Spiritual Autobiography Research Articles

Soul-Life: Richard Jefferies’ Mystical Vision of Nature

This paper examines Richard Jefferies’ contribution to the study of nature mysticism. I argue that the study of nature mysticism can be utilized as a valuable source of insight to cultivate a more ecocentric response to the ecological crisis. Historically, the study of mysticism in the West has been shaped by a monotheistic bias that tends to marginalize the teachings of nature mystics. I seek to redress this lacuna in the field by calling attention to the understudied teachings of the English mystic and author, Richard Jefferies. I claim that Jefferies’ spiritual autobiography, The Story of My Heart ([1883] 2014) presents a compelling vision of nature mysticism that challenges the reader to reflect critically on conventional understandings of God, body, and time/being. Most significantly, I argue that Jefferies’ concept of “soul-life” can be interpreted as an ontological category characterized by an intellectual and moral sensitivity towards the wonders of nature. Jefferies believed that the cultivation of soul-life is transformative and key to unlocking the full potential of our relationship to the earth and each other.

“A noise of great good coming”: C. S. Lewis’s Dymer as a Spiritual Autobiography

“A noise of great good coming”: C. S. Lewis’s Dymer as a Spiritual Autobiography

Dolina Isse: duhovna avtobiografija in »film spomin«

The article deals with the novel The Issa Valley, written by the Nobel laureate in literature Czesław Miłosz, and its eponymous film adaptation by film director Tadeusz Konwicki. Both authors were born in the region of today’s Lithuania, which, with its intact natural environment and ancient folk beliefs, left a strong mark on their childhoods. In the present novel or film, the authors narrate their childhood through fragmentary memories, which are transformed by fiction, and through representations of thoughts: while Miłosz narrates his own childhood, Konwicki transforms the novel into film and shows the story through audio-visual images, at the same time also exposing himself in the role of author. With a chronotope analysis, and based on the anthropological-morphological method of film analysis, the contribution presents the methods of verbal and audio-visual representation of an adult-narrator memory on the landscape of his home region and on the time of childhood as well as defining the discussed works with the categories “spiritual autobiography” and “film-memory”.

L’Œil du cyclone

This article probes the convergence of meteorological disaster and memory in L’Île et une nuit by Daniel Maximin and La Case du commandeur by Édouard Glissant, reading fragments of these novels through reflections lifted from spiritual autobiographies by M. Jacqui Alexander and Mimerose Beaubrun. While anglophone Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe employs weather systems and climate as figures to apprehend the pervasiveness of antiblackness in today’s world, hurricane disaster takes another form as a device used by francophone Caribbean authors to observe and disrupt the ontological negation of Black people. Tracing the multiple resonances between ‘the wake’ (Sharpe, 2016) as a prismatic theoretical tool and meanings of water, passages, and wakefulness generated by hurricanes in Glissant and Maximin, this article explores the relation between this meteorological disaster event and an expansive consciousness of the human disasters of deportation and rupture. It pays attention to homonymic language tethering the eye of the hurricane and other manifestations of suspended wind and saltwater to the ‘vision’ or modes of sensorial knowing this phenomenon confers, addressing the ways in which African diaspora authors and spiritual practitioners understand the disaster of the Middle Passage through the disaster of the hurricane as temporally amplified, immanent, and beyond human.

Spiritual Authority for a (Post)Secular Age: Olive Schreiner’s Dreams as Literary Theology

Although an outspoken freethinker, Olive Schreiner engaged frequently and creatively with religious texts and traditions throughout her writings. Her religious revisionism informs Dreams (1890), a collection of short narratives that influenced many subsequent women’s rights activists but has since fallen into relative critical neglect. Responding to developments in postsecular scholarship, this article re-reads Schreiner’s stories as advancing a literary theology of immanence. Her various and fragmentary revelations adapt inherited models of spiritual autobiography and refashion biblical imagery, experimenting with religious allegory to challenge religious exclusivism. These innovations reflect her participation in several intersecting developments within early feminist movements that sought not only to overturn patriarchal expressions of religion but also to reclaim women’s spiritual authority and imagine new pathways to divinity. Rather than advancing a linear model of spiritual development, Dreams reflects an eclectic, open-ended process of searching that refashions religious symbols even as it ventures beyond canonical and institutional boundaries. This work, in turn, invites a critical reassessment of Schreiner’s freethinking output not as a rejection of religion but as an effort to rewrite it.

