Introduction
Desire in recent theology
This book examines the distinctive account of desire developed in the writings of the Spanish Discalced Carmelite friar John of the Cross (1542–91), and locates its vital significance for modern depictions of Christian life and the transformation of the self. John is undeniably one of the major theological figures of the sixteenth century, despite extensive subsequent periods of neglect. As Teresa of Avila’s junior partner in her reform of the Carmelite Order, he helped to institute numerous friaries and convents that, even before his death, established a distinguishable way of life for the Discalced Carmelite Order. His poetry represents a pinnacle of Spanish art’s so-called ‘Golden Age’. Many of his most famous poems depict erotic love as vividly as any in the literary corpus. His four prose works, written as guides to the religious and laypeople with whose spiritual care he was charged, and which read as commentaries on three of these poems, offer deep wisdom on the Christian life. They detail the path of spiritual ascent in the Christian life, a course undertaken by a soul seeking nothing less than union with God. Such diversity in a relatively small corpus has occasioned a range of interpretations of John’s writings. Most focus predominantly either on his poetry at the expense of his prose or vice versa, or else single-mindedly point out other apparent contradictions in his writing. By contrast, I contend that John’s delineation of the changes that are undergone by the ‘soul’ in the spiritual ascent is in fact rooted in a distinctive and systematic theological vision. A rich notion of desire animates his poetry and prose works and draws with creativity and novelty on biblical, Platonic, and Christian sources. This book traces the crucial role played by this underlying erotic driver of the spiritual ascent, and suggests that it represents a unique working out of the scholastic narrative of the graced
John of the Cross: Desire, Transformation, and Selfhood. Sam Hole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sam Hole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863069.003.0001
transformation of the sensory appetites and the faculties of intellect, memory, and will. John offers an account of the transformation of the self through the progressive purification of desire which is, accordingly, worthy of renewed contemporary theological attention.
I. Desire, transformation, and selfhood: four contributions
This chapter begins by laying out four significant contributions offered by John. I then turn to survey recent theological approaches to desire, before finally indicating, as will be laid out more fully in the Conclusion, the resources offered by John’s thought that may aid the ongoing theological recovery of desire.
Four interconnected aspects of John’s thought constitute, I suggest, a bold and sophisticated account of desire that may enrich current research and reflection. None of these aspects is, by itself, unique to John. Taken as a whole, however, they form an account that has not been adequately recognized in recent academic studies of John’s thought, and which may deepen and enrich the theological grounding of recent accounts of desire. Accordingly, I now programmatically describe these four aspects.
In the first place, John understands that a description of human desire requires reference to the entirety of the self, which he describes using the equivalent terminology of the ‘soul’ (John’s understanding of the soul should not be anachronistically confused with modern understandings of that term).1 John recognizes that desire is not simply to do with a narrow aspect of the anthropology of the soul—be it the passions, the
1 In line with Aquinas, John understands the ‘soul’ to be the ‘form of the body’. His use of the notion therefore refers both to the physical and spiritual aspects of a single unified entity. In modern discussion, however, there is a rather different tendency to speak of the soul as distinct from the body. To avoid misinterpretation, therefore, although I continue to speak of the ‘soul’ when considering John’s writings, at times (particularly when considering the modern significance of John’s thought) I refer to the ‘self’. It is in the language of selfhood that modern discussion would recognize the unity of the human in its physical and spiritual aspects. ‘Self’ accordingly better represents John’s thought for modern discussion than would reference to the ‘soul’.
will, or a particular conception of sexuality. He frequently evokes the notion of ‘desire’ through the technical anthropological terminology of the sensory appetites (apetitos), passions (pasiones), affects (afectos), and will (voluntad), using an anthropology that is largely—though by no means entirely—aligned with that of Thomas Aquinas. He also regularly explores the notion through his account of the growth of love (amor) or charity (caridad) in the soul. Yet desire serves a less technical but more unifying role in John’s thought through a series of terms that are typically translated using terms such as ‘desire’, ‘yearning’, ‘seeking’, and ‘longing’ (ansia, aspiración, codicia, concupiscencia, gustar, hambre, inclinación, pretender, querer), and above all in the term ‘desire’ itself (desear/deseo).
