 2013): p. 419. hooks, bell. Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (New York: Routledge, 2015). Houchins, Sue  E. “Introduction.” In Spiritual Narratives, The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. xxix–xliv. Huerta, Dolores. “Dolores Huerta on Spirituality: Interview with Mario T. García, June 1, 2007.” In A Dolores Huerta Reader, edited by Mario  T.  García (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), pp. 331–45. Huffer, Lynne. Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). Humez, Jean McMahon. “Introduction.” In Rebecca Cox Jackson, Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress, edited by Jean McMahon Humez (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). Hunt, Mary. “Just Good Sex: Feminist Catholicism and Human Rights.” In Good Sex: Feminist Perspectives from the World’s Religions, edited by Patricia Beattie Jung, Mary Hunt, and Radhika Balakrishnan (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers, 2001), pp. 158–73. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, book 2, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Boston, MA: Kluwer, 1989). Ignatius of Loyola. The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, translated by George Ganss, S.J. (Chicago, IL: Loyola Press, 1992). Imperatori-Lee, Natalia. Cuéntame: Narrative in the Ecclesial Present (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2018). Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman, translated by Gillian  C.  Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). Irigaray, Luce. Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Irigaray, Luce. Elemental Passions, translated by Joanne Collie and Judith Still (New York: Routledge, 1992). Irigaray, Luce. “Belief Itself.” In Sexes and Genealogies, translated by Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 23–53. Irigaray, Luce. “Body Against Body: In Relation to the Mother.” In Sexes and Genealogies, translated by Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 7–21. Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference, translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). Irigaray, Luce. “Divine Women.” In Sexes and Genealogies, translated by Gillian  C.  Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 55–72. Irigaray, Luce. Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution, translated by Karin Montin (London: Athlone, 1994). Irigaray, Luce. Le soufflé des femmes: présente des credos au féminin (ACGF, 1996). Irigaray, Luce. I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity within History, translated by Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1996). Irigaray, Luce. The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, translated by Mary Beth Mader (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1999).

Bibliography  283 Irigaray, Luce. Democracy Begins Between Two, translated by Kirsteen Anderson (New York: Routledge, 2001). Irigaray, Luce. To Be Two, translated by Monique M. Rhodes and Marco F. Cocito-Monoc (New York: Routledge, 2001). Irigaray, Luce. Between East and West: From Singularity to Communion, translated by Stephen Pluháček (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Irigaray, Luce. Key Writings, edited by Luce Irigaray (New York: Continuum, 2004). Irigaray, Luce. Prières quotidiennes/Everyday Prayers, translated by Luce Irigaray with Timothy Matthews (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2004). Irigaray, Luce and Michael Marder. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Isasi-Díaz, Ada María. Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996). Isasi-Díaz, Ada María. En la Lucha/In the Struggle: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004). Isasi-Díaz, Ada María. La Lucha Continues: Mujerista Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004). Isasi-Díaz, Ada María and Yolanda Tarango. Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1992). Jackson, Rebecca Cox. Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress, edited by Jean McMahon Humez (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Routledge, 2002). Janicaud, Dominique. The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology, translated by Bernard Prusak. In Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), pp. 16–103. Jantzen, Grace. God’s World, God’s Body (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1984). Jantzen, Grace. Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Jantzen, Grace. Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1999). Jantzen, Grace. Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian, new ed. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 2000). Jantzen, Grace. Foundations of Violence, vol. 1, Death and the Displacement of Beauty (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2004). Jantzen, Grace. Violence to Eternity, vol. 2, Death and the Displacement of Beauty, edited by Jeremy Carrette and Morny Joy (New York: Routledge, 2009). Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). Johnson, Elizabeth. Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints (New York: Continuum, 2006). Johnson, Elizabeth. She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 2007). Jones, Serene. “This God Which Is Not One: Irigaray and Barth on the Divine.” In Transfigurations: Theology and the French Feminists, edited by C.  W.  Maggie Kim, Susan M. St. Ville, and Susan M. Simonaitis (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), pp. 109–41. Jones, Serene. Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2000). Joy, Morny. Divine Love: Luce Irigaray, Women, Gender, and Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

284 Bibliography Jones, Serene, Kathleen O’Grady, and Judith L. Poxon, eds. French Feminists on Religion: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2002). Kanter, Deborah  E. Chicago Católico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2020). Katz, Steven T. “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism.” In Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, edited by Steven T. Katz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 22–74. Kearney, Richard. “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics.” In Carnal Hermeneutics, edited by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), pp. 15–56. Keenan, Marie. Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church: Power, Gender, and Organizational Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Keller, Catherine. Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003). Keller, Catherine. “Delores Williams: Survival, Surrogacy, Sisterhood, Spirit.” Union Seminary Quarterly (Fall 2004): p. 84. Keller, Catherine. Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Keller, Catherine. Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). Kerr, Fergus. “Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar.” New Blackfriars 79, no. 923 (January 1998): p. 26. Kerr, Fergus. Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Neoscholasticism to Nuptial Mysticism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007). Khanna, Ranjana. The Dark Continent: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Kidder, Annemarie S. “Introduction.” In The Mystical Way in Everyday Life, translated by Annemarie S. Kidder (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010), pp. xi–xxxvi. Kilby, Karen. “Balthasar and Karl Rahner.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, edited by Edward  T.  Oakes, S.J.  and David Moss (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 256–68. Kilby, Karen. Karl Rahner: Theology and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2004). Kilby, Karen. Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012). Kristeva, Julia. About Chinese Women, translated by Anita Barrows (New York: Urizen, 1977). Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon  S.  Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language, translated by Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Kristeva, Julia. In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Kristeva, Julia. Tales of Love, translated by Leon  S.  Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Kristeva, Julia. Nations Without Nationalism, translated by Leon  S.  Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Kristeva, Julia. Julia Kristeva Interviews, edited by Ross Mitchell Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Kristeva, Julia. Crisis of the European Subject, translated by Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2000).

