The Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality

Arthur Holder, Arthur Holder

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444393811
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality is a comprehensive single-volume introduction to Christian spirituality, and represents the most significant recent developments in the field.

• Offers a thoroughly interdisciplinary, broadly ecumenical, and representative overview of the most significant recent developments in the field
  
• Comprises essays combining rigorous academic scholarship with accessible and elegant writing
  
• Reflects an understanding of the field as the study of the lived experience of Christian faith and discipleship
  
• Provides material on biblical, historical, and theological foundations, along with treatment of contemporary issues

PART I
What is Christian Spirituality?

1 Approaches to the Study of Christian Spirituality
Sandra M. Schneiders

CHAPTER 1

Approaches to the Study of Christian Spirituality

Sandra M. Schneiders

Spirituality as an academic field is the study of spirituality as an existential phenomenon (the material object) under a formality (the formal object) which distinguishes it from theology, on the one hand, and religious studies, on the other. This requires, if not a definition, at least an identification of the phenomenon being studied and a description of the specific formality under which it is being studied. This task will be briefly addressed in the first part of this essay.

The second part will deal with the major topic of this essay: basic contemporary approaches to the academic study of spirituality. By approaches, I mean orienting frameworks within which specific methodologies are developed for the study of particular phenomena within the field of spirituality. Approaches reflect primarily the types of knowledge (or skills) the student seeks to attain which reflect the aspects of spirituality that she or he finds most interesting or important. Methodologies are articulated complexes of procedures (methods) which are developed to investigate what is of interest. Methods do not, or at least should not, dictate either what can be studied or how it should be studied. Rather, methods are systematic attempts to ensure the validity and fruitfulness of the research. Our concern in this essay is with approaches rather than with methodologies or specific methods.

The third part of the essay will address a specific issue in the academic field of spirituality, namely, how the self-implicating character of the study of the human search for God influences work in the field.

The reader should bear in mind that spirituality is studied in a variety of academic contexts and the objectives pursued in these diverse settings significantly influence what is studied and how it is studied. In this respect, spirituality is analogous to some other humanistic fields of study, such as psychology. A freshman in college may study psychology primarily to gain some understanding of her or himself or to determine whether this field might become her or his major. A master’s student may wish to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills to become a secondary school counselor. A physician may be doing a clinical specialization to become a psychiatrist. Or a PhDstudent may be primarily interested in theoretical research in the field. Any or all of these objectives might be simultaneously operative and mutually influencing in the work of any particular student. Analogously, some students of spirituality, especially those in formation programs and students taking their first courses in religion, are often primarily concerned with their own spiritual development. Some, especially those in seminary-type programs, are primarily concerned with learning how to mediate the riches of Christian spirituality to others and how to discern and deal with the spiritual concerns of those in their pastoral care. Others, particularly those in doctoral-level programs in spirituality, are primarily concerned with the qualitative and quantitative expansion of knowledge in the field and becoming equipped to contribute to the field by their own research and teaching in the future. However, while it is important to distinguish these objectives and attend to the differences they introduce into the approaches to the study of spirituality, it would be artificial to pretend that researchers have no interest in their own spiritual lives or in assisting others in theirs or that pastors have no need of theoretical knowledge of the spiritual life. In short, although the field of spirituality is a broad terrain in which personal, practical, and theoretical projects are pursued and interact, the academic discipline of spirituality is primarily the research discipline whose specific objective is the expansion of our knowledge and understanding of the God–human relationship.

Finally, while spirituality as such is not necessarily religious, denominational, or confessional, this volume is concerned with Christian spirituality. Therefore, unless otherwise specified, spirituality in this essay means Christian spirituality.

Spirituality as a Field of Study

The material object: spirituality as existential phenomenon

Christian spirituality as an academic discipline studies the lived experience of Christian faith, the subjective appropriation of faith and living of discipleship in their individual and corporate actualization(s). Because this definition is so general as to be open to misinterpretation, I would prefer to situate Christian spirituality as existential phenomenon within a more nuanced definition of spirituality in general and then specify it as Christian. Spirituality is the actualization of the basic human capacity for transcendence and will be defined for the purposes of this essay as the experience of conscious involvement in the project of life-integration through self-transcendence toward the horizon of ultimate value one perceives. Each element of the definition helps to specify what we are discussing.

First, spirituality is not simply spontaneous experience, however elevating or illuminating, but a conscious and deliberate way of living. It is an ongoing project, not merely a collection of experiences or episodes. Thus, lived spirituality is often referred to as one’s “spiritual life,” a term I will use occasionally in what follows. Second, the project is not self-enclosed but orients the subject beyond purely private satisfaction toward the ultimate good, the highest value, that the person recognizes, which may be God but might also be something other than God, for example, the full personhood of allhumans, world peace, enlightenment, or the good of the cosmos. Third, the ultimate value functions as a horizon luring the person toward growth. Hence, the spiritual life is intrinsically dynamic. Finally, this definition allows us to disqualify as spirituality negative life-organizations such as addictions (no matter how all-consuming they might be), exploitative or aggressive projects that seek the good of the individual at the expense of others or the rest of creation (no matter how energizing such a project might be), or venal concerns with money, power, or pleasure.

