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ОглавлениеReligious Author, Spiritual Writer
The very best in art is too spiritual to be given directly to the senses; it must be born in the beholder’s imagination, though it must be begotten by the work of art.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
Most of us in the West know what a religion is. We know it by its myths and artifacts, its history and beliefs, its God and its texts. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we know that old white man, Jehovah, bushy gray beard and furious scowl. We know John the Baptist, his sandals in the river, and Francis, the people’s pope, his slippers in the Vatican. We’ve stood before the Celtic cross and inside the cathedral of Rheims. We’ve seen still and moving images of mitered bishops, snake-handling evangelicals, boy preachers as young as two. We’ve imagined a monk praying in a Benedictine cell, a nun chanting Compline in a convent chapel. We’ve beheld Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece and Titian’s Madonna and Child. We’ve heard Protestant hymns and civil rights anthems, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. In Barcelona, there’s the Sagrada Familia. In Rome, St. Peter’s Square. At Holy Ghost in Harlem, the Pentecostals roll the holy up and down the aisles, while in Mexico City, pilgrims stream by the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The blood of the nailed Christ drips on our upturned heads. Whether it’s real or metaphoric doesn’t matter; we raise his suffering above all as our Lord and Savior.
Most of us know the Judeo-Christian texts—dictated documents and composed convictions whose pronouncements, parables, and punishments are decreed by God and dispensed by humankind: the Talmudic Law, the Ten Commandments, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And, though not all of us subscribe, most of us recognize religion’s brightest beam: to flock a congregation of like-minded souls who share moral convictions, ceremonies of birth, baptism, marriage, and death, as well as obeisance to a supreme being.
As much as we know that a religion is its palpable presence in the world, we cannot claim the same of faith’s capricious partner, spirituality. We know that realm—if we do at all—by its immateriality, its expressions inscrutable, transient, and inborn.
Spirit suggests a life force, a will, which Arthur Schopenhauer calls the “striving of matter,” the “eternal becoming and endless flux” of life. We don’t know for certain, but at one time spirit may have brought dead matter to life, stardust to chemistry. Spirit invites paradox almost from the get-go. Its absence from our grasp is its presence. It’s the unseen in the “evidence of things unseen.” It’s a ghost in the machine. Invisible but charged. Embryonic. Popping in unannounced. Gone in a heartbeat. The spirit-voice of the wind. The spirits in a gin and tonic. The spirt of an imp or a goblin, conjured or cast out. The spirit of our Revolution. The spirit of the 1960s. The spirit of Black Lives Matter. Spirit manifests in singers like Billie Holiday, in towns like Santa Fe, in buildings Frank Gehry designs, in the pinstripes worn by the New York Yankees. Spirit guides the Eucharist, the Day of the Dead, the Quaker meetinghouse, the cradle and the coffin maker. Even without the New Age woo-woo of Deepak Chopra, most of us know that spiritual feelings are real. Our spirits bend from elated to depressed, from songful to sorrowful. Merciless, we break the horse’s spirit; bereft, we sing a Negro spiritual. We laud the men who gave “the last full measure of devotion” at Gettysburg and honor the spirit of those dead men who live on, somehow, if only by reciting Lincoln’s matchless address.
It seems impossible to separate religion and spirituality. One reason is that the spiritual, which predates organized faith, has been appropriated, if not colonized, by the fixed doctrines, the pious rites, and the tribal sects that further a creed’s cause. Religious pioneers branded the appropriation the holy spirit, a divination for members who acquire the creed, by conversion or birth. Untold examples come to mind: the haloes encircling the heads of saints in medieval paintings, the crutch-throwing and money-soliciting circuses of televangelists, the prayers of parents who petition God to save their opiated babies and selves.
In contemporary America, amid a stalled Christianity and an avid New Age, where sects are returning the transcendent to its pagan realm, our culture has little agreement as to what spiritual means. Nowadays, all sorts of hip practices vie for coverage; they are sacerdotal and silly, kooky and generic. Celebrities in particular are the new (and least qualified) purveyors. They promulgate unnuanced notions that spirit is synonymous with sensitivity, compassion, an innate sense of fairness and peace. The spiritual, they say, focuses on love, caring for oneself and others, kindness to animals and the planet. It can also be spiritual to tidy your desk and pack your suitcase well, parceling that transcendent feeling into a diet and exercise program or a Viking cruise. From it we get dubious concoctions like “interfaith ministry,” “smiling meditation,” “mediumship,” “messages from the other side,” and “mindful recycling.”
In our hothouse environment of uncheckable climate change and mass migration, religious certitude continues to threaten our survival. To see beyond the headlines seems to be good for all beings, who, if nothing else, are or should be or should hope to be humane. Though unlikely, the fundamentalist must lie down with the atheist, not to mention the Muslim with the Jew. We agree Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was religious and spiritual in the best sense. But despite King’s grace, religion’s tribalist nature, its rare reform, and its right-wing politicization of late encourage the unaffiliated to avow they are “spiritual but not religious.”