As I observe shortly, recent theological revival of interest in desire has tended to focus on desire as eros, placing great emphasis on the sexual implications of desire. John offers a more holistic theological account of desire, deploying a rich range of language to depict the progressive purification and redirection of the soul’s desires as it is brought to union with God.
The second salient aspect of John’s account of desire is that it is embedded in a holistic account of the Christian life, articulated in terms of the spiritual ascent, which lays out a process by which the soul’s desires are transformed. There exists a long Christian tradition of the discernment of desires (or sometimes ‘passions’) that stretches from the Desert Fathers, Evagrius Pontus, and Ignatius of Loyola into the present day. In common with all these figures, John recognizes that the spiritual ascent requires a transformation in the soul’s understanding of—and consequent response to—its desires. A soul’s desires may either be lifegiving or destructive to itself and others; the spiritual ascent accordingly demands growth in discernment of those desires that are good. For John, souls are typically enslaved to the desires of their sensual appetites, with the consequent distortion of their spiritual faculties of intellect, will, and memory. Moreover, John argues, while the purification of these sinful desires should begin in the sensual appetites, these desires permeate the whole soul. John’s sketch of the ascent of Mount Carmel accordingly graphically lays out the necessity, for any transformation to take place, of the progressive and total purification of first sensual and then spiritual desire.
This spiritual ascent, traversed through the ‘dark night’ of the soul, is a task requiring extended ascetic discipline. It will, John emphasizes, involve engaging with the depths of the soul, bringing to light the motivations, fears, and hopes that for most lie hidden from view. This is not simply a matter of self-improvement: divine grace (and not merely human effort) is integral to the spiritual ascent. Moreover, as John emphasizes in a manner distinctive to much of the theological tradition, depth of feeling is not in itself a good guide to the value of specific desires. In contrast to many understandings of desire in recent academic contributions, in other words, this study contends that John’s writings more adequately represent the distortions, conscious and unconscious, of much ordinary human desire.
Despite his stark vision of the depth and pervasiveness of human sin, though, John offers the striking combination of this deep awareness of sin with a highly optimistic vision of the extent of transformation that is possible in this life. His poetic depiction of this union draws on all his powers of language to describe a pneumatologically driven participation in God that is as positive and hopeful about the potential for human transformation as any in the Christian tradition. In short, John sophisticatedly draws on and extends historic theological reflections on the many kinds of desire that may arise in the soul, offering a holistic account of the spiritual ascent to describe their purification and redirection.
Third, John’s guidance on the discernment, purification, and redirection of the soul’s desires is set within a nuanced appreciation of the relationship between the desire in the created order and desire as it pertains to God Godself. The created order is, in John’s vision, itself suffused with desire. The transformation of the soul accordingly requires a concomitant transformation, in the course of the spiritual ascent, in the extent to which divine desire is recognized to suffuse the created order. John uses images of the beauty of the created order, as well as bold variations of language in both poetry and prose forms, to explore the quality of this desire. And, in his most tantalizing indications in the final pages of the Canticle and Flame, he suggests that the desire experienced by the transformed soul is equivalent to the love that binds together the persons of the Trinity. Desire is, it might be said, not simply the means by which the soul attains an entirely distinct end: desire is both the means and the
end of the spiritual ascent. John would have been well aware of the theological dangers in attributing desire to God—notably, as modern thought has highlighted, with reference to the difficulties occasioned by implying that God may lack something. Yet he is willing to pursue this daring path. Evidently he envisages that the soul’s desire, when appropriately purified and directed, is participatively reflective of the inner life of God.
Yet John’s distinctiveness with regard to the soul’s discernment of its desires lies in his recognition that this reordering of the soul’s perception of the created order is itself essential for a true vision of God. John recognizes, long before Feuerbach, the extent to which projection shapes the human relationship with God. John’s account of human projection does not come in the context of an argument for atheism, however, but rather in the course of his account of how souls may come to know God. The soul’s projection of certain visions of God is, in John’s account, a result of the self-centredness of the untransformed soul. The ‘dark night of the soul’ is perhaps the most renowned element of John’s response to this dilemma: a ‘darkening’ of the soul’s attachment to created objects so that in ‘dark faith’ the soul may proceed on the spiritual ascent. But the dark night is set by John within the context of a far broader graced and life-long transformation of the soul’s desires so that they may be united with God’s own desire.
