Posts Tagged ‘Desire’
Sebastian Moore: The Emergence of Self-Awareness & Original Sin
In the previous section we discussed two awakenings to God as the ultimate cause of desire. In this section we will be exploring Sebastian Moore’s answer to the question of why such awakenings are necessary in the first place. Indeed, why not think of the normal, run of the mill, sorts of desire we experience in everyday life as being normative, while bracketing off the sorts of desire experienced when falling in love or during rather exceptional mystical experiences, as being simply odd quirks of human psychology? The answer that Moore gives us is, in brief, that desire as experienced by most adults is but the latest form of a process that has a long history. And once this history is gotten in view it is possible to see that calling the emotion we feel in our daily lives “desire” is much like calling Superman merely “Clark.” In laying out Moore’s narrative of the “history” of human desire this chapter will finally bring into focus Moore’s theory of original sin: the loss of our original desire and resistance to its recovery.
Moore reads the history of desire in human life through our developmental history, both corporately and individually. Psychoanalytic theory is one of his principle dialogue partners in charting this territory. He is particularly interested in how psychoanalytic theorists like Margaret Mahler show us how children grow into self-aware existence through a series of crises. The two crises that Moore focuses on most are the separation crisis and the Oedipal crisis. In both cases these crises represent a narrowing down of awareness and desire. This process of individuation is good in that it the process of identity formation, but it comes at the cost of losing the security of one’s original union with being, most obviously symbolized as the child within the mother’s womb.
The Separation Crisis: From “We” to “I”
The separation crisis initiates the human habit of always measuring ourselves against the reactions of others. Following Mahler, Moore describes the process by which the child with newly developed motor skills begins the ecstatic adventure of charting the world beyond the safety of the mother.[1] The crucial point here is that this exploration requires an enormous amount of emotional support by the mother. Just the right balance must be struck between encouraging the child to be on its own and remaining a stable security in the background. However, no mother can ever offer such a consistent, emotionally-supported send off. And to the extent this is true, the infant gets the unbearable message: “either be a part of me, or be on your own.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 71.) Thus, this separation, this first experience of what it is like to be “I,” is less than ecstatic. This dynamic that begins with the mother is then extended to all others. “The imperfectly separated individual existence looks continually to the other whence it has been unable clearly to pull away. Not knowing ourselves apart from others is our trouble, to remedy which we look to others!” (Let this Mind Be in You, 72.)
This initial phase in the birth of self-consciousness gives us the first part of our answer to the question of why our original goodness is more fundamental than our self-image (and therefore desire) as we experience it later in our developmental journey. It also explains why talk of our original goodness is puzzling to most of us, for, as Moore asks, “Why would anyone think of being him/herself other than the way they first came into consciousness? The world on which we first opened our eyes psychologically comes to be the world.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 72.) And to that extent, our emergence into self-aware existence impedes our awakening into luminous selfhood, for so long as we are looking to others for reassurance and measuring ourselves by their reactions, we are deaf to the “call from the depths of existence which says, ‘you are mine. You are not your family’s, your class’s, your race’s, your party’s. You are mine.’” (Let this Mind Be in You, 72.)
The Oedipal Crisis: From Yes to No
The second part of the answer to our question comes from a complexification of the child’s now reduced sense of desirability. This is the Oedipal phase. Here, desire makes its first translation from an original oneness with the mother into interpersonal feeling. In a tremendously intense, sexually undifferentiated love, the child makes a total bid for the mother’s affection. It is here that the child encounters a “mysterious rival:” the father. The father is mysterious due to the fact that he has a claim to the mothers affection in a different way than the child. So not only is the father a rival, but he is a different kind of rival. (Let this Mind Be in You, 73.) The result of this asymmetrical collision is that the child’s total bid for the mother’s affection becomes a “no-no” and is repressed.[2] Of this repression Moore says, poignantly, that,
I suspect that this is an important part of that repression of our sense of being desirable which is the root of our weakened relationship with God, people, and the planet. That child’s total zest for life, the sense of being welcome everywhere without strings attached, meets its first great disappointment in the mother’s commitment to an ‘other’ in an ‘other’ way. (Let this Mind Be in You, 73.)
