Abstract
Perceiving the divine is at the heart of both theology and spirituality, with questions, concerns, and possibilities shaping traditions and practices across the Christian tradition. Unfortunately, rather than addressing the question of spiritual perception head-on, theologians often theologize around the topic, expositing doctrines that assume some form of spiritual perception but never turn to specifying it with more meaningful detail. While related doctrines are beginning to see a revival in Protestantism, such as recent emphasis on the beatific vision as a biblical and Protestant account of eternity, few have sought to engage the tradition broadly, or even the Protestant tradition more narrowly, on questions about perceiving divine things. To advance a specifically constructive retrieval, in light of this, will require a patient attending to the history of Christian thought and a biblical and theological articulation of divine perception in light of current discussions of psychology. There is a conservative temptation at this stage of retrieval, which is to avoid advancing the topic constructively, trading that for a mere reiteration of old models of psychology that feel less “tainted” by secularism. It is certainly possible that old models are more faithful, but baptizing historic constructions is no less naïve than baptizing what is new. Rather, a critical and constructive engagement of the tradition and Scripture requires the full-breadth of a theologian’s resources.
To recover a robust and insightful discussion of divine perception, one must recognize the difficulty of engaging a topic often dispersed throughout a theologian’s work, and not secluded to one doctrinal locus. One cannot peruse a systematic theology and find “perceiving the divine” among listed topics of inquiry. Rather, this question concerns many doctrines and diverse questions, and so one often discovers a thinker’s view only by canvassing large swaths of their work. This is one reason why the project under consideration here is so intriguing. Many edited volumes seek to address a lacuna in the field, inevitably failing to address both the historical and constructive, but this volume follows upon a previous edited volume by Paul Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley, The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Building upon the historical work of this former volume, Aquino and Gavrilyuk’s volume seeks to advance the former insights in a more constructive direction. To do so, this project brings together scholars to address various aspects of what perceiving the divine might entail in two sections, “Part 1: Facets,” and “Part II: Intersections” (admittedly, not the most helpful organization). The authors each seek to articulate a vision of spiritual perception both attuned to the tradition but also advancing these insights into more constructive proposals.
In the “Afterword” of the volume, John Cottingham notes an unusual focus of this project that is helpful to reiterate here. He notes how much of our culture presupposes a kind of scientism that makes the question of perceiving the divine feel somewhat absurd, or, at best, naïve. One might think that retrieving spiritual perception in the fields of philosophy and theology against the backdrop of this naturalism might be too difficult given the emphases, interests, and directions of these fields. But, Cottingham rightly notes, this volumes surprises in precisely this place. Against the assumption that this volume would focus on esoteric notions of spirituality, devoid of practical content, he explains, To be sure, the reader will find frequent references to the divine, but the focus of detailed attention, again and again, is on how we experience the world – not how we apprehend some ‘spooky’ other realm, but how we encounter this world, the world around us, in all its mystery and wonder. The abiding impression from these essays is that the spiritual senses tradition, or at least a significant portion of it, is not about employing some ghostly faculty of the soul to contemplate an immaterial realm, but on how, in episodes of profound significance, embodied human beings make empirical contact with this world. (229)
Cottingham’s insight is helpful in light of the content of the book. The biblical insight is that perceiving the divine is not somehow looking beyond the world, but recognizing God’s unique presence and revelation within the scope of the natural. The natural has the capacity to communicate divine presence, and one does not have to annihilate the natural to see the spiritual, or, less radically, one does not have to look away from the natural to discover the supernatural. Along these lines, perception of the divine is related to various questions plaguing the church in our own context. Therefore, the editors’ stated goal is to “make progress towards a constructive account of the different aspects of spiritual perception while exploring its intersection with various theological and philosophical issues, such as biblical interpretation, aesthetics, liturgy, race, ecology, eschatology, and the hiddenness of God” (xx).
Throughout the volume, it is clear that contributors are seeking to navigate the two kinds of perception clarified in the introduction: one of which is done through an analogy with the five physical senses and the other a sui generis kind of perception. With Cottingham, the former is emphasized more throughout, and the implications are utilized to address questions of theodicy, race, liturgy, and even pornography. In many ways, it is this practical focus that makes this volume so intriguing, but also which raises important questions about the cultivation and training of this capacity. Gavrilyuk’s contribution, “Developing Spiritual Perception: Lessons from Claude Monet and Wassily Kandinsky” attends to the issue of training this perception specifically, building on John Greco’s chapter that provided a “psychologically realistic” model for moral and spiritual perception. Gavrilyuk attends to the advancement of this spiritual perception by focusing on the cultivation of aesthetic perfection, using this analogically to articulate how Scripture, specifically, trains in spiritual perceiving. Tapping into the long tradition of using visual imagery to address Scripture’s impact on the human person (one thinks of James’ image of Scripture as mirror, Calvin’s emphasis of Scripture as glasses, or even just the focus on illumination in the Christian tradition), Gavrilyuk gives an account of the training of spiritual perception with important devotional implications and precedent. Likewise, his co-editor Frederick Aquino focuses on this training through Cassian’s Conferences, with particular focus on purity of heart and its role in cultivating spiritual perception.
While space will not allow for a more thorough canvassing of the various chapters, it is worth noting that the editors were able to pull together significant scholars (including senior scholars) and were able to maintain (broadly considered) a coherent volume. Every edited volume struggles to maintain internal coherence, pulling together scholars with different goals, interests, and agendas, and this volume is no different in that regard. Nonetheless, the essays are consistently high-level, well-researched, and original. Having contributions from Catherine Pickstock, Sarah Coakley, and Boyd Taylor Coolman bring serious weight to this collection of essays (taking nothing away from the quality or significance of the other contributors), along with a posthumously published essay from William Abraham, and the focus on current social issues of race, pornography, liturgy, and evil serve the volume well. Perceiving Things Divine offers a spiritual vision that does not lead one to avoid the world seen with our eyes, but invites the reader to have eyes to see this world as one beheld by God. Scholars doing work in spiritual formation, the visual, and aesthetics will all find this to be both important and meaningful for their work.