Fourth and finally, study of John’s treatment of desire, and his associated insights on affectivity, experience, and prayer, must not be consigned to a subdiscipline of spiritual, mystical, or pastoral theology, but needs treating as central to his own theological vision. The inseparability of the theological from these latter disciplines has been proclaimed for many decades. Yet precisely what this entails for systematic theology remains a point of contention, and recent systematic theologies have attempted in diverse ways to draw on the wisdom of these fields to theological ends.2
John’s works offer a valuable resource for this knotty dilemma. His works may be primarily directed at those in his spiritual care, but this by
2 See, for example, the diverse approaches taken in the recent systematic theologies of Kathryn Tanner, Graham Ward, Katherine Sonderegger, and Sarah Coakley.
no means makes them belong to a different genre from the theological. His writings are, as A.N. Williams neatly puts it, ‘not a set of how-to manuals on spiritual discipline or prayer, but a series of reflections on the conditions under which human persons come to God and on the identity of the God who is sought in contemplation’.3 Increase in theological understanding is, for John, inseparable from treading the spiritual ascent that is encountered above all through prayer, in its various states of meditation and contemplation. Moreover, in contrast to any account of prayer that describes the undertaking without reference to that most intimate of human activities (namely, sexual desire), John offers an account of prayer that highlights the connections between prayer and the full range of human desires. An underlying theme in the middle chapters of this work is accordingly the historical question of how John himself understood theology itself to relate to the entirety of human life and experience. In the final chapter, I suggest ways in which reflection on John’s understanding of the nature of theology may aid consideration of the comparable questions that press on theologians today.
In sum, this book seeks both to restore desire to its rightful centrality in John’s thought, and to promote this account as worthy of contemporary attention. Desire serves as a constellating metaphor for other key themes in John’s thought, among them the search, the journey, and the relationship between darkness and light. John recognizes that desires pervade the individual, and provides a subtle anthropology of the soul that allows for their intricate analysis. His account of the spiritual ascent, with its progressive movement from deep sin to union with God, is framed around the discernment, purification, and redirection of the soul’s desires. And John’s heightened sense of the soul’s desires is underpinned by the way in which desire is emphasized as a fundamental feature not simply of the created order but of God himself.
This book therefore engages in an in-depth historical study of John’s thought. Moreover, it undertakes this historical task with sustained attention to the context of John’s thought. It provides, in other words, an intellectual history of John’s novel articulation of desire, yet it contends
3 A.N. Williams, ‘The Doctrine of God in San Juan de la Cruz’, Modern Theology 30, no. 4 (2014): 502.
that such historical understanding can be most profoundly realized through sensitive attention to the social, economic, ecclesial, and wider cultural context in which these ideas were both articulated by John and also received in subsequent centuries. Such an approach recognizes that language shifts in meaning over time, possibly obscuring what someone in the receding past may once have tried to convey; attention to the context in which ideas were articulated and received is necessary if they are to be appropriately understood today.
It has, admittedly, been a commonplace since at least the 1970s for intellectual historians to emphasize the importance of study of context.4 Such an emphasis recognizes that study of the context of writings and their reception, far from committing the ‘genetic fallacy’ of claiming that to explain the background or origins of an idea is to explain the idea away, is a necessary part of the sensitive translation of that work to modern thought. Yet although this commitment is now widely assumed in historical theology, a fair proportion of works continue either to treat a past thinker’s writings as straightforwardly applicable to modern thought, or restrict investigation of context to exploration of the possible intellectual influences on the topic of study. Through the delivery of an in-depth and contextualized historical study of John’s thought and its reception, this work aims to challenge that continuing tendency.
Accordingly, in relation to John’s own time it attends, for instance, to the importance of the interplay between John’s formal academic theological study and his extensive reforming activities within the Carmelite order. It examines contemporary Spanish understandings of language and poetic form. And it notes the resonances of John’s work with the series of contemporaneous theological reappraisals of selfhood influentially developed by Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Avila. Arguably, one of the reasons that it has been tempting in modern times to depict John as a timeless ‘mystical’ writer is the relative absence of explicit and easily understood references in his work that contextualize his writing; this work’s study of the setting of John’s writing serves as a reminder of the necessity for good theology of attending to his historical context.
