Emptiness

Feeling Christian in America

John Corrigan

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226237633
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

For many Christians in America, becoming filled with Christ first requires being empty of themselves—a quality often overlooked in religious histories. In Emptiness, John Corrigan highlights for the first time the various ways that American Christianity has systematically promoted the cultivation of this feeling. Corrigan examines different kinds of emptiness essential to American Christianity, such as the emptiness of deep longing, the emptying of the body through fasting or weeping, the emptiness of the wilderness, and the emptiness of historical time itself. He argues, furthermore, that emptiness is closely connected to the ways Christian groups differentiate themselves: many groups foster a sense of belonging not through affirmation, but rather avowal of what they and their doctrines are not. Through emptiness, American Christians are able to assert their identities as members of a religious community.Drawing much-needed attention to a crucial aspect of American Christianity, Emptiness expands our understanding of historical and contemporary Christian practices.

1

Feeling

Something and Nothing battle here.

One we never get to see at all,

The other we watch closely

Changing costumes and masks

In hope it’ll add up to something.

—Charles Simic

The Emotion of Emptiness

Emotion is more important than it used to be. In the past several decades, the humanities have rediscovered it and made it a prime concern. In areas such as religious studies, classics, philosophy, literary studies, and history, recent scholarship evidences a reorientation to emotion as a primary datum susceptible to scholarly analysis. There are new theories of emotion, its expression, its relation to cognition, the body, culture, and power. This renaissance in the study of emotion is characterized by bold interdisciplinary research and ambitious interpretation. It is changing the way we think about Mediterranean antiquity, the French Revolution, Pacific Islander communities, Egyptian Bedouins, memory, ethics, space, politics, and America.1

In the area of religion, this development has been noticeable even though the field has never been without some scholarship addressing feeling.2 Overviews of recent work describe a turn within the field from theologically framed analyses of emotion to approaches that draw upon the social and behavioral sciences, biological sciences, and social and cultural history. Scholars have studied religious conceptualizations of emotion and its ritual performances, emotion in religious ethics and material culture, the gendering and racializing of emotion, language and embodiedness, the historical development of emotional religious cultures, and individual emotions such as anger, fear, and love.3 In short, we know much more about emotion in religion than we did thirty years ago. As a result we are better positioned to appreciate the similarities and differences among religious groups in different parts of the world. We also are able to better understand religion in relation to other aspects of life, from politics to art, work, family, and institutions.

The surge of interest in emotion among religion scholars has opened opportunities for reconsiderations of American religious history. A focus on emotion enables interpretation that can track lives as they unfold in a wide range of contexts where similar emotional experiences are found. Rather than focusing primarily on doctrine or polity, study of American religion can pay attention to feelings that are important in religion and follow those feelings into other aspects of culture, observing the ways in which life experiences in various areas are interwoven around emotion. An investigation of emotion in religion in America accordingly notices human subjectivities that have been biologically framed and culturally shaped, identifies a key emotion or cluster of emotions and a set of cultural sites for their performance, and illustrates how emotional religion plays a role in the shaping of a national culture.

But what emotion? Of all of the emotions that have been associated with religion—wonder, awe, jealousy, love, shame, and many others—which one is best for a study of Christianity in America? The simple answer, and the obvious one, is that we should focus on an emotion that is prominent in religion but that also recurs in other contexts. The better answer is that we are less likely to see anything new in American Christianity by following the trail of an emotion that previously has been privileged in religious scholarship. Love is such an emotion. So is fear. So is hatred. It is possible that historians versed in emotions studies might one day reevaluate such emotions and by so doing fashion original historical narratives around them. For the present, however, we can endeavor to follow the trail of an emotion less familiar to readers of histories of American Christianity but crucially important to understanding American Christianity’s history. That emotion is emptiness.