Many in the West want to reconstitute spirit outside our history’s two-millennia tower of Bible-based faith. Indeed, removing the spiritual from the religious—emphasizing that but not—is one of the deeper, and least acknowledged, causes of our cultural malaise.
Today, we live in a culture that is severing spirituality from religion. The examples are everywhere apparent. Millions wish to sever spirit from religious sects that inculcate one belief over another. To sever spirit from religious sects who say disbelief in their way is a ticket to hell. To sever spirit from sacred texts whose so-called divine origin argues against science or wars on behalf of the saved. To sever spirit from Christian commandments and the exemptions their adherents claim the U.S. government needs to protect. To sever spirit from all that so what we hope remains is uncorrupted, personal, universal, and kind. Whatever the outcome, spirit has a fierce, renewable, intrinsic value, which we cling to like a life vest.
Religion is put upon us, most heavily in childhood, by parents who maintain it is a right to raise their children in the faith. Once acquired, that faith in most heirs seldom strays from their parents’ beliefs and remains immovable like blood. The spiritual, by contrast, strays any way it chooses. It may take you in, take you on, take you for a ride, but just as fickly let you go—for spirit has other winds to hound, other souls to haunt beyond loyalty to family or the prosperity gospel. The spirit is the fairest of fair-weather friends. And there are those who as creators of art and makers of literature activate that fair-weathering without recourse to anything institutional. Most of them—most of us living in the age of but not—know that the arts we practice need no religion to shape our inviolable sense of how and who we want to be.
* * *
IF THE spiritual need not lie with a faith, might it lie more reliably somewhere else? At times, the spiritual is out there, a heron gliding over the lake, uncageably alone and free. At other times, the heron is caged within, that is, preternaturally within, as unfettered as a lion cub. We may call on the spirit and the spirit may refuse. Then again, the spirit may be smitten and leap in, taking his saxophone solo. Erratic turns and misty off-ramps comprise the contemporary character of spirituality. What’s more, spirit is a kind of unrehearsed intimacy we have with an unknown—the timelessness of nature you are lofted into at the edge of the Grand Canyon or the helplessness your stomach roils with while stirring your son’s ashes into garden soil.
It’s from these without us / within us modes of celestial and private being that my inquiry begins. On a seesaw, I go up and down, studying the inner stake religious authors and spiritual writers bring to their work. The dichotomy is entirely mine, though I aim to simplify and to extend it. At once, there’s the literary parent, the classic autobiography, centuries old. At once, there’s the literary descendent, the new American memoir. Autobiography and memoir pedestal personal veracity, from which social and cultural reflection arises.
The spiritual dimension that exists in personal writing has its seed in the formidable convert Augustine, the foremost of confessional authors. His guilt-ridden and shame-based tell-all, Confessions, remains the apotheosis of self-disclosure for any of us who write personal essays and memoir.
I’m interested in this field only when the writing is authentically personal, felt, and original, which, as such, increases the likelihood of its reliability and, at times, its truth. How difficult it is to describe the inner experience of our enigmatic selves, how cunningly we set or trouble our beliefs. Spiritual understanding sets the conduct of our belief, in private and social domains, in lieu of a religion’s often single-minded insistence that we ascribe to what the fathers of the faith assert.
Incomparable, epiphanic events in our rainy and sunny lives spring on us nonverbally; it is only when rapture (or dread) is given a tongue to speak, or a literary style to write, does it become real to others. Reality, proof, testimony, take your pick. Textual semblance transforms an epiphany. Words, and their best order, highlight language’s evocative and expansive realm, whereas, by comparison, any lived numinous moment fades. In its wake, a new discursive experience arises—writing, which itself may be an incomparable, epiphanic event all its own.
Among the questions I’m asking are, How do life-writers express these spiritual breakthroughs? Do their works differ from each other? How might differences be significant for writer and reader? For example, if you write from the Christian faith, what makes the story Christian? What in the literature of Christianity do we value—surely not a mere summary of biblical tenets? And what are the pillars of past confessional writing that yield the leafy green and the hanging fruit in the spiritual memoir today?