Bibliography  285 Kristeva, Julia. “Interview with Elaine Hoffman Baruch on Feminism in the United States and France.” In The Portable Kristeva, updated ed., edited by Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 371–82. Kristeva, Julia. Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, vol. 2, translated by Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Kristeva, Julia. Revolt, She Said: An Interview by Phillipe Petit, translated by Brian O’Keeffe and edited by Sylvère Lotringer (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2002). Kristeva, Julia. This Incredible Need to Believe, translated by Beverly Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Kristeva, Julia. Hatred and Forgiveness, translated by Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Kristeva, Julia. Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, translated by Lorna Scott Fox (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Kristeva, Julia. “Tragedy and a Dream: Disability Revisited.” In Carnal Hermeneutics, edited by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), pp. 115–27. Kristeva, Julia. Je me voyage: Mémoires—­Entretiens avec Samuel Dock (Paris: Fayard, 2016). Kristeva, Julia and Catherine Clément. The Feminine and the Sacred, translated by Jane Marie Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). Lacan, Jacques. Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, edited by Jacques Alain-Miller and translated by Bruce Fink, vol. 20, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). Lacan, Jacques. “The Signification of the Phallus.” In Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), pp. 575–84. Lacoste, Jean-Yves. Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, translated by Mark Raftery-Skehan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Lamm, Julia A., ed. The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2013). Lamm, Julia A. God’s Kinde Love: Julian of Norwich’s Vernacular Theology of Grace (New York: Crossroad, 2019). Langenfeld, Friedrich Spee von. Cautio Criminalis, or a Book on Witch Trials, translated by Marcus Hellyer (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003). Lanzetta, Beverly  J. Radical Wisdom: A Feminist Mystical Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005). Lee, Jarena. Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel. In Spiritual Narratives, The Schomburg Library of NineteenthCentury Black Women Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). León, Luis  D. La Llorona’s Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the U.S.–Mexican Borderlands (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004). Levenson, Deborah T. Adíos Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). Lloyd, Vincent. Black Natural Law: Beyond Secularism and Multiculturalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Lloyd-Moffett, Stephen. “The Mysticism and Social Action of César Chávez.” In Latino Religions and Civic Activism in the United States, edited by Gastón Espinosa, Virgilio Elizondo, and Jesse Miranda (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 35–52. Lloyd-Moffett, Stephen. “Holy Activist, Secular Saint: Religion and the Social Activism of César Chávez.” In Mexican American Religions: Spirituality, Activism, and Culture, edited by Gastón Espinosa and Mario T. García (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 106–24.

286 Bibliography Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing, 1984). Lorentzen, Robin. Women in the Sanctuary Movement (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991). Losinger, Anton. The Anthropological Turn: The Human Orientation of the Theology of Karl Rahner, translated by Daniel Dahlstrom (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1957). Loughlin, Gerard. “Sexing the Trinity.” New Blackfriars 79, no. 923 (January 1998): p. 18. Mabee, Carleton with Susan Mabee Newhous. Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend (New York: New York University Press, 1993). Machado, Daisy  L. “The Unnamed Woman: Justice, Feminism, and the Undocumented Woman.” In A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice, edited by María Pilar Aquino, Daisy  L.  Machado, and Jeanette Rodríguez (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002), pp. 161–76. Mairs, Nancy. Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1993). Makransky, John. “A Buddhist Critique of, and Learning from, Christian Liberation Theology.” Theological Studies 75, no. 3 (2014): p. 635. Malcolm, Lois. “Rahner’s Theology of the Cross.” In Rahner beyond Rahner: A Great Theologian Encounters the Pacific Rim, edited by Paul Crowley, S.J. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), pp. 115–31. Maréchal, Joseph. The Psychology of the Mystics, translated by Algar Thorold (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004). Margaroni, Maria. “ ‘The Lost Foundation’: Kristeva’s Semiotic Chora and Its Ambiguous Legacy.” Hypatia 20, no. 1 (Winter 2005): p. 78. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, translated by Thomas Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001). Marion, Jean-Luc. In Excess: Studies in Saturated Phenomena, translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002). Marion, Jean-Luc. In the Self ’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, translated by Jeffrey Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford, 2012). Marion, Jean-Luc. “The Invisible and the Phenomenon.” In Michel Henry: The Affects of Thought, edited by Jeffrey Hanson and Michael R. Kelly (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), pp. 19–39. Martin, Alison. Luce Irigaray and the Question of the Divine (Leeds: Maney, 2000). Martin, Jennifer Newsome. Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). Martin, Jennifer Newsome. “The ‘Whence’ and the ‘Whither’ of Balthasar’s Gendered Theology: Rehabilitating Kenosis for Feminist Theology.” Modern Theology 31, no. 2 (April 2015): p. 211. Martin, Jennifer Newsome. “Balthasar Avec Kristeva: On the Recovery of a Baroque Teresa of Avila.” Modern Theology 37, no. 1 (January 2021): pp. 23–43. Martínez, Rubén. “The Undocumented Virgin.” In Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, edited by Ana Castillo (New York: Riverhead, 1996), pp. 98–112. Matovina, Timothy. “Theologies of Guadalupe: From the Spanish Colonial Era to Pope John Paul II.” Theological Studies 70 (2009): p. 61. Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). McAvoy, Liz Herbert. Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2004).

Bibliography  287 McCabe, Megan  K. “A Feminist Catholic Response to the Social Sin of Rape Culture.” Journal of Religious Ethics 46, no. 4 (2018): p. 635. McGinn, Bernard. The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, vol. 1, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1991). McGinn, Bernard. The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–1350), vol. 3, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1998). McGinn, Bernard. The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing (New York: Crossroad, 2001). McGinn, Bernard. The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 1350–1550, vol. 5, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 2012). McIntosh, Mark A. Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998). Medina, Lara. Las Hermanas: Chicana/Latina Religious-Political Activism in the U.S. Catholic Church (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004). Medina, Néstor. Mestizaje: (Re)Mapping Race, Culture, and Faith in Latina/o Catholicism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2009). Medina, Rubén. “El mestizaje a través de la frontera: Vasconcelos y Anzaldúa.” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 25, no 1 (Winter 2009): p. 101. Meltzer, François. “Transfeminisms.” In Transfigurations: Theology and the French Feminists, edited by C.  W.  Maggie Kim, Susan  M.  St. Ville, and Susan  M.  Simonaitis (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), pp. 17–30. Mercer, Ronald L. “Radical Phenomenology Reveals a Measure of Faith and a Need for a Levinasian Other in Henry’s Life.” In Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology, edited by Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), pp. 158–67. Metz, Johann Baptist. A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity, edited and translated by J. Matthew Ashley (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1998). Miller, Paul Allen. Diotima at the Barricades: French Feminists Read Plato (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Modras, Ronald. Ignatian Humanism: A Spirituality for the Twenty-First Century (Chicago, IL: Loyola Press, 2004). Moore, Brenna. “How to Awaken the Dead: Michel de Certeau, Henri de Lubac, and the Instabilities between the Past and the Present.” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 12, no. 2 (Fall 2012): p. 172. Moraga, Cherríe and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 4th ed. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2015). Morrison, Toni. Beloved (New York: Vintage, 2004). Moten, Fred. “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh).” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (Fall 2013): p. 737. Muers, Rachel. “A Queer Theology: Hans Urs von Balthasar.” In Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body, edited by Gerard Loughlin (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 200–11. Murphy, Ann  V. “Beyond Performativity and Against ‘Identification’: Gender and Technology in Irigaray.” In Returning to Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy, Politics, and the Question of Unity, edited by Maria C. Cimitile and Elaine P. Miller (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), pp. 77–92. Newman, Barbara. Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).

