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Deforming God: Why Nothing Really Matters A Lacanian Reading of Thomas Aquinas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Tina Beattie
Tina Beattie*
Affiliation:
Digby Stuart College, University of Roehampton, London, SW15 5PH
*
Email: t.beattie@roehampton.ac.uk
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Abstract

This paper takes its cue from studies that point to the influence of Thomas Aquinas on the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan and explores key Lacanian themes of language, desire, God/the real, embodiment and gender from the perspective of the Summa Theologiae. To illustrate how a Lacanian perspective opens new interpretative possibilities with regard to the Summa, it focuses on language and desire, on the doctrines of creation ex nihilo and the incarnation, and on Thomas's attempt to incorporate gendered Aristotelian concepts of form and matter into Christian theology. It argues that it is possible to resist Lacan's nihilism, while allowing his psychoanalytical approach to language to bring about a deconstructive reading of Aristotelian philosophy from the perspective of Christian theology. This allows the reconciling paradox of the incarnation to challenge the dualism of form and matter inherent in philosophical cosmologies, to offer a more dynamic understanding of the significance of material creation and its incorporation into God by way of the resurrected body of Christ. A Lacanian approach brings to light hidden and neglected dimensions of Thomas's theology, making possible a postmodern Thomism, which offers a viable theological response to some of the most challenging questions facing theology today, around questions of language, desire, gender and creation.

Keywords

Thomas AquinasLacantheologypsychoanalysiscreation ex nihiloAristotelianism
Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 95 , Issue 1056 , March 2014 , pp. 218 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 The Dominican Council

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Footnotes

1

This paper is based on my recently published book: Tina Beattie, Theology After Postmodernity: Divining the Void – A Lacanian Reading of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Further references for all the ideas presented here can be found in that book.

References

2 See Holsinger, Bruce W., The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Labbie, Erin Felicia, Lacan's Medievalism (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)Google Scholar. See also Pound, Marcus, “Lacan's Return to Freud: A Case of Theological Ressourcement?” in Flynn, Gabriel and Murray, Paul D. (eds) Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology (Oxford University Press, 2011): pp. 440–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See Beattie, Tina, New Catholic Feminism: Theology and Theory (London and New York: 2006)Google Scholar.

4 Rocca, Gregory P. OP, “Aquinas on God-Talk: Hovering over the Abyss”, Theological Studies, 54 (1993): pp. 641–61, p. 641CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006), p. 374Google Scholar.

6 Thomas Aquinas, Summa super libros Sententiarum I, 8, 1, 1 ad 4, quoted in Rocca, ibid., pp. 648–49.

7 Turner, Denys, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. xivCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Fisher, David H., “Introduction: Framing Lacan?” in Wyschogrod, Edith, Crownfield, David, and Raschke, Carl A. (eds), Lacan and Theological Discourse (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 20Google Scholar.

9 Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 21Google Scholar. Taylor attributes the phrase “multiple modernities” to Victor Turner.

10 Caputo, John D., !Spectral Hermeneutics” in Caputo, John D. and Vattimo, Gianni, After the Death of God, edited by Robbins, Jeffrey W. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 85Google Scholar.

11 Gilson, Étienne, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1961), p. 93Google Scholar.

12 Cf. Johnson, Elizabeth, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992)Google Scholar.

13 See Kilby, Karen, “Aquinas, the Trinity and the Limits of Understanding”, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 7 (4), 2005: pp. 414–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 See Lacan, Jacques, Le Séminaire Livre XX: Encore (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975), p. 137Google Scholar.

15 All parenthetical references are to the Summa Theologiae: Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Benziger Bros., 1947) available online at http://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/index.html [accessed 5 November 2013].

16 Stump, Eleonore, Aquinas (Arguments of the Philosophers Series; London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 198Google Scholar.

17 For a reading of Thomas in the context of the new physics, see Arraj, James, The Mystery of Matter: Nonlocality, Morphic Resonance, Synchronicity and the Philosophy of Nature of Thomas Aquinas (Midland: Inner Growth Books, 1996)Google Scholar.

18 Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, p. 32.

19 Ibid., p. 33.

20 These arguments are explored in Lacan's typically obtuse style in Lacan, Jacques, Le Séminaire Livre XX: Encore (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975)Google Scholar; Lacan, , On Feminine Sexuality – the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore, 1972–1973, ed. Miller, Jacques-Alain, trans. Fink, Bruce (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999)Google Scholar. See Beattie, Theology after Postmodernity, pp. 275–9.

21 For a Kabbalistic interpretation of this, see Reinhard, Kenneth and Lupton, Julia Reinhard, “The Subject of Religion: Lacan and the Ten Commandments”, Diacritics, 33 (2), 2003: pp.71–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Beattie, Theology after Postmodernity, pp. 314–5.

22 See Aquinas, Thomas, On Boethius on the Trinity – Questions 1–4, trans. Brennan, Rose E. S.H.N. (Herder, 1946)Google Scholar. See also Beattie, Theology after Postmodernity, pp. 356–61.