Christian spirituality as Christian specifies the horizon of ultimate value as the triune God revealed in Jesus Christ to whom Scripture normatively witnesses and whose life is communicated to the believer by the Holy Spirit making her or him a child of God. This new life, which Paul calls “life in the Spirit” (cf. Rom. 7: 6; 8: 2, 6, 10–11; Gal. 6: 8) is celebrated sacramentally within the believing community of the church and lived in the world as mission in and to the coming reign of God. This life of faith and discipleship constitutes the existential phenomenon that Christian spirituality as a discipline studies.

The contemporary discipline of spirituality, aware that the human subject and its context are immensely more complex than was once thought, attends to topics that, in the past, were considered peripheral or irrelevant to the spiritual life. Today we recognize that the subject of Christian spirituality is the human being as a whole: spirit, mind, and body; individual and social; culturally conditioned and ecologically intertwined with all of creation; economically and politically responsible. The Christian’s spirituality, although individually unique and intensely personal, is not a private or purely “interior” affair concerned exclusively with prayer and the practice of virtue. It is, as Peter Van Ness (1996: 5) described spirituality in general, the relation of the whole of oneself to reality as a whole. In the field of Christian spirituality, both “self” and “reality” are defined by Christian faith.

The formal object: spirituality as religious experience

All Christian theology studies Christian faith: God, Christ, Scripture, sacraments, church, morality, and so on. And the locus in which these realities appear is, ultimately, the experience of the church in its members throughout its history. In other words, all theology is an investigation of experientially rooted faith. The distinguishing characteristic, or formal object, of spirituality as a field of study is its specific focus on Christian faith as the experience of the concrete believing subject(s). In other words, spirituality studies not simply Christian faith but the lived experience of Christian faith.

Experience, religious or otherwise, is notoriously difficult to define. We might begin by saying that to experience is to be “subjectively aware” and that experience is always “experience of.” First, experience is by definition subjective and, as such, incommunicable. My pain cannot be felt by you even though, because you have experienced pain, you can empathize, by entering analogically into my experience, and thus understand it. Experience, including spirituality as existential phenomenon, can only be communicated by articulation in “texts”: verbal, literary, artistic, behavioral, and so on (cf. Ricoeur 1976: 16, 30–1). Second, since experience is always “experience of,” there is an object, “something” to articulate and to be understood. Thus, even in the case of mystical experience, which is the most ineffable of religious experiences, the subject can and does say something intended to allow the reader/listener access to “something.” This articulated “something,” precisely as experience, is the object of spirituality as a field of study, what the researcher wants to understand.

Since religious experience as experience can only be accessed in its articulations, the student of spirituality is always dealing with “texts.” Again, the analogy with psychology is illuminating. The psychologist is not studying anxiety as such or in general but the particular experience of anxiety of this individual or group. Verbalization, texts, drawings, dreams, behaviors, and other such articulations of the anxiety are the psychologist’s access to the particular experience of anxiety. In attempting to understand this particular experience, the psychologist draws on the large body of theoretical knowledge about anxiety as well as on his or her own direct or vicarious experiences of anxiety or related states. But neither the general theory nor the therapist’s experience is the focus of study in this case. The material object of the therapist’s attention is anxiety, but the formal object is anxiety as lived experience.

Similarly, the student of spirituality is not studying prayer as such but, for example, the prayer of Teresa of Avila as it is articulated in The Interior Castle and is manifest in her life which, itself, is mediated by her autobiography. The researcher presumably has considerable theoretical knowledge of prayer both through theological and psychological study and through personal and/or vicarious experience. But the focus of study is neither the theology of prayer nor the researcher’s experience of prayer, but specifically the prayer of Teresa of Avila.