In Freudian terms, the culmination of this crisis results in the repression of the Id (the total love-bid now become a no-no and repressed), followed by the emergence of sexually differentiated identity (the Ego), which is modeled and reinforced after one’s parental role model (the Superego). (Let this Mind Be in You, 74.) In Moore’s thought, this forms the basis of his theory of original sin. Original sin, he says, “…is the universal, culturally propagated and reinforced, human response to the trauma of coming out of animality into self-awareness, into ‘the knowledge of good and evil.’” (Let this Mind Be in You, 88.) It is not simply the repression of our passionate nature that forms the birth of evil (as Moore reads Wilhelm Reich as arguing), but also the fact that “…in repressing our passionate nature we are discounting our desirability, which is our experience of ourselves as God’s desired.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 74.) Without this element, our passionate nature can still be interpreted as “desire from emptiness” and thus be open to all the problems that attend such an anthropology (e.g. relations of dependence).
Once that is understood, then certainly we can say that repression is the origin of evil, and that what our transformation will consist in is the final befriending of all all that is in us that we have had to repress on our first steps into personhood. God is that infinite intelligence for which there is no such thing as evil. Evil arises out of our self-doubt on the part of God’s self-aware creatures. And the closer a person or a community comes to God, the more their ‘dark side’ becomes light. (Let this Mind Be in You, 74.)
And yet, to the extent that we remain “far from God,” much of life takes on a compulsive quality. As Ernest Becker has helped us see, viewed corporately, repression is culture. As such, to appropriate Robert Kegan’s language, culture functions as a corporate “immunity system.” This partial view of our whole life, motivated as it is by the terror of death, thus compels us to live according to the biases of our family, class, ethnicity, and so on. For if we do not, we will leave ourselves open to the very threats that our collective immunity system was tailor made to protect us from. Seen in this light, Moore’s theory of original sin is not only original, but also universal.
The final point that needs to be understood in Moore’s theory of original sin is that it is not the limited, repressed life that we find ourselves in that constitutes our sin, but rather is it our decision to stay there, to say “this is all there is.” Life itself is a movement of growth and it is our resistance to growth that puts us at odds with life. In this way Moore seems to want to go further than Becker was able to bring himself. Our desire is made for more than merely the creative self-restriction that repression affords us. Desire longs for liberation. Failing this, Moore sees humanity as being “shut in” and “psychologically on top of each other.” Our desires are “limitless,” he says, “and need the limitless breathing-space of the spirit. Closed in, they make us mutually destructive.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 104.) In the next section we will consider Moore’s Christology which functions as his theological solution to this problem of original sin as the narrowing of desire and resistance to its liberation.
This post is a continuation of a series in which I make use of the blogosphere to motivate my dissertation free-writing. For context, read the short summary of my work here. There you will also find a table of contents with links to all the posts in this series.
[1] For this narrative Moore is relying on the following Margaret Mahler’s book: The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant.
[7] Following R.D. Laing, Moore stresses that repression is not only forgetting, but forgetting that you’ve forgotten.
Sebastian Moore: The Structure of Desire
Before we can see how Moore conceives of the paradox of salvation in human desire, we must first more fully develop his concept of desire. The basic distinction we need to begin with is between desire for particular things and desire as such, or, as he often puts it, the “whole context of desire” that manifests as desire for “we know not what.” He reads basic distinction through the classic theological tradition, as most notably formulated by Augustine and Aquinas, and also through the psychoanalytic tradition.
In the classic theological tradition an “exit and return” pattern is adopted from Neo-Platonic spirituality in which creatures have their particular nature because they are fallen from their original home in the divine One. Salvation is then thought to be a power that enables creatures to return to God who is the unity beyond the many particular things of creation. Yet, though our desire—having its origin in the divine—finds its ultimate fulfillment only in the divine, it nevertheless seems endlessly misdirected toward the fleeting things of creation. The love of God revealed by Christ thus enables a certain detachment from the merely creaturely dimension of reality, thus liberating love to be properly directed to the divine dimension in which all created reality participates. [1] This reorientation of one’s love simultaneously allows one to love creation in a way proper to one’s own creaturely nature, namely as an unexpected gift rather than a possession. In this way desire is moved from the known and the particular to the mysterious and eternal in all being.
