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.
The Spiritual Essayist
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers.
—James Baldwin
The spiritual essay anchors the biggest part of the briefest moment, an economy of insight, if you will, that the long-winded autobiography and memoir do not share. This economy allows writers to impress upon us that they have grasped the spirit’s light even though it has already flashed by. In addition, its brevity engenders flexibility: the essay can turn on a dime, go against itself, and come back or keep roaming. The essayists I discuss—D. H. Lawrence, Langston Hughes, Bruce Lawrie—succeed in their abstract/sensual marriage by remaining lyrically intimate as much as numinously alert, dwelling loosely but fixedly on the form’s brevity, compaction, and intensity. These writers must try and angle the profound into the passing of the profound—no easy task.
Among the finest spiritual essays in English is Lawrence’s “The Spinner and the Monks.”1 In 1912, the writer and Frieda von Richthofen, having fallen lust-mad for each other, spent the winter/spring seasons on Lake Garda in Gargnano, Italy. High above Gargnano and its tangled streets sits the church of San Tommaso. The small chapel, which Lawrence espies from the lakefront, seems to float in the sky, pondering, like the author, the snow-capped peaks of the Tyrol. Climbing cobblestone streets up through the village, passing walled houses atop steep stairways, he discovers San Tommaso’s terrace, “suspended . . . like the lowest step of heaven” (21), a place with an earthen sacredness in between (or joining) sky and Earth. He enters the sanctuary and inhales “a thick, fierce darkness of the senses” (22). His soul shrinks, he says, and he hurries outside.