John Cottingham concluded the term with his examination of what it means to talk of a spiritual quest for God and how the ‘longing’ it involves is to be distinguished from that at issue in atheistic conceptions of spirituality.

Whatever problems there may be in understanding the idea of God, it does serve as a kind of ‘objective correlative’ for the longing for meaning and completion that seems to be an ineradicable part of our human nature. We may not be able to grasp the object of this longing, but we can at least examine its phenomenological character – what it feels like for the subject. This paper considers two models of (or analogues for)the desire for God, both of which go back to Plato: the model of erotic longing and the model of philosophical striving towards the transcendent world of the Forms. It is argued that both models suffer…