Moore sees in the psychoanalytic tradition a similar motion. A central Freudian insight, which he deems to be very important, is that the child grows out of an undifferentiated “sea of delight,” a sort of “oceanic dream of self….” [2] Compared to the theological imagery we have just discussed, this undifferentiated state is analogous to the divine One prior to the fall, or perhaps one might think of it as the pre-fall state of Adam and Eve in the Biblical narrative, before the separation from intimacy with God occurred. This delightful background precedes desire as it later becomes channeled more and more into particular objects. Much like the Platonic imagery that infuses classical theology, the loss of touch with this original context of all-embracing goodness leads to a terror of death and fetishization of particular objects of desire. The process of the differentiation of desire, as we shall see later, is traumatic and dramatic. This drama plays itself out in the relationships the child negotiates with its first caregivers. Psychotherapeutic method seeks in various ways to heal the trauma that attends the birth of self-consciousness. Moore sees this most fundamentally as an effort to to reconnect the patient to the long neglected sense of self as good/desirable that largely resides beneath the surface of everyday awareness.
Out of these two traditions Moore creates his distinction between particular desires and the preceding origin of desire as such. The former, if fixated upon in the absence of a solid connection to the later, constitutes the core problematic of his analysis.
With this in view we can now see another crucial element of Moore’s thought, namely the distinctive way he relates these two modes of desire. His concept of generic desire, or “desire for we know not what,” inverts a commonsense idea of desire, namely that desire flows from an inner emptiness, or a lack. Moore objects. Desire, he wants to say, flows from an original over-abundance of goodness. To see his point, it is worth quoting him at length.
Wanting this or that cannot possibly be the start of the wanting process. It too must be preceded by a continuous condition of myself in my environment, a continuous wanting-I-know-not-what, a ‘just wanting.’ Now what is this ‘just wanting’ state? If we don’t reflect carefully, at this point, on our experience, we will say, ‘It is a state of emptiness wanting to be filled.’ But if we reflect, we see that this is the opposite of the truth. ‘Just wanting’ is a feeling good that wants to go on feeling good and looks for things to feel good about. This is very clear in the child. The child—like the dolphin—is a bundle of pleasurableness. Freud describes our original condition, moving in the amniotic fluid, as the ‘oceanic’ condition. Thus as we move, in our inquiry, from the definite, specific wants, back to the undifferentiated ‘just wanting,’ we are moving towards not emptiness but fullness. In the life of desire, it is ‘everything’ that becomes ‘this thing;’ it is not ‘nothing’ that becomes ‘this thing.’ (Let this Mind Be in You, 5.)
The basic structure is now in view. The task now is to show how this structure operates in human life.
Two Awakenings to the Ultimate Cause of Desire
Moore describes two basic ways that individuals who are living under the normal circumstances of focusing only on particular desires can be awoken to God as the ultimate mystery of desire. These two ways he calls “indirect” and “direct” awakening. The first is an awakening mediated through particular things, especially through intimate relationships with other people, whereas the second is not so mediated. In both cases a successful awakening has the same result, the liberation of desire and a reconnection with an immeasurable sense of self as desirable, that is to say, as good. Let us now briefly consider each of these ways of awakening.
