Towards an embodied beauty of obedience: from Christ-shaped virtue to tangible theōsis.

Benitan, M.C. (2023) Towards an embodied beauty of obedience: from Christ-shaped virtue to tangible theōsis. Doctoral thesis, Liverpool Hope University.

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Abstract

The golden thread running through this thesis is obedience. It is a vilified protagonist, often distorted into a tool of oppression and control and caricatured as a vice. Therefore, the first purpose of this thesis is remedial. By using a set of different lenses – psychological and sociological, ethical, Scriptural, theological and religious – obedience is recovered as a Christian virtue par excellence. In the first half of this thesis, obedience thus emerges as a Christ-shaped virtue firmly rooted within the realm of ethics. To avoid superficiality in this part, one of the theological anchors is the virtue account of St Thomas Aquinas.

The second half of this work expands this vision beyond ethics by describing an ideal “trajectory” of obedience outgrowing its deontological and practorological habitat (the word “practorology” is coined for all agent-centred ethical dimensions such as virtue ethics or ethics of care). Developing teleologically, the mature virtue of (discerning) obedience reaches its perfection (telos) in a kenotic fashion: as a union of the divine and human wills. In turn, the perfection of this union is, ultimately, divinisation (theōsis). From such a mystical perspective, the union of wills (the pinnacle of obedience) defines human beings as becoming by grace what Christ is by nature (i.e., divine) without losing their creaturely status. Obedience, therefore, leads to the heights of mysticism and contributes supremely to divinisation. To avoid superficiality in this part, one of the spiritual anchors is the work of St John of the Cross.

Next, the argument enters the realm of aesthetics by claiming that divinised human beings enflesh divine Beauty individually and as the Body of Christ. Hence, the unique focus of this work is on the embodied dimension of divinisation: how the limited body participates in the process of tangible theōsis. The pattern for this process is the divine perichoresis, which is postulated as a higher-level symmetry and, therefore, the foundation of all Beauty. Consequently, obedience is shown as ultimately contributing to a distinctly tangible, Christ-shaped beauty, which includes embodied (moral and corporeal) actions, healing reality of sacred bodily presence, embodied movement, and even holy touch.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Additional Information and Comments:	Copyright © The Author 2023. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request.
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Creative Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities
Depositing User:	Matthew Adams
Date Deposited:	29 Nov 2023 09:54
Last Modified:	16 Dec 2024 15:21
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4084

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