Divine Enjoyment A Theology of Passion and Exuberance

This book's theological and philosophical construction of a God of enjoyment poetically remaps views of divine love. Posing a critique to the Aristotelian unmoved mover and actus purus whose intellective enjoyment is self-enclosed, this book's affective tones paint an image of a passionate God who suffers and yearns because of love, and permeably intermingles with the cosmos, in order to intensely love the many by taking on their form as lover, even if appearing improper. The narrative of this book leads the reader onto a via eminentia or path of excess of the intemperate kind, first in the form of an intellective appetite that for St. Thomas Aquinas places God beyond the divine self, then more erotically of a silhouette of so good a lover whose love, as for mystics like St. Teresa de Avila, is like a delectable pain that wounds and is wounded by love. Culminating with hospitable images of banqueting, fiesta, and the carnival, it progressively deterritorializes God's affect, in that it conceives of an expansively hospitable enjoyment that stems from the many life forms and their ways of loving. With a renewed sense of welcome to pleasure, the book also upholds a disruptive ethic. Ultimately, an immoderate God of love whose passionate enjoyment stems from the sufferings as well as joys of the cosmos offers another paradigm of lovingly enjoying oneself in relationship with the many others, whose dreams and hopes, pains and ancestral memories, come to empathically be a part of one's passionate becomings.