The Beginnings of a Christian Doctrine of the Spiritual Senses before Origen

Heath, Jane

Abstract

In 1932, Karl Rahner’s article ‘Le début d’une doctrine des cinq sens spirituels chez Origène’ marked the beginning of twentieth-century debate about the ‘doctrine of the spiritual senses’. In 2012, Gavrilyuk and Coakley’s The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity marked a renaissance of interest in this theme. Gavrilyuk and Coakley harked back to Rahner as the father of the debate but revised his definition of the ‘doctrine of the spiritual senses, rendering it flexible enough to include a wider range of theologians. However, they drew their further examplars only from among theologians later than Origen, without considering earlier Christian material. In this chapter, select portions of Clement of Alexandria and of the New Testament are discussed, with a view to showing that Christian material earlier than Origen uses the language of sense perception in ways that are historically and conceptually significant for the spiritual senses tradition.

Citation

Heath, J. (2023). The Beginnings of a Christian Doctrine of the Spiritual Senses before Origen. In L. Ayres, M. W. Champion, & M. R. Crawford (Eds.), The Intellectual World of Late Antique Christianity: Reshaping Classical Traditions (21-46). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108883559.004

• Online Publication Date: Oct 5, 2023
• Publication Date: Oct 26, 2023
• Deposit Date: Feb 7, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 7, 2025
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 21-46
• Book Title: The Intellectual World of Late Antique Christianity: Reshaping Classical Traditions
• Chapter Number: 2
• ISBN: 9781108835299; 9781108793124
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108883559.004
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/3471367