The experience of emptiness often is mentioned in psychoanalytic literature and is discussed in psychology journals, but less often has it been the focus of empirical investigation. Some researchers treat it as raw emotion, while others have described it as a highly cognized emotion, one that is related to existential concerns and involves philosophical and reflective thought. It has been linked to suicidal ideation, borderline personality disorder, and schizoid ego structure, and has been differentiated from depression. It is related to boredom in some psychological studies and in the writings of philosophers such as Jean Paul Sartre (“soul-destroying boredom”) and Søren Kierkegaard. Virtually all psychological research agrees that it is a common human experience, and researchers employ the term “feeling of emptiness” to refer to it. The anthropologist Richard A. Shweder has argued for a cross-cultural understanding of feelings of emptiness as “soul loss,” pointing out that the emotion of emptiness is common to cultures around the world and that it is associated with a similar cluster of ideas and related feelings in its various settings: death, vulnerability, blood stagnated in the veins, cold, darkness, a missing soul, and so forth, and that it is somatized similarly (i.e., sleep loss, weight loss, dizziness). The American psychologist James H. Leuba (1867–1946), among other American writers, became curious about emptiness in connection with religion in the early twentieth century, but little scientific research has followed from that.4

Those familiar with Buddhism will not be surprised by the focus here on emptiness (in some cases expressed as “nothingness”) as an emotion central to religious lives. The experience of emptiness is fundamental to Buddhism and has been much discussed in Anglophone literature over the past half century, particularly in relation to Christianity. Recent scholarship has defined the Western engagement of Buddhism, as that religion gradually became known to Europeans following the sixteenth-century reports of Francis Xavier, as the invention of the “Oriental philosophy,” a system characterized above all by “the cult of emptiness” or “the cult of nothingness.” More pointedly, beginning in the 1960s and continuing for several decades, the influence of deconstructive theology, alongside growing American interest in Asian religious traditions generally, was felt in numerous studies arguing for similarity in Buddhist and Christian spirituality. The point of comparison in such work typically was that the experience of emptiness—the sunyata of Buddhism—was thought to occur not only in Christian mysticism but in the everyday religious practice of Western Christians. The writings of Japanese scholars Nishida Kitaro and his disciple Keiji Nishitani, among others, proved particularly alluring to Westerners who sought to advance postmodern inquiry about consciousness, logic, time, identity, and ethics through a focus on the feeling of emptiness.5

One endeavor eventuating from the Western interest in Buddhism was the attempt to demonstrate the theological compatibility of Buddhism with Christianity. Buddhist emptiness was compared, for example, to the Christian idea of kenosis. Drawing upon the writings of Christian mystics, some argued that kenosis as a kind of purposeful emptying of the self in expectation of being filled by God was a Christian expression of the cultivated emptiness that was central to Buddhist thought. A related scholarly project was the attempt to demonstrate that Christian apophatic theology, or negative theology (via negativa)—a spiritual path emphasizing awareness of what God is not, rather than what God is—was congruent with Buddhist emptiness. Among the most ambitious of scholarly efforts to bring the Buddhist experience of emptiness to the center of the study of religion—not just in comparison with Christianity but as a framework for understanding a range of traditions—was the work of Frederick J. Streng, an accomplished mid-twentieth-century translator of Mādhyamika texts and interpreter of Nagarjuna’s (c. 150–250 CE) doctrine of emptiness. In Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning, Streng proposed, drawing on Nagarjuna, that emptiness was a “means of ultimate transformation,” a process, and he asserted therein and in other writings that the term “religion” consequently had no fixed referent. The study of religion accordingly should set aside trust in language to identify a religious “essence” and pursue instead inquiry into the various networked social and cultural contexts from which “religious” meanings emerged. His approach, said one commentator, was to proffer “emptiness as a paradigm for understanding world religions.”6