288 Bibliography Newman, Barbara. “Gender.” In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, edited by Julia A. Lamm (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2013), pp. 41–55. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: An Ecumenical Study Bible. New revised standard version. 5th ed., edited by Michael  D.  Coogan et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Oliver, Kelly. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind (Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1993). O’Meara, Thomas. God in the World: A Guide to Karl Rahner’s Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2007). O’Regan, Cyril. “Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Unwelcoming of Heidegger.” In The Grandeur of Reason: Religion, Tradition, and Universalism, edited by Peter M. Candler, Jr. and Connor Cunningham (London: SCM, 2010), pp. 264–98. Ortega, Mariana. In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016). O’Sullivan, Michael. Michel Henry: Incarnation, Barbarism, and Belief: An Introduction to the Work of Michel Henry (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). Paik, A. Naomi. “Abolitionist Futures and the U.S. Sanctuary Movement.” Race & Class 59, no. 2 (2017): p. 3. Peterson, Brandon. “Karl Rahner on Patristic Theology and Spirituality.” Philosophy & Theology 27, no. 2 (2015): p. 499. Peterson, Brandon. Being Salvation: Atonement and Soteriology in the Thought of Karl Rahner (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2017). Phelps, Jamie T., O.P. “Black Spirituality.” In Taking Down Our Harps: Black Catholics in the United States, edited by Diana  L.  Hayes and Cyprian Davis, O.S.B. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998), pp. 179–98. Pineda-Madrid, Nancy. Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Juárez (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2011). Pitstick, Alyssa Lyra. Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ’s Descent into Hell (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007). Prevot, Andrew. Thinking Prayer: Theology and Spirituality amid the Crises of Modernity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). Prevot, Andrew. “Divine Opacity: Mystical Theology, Black Theology, and the Problem of  Light-Dark Aesthetics.” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 16, no. 2 (Fall 2016): p. 166. Prevot, Andrew. “Dialectic and Analogy in Balthasar’s ‘Metaphysics of the Saints’.” Pro Ecclesia 26, no. 3 (2017): p. 261. Prevot, Andrew. “Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) and Contemporary Mystical Theology.” In A Companion to Jesuit Mysticism, edited by Robert  A.  Maryks (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 279–309. Prevot, Andrew. “No Mere Spirituality: Recovering a Tradition of Women Theologians.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 33, no. 1 (Spring 2017): p. 107. “Priest’s Suicide Note Begs Forgiveness for Sins.” South Bend Tribune (April 13, 2016), accessed at southbendtribune.com. Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave. In The Classic Slave Narratives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Penguin, 2002), pp. 249–321. Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works, translated by Colm Luibheid (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1987). Rahner, Karl. “Concerning the Relationship between Nature and Grace.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 1, translated by Cornelius Ernst, O.P. (London: Darton, Longman, & Todd, 1961), pp. 297–317.

Bibliography  289 Rahner, Karl. “Some Implications of the Scholastic Concept of Uncreated Grace.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 1, translated by Cornelius Ernst, O.P. (London: Darton, Longman, & Todd, 1961), pp. 319–46. Rahner, Karl. Mary, Mother of the Lord: Theological Meditations, translated by W. J. O’Hara (New York: Herder and Herder, 1963). Rahner, Karl. Visions and Prophecies, translated by Charles Henkey and Richard Strachan (New York: Herder and Herder, 1963). Rahner, Karl. The Dynamic Element in the Church, translated by W. J. O’Hara (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964). Rahner, Karl. Watch and Pray with Me, translated by William Dych, S.J. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966). Rahner, Karl. “ ‘Behold This Heart!’: Preliminaries to a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 3, translated by Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1967), pp. 321–30. Rahner, Karl. “The Ignatian Mysticism of Joy in the World.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 3, translated by Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1967), pp. 277–93. Rahner, Karl. On the Theology of Death, translated by C.  H.  Henkey and revised by W. J. O’Hara (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967). Rahner, Karl. “The Passion and Asceticism: Thoughts on the Philosophico-Theological Basis of Christian Asceticism.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 3, translated by Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1967), pp. 58–85. Rahner, Karl. “Reflections on the Problem of the Gradual Ascent to Christian Perfection.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 3, translated by Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1967), pp. 3–23. Rahner, Karl. “Philosophy and Philosophising in Theology.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 9, translated by Graham Harrison (New York: Seabury, 1973), pp. 46–63. Rahner, Karl. “Theology and Anthropology.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 9, translated by Graham Harrison (New York: Seabury, 1973), pp. 28–45. Rahner, Karl. “Teresa of Avila.” In Opportunities for Faith: Elements of a Modern Spirituality, translated by Edward Quinn (New York: Seabury, 1974), pp. 123–6. Rahner, Karl. “The Position of Woman in the New Situation in which the Church Presently Finds Herself.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 8, translated by David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1977), pp. 75–93. Rahner, Karl. “Christian Living Formerly and Today.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 7, translated by David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1977), pp. 3–24. Rahner, Karl. “The Eucharist and Our Daily Lives.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 7, translated by David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1977), pp. 211–26. Rahner, Karl. “Anonymous and Explicit Faith.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 16, translated by David Morland, O.S.B. (New York: Seabury, 1979), pp. 52–9. Rahner, Karl. “The Doctrine of the ‘Spiritual Senses’ in the Middle Ages.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 16, translated by David Morland, O.S.B. (New York: Seabury, 1979), pp. 104–34. Rahner, Karl. “An Investigation of the Incomprehensibility of God in St. Thomas Aquinas.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 16, translated by David Morland, O.S.B.  (New York: Seabury, 1979), pp. 244–54. Rahner, Karl. “Religious Enthusiasm and the Experience of Grace.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 16, translated by David Morland, O.S.B. (New York: Seabury, 1979), pp. 35–51.

