Abstract
My argument is that our body and its capacity for pleasure are an aid and never a hindrance in our path to God. I am a Catalan Benedictine nun and a feminist theologian. I understand feminist theology as a critical thinking linked to an experience of contradiction: contradiction between my own very positive experience of God and self, and some of the statements about God/woman/human coming particularly, but not only, from my Roman Catholic tradition; the perceived contradiction can also be between my experience of God/self and some biblical passages, some liturgical or pastoral practices of the Church or some aspects of the organization and governance of the Church or society.
Pleasure from a Theological Perspective: The text is the transcription of the oral exposition and has the direct and vivid style of an oral exposition with rhetorical questions, repetitions and recapitulations.
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Notes
- 1.
Teresa (1987).
- 2.
Bernini (2011).
- 3.
Teresa (1987), pp. 13–14 (author’s own translation).
- 4.
Kant (1995).
- 5.
Heschel (1996).
- 6.
Gospel of Luke 15, 31.
- 7.
See attached table entitled Analogy between the human being and God. This table proposes an analogical understanding of space, time and sex as basic human categories able to sustain a subjective experience of God as reciprocity, truth and fire. The analogical character of space, time and sex implies the freedom of the human subject. By virtue of its being created to the image of God, the human subject cannot be predetermined: it is free; this freedom implies the possibility to block its own fulfilment. The analogy implies that human subjectivity finds its fulfilment in the experience of reciprocity, truth and fire in a historical and personally differentiated (unique) way. It implies likewise that the fundamental subjective value of space, time and sex in one’s life can be “denied” or wrongly experienced as “absolute”. And, finally, it implies that the divine (fulfilling) orientation of one’s experience of space, time and sex cannot occur once and for all, but presupposes a constant break with inertia, a moment of creativity that needs to be constantly re-enacted (in Lacanian terms: the precipitation of subjectivity; in Christian theological terms: being born again; cf. Gospel of John 3).
- 8.
Teresa (1982) (author’s own translation).
References
Bernini, Mormando F. 2011. His life and his Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Heschel, Abraham Joshua. 1996. The Sabbath. Scarborough: Harper Collins.
Kant, Immanuel. 1995. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Teresa, Ávila. 1987. Book of life, 17.8. The life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by herself. London: Penguin Classics.
Teresa, Ávila. 1982. Camino de Perfección (Way of perfection) Manuscrito de El Escorial 42.4. In Teresa de Jesús. Obras completas. Texto revisado y anotado por Fr. Tomás de la Cruz , C.D. (3a edición). Burgos: editorial Monte Carmelo, p. 262.
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Forcades i Vila, T. (2020). Pleasure from a Theological Perspective. In: Hensold, J., Kynes, J., Öhlmann, P., Rau, V., Schinagl, R., Taleb, A. (eds) Religion in Motion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41388-0_4
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