These three papers draw key medieval Christian thinkers into conversation and debate with 20th century French philosophy. Each paper circles around the theme of being in different modes: self, God, and world. The first considers and challenges Marion's critique of Duns Scotus’ univocity of Being, the second makes different use of French phenomenology to argue that Gregory of Nyssa prefigures 20th century discourses of groundlessness, and the third explores whether Kristeva's reading of St. Teresa can help challenge Kristeva's own reading of the beguines.
This essay examines the relationship between Jean-Luc Marion’s argument of “conceptual idolatry” and John Duns Scotus’ doctrine of the univocity of being. I argue that Scotus does fall under Marion’s criticisms, which radically undermine the use of “being” in theology, but univocity, in its barest Scotist form, also seems impossible to avoid. After arguing that attempts to move past this ontological conundrum fail, I conclude the relationship stands at an impasse. While this conclusion is critical, I make it for the sake of a constructive argument: Post-metaphysical theology should reckon with the inevitability of being, appreciating this impasse between the apparent hegemony of being and the priority of God’s Self-revelation. Making the impasse clear at least points the way towards a renewed theological consideration of being.
In her novel Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila Julia Kristeva reads the work of Teresa of Avila through the dual lens of the psychoanalytic and the literary-poetic, providing a voice within the tradition of post-structuralist theory which seeks to retrieve something of the mystical from the Christian tradition. In particular, she identifies in Teresa of Avila a “scriptorial therapy,” which Kristeva identifies as working against typical interpretations of women mystics as pathological hysterics. Teresa’s scriptorial mode of mystical reflection instead is evaluated by Kristeva as a productive of a constructive, positive subjectivity oriented towards healing and community, rather than exclusively caught up in the jouissance of woman’s not-all-ness. The beguines, however, are associated by Kristeva with only the hysteria of the semiotic, rather than with the affective-intellectual balance of the semiotic and symbolic functions found in Teresa. This paper explores whether the writings of the beguines can provide their own spiritual-therapeutic narrative within and beyond Kristeva’s framework, taking into account the theological content of their writings while simultaneously appreciating the psychoanalytic and literary reading of Teresa that we find in Kristeva.
In a number of texts, Gregory of Nyssa denies either the existence of matter or, at least, our access to pure materiality. These arguments seek to answer challenges arising from (1) philosophical accounts of matter as eternal substrate and (2) the problem of an immaterial God creating a materiality. Gregory’s response calls matter itself into question, contending that we never experience it directly but only experience intellectual properties (e.g., shape and color) associated with matter. While a debate continues over whether Gregory intends this epistemologically (denial of access to pure matter) or ontologically (denial of matter itself), this paper instead offers a constructive rereading of these texts, engaging French phenomenology to argue that this denial—rather than expressing a philosophical oddity or denigrating creation’s goodness—reveals Gregory’s account of how the goodness of creation is found precisely in the groundlessness and incompleteness of finite being.