It seems not to matter whether these life-writers are the guilty disclosers of sin-soaked autobiography or the unruly testifiers of revelatory memoir. In either form, we herald someone like Thomas Merton, the young hedonist who in his twenties converts to Catholicism and ten years later, in 1948, writes his majestic self-examination, The Seven Storey Mountain. Merton works with strategies of rhetoric and narration, often in the Augustinian model of depravity and salvation, until he realizes he’s telling his story, in part, to reveal and to convince himself how Catholicism has rehabbed him. That’s his motivation. And yet, despite his tale’s honesty and intensity, he understands that autobiography is not the measure of a man. In a letter to the French philosopher Étienne Gilson, Merton expresses the core idea: “Please pray for me to Our Lord that instead of merely writing something I may be something.”1
Our best spirit-haunted narratives are chockablock with queries about the topsy-turvy relationship between writing and the author’s life. Such narratives grow more unwieldy the more each scriptor, a useful synonym from Roland Barthes, grapples with those queries. As we will see, Merton’s story is a case in point.
For first-person authors, the most germane question to ask is this: To what degree is your art, backboned by your religious or your spiritual quest, your lost or never-lost faith, a voyage of uncovering the mystery of sudden, numinous, and life-altering events, whose tensions and illusions and disclosures will not let you be, until you start writing about them?2
* * *
BEFORE TACKLING my many questions, I want briefly to examine the origin of writing, the expressive dimension of speech. Speech’s domain is the fountainhead of storytelling and the source of language’s felt nature. To illustrate, consider the shaman who uses his body to conjure fate, or the charismatic Billy Graham, who testifies that God is as real to him as his skin. So much of their communicative value rests on voice, passion, sincerity, emotional logic, oratorical flourish, and the live, sweating, possessed enactor or taleteller whose conviction is on display. It’s called testimony, Tell it, Brother: the more animated its theater, the more enthralled are the bodies who receive it.
First order of distinction. Text is not speech. Such was the great insight of those who wrote or took down God’s dictation as the Bible: in order to make the writing come alive—to a largely illiterate and awestruck audience—disciples had to preach the Word. By contrast, readers have fewer means of verifying the convicted spark when the voice, its arousal, its elegance, its bellow is silenced onto or by the page. As music elicits feeling much more directly than text can, so, too, does the sonority of the heaven-bent pastor elicit faith in and for the community than a treatise on original sin. Better to bloodedly quote Leviticus than to turn in another student essay.
Eric A. Havelock, in The Muse Learns to Write,3 describes “written discourse” as the singular tool that moved us from a wholly speaking culture to a multiliterate one, ca. fifth century BCE. This shift “from Greek orality to Greek literacy” activated the intellect, helped organize thought, developed rules for argument (the source of democracy), and created libraries of knowledge (the birth of hard science). Moreover, Havelock argues that once oral discourse intermingled with written documents in our history, the crossover “represent[ed] a new level of the human consciousness,” “which as it speaks also thinks” (114). As, as in simultaneously.
In its wake, what proliferated, Havelock says, were new terms “for notions and thoughts and thinking, for knowledge and knowing, for understanding, investigating, research, inquiry.” Socrates brought “this new kind of terminology into close connection with the self and with psyche. For him, the terminology symbolized the level of psychic energy required to realize . . . what was permanently ‘true,’ as opposed to what fleetingly happened in the vivid oral panorama.” The basic contrast was that speaking retained its hold on “feeling and responding,” while writing became the “‘true’ mental act of knowing” (115).
Writing became indispensable to—if not a mirror of—knowledge.
Despite the transition, speaking retained its virtues: narrative, dialogue, drama, grammatical and rhetorical improvisation, and the first-person voice, “I.” For a time, vocal finesse remained true of spontaneous debates among disputants in the Greek agora. Each disputant has a point of view, and that point of view is as real as the in-person voice of its utterance. But imagine the speaker has grown more articulate because he also writes. Writing gives him distance and perspective and circulates his ideas among others; he may become known for his individual style. In addition, writing nurtures topicalization, history, reflection, philosophy, and an impersonal “you,” a “he,” or a “she,” which broadens the idea that any “I” might be informed. Here is what many of us regard as worth knowing—a written truth based on but often different from what is said. Recall Plato copying and structuring and emphasizing the ideas of Socrates as foundational to Western civilization.
I don’t think this oral-written distinction and the oral-written merger is too pat. An oral action implies doing, practicing, performing: the Muses sing, dance, and recite in orgiastic rituals. A literate action implies stating, thinking, knowing: as I say, Plato spent his adulthood preserving the ideas of Socrates for future generations to study. Researchers and intellectuals pore over the civilizing juggernaut Greek literacy launched. Though it was a complex shift, the idea is simple: speaking begets writing, and writing, enhanced by the recitation of texts, which, in a sense, is a new way of speaking, begets reading.
How is this relevant to religious and spiritual texts? Declaring a creed, orally or as a scriptor, is the evidence of same. According to one American evangelical, “God said it, it’s in the Bible, I believe it.” Testimony of the speaker differs from the testimony of the writer, of course, although, with the slow-growing authority of a text critical to the speaker’s message, those testimonies begin to merge. The goal is to join what was spoken with what is read. The ensuing book has it both ways. Eventually, for example, the Bible’s textuality supplants the content of what is spoken. The spoken has conquered but the written rules. The spoken cannot be infallible because it can be changed. The text is text for all time.