290 Bibliography Rahner, Karl. “The ‘Spiritual Senses’ According to Origen.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 16, translated by David Morland, O.S.B. (New York: Seabury, 1979), pp. 81–103. Rahner, Karl. “The Body in the Order of Salvation.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 17, translated by Margaret Kohl (New York: Crossroad, 1981), pp. 71–89. Rahner, Karl. “Mystical Experience and Mystical Theology.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 17, translated by Margaret Kohl (New York: Crossroad, 1981), pp. 90–9. Rahner, Karl. “Experience of the Holy Spirit.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 18, translated by Edward Quinn (New York: Crossroad, 1983), pp. 189–210. Rahner, Karl. “A Perfectly Normal Christian Family.” In I Remember: An Autobiographical Interview with Meinold Krauss, translated by Harvey Egan, S.J. (New York: Crossroad, 1985), pp. 24–34. Rahner, Karl. Prayers for a Lifetime, edited by Albert Raffelt (New York: Crossroad, 1985). Rahner, Karl. “Following Christ Today,” translated by Robert Braunreuther, S.J.  In Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews: 1965–1982, edited by Paul Imhof and Hubert Biallowons (New York: Crossroad, 1986), pp. 181–5. Rahner, Karl. “Against Witch Hysteria.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 23, translated by Joseph Donceel, S.J. and Hugh M. Riley (New York: Crossroad, 1992), pp. 169–77. Rahner, Karl. Spirit in the World, translated by William Dych, S.J.  (New York: Continuum, 1994). Rahner, Karl. The Need and the Blessing of Prayer, translated by Bruce Gillette (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 1997). Rahner, Karl. Encounters with Silence, translated by James Demskey, S.J. (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999). Rahner, Karl. The Trinity, translated by Joseph Donceel (New York: Crossroad, 2003). Rahner, Karl. “Why We Need to Pray.” In Karl Rahner: Spiritual Writings, edited by Philip Endean (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004), pp. 31–3. Rahner, Karl. Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, translated by William Dych, S.J. (New York: Crossroad, 2005). Rahner, Karl. “Alltägliche Dinge.” In Sämtliche Werke, vol. 23, Glaube im Alltag, edited by Albert Raffelt (Freiburg: Herder, 2006), pp. 475–90. Rahner, Karl. “Erfahrung des Heiligen Geistes.” In Sämtliche Werke, vol. 29, Geistliche Schriften: Späte Beiträge zur Praxis des Glaubens, edited by Herbert Vorgrimler (Freiburg: Herder, 2007), pp. 38–57. Rahner, Karl. Sämtliche Werke, vol. 7, Der betende Christ: Geistliche Schriften und Studien zur Praxis des Glaubens, edited by Andreas R. Batlogg (Freiburg: Herder, 2013). Rakoczy, Susan, IHM. Great Mystics and Social Justice: Walking on the Two Feet of Love (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 2006). Rambo, Shelly. Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010). Randall, Margaret. “Guadalupe, Subversive Virgin.” In Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, edited by Ana Castillo (New York: Riverhead, 1996), pp. 113–23. Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, translated by Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, S.J.  (New York: Routledge, 2003). Rine, Abigail. “Maria Redux: Incarnational Readings of Sacred History.” In Building a New World: Luce Irigaray Teaching II, edited by Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 95–107. Rivera, Joseph. The Contemplative Self after Michel Henry: A Phenomenological Theology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). Rivera, Mayra. Poetics of the Flesh (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

Bibliography  291 Rodriguez, Jeanette. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among MexicanAmerican Women (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994). Rodriguez, Jeanette. “Guadalupe: The Feminine Face of God.” In Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, edited by Ana Castillo (New York: Riverhead, 1996), pp. 25–31. Rodríguez, Luis J. “Forgive Me, Mother, for My Crazy Life.” In Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, edited by Ana Castillo (New York: Riverhead, 1996), pp. 128–36. Rodríguez, Rubén Rosario. Racism and God-Talk: A Latino/a Perspective (New York: New York University Press, 2008). Román-Odio, Clara. Sacred Iconographies in Chicana Cultural Production (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Rose, Margaret. “Delores Huerta: The United Farm Workers Union.” In A Delores Huerta Reader, edited by Mario T. García (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), pp. 3–22. Ross, Susan. “Women, Beauty, and Justice: Moving Beyond von Balthasar.” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 25, no. 1 (2005): p. 79. Roten, Johann, S.M. “The Two Halves of the Moon: Marian Anthropological Dimensions in the Common Mission of Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar.” In Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work, edited by David L. Schindler (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1991), pp. 65–86. Rubio, Julie Hanlon. Family Ethics: Practices for Christians (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2010). Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1993). Salzman, Todd and Michael Lawler. Sexual Ethics: A Theological Introduction (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2012). Schmidt, Leigh Eric. “The Making of Modern ‘Mysticism’.” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70, no. 2 (June 2003): p. 273. Schumacher, Michele. A Trinitarian Anthropology: Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar in Dialogue with Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 2014). Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology (New York: Continuum, 1995). Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. Transforming Vision: Explorations in Feminist The*logy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2011). Schwab, Gail. “Reading Irigaray (and Her Readers) in the Twenty-First Century.” In Returning to Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy, Politics, and the Question of Unity, edited by Maria C. Cimitile and Elaine P. Miller (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), pp. 25–50. Sells, Michael  A. Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Serrata, Josephine  V., R.  Lillianne Macias, Alvina Rosales, Rebecca Rodriguez, and Julia L. Perilla. “A Study of Immigrant Latina Survivors of Domestic Violence: Becoming Líderes Comunitarias (Community Leaders).” In Gendered Journeys: Women, Migration and Feminist Psychology, edited by Oliva M. Espín and Andrea L. Dottolo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 206–32. Shange, Ntozake. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf: A Choreopoem (New York: Scribner, 2010). Sharpe, Christina. Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