Spirituality, in other words, is an instance of what Paul Ricoeur (1976: 78–9) calls “the science of the individual.” Studies in spirituality do not aim to develop a second-order theoretical language about the spiritual life which can be verified in all authentic Christian spirituality, but to investigate the spiritual life as it is and has been concretely lived. Spirituality is related to theology as the study of Hamlet, or even the Shakespearean corpus, is to the study of literary theory. The “individuals” that spirituality studies may be specific persons like Teresa, or specific movements like Benedictine monasticism, or themes like “the world,” or practices like centering prayer, spiritual direction, or religious pacifism. Although there is constant interplay between the knowledge of the particular individual(s) which enriches theoretical knowledge of the spiritual life and the theoretical knowledge which helps illuminate the interpretation of the individual, the focus/object of spirituality as a field of study is the experience of the spiritual life as experience. Consequently, unlike theology, whose analyses and conclusions intend applicability to all instances in the class in question (for example, an adequate theology of grace should be applicable to all the baptized), spirituality studies unique experiences of the living of Christian faith which, in their very uniqueness, can encourage, challenge, warn, illuminate, confirm, expand, subvert, or otherwise interact with both general theological theory, on the one hand, and other specific experiences of faith, on the other. Dorothy Day’s pacifist spirituality, for example, ran counter to the official theology of the US Catholic bishops during World War II and could not be fully appropriated by her (presumably very holy) contemporary, Thomas Merton. Day’s pacifism can be theologically related to, but not fully contained within, the Catholic just-war theory and studied within the context of moral theology. But the discipline of spirituality studies Day’s pacifism as the existential encounter with the Beatitudes that shaped the unique faith experience and lived discipleship of this particular woman and both challenged and expanded our understanding of Christian faith and life (Krupa 1997).

Although three different approaches to the study of spirituality will be discussed below, it is important to realize that they interact continuously in most real research projects and that all three, influenced by the postmodernity that has emerged in the academy since the mid-twentieth century, are marked by the linguistic-hermeneutical turn that has undermined the scientistic positivism of the modern period.

Three Approaches to the Study of Christian Spirituality

The three approaches to spirituality as an academic discipline that will be discussed in this section – the historical, the theological, and the anthropological – are derived from reading, discussions, and observations in the field over the past thirty to forty years. In other words, this is not a de jure prescriptive classification but a de facto heuristic taxonomy.

The historical approach

The least controversial approach to the study of spirituality is the historical approach. This is due largely to the fact that history as a modern academic discipline has always admitted subject matter specializations, such as the history of Western Europe, the Enlightenment, the papacy, Baroque music, women’s dress, or medieval penal methods. As long as something happened or existed, it is legitimate within the discipline of history to study it historically. Consequently, an interest in studying religious experience or some aspect of it as an historical reality does not need any particular justification, even if “locating” and identifying the object is problematic.

Many scholars approaching spirituality historically, both in the past and today, are actually primarily historians of spirituality rather than scholars of spirituality whose approach is primarily historical. The former are scholars who approach the phenomena of spirituality as trained historians, differing from their religious studies colleagues in religious or church history, not in terms of their understanding of historiography, historical methods, or the desired outcomes of research in terms of historical analyses or interpretations, but in regard to what they are interested in studying, namely, Christian religious experience. Many secular historians have done excellent work on Christian religious life, figures, literature, and movements (for example, Bynum 1987; Brown 1988; Ranft 1996). What seems to differentiate the historian of spirituality (for example, McGinn 1991–8) from the religious studies historian of religion is an interest in interpreting what is being studied as Christian faith experience within the context of Christian theology.

Historical spirituality scholars, on the other hand, are scholars of spirituality (not of history) who find the historical approach particularly useful for their projects (for example, Bynum 1982; Short 1999; McGinn 2001). Thus a researcher interested in the tradition of “nuptial spirituality” (mystical experience understood and expressed through the metaphor of “marriage to Christ”) may decide to study its expression in the spirituality of the thirteenth-century beguines (Murk-Jansen 1998) or through the commentaries on the biblical Song of Songs in the works of Origen, Bernard of Clairvaux, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Edward Taylor in the historical context of their respective lives and practice. The historical approach and its methodology are in the service of understanding nuptial spirituality rather than the construction of a history of nuptial spirituality or of interpretation of the Song of Songs as a text that nourished mystical experience in different periods. As the authors referenced above exemplify, the same scholar may function at different times, or even in the same work, as an historian of spirituality primarily interested in the development of some facet of spirituality and at other times as a spirituality scholar primarily interested in some aspect of spirituality studied within its historical context.

Prior to the mid-twentieth century, historians of spirituality shared with other historians, including most biblical scholars, a modernist understanding of history itself and of its methods and results. The modern historian was preoccupied with “what really happened” as that could be determined by the use of historical critical methods. And what “mattered” historically was the activity of major figures (almost always hegemonic Western males) and major movements (almost always those of the historical winners). Economic, political, military, and religious events dominated the concerns of modernist historians, biblical, social, cultural, and religious. Historiography was largely the attempt to construct uni-directional, periodized, cause-and-effect metanarratives that explained how and why th...

Table of contents

• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: What is Christian Spirituality?
• Part II: Scripture and Christian Spirituality
• Part III: Christian Spirituality in History
• Part IV: Theology and Christian Spirituality
• Part V: Interdisciplinary Dialogue Partners for the Study of Christian Spirituality
• Part VI: Special Topics in Contemporary Christian Spirituality
• Index