Confessional writers, churchly and otherwise, testify by stealing or miming or extending the tools of a spoken or acted story. The traits of the hero’s myth or tale are everywhere known: a dramatic rising-and-falling narrative, a narrator who guides a character to his destinal end, and a writerly insistence on telling details and vivid metaphors. This is Homer’s Odyssey and it is the story of Jesus. What’s more, if it’s the latter, a religious text, it must embody direct messages. For example, Christ’s “Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”
For all that, the best literary writers do something more exacting. They make a person, a mere representation of a woman, say, live on the page. Such animation projects and, thus, possesses a self. She shows more than she tells, she personifies more than she illustrates, she eulogizes and schemes more than she syllogizes and deliberates—tricks of the trade the writer animating a character, even if it is her “self,” uses to both their advantages.
* * *
I THINK it safe to state that when searching for the beginnings of a religious literature, we will find that those beginnings are collective. We read, at times admire, the mouthpieces we know in no other way than via text—Moses and Isaiah, lawgivers, rabbis, and prophets, the vanity-plagued assembler of Ecclesiastes, the gospel writers, Matthew, most magnificent, and Paul, the theological wordsmith. Each fashions his truth claim, via statement and story, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Christian script. They nail down these claims on parchment scrolls, which are collected and bound into a book, the book, a holy book. The Bible is one prime exhibit—a written mélange of polyphonic and centuries-old views whose leather-bound contents, stitched by hand for lap or hand to cradle, canonize derring-do tales and moral choices into portable, quotable creeds.
Writing a religion becomes the religion.
What’s written is scripture—declared by its author (the Lord) or its authors (the scribes) as revealed truth, here John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”4 Note how each succeeding phrase is a rhythmic diminution and how each phrase holds to the anapestic (short/long) stress of “the Word,” creating cadential closure. The aesthetic turn, a testament to that sentence’s composer, kerosenes a literary light and, thus, illumines a bright ore. But as scripture stamps out thousands of these claims, we have a problem. Scripture’s aesthetic is displaced. Instead, the fact or evidence of the words—the Word itself—rules, becomes, as I say, unalterable, inerrant. The “Word of God” is fixed, set in stone. We are no longer in the realm of the writing but, instead, in the realm of the written. (Memoirists know that once your story is written and published, the drama is locked in for good. The degree to which it is factual or exaggerated matters less than its chiseled embodiment in print. The same can be said, in our time, when one’s actions are “caught on video.”)
Most of us know what scripture is: in the West, it is the Torah and the Bible. For two dozen centuries, books emulate scripture. The apocryphal gospels, Gnostic literature, the Talmud, even the Book of Mormon (1830). There are service books: Catholic catechism and the Book of Common Prayer (1549). Theological tracts: Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas (1274) and Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman (1866). Hagiographies and martyrologues: Lives of the Saints by Ælfric of Eynsham (997) and The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints by Alban Butler (1759). Devotional books: Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola (1524) and the Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton (1949). And metaphysical verse: The Temple by George Herbert (1633) and Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667). Spiritual allegories: Piers Plowman by William Langland (1390) and Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (1678). Mystical how-to’s: Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales (1608) and The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz (1997). Worshipful prose: Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ (1427) and The Book of Margery Kempe, written in the 1430s and considered the first autobiography in English. And, in the New World, personal tests of faith: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1791).5
The term for scripture’s origin is not written but revealed. It has arrived, a gift messengered to humankind, sparked by a bush or a skylark or an exaltation of scribes who heard it from on high (or, some say, wrote the revealed words because of God’s inspiration). The gift did not appear as a symphony, a mural, or an ASCI code, which means, in a nutshell, that texts reign. As I say, religions are nearly all empires bred and disseminated by the book. What other physical evidence do they have?
We arrive at sacred and near-sacred texts, which we know via their lofty tone and annunciatory style. Their journey into book-being is essentially over. However, the journey taken and told by the wayfaring pilgrim is something quite different from scripture. Indeed, an individual testament, by one who walks the Pilgrim’s Way in England, for example, avows faith and, on occasion, deepens doubt, a see-for-oneself standard unlike the holy book’s “believe it or else” rationale.
When spiritually minded authors take any nonfiction form as their lingua franca, they hope to enact in language their relationship with the sublime and the inexpressible or, under a religious aegis, with the ideas of suffering and evil. The degree to which any relationship to the ineffable is true from the writer’s point of view may or may not be the degree to which it is true from the religion’s point of view. This is a major rub. God’s book and God’s textual purveyors differ enormously from the pilgrim’s tract—as everyman’s does from the individual’s.
