Based on a series of lectures delivered in British Columbia the book begins with a comparison of the 19^th Century English painters Constable and Turner; and the question “Why a world? Why this material sensual place, this interweaving of quarks and gluons, which we inhabit? Why blood, bone, semen and faeces? Why senses?”

If that doesn’t grab your attention it is probably imperative to read this book.

If the creation is a foreshadowing of glory, Gorringe writes, then the senses are what allow us to explore it. For the Christian, salvation is bodily.

St Augustine, whose profound influence on Christian spirituality endures to this day, had a conflicted relationship with the body. I was particularly fond of the passage he wrote beginning, “When I love you, what do I love?” (Confessions 10.6).Gorringe deals that the coup de grace:“It is beautiful, but it is not the gospel”.

At the other end of Christian history, its ostensible enemy Karl Marx made a pertinent contribution when he wrote that the forming of the five senses was a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.

Gorringe’s thesis is that our senses are the means by which God chooses to explore materiality through us.The discipling of the senses, and through this the education of desire, is the work of genuine spirituality.

This is not a simple task because free will gives us choices about where to invest our desires.

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From Helen Keller onward ‘normalisation’ guided approach to handicap. Today many disabled writers criticise normalisation as oppressive because it comes at the expense of the disabled person’s needs and rights.

Realising that ageing is disabling helps non-disabled people to see that people with disabilities are not ‘other’; and that they themselves are TAPs (Temporarily Abled Persons).

Impairment is given, Gorringe writes, but disability is socially constructed. “It seems to me that in creating the conditions for freedom God has created a world in which randomness and chance play a fundamental part.” No malice aforethought, no testing of the human creature, as in Job, is involved.

The question of normality is briefly raised, and the fact that there is no satisfactory canon of normality; certainly not the idolatry of the young, fit, healthy body. Christians do not have an able bodied God as their primal image.

Independent adults who do not need help are themselves handicapped in the context of the dependence necessary to live in the image of God. The wounded healer tradition also challenges the notion of bodily perfection.

Succinctly – there are depths plumbed by difficulty which are not plumbed by ease.

Gorringe unpacks the fact that the body, through the senses, has become something of a scapegoat for the popular perception of sin.

He points out that Sarx (flesh) for St Paul is not rooted in sensuality – rather in religious rebellion in the form of self-righteousness.

Of the sins of the flesh – only two refer to the body per se – lust and gluttony.

Pornography is big business in Western society and therefore Gorringe includes a discussion of this phenomenon -with an interesting aside that women’s eroticism, unlike men’s, has more to do with touch than sight.

But pornography, he writes, is not centrally about women or sex at all, but about transgressing boundaries. “Sexual relations between men and women always render explicit the nature of social relations in the society in which they take place and, if described explicitly, will form a critique of those relations.”

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Of course, consumer capitalism has given us clean water, an amazing diet, housing that would have seemed paradise to the urban poor of the 1800s as it would to the two-thirds world slum dwellers today. It has given us accessible transport, global communications and greater life expectancy.

For the first time in history human desires can be met and God hands us over to the power of our desires. (Rom 1.24) 86.

But following our desires does not fulfil us but actually enslaves us. The heart of the New Testament critique of desire is that it is a form of addiction which destroys our freedom to serve both God and our neighbour.

Both Greek and Christian traditions point to the need for discernment between real desire and desire posing as egoism. The critique of capitalism rests on a distinction between needlessly stimulated desires on the one hand and real needs on the other.

To the caveat that both desires and needs are socially constructed Gorringe replies that the peculiarity of a consumerist culture is the attempt to obliterate the distinction between them.

All high cultures recognise that the nondivine imagination needs training and exercise. This work is called education.

Freud’s ‘repression’ is understood by both the classical and the Christian tradition to be discipline. It is not about denying the body, but about channeling its energies creatively.

The current problem is where the market – which is what we call society – has to infantilize us in order to survive. Instant gratification is the name of the game.

Freud,for all his iconoclasm, highlighted the way in which we replace the God of the gospel with the domineering God of the super-ego. A nightmare projection; a god which does not exist.

Gorringe remarks that Greece prioritized sight while Israel prioritized hearing.