4 For an influential argument to this end see Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory 8 (1969): 3–53.
It is also essential, however, to attend to the context that informed the reception of John’s work in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter 1 traces the significance of John’s writing for the emergence of modern conceptions of mysticism and spirituality, unpicking the context from which these frameworks emerged so as to release John from these constrictive impositions on his thought. Subsequent chapters emphasize that any interpretation of John through the lens of concepts such as experience, affectivity, contemplation—and of course desire— must attend to the complex and subtle shifts over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in usage of these concepts. During this time John has been drawn into a series of modern debates. He has been co-opted into disputes within Roman Catholicism, largely divided along the lines of religious orders, on the meaning of contemplation. He has become, for some, a standard-bearer of a faith that downplays or even rejects ecclesial institutions and authority in favour of the individual’s encounter with God. His mid-twentieth-century role as a Spanish national hero has further obscured the full shape of his life and thought. In short, attention to the context of modern reception of John is crucial to prevent the current framework of discussions about desire and many other concepts from being naively or unconsciously projected onto John’s texts. Whether reading modern studies of John or reading the most widely used modern English translation of John’s writings (which has a particular tendency to impose modern frameworks of thought on John’s words), careful attention to the context in which ideas were received and reworked is required if his genuinely constructive and distinctive theological take on desire is to emerge with clarity.
Yet this in-depth study of John and his reception is not undertaken for purely historical purposes. Instead, what follows is presented in the belief that this approach generates constructive outcomes for systematic theology, since successful theological enquiry must ‘think with’ the sources of the tradition if it is to deliver systematic theological insight. Far from being enquiry of merely arcane interest, detailed historical research of the sort undertaken here is resolutely theologically constructive insofar as it delineates the parameters of the tradition and opens up lines of thinking closed off by more recent modes of conceiving of the theological task. This an important reminder for much theological
enquiry. It is, however, particularly pertinent for the theological study of desire. Recent discussion of the theme has been extensively conducted with reference to contributions from continental philosophy and its engagement with Freudianism, a tradition that has tended to show far less interest in the kind of detailed historical work undertaken here. Recovery of John of the Cross’s understanding of desire may therefore significantly enrich the options for theological articulation of this theme.
II. Desire in recent theology
The past two decades have witnessed academic theological circles turn increasing attention to the theme of desire. Multiple scholarly conversations using the term have developed, often exhibiting little explicit engagement with one another. Yet the dominant strands of debate have, I suggest, only partially engaged desire’s full theological implications and potential.
For much of the second half of the twentieth century, the dominant theological definition of desire was provided by the Swedish Lutheran Anders Nygren, in his enduringly influential but highly problematic analysis of eros and agape as two fundamentally opposed understandings of love.5 For Nygren, eros was an essentially egocentric love that takes the form of an acquisitive desire for goodness and beauty. Agape was the gratuitous, self-sacrificial love that finds expression in the cross and takes the form of wholehearted surrender to God. Nygren himself preferred to use the Greek terms, but the implications of his work for English terminology became widely accepted: love, as a shorthand for Christian agape, remained an acceptable theological term; desire, cryptically a reference to Platonic eros, became unacceptable. Nygren’s arguments had a huge influence towards the neglect of desire in both Protestant and Catholic circles. That influence was greatest in Protestant discussions where, endorsed by such heavyweight figures as Karl Barth, Nygren’s
5 Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (London: SPCK, 1953). See also the insightful critiques by M.C. D’Arcy, The Mind and Heart of Love, Lion and Unicorn: A Study in Eros and Agape (London: Faber and Faber, 1954) and Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1997), 211–14.
