This book considers Thomas Aquinas alongside Jacques Lacan. It seems that Lacan had some interest in Thomas, speaks of what it is like to read him, and knows about Gilson's existentialist interpretation of Thomas's metaphysics.
The book unfolds in five parts. ‘Being and Desire’ introduces Lacanian psychoanalysis and summarises the thought of Thomas. I cannot judge the accuracy of the presentation of Lacan but for Beattie he is ‘an atheist Thomist’. Certainly his account of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary is of great interest in its own right. Beattie argues that reading Thomas's theology in a Lacanian key releases important insights about ‘the incarnate Other of Thomas's One God’, glimpsed in many parts of his work but always quickly repressed because of his attachment to Greek philosophy.
‘Ordering Desire’ gives the main critique of Thomas: because he was such a brilliant re-thinker of earlier traditions, and because of his own later authority in the Church and beyond, he played a significant part in entrenching a patriarchal order which has dominated the Western intellectual tradition from Parmenides to von Balthasar. On the basis of a gendered cosmology coming from Aristotle, but at key points influenced by Plato and Neoplatonists, Thomas strengthened an understanding of law, politics and Church order which at worst excluded women (from the universities, e.g.) or at best included them in a purely passive and receptive capacity (in the Church, in medieval romance, in romanticism). For Beattie, the seed of all this is the distinction between matter and form understood as feminine and masculine, passive and active – everything follows from that and so one must return to that point in order to think it out again. Where others might finger Descartes, Duns Scotus, or ‘modernity’ as the culprit in subverting some wonderful synthesis which the patristic and medieval periods supposedly constructed, Beattie shows, convincingly, that we must step much further back, implicitly agreeing with Anscombe's comment that Western thought is a series of footnotes to Parmenides rather than to Plato.
Part Three is entitled ‘Conquering Desire’ and looks at what the Reformation and Enlightenment did to solidify further the dualisms already established and to copper-fasten the objectification of the body and the rejection of desire. Whatever hope there might have been to save something from the Fathers of the Church or the medieval scholastics is decisively removed by Protestant theology, scientific positivism (Galileo as a baddie!), the Cartesian subject, and Kant's ethics of duty without desire. So we end up with the bifurcated world in which we live, scientific achievement and technology raping nature on one side, pornography, poverty and oppression endured by so many, mainly women, on the other. If it is not Kant, then it is the Marquis de Sade: postmodernity honours both, with no attempt to resolve the contradiction they represent.
In Part Four, ‘Sexing Desire’, Beattie seeks to give voice again to the body and the body's wisdom. She believes that in spite of the problems she has identified with it, there is potential in Thomas's thought that would support a Lacanian reading of his work. Does Lacan's ‘real’ function as Thomas's ‘God’? Does Lacan offer ‘an inverse but truer Thomism’ in which the radical implications of creation, incarnation and resurrection are allowed to develop? The strength of the first part of her argument, that Thomas is a key culprit in developing the dire situation in which we find ourselves, seems to cancel out the second part, that there are some parts of Thomas's work that are redeemable. So her main argument fails, for two reasons. One is that the ‘good bits’ of Thomas she presents seem trivial by comparison with the metaphysical and philosophical principles that structure his theology. One or two nice texts cannot count for much against the massive structural problems she has identified in his work. The second reason it fails is because the teachings in Thomas's theology in which she finds hope are not special to Thomas: they are the orthodox Catholic doctrines of creation ex nihilo, redemption through the enfleshment of the Word, and a life of grace sustained in the sacraments of the Church. None of that belongs to Thomas Aquinas. In the end, it is not clear why one would now need to read him except as part of the long history of Western thought, including its exclusion of women, to which however unwittingly he was a major contributor.
Catherine of Siena is the heroic figure in the last part of the book, ‘Embodying Desire’. She made the central Christian doctrines her own, translating them into her intellectual, physical and emotional experiences in a way that illustrates what a future Catholic theology might look like. So she speaks of creation ex nihilo (God is, Catherine is not), the purposelessness of creation emanating from the mad love of God, the maternal Trinity who gathers the world into her outstretched arms (which are the Son and the Spirit: Thomas's wonderful text on this, Summa Theologiae Ia, q.43, gets no mention), the incarnation of the Word whose feet can now be kissed, whose wounded side can be suckled, whose mouth can be covered by that of the desiring creature, the feeding that is the Eucharist, and so on. Catherine's language is clearly more sensuous than that of Thomas, her recorded engagement with the divine mystery obviously more holistic. It illustrates well how the patriarchal systems imprisoned men as well as women albeit in different ways: Thomas felt he had to choose between ‘what I have now seen’ and the lifetime's work he dismissed as ‘so much straw’.
Although the argument gets a big ragged in places, and her account of Thomas's thought needs correction and completion at many points, this book is interesting and stimulating throughout, encouraging many thoughts and associations along the way. Whether there is to be such a thing as a Lacanian Thomism, who knows. At the end one feels that it is Catherine of Siena, believer and lover, mystic and activist, Doctor of the Church, who holds out the best hope for a feminist Catholic theology
