Divine Enjoyment

A Theology of Passion and Exuberance

Elaine Padilla

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780823263578, 9780823263561
• eBook ISBN: 9780823263585
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism

This book's theological and philosophical construction of a God of enjoyment poetically remaps divine love. Posing a critique to the Aristotelian unmoved mover whose intellective enjoyment is self-enclosed, this book's affective tones depict a passionate God who intermingles with the cosmos to suffer and yearn out of love— even improper love.Divine Enjoyment leads the reader to a path of excess, first in the form of an intellective appetite that for Aquinas places God beyond the divine self, then more erotically in the silhouette of a lover whose love is like the delectable pain of mystics. Culminating with banqueting, fiesta, and carnival, the book deterritorializes God's affect, conceiving of an expansively hospitable enjoyment stemming from many life formsWith a renewed welcome for pleasure, the book also upholds a disruptive ethic. Ultimately, an immoderate God of love whose passionate enjoyment stems from the sufferings as well as joys of the cosmos offers another paradigm of lovingly enjoying oneself in relationship with passionate becomings that belong to many others.

ONE

Pain: Groans and Birth Pangs of the Divine Enjoyment

Neither metaphysically nor epistemologically was Greek thought prepared to ponder or believe in a crucified God.

—JON SOBRINO1

What foolishness is the foundation of Christian thought—a God who endured the cross! The centuries-old debate about divine apatheia—the absence of passion—yields an alternative model of divine love to the classical theistic view of impassibility. For how could a God of love, whose outstretched arms on the cross offer eloquent testimony to the divine yearning, be incapable of receiving passion from the cosmos? To posit divine love for that which is other than God is consequently to raise a question about the passion of God. Being mindful of those on the underside of history, Christian authors such as Jürgen Moltmann and the liberation theologian Jon Sobrino have mounted compelling challenges to this idea. Their basic premise is that of a relational God, who willingly seeks to be “stirred by” the happenings of the cosmos. Their starting point is divine passibility linked with the experience of human suffering caused by the atrocities committed over the course of the past centuries.

I agree with some of the main conclusions these theologians have reached regarding the inadequacy of the argument for divine impassibility when set against the suffering of the world. At the same time, I seek to address the question from a different starting point: that of enjoyment. Hence the opening and closing arguments of this chapter, as if enveloping the trope of suffering, will steer the conversation toward the question at hand, whether a divine enjoyment can also stem from a give-and-take with the created order. This chapter furtively glances at the God who passionately loves the cosmos and introduces the concept of a God capable of experiencing a pleasurable suffering, a concept that arises in the context of Latin American liberationist feminism. Accordingly, the notion of a God who is vulnerable like us is explored, but with a theological twist: God’s pathos is not reduced to suffering. The basic proposition is that a classical Aristotelian notion of an unmovable God cannot offer a full enough view of divine love, that God instead intimately relates to the cosmos, is in history confronting us, while also painfully becoming with and birthing in us a dream of and a passion for better things to come.

Therefore, through a constructive study of the trope of the beloved divine lover who suffers as well as enjoys the cosmos, I hope to challenge static views of divine love and definitions of passion that omit enjoyment or relativize its importance. In briefly laying out the history of the evolving thought about the passionate love of God, this first chapter does not attempt to provide an exhaustive account. Rather, offering a bird’s-eye view, it quickly leaps from antiquity to early Christian thought, then on to medieval, modern, and explicitly feminist views. It introduces the reader to part of the corpus on divine passion, and to some of the arguments of those interlocutors who may help guide this exposition. The challenges raised in this chapter assist in examining the various historical answers offered to the problematic of the Aristotelian model as a way to carry forward, beyond its principle of impassibility, the nuanced God of enjoyment to whom this book introduces us.

God’s Apathetic Happiness?

The Deity is thought of as a Being who abides in absolute calm.

Abraham J. Heschel2

Christian theology has long held views of God that are deeply rooted not only in Jewish or Hebraic thought but also in classical Greek thought. One of the foremost influences in this regard has been Aristotle, and specifically with respect to this project, his view of the enjoyment or happiness of God. Insofar as Aristotle is the primary proponent of the idea of apathy, of a dispassionate being, that this work challenges as it constructs the figure of a beloved divine lover, it may seem surprising to discover what a high value he places on eudaimonia, or enjoyment, which is, after all, a passion, in his discussions of God.

PHILEIC ENJOYMENT

In classical Greek thought, eudaimonia—happiness or enjoyment—is a good in and of itself. In particular, for Aristotle, it is the source from which all well-being stems and the end or goal toward which all things move.3 In the circular movement between goal and end, goal as end, happiness denotes completion and thus self-sufficiency. Also, according to this definition, the good of happiness is to be found in it being both the beginning (source) and the end (goal) of happiness, thereby denoting perfection. Therefore, self-subsistence in relation to happiness comes to mean mostly to be in need of nothing, to lack nothing. Granted, self-sufficiency in Aristotle’s paradigm has nothing to do with living in excess, such as in luxury, but rather with meeting one’s basic needs, and finding much enjoyment in living well, as when heads of households are able to provide for the needs of the household, or a city is able to sustain itself with very minimal use of trade for its self-subsistence.4 Also, happiness is a virtue in itself: seeking happiness for its own sake, which would mean for the sake of the good life just described, denotes completion. A happy life is a complete life of virtue in which even political and civic duties or pursuits find their end. By itself, happiness makes one’s living worthwhile.

