The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity by Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley editors (review)

What does it mean to perceive God with the senses? And are one’s physical senses up to the job? Is it a purely mental activity? Or are the bodily senses somehow engaged? These questions reveal the variety of Christian reflection on the topic of spiritual perception. The perceiver and the perceived invite as much scrutiny as the process of and conditions for perception of God.

The editors have assembled sixteen fine essays, each (with a few exceptions) devoted to a specific Christian writer. Patristic writers include Origen (Mark J. McInroy), Gregory of Nyssa (Coakley), Augustine (Matthew R. Lootens), Gregory the Great (George E. Demacopoulos), Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (Gavrilyuk), and Maximus the Confessor (Frederick D. Aquino). Readers of this journal might be tempted to stop there. To do so, however, misses some fascinating developments in the tradition, as explored in essays on scholasticism, mysticism of the high middle ages, the Puritans and Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, and, more recently, Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and contemporary analytic philosophers of religion.

A full treatment of the entire collection is beyond the scope of this review. Instead, a few themes emerging in several essays deserve to be highlighted. The tension between spiritual senses as analogical and anagogical is a recurrent issue. Platonism’s disjunction between the “sensibles” and the “intelligibles” shaped Origen’s claims that the spiritual senses belong to a separate, if analogous, cognitive faculty. Yet, many of Origen’s followers found it difficult to uphold that tidy opposition between physical and spiritual senses. For instance, Gregory of Nyssa’s De anima reveals a previously overlooked turning point in the Nyssen’s thinking on the separation, a revision perhaps connected to the recent deaths of two siblings. Other thinkers, however, upheld the separation of corporeal and incorporeal perceptions. For Augustine, corporeal senses could not perceive an incorporeal God; only interior, spiritual senses were disposed to this object and could give a foretaste of the eschatological vision promised for the resurrection.

Another interesting contribution is the focus on how physical practices cultivate the spiritual senses. Even Gregory the Great, who regarded physical senses as disruptive of any spiritual perception, appealed to the spiritual senses to express pastoral and ascetic concerns. Dionysius the Areopagite, though indebted to Platonic ideals, posited the physical and spiritual senses as belonging to a single “cognitive continuum” by which perception becomes stretched and extended, but never abandoned. Sacraments such as baptism activated spiritual perception, as other sacraments energized the ascent toward contact with God. Maximus the Confessor also regarded ascetic virtues and contemplation as the training ground for spiritual perception and thereby progress.

Even if such a diversity of approaches belies any “doctrine” of the spiritual senses (as Karl Rahner posited in essays on Origen and Bonaventure in the 1930s), there is a longstanding and diverse tradition here with significant implications for reflecting on the role of the human body in knowing God. Two essays on medieval writers deserve special mention for the methodological questions they raise. In a lucid and engaging essay, Richard Cross considers how Aquinas, informed by Aristotelian principles, dispensed altogether with the need for any notion of the spiritual senses. And Bernard McGinn provides a useful comparative context in an essay on five late-medieval mystics, several of them women. He calls attention to the increased use of vernacular languages and somatic language in mystical writings as expanding linguistic possibilities for describing spiritual perception of God.

This collection will interest a wide range of scholars, including those interested the relation between affect and cognition, patristic and medieval spirituality, the role of the senses in shaping liturgical and the sacramental experiences, the legacy of both Plato and Aristotle for Christian mysticism, and late-antique and medieval attitudes toward the body, in general, and the physical senses, in particular. With an up-to-date bibliography of scholarly works, a helpful general index, and an index of...