* * *
IN THE early Christian era, the Bible authorized thoughts and feelings about the context of faith, say, joy at the pearly gates of St. Peter, wonder about the Magi bearing gifts, horror over Christ’s crucifixion. The object of these thoughts and feelings eventually began to change once the reader of the Bible realized that its stories of sin and damnation, hope and glory, were targeting him—his doubts, his failures, his devotion.
Oh sin, oh damnation, oh hope of glory other than what this wretched life offers—all this was terrifying enough to bring about the Confessions of Augustine, the first, the most fully felt, and the most compelling of life stories. Most felt and compelling because the book centers on the depravity of sin in light of God’s love and because of the pathos of Augustine’s exquisitely crafted testimony. What Augustine starts in 400 CE still haunts autobiography and memoir, a kind of pox whose scars any tell-all must bear. Even today, our oversharing culture remains fixed on the memoirist’s shame. Just one example: Mary Karr, whose 2009 Lit describes the pigsty of her alcoholism and the rescue dogs of AA and Catholicism. The book’s neurotic power issues from her rattling the reader with tales of binge drinking, of swearing it off, of bingeing again while swearing it off. Karr’s testament is much like Augustine’s—it takes divine intervention and a feral will for her to realize just how bad off she is.
This book, Spirituality and the Writer, maps the trajectory from scripture to confession, from essay to memoir. It lingers on, with aesthetic and critical pleasure, the literary qualities of the old forms as well as their innovative contemporaries.
To get the inquiry going, I present a classic of mystical confession by the sixteenth-century Spanish poet John of the Cross: Dark Night of the Soul.6
Dark Night is an odd bird. It begins with an eight-stanza, forty-line poem followed by a lengthy treatise analyzing the theology behind the poem. “As we embark on an explanation of these verses,” John writes, “the soul who utters them is speaking from a place of perfection” (28). He personifies the soul as she, alternating her voice with his. (Arcane Christian narratives denote the soul feminine, God, masculine.) Like the stalker Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, the she-soul is “so on fire with love for God that she will get to him by any means necessary” (17).7
What’s so striking about this tract is how scant John’s actual story is. His biography comes from other sources. During the Spanish Inquisition, John was identified as a Catholic “reformer.” His and other orders, including the “Barefoot Carmelites” of Teresa of Avila, sought a return to monastic simplicity, unmediated aloneness with their savior. As monastics, they were rebelling against papal ecclesiastics who demanded total submission to church rule. In 1577, John, captured by friars in Toledo, was held nine months in a six-by-ten cell which, before his incarceration, was used as a communal toilet, and where he existed with inadequate food, light, warmth, and clothing. He was taken out only to be flogged while the monks ate their dinner, and where, internally, as translator Mirabai Starr reports, “over time the divine presence began to fade” (5–6).
But John, the post-captive, hardly sounds as if he’s in prison. In Dark Night, there is poetry—the initial poem, “Songs of the Soul,” steams up the windows and reflects the torrid elopement of the she-soul and her Beloved, God. Their passion, an interior swoon, eroticizes the dark: “O night, that guided me! / O night, sweeter than sunrise! / O night, that joined lover with Beloved! / Lover transformed in Beloved!” (24).
Elsewhere we find that what John endured has been depersonalized in the writing. Which may mean that God prefers us in our representativeness, not a one-to-one dynamic. What John suffered—no doubt, roach-ridden insanity—is almost all accounted for in esoteric argot. Here’s one of many such servings in Starr’s able rendering.
God cherishes the soul’s absence of self-satisfaction and her sorrow in not serving him. This means far more than any of the spiritual pleasures in which she used to indulge, and more than any of her religious doings; no matter how lofty they have been, these deeds were the occasion of many imperfections and unconsciousness. Innumerable blessings flow from the fountain that is the source of self-knowledge to the soul that is humbly clothed in the cloak of aridity. (76)
John’s book is Christianly therapeutic, to be sure. Here’s how the soul should progress, though I’m not sure how removing the “cloak of aridity” will let the “innumerable blessings flow.” Its oddity is that it sounds spiritual, but abstractly so. There is precious little of the palpable, tortured, befouled, hungry, boil-racked body to convince us of the corporeal chord it claims to be sounding.
* * *
IN OUR time, New Age culture (Mirabai Starr is one exponent) has appropriated “dark night” to mean spiritual pain, which is necessary to personal healing. But for John, in 1577, that end does not apply. He plies metaphor, which, mimicking a mystical affair, results in sense-obliterating nothingness, a kind of suicide of the self. The union he wants with the divine is humanly unattainable: “A soul only achieves perfection,” John writes, “in proportion to the perfect habits she has cultivated” (36). The she-soul describes the many ways in which you, a perfection-adept, won’t last the “dark night.” The chief roadblock is to assume you’re more spiritual than you are. If you’re on the quest, you’re already handicapped by pride, greed, lust, anger, envy—emotions that distract you from the soul’s mission. Much of the she-soul’s exposition tells how you’ll fail, how ego abrades your spirit, how your senses mislead you, how questions weaken your compliance. Indeed, “only a few souls ever pass beyond the night of sensory purification” (84).