292 Bibliography Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Sheehan, Thomas. Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987). Sheldrake, Philip. “Michel de Certeau: Spirituality and the Practice of Everyday Life.” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 12, no. 2 (Fall 2012): p. 207. Sheppard, Phillis Isabella. Self, Culture, and Others in Womanist Practical Theology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Simcikova, Karla. To Live Fully, Here and Now: The Healing Vision in the Works of Alice Walker (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2007). Smith, Andrea. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). Smith, Anne-Marie. Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable (Sterling, VA: Pluto, 1998). Smith, Felipe. “Alice Walker’s Redemptive Art.” In Critical Essays on Alice Walker, edited by Ikenna Dieke (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999). Socolow, Susan Migden. The Women of Colonial Latin America, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Soelle, Dorothee. The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance, translated by Barbara and Martin Rumscheidt (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001). Sousa, Lisa, C. M. Stafford Poole, and James Lockhart, eds. The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso de la Vega’s Huei tlamahuiçoltica of 1649 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Speyr, Adrienne von. Geheimnis der Jugend, vol. 7, Die Nachlasswerke (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1966). Speyr, Adrienne von. Kreuz und Hölle, part 1, Die Passionen, vol. 3, Die Nachlasswerke (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1966). Speyr, Adrienne von. Theologie der Geschlechter, vol. 12, Die Nachlasswerke (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1969). Speyr, Adrienne von. Das Wort und die Mystik, part 1, Subjektive Mystik, vol. 5, Die Nachlasswerke (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1970). Speyr, Adrienne von. Das Wort und die Mystik, part 2, Objektive Mystik, vol. 6, Die Nachlasswerke (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1970). Speyr, Adrienne von. Das Hohelied (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1972). Speyr, Adrienne von. Erde und Himmel: Ein Tagebuch, vols. 8–10, Die Nachlasswerke (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1975–6). Speyr, Adrienne von. They Followed His Call: Vocation and Asceticism, translated by Erasmo Leiva (New York: Society of St. Paul, 1979). Speyr, Adrienne von. Handmaid of the Lord, translated by E. A. Nelson (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1985). Speyr, Adrienne von. The World of Prayer, translated by Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1985). Speyr, Adrienne von. The Book of All Saints: Part One, edited by Hans Urs von Balthasar and translated by D. C. Schindler (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2008). Spillers, Hortense J. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “French Feminism in an International Frame.” In In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 134–53. Stewart, Maria  W. Productions of Mrs. Maria  W.  Stewart. In Spiritual Narratives, The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Bibliography  293 Surin, Jean-Joseph. Correspondance, translated and edited by Michel de Certeau (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966). Sutton, Agnetta. “The Complementarity of the Two Sexes: Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and John Paul II.” New Blackfriars 87, no. 101 (July 2006): 418–33. Sutton, Matthew Lewis. Heaven Opens: The Trinitarian Mysticism of Adrienne von Speyr (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014). Tanner, Kathryn. The Politics of God: Christian Theologies and Social Justice (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992). Tanner, Kathryn. Christ the Key (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Terrell, JoAnne Marie. Power in the Blood: The Cross in the African American Experience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998). Thurman, Howard. A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life, edited by Walter Earl Fluker and Catherine Tumber (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1998). Tillet, Salamishah. In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece (New York: Abrams, 2021). Toland-Dix, Shirley. “Meridian and We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Alice Walker’s Evolving Vision of the Spiritual Warrior.” In Critical Insights: Alice Walker, edited by Nagueyalti Warren (Ipswich, MA: Salem, 2013), pp. 107–23. Tonstad, Linn Marie. “Sexual Difference and Trinitarian Death: Cross, Kenosis, and Hierarchy in the Theo-Drama.” Modern Theology 26, no. 4 (October 2010): p. 603. Tonstad, Linn Marie. God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude (New York: Routledge, 2016). Townes, Emilie M. In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1995). Trexler, Richard  C. Reliving Golgotha: The Passion Play of Iztapalapa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Trible, Phyllis. “Love’s Lyrics Redeemed.” In A Feminist Companion to the Song of Songs, edited by Athalya Brenner (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993), pp. 100–20. Truth, Sojourner with Olive Gilbert, Frances Titus et al. Narrative of Sojourner Truth, edited by Nell Irvin Painter (New York: Penguin, 1998). Turner, Denys. Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs (Trappist, KY: Cistercian, 1995). Turner, Denys. The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Turner, Denys. Julian of Norwich: Theologian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: The Preeminent Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (New York: Doubleday, 1990). Valenzuela, Liliana. “Virgencita, Give Us a Chance.” In Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, edited by Ana Castillo (New York: Riverhead, 1996), pp. 92–7. Vasconcelos, José. The Cosmic Race, bilingual ed., translated by Didier T. Jaén (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Vasko, Elisabeth. “The Difference Gender Makes: Nuptiality, Analogy, and the Limits of Appropriating Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology in the Context of Sexual Violence.” The Journal of Religion 94, no. 4 (October 2014): p. 504. Vásquez, Manuel A. “Rethinking Mestizaje.” In Rethinking Latino(a) Religion and Identity, edited by Miguel A. De La Torre and Gastón Espinosa (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2006), pp. 129–57.

294 Bibliography Vinson, Ben. Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Vorgrimler, Herbert. Understanding Karl Rahner: An Introduction to His Life and Thought (New York: Crossroad, 1986). Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1983). Walker, Alice. By the Light of My Father’s Smile: A Story of Requited Love, Crossing Over, and the Sexual Healing of the Soul (New York: Random House, 1998). Walker, Alice. Meridian (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003). Walker, Alice. The Third Life of Grange Copeland (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003). Walker, Alice. Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (New York: Ballantine, 2005). Walker, Alice. Possessing the Secret of Joy (New York: The New Press, 2008). Walker, Alice. The Temple of My Familiar (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). Walker, Alice. The Color Purple (New York: Penguin, 2019). Walker, Alice and Pratibha Parmar. Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women (New York: Harcourt Brace &c, 1993). Ward, Graham, ed. The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997). Ward, Graham. “Michel de Certeau’s ‘Spiritual Spaces’.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 2 (Spring 2001): p. 501. Ward, Graham. Christ and Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005). Watson, Natalia. Introducing Feminist Ecclesiology (New York: Sheffield Academic, 2002). Weber, Alison. Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). West, Traci  C. “Is a Womanist a Black Feminist? Marking the Distinctions and Defying Them: A Black Feminist Response.” In Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society, edited by Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 291–5. White, Thomas Joseph, O.P., ed. The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011). Williams, Delores. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993). Williams, Rowan. “Balthasar and Rahner.” In The Analogy of Beauty: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, edited by John Riches (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986), pp. 11–34. Williams, Rowan. Teresa of Avila (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1991). Williams, Rowan. “Afterword: Making Differences.” In Balthasar at the End of Modernity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), pp. 173–9. Williams, Rowan. On Augustine (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—­An Argument.” New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): p. 257.

Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Adkins-Jones, Amey Victoria  224 alterity  12, 16–17, 26, 105–6, 113–18, 122–39, 160, 177–8, 191, 194, 215, 224, 227, 268 analytic philosophy of religion  15, 20 Angela of Foligno  18, 78–9, 103–4, 143, 159 Angelus Silesius  103–4, 150, 155–6 Anselm of Canterbury  176–7, 217–18 Anzaldúa, Gloria  184–5, 189–92, 194–7, 202, 205, 211–12, 216–17, 220–1, 245, 248 apophasis  14, 17, 19–22, 32n.10, 83, 103–4, 113–14, 146, 191, 225, 227–31, 249, 268–9 Aquinas, Thomas  1n.1, 32–6, 40–1, 44–5, 48, 55, 111–12, 159, 171, 204–5 Aristotle  34–5, 141 Armour, Ellen  149–51 asceticism  12–13, 20–2, 44–52, 57–8, 62, 66, 69, 86–7, 109, 124, 131–2, 144–5, 152–3, 171, 197–8, 214, 251–2 Astell, Ann  158 Augustine  1n.1, 5n.12, 21, 48, 107n.8, 111, 116–18, 142, 159, 161, 231–2 Balthasar, Hans Urs von his mystical theology and connection with Speyr 63–100 and postmodernity  103–5, 111–12, 116, 119–25, 127–9, 134, 137–8, 143, 146, 149–50, 152–4, 174–5, 178–9 and Rahner  24–6, 31–3, 46n.49, 52, 54–5 and the undersides of modernity  187–8, 207–10, 214–15, 217, 230, 240, 257–9 Barth, Karl  19–20, 74–5, 83–4, 149–50 Bataille, Georges  17–18, 103–5, 147–8, 150, 159, 161 Bauerschmidt, Frederick  136–7 beatific vision  33–5, 40–1, 96–7, 204–5, see also eschaton Beatrice of Nazareth  14, 18, 144n.16 Beattie, Tina  66n.5, 69, 72–3, 76–7, 149–51 Berlant, Lauren  46–7 Bernard of Clairvaux  9, 15–16, 158–60, 165 Bible  5, 19–21, 24–5, 32–4, 38–9, 54, 66–7, 72, 74–5, 83, 85–6, 91, 106, 109–10, 121–2, 130, 135–6, 152, 167, 205, 232–3, 235,