definitions achieved the status of near orthodoxy, and desire became a little-used theological term.6
Catholic ignorance of the theological significance of desire was also caused, though, by simple lack of interest in the theme in the first half of the century. Neo-Thomist interpretation of Thomas Aquinas emphasized his Aristotelian heritage in a manner that neglected the aspects of Thomas’s thought which most evidently displayed his interest in desire. Accordingly, although the term has been the subject of much debate in Catholic theology in the past half century, it has been within the context of a far more restricted understanding of desire—namely, the longrunning controversy concerning Henri de Lubac’s study of the ‘natural desire for the vision of God’ (desiderium naturale visionis Dei). It is with reference to this ongoing debate concerning the relationship between nature and grace that desire is still primarily used—the excellent recent Encyclopedia of Christian Theology, for example, directs readers interested in desire to the entry on the ‘supernatural’.7 While recognizing the importance of that particular theological discussion, I suggest that one negative impact of the terms of debate as they have emerged has been to obscure the broader theological possibilities of the theme of desire.
Given this sustained inattention to and near dismissal of desire in theological circles, it is perhaps unsurprising that the increasing and widespread theological interest in desire that has arisen in recent decades has been largely inspired by the prominence of desire in other academic traditions such as continental philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, and semiotics. Desire features strongly in—to name just a few of the major theorists of the last seventy years—the work of Lacan, Barthes, Levinas, Deleuze, Ricoeur, Foucault, and Derrida. The analyses of desire provided by these thinkers have proved highly attractive to many theologians.8 The most notable early impact of their work was the explosion
6 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.2: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, trans. G.W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 734.
7 See p. 436 in volume 1 of Jean-Yves Lacoste, ed., Encyclopedia of Christian Theology (New York; London: Routledge, 2005).
8 For a sense of this enormous variety, see Margaret R. Miles, Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine’s Confessions (New York: Crossroad, 1992) using Barthes’s theory of textual pleasure, Richard Kearney, ‘Desire of God’, in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 112–45, examining the possibilities for a non-ontotheological desire for God in Derrida’s writings, and Mario Costa, ‘For the Love of God: The Death of Desire and the Gift of Life’, in Toward
of theological interest in sexuality and the body that occurred during the 1980s and 1990s, which employed ‘desire’ as a primary interpretive lens for engaging with these areas. Michel Foucault’s interest in the historical production of cultural discourses around concepts such as sexuality was an important background influence. Gender analysis, borrowed from women’s studies, also figured prominently. An increased methodological emphasis on experience as a source for theological reflection gave greater scope to phenomenological analyses of the human experience of gender and sexuality.9 During the 1990s, these developments proved of particular value for feminist theologians, who used these insights to attend urgently to the importance of eros for accounts of personal identity, power relationships and politics.10
This interest in desire—often referred to simply as eros—in relation to questions of sexuality and the body has in the last two decades been maintained, while expanding in the range of theoretical and theological dialogue partners. Four recent works may serve as representative of the various approaches typically taken in this most recent wave of thinking. The Embrace of Eros, Margaret Kamitsuka’s recent edited volume, exemplifies how studies of eros in historical theology and critical theory may aid theologically focused reflections on sexuality.11 The writers of the recent Seducing Augustine explore the relation of desire, asceticism, and sexuality in the Confessions by drawing variously on literary theory, theology, and philosophy.12 Jean-Luc Marion examines the ‘erotic phenomenon’ using the lens of a phenomenological account of human
a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline, ed. Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 38–62, re-examining the age-old questions of the relation of whether desire implies lack and whether desire can be satisfied in the post-metaphysical writings of Lacan and Derrida. The analytic philosophical tradition has undertaken thoughtful consideration of desire, which has not been so dominated by sexual desire (e.g., William Braxton Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)), but this has not been extensively taken up in theological discussion.
9 This is neatly summed up by Margaret D. Kamitsuka, ed., The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires and Sexuality in Christianity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 7–8.
10 For an overview of various approaches taken here, see Sandra Friedman and Alexander Irwin, ‘Christian Feminism, Eros and Power in Right Relation’, in Christian Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender, ed. Elizabeth Stuart and Adrian Thatcher (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 152–67.
