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An influential contemporary trend in pneumatology, pioneered by Thomas Weinandy and Sarah Coakley, uses resources from traditions of prayer to explain how the Spirit is equal to the Father and Son. Several thinkers who participate in what Coakley calls “incorporative” pneumatology draw on figures like John of the Cross to argue specifically that the Spirit’s activity in originating other divine persons is equal to that of the Father and Son. Despite the promising novelty of this approach, some have criticized these thinkers for attenuating trinitarian distinction without overcoming trinitarian inequalities. My paper contributes to incorporative pneumatology by supplying two new insights that I take from John of the Cross: his iterative theory of apophatic language and his nuptial framework for examining active trinitarian love. I argue that the combination of these two insights accounts for the equality of trinitarian activity in terms of nuptial love without jeopardizing trinitarian distinction.
Theological talk of the Spirit strikes at the root of the problem of theological utterance itself. To speak truly of God presumes that one speak in the Spirit. Yet, if the Spirit is the Spirit of prayer, then theology is led ever deeper into prayer's region of vast silence. Held within this silence, how can theology open its mouth? The paper considers two styles of theological speech, both of which prioritize the unutterable as touched on in prayer. These are John Caputo's "weak" theology and Sarah Coakley's systematics. It then turns to the desert moanstic tradition, which places theology under the discipline of silence. A contempoary theology that aims to follow after prayer must enter its unsettling silence, as well as those other unsettling silences that surround us: those of voices suppressed, lives cut short, and the ever more likely great silence of the species.
Although the influence of Paul Claudel upon twentieth-century theology is well known, little attention has been given to the way that Claudel’s oeuvre can help us not only to rethink a kind of sacramental cosmology but also the ways in which pneumatology is bound up with this project and reveals it as something more than just a retrieval of the premodern sacred. Through a reading of Claudel's second Great Ode, 'Spirit and Water', I argue that Claudel’s pneumatology points towards a theological resacralization of the finite that includes human subjectivity and creativity, indeed, one that gives a central place to the body, creaturely finitude, and to the shaping work of the human imagination. In this way, Claudel points us to a robustly theological account of human subjectivity in a sacramental cosmos, an account that escapes the aporetic modern theological shuttle between the epistemological turn-to-the-subject and reactionary reassertions of premodern metaphysics.