The Other Sun: A Spiritual Autobiography by Olivier Clément, translated and annotated with an introduction by Michael Donley, Gracewing, Leominster, 2021, pp. xx + 200, £15.99, pbk

The Other Sun: A Spiritual Autobiography by Olivier Clément, translated and annotated with an introduction by Michael Donley, Gracewing, Leominster, 2021, pp. xx + 200, £15.99, pbk

Sarah Wood. Piers Plowman and Its Manuscript Tradition

Sarah Wood’s new monograph takes as its focus several distinctive patterns of scribal behaviour in the early transmission of the A, B, and C versions of Piers Plowman: (1) deliberate textual alterations and continuations added to their exemplars, (2) distinctive patterns of marginal annotation and illustration, and (3) efforts to incorporate the poem into larger, miscellaneous volumes containing three specific subgenres of medieval narrative. All of these scribal choices, she maintains, ‘offer fascinating, if ambiguous, insight into the sometimes unexpected ways the poet’s earliest audience understood his work’ (p. 1). Since most modern studies of the Piers manuscripts have focused instead on a fairly small number of reliable early copies necessary for establishing authorial readings in the poem’s recognized versions, Wood hopes to rectify some of the negligence suffered by the other primary witnesses, which ‘languish virtually unknown to most readers except as sigla in editions’ (p. 2). One of Wood’s central claims is that the layout choices and marginal annotations of relatively obscure Piers manuscripts sometimes reveal early scribes and consumers of Piers Plowman bringing very different expectations to their reading experience of the poem than we typically do today. Many early readers seem to have believed that Piers Plowman would tell a ‘story’ and that it would deliver a coherent account of a ‘life’, either that of Will or that of Piers (p. 5). This often meant an expectation, on their part, of some kind of spiritual autobiography. By contrast, recent academic studies of Piers sometimes tend to look past the narrator completely, as a mere enabling device, and focus much more attention on the poem’s reflections of late-medieval theological disputes than on the narrative details about what purports to be Will’s pilgrimage to Truth.

Exvangelical (De)conversion Narratives and the Religious Politics of Spiritual Autobiography

Abstract: Scholars and pundits have devoted significant attention to the rise of the religiously unaffiliated in the United States in recent years. Within that demographic there are many former evangelical Christians who remain Christian but are no longer evangelical or have abandoned Christianity altogether. Many of these former evangelical Christians identify as exvangelicals . This essay analyzes autobiographies written by exvangelicals, and argues that their narratives of deconversion can best be understood in the generic tradition of the conversion narrative. When situated in this generic context, these exvangelical autobiographies testify to a crisis in twenty-first-century religious politics that mirrors similar tensions in the past and suggests the US is in a period of civic transition.

Working Title

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The Second Pawo Rinpoché, Tsuklak Trengwa (1504–1566): Visions in Meditation and Dream

This paper provides a brief introduction to the secret level of Tibetan spiritual biographies (gsang ba’i rnam thar) and autobiographies (gsang ba’i rang rnam) with a focus on visions in meditation and dreams. In the analysis section, some appropriately selected episodes of such secret aspects taken from one of the spiritual autobiographies of the Second Pawo, Tsuklak Trengwa (dpa’ bo gtsug lag phreng ba; 1504–1566), called The Mirror Reflecting the Illusory Countenance (‘khrul pa’i bzhin ras ‘char ba’i me long) are presented and interpreted.

Aspects of Political Theology in the Spiritual Autobiography of Nicolae Steinhardt

Important personality of the Romanian space, the Jew Nicolae Steinhardt that will discover the Christianity in prison and will be baptised in Jilava prison, will be not only an intellectual with ecumenical vocation, but also a writer that offers a rich testimony about the way how Communism from the Romanian space can not only ruin a life, but also make one to come closer to God and arrive to a deeper consciousness of the real values of life and spirituality that will therefore be connected to the cultural space, seen as an alternative and a form of survival in the Prison life. Both the experience that he had as an imprisoned for political reasons, like the one after his release will be emphasized in his discontinuous journal and therefore aspects like political theology will come as outcomes of his experiences or as forms of presenting the conclusions of his lectures. Contribution: Based on The diary of happiness, the most important and the most translated work of Nicolae Steinhardt (translated in 20 languages), that constitutes also an important part of the samizdat literature from Romania during the Communist period, the present research emphasizes the way how Steinhardt’s spiritual autobiography comes in contact with the political theology, bringing into attention the pillars of his conception.

Race, Gender, and Christian Mysticism: The Life of Zilpha Elaw

Drawing on the spiritual autobiography of the nineteenth-century Black female preacher Zilpha Elaw, this article argues that it should be included in the canon of Christian mystical texts because it sheds light on questions about race and gender relevant to current conflicts in both church and society. Elaw’s story demonstrates that while the grace of divine union promotes social transformation, it may not immediately free one from structures of sin. Mystical spirituality requires ongoing critical discernment.

