ABSTRACT
This chapter is situated in the context of a Lacanian study of bodiliness, language and gender in the theology of Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena. 1 A key focus of the study is Jacques Lacan’s theory that Greek philosophical concepts of form and matter, mediated through Neo-Platonism and medieval Aristotelianism, have had a pervasive influence on western culture, which has been perpetuated through the linguistic order even after the so-called death of God. To trace this idea back to its medieval sources – particularly Thomas’s Summa Theologiae – means allowing Lacan to reopen complex and elusive questions about the relationship of matter, desire and the body to form, language and God, and about the ways in which God plays upon our desire in different registers, as the One and the Other.