The chaste contemplatives of John’s Carmelite Order try and dissolve the ego, so longing falls and spirit rises. There’s a process. Initially, one shuts off the body’s senses, its “false self.” During John’s first night, “the soul is stripped of all perceptions of God.” In the second “night of spirit, all ideas of God fall away” (italics are not added). God, happy you’ve dumped your vanity, now unites your interior with his command to banish the self. “Apprehending the word of God” via John’s way means “the soul becomes acutely aware of her own insignificance” (75). The soul then possesses a designified “I”—the goal of Christian mysticism, medieval or modern. You are purified, voided. You achieve a kind of feelinglessness, or no-mind.8
In John’s descriptive flurry, it’s unclear how you purge your core desires. Taking this path, your soul must feel excruciating pain. Just as the body does. An existential question is piqued: How would we know the soul’s emotions except as those emotions braise our skin or fray our nerves? Starr advises: “By sitting quietly with the breath, the blessed ‘no-self’ begins to emerge” (13). Set aside how this is done, sixteenth-century-style. If one annihilates “I,” what’s left to feel the spirit with?
One of John’s goals, it seems, is to resurrect the soul, abandoned in our prelapsarian past. To get there, he warns, beware “the path of the mind.” “Discursive thought and imagination” derail the soul’s advancement. (So much for memoir.) The goal is “formless prayerfulness,” that is, “doing nothing.” Being over becoming. John’s purpose is to focus “loving attentiveness” on God. That’s all that matters.
Dark Night portrays what is personally inconceivable, not what is demonstrable. It is the spiritual equivalent of praying away cancer, which generations past labeled “faith healing” and current practitioners now call “spontaneous remission.” Today, we judge John of the Cross’s discourse as a metaphor for becoming as “empty” of ego as the divine (presumably) is. And yet to locate God in this way cannot be redescribed—the no-self has no self (pardon the hocus-pocus) with which to report the obliteration it took to locate God.
Even Catholic sticklers, heeding the doctrine of original sin, discount this putative union between God and the writer, or the artist for that matter. Under “Mysticism” in The New Catholic Encyclopedia,9 we learn that our means of “experiencing” God is incompatible with the “sense experience” that defines us and, certainly, defines human creation.
Since any created nature is finite and liable to imperfection, only by special divine help would human nature be able to abide permanently in the enjoyment of a situation calling for the complete integration and subordination of all its faculties to the purposes of the spiritual side of its being. Having lost that preternatural endowment, man, of himself, is no longer capable of that intellectual awareness of God which, if awareness is to be adequate, must obviously be free from the distorting effects of imagery. God is pure spirit and is therefore not to be described in language drawn from sense experience. (113)
In “The Rhetoric of Scripture and Preaching,” Carol Harrison notes that for some Christians literature is yet another polluted runoff proving the Fall of Man: “Adam and Eve enjoyed a direct and intuitive grasp of the truth in their minds and had no need for language to convey, or mediate it, for them.” Language, she continues, “to some extent, is a result of the Fall: it forms a veil which obscures, distances, hides the truth from fallen man, whose eyes are no longer able to gaze upon its brightness. It separates and distances one man from another; it is essentially arbitrary; it can dissemble, misrepresent, be misunderstood.”10
Writing, painting, sculpture, music, film, are “drawn from,” if not “drawn to or by,” our “sense experience.” But despite that magnetic pull, the arts, so the authors of “Mysticism” claim, distort the pure spirit of God. Though it’s arguable whether the spirit of God and the spirit of the arts are comparable, it still seems the paradox is joined: Christians tout the Bible’s Word of God as inerrant, but any Word distorts God’s pure spirit.
What do we do with this and other paradoxes? Abandon them? Reconcile them? Leave them irreconcilable? Why did Augustine, Teresa of Avila, Thérèse of Lisieux, Thomas Merton, and a few other literarily called authors unpack so eloquently and so lustily these distortions and contradictions if only to show us that language itself may also, like the soul, house the mystery of existence?
One bad result of all this: such conundrums embarrassed clerics and led them to sanitize or censor writers for millennia. Anyone who appealed to the purely sensual aspect of the reader the church editors targeted as gratuitous, immodest, vain. One argument has been that God doesn’t need the sentiments of anyone’s ego because none holds a candle to his. So, the critic asks: Why does God need so much praise, so much worship, even written confessions that testify over and again to his perfection?