Judge the Evil of Human Nature: “Moll Flanders” and Defoe's View of Conscience

“Moll Flanders” is a companion piece of Daniel Defoe's “Robinson Crusoe”, known as Defoe's "female version of spiritual autobiography". For a long time, Defoe researchers have focused on the "individual self-sufficiency" and social problems in his works. However, the research on Defoe's moral outlook is slightly fragmented, involving money and morality, Christian morality, national morality and so on. Therefore, it is necessary to start from the text of “Moll Flanders” to deeply explore the core of Defoe's moral thought, reveal Moll Flanders' crime and punishment under the threshold of his view of conscience, and analyze the birth context of Defoe's view of conscience, which mainly includes the following aspects: The relationship between Moll Flanders and the spirit of early capitalism, the lack of national welfare policy and Moll Flanders’s moral crisis, Moll Flanders' criminal predicament and spiritual redemption. Finally, this paper aims to explore the similarities and differences between Defoe's view of conscience and David Hume's and Adam Smith's view of conscience in the context of moral philosophy, to reveal the continuity and development of the ideas, to provide the thought resources from Defoe for the modern society. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the behavior and moral concepts of the heroine Moll Flanders in Defoe's work and to explain how the social values and ideas implied in it reflect Defoe's notion of conscience. The significance of this paper is to explore the moral philosophy of Defoe's work and the connection between his conscience and Hume and Adam Smith.

Reinterpretation of Spiritual Autobiography Genre in Richard Rodriguez’s Darling

The article is focused on the reinterpretation of the genre of spiritual autobiography in Richard Rodriguez’s novel Darling. Rodriguez’s autobiographical prose depicts his extremely embittered attitude to heritage and the pitfalls lurking at the crossroads of cultural practices. For a long time, this author had been placed outside the canon of Chicano literature and was considered an ‘outsider’ because of his statement that he was not a representative of a minority but a supporter of the assimilation of immigrants into the broader mainstream American society. Rodriguez emphasized the privilege of the individual over the collective identity. The study focuses on the formation of ethnic identity by autobiographical narrator Rodriguez and the evolution of his views on the nature of the concept of ‘self-identification’. In addition, as Mexican-Americans are gradually becoming the largest ethno-cultural group in the United States of America, the issues of identity, assimilation, heterogeneity and cultural hybridity raised by the author stay relevant and important.

Profession as a road to God – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s and Dag Hammarskjöld’s spiritual autobiographies: A case study

In this article, the author speaks about how a profession (job) can constitute a road to God and can lead one to a deeper understanding of spirituality as the heart of theology, by investigating the spiritual autobiographies of Teilhard de Chardin and Dag Hammarskjöld. While the former was a Jesuit with important contributions to the historical field, the latter was an important personality in the field of international diplomacy, whose contribution came to light towards the end of the important crises that took place in the 1960s. Both of them left us rich spiritual autobiographies in the form of a last published book (De Chardin) and a manuscript discovered after the author’s death and published posthumously (Dag Hammarskjöld).Contribution: This article brings into attention two important authors of the 20th century with different confessional backgrounds (Teilhard de Chardin was a Catholic Jesuit who worked as an archaeologist and was recognised for his work by being elected as a member of reputed forums such as the French Academy, while Dag Hammarskjöld, one of the holders of the posthumous Nobel Prize, was a diplomat with economical and law studies and deep theological concerns, which left to the posterity not only works from his activity field, but also an extremely useful spiritual autobiography) by investigating their spiritual autobiographies and showing how the profession they exercised led them to God and helped them deepen their spirituality and theology.

Scott McLaren, Pulpit, Press and Politics: Methodists and the Market for Books in Upper Canada

<i>Scott McLaren</i>, Pulpit, Press and Politics: Methodists and the Market for Books in Upper Canada

Образ Джона Вулмена в англоязычной публицистике 1850–1940-х гг.: агиографические мотивы

John Woolman, an 18th century Quaker preacher, is known in the history of American literature for his spiritual autobiography titled The Journal (1774). The 1850–1940s is a period when Woolman’s autobiographical character attracts the attention of British and American critics and essay writers. They publish a significant number of non-fiction texts, which contain numerous elements of hagiography in Woolman’s portraiture, depicting him as a saintly proto-abolitionist figure. According to recent studies, the pioneering role in Woolman’s literary “sanctification” belonged to the 19th century American poet John Greenleaf Whittier, and it was his essays about Woolman that established the “hagiographical” tradition. The paