The Politics of Sacred Vulnerability: Reading Martha Fineman with Meister Eckhart

ABSTRACT

Martha Fineman’s analysis of universal vulnerability evokes deep theological and spiritual resonances. By reading Fineman’s work through the lens of an Eckhartian theological anthropology, this article develops an account of vulnerability as a mode of human flourishing. By disrupting the intuitive definition of vulnerability by contrast with invulnerability, this Eckhartian reading moves beyond Fineman by re-articulating the category of vulnerability in positive ontological terms and metaphysically re-locating it in relation to God’s act of self-communication. Whereas Fineman proposes a form of ‘responsive solidarity’, the Eckhartian approach situates responsiveness within an antecedent receptivity to vulnerability as that which locates the subject within dynamics of gift-exchange that are animated by gratitude. Eckhart presents us with a set of spiritual strategies and practices through which vulnerability can be lived in mutuality as resilience rather than precarity, a mode of inhabiting the world that allows vulnerability to be turned against experiences of dispossession.

KEYWORDS:

• Meister Eckhart
• vulnerability
• theological anthropology
• Martha Fineman
• theological method
• subjectivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Oliver James Keenan OP is Lector in Dogmatic Theology at Blackfriars, Oxford.

ORCID

Oliver James Keenan OP http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4147-3256

Notes

1 Journal of 3rd December 1854, cited in: Lear, A Case for Irony, 3.

2 I think, for instance, of the creative moments of vulnerability that took place in the Seiberling Gatehouse and at 855 Ardmore Avenue in Akron, OH, during June 1935, from which twelve-step fellowships emerged. See also: Lear, ‘Wisdom Won from Illness’; McNulty, Wrestling with the Angel, 239–65.

3 This section draws extensively upon Fineman’s account of the vulnerable subject contained in: Fineman, ‘The Vulnerable Subject’.

4 Fineman and Grear, ‘Vulnerability as Heuristic’.

5 Kerr, After Aquinas, 22–4.

6 Fineman, The Autonomy Myth.

7 On the detachment as a perfection proper to the divine nature, see: Vinzent, The Art of Detachment, 1–50.

8 Fineman, ‘The Vulnerable Subject’, 1–2.

9 Ibid., 10–1.

10 Fineman and Grear, ‘Vulnerability as Heuristic’, 3.

11 Fineman, ‘The Vulnerable Subject’, 1.

12 Butler, Precarious Life, 128–52.

13 Assiter, ‘Kierkegaard and Vulnerability’.

14 There are resonances between Fineman’s vulnerability analysis and Donald Mackinnon’s theological sensitivity to tragedy. On tragedy and subjectivity, see: Tracy, ‘Augustine Our Contemporary’; Williams, The Tragic Imagination, 56–81.

15 Volf, Exclusion and Embrace.

16 Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.

17 A forgetfulness that is almost the inverse of Heidegger’s ‘forgetfulness of being’.

18 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.

19 On which, see: Sertillanges, La Vie Intellectuelle.

20 For an account of Eckhartian ‘releasement’ that is decidedly not ‘thin’, see: Schürmann, ‘Heidegger and Meister Eckhart on Releasement’.

21 Ernst, The Theology of Grace, 68.

22 Proc. Col. I, §77.

23 Quero-Sánchez, ‘Non-Situated Being’.

24 Red Notebook entitled ‘Death and Lofty Spiritual Thoughts’, contained within his small Nachlass in the Archive of the English Dominican Province.

25 Przywara, Analogia Entis.

26 Richter, ‘Meister Eckhart Und Die Gottesgeburt Im Menschen’.

27 ST I, q. 45, a. 3.

28 Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, 103–10.

29 See Pr. 6, as Sermon 65 in: Walsh, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 329.

30 See: Pr. 6. [DW I: 103-5].

31 Tobin, ‘Eckhart’s Mystical Use of Language’.

32 Ibid., 168.

33 Kern, ‘Eckhart’s Anthropology’.

34 LW III: 77.

35 See John XXII, In Agro Dominico of March 27th 1329, in: Quint, Deutsche Predigten Und Traktate, 479ff.

36 LW III: 185. See: Kern, ‘Eckhart’s Anthropology’, 246.

37 Tobin, ‘Creativity and Interpreting Scripture’; On the ‘biwort’, see: Flasch, Meister Eckhart, 55; cf., Colledge, ‘Eckhart’s Orthodoxy Reconsidered’.

38 Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity and Incapacity’.

39 Mieth, ‘Dynamics of Meister Eckhart - Past and Present’; ‘The Outer and Inner Constitution of Human Dignity in Meister Eckhart’.

40 Mojsisch and Summerell, Meister Eckhart, 55.

41 In Ex. §112.

42 For a masterful account of Eckhart’s creative use of the principium category, see: Wojtulewicz, Meister Eckhart on the Principle.

43 Cf., Moltmann, The Crucified God, 201.

44 Duclow, ‘My Suffering Is God’; Milem, ‘Suffering God’.

45 In fact, Eckhart keeps the radicality of the first-person singular intact throughout. See: Walsh, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 549.

46 Woods, ‘Eckhart and the Justice of God’.

47 LW II, 587. For a reading of Eckhart that locates his thought within the causal ontologies of his day, see: Biard, ‘God as First Principle and Metaphysics as a Science’; McCabe, ‘The Involvement of God’.

48 Walsh, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 524–8.

49 Ibid., 528–51.

50 As Eckhart puts it, a consideration of the consolation that is found in ‘deeds’ and not just in the cognitive content of ‘words’. Walsh, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 551–4.

51 For the determinative role that divine unity and simplicity play in Eckhart’s theological ontology, see: Enders, ‘Meister Eckhart’s Understanding of God’; Mazzocco, ‘The Secret Dynamism of Divine Simplicity’.

52 If a philosophical paper can ever be comfortable with the notion ‘I’, see: Anscombe, ‘The First Person’.

53 John XXII, In Agro Dominico of March 27th 1329, in: Quint, Deutsche Predigten Und Traktate, 479.