Thus, we’ve been encumbered with a tradition of devotional autobiographers who, like John of the Cross, adhere more to the pontifical, less to the experiential. These books, as we’ll see, advocate collective or sanctioned schemes and tropes, rarely exhibit a tangy style or a sultry voice. They fall into habits of toady sentimentality, eschew the irreverent pungency of a Simone Weil or a Chet Raymo.11 And it’s been literature’s loss.
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BUT ALL is not lost. By showing John of the Cross’s unlikely path to spiritual perfection, we get a first variety, albeit medieval, of the lengths one God-infused enthusiast will go. Such audacity haunts nonfiction testaments: confession, autobiography, devotion, essay, memoir. These brachial forms let us see the winding, uneven expanse of the territory we’re heading into, terrain I and others measure much as Lewis and Clark mapped the Louisiana Purchase while they trekked. The continental size also mirrors the time of its long, slow coming into being. Across two millennia, writers have enlarged their connection to holy texts and aerie ideals with greater confidence in their own transcendentally puzzling experience. Mindful of the gradual change and its delta-like spread, I find that writers who are marked by liminal adventure fall into two neighboring topographies, basin and range.
One (the range) is the lyric. Poem, prayer, song, hymn, and such select Bible verses as the beatitudes and the psalms. These forms mimic the transcendent by marrying the metaphor and the metaphysical in language. In England, celestial queries are exquisitely rendered in John Dryden’s Christian humanist verse, in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sprung-rhythm poems on God’s grandeur. Down the bookish eras, poets pinnacle heaven as their keenest wish, endowing paradise with a euphoria our species can never (again) reach. Such versifiers compact the sublime into stanzaic space with pithy shots of spiritual adrenaline.
The other (the basin) is the discursive narrative—one that proceeds via an often-unwieldy mix of argument, testament, commentary, a tone pensive if not grave, and an anecdote-rife, partial or full life story. In this form, the roomier extensions of life-writing allow tellers to intermingle the epiphanic and the summational. The result may bear some relationship to the faith-forged confession but is, in the hands of today’s eclectic masters, a differently imagined voyage of experiential wonder. These books dominate the current practice, on which, in coming chapters, I will focus.
Among the principal testaments of faith in English is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). The book has been described as a spiritual autobiography, an epic travelogue, an epistolary confession, and the first novel in English. This hero’s journey captures the risk-taking exploit for which Englishmen of the eighteenth century longed. Call it the adventure of the colonial entrepreneur—who is also a slaver, an imperialist, a barbarous pilgrim, not to mention a cannibal tamer and killer—saddled with Christian righteousness. (Crusoe, who is shipwrecked oceans away from London’s Great Plague, stows one book: the Bible.) The character’s voice, its tone high-mindedly penitent, speaks to what David Lyle Jeffrey calls “the protagonist’s experience . . . from original sin and alienation through exile, wandering, and providential intervention to a discovery and reading of the Bible, which then interprets life retrospectively, bringing about repentance, conversion, and rescue.”12
Defoe’s classic is, Jeffrey notes further, “the progenitor of the modern novel,” realistic fiction, a lie or exaggeration that tells the truth. In the uphill struggle of much spiritual narrative, whose authors create physical and moral trials they must pass, a form eventually crystallizes.
This form—which we now call the spiritual memoir—features a compelling narrative, often to an exotically new place, where a man or woman who lives by his or her wits and under the veiled grace or outright absence of God is challenged, transformed, and, on occasion, redeemed. Such works blend the “I” of the writer and his creation, the “I” of the narrator. Such works posit alternatives to, or argue with, the precepts of the author’s religion, if he or she has or has lost one. Such works unscroll a death-defying plot, perspire with detail, foreshadow harrowing events, and, when necessary, load and lengthen and hold onto their mountaintop moments of spiritual liberation with awe.
But before all that complication, there’s a middle way, which need not shepherd one’s higher love down the sticky sidewalk of one’s quotidian survival, which need not tally three hundred pages and years of intemperate searching. It’s a compromise between basin and range, between lyric and discursive—the spiritual essay.
NOTES
1. Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master; The Essential Writings, ed. Lawrence Cunningham (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), 15.
2. Some readers will recognize my paraphrase of what may be the most precise of all quotations about the writer’s craft: “A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.” William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978), 17.
3. Eric A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
4. Erasmus (ca. 1466–1536) translated this sentence differently: “In the beginning was the Speech.” The idea is that God spoke the Word long before his followers discovered writing, and then wrote his Word down. Speech lacks the carved-into-stone solidity that Text has. It is inescapable that so-called holy texts (aka speech acts) of Christianity and Judaism happen before writing, and yet the writing lays the groundwork for the religion’s truth claims. For my purposes, this means our interpretation of religious/spiritual writing is based more on the rhetoric of literature and less on the rhetoric of speech.
