Closer than Kissing: Sarah Coakley's Early Work

Anglican Theological Review, Winter 2008 by Byassee, Jason

So we see that Cappadocian ascetical rigor and eschatological rationale can have a major impact on our understanding of gender roles, perhaps rendering them entirely fluid. The very words and scripted performances of "maleness" and "femaleness" are not now fixed essences in which one is superior and the other inferior. They are rather both signifiers drafted into Gregory's theological vocabulary for describing ascent into the divine life. Switches between "male" and "female" imagery are meant both to confuse and to illuminate by stoking our imaginations and kindling our hearts to grow in love for God. This process of growth into the divine will continue throughout eternity, since Gregory managed to make the move of defining "perfection" as infinite progress into the divine. Because God is eternal and infinite, we finite and temporal creatures can grow infinitely toward him, ever satisfied with the divine fullness without ever becoming sated. We should say too that this is not merely a spiritual growth. It is also bodily: "Gregory's eschatological body is an ever-changing one," growing indefinitely like the seed of 1 Corinthians 15.20 We see that we have a radical anthropology in which our very being is nothing more than an ecstatic calling forth toward God. God called us from nothing toward Godself and, as we make this unending movement we grow ever more full of the divine love, sensed with only spiritual senses. Over against this understanding of humanity as that which ever grows into God, modernity has lost any capacity for "fluidity into the divine." Its understanding of what makes up a person has shrunk down to individual fleshiness. Left with nothing but bodies and their irresolvable, unmediated differences, we worship them, resolved to keep them "alive, youthful, consuming, sexually active, and jogging on (literally) for as long as possible."21 Gregory's suggestion is for an asceticism not less arduous, but ultimately much more peaceful.

One better-known example of the feminist fruit of the contemplative patristic tradition is the handful of examples in which the Holy Spirit is spoken of in feminine terms. Coakley is less than impressed with this tradition, which was notoriously uncharitable toward women and sexuality It nibbles around the edges of a more radically incorporative and feminist-friendly doctrine of God, but fails to get to the heart of things. Coakley prefers the more mainstream patristic tradition that insists on the "ultimate unknowability of God, transcending all categories of gender." If God is unknowable and transcends our gender distinctions, then a humanly adequate perception of God requires our alternating between masculine and feminine images for the entire Godhead (again, not just the Spirit) ("God as Trinity," p. 120). If God is unknowable and no language directly describes him, then our language must not claim to describe what God is like "chez God." It must rather attempt to "stir the imagination, or direct the will, beyond the known towards the unknown, prompting 'hints half guessed.'"22 Paradoxically perhaps, our language will grow more apophatic as we ourselves grow in love and desire for God.