But Buddhism is not Christianity. Whatever the goals of research that seeks to harmonize those religions, and others with them, those are not our purpose here. We are interested in emptiness first of all as a feeling, and not primarily as a theological construct that might intersect with other such constructs. Feelings do not take place in a cultural vacuum and to some extent are cognized. The worlds of ideas in which people live are not distinct from people’s experiences of emotion. There is some value, at some point, to compare Buddhist and Christian characterizations of the feeling of emptiness. But in inquiring into feeling and religion in American Christianity, we must avoid overlaying that Christianity with an Asian Buddhist conception of emptiness. It is the emotion itself that matters. It is what the psychologist and historian of religions Louise Sundararajan has emphasized in her writing about the “savoured” Chinese Buddhist emotion of kong, “the feeling that everything is ‘empty’ to the very core.” For Sundararajan, kong is negative affect that paradoxically is cultivated for its capability to positively transform a person. We follow her lead here, taking emptiness firstly as an emotion, not a theological idea. But it is a complex emotion, and when it occurs it often is ornamented with religious ideas.7 Love can be experienced similarly. And shame.

As in Buddhism, emptiness has a long tradition in Christianity, reaching back to classics such as Saint Augustine’s Confessions, and before that into a primitive Christianity shaped by Neoplatonic philosophy.8 Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Protestant theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and Rudolf Otto, the former accentuating a “feeling of absolute dependence” and the latter a feeling of “emptiness and nothingness” as the core of Christian spirituality, were familiar with the reports of medieval mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Saint John of the Cross (and Otto with Buddhists, whose notions of emptiness he compared to Meister Eckhart’s).9 Like their contemporaries, they were able to draw on a deep vocabulary about emptiness and nothingness in their writing. One of their influences, the German Eckhart (c. 1260–1327), wrote at length about the feeling of emptiness, about the “God beyond God,” God as Absolute Unity, the Void, and the profound emotional states experienced in the mystic’s search for God. The sixteenth-century Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross likewise created a rich vocabulary for speaking about the experience of emptiness and its centrality to Christian spirituality. In Dark Night of the Soul (1585), he described the soul’s journey to God and the trials experienced along the way. In that journey, it is “the mark of the spirit (that has been purged and annihilated with respect to all particular affections and all particularized knowledge) that, remaining in emptiness and darkness, it takes pleasure in no particular thing, but is capable of embracing all things in their totality.” The experience of “aridness and emptiness,” repeatedly referenced by the Spaniard, forced upon the soul recognition of its baseness and wretchedness. The feeling of emptiness, however, was also desire, a desperate yearning for union with God. It was a complex emotion, a feeling, as Sanjuanian scholar Laura L. Garcia observes, that “what we need in order to be united with God is to be empty of ourselves.” Such was the conclusion also of the nineteenth-century Bowdoin College philosopher and psychologist Thomas C. Upham, a devout follower of Wesleyan holiness, who drew inspiration from (and authored a book about) Saint Catharine of Genoa, whom he quoted: “No matter whether he be man or angel, no being can be any thing in God until he has become nothing in himself. When the emptiness of the creature is filled with the fullness of God, then . . . God dwells in the creature.”10

The experiences of emptiness and of fullness often were linked for religious persons such as Saint Catharine and, before her, Augustine, who anticipated how one day God “wilt destroy this emptiness with an amazing fullness,” a hopeful expectation of “that time when I pass from the pinch of emptiness to the contentment of fullness.” That time, as well as the means by which emptiness became fullness, and even the experience itself of emptiness-becoming-fullness, were thought to be hidden from full human comprehension. According to Eckhart, Saint John, and many other mystics, such feeling was indescribable, beyond what words could manage, and it was paradoxical. In that vein, the thirteenth-century stigmatic Blessed Angela of Foligno, futilely reaching to capture in language something of her feeling, referred to the “indescribable abyss of delights and illuminations.” Professions of indescribability, however, did not keep the American religious press and religion writers from ongoing commentary on the theme, nor from earnest citation of medieval mystics, nor from seeking to educate about something that was imagined as beyond words. It did not keep the Mennonite Herald of Truth, located in Chicago, from republishing in 1880 an extract from Thomas à Kempis under the title “The Emptiness of Mere Human Knowledge,” as a way into discussing the matter more fully.11

