Sarah Coakley on Aquinas, Wittgenstein, and the 1980s Yale School

At first I mistook The Broken Body for the second volume of Coakley's systematic theology.1 Rather, this book collects studies that will feed into the systematics. Those who teach or write about Coakley will want to read the whole book. Those who find her a source of pleasure or inspiration will want to use the table of contents to read selected essays. Many of these essays have appeared in prominent or out-of-the-way publications or circulated as samizdat lecture manuscripts among those so eager to read what Coakley has thought that we email her and beg. If you are among the readers who have seen or heard an essay elsewhere, you will find the content clearer and more persuasive here. As preparatory to the systematics, these studies function like the small-print sections in Barth or the elaborate articles of Aquinas's Sentences Commentary. Presented here, in advance, they save the main text, in the system to come, from paths not taken and battles with real or constructed opponents. That means that some essays still echo with a combative tone. In these pages the author is almost always “bold,” other scholars “vying” or “contending,” their arguments “ploys” or “blandishments.” One of the marvelous things about watching Coakley at a small conference is the generous, gracious way in which she fosters younger scholars. Getting the combat out of the way in preliminary studies will allow the systematics to achieve an even, teacherly tone that rises above the rabies theologorum. Take Aquinas as the model: he names his sources but not his opponents and loses his charitable tone in the Summa so far as I can tell only once. For its uniqueness and humanity I treasure the place where he uses the adverb stultissime (most stupidly) to describe the mode of argument (but not the person) of a certain David (ST I.3.8c). These essays also echo with the traces of oral delivery. I have sometimes found myself puzzled why the published versions still italicize and ‘scare quote’ so many words—this time puzzled to distraction, even when I myself mark up a manuscript in just that way for oral delivery and consistently choose an orally delivered version for publication as briefest and best. But Coakley's sentences are well constructed to convey their own emphasis. Their vocabulary exemplifies Aristotle's mixed diction to mingle technical and vernacular terms with aplomb. A competent reader can be trusted to appreciate stress and tone without typographical aid or interference. The alternative would be to construct an incompetent reader. The beauty of The Broken Body is to answer critics, solicit improvements, and declutter the final version—all at once. The agonistic tone that marked early skirmishes and the cantillation marks by which once the speaker sang for her supper can now—as the eschatological Summa heaves volume by volume into view—finally fall away. As the subtitle indicates, the essays belong to three, loosely analogous broken bodies: the body of Jesus, the body of the people of God, and the body of eucharistic sacrifice. I say little about the essays on Christianity and Judaism, except to note that almost all Christians need to keep thinking about that, and to commend Lindbeck's observation that Judaism and Christianity might not be regarded as one in potential to the other, but both in potential to the kingdom of God.2 In what follows I start from the last section and return to the beginning. The chapters on sacrifice (8-12) are alone worth the (very reasonable) price of the paperback. Several essays radiate clarity, most of all chapters 9 and 10, “Who, or Where, Is Christ at the Altar?” and “Blood and Gender.” The first now seems to place beyond argument that the priest must represent both the people to God and Christ to the people, and that if you are going to follow Ephesians to gender Christ and the Church, then the priest must occupy the whole spectrum of gender or pass fluidly along it precisely in celebrating the eucharist. In my own work on blood, I had strained to see what Coakley meant by gesturing to Victor Turner. Coakley uses him here to gain anthropological authority for the notion that (priestly or gendered) words and gestures can bypass conscious awareness to summon feelings that must be surfaced to be disarmed or redeployed (211-12). I wish I had seen this version ten years ago. In Chapter 8, “In Defense of Sacrifice: Gender, Selfhood, and the Binding of Isaac,” Coakley asks after the reaction of Sarah, and associates her death with the trauma. I wonder how it would change or deepen Coakley's account to attend to the often untranslated Hebrew particle ,נָ֠א na enclitic to the imperative verb of God's request (Gen. 22:2). It means “please,” but as Brown Driver Briggs notes, it “craves a favorable response.” It marks the beginning of bargaining. It identifies a trickster—like Abraham himself—and in this case maybe God. It works like, “Say, have I got a deal for you!” Abraham uses it a lot (Gen. 12:13; 13:8, 9; 18:27, 30, 31, 32; 24:2, 6). Why does he not respond when God uses it on him? Elsewhere it shows God's own sarcasm “Stand fast [na] in your spells and your many sorceries” (Isa. 47:12; cf. Isa. 1:18, 36:8, 51:21). Why does Abraham not hear that here? If Sarah overheard God and Abraham talking about Isaac (the text does not say) what would she feel, knowing the two of them, the tone of their voices, the time when Abraham did bargain with God (Gen. 18:27-32, with na in nearly every verse), the time when he passed her off as his sister?3 Chapter 11, “Gift Retold,” surveys, in a way for which the word magisterial was designed, the gift-debates of the last century. Like many typologies, the categories are enlightening even if you disagree about the details. I wish I had read this chapter, too, ten or fifteen years ago. Chapter 12, “Real Presence, Real Absence: The Eucharist and the ‘Apophatic’ Christ” takes us back to Chapter 1, “On the Identity of the Risen Jesus: In Quest of the ‘Apophatic’ Christ.” And it takes us back in more ways than one. Not only do the titles echo the Apophatic Christ. They also attempt to answer an abiding worry about Coakley's Christology. More important, the last chapter shows the best way to go on. To explain, I need to say something about teaching. Teaching catches scholars at their most exposed and spontaneous. We constantly search students’ faces for understanding. What will restore the light to glazed eyes? I have found that Coakley's account of the Trinity works better even than my own. If I say, in Coakley-fashion, “The Spirit leads us to the Father and what happens is Christ-like-ness—or even Christ,” then alertness redawns in students’ eyes. (More technically, I note that this version of the Trinity seems to lie entirely on the side of what Linn Tonstadt calls a soteriological account, which she approves of, rather than what she calls an epistemic account, of which she seems to suspect Coakley, and which Tonstadt regards as knowing too much.) Students seldom think to ask, “What about Jesus himself? Is he special or is he just an instance of a trinitarian pattern?” I myself am not worried about those questions. Different theologies have different virtues; that is why the Holy Spirit multiplies them like loaves and fishes. Ephrem Syrus uses a different metaphor: “oil is the dear friend of the Holy Spirit, it follows him everywhere. Christ has many facets, and the oil acts as a mirror to them all: from whatever angle I look at the oil, Christ looks out at me from it.”4 Thus, I use other authors to talk about Jesus of Nazareth. But I would like to highlight three chapters in which Coakley does more of what Coakley does best. In Chapter 1, “On the Identity of the Risen Jesus,” Coakley breaks open the conventional question of whether we find Jesus in faith or history, proposing that we meet Christ in—the poor. We do not feed the poor to find Christ (with pride) in ourselves: we feed the poor to find Christ at all. That is where he said we might find him. This is a fitting and bravura reply to those who wonder where and who Christ is in Coakley. She allows to go without saying that this is a move more familiar in liberation theology. Meanwhile, it is one of the things Coakley does best: Don't be trapped by a conventional question. Change the terms. Make people think. Make them uncomfortable. Chances are the conventional question limits us to safe options. Where have the conventional questions hidden the unsafe answers? Among all the mentions of “identity” in “The Identity of the Risen Jesus,” I miss a reference to Hans Frei's profound and mystical little book The Identity of Jesus Christ. Published in the shadow of The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, Identity sought to exemplify how the narratives about Jesus managed mysteriously and unaccountably to bring his reality with them. In the center of the book lie two brief paragraphs, which, Frei admitted with a shrug of his forward-hunching shoulders, track the ontological argument of Anselm, but apply this time to the resurrection, the non-occurrence of which becomes inconceivable to those in Jesus's identity's grasp (145). Frei also admitted, again ruefully, that he had cut pages from the argument, because they merely buried the point that here was a mystery that could be stated but not illuminated with any additional pile-up of words. “To know who he is in connection with what took place is to know that he is” (145). Here Frei enacted the apophasis that Coakley commends, a helpless gesturing to a reality that takes our words away, a reality that we can state and appropriate but not comprehend. Immediately Frei goes on to determine the appropriation a lot like Coakley: it is the “grateful love of God and neighbor [that] is the proper manner of appropriating the presence [that Jesus's identity brings with it] .... That this act is the only manner of appropriating the resurrection we cannot doubt” (146). Here is an unexpected ally, one worth acknowledging. In Chapter 2, Coakley poses the question, “Does Kenōsis Rest on a Mistake?” I thought the answer would be a resounding “no,” doubling down on a doubtful, self-exhausting sacrifice, and worried that Tonstadt's critique might be confirmed. But on the contrary! Kenosis, it turns out, rests on a qualification such as any critic would desire: kenosis is the incarnation of the fulness of God, which can never go empty. Reading Cyril of Alexandria, Coakley concludes that “Kenōsis, here, then, is really assumption” of Christ's human nature (32). Again, “kenosis involves no change in the divine nature, but a means of transference of divine ‘energy’ into the human nature” (33). In returning to its patristic roots, Coakley also restores kenosis to its Christological role in Philippians 2. Hers is no philosophical arche that exhausts God, no hopeless solidarity that sinks God with us together in the same boat. Hers is a kenosis limited by apophatic rules, a created reality (the incarnation) governed by the limitless power of God. In Chapter 3, she presents “‘Mingling’ in Gregory of Nyssa's Christology: A Reconsideration.” I once worried over “mixing” language that I liked in Ephrem the Syrian, but which I thought ran afoul of Chalcedon. Coakley gives that language back to us. Theology gets so invested in policing the boundaries that it's refreshing to see someone enlarging them, as Coakley does so well. Mingling may be a small example. But it belongs among more and greater recoveries, such as of desire, evolution, prayer practice, and theologies of the cross. (Theologies of the cross have many problems, but they are thinner on the ground than they have been for hundreds of years, and since they are not going away, someone must learn to use them well or they will be left to those who use them for ill.) Among a variety of Coakleys in their different moods and modes, the Coakley who extends and integrates and makes theology more small-c catholic is among the best. Both Chapter 12 and Chapter 4 distinguish realistic and linguistic approaches to doctrine. The task is to integrate them. Chapter 4 considers those approaches to Chalcedon, that is, to the incarnation. Chapter 12 considers those approaches to the eucharist. Two bodies of Christ, two encounters with the limits of language and the uncapturability of reality. But Chapter 12 does it better, and Chapter 4 would benefit from revision in light of 12. It is both unexpected and delightful if your account of the eucharist throws light back onto the incarnation. So I put Chapter 12 first. “Real Presence, Real Absence” does not balance or trade off but integrates the reality and the incomprehensibility of Christ's eucharistic presence. The reality goes so deep as to transcend words, so that realism and are not at but belong Coakley that out by who to point out what he to It is well when Coakley of it is no to mark the limits of and point beyond to what he cannot say, but a like is at most a those it is worth I from that when magisterial its of as no of us to the of the as a most that is, one appropriate as as an vocabulary is the best To to the Coakley for the eucharist works by to change the human This is way to say it is that in Aquinas the eucharist must work by The is that is The eucharist does not work if or without the on a for the eucharist or in the The eucharist does not work because of what the do but by the on the of seems out to that the eucharist does not work by or like a but by to it still involves the In a of the Coakley that when the Spirit us to the body in the Spirit also it to change our in the of Coakley's are to about his both of the eucharist and of She own has to be a the of a of mystery that on out rather than a and This is a apophatic that it is by no means a up on alone a into it is a of precisely the of to to to that attend any account of the would be an way of in Chapter If that is the case for the it's the case even more so for the incarnation. But first me note how is Coakley's here, when he not of eucharistic or bodies in which God is said to but even of created are because they are to the of it is of the nature of things that their cannot be by any because these things are which means that the which makes them of must be at the same time the why things are That is the of that Coakley approaches in Chapter 4 and in Chapter 12, one in which and better when and in the mystery by which beyond to God, the in which the Holy Spirit us to the Father by us on the of the then, that her of brings in Chapter to is, in the systematic to her account of in Chapter 4 by the account of the eucharist in Chapter 12. Chapter 4 is “What and What It The chapter in a It shows how the in only to said something by the of the Holy Spirit, they in the and found the limits of But I have a to about the way of I of the of does not in the Coakley we find Coakley from an author who would to be entirely her I think of I miss him. I am to this that I miss him more than the other the of and for that are the of The Broken At first Coakley seems to that, the linguistic need not the reality of things but is better as return of the apophatic But then something her to a that is not an ontological but a more of linguistic of of a And why does to a of the to and to This your without of I was down three at In case the me not to some too me from up on Frei an oral and in the presence of other that not in the was And in the final as as to his his work that when he me that in and was a in the of to the act of faith into an (ST which and the to and an (ST which and the to the The first had to do with the of the to the (the God, the second had to do with things that might be It was only in the second that his as an at and the of it as an on he to find ways to whatever in the first hidden in the second It is because The of to the broken body of that book to not but which small and to human works are a of questions and many of them on of or in the of It is even to them together in Many are as to apply as a They often or the limits of They do not determine any or They do not construct any or would from the way his have him so if he had so I never heard talk about by about and Aquinas without about the of those was not for but for up for the words that had too for For in the the with what he calls is not that it sometimes works and to reality. he no more than In how the language to the word three in the same that the reality is “The then, that is a the case of Jesus, in which and the reality is at once as a divine reality and as a human reality This is a to be but it is not a it is a that cannot function without It is a about so real that it our something that the describe and in which the us to concludes that the far from language talk about Christ both the way that people talk about and talk about him human Those are to precisely because takes them for The only when apophatic clarity, when it a human nature and a divine nature as two in the same As the would to in not it's As and as reality might it is not that takes for that such to about which Christians not They not both because they of God and because they Immediately to the nature of any to a he by in a and without of and the of both the and the Jesus Christ is but two that is, he is a the divine as and at the same time as a human these things are that is why we must be about how we are to of them. these things are that is why we must we have not them. these things are that is why we must not our to and them us A linguistic account can to not because a linguistic account cannot without the of it cannot from But I want to return that point to the of human acts in the eucharist in Coakley's Chapter 12. The of the linguistic that language is not and than the one regards or as is a human act of the and of the as as Here again Coakley's eucharistic her Coakley to the of the It is worth how the uses the word in this how the uses the and its verb This Coakley's case by returning it to the eucharistic that is Chapter 12. In the God only and God and a once an is familiar to Aquinas but to by far the most It is the or the or table of by some This is not a of but of a It Coakley's case to that, in the the most is, as one might say in not a of or of but something to do with the a of as no one would of that a of into the and the is a human so too no one that linguistic involves the or the in a human To a is a is language and are both not an alternative to reality. The and the priest at the eucharist and what is first of all the of God, that God's people God's into their to bring about a and a greater

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