Sound has to do with hearing, interiority, and hosts the voice of conscience and reason. Silence can be profoundly communicative, but it is defined by words.

Plato called music ‘spells for the soul’, and of course there are good and bad spells. The enormously successful visit of the New York Philharmonic to Pyongyang in February gives credence to the spellbinding ability of music having brought together traditional enemies.

Sight opens the soul to the material world. Gorringe makes a tantalising comment that gothic cathedrals reveal the metaphysics of light, but that few contemporary eyes can see it.

Touch is a neglected sense if the thesis that Christians are Christ’s hands and feet in the world is taken seriously.

Taste is perhaps the poor cousin of the senses when discussing Christian spirituality. But in the Oscar winning movie ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ Jean Dominique Bauby, although unable to move a muscle except his left eyelid, could remember the pleasures of taste and treat himself to a banquet in his imagination.

Smell, like taste, cannot be measured scientifically. It does not have a highly developed vocabulary – but a person can detect between 10, 000 to 40,000 different odours, and this sense has a direct line to memory.

Through these senses, Gorringe writes, God has given us leave to be delighted.

Of course this raises the theological problem of ‘disability’and healing.The author writes that it is not for those who are not disabled to colonise this discourse. He uses material written by people with disabilities.

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Our sense of hearing is subject to “a wind tunnel of gossip”; the press is a “gigantic maw of lying” (Karl Barth); and real lies – counterfeits which fully resemble the truth – are rife in the advertising milieu in which we live.

Gorringe points out that far from being the flesh corrupting the spirit, these breaches of the ₉th Commandment are actually the spirit corrupting the flesh.

Touch brings us the blessing of the caress and the curse of the blow. Torture is the rule rather than the exception in the contemporary world, and is considered in the context of the relation of power and helplessness; the fragility of our ability to care, and the danger of our fantasies of omnipotence.

Gorringe’s discussion of the corruption of taste by gluttony and obesity is somewhat out of date, with new research revealing limitless vistas of new intelligence through the Human Genome Project.

Smell is an important social and moral indicator – references to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ smell permeates our vocabulary.

Finally, bodily integrity is where body and soul work together as God intended.“To live graciously is to seek the kingdom and pursue it, and that... is what we are called to use the senses for and it is failure to do so which is what we mean by that much misunderstood term ‘sin’, which never... refers primarily or above all to ‘the flesh’.”

“The body has become one of the idols we worship... But neither bodies nor pleasure are intended as ends in themselves, and when they are treated as such they become idols.”

Consumer capitalism possesses all the classical attributes of deity – omnipresence, omnipotence, infinite (it knows no limits).

However, it exploits the body by devaluing it in its natural state and using it in the service of Mammon, creating a narcissistic society of permanent adolescence.

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As a consequence we are faced with the
epitome of idolatry – ecological forces are fair set to destroy the idolatry of consumption. Only spiritual mastery of the greed itself can help us. Given the atomization of Western cultures by capitalism, the re-establishment of a moral consciousness must be reconstituted, but this would involve the subordination of money.

The Christian ascetic tradition represented an attempt to realise what Freud called the ‘reality principle’ as opposed to the pleasure principle.

Holiness and grubby reality are not opposed but go together, as St Paul points out in the Corinthian correspondence. Asceticism was really about what liberation theology calls “the option for the poor” – the choice of voluntary poverty to put oneself alongside those enduring involuntary poverty.

Effective cultural change will involve a change of attitude to the body. What is needed is a movement for the liberation of all forms of desire, including eros, from the tyranny of consumerism.

We need a body-friendly ascetism.

What is going on in the Church at the moment is a profound move beyond present structural boundaries – but we will continue to need boundaries. The church exists where human desire is educated, disciplined, by Word and sacrament.

In the context of the consumer capitalism in which we live it has to be both affirmative of the physical body, and of the earth, and for that very reason hostile to all forms of consumerism.

Christian resistance to torture, for instance, depends on having a visible social body in order to counter the discipline of the State.

The Eucharist affirms the body and therefore protests every attempt to colonise, patent and exploit it.

This precis of Gorringe’s book I hope will at least stimulate reflection on his thesis, even if you don’t read the book itself. He has taken on a crucial topic in the churches’ struggle for ‘relevance’ to contemporary discourse.