Spirituality and the Writer

A Personal Inquiry

Thomas Larson

• Publisher: Swallow Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780804041041
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Scrittura creativa

Today, the surprisingly elastic form of the memoir embraces subjects that include dying, illness, loss, relationships, and self-awareness. Writing to reveal the inner self—the pilgrimage into one's spiritual and/or religious nature—is a primary calling. Contemporary memoirists are exploring this field with innovative storytelling, rigorous craft, and new styles of confessional authorship. Now, Thomas Larson brings his expertise as a critic, reader, and teacher to the boldly evolving and improvisatory world of spiritual literature.

In his book-length essay Spirituality and the Writer, Larson surveys the literary insights of authors old and new who have shaped religious autobiography and spiritual memoir—from Augustine to Thomas Merton, from Peter Matthiessen to Cheryl Strayed. He holds them to an exacting standard: they must render transcendent experience in the writing itself. Only when the writer's craft prevails can the fleeting and profound personal truths of the spirit be captured. Like its predecessor, Larson's The Memoir and the Memoirist, Spirituality and the Writer will find a home in writing classrooms and book groups, and be a resource for students, teachers, and writers who seek guidance with exploring their spiritual lives.

The Christian Autobiographer

Both what I know about myself and what I do not know will therefore be my testimony to you, since what I know I have seen by your light, and what I do not know is from my own darknesses, not yet scattered by your noonday gaze.

—Augustine

What does it mean to call religious and spiritual writing literary? How necessary is this designation? On one hand, we have the seventeenth-century verse of the metaphysical and devotional poets as well as John Milton, whose headline is Christian Charity Defeats the Devil. Those authors live in a world biblically organized, write in a confessional or fabulist voice, and, especially with Milton’s Paradise Lost, help fashion a Christian literature during the English Renaissance. During the eighteenth century, the majority of Enlightenment writers eschew biblical themes. They elevate human iniquity and social relations as their primary concern, and from their efforts a literature, call it secular or humanist, begins to grow. These works eventually undergird a culture’s fiercest metanarratives—stories of thwarted freedom: Ahab and the whale, Huck and Miss Watson, Meursault and his indifference.

But the question of literariness remains for one monumental reason—the Bible. The Bible is, indisputably, thought of as the Word of God and, disputably, thought to be a fully flourishing literary document.¹ Despite the latter dispute, I realize the autobiography and memoir I’m critiquing owes its themes, tropes, and terminology to the Bible. Indeed, in a book-blessed culture, a religion needs inerrant, testimonial texts whose message is used to convert the wayward. This occurs before a faith-affirming confession is possible. In the Common Era, such books (though few and far between) model a salvaged life, one that is, according to its disciples, rarely achieved. All the more reason to seek it.

Christians believe the Bible is God’s word, spoken and transcribed. Its texts include family trees, injunctions, anecdotes, parables, myths, miracles, poetry, and much testimony. Its writers employ syntactic parallelism, synonymous restatement, and naturalistic metaphor. By 1530, the Great Book was given Anglo-Saxon accents and sonorities in William Tyndale’s English translation. Eighty years later, his version was further enhanced as the King James Bible. You can hear Tyndale’s music in Isaiah 40:8: “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the Word of the Lord shall abide forever.”

The Bible regularly uses the word spirit (in Greek, pneuma): God himself is spirit, as are the ministering angels, the agent by which Mary is impregnated, the inner reward of adhering to divine law, and the gift of kingdom come through Jesus Christ, who bears and dispenses the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit descends on Jesus during John’s baptism with the metaphor of the descending dove. Spirit manifests through him in his prophecies, his healing arts, and the Sermon on the Mount. To complete the story, Christ has to relinquish his carapaced essence when he dies: “Father, unto your hands I commit my spirit.”

In addition to its “holy” label, the word (there are 719 uses of spirit in the testaments) carries fatalistic extensions: unless we are hyper-wary, the spirit of evil, already staining flesh, earth, and body, dupes us into desire, vanity, and sin, funneling us, if we’re not careful, to perversion, apostasy, and Satan. Here is the foundational contrast. Spirit, in Paul’s disseverment, opposes flesh—the former sacred and incorruptible, the latter violable and mundane. Romans 8:6: “For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.”