Indirect Awakening
Before all else, says Moore, we long to be desired. More precisely, we long to be desired by the one whom we desire. (The Fire and the Rose Are One, xiii.) This longing flows from a certainty of being desirable. This is a counter-intuitive statement, but it shows itself when we are spurned by one we love. We become angry and indignant which proves that, deep down, we really do have come concept of our desirability. (Let this Mind Be in You, 14) This makes no sense if consider this desirability as being based on a notion of self-awareness that looks at oneself as an object. Indeed, we often do not feel desirable when we reflect on ourselves in that way. This deeper concept of our own desirability flows from Moore’s idea of our unfathomable inner-goodness that we often cover up. Such desire flows from a concept of self-awareness that looks “with” the self, not “at” the self. Problems of self dis-esteem flow from looking at the self, which is a rationalization of one’s very being. (Let this Mind Be in You, 13-14.)
From this sort of psychological sleep, the experience of desire for another has a way of reconnecting one with their own sense of desirability. As Moore says, “…when you feel drawn to another person, that is your own sense of your goodness expanding. There is always, in the attraction to another, the feeling of a larger life opening up in myself.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 14.) Moore traces this movement through several steps. First one is attracted to another. In this attraction, their own sense of their desirability is awoken. But this is only the beginning, for one wants their desire to be fully exercised in having the other be also attracted them. This can only happen, however, if the other person comes under the power of the first person’s goodness and beauty. This awakening, in turn awakens the other person to their own desirability. It is at this moment that the relationship moves from a relation of dependence to interdependence. In the early stages of mutual arousal, interdependence happens with ease, but if the relationship is to grow, one’s own self-affirmation (which is the power that attracts the other) needs to persist in order to avoid sliding back into an unsustainable relation of dependence.
This new moment, of self-acceptance in a love relationship, is the crucial moment. It is the watershed in all human relations. It is what most of us most of the time stop short of. For this is the vital point at which our belief in our goodness is not strong enough to carry us forward. It is always some, often subtle, self-rejection that hinders us from believing in another’s finding us attractive and from seeing that the other does so when this happens. (Let this Mind Be in You, 27.)
When our belief in our goodness persists in interdependent relationship “…each is affirming, is accepting, is appropriating, his or her own goodness as working in the relationship.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 27.) Desire has now been transformed “…into an investment of myself in a developing shared life, a commitment of myself to the unpredictable in hope.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 28.)
It is here that we see the paradoxical nature of a stage transition. In moving from dependence to interdependence one is actually entering into a new dependence (though qualitatively different from the former dependence). As Moore says, “…it is a dependence on the total mystery that constitutes me, this unique good person, and supports my investment of my goodness in the risk-laden adventure of intimacy. The anchor of my new hope is goodness itself.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 28.) These words sound familiar as they contain elements of two different stage transitions that Scharlemann mentioned in the previous chapter.
Another thinker who has done a great deal of work on this particular transition, and who has made explicit use of Moore’s theology, is David Schnarch. As I have mentioned earlier in this thesis, Schnarch is a psychotherapist who specializes in merging the disciplines of marital and sexual therapy with a particular emphasis on the dynamics of desire. He makes use of the idea of “inherent paradox” to help his patients see that they have, in fact, become “too important to each other” because they have ceased to grow beyond a dependency relation to each other. He calls this state “emotional fusion,” and though this state has the merit of regulating the anxiety of those in the relationship, the negative result is that desire evaporates. (Intimacy and Desire, 44-46.) Because partners lack the confidence in their own fundamental goodness, they cannot stand the anxiety of upsetting their partner beyond a certain point. Difficult issues are thus left unaddressed, and the couple contents themselves with elements of the relationship that are not as problematic, but which (owing to their safety) also tend to be quite boring and lacking passion. Some spend their whole adult life in this lifeless anxiety management system, but for others, something within refuses to accept such a circumstance. These are the one’s who either leave their partner or end up in therapy. Schnarch’s tactic as a therapist is just what Moore has previously indicated: He attempts to help the couple feel their own desirability/goodness that exists prior to the validation of their partner, thus enabling the courage to face the difficult elements within themselves and their relationship. [3] Interestingly, Schnarch has found that in the process a spontaneous spirituality is birthed in such couples. (Passionate Marriage, 382.)