5. I am not including such post-Augustine philosopher-theologians as Peter Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Søren Kierkegaard, and others, in part because the vast majority of Christian authors, including these, are theological writers. Very few chew the grit of personal narrative; they don’t sink into the personal as witness, having so few models, Augustine notwithstanding. At the same time, I acknowledge the importance of sacred-like textual and artistic monuments such as those to the “American faith.” These we might call, expanding the community, secular scripture: the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights; films like It’s a Wonderful Life and Taxi Driver; paintings like Nighthawks and Freedom from Want; and books like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, True Grit, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, of which Harriet Beecher Stowe remarked, “I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did His dictation.”
6. St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, trans. Mirabai Starr (New York: Riverhead Books, 2002). You’ll need some backbone to read the secondhand accounts of his brutal Inquisition-blessed confinement. He was often starved and regularly lashed by the Spanish Catholic authorities. Starr labels him “Spain’s favorite poet and most confusing theologian” (xvii).
7. I suspect this is as good a spot as any to distinguish soul and spirit, words that seem interchangeable but which are not. In Webster’s New Dictionary of Synonyms (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1984), soul “usually suggests a relation to or a connection with a body or with a physical or material entity to which it gives life or power.” Thus the familiar verse in Matthew: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind” (22:37). Or Mark 8:36: “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul.” Soul is like a taproot of our species, as in “it often takes a war to lay bare the soul of a people.” We hunt high and low for our soulmates. We recognize from 1776 Thomas Paine’s “times that try men’s souls.” African Americans rally around soul music and soul power, The Souls of Black Folk and Soul on Ice. Countless other examples are available.
In my first few pages, I described spirit as a temperamental force. Webster’s Synonyms notes further that spirit “suggests an opposition or even an antithesis to what is physical, corporeal, or material and often a repugnance to the latter.” The poor may be “blessed in spirit” despite their poverty. Native Americans honor the Great Spirit, which connotes a kind of moral magnetism found in the Earth and from which civilized peoples stray. Even as the body wears out, the spirit survives. The spirit models itself, again from Webster’s, as “signs of excellent physical, or sometimes, mental, health as ardor, animation, energy, and enthusiasm.”
Angels and devils have no souls; it’s their spirits that do the haunting. I like this ambiguity: Spirit requires a body or a soul through which its immateriality, paradoxically, is experienced. When we “obey the spirit rather than the letter of a law,” we move beyond a prescribed action. We measure intent, apply moral leniency, and decide cases individually. Spirit is slippery and inchoate when it’s roaming, single-minded and leading the way when it’s lit.
Soul feels permanent, spirit evasive; one clothed, the other unclad. The soul is immortal. F. Scott Fitzgerald writes to try and discover the “American soul.” Joyce forges the “uncreated conscience of his race” in the “smithy of his soul.”
Spirit comes close to immortality as well. But it is often more functional, giving us vitalism, our sanguine natures, exalted emotions, and an alchemical ability to reconstitute the self or any other object it chooses to inhabit.
8. The Cloud of Unknowing, trans. Carmen Acevedo Butcher (Boston: Shambhala Books, 2009), a manuscript from the late fourteenth century by an unknown author, states that God “can be loved but not thought. By love God can be embraced and held, but not by thinking” (21). A mystic from earlier in the same century, Richard Rolle, asks what is God: “I say that thou shalt never find an answer to this question. I have not known; angels know not; archangels have not heard. Wherefore how wouldest thou know what is unknown and also unteachable?” The Fire of Love, trans. Richard Misyn, in Richard Rolle Collection (London: Aeterna Press, 2015), 56.
Scribes and scholars, however, then and now, declare that via writing and speech God is knowable because he has communicated his being partly in words, which are further sanctified by their inerrancy. Thus, there shouldn’t be much doubt that what he says he is in language, he is. Or do we just disregard this in favor of his “working in mysterious ways”? This literate and literary aspect of God’s being is, for me, central to the necessity of religious and spiritual discourse. To discuss, debate, believe, and disbelieve such being. To argue that language can’t render it is a copout.
9. T. Corbishley and J. E. Biechler, “Mysticism,” in The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Farmington, MI: Gale Group, 2003), 10:113.
10. Carol Harrison, “The Rhetoric of Scripture and Preaching,” in Augustine and His Critics (New York: Routledge, 2002), 223.
11. Were the science essaying of Raymo’s books better known! For example, Honey from Stone: A Naturalist’s Search for God (1987) plumbs the physicist’s year spent communing with nature on a peninsula, geologically and ornithologically alive, in western Ireland: “If I am to encounter God, it must be as the ground for ‘things seen.’ If I am to encounter mystery, it must be within the interstices of ‘things known’” (112).
12. Oxford Guide to Ideas and Issues in the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 296–97.