Spirit is that which is sent to act on those the man behind the curtain has deemed worthy. One such is Ezekiel (37:1–14). The Lord sends his servant, Ezekiel, into a valley laden with dry bones. The Lord tells him to prophesy over the skeletons, so they hear the word of God. The bones, with the added importuning of the wind, are animated with human substance: skin, muscle, organs, breath. Suddenly an army springs up, a legion of fighters to retake Israel. All this is produced by “the spirit of the Lord” through Ezekiel—because he did as he was told in a kind of divine, unquestioning rapture. The unseen agent uses Ezekiel as his agent to do his bidding. The allegory is as obvious as it is wondrous.

In the Gospel of John, the Word gets top billing as God. In John 6:63, Christ says, “The words that I speak unto you [the disciples], they are spirit, and they are life.” They also carry meaning—indeed, meaning that sacralizes language as a metamorphic force. It’s the force of metonym and synecdoche: The words spoken by Christ and by God—the Word itself—stand for part of or, if you like, the whole of Christ and God.

Paul’s writing, which pervades the New Testament, asserts that the Spirit’s mission on Earth is Christ’s mission; they are the same. Or, better, Christ’s life and death materialize the Holy Spirit into its earthly cast. Christ is the historical flesh-and-blood hatching of a transcendent reality—the first and last, the one and only, the lone undead human being. In Romans 1:4—the words are Paul’s—Christ is “declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.” That is, Christ, crucified and tomb-fled, is resurrected and returns, unveiling for the disciples his stigmatic hands and missionary message. Christ appears and disappears to his followers as spirit.

To the larger point, like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Paul makes of spirit an abstraction, an object of thought. This abstraction—which would have been enacted in the drama, poetry, and music of the preliterate era—resides in Paul’s words: to turn Jesus into Christ, to turn a human being into a consciousness, to turn a man’s story into a savior’s text. Christ is transformed into the Holy Spirit and then transformed into scripture in Christ’s day and, so it’s avowed, for eternity. Such is Paul’s moon landing.

Paul’s gift: spirit comes from a holy or a nonhuman source. Thus, if the spirit is outside the body and placed into people as a reward for their devotion, then we need a church, an institutional placeholder, a delivery system, to bestow the reward. Christians are called to follow Christ’s teachings. Its adherents should accomplish “good works.” Given exceptional honesty and deeds, an individual becomes a placeholder of spirit himself. Case in point—the moral anchor of Daniel and Philip Berrigan.

* * *

IN PAUL’S thirteen New Testament letters, his pronouncements of the precepts of faith far exceed any personal intuition he divulges about himself as the deliverer of those precepts. A quick overview should clarify what I mean.

When we meet Paul, on the road to Damascus, he is Saul of Tarsus, a Hellenistic Jew and Roman citizen. He has spent his adulthood exterminating apostles of Christ, who are called “Jewish Christians.” Suddenly, the murderer Saul has a vision, as bright as it is loud. A voice out of the firmament accuses him: Why are you persecuting us? What have we Jewish Christians done to you? Saul demands: Who is speaking? It is Christ, the voice says, who tells Saul he, Jesus, is the chief victim of Saul’s persecution. Before Saul replies, he is blinded by Jesus, by God, by lightning—it’s not clear who or what. He is led to Damascus, where, after he has gone without food and water for three days, his sight is suddenly restored. To Saul the Lord has spoken. Reborn as Paul, he begins declaring in every town, around every communal well, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.

The supernatural snap on the road is among the greatest anointings in Christendom. In The Conversion on the Way to Damascus, Caravaggio imagines Paul thrown from his horse and fallen flat on his back—stunned, as it were, into action. In Acts 9:15–16, Luke says of Paul—quoting God—that he “is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel: For I will shew him how great things he will suffer for my name’s sake.” Paul is rendered missionary, his new vocation sent from above via a sound-and-light show as well as from the bitter elixir of self-loathing.

Most Christians venerate the Gospels and the Pauline writings. But the latter do not narrate the Jesus story as the four Gospel authors do. Rather, the writings are impersonal, even as they summon devout and high-strung emotions. They rarely soar with telling details or seat-edge tales of Paul’s storied career. They reflect the zeal of his church-building charge: to convert Gentiles. Paul’s letters seldom, if ever, disclose the vicissitudes of him as a conflict-beleaguered autobiographer.²

Here’s a pronominal division critical to autobiography and memoir. With first-person narrative, we have one “I,” that of the writer. And we have another “I,” that of the narrator the writer has created to represent himself on the page. Many narrators have no self-consciousness. They ignore the writer (or, we might say, the writer ignores his narrator), and they just tell the tale.

