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Reclaiming the Enjoyment of God: Desiderium and Sacrifice

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Reclaiming the Enjoyment of God: Desiderium and Sacrifice 1 Reclaiming the Enjoyment of God: Desiderium and Sacrifice Christians of various centuries considered the enjoyment of God to be the preeminent goal of humanity. As early as the fourth century, Augustine argued that God was the summum bonum of life and, as such, should be enjoyed exclusively.1 As the “highest good,” God was to be the object of humanity’s desire and enjoyment (fruitio), while created things were to be used (usus) as a means toward the greater enjoyment of that good.2 By implication, then, one of the central tasks of theology was to facilitate the enjoyment of God; likewise, it was imperative that the theologian cultivate his or her own delight in God. Not only was one’s study to be pleasurable, but the object of one’s study was to become the supreme source of joy.3 Subsequent generations of theologians, however, did not univer- sally recognize the preeminence of this theme. While various authors attempted to recover its primacy, the emphasis in the “schools” of the medieval period, for example, shifted to other goals.4 Augustine himself may have contributed to the subsequent waning of his vision when he concluded that the human capacity to enjoy the summum bonum during this life is but partial.5 Despite his own longing (de- siderium), he averred that the consummation of enjoyment awaited 1 © UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME 2 — Sacrifice and Delight in the Mystical Theologies a different time, a different “city,” when one was finally united with God. One had to look toward the “end without end” to experience unbounded delight; God would be the “bliss” only of that eternal city where “we shall see and our hearts rejoice.”6 The height of joy was thus relegated to the realm of the eschato- logical. The desire for God, while it tended toward union with the object of desire, was thwarted by the vicissitudes of finite existence. Humanity’s lot was simply to glimpse that final beauty, and this limi- tation fueled yet frustrated that yearning. Life on earth would be marked by toil and loss—a shadow of the blessed life to come. Within the mystical tradition, however, a vibrant strand emerged that promoted the idea that, contrary to Augustine, union with God could be achieved in this life and desiderium fulfilled.7 For example, commentaries on the Song of Songs proliferated during the medieval period, encouraging readers to seek deeper intimacy with the Di- vine.8 These commentators agreed with Augustine that union with God would be enjoyed in its fullest measure at the final beatific vi- sion, but they insisted that eschatological incursions of celestial bliss into this present life were both possible and desirable. Given certain conditions, a yearning for God could result in complete, unhindered enjoyment of God, that is, union with God during this life.9 Some authors went so far as to trace careful steps—spiritual itineraries—by which the seeker might reach this goal.10 During the Reformation conflict of the sixteenth century, again the theme of fruitio Deo (the enjoyment of God) slipped into the background.11 Theologians devoted their energies to disputing issues such as salvation, justification, faith, and the nature of grace.P olemic fervor only increased in the following century as Protestants sought to delineate categories, crafting their self-identity over and against other camps both within and without the Protestant world.12 Despite strident debates during the post-Reformation era of the church, select Catholic and Protestant thinkers reclaimed Augus- tine’s imperative to enjoy God and developed it further. While the impetus is not clearly established, it is unmistakable that it returned with renewed force in disparate pockets of the church. The French © UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME Reclaiming the Enjoyment of God — 3 school of spirituality, for example, emphasized the “sweetness of Christ,” and Catholic mystical treatises detailed the soul’s journey toward delectable union with God.13 On the Reformed side, the Westminster Shorter Catechism of the 1640s heralded the claim that the “chief end of [humanity] is to glorify God and to enjoy [God] forever.”14 Though Calvin did not develop this theme, he hinted at it in his Institutes,15 and those within the provenance of the Reformed Church would have been familiar with the language of both Calvin and the Creeds. Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78), the most renowned female theologian of seventeenth-century Holland, was among those who recovered this Augustinian strand. Adhering to the Reformed Creeds, she believed that “the chief end for which [humanity] was created is to . enjoy [God] forever.”16 To the discomfort of her readers, how- ever, she prescribed means toward that end that departed from the typical categories of Reformed orthodoxy. Though van Schurman retained the core of her theological background, she added layers of thought arguably inherited from the Catholic mystical tradition, yielding a mixture of ideas that provoked suspicion. Elsewhere in Europe, a similar blending of ideas emerged in the spiritual writings of another female theologian. Madame Jeanne Guyon (1648–1717), a French Catholic who would not have had ob- vious access to the writings of her Protestant neighbors, began to employ language strikingly similar to that of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. In the Moyen court et très facile de faire oraison (“A short and very easy method of prayer,” 1685), she argued that “the end for which we were created is to enjoy God from this life on.”17 She wrote that finding pleasure in God is the “height of happiness and the end for which we were created” (le comble de la félicité et la fin pour laquelle nous avons été créés).18 Both van Schurman and Guyon would have inherited this idea ultimately from Augustine. The ideal of “enjoying God” in this life took on various permutations, however, after Augustine.19 One might argue that it was forgotten in significant portions of the church during the seventeenth century and was no longer considered a © UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME 4 — Sacrifice and Delight in the Mystical Theologies supreme virtue, despite the nominal attention that both Reformed and Catholic theologians paid to it.20 This seems true of van Schur- man and Guyon’s immediate contexts in particular. As Martin Pro- zesky has convincingly argued, even major strands of Dutch Pietism stressed morality over the enjoyment of God.21 And Guyon’s in- herited Catholicism, dominated by the formidable Bishop Jacques- Benigne Bossuet, hardly focused on finding one’s “pleasure” in God. There were exceptions to this rule, as in the case of Bérulle and the French school of spirituality, as well as in the writings of St. Francis de Sales. Nevertheless, Bossuet’s leadership influenced much of the theological tenor of his day in France and beyond.22 This book examines the work of these two women who made the enjoyment of God central to their thought. Both van Schurman and Guyon, standing in divergent theological camps, inherited and ex- panded this notion and added surprising permutations of their own. Not only was their emphasis on the possibility of achieving union with God on earth a source of controversy, but the road that they mapped for their readers was a difficult one: they uncovered a signifi- cant cost to finding enjoyment in God. The demands that they im- posed on the follower of Christ seemed so excessive and harsh that their teachings appeared pathological to some observers. Indeed, they called for nothing less than complete self-denial (in the case of van Schurman) and self-annihilation (in the case of Guyon) from those who longed to enjoy the highest good. A RADICAL SURRENDER: ENJOYMent’S SHADOW SIDE Van Schurman and Guyon argued indefatigably that the “chief end of humanity” was to “enjoy God” both “in this life” and forever. This enjoyment, however, came at great cost. If the highest call was to find one’s pleasure in the summum bonum, they argued together with Au- gustine that one consequently had to forsake “lesser” pleasures as an end in themselves. Inferior joys offered a mere facade and proved a barrier to the purest pleasure available in God. Ridding oneself of false joys required self-abnegation. © UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME Reclaiming the Enjoyment of God — 5 But van Schurman and Guyon went further. Departing from Au- gustine, they argued that union with God was possible on this earth through this process of purification. The trouble with this claim was not that they extended a strong form of fruitio Deo to the temporal; the mystics of the medieval period had already introduced that idea. Rather, it was that they regarded union with God as impossible apart from self-sacrifice. A thoroughgoing denial or annihilation of the self was required for the greatest pleasure in God to be experienced. Put another way, the uprooting of inferior joys required deep, painful purgation. The accent in their writings fell uncomfortably on the arduous nature of the path that leads toward union, even as they pur- ported to celebrate the goal. An emphasis on self-denial, of course, already had a long history in Christian theology and spirituality.23 What makes van Schurman and Guyon unique is the way in which they coupled self-denial with pleasure. They intensified the denial as well as the pleasure.24 Though van Schurman and Guyon described this journey to- ward God in painstaking detail, they were careful to affirm that the drive toward self-denial (for van Schurman), or self-annihilation (for Guyon), is an innate longing of the soul to become more intimate with the object of desire.
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