11 Kamitsuka, The Embrace of Eros
12 Virginia Burrus, Mark D. Jordan, and Karmen MacKendrick, Seducing Augustine: Bodies, Desires, Confessions (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).
interpersonal love, a love that Marion understands (he asserts in his final pages) to find its fullest expression in love of the divine.13 And the range of essays in Towards a Theology of Eros contain a wealth of reflection on many of the most pertinent contemporary topics, among them eros in Plato’s Symposium, reading the Song of Songs, and the relationship between the passions, love, and desire.14 The renewed philosophical attention to desire, exhibiting great diversity though continuing to draw largely from the continental philosophical tradition, shows no sign of abating.
This explosion of theological attention to desire in the last quarter century occasioned the writing of various historically focused studies of desire in Christian thought. Three surveys written in the 1990s examined subtle shifts over time in the patristic and medieval understanding of desire, recognizing the intertwining of biblical, Platonic, and Christian ideas in the repeated reworking of the theme.15 In particular, the importance of scriptural and literary influences is well studied in Denys Turner’s work, which examines how the erotic themes in the Song of Songs, reflecting desire in its earthly and divine fullness, were taken up in medieval monastic literature. Likewise, recent historical studies of specific figures such as Gregory of Nyssa,16 Augustine,17 pseudo-Dionysius,18 Aquinas,19 and Kierkegaard20 take time to study the role of desire in their respective theologies, doing so with a subtlety
13 Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
14 Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller, eds, Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006).
15 Denys Turner, Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1995); Bernard McGinn, ‘God as Eros: Metaphysical Foundations of Christian Mysticism’, in New Perspectives on Historical Theology: Essays in Memory of John Meyendorff, ed. Bradley Nassif (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 1996), 189–209; Ysabel de Andía, ‘Eros and Agape: The Divine Passion of Love’, Communio 24 (1997): 29–50.
16 Sarah Coakley, ed., Re-Thinking Gregory of Nyssa (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
17 Burrus, Jordan, and MacKendrick, Seducing Augustine; John E. Thiel, ‘Augustine on Eros, Desire, and Sexuality’, in The Embrace of Eros, ed. Margaret D. Kamitsuka (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 67–82.
18 Sarah Coakley and Charles M. Stang, eds, Re-Thinking Dionysius the Areopagite (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
19 Nicholas E. Lombardo, The Logic of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), though this understanding of ‘desire’ is focused on Aquinas’s account of the affects in the Prima Secundae
20 Carl S. Hughes, Kierkegaard and the Staging of Desire: Rhetoric and Performance in a Theology of Eros (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).
and conceptual precision unknown in previous studies. These works are all invaluable for a broader appreciation of how desire has been understood within the theological tradition, and represent the set of works alongside which this study (with important shifts in emphasis) may most obviously be located.
Finally, again likely stimulated by this philosophical revival, various recent short theological works predominantly aimed at a popular audience have recognized the theological possibilities of the theme of desire. Philip Sheldrake’s study of desire and selfhood, in particular, provides a sensitive and accessible overview of how a focus on the desiring nature of the self may aid consideration of the Christian life.21 Sebastian Moore and Michael Buckley have also in recent decades written insightfully on the theme.22 (It is telling of the way in which academic theology has sometimes limited its terms of reference that it is among this set of thinkers, all professed either in Benedictine or Jesuit settings, that the most astute and pastorally toned insights into the importance of desire for human selfhood are to be found.) Yet these works, despite mining a rich seam of theological thinking on desire, have not had as much influence as they might on current theological discussion of desire. Recognizing this lacuna, this study also draws on these various books, seeking to demonstrate the significance of their pastoral and affective insights for a systematic theological account of desire.
It is in aid of these diverse conversations concerning the constructive theological significance of desire that this study recovers John’s articulation of the theme. In particular, it suggests that the four interconnected aspects of John’s distinctiveness outlined at the start of this Introduction may enrich current theological discussion of desire. It is, accordingly, to these that I now turn.
First, John’s distinctive articulation of desire challenges the postFreudian obsessions of recent decades. The reductive physiological overtones that have often accompanied discussion of desire, approached
21 Philip Sheldrake, Befriending Our Desires, 3rd ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2016).
22 Sebastian Moore, Jesus the Liberator of Desire (New York: Crossroad, 1989); Michael J. Buckley, SJ, What Do You Seek? The Questions of Jesus as Challenge and Promise (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016).