Calvin’s Legacy

In Everything and Nothing, a rumination about Shakespeare’s extraordinarily productive career, Jorge Luis Borges wrote: “There was no one in him: behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one.” From boyhood, writes Borges, Shakespeare had sensed “this emptiness.” That depiction of Shakespeare is suggestive of the language about emptiness in the Puritanism that coalesced during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Catherine Gimelli Martin, observing the Puritans’ antipathy to “self-esteem,” remarks that “not only did they link it to spiritual pride, but they considered even ‘self-confidence’ the equivalent of self-conceitedness and self-fullness, the diametric opposite of the self-emptiness that directed their ‘utter dependence’ on God.” The Puritan mystic Francis Rous, as Jerald C. Brauer wrote, “shared several elements of classical Western Christian mysticism.” Rous, a politically active Presbyterian (and later Independent) and a member of Cromwell’s council of state after 1653, “stands firmly within the mystical tradition when he argues for the necessity of purging the total person in preparation for a heavenly visitation: only the pure in heart can see God, and one must be empty before one can be full.” Only a minority of Puritans were as deeply mystical in their devotions as Rous, but, as Brauer points out, that “mystical dimension of piety is very strongly present within the evangelical tradition of Puritanism.” As such, it influenced the construction of Puritan spiritual lives in New England as well as Old England. Thomas Hooker, a former fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, which was a breeding ground for Puritans, came to Massachusetts and eventually decamped from there to Hartford, where he is remembered as “the Father of Connecticut.” He is also remembered for preaching that “you must be empty if ever Christ will fill you.” The Puritan cultivation of emptiness in expectation of being filled became an important component in the development of Christianity in America.12

In the fledgling communities of New England, Puritans kept records of their feelings of emptiness. One collection of those records is the book of conversion accounts of congregants in Rev. Thomas Shepard’s First Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the 1630s–40s, a succession of persons came before the church to relate their stories of experiencing saving grace, with the expectation that having confessed to a crucial stage in their regeneration, they would be admitted to full communion in the church—a status important for social as well as moral advancement. Shepard, who was the son-in-law of Hooker, recounted in his autobiography his own experience “of a total emptiness” as a central part of his spirituality. His congregants in Cambridge, as Andrea Knutson has observed, likewise claimed “emptiness” in their confessions. The tone of a young male’s testimony was typical: “I lived without God in the world. Mr. Hooker’s sermons about sight of sin and sense of it did stir up prayer. But I returned to the vanity and carelessness of my life” until “I heard directions how to come to Christ: (1) Come empty and poor and answerable with sense of want of everything.” The joining of a feeling of emptiness to desire, to the “sense of want” or the anticipation of being filled, is redolent in the relations of Shepard’s confessors just as it is present in the writings of other Puritans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That is not to say that Puritans, and other Christians, in every instance expressed their “want of God” to fill them when they spoke of their feelings of emptiness. In some cases, they felt empty because of the death of a loved one, or in migrating they felt the loss of familiar environs. Even those experiences, however, often led them to eventual reflection on the emptiness of the world and the vanity of things, and to renewed expressions of desire to be filled by God.13

In Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes, published in the 1640s, the Massachusetts Puritan leader John Cotton offered the children of New Englanders a catechism he proffered as milk “drawn out of the breasts of both testaments for their souls’ nourishment.” One of the various doctrinal sips that Cotton urged upon young Christians began with a question: “What is your corrupt nature?” The answer: “My corrupt nature is empty of grace, bent unto sin and only unto sin.” That highly theologized representation of emptiness, in keeping with Calvin’s dictum that individuals “cannot seriously aspire to [God] before we begin to become displeased with ourselves,” framed much ...