238–41, 246–7, see also Genesis; John, the Evangelist; Paul, the Apostle; and Song of Songs Bingemer, Maria Clara  12, 46n.49, 206–7 Blackness  3–4, 7n.16, 10, 23–4, 26–7, 168–70, 187–90, 192, 222–66, 268 body Christ’s  9, 15, 82, 95, 115, 144–5, 153–4, 249 general discussion of  2–4, 6–7, 10–11, 14–16, 20–2, 44–5, 51, 74–5, 82, 88, 117, 126–7, 131, 137–8, 152, 171–3, 175–8, 193–5, 203–4, 220, 227, 234, 242, see also eros; gender; joy; jouissance; touch Mary’s  54, 85, 154, 162, see also Mary in relation to flesh  8, 10–11, 22, 26, 87, 99, 104–8, 114–17, 120–1, 137, 152–5, 161, 165, 194–5, 223–4, 226–7, 251 as semiotic  139–40, 147, 160, 207–8, see also Kristeva, Julia suffering of  13, 18, 67–8, 74, 96–8, 125–6, 144–5, 148–9, 151, 185–6, 217, 228–31, 235–6, 239, 251–7, see also crucified people; sexual violence suspicion of  10, 22–3, 141–2, 144–5, 151–2, 161–2, 171, 209–10 women’s bodies  9, 13, 16–18, 56, 69, 72, 74–5, 115–16, 143–4, 146, 151–2, 154–5, 155n.56, 162, 185, 213, 239, 244, see also gender womanist perspectives on  27, 223–4, 228, 238–9, 243–4, 247–8, 251–65, see also womanism Bonaventure  5n.12, 33–4, 40–1, 48, 111–12, 196 Bostic, Joy  10, 232, 235n.29 breath  84–5, 126–7, 155–6, 170–2, 176–7, 224–5, 227, 247–8, 259, 261–2, 269–70, see also Holy Spirit Brown, Jayna  227 Brunner, Emil  85–6 Burke, Tarana  164 Butler, Judith  11, 22, 163 Catherine of Siena  4n.10, 9, 15–16, 78–84, 86–7, 96, 148–9, 161–2, 165–6 Castañeda-Liles, María Del Socorro  212–13

296 Index Certeau, Michel de  7–8, 25–6, 104–6, 118, 122–38, 140, 155, 161–2, 178–9, 184–5, 191, 215, 225 Chapman, John  21–3 charismatic  41, 48–9, 79n.45, 234 Chávez, César  194–5, 197–9 Chrétien, Jean-Louis  10–11, 105n.5, 116–18, 144n.16 Cisneros, Sandra  209–12 Coakley, Sarah  14, 20–5, 59–60, 83n.59, 105, 161, 225–6, 259–60 Community of St. John  65–8, 86–7, 99–100 Copeland, M. Shawn  13–14, 25, 27, 96n.95, 222–4, 228–31, 236n.33, 239–40, 246, 249–52, 254–6, 259–61, 264–6 Crammer, Corinne  71–5 Crawley, Ashon  227, 231 crucified Christ  13, 15, 17, 26–7, 32n.10, 50, 61, 67–8, 93–100, 144–5, 174–5, 178, 213–21, 249, 251–7 crucified people  96, 213–21, 249, 251–7 cruciform  13, 17, 31, 46, 49–50, 95, 129–30, 134, 143–4, 174–5, 215–16, 220, 249–50, 254 darkness brilliant/luminous  1, 20–1, 195, 225, 249 divine  1, 20–1, 23–4, 27, 113–14, 143–4, 223–6, 229, 265–6 dark continent  141, 168, 225, 266 dark liver  260 dark night  127–8, see also John of the Cross dark wisdom  229–30 epistemic  49–50, 113–14, 143–4, 191, 225, 265–6 erotic  40–1, 191, 211, 233, see also eros as image of sin, death, or hell  217, 232–3, 235–6, 238 racial  4, 23–4, 27, 177, 189, 192, 206–7, 211, 225–6, 229, 255–6, 258–9, 265–6, see also Blackness; indigenous; mestizaje Davalos, Karen Mary  219–20 De La Torre, Miguel  192, 200–1 de Lubac, Henri  5n.11, 36–7, 74–5, 93n.90, 122, 124, 134–6, 155 Delille, Henriette  239–40, 249 demonic  39–40, 124–6, 215, 235, 237–8 Derrida, Jacques  22, 103–5, 148 Descartes, René  107, 141–2 Désir, Harlem  168–9 Dionysius  1, 5n.12, 15–16, 19, 21, 48, 103–4, 116–17, 128, 131, 142, 145–6, 191, 223–5, 225n.5, 266 disability  11, 39n.28, 166, 255–6 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor  159, 161–2, 173, 245–6

Eckhart, see Meister Eckhart ecology  12, 14, 19, 23, 154–7, 171–2, 195–7, 242–3, 248–9, 253–4, 258, 265–6 Elaw, Zilpha  227, 233–8, 240, 262 elitism  4, 12, 21, 44–6, 48, 50, 92–3, 132, 185–6, 189 Elizabeth of the Trinity  78, 81–2 Elizondo, Virgil  186, 188–90, 193, 206, 213–14 Endean, Philip  31n.1, 33n.13, 41n.35, 43 eros absence of  67 in mystical theology  8–9, 15–17, 20, 44–5, 70, 115–16, 128–9, 132, 141, 159–61, 172, 175–7, 185–8, 210–12, see also jouissance; Song of Songs mystical marriage  87–93 sexual reductionism  64, 73, 75–6, 91 used violently, see sexual violence womanist perspectives on  222–3, 243–4, 247–8, 257–61 eschaton  5, 35, 50–1, 84–5, 117, 120, 135, 172, 187, 226–7, 261, 265–6 Estés, Clarissa Pinkola  207 Eucharist  9, 47, 60–1, 82, 86, 126, 155n.56, 161, 174, 197–8, 203, 205, 239, 249, 259–60 Eurocentrism  3–4, 8–10, 23–4, 26–7, 49, 62, 103, 166–8, 183–4, 187, 189, 206–7, 221, 265–7 Falque, Emmanuel  113, 116n.31, 161 Fanon, Frantz  169–70, 224, 228–9 Feuerbach, Ludwig  16, 18, 148–51, 155–7, 170 flesh, see body, in relation to flesh Foucault, Michel  15–16, 22, 47n.51 Francis of Assisi  79, 82, 96, 159, 196–7, 209 French feminism, see Kristeva, Julia; Irigaray, Luce Gelassenheit  79–82, 103–4 gender essentialism  18, 22, 25–6, 52–4, 64–5, 68–82, 88–9, 105, 115, 128–9, 140, 144–6, 150, 156–7, 163–6, 172, 178, 209–10, 257, 268 fluidity  19, 64, 69, 72–4, 80, 82, 160, 198–9, see also queer neutrality  52–7, 63–4, 90–1, 268 performance  9, 69, 77, 267 Genesis  74–5, 149, 154–5, 246 Goizueta, Roberto  207, 216–17, 219–20 Gonzalez, Rodolfo Corky  194–5, 198–9 Hadewijch  9, 15–16, 18, 78, 128 hagiography  17–18, 25–6, 31, 65, 71, 77–82, 100, 178, 209–10