The basic movement of the indirect awakening of God as the ultimate mystery of desire can now be seen. From desiring another, to the exercise of desire in a relationship of interdependence, to desire become hope in the total context of desire. The self is thus moved from an experience of isolation to a “partnership in the energy that unites persons in love.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 20.) This, argues Moore, is life in the Spirit. “Spirit [is] inter-life, the mysterious energy that flows between persons”. It is participation in this energy that “opens us to God, [and is] at once the opening of our desire to God and God’s point of entry into us; our way of opening, God’s way of entering.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 25.)
Direct Awakening
Though our desire has its source in our own basic goodness or desirability, we typically sense it indirectly through the “symptom” of desiring an other. (Let this Mind Be in You, 35.) But there is another way for our desirability to be felt, and this is what Moore calls a direct awakening of desire. Here desire breaks the rules and reaches out towards “nothing in particular.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 35.) It is not a matter of “I am wanting such and such a thing,” but rather, it is a matter of “I am.” This experience of desire is simultaneously the experience of one’s own desirability. No object has aroused it, rather “its very center has been stirred.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 43.) For this reason, a direct awakening of desire reverses the order of desire as normally experienced in indirect awakening. Rather than the self coming to experience its desirability in desiring another, here the self experiences its desirability first, then, like a river overflowing its banks, other objects of desire are caught up in the flood. (Let this Mind Be in You, 43.)
One might think to ask towards what this direct awakening of desire is aimed since, as we have noted, it has no object. Clearly language is strained at this point, but the only adequate answer is that “it is with ‘what makes me desirable’ that I seek intimacy,” (Let this Mind Be in You, 35.) the cause of my being and goodness. In line with classical theology, the only reality that makes desirable what it desires is God. It is God alone that “…directly arouses my self-awareness as desirable; that which, not as object desired but as subject making desirable, causes in us that desire for we know not what which is the foundational religious experience.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 36.) The intensity of this experience is certainly lost amidst this academic prose, but for a moment consider what it would be like to experience all the various forms of your erotic engagements with friends, lovers, and even the glory of nature, at its source. (Let this Mind Be in You, 38.) This, Moore encourages us to see, is the heart of religion, even while it turns conventional notions of religion on their heads. It fact it is often the case that when people first taste this experience they feel that conventional religion no longer speaks to them. Why? Because this awakening brings with it “a sense that I am in myself and not relatively to other people and to my culture and race.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 38.)
This breakthrough is what Moore calls the discovery of luminous selfhood. It is not necessarily a religious experience, he says, but it is spiritual. For it to become a religious matter one must answer “yes” to the call of longing that emerges. This latter choice, says Moore, is what constitutes religious faith. The result is a life lived in love, for “Love is desire decided for.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 40.)
From this distinction between an awareness that is dominated by knowing oneself always as measured against the responses of others and an awareness that is dominated by knowing oneself directly as good, somehow chosen, and beloved, Moore makes a distinction between two types of religiosity: Romantic and Mystical religiousness. Romantic religiousness takes its point of departure from the first mode of consciousness. Here religious truths are spoken of “by spinning a web of speculation and beautiful thoughts out and beyond this sure base. It’s up in the air, controlled only by the person’s fancy as he/she conjures up a God who is like Grandma but infinitely better. So it’s romantic. It’s building castles in Spain.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 39.) Mystical religiousness, on the other hand, renders ordinary consciousness questionable rather than taking it as its point of departure. “Its religious thinking is not up in the air, romantic, moralistic pious guesswork whose only anchor is ordinary social consciousness, but is deeper [and] more real.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 39.)
Romantic religiousness has the great risk of painting a picture of God that “evokes an experience of being loved first by another person in whom we are not interested—which is one of the most negative experiences we have.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 45.) Mystical religiousness is not about “loving others,” but about “turning them on.” What we desire most is to be desired by one who excites us, and in a religious context this boils down to being Christ for people. Jesus did not “love people,” rather, “he allowed God to show him to people as his beloved, desirable because desired from all eternity. As each of us is.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 46.)
