The coming of the flesh in human and cosmic relations

(re)thinking incarnation with Luce Irigaray

Abstract

This reflective essay is framed by two Irigarayan texts, ‘Belief itself’ and Sharing the Fire. It raises formative questions that reflect four decades of engagement with the evolving works of Luce Irigaray. The free association in ‘Belief itself,’ first published in 1993, introduced me to the Irigarayan themes of gendered subjectivity, bodied experience, and the divine, which still speak to a poesis of knowing necessary for faith and transformed relationality. Mitchell D. Murtagh’s 2019 Karen Burke Memorial Lecture on an Irigarayan quantum field theory challenged me to reckon anew with Irigaray’s evolving thought. I began to ponder how Irigaray’s project might assist the wide variety of approaches to thinking about God, religion, and the human body in the rapidly accelerating changes we face in the twenty-first century.

I grounded my quest in mystery and metaphor for two interrelated reasons. First, with the irreducible differences in their methods, science, theology, and philosophy all encounter in one way or another the mystery of reality. Second, metaphors express movement from the known to the unknown. The original root metaphor in the Jewish and Christian traditions is generally expressed in terms of ‘a personal deity relating to the human and natural world as its source and transformer’ (McFague 1982:104). A dominant model shaped by that root metaphor has become not only idolatrous but potentially dangerous to life for all on planet Earth. Remembering the tensive ‘is/is not’ of metaphor, I returned to the Irigarayan corpus to rethink Christianity’s root metaphor within an evolutionary framework. 

After pointing to selected Christian theologians and spiritual practitioners whose metaphors uncover an evolutionary understanding of matter and incarnation, I turn to Sharing the Fire, first published in 2019, to wonder with Irigaray about desire and longing for the absolute. In dialogue with Hegel, she theorizes about transformed relational encounters that would correspond to the embodiment of an absolute. I suggest that Irigaray’s multivalent uses of nature, culture, and desire express a growing awareness of natural belonging within living matrices of religions, world, and cosmos. The flame that fully ignites Sharing the Fire is a sensitive longing for transcendence that is ‘incarnate in finiteness, an absolute always in becoming’ (p. 25). This innate longing aspires to an infinite absolute from within each one’s unique space and time through an amorous desire. Irigaray’s dialectics of sensitivity outlines a triple incarnational dialectic, within the one, within the other, and in the transcendence they share. It is, in effect, the cultivation of qualitative relations that aspire to an infinite absolute in finite living flesh.

I conclude by suggesting that shared fire breathes life into Christianity’s root metaphor. Irigaray challenges me to embrace my own incarnation and share life, where each one’s unique difference nourishes transformation of consciousness. I hope these reflections invite others, within and beyond religious traditions, to ponder the nature of desire and the mystery of transcendent destiny.