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.
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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.
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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
