Abstract
Richard Woods and Peter Tyler (eds),
The Bloomsbury Guide to Christian Spirituality
, Bloomsbury Continuum: London and New York, 2012; 368 pp.: 97811441184849, £30.00/US$49.95 (hbk); 9781441174239, £8.99/US$14.99 (e-book)
This new guide to Christian spirituality is in competition with a number of others attempting to steer modern readers, students and spiritual seekers through this complex and fashionable field. From single-author commentaries (Alister McGrath, Glen Scorgie) to weighty edited collections from such publishers as SPCK and SCM Press; there is plenty of fodder on the market for those seeking enlightenment.
The virtues of this volume are that the authors are distinguished and well-known experts in their particular fields, who have been around for long enough to have understood the needs of those likely to use this volume. Few readers are going to read it straight through. In a way this is a pity because the agenda covered by the volume is a good indicator in itself to the way Christian spirituality is currently understood. And that is, not as a self-enclosed, esoteric discipline but rather as a field for conversation with partners from various parts of the Christian world, from other faith traditions and with secularism. Yes, the old ‘schools of spirituality’ approach is there, with the classic approaches (Augustinian, Monastic, Orthodox, Dominican, Franciscan, Carmelite etc.) covered deftly enough. But this is a volume which seeks a wider understanding. There is a particularly fruitful essay on spirituality and atheism, which tackles not only what counts for spirituality among those who do not believe in God but also what we might make of the long experience of spiritual abandonment which is recorded in the journals of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The essay links the experience to apophatic themes (and might indeed have been helped by a more searching exploration of orthodox apophaticism).
There is always something unsatisfactory about these guides, however authoritative the authors and attractive the production; and that is simply that the task of compression involved in producing a general essay on, say, the Desert Fathers or Ignatian Spirituality produces writing which can seem to depend too much on the reader's understanding of what it attempts to explain. In other words, the more you know about a particular subject the more you are likely to get out of the treatment here. Benedicta Ward's essay is a case in point. The material is as fresh and engaging as anything she has written in her many years as an expert on the Desert Fathers. Yet someone new to the subject might feel there were obvious questions of context and background which there had been no time to address. This difficulty emerges with the very first essay in the book; one of three chapters devoted to the building blocks of the Christian spiritual tradition. Margaret Barker has developed an impressive, if still controversial, body of writing about the significance of the Jewish Temple. This is explored at exhilarating, if breathless, pace. Yet somehow the conclusions are not drawn in such a way as to make clear why this is the starting point for the whole book. Not a problem if you are dipping in and out, but hard for those seeking coherence.