Creative Tensions

Theopoetics is transforming the way theology is written and understood. As this edition of the journal demonstrates a new energy and creativity is entering theological discourse. This reaches back to draw upon the rich inheritance of imaginative thinking within our ancient traditions and it also responds to the distinct cultural and spiritual needs of our times. The sacred currents of this age flow through suffering and desiring bodies, everyday material life and all forms of aesthetic creativity.They increasingly bypass the old circuitry wired by abstract reason and ideal forms. However, while this movement is often welcomed as a source of theological renewal it is important to ask what kind of refreshment it is bringing to the traditions of faith. Is it offering rich, new life to theology that is over circumscribed by its conventions and distanced from contemporary concerns and sensibilities? Or is its impact rather more disturbing and radical – new wine tearing through the old skins? 

Both ways of approaching theopoetics stand in lively tension at the present moment. The first, drawing upon approaches established in theological aesthetics, is keen to stress both the challenging difference and the deep complementarity between poesis (human creative making) and theology. It is their asymmetry that allows their fruitful coupling within the divine economy. The second approach ascribes to human creative making a much more powerful revelatory significance; poesis is seen as a mode through which the divine speaks in strange and disruptive ways that theology may not contain and sometimes cannot comprehend. In this perspective artistic creativity does not supplement the theological enterprise it also deconstructs and fundamentally undermines its authority. 

In this essay I shall explore these two contrasting visions of theopoetics with particular reference to my own area of research and practice. This was known in the past as spiritual biography – a broad term including biographical reflection on the lives exemplary ‘saints’ and also confessional autobiographical writing.It is now more frequently termed spiritual life writing in recognition that it shares much in common with other forms of literary production.  As my reflection develops, I shall focus particularly upon women’s life writing. However, I begin with briefly noting the ancient uses of life writing within Christian tradition and the creative tensions have been present from the beginning.  

Coherence and Conflict in Life Writing

Life writing is a particularly ancient and important way of expressing faith. Indeed it could arguably be described as an archetypal theological form. The Gospelsthemselves show how the most sacred mysteries can be best expressed in terms of a life lived and sacrificially laid down. SimilarlyAugustine’s Confessions (Augustine (1963 [397-400]), which stand as a cornerstone of the Christian tradition,reveals not only the spiritual power of the life writing but also how complex and nuanced doctrinal debates can be powerfully explored through this capacious genre. However, both theseparadigmatic examples of spiritual life writingalready display the tensions inherent in life writing itself.

The gospel accounts are vivid and beautiful. They appear clear and luminous in their witness. However, their evident heterogeneity anduse of deeply crafted narrative forms alert us to the fact that life writing in the theological context is neither transparent or innocent but always artful. We cannot smooth out these foundational narratives out to protect ourselves from their challenging literary qualities. They do not combine into one seamless whole and indeed their power is partly due to the gaps, divergences and mysterious silences they preserve at the heart of our understanding of the Word made flesh.  

SimilarlyAugustine’s great work is deeply ambivalent for faithful readers. Taking his pattern from the epic quest legends of the ancient world (tales of trials, gods and heroes) he carefully crafts a narrative of how, through a perilous journey, the self moves away from the chaos of the unconverted state to find its reconciled fulfillment in God. As the narrative develops self and story are brought into coherence and wayward aspects of experience are braidedtogether into a sanctified whole.  As Robert Bell writes ‘spiritual autobiography in the Augustinian mode leads … from sin to grace like a line of melody seeking resolution (Bell, 1977:116). A pattern is established that has dominated the Western literary tradition from Pilgrim’s Progress to Harry Potter and which sets before us an image of the self journeying towards its true identity and its spiritual home. 

However, this harmonious project is riddled with conflicts. Augustine himself struggles with the fact that he must bring an autonomous self into being in order to justify the claims he makes for God. However, he also wishes to abject his own agency in creaturely submission and present God as the author of his life and text. In other words he wishes to both ‘write’ and ‘unwrite’ himself and the work testifies to the distress these conflicting desires create. . ‘Let me not be my own life’ he cries (1963: 290) LarrySissons argues that this tension skews and off-centres his writing and ‘unsettles notions of individual and freely determined authorship’ (1998:98) in the literary form he established.  Whenever we encounter spiritual narratives in the Augustinian mode we can expect to witness a strong pull towards harmonious coherence and an equally strong force that must witness to the disruption in a life where divine and human agency both unfold within each other and stand forever in tension.