Sensing God? Reconsidering the Patristic Doctrine of “Spiritual Sensation” for Contemporary Theology and Ethics
Sarah Coakley
9781626005143
78 pages
Marquette University Press
Overview
Organized into three sections, this study is concerned with the tradition of 'spiritual sensation', so-called, in the early Greek Fathers; first we engage with the issue of how this almost-lost, and somewhat arcane, patristic tradition of theological epistemology suddenly became repristinated in the work of a group of extraordinarily gifted younger Jesuits in the inter-war years in Europe, all of whom were to have illustrious and controversial ecclesiastical careers thereafter. The book goes on to explore how this was only the beginning of a new, contemporary, story about 'spiritual sensation' which is still unfolding today and moves well outside the groups earlier purview, for all its seminal significance. This is a new critical assessment of Jean Daniélou's classic rendition of the theme of “spiritual sensation” in the work of Gregory of Nyssa, and shows the surprising wider relevance for such pressing contemporary cultural problems as racism, sexism and addiction to pornography.
Author Bio
Sarah Coakley was the Norris-Hulse Professorship at Cambridge University, from 2007 to 2018, from 2018 she has been an Honorary Professor at the Logos Institute, St Andrews University, and from 2019 a Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Australian Catholic University (Melbourne and Rome). Professor Coakley is an Honorary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, an Emeritus Fellow of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the European Academy of Arts and Sciences. She holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Lund, St Andrews, Toronto (St Michael’s College), and London (Heythrop College). Sarah Coakley is the author or editor of nearly two-dozen books and is currently writing the remaining volume of her four-volume work on systematic theology with Cambridge University Press and editing her recent papers in philosophy of religion.