Index  297 Hayes, Diana  246, 248 Hegel, G. W. F.  34–5, 46, 94, 103, 107–8, 135, 141, 148, 151, 156–7, 164–7, 174–5, 177, 179, 226, 228–9 Heidegger, Martin  22, 34–5, 47–8, 58–9, 72, 80, 103–5, 107–8, 116–17, 131–4, 141–2, 148–51, 155–7, 171 hell(s)  10, 12, 65–7, 93–100, 126, 137–8, 214–15, 217–18, 220, 230, 235, 238, 251–2, 254–6, 261–2, 269–70 Henry, Michel  25–6, 104–23, 127–9, 137–8, 140, 165, 178–9, 184–5, 191, 215, 217, 224, 251, 261–2 Hildegard of Bingen  15–16, 21, 78–9, 82 Hollywood, Amy  10n.24, 14, 17–25, 99, 104–5, 140n.1, 144, 147–51, 165n.95 Holy Spirit general discussion of  1–4, 13–14, 20–1, 24–5, 268–70 in mestizo/a sources  194–7, 217–18 in postmodern sources  103–4, 106, 110, 117–18, 125–7, 135, 152, 155, 157, 161, 171 in Rahner’s theology  33–4, 41, 49–51, 57–61 in Speyr and Balthasar’s theology  65–6, 72–3, 84–5, 89, 91–3 in womanist sources  223, 231–4, 237–43, 246–7, 249–51, 259, 262, 265–6 hooks, bell  2–3, 228–9 hospitality  117–18, 128, 137–8, 167, 176–7, 200 Houchins, Sue  231–2 Huerta, Dolores  194–5, 197–8 Husserl, Edmund  105–8, 115n.27, 251 hysteria  55–6, 172–3, 175–6 Ignatius of Loyola  4n.10, 41–3, 46, 49n.57, 51, 55–6, 66, 80–4, 86–7, 96, 111–12, 122, 127, 129, 133, 136–7, 175–6, 214, 240, 262 immanence  8, 12, 14–15, 26, 37, 62, 105–23, 139, 155, 177–8, 191, 194, 224–5, 245–6, 268 Imperatori-Lee, Natalia  210 indigenous  3–4, 7n.16, 184–6, 188–9, 191, 196–7, 207, 210–13, 220–1, 227n.11, 235n.29, 241, 245, 250, 253–4, 259, 265–6 interdisciplinarity  7, 24–5, 100, 103–4, 178, 183–4, 220–1, 223–4, 268 intersectionality  3–4, 10, 13, 23, 25–7, 105, 116n.31, 163–70, 181, 267–70 Irigaray, Luce  16–18, 25–6, 35n.18, 50n.59, 72n.25, 73, 76–7, 104–5, 116, 116n.31, 126n.50, 128–9, 139–79, 184–5, 191, 196–7, 207–10, 215, 224–5, 245–6, 248, 253, 257, 259

Isasi-Díaz, Ada María  13–14, 25–7, 50n.59, 184–5, 189–90, 192–4, 202–5, 211–12, 214, 216–17, 220–1, 254–5, 265 Jackson, Rebecca Cox  10, 223, 227, 238–41, 262, 267 James, William  5–8, 15 Jantzen, Grace  14–25, 75n.34, 104–5, 149–50 Joachim of Fiore  93n.90, 134–6, 155, 187–8 Joan of Arc  78–9, 82 John the Evangelist  19–20, 33–4, 40–1, 67–8, 85–6, 110, 200 John of the Cross  5n.12, 9, 37–8, 55, 80–2, 84–5, 88–9, 111–12, 117, 127–8, 143, 155, 175 Johnson, Elizabeth  54, 87, 90n.84, 99–100 Jones, Serene  140n.4, 149–51 joy  8, 11, 13, 46, 50–2, 57–8, 80, 87–8, 91, 106, 111, 118–22, 137–9, 143–5, 176–7, 184, 187, 198–9, 201–4, 217, 223–4, 231, 233–8, 244, 249–50, 252, 257–61, 264, 266, 268–9 jouissance  26, 143–5, 147–8, 152–4, 157, 162–5, 177–8, 207–8, 224, 257 Julian of Norwich  9, 14–17, 19, 21, 78–9, 96, 145–6, 231–2 Kant, Immanuel  32n.10, 34–5, 40–1, 107, 113–14, 141, 167, 187, 226, 228–9 Keller, Catherine  14, 19–25, 104–5, 225 Kilby, Karen  33n.12, 73, 75, 91 Kristeva, Julia  22, 25–6, 104–5, 126n.50, 128–9, 139–79, 184–5, 191, 207–8, 215, 245–6, 251–2, 259 Lacan, Jacques  16–18, 22, 103–6, 122, 128–31, 134–6, 138–41, 144, 147–50, 157–61, 172–3, 178 Lacoste, Jean-Yves  105n.5, 116–18 Latino/a  24, 183–221, 251–2, 268, see also mestizaje Lee, Jarena  10, 227, 234–8, 240–1, 246–7, 262 Levenson, Deborah  218–19 Levinas, Emmanuel  16–17, 116, 116n.31 liberation  3–4, 12, 17, 23–4, 26–7, 49–50, 55–6, 59–61, 72n.25, 94, 98–9, 120–2, 139, 145, 147, 165, 171, 179, 188, 192–4, 196–9, 202, 205, 210–12, 214–17, 219, 224, 230–2, 242–3, 254–6, 265–6, 269–70 Lorde, Audre  257, 259–60 Madame Guyon  78–9, 128, 133, 159, 161–2, 175 madness  1, 123–6, 128–9, 138, 147, 151, 225, 242–3 Maréchal, Joseph  34–5, 37–8, 40–1 Marguerite Porete  9, 17–18, 143, 146n.23

298 Index Marion, Jean-Luc  105n.5, 116–18, 142 Mary  3–4, 54, 67–8, 71–2, 83, 85–6, 153–4, 156–7, 159, 162, 205–13, 219–20, 244–5, 257 Matovina, Timothy  211–12 McGinn, Bernard  6–7 McIntosh, Mark  31n.1, 32–3 Mechthild of Magdeburg  9, 17–18, 78, 84–5 Meister Eckhart  5n.12, 14–19, 80–2, 84–5, 103–4, 107–12, 123, 127–8, 133, 143, 146, 175, 225, 225n.5, 267 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  107, 116 mestizaje  3–4, 7n.16, 23, 26–7, 169–70, 183–222, 224, 258, 268 metaphysics  34–5, 40–2, 79–80, 83–4, 94, 103, 111–12, 123–4, 141–2, 150–2, 156–7, 163, 165, 179, 229–30 Metz, Johann Baptist  45n.46, 265 monasticism  1, 12, 44n.44, 45–6, 48, 50, 66, 128, 131, 136–7, 266–7 Moten, Fred  226–7, 231 mujerista, see Isasi-Díaz, Ada María Neo-Platonism  10–11, 19, 74–5, 83–4, 91–2, 141–2, 151–2, 159, 161–2, 188, 225n.5, 266 Nicholas of Cusa  14, 19, 136–7, 155n.57, 225 Nietzsche, Friedrich  19–20, 50, 103, 107, 114, 149–53, 184–5, 247n.61 nothingness  8, 11–13, 27, 80–1, 90–1, 128, 130, 141–2, 146, 183, 224–31, 263, 265–6 obedience  8, 25–6, 46–8, 63–100, 103–4, 112, 121, 153, 194, 207–8, 212–13, 233–4, 237–40, 254–6, 261–2, 268 Origen  21, 40–1, 48, 111–12 Orthodox (Eastern)  60n.86, 161, 167, 176–7, 204–5 Paul, the Apostle  1n.1, 19–21, 33–5, 40–1, 41n.37, 57–8, 60n.85, 71n.23, 74–5, 85–6, 93, 99–100, 111, 232–4, 251, 259 patriarchy  3, 9, 13, 20–3, 26–7, 50, 65–6, 76–7, 82, 139, 147, 155, 157, 168, 172, 185, 190, 192–4, 206, 210–12, 221, 224–5, 227, 237–8, 243–4, 246–7, 251–7, 261, 264, 269–70 phallocentrism  9, 16–17, 20, 76, 116, 128–9, 139, 141–7, 151–7, 165, 171, 178–9, 207–10, 224–5, 268 phenomenology  2, 5–6, 10–11, 22, 26, 37–8, 45, 48, 104–22, 161, 178, 224, 251, 264–5, 268 Pineda-Madrid, Nancy  217–18 pneumatology, see Holy Spirit popular religion  183–4, 206, 211–14 prayer in Balthasar and Speyr  77–8, 80, 86–8, 92, 97–8

Black  227, 232–40, 243–7, 249–50, 253–4, 258, 262–4 in Coakley  21–3 mestizo/a  183–4, 196–203, 206, 208, 212, 220–1 in postmodernity  112–13, 117–18, 125–6, 131, 137–8, 171, 176 in Rahner  25–6, 32, 48–50, 57–62, 251–2 thinking  2, 24–5, 72n.25, 105n.5, 137–8, 269–70 visionary, see visions prophetic  20–1, 38, 41, 43, 51–2, 62, 81, 83n.59, 85, 87, 121, 167, 193–4, 198, 205, 232–3, 237–8, 249–50, 262, 269–70, see also liberation; visions Przywara, Erich  74–5, 80–1, 83–4 Pseudo-Dionysius, see Dionysius psychoanalysis  2, 22, 26, 65–6, 104–7, 128–31, 133, 139–79, 191, 209–10, 251–2, 268 Quaker  7n.15, 200, 233–4 queer  9, 11, 14, 18–19, 39n.28, 73–4, 91–2, 116n.31, 123, 163, 165, 191–2, 210, 216–17, 220–3, 255–6, 266–7, see also eros; gender race, see Blackness; Eurocentrism; indigenous; and mestizaje Rahner, Karl and Balthasar  63–4, 66, 71, 77–9, 85–7, 93n.91, 98, 100 his mystical theology  3n.8, 24–6, 31–62 and postmodern philosophers  103–5, 111–13, 116–17, 121–2, 127–34, 138, 140, 145, 150–1, 153–7, 164–5, 171, 178–9 and Latino/a and Black traditions  184–6, 207–8, 214, 240, 245–6, 251–2, 261–2, 265 Rivera, Mayra  116n.31, 251 Rodriguez, Jeanette  207 Rodríguez, Rubén Rosario  189 Sanctuary Movement  199–200 scripture, see Bible sexual violence  64, 70, 74, 82–3, 90, 92, 164, 185, 188, 190, 192–4, 199–200, 213, 218, 224, 235–6, 243, 246–7, 252–5, 258–60, 266 sexuality, see eros Soelle, Dorothee  51–2, 52n.63, 203n.65 Song of Songs  20–1, 73, 80, 91–3, 160, 258 Spee, Friedrich  55–6 Speyr, Adrienne von  25–6, 52, 54–5, 63–100, 105, 116, 119–20, 123–6, 128–9, 137–8, 140, 143, 146, 153–4, 164–5, 174–5, 178–9, 184–5, 207–10, 214–15, 217, 230, 240, 244–5, 251–2, 257, 259

Index  299 Spillers, Hortense  168, 251 Spinoza, Baruch  16, 107, 112–13 spiritual senses  40–1, 117, 126 Stewart, Maria  232–3, 235–6, 238, 240, 262 Surin, Jean-Joseph  7–8, 123–8, 133, 136–8, 215 Teresa of Avila  6n.13, 9, 21, 37–8, 55–7, 77–82, 103–4, 117–18, 128, 133, 136–7, 139–40, 143, 148–9, 155n.57, 172–6, 178, 196, 231–2, 251–2, 259, 267 Thérèse of Lisieux  81–2 Thurman, Howard  225, 262 Tonstad, Linn  73–5, 84 touch  8, 40–1, 59, 88, 115, 117, 143–4, 152–3, 157, 177–8, 204–5, 215–16, 257, 259–60, 269–70 Townes, Emilie  224–5, 227–8, 231, 246–8, 250, 258 Trinity  20–1, 46n.47, 58–60, 64, 72–5, 81, 84–5, 87–90, 92–5, 109–11, 119–20, 125, 134, 141–2, 155, 161, 176–7, 214–15, 257

Truth, Sojourner  10, 227, 235–8, 243, 246 Turner, Denys  5n.12, 7–8, 80n.49, 145–6 Underhill, Evelyn  4n.10, 5n.12 Valenzuela, Liliana  210 Vasconcelos, José  187–90, 192–3 Vasko, Elisabeth  74 vernacular theology  9, 55–6 visions  1, 15, 32, 37–41, 55, 67–8, 77–9, 96–7, 126, 157, 199, 208–9, 233–41, 244–5, 247, 253–4 Walker, Alice  27, 222–66 Wesleyan  7n.15, 231–5, 237–9, 246–7 Williams, Delores  13–14, 246–8, 250, 255 witches, persecution of  15–16, 55–6 womanism  7n.16, 10, 23, 26–7, 169–70, 222–66, 268 Wynter, Sylvia  3, 49, 227n.11 yoga  170–2, 196–7