On the Catholicity of Desire. Introduction. (original) (raw)
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A Catholic Perspective on Homoerotic Desire
Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, 2019
IN RECENT YEARS, homosexuality has become one of the most contested cultural issues, at both a national and international level. Even the question of language is hotly debated, especially in Christian circles, with some rejecting "homosexuality" because of its relationship with clinical psychology in past years, and some insisting upon its use because of the associations of the term "gay" with certain political and cultural movements. This article will take a step back from those particular questions and will seek to give an account of a more fundamental question: that of desire, particularly same-sex desire. It will give a historical and philosophical account of the nature of erotic love and then apply this account to the question of homosexuality and homoerotic desire. While maintaining an adherence to Catholic teaching, especially the teaching laid out in the "Catechism of the Catholic Church," this article will seek to move the conversation forward, in giving a positive account of homoerotic desire and reframing the current discussion of homosexuality and Catholicism....
Desire and its Paradoxes: A Phenomenological Study Based on Christian Mysticism
This paper is concerned with the phenomenon of desire within the framework of a phenomenology of mystical experience. I understand desire as a fundamental, personally constitutive movement. Describing the interpersonal experience of mystical life given in its two complementary aspects, distance and nearness, desire refers to an existential tension peculiar to finite beings; this tension accompanies each unique personal way toward the Desired. Desire is revealed in its vocational, infinite, dis-possessive, gifting, and ever ambiguous character, bearing its irrevocable existential paradoxes.
Directed by desire: An exploration based on the structures of the desire for God
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The concept of ‘desire’ offers an interesting bridge between cultural phenomena of contemporary society and the theological tradition. The exploration of some key elements of this tradition concerning desire supports the launching of a ‘theology of desire’. Although the natural desire for God, as discussed in the so-called ‘théologie nouvelle’, provides very valuable material for this exploration, ‘desire’ is conceived here in a somewhat broader sense. Three levels of desire are distinguished. The ‘lover's desire’ refers to the conscious affirmation of the presence of God's love. The second level, called the ‘seeker's desire’, concerns a more general desire for happiness. Third, the desire for God as an ontological term refers to the relationship between God and humankind. The desire for God, revealed by Jesus Christ, demonstrates the ultimate capacity of our human nature. Thus christology, and especially the creed of Chalcedon, offers the key to systematic anthropology....
The Downside review, 2018
This article explores the Christian theological work of Sebastian Moore O.S.B. and his notion of human desire as the existential point of impact or subjective dynamics where a human being may discover a call to communion in Love, a presence of the Creating God himself as hidden source of joy and fulfilment, attracting a person to his or her ultimate meaning. Human desire is, in its deepest reality, the emergent presence of the Self as gift. This gift is attracted, oriented, healed and liberated by the presence of Jesus and the discipleship that he awakes in every one of those to whom he revels himself as the Loving other. Desire is, therefore, considered an ontological and theological via to access and undergo the transformative three-phased process of union to God or divinization, following Jesus' destiny: an awakening, an emptying and a fulfilling of desire. A conscious and consented transformative union (théosis) may occur, in desire, between God and a human person. Moore's Christian spiritual itinerary of transformation of human desire is, in a second moment, paralleled with the experience of prayer and transformation that are the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. We draw attention to the fact that the Christian spiritual itinerary exposed in Moore's theology of desire is strikingly interlocked with the structure and key theological moments of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises.
Maximus the Confessor's Ambiguum 7 has long been considered the anchor of a substantial refutation of Origenist cosmology and teleology, with Maximus still seeking to rehabilitate the ascetical "gospel" of Origen. Yet in commenting on Gregory Nazianzen's Oration 14 in Ambiguum 7, Maximus acknowledges that Gregory is dealing less with the scheme of human origins per se than with the miseries attending life in the body, which opens up the whole question of how embodied, passible human existence is the frontier of human salvation and deification. I argue that for Maximus human desire in all its cosmological and psychosomatic complexity-both as a register of creaturely passibility and affectivity, and as integral to the definition of human volition and freedom-is central to the subtle dialectic of activity and passivity in the creaturely transitus to deification. The morally malleable character of desire and the passions, and their ambiguous but ultimately purposive status within the economy of human transformation, decisively manifest the divine resourcefulness in fulfilling the mystery of deification-especially in view of Christ's use of human passibility in inaugurating the new eschatological "mode" (tropos) of human nature. In his engagement of Gregory of Nyssa, in particular, Maximus develops a sophisticated dialectics and therapeutics of desire that integrates important perspectives of the Confessor's anthropology, christology, eschatology, and asceticism.
The Quest for God: Rethinking Desire
Royal Institute of Philosophy supplement 85, 2019: The Passions and the Emotions, 2019
How are we to view the nature of desire and its relation to value, humanity, and God? Sartre, Nietzsche, and Levinas have interesting things to say in this context, and they can be understood to be responding in their different ways to two seemingly opposed ways of conceiving of desire, namely, as lack or deficiency (option 1) or as plenitude or creativity (option 2). I clarify, link, and distinguish the relevant conceptions of desire, and give a sense of what it could mean to comprehend desire in either or both of these ways. I question Sartre’s insistence that man is a ‘useless passion’, trace it back to his commitment to a ‘lack’ model of desire, and argue that this model, as he understands it, stands in the way of the more creative conception which is lurking in the background of his account. There will be a question of whether the atheist is entitled to this creative conception, and I shall challenge his assumption that it becomes available only when theism is overthrown. I shall suggest also that there is something important to be salvaged from the lack model.