No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Prayerful Dispossession and the Grammar of Thinking Theologically: Sarah Coakley and Gillian Rose
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Gillian Rose's re-thinking of Hegel in the wake of twentieth century ‘right’ and ‘left’ wing Hegelianisms has offered occasion for a recovery of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as more than simply the narration of the way consciousness absorbs its objects, as textbook accounts often suggest. Rose's suggestion is that Hegel offers a program of radical criticism that destabilises the modern ego in speculative thought itself. Sarah Coakley's recent first volume, of a proposed four, of her systematic theology triangulating Trinity, prayer and dispossessive spiritual practices provides a fruitful dialogue partner for Rose's project in that Coakley offers a mode of thinking about prayer deeply attentive to the shape of spiritual discipline and it's relation to theological grammar. This paper contests that it is precisely in the non-objectivity of divine being, as thought by Rose and Coakley, that we find resources for conceptualising thinking itself as a dispossessive spiritual act. The theological and the spiritual (theory and praxis) cannot, therefore, be partitioned out without violence being done to the act of thinking itself.
- Type
- Original Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2014 The Dominican Council
Footnotes
*
I would like to thank Sarah Coakley for her helpful and constructive feedback on this piece.
References
1 Williams, Rowan, ‘Between Politics and Metaphysics: Reflections in the Wake of Gillian Rose’ in Modern Theology 11:1 (1995), pp. 3–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Lloyd, , Law and Transcendence: On the Unfinished Project of Gillian Rose (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), p. 97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lloyd's argument goes on to suggest that there is little space for transcendence in Rose. However, following Andrew Shanks, I want to suggest that there is a latent form of transcendence in Rose's thought. Shanks, Andrew, Against Innocence: Gillian Rose's Reception and Gift of Faith (London: SCM Press, 2008) p. 41–97.Google Scholar
3 Rose, , The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), p. 236Google Scholar.
4 See Rose, , Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Verso, 2009), p. 2–14Google Scholar.
5 Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, 9. Cited in, Vincent Lloyd, Law and Transcendence, p. 17.
6 Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 4.
7 Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 5.
8 Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 5.
9 Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 12.
10 Rose, Paradiso (London: Menard Press, 1999), p. 20.
11 Rose, Paradiso, p. 20.
12 Rose, , Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 127Google Scholar.
13 Rose, Paradiso, p. 26.
14 Rose, Gillian, Love's Work (New York: New York Review of Books, 2011), p. 127Google Scholar.
15 See Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 98–107.
16 Rose, The Broken Middle, p. xii.
17 Rose, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993), p. 8. Again Rose notes, “Post-modernism is submodern: these holy middles of ecstatic divine-milieu, irenic other city, holy community – face to face or Halachic – and the unholy one of the perpetual carnival market, bear the marks of their unexplored precondition: the diremption between the moral discourse of rights and the systematic actuality of power, within and between modern states.” p. 47–48.
18 Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 8.
19 This transpires, Kate Schick argues, into something like a mirroring of modernity wherein alterity creates a new essentialism in that the Other alienates rather than creates solidarity. Kate Schick, , Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 86–87Google Scholar.
20 Rose, The Broken Middle, p. xii.
21 Rose, Paradiso, p. 24.
22 Rose, Paradiso, p. 24. italics added
23 Rose's criticism of Kant's oppositions offers us a way into her reading contemporary political liberalism. Liberalism offers no way of negotiating struggle, for it fails to see the trauma between the utopian promises of Enlightenment rationality in its bestowal of rights and the systematic actualities of power and domination. However, she does not let this lead her, as she accuses many postmodern theorists, to a celebration of (phenomenologically irreducible) difference that forgets the struggle of the maintenance of complex social orders (law). In other words, postmodernity is melancholic; it retreats from actual political engagement into utopic ‘communities’ of shared interest, unable to engage in shared struggle. See, Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 15–40.
24 Williams, ‘Between Politics and Metaphysics’, pp.11.
25 Here my language is indebted to Rowan Williams’ exploration of revelation as “learning about our learning”. See Williams, Rowan, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 131–147Google Scholar.
26 Trauma is a critical word in Rose's oeuvre, indicating the tension of the middle and the never mended character of our rationality. See Schick, A Good Enough Justice, p. 57–80.
27 Coakley, Sarah, God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 326CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self, p. 327.
29 The language of ‘thought gone stale’ is borrowed from Andrew Shanks. Shanks’ appropriates Hegel's ‘unhappy consciousness’ [das unglückliche Bewusstsein] as the “unatoned state of mind”. This state of unatonement is reflexive of the master-slave dialectic out of which das unglückliche Bewusstsein emerges in that in the servile state of mind ideological a priori oder the consciousness such that the subject cannot be laid open to fresh experience, and so be interrogated and transformed. Andrew Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith: Divided Brain, Atoning Spirit (London: Continuum, 2011), p. 45–49. Terry Pickard reads the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ as “the way in which the skeptic must live his life. The skeptic holds that only his own activity of evaluating all claims to knowledge is authoritative; he this holds that he achieves independence in taking that detached attitude to every kind of claim-making activity. Yet he also holds that there is nothing that can be affirmed, including this affirmation of his own independence, because any such affirmation would require a non-contingent, universal point of view that is itself impossible to attain.” Therefore those who participate in the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ believe certain things but are unable to see or justify their belief. This is rather different to Shanks in that the religious overtones of the language of ‘atonement’ are shed in favour of a way of thinking the processes of the rational itself in opposition to theological intellectual total pictures. Pinkard, Terry, Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 69Google Scholar.
30 This connection is made explicit by Karl Barth. “Remarkably, and certainly not by accident, this is the same cry as the Gospel narrative (Mk 14:36 Mk. 14:36) puts on the lips of Jesus when He is at prayer in Gethsemane. So then, in this form, the Son of God is the prototype of the sonship of believers. The children of God have put on this Christ.” Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics vol 1. part 1. trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance (Edinbugh: T&T Clark, 1969), p. 458. Rowan Williams also follows this lead from Barth, noting the suggestiveness of Barth's remarks regarding the Spirit's ‘historicity’. Williams, On Christian Theology, p. 107–128.
31 Barth, , Church Dogmatics, vol 4. part 1. trans. Bromiley, Geoffrey W. and Torrance, Thomas F. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), p. 157–210Google Scholar.
32 See Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 98–127.
33 Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith, p. 50.
34 Williams, , ‘Logic and Spirit in Hegel’, in Higton, Mike ed., Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (London: SCM Press, 2007), p. 36Google Scholar.
35 Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 264.