Those who experience direct awakening become means of grace for others. And what “we call grace, or the new creation, is that movement within people whereby the infinite desire which constitutes them in being (the ‘first creation’) happens for them, happens in their consciousness, happens as a new empowering of the heart.”[34] Thus, whether first mediated through human relationships, as is most common, or awoken directly, the goal is the same: the liberation of desire by making contact with desire’s ultimate cause, the love that courses through the entire universe.
This post is a continuation of a series in which I make use of the blogosphere to motivate my dissertation free-writing. For context, read the short summary of my work here. There you will also find a table of contents with links to all the posts in this series.
[1] Augustine stressed that this is a process that is never completed in this life. As he says in the City of God, “For to be quite free from pain while we are in this place of misery is only purchased, as one of the world’s literati perceived and remarked, at the price of blunted sensibilities both of mind and body. And therefore that which the Greeks called ἀπάθεια, and what the Latins would call, if their language would allow them, ‘impassibilitas,’ if it be taken to mean an impassibility of spirit and not of body, or, in other words, a freedom from those emotions which are contrary to reason and disturb the mind, then it is obviously a good and most desirable quality, but it is not one which is attainable in this life.” (The City of God, 410.)
[2] Moore will later be critical of Freud because Freud called this desire that precedes the desire for particular things “the unconscious.” Moore sees Freud as having “made the common mistake of thinking of self-awareness as having oneself as object of awareness”, thus, “he had to call the fundamental condition that precedes all our [desirous] activity the ‘unconscious’.” (Let this Mind Be in You, 6.) For Moore this fundamental sense of desire is not unconscious, but instead, is a mode of consciousness that, though seldom present to us, can be reconnected with though meditation. (Let this Mind Be in You, 10.) Indeed it is this fundamental desire that is the deeper stability that all therapy directs itself toward. (Let this Mind Be in You, 14.)
[3] For Schnarch this basic idea is interpreted through the idea of “differentiation” as first developed by Murray Bowen, but expanded upon in Schnarch’s own work.
Sebastian Moore and the Paradox of Salvation in Human Desire: Introduction
What is it that most animates human life? As children we play with friends and test our parents. As adolescents we begin looking for love and finding out “who we are.” As adults we raise families, engage in politics, build nations, make war, go on vacations, participate in religious communities, get a jobs, volunteer at charities, shop for insurance, buy McMansions or, perhaps, build tiny homes. Is there a unified drive that stands behind all of these activities? If Ernest Becker’s work is still top of mind, one might be tempted to answer that deep down it is all ultimately the fear of death that drives human activity. But if one looks closer it becomes apparent that before there can be a fear of death, there must be a desire for life. It is this limitless desire that makes our eventual perception of the actual limitations of life so unbearable. This is, once again, the existential paradox of human life, and it is this paradoxical relationship between conscious desire and the knowledge of death that drives the human animal.
In view of this, what theology of salvation could possibly be adequate to address this existential paradox? To be clear, I don’t mean by this question the much weaker problem of how to live a relatively decent life that measures up to our desires as we have limited them. What I am pointing at here is the crushing desire that leaves a lump in your throat and that makes all of life seem but a monotone facade once it has been experienced. C.S. Lewis points to this form of desire in his description of his first encounter with what he later came to call “joy.” His recounting is worth quoting at length.
As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton’s ‘enormous bliss’ of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to ‘enormous’) comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation of course, of desire; but desire for what? not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss, nor even (though that came into it) for my own past.…[A]nd before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, that whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. it had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison. (Surprised by Joy, 16.)
It is possible that my reader will have no idea of what I am now referring to. This is to be expected since the great majority of our lives tends to be a focus on much more attainable and less puzzling objects of desire. Yet it is my claim that behind these particular desires there stands an unlimited desire in which all particular desires find their home and are given their meaning. Much more will be said about this in the coming sections, but for now, get in your mind the desire that drives adventurers and makes you long to be adventurous. Think also of the desire that moves all lovers and makes you want to be in love.
Such a form of desire is a problem because nothing in this world can satisfy it. And because its relationship to all other particular desires, as their ground and end, all particular desires are likewise caught up in the problem. We are left with a dilemma: Either we can avoid having the sweetness of this deep desire awoken in us and thereby attempt to avoid the ache of its lack of fulfillment in this life (like Tolkien’s Hobbits [with the exception, perhaps, of those of Tookish descent] we can steadfastly refuse to go on adventures!), or, on the other hand, we can open ourselves to this desire, knowing that in this life heartache will be our constant companion. I ask again, what theology of salvation could address such a situation?
This chapter will be an attempt to articulate an attempt to respond to this question. In chapter two we developed an anthropology by way of the psychological insights of Ernest Becker and Robert Kegan. There we learned that growth amounts to a repeating pattern of self-protective self-limitation and transcendence of these same limitations leading to greater freedom to explore new potential in thought and action. In chapter three we dealt with the question of truth from the dual perspective of reflection and response. There we learned that both he reflective and responsive activities of reason progress through a series of stages whereby the activities of criticism and doubt force reason into a paradox that cannot be met according to the resources of its current stage of reflection or response, but can only be transcended. The criticism and doubt from the previous stage are in this way answered, but not on the same plane upon which they had operated. In both cases a form of death preceded new life. Previous forms of knowing, desiring and relating were sublated into a more complex and embracing way of being.
To this I now introduce the work of Sebastian Moore. Over the course of several books Moore has worked out a Christology that aims to answer the existential paradox that we have been articulating.[1] He stands firmly in the Augustinian tradition and is well known as a theologian of desire. Moore makes explicit use of Becker’s work, seeing in it a scientific anthropology that harmonizes with his own theological intuitions. What Moore adds to our picture is an explicitly theological focus on the dynamics of growth and salvation. Where Scharlemann and Tillich presented the dynamics of salvation in human reason, Moore provides us with a soteriology of desire.[2]
The basic shape of Moore’s theology is contained in his conception of Jesus as the liberator of desire. Moore characterizes human desire as having its origin in our original sense of experiencing ourselves as good. We will be addressing this aspect of Moore’s thought in the next section. This original experience of early childhood is progressively diminished along one’s developmental journey, and, as a result, so is the intensity and scope of our own desires. This is Moore’s theory of original sin. This idea will be explored in the section following our discussion of original desire. The first step in the process of salvation is then to reawaken our original sense of ourselves as good. But this reopens the problem we raised above, namely that unlimited desire seems to be a cruel joke within the limits of creaturely life. This leads to the final step. Having awoken unlimited desire, Jesus turns toward Jerusalem and the cross, teaching us to detach our desire from the merely creaturely dimension of life and lose it within the divine movement that courses through all life in freedom and grace. Before moving on to the first section on desire, I will close this introduction with Moore’s own tremendous summary of what he calls his “big discovery.”
The discovery is that Jesus awoke desire in his followers; that the desire he liberated is that infinite desire whose infinity we seldom sense directly; that this desire for life in its fullness chafes at life’s limits and so moves in a mysterious harmony with death…that this desire was altogether beyond the power to own, and so found its place-to-be in Jesus: the awakener of desire becomes its containing symbol. Thus the destruction, the dismantling, of the symbolic place of desire brought desire itself to the crisis that death will be for each of us. Living they died, were carried beyond this world, knew what the dead know. And the focus of this spiritual enlargement, its agency, was the crucifixion of Jesus. (The Inner Loneliness, 120.)
This post is a continuation of a series in which I make use of the blogosphere to motivate my dissertation free-writing. For context, read the short summary of my work here. There you will also find a table of contents with links to all the posts in this series.
[1] The Crucified Jesus Is No Stranger; The Fire and the Rose Are One; The Inner Loneliness; Let This Mind Be in You: The Quest for Identity Through Oedipus to Christ [2] However, this matter is made complex since the conception of reason we dealt with in our time with Scharlemann and Tillich includes the activity of desire in the both the reflective and responsive modes of reason, but perhaps especially in the responsive mode. Moore will speak often about the “awakening” of desire, which is essentially reason’s response to an objectival presence.
living through death 