What is the connection between the doctrine of the Trinity and desire – between one of the deepest mysteries of Christian doctrine and the erotic forces that shape human existence? This is the central question of God, Sexuality and the Self, the first of four planned volumes comprising Sarah Coakley's new systematic theology. It is an intriguing, difficult question, and Coakley's response to it offers a compelling vision not only for theology, but also – though less explicitly – for the philosophy of religion.

The book's thesis, like its theme, is rich and complex. However, it is given a clear structure by the methodology developed for the project as a whole. Coakley calls her method théologie totale, after l'histoire totale in which the Annales School sought to disclose all levels of historical culture. In her first chapter Coakley sets out her commitment to ‘an exploration of the many mediums and levels at which theological truth may be engaged … an attempt to do justice to every level, and type, of religious apprehension and its appropriate mode of expression’ (p. 48). Applying this multidisciplinary method to the doctrine of the Trinity involves analysing the relationship between feminist theory, sociology, and theology (chapter 2); examining the historical development of doctrine in the early church, with a particular focus on views of prayer and the Spirit (chapter 3); documenting fieldwork at an Anglican charismatic church in the late 1980s (chapter 4); interpreting trinitarian images in iconography (chapter 5); comparing Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa on gender, desire, prayer, and the Trinity (chapter 6); and, finally, engaging with Dionysus the Areopagite to reflect on ‘divine desire’ and divine naming (chapter 7). This eclectic approach facilitates an intensive focus on Coakley's theme: how the ‘messy entanglements’ (pp. 59, 340) of sexual desire and the desire for God, and of the secular and spiritual realms, themselves become messily entangled with trinitarian doctrine over the long history of Christian thought.

The most important and distinctive aspect of théologie totale, and of Coakley's theological approach more generally, is an insistence on the primacy of contemplative practice. In recognizing that the waiting and the silence of contemplative prayer or meditation has a power that is ethically, epistemologically, and even ontologically transformative, Coakley's theology achieves a creative fidelity to the earliest sources of Christian doctrine on the one hand, and to contemporary religious life on the other. Much modern theology has effectively become meta-theology: too often it resembles a game of conceptual chess, in which theologians loom like giants over their belittled subject matter, stridently demonstrating the ‘failure’ of their opponents’ ‘positions’ and ‘moves’. It is ironic that some of the most forceful theological critiques of secular ‘modernity’ themselves exhibit the ‘peculiarly modern aberration’ of refusing the ‘transformational feature of theology’ (p. 19). For Coakley, by contrast, ‘the task of theology is always, if implicitly, a recommendation for life … One may rightly call theology … an ascetical exercise – one that demands bodily practice and transformation, both individual and social’ (p. 18). She adds that her contemplative approach renders theology inherently provisional and dynamic, ‘always undoing and redoing itself, not only in response to shifting current events, but because of the deepening of vision that may – and should – emerge from such ascetical demand and execution’ (pp. 18–19). This means that théologie totale implies not systematic totalization but, on the contrary, a perpetual openness to ‘destabilisation and redirection’ (p. 48). And this takes us back to the Trinity: the contemplative theologian is ‘persistently vulnerable to interruptions from the unexpected – through [her] radical practices of attention to the Spirit’ (p. 49).

This presents a challenge to the philosophy of religion, which often excludes the contemplative and liturgical contexts of religious practice in focusing on artificially abstracted notions of ‘doctrine’ and ‘belief’. Recent decades have seen admirable attempts to correct this intellectualism within philosophical discourse more generally – notably, Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life, Michael McGhee's Transformations of Mind: Philosophy as Spiritual Practice, and much of Jonathan Lear's work – but although this is especially pertinent to the philosophy of religion, interest in the relationship between philosophy and ascetic or spiritual exercises remains at the margins of the subject area. Of course, any appeal to contemplation and its resulting transformations raises the tricky question of subjectivism. But however philosophically inconvenient this appeal may be, it nevertheless indicates a truth to be dealt with. As Coakley puts it, ‘if one is resolutely not engaged in the practices of prayer, contemplation and worship, then there are certain sorts of philosophical insight that are unlikely, if not impossible, to become available to one’ (p. 16). This book does not engage at any length with the philosophical difficulties attending such a claim, but the planned second volume (Knowing Darkly) will have a more epistemological orientation. In earlier work Coakley has drawn attention to the pre-modern idea of ‘spiritual senses’, and her mature systematic theology promises to make a distinctively Christian contribution to the revival of an expanded conception of philosophy to include its transformative, ‘way of life’ dimensions – and disruptions.

With respect to the themes of God, Sexuality and the Self, Coakley's emphasis on contemplation brings attention to the transformation of desire. ‘Contemplation reorders the passions’, she argues; ascetic practice ‘implies a loss of repressive control, but at the same time it engenders a reordering of the passions such that “control” finds new and significant coinage as right direction and purification of the passionate nature’ (pp. 342–343). At the same time, contemplation ‘presents us with a trinitarian model of power-in-vulnerability’ (p. 342). The connection between these two aspects of Coakley's complex thesis can be traced to Romans 8:26, where Paul suggests that the Spirit enables us to pray: ‘Strictly speaking, it is not I who autonomously prays, but God (the Holy Spirit) who prays in me, and so answers the eternal call of the “Father”, drawing me by various painful degrees into the newly expanded life of “Sonship” ’ (p. 55).

This theological analysis of contemplation and desire clearly has implications for our understanding of the self. In so far as the self is conceived – as ‘it’ is in this book – as a subject of desire, the transformation of desire accomplished through prayer is also a transformation of the self that is rooted in the triune God. Coakley sums this up as ‘a kind of seepage in the self, a recognition of rich unconscious elements, a transcendence of narrow rationality’, and she points out that this ‘expansion’ of selfhood is particularly significant now that, ‘simultaneously, postmodern philosophy is obliterating the Enlightenment vision of the autonomous reasoned self, and feminist women are wondering whether they are being asked to lose an “autonomy” they never enjoyed’ (p. 342). However, she offers less explicit discussion of the philosophically troubling concepts of selfhood and subjectivity than her book's title may lead us to expect. For example, it would be productive to consider further how the self may be conceived not only as a subject of (divine) desire, but also as an object of (divine) desire – especially in the context of Coakley's distinctive theological vision, wherein Christian tradition is continually brought into a creative dialogue with modern feminist theory.

Another question that calls for further reflection is whether, and how, it may be possible to incorporate contemplation into theological debate. It is clear that in Coakley's own thinking the transformation brought about by ascetic practice is underway. But although she alludes to her personal experience, she is cautious about discussing it. This is no doubt because the genre of academic writing tends to exclude, if not repress, this sort of reflection. Within our academic culture any appeal to contemplation is likely to become just another conceptual token – another piece on the theological chessboard – so that instead of shifting the ground of intellectual debate it is absorbed into that debate and thereby drained of its power, its real presence. If contemplation is to escape the enervating snares of subjectivism and intellectualism, it would have to become a communal practice, to be incorporated into the academic community. This is difficult to imagine. Coakley is adept at exposing the limitations of current theological debate, but it may be that the spirit-led transformations she envisages are a step too far even – or, indeed, especially – for those theologians and philosophers who describe themselves as ‘radical’. Nevertheless, if her systematic theology becomes essential reading for the present generation of theologians and philosophers of religion, as it deserves to, then it should at least encourage us to contemplate such possibilities.