If defined to be solely about itself, happiness might seem to culminate in loneliness, at least according to our contemporary views of the individual self. But that is not the case, for happiness entails friendship when expressed in the context of human-to-human relations, a friendship, moreover, that is always linked to the well-being of the community. Although happy people lack nothing, for “all good things belong to them already,” Aristotle also states that “it seems absurd, when people assign all good things to the happy person, not to grant him friends, which seems to be the greatest of external goods.”5 Friendship being a good and in addition to the good things already possessed means that happiness can come both before friendship and as a result of it. And here an apparent contradiction may be resolved. A happy person, who by definition is one who possesses all things yearned for, may also seem to be one who has the most friends. According to Aristotle, it would be absurd to construe the self-sufficient (happy) person as solitary, underscoring that happiness and friendship are intricately related in this perspective.

The significance of happiness being paired with friendship entails a reciprocated sense of active goodness that at first glance can seem attractive when one considers arguments for a God of passion. For one thing, its meaning could convey the image of a God who, while being happiest, is able to receive something in return from the cosmos, as friends commonly do. This relation would be most appropriate, since doing good and returning good for the sake of one’s friends abolishes any notion of happiness being concomitant on greed, or on any compulsory return of love or goodness.6 Well-being and friendship go hand in hand, for friends wish to do good for one another and act in ways that bring about happiness for one other. Happiness based on mutual well-being has to do with having the satisfaction of “loving more than … being loved.”7 So if this friendship model allows for it, God in a sense could love without concupiscence even when receiving something from the cosmos, for friends do not seek to obtain anything from each other and do not demand anything from one another in return. This concern could mean that God’s love is found in the act of loving the divine self and others in ways that do not increase God’s own pleasure at the expense of others’.

When it comes to kings and gods, however, in the Aristotelian model the possibility of God being a friend appears less plausible. For Aristotle, kings and gods (he places them in the same category) cannot be friends with those who are under them. Kings are considered to be greater in virtue, affluence, and self-sufficiency. This is not to say that kings in their self-sufficiency are necessarily without concern for others. A king, though in no need of the friendship of others, “looks to the things beneficial not to himself but to those who are ruled.”8 By contrast, the tyrant only “pursues what is good for himself.”9 So even when kings lack friends who are counted to be lesser than they, they can still behave in a manner conducive to benevolence, meaning not merely self-beneficial. A king might do well for an underling for the sake of the underling and not for the king’s own sake. Yet could not this model of Aristotle pose a hindrance, particularly if we wish to postulate that God enjoys the cosmos, as I seek to do in this work, and when for him it is true that gods are self-sufficient to an absolute degree? Aristotle firmly states the division between gods or kings and their inferiors with these words:

And this is clear if the divergence becomes great in virtue or in vice or in affluence or in anything else; for no longer are they friends, nor do they think to deserve to be. This is most manifest in the case of the gods, since they have the greatest superiority in all good things, but it is evident also in the case of kings, since those who are inferior do not even think they deserve to be friends with those who are best or wisest. In such cases there is no precise boundary up to which they are friends, for when many things have been taken away the friendship still remains, but when they are separated greatly, as from a god, it no longer does.10

To wish the good for the sake of a friend can only be done for another who is human, argues Aristotle. Humans cannot necessarily wish good for a god, since gods have no need of more good or good will; and this is all the more the case insofar as the gods cannot be one’s friends. A hermetic barrier is raised. God would have no friends in that God would not mutually receive the love being reciprocated and respond accordingly. Summarizing Aristotle’s view, Abraham Heschel writes, “if we love God, we cannot desire Him to return our love, for then he would lose His perfection by becoming passively affected by our joys and sorrows.”11 For the world to be a friend of God would mean for God to also passively receive something from the world, to be in the position of a recipient to whom something could be added or from whom something could be taken way.

Interestingly, Aquinas reads Aristotle otherwise, by interpreting him in accordance with some principles enunciated in the scriptures. According to Aquinas, when Aristotle says “If, as we commonly supposed, the gods have any care of men, we may well believe them to take delight in that which is best and most akin to themselves … the intellectual worker then will be the best loved of heaven,” he is implying that God can also have friends.12 Aquinas interprets this passage the following way: “This Holy Writ teaches, saying: God guards all that love him (Ps. cxliv, 20); and the Philosopher also teaches that God has especial care of those who love understanding, and considers them His friends.”13 In the passage quoted by Aquinas, Aristotle is speaking from the context of the gods being the most blessed and happy, and thus being somewhat also at work, not being asleep, like Endymion.14 So an element of benign work or action on behalf of others is implied, which for Aquinas denotes divine-to-human friendship.

It is undeniable that Aquinas’s reading of Aristotle differs from that of Heschel, who asserts that the God described in the work of Aristotle is incapable of having friends. I agree with Don Adams that Aquinas took certain liberties in his approach to the texts of Aristotle on enjoyment.15 He creatively sought to bridge Greek thought with the scriptures and Christian classical views in order to demonstrate that wisdom may be also found in the wider world. As evinced by the established doctrine that God is love, he would not have been the only one who sought to add nuance to Aristotelian thinking, since Christianity has reinterpreted this paradigm by placing agape at its core. Perhaps this is the reason why for authors like Anders Nygren, the Greek concept of kingly eudemonia is comfortably replaced by that of a divine love that is benevolent: “an outflow,” a love “that descends, freely and generously giving of its superabundance.”16

Nevertheless, the views of the gods, or God, articulated by Aristotle still recognizably establish a chiasm between God and everything else that demands our attention. And while Christianity is clearly willing to narrow the distance between the two by granting friendship to God in the form of agape, with respect to Aristotelian in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Pain: Groans and Birth Pangs of the Divine Enjoyment
• 2. Yearning: Traces of the Divine Erotic Existence in the Cosmos
• 3. Permeability: The Open Wounds of the Lovers’ Flesh
• 4. Intensity: Passionate Becomings of the Divine Complex
• 5. Impropriety: Incarnations of Carnivalesque Passion and Open-Ended Boundaries
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index