The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity
Edited by Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley
Cambridge, 2012
Is it possible to see, hear, touch, smell and taste God? How do we understand the biblical promise that the ‘pure in heart’ will ‘see God’? Christian thinkers as diverse as Origen of Alexandria, Bonaventure, Jonathan Edwards and Hans Urs von Balthasar have all approached these questions in distinctive ways by appealing to the concept of the ‘spiritual senses’. In focusing on the Christian tradition of the ‘spiritual senses’, this book discusses how these senses relate to the physical senses and the body, and analyzes their relationship to mind, heart, emotions, will, desire and judgement. The contributors illuminate the different ways in which classic Christian authors have treated this topic, and indicate the epistemological and spiritual import of these understandings. The concept of the ‘spiritual senses’ is thereby importantly recovered for contemporary theological anthropology and philosophy of religion.
Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses: Perceiving Splendour
Mark McInroy
Oxford University Press, 2014
In this study, Mark McInroy argues that the “spiritual senses” play a crucial yet previously unappreciated role in the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar. The doctrine of the spiritual senses typically claims that human beings can be made capable of perceiving non-corporeal, “spiritual” realities. After a lengthy period of disuse, Balthasar recovers the doctrine in the mid-twentieth century and articulates it afresh in his theological aesthetics. At the heart of this project stands the task of perceiving the absolute beauty of the divine form through which God is revealed to human beings. Although extensive scholarly attention has focused on Balthasar’s understanding of revelation, beauty, and form, what remains curiously under-studied is his model of the perceptual faculties through which one beholds the form that God reveals. McInroy claims that Balthasar draws upon the tradition of the spiritual senses in order to develop the means through which one perceives the “splendour” of divine revelation.
McInroy further argues that, in playing this role, the spiritual senses function as an indispensable component of Balthasar’s unique, aesthetic resolution to the high-profile debates in modern Catholic theology between Neo-Scholastic theologians and their opponents. As a third option between Neo-Scholastic “extrinsicism,” which arguably insists on the authority of revelation to the point of disaffecting the human being, and “immanentism,” which reduces God’s revelation to human categories in the name of relevance, McInroy proposes that Balthasar’s model of spiritual perception allows one to be both delighted and astounded by the glory of God’s revelation.
Knowing God by Experience: The Spiritual Senses in the Theology of William of Auxerre
Boyd Taylor Coolman
The Catholic University of America Press, 2012
This book, the first English-language monograph on William of Auxerre, traces the motif of the spiritual senses through his Summa Aurea, using it as an illuminating and unifying lens through which to appreciate his theology.
The Spiritual Perception Project 