most robust
Literature as an encounter with the spiritual or ultimate Mystery
Traditional literature has always included a variety of genres that embody for the reader the world of spiritual or ultimate meaning. Most literature began with scriptures, hymns, religious journeys, or rituals. Much literature from the medieval to the modern period used spiritual genres, as we see in the writings of mystics and the poetry of Donne, Herbert, the Romantics, Hopkins, Eliot, Levertov, and Cairns. This dimension tends to be lost to modern students when all literature is studied only as a social power struggle or a language game. Although, as Charles Taylor argued in A Secular Age, the modern period has become publicly a secular age with few common spiritual experiences for many, the spiritual potential of literature remains available to the open reader. The reader, however, must learn to be open to what Arbery calls “a kind of pure receptivity,” for “the beauty of form . . . cannot be made by human will and expectation. Something else—some super-added grace—must descend with the transformed matter.” Thus mentors find ways to open young readers to the final dimensions of what Dante called “spiritual” or “anagogical” levels of meaning. Even for persons without clear religious convictions, such readings of ultimate meaning can become at least understandable within a historical context, as teachers of medieval literature have found. In addition, Paul Ricoeur affirms the power of some literature to produce a “transfiguration” in the reader. Thus most students can engage with literature of ultimate meaning with at least an imaginative engagement with “how it feels” to experience a spiritual moment (e.g. Brothers Karamazov, Four Quartets, White Noise).
On the level of theory, we can make use of the metaphor of incarnation to explore this ultimate dimension of literature. As Charles Du Bos has written, “All literature is an incarnation . . . in the living flesh of words” as “the creative emotion incarnates itself in the form and there is the highest and most complete expression of the artist, thus the emotion has become flesh in words.” Thus, the student can follow this metaphor of incarnation to its source in theology and perhaps in human experience of the incarnation of the Word in the first chapter of the Gospel of John. Studies of literature and theology have shown that the literature of ultimate Mystery includes not only this metaphor of incarnation but also archetypes of the journey, the cosmic battle, the mystical marriage, the transformation story, cosmic organicism, and silence.
If reading literature can bring alive the transformative journey of readers toward meaning of words and the Word, then there is deep resonance for us in the words of Glenn Arbery: “Literature matters because nothing can better approach the form . . . of life in its felt reality, as it is most deeply experienced, with an intelligence that increases in power the more it explores the unbearable dimensions of joy and suffering. Without being specifically religious in itself, [literature] can give an experience of ‘a common glory’ that intimates something otherwise unsayable about the nature of the Word through whom all things are made.”
David Leigh, SJ is professor of English at Seattle University, where he teaches British literature and theology, and coordinates faculty development programs. He has published two books: Circuitous Journeys: Modern Spiritual Autobiography (2000) and Apocalypse in Twentieth-Century Fiction (2008).