Paul fits the bill. A man who hears voices, has seizures, is boastful, and wields a messianic cudgel, he’s become God and Christ’s “chosen vessel,” a ship of letter-writing scripture. He writes about what he’s been told to—missionize the lost, baptize the strays, reel in the fleeing souls. He is accommodating because rapture offers him no choice. Here is how he says he’s vesseled by Jesus: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless, I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). Paul is a receiver, a broadcaster, an aggregator. In 1 Corinthians 9:22, he states, “I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.” There’s no strutting and fretting on his epistolary stage. Indeed, nowhere does Paul show us how he changed from killer to apostle.

What is missing in Paul is a self who is disclosing his truth. What is missing are the words of a writer in whom his inner turmoil is expressed while he’s disclosing that truth. Such a calling, alas, awaits a confessional artist, some three hundred years hence. When a writer of proven literary skill portrays the deepest concerns of his narrating “I” alongside those of his own—an author who is thinking and feeling, believing and questioning, conforming and psychologizing—we are in the presence of literature’s shaman, a truthteller, whom readers trust. From him, we get a more rounded, more reliable, more honest, more capable, more relatable “I,” a savvy, interdependent mix of narrator and writer, than an “I” where all things inner are kept at bay.

If there is an “I” in Paul, that “I” is fetal at best.

And fetal that “I” remains until Augustine, bishop of Hippo, brings the faith’s inaugural written self to a nascent Christianity.

* * *

THE FIRST writer in the West to detail his spiritual journey—to emotionally inhabit that journey with flashes and fanfares of literary genius—is Augustine (354–430 CE), author of Confessions, published between 397 and 400.³ In thirteen books, his autobiography is a dialogue with God. In it, he testifies to what he knows and to what he’s been instructed by God he should know. Most important, he dwells on his failure to follow those instructions. He knows things, but his experience often counteracts that knowledge. Augustine limns the struggle between his body (bad) and his soul (good). Simple. But when I read Augustine, I’m shocked by the certainty with which he declares his lusts have been so immoral and his soul so scarred that there’s no doubt he’ll lose God’s grace, and worse, forgo heaven. Such horrors are neither abstract nor credal. They are real, roiling his body and mind, not to mention the “sin-ridden” lives of everyone. His God seems to have one writerly demand: Who among my small but growing Christian mass will admit the sexual pleasure of his sin? Augustine volunteers.

Writing of his shame, Augustine says he’s failed to acquire the virtues God commands of him. (Alan Watts: “God did not give us commandments in order that we should obey them, but rather to prove that we could not.”)⁴ What’s more, Augustine recognizes what he should do: convert, confess, renounce pagan desires, and receive the Holy Spirit. If he proves worthy—in life and in writing—God heavens him home. Augustine demands this not of God but of himself.

Eventually, the day arrives when what he demands of himself will prove worthy of God.

It is August, 386 CE. Augustine is thirty-two, living in Milan and teaching rhetoric. He is tormented, “soul-sick,” and blubbering uncontrollably to a witnessing friend. Why the tears? He’s an ADD mix of sex maniac and self-flagellator. He has promised to marry a young girl and is waiting for her to turn twelve, the legal age. In the interim, he continues his depravity with several concubines, hating his weakness. He is enslaved, he writes, in Garry Wills’s translation, “My now-ingrained panic was increasing daily, and I daily panted for you” (169–70). At one point, so enamored of his debauchery, he tells God not to save him too soon “from the sick urges I wanted rather intensified than terminated.” He moans, “Give me chastity and self-control, but not just yet” (173).

In book 8 of Confessions, it is afternoon, and he is crawling into the backyard garden of his home, where he collapses under a fig tree and beseeches God, “How much more” before his conflict between flesh and spirit ends. He hears a neighboring child say, “Lift! Look!” (181). (Much confusion still exists about this “voice.” Is it Augustine’s internal voice? An actual child, chosen for the sound of his or her innocence? Is it God’s or Christ’s voice, echoing Paul’s audition?) Lift what? The Epistles of Paul, which are conveniently lying nearby. Augustine does, and the book falls open to Romans 13:13. He reads the verses aloud: “Give up indulgence and drunkenness, give up lust and obscenity, give up strife and rivalries.”⁵ He is instructed to “clothe yourself in Jesus Christ the Lord,” which for Augustine means to do away with his beloved “concupiscence,” or lusts. He ends the paragraph with perhaps the greatest reported moment of spiritual awakening (some might call it the greatest non sequitur) in confessional narrative: “The very instant I finished that sentence, light was flooding my heart with assurance, and all my shadowy reluctance evanesced” (182).

Augustine is convert...