The Hypostatic Death Drive

My spiritual director once directed me to the writings of Blessed Columba Marmion. The recommendation came in an especially dry season in the spiritual life. In Christ and His Mysteries, Marmion made several salient references to the significance of the Incarnation. One of these says:

In taking a human nature from our race, the Word, so to speak espoused all humanity to Himself…

and in another place later on:

Each of Christ’s mysteries [the events in his human life], representing a state of His Sacred Humanity, thus brings to us a special participation in His Divinity…Following Christ Jesus in this manner throughout all His mysteries, uniting ourselves to Him, we share, little by little but surely, and each time more fully and deeply, in His Divinity and His Divine Life.

At one level, this ought not to have been anything new to me. Perhaps as a reminder of a fundamental truth which I forgot given my dry season and the state I was in. And truly it did.

What it also did, however, was bring new light to something I wrote a decade ago in my book Redeeming Flesh. There I wrote that Jesus redeemed and fulfilled a desire embedded within a psychoanalytical category known as the “death drive”. Using the terminology of Freudian psychoanalysis, the “death drive” constituted a drive to tap into an “excess of life” that transcended biological life, yet pulled that transcendence into biological life, bringing about what psychoanalysis calls an “infinite creature”.

I was not aware of it at the time of writing, but reading Marmion made me aware of the salience of the Hypostatic Union - the union between the divine and human natures of the incarnate Word - for the purposes of the book. The “death drive” in trying to bring together the transcendent and the biological, was a secular attempt at bringing about that very union that only Christ can embody.

Conversely, it also reminded me of the sympathy that Christ has for humanity, such that the hypostatic union can be seen, not as something distant and abstract, but something that responds to a very human desire. This is the desire to undergo very human processes in biological living, yet also cross that biological threshold in those very experiences and enter the realm of participation in the divine nature.

Check out Redeeming Flesh and Matthew’s other publications here.