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 from serious flaws, but that elements can be salvaged from each that shed light on the psychological and ethical character of the human longing for God. A final section of the paper invokes a comparison with the love poetry of John Donne to support the conclusion that the longing in question, so far from being tragic or futile, is the authentic signature of our humanity — something which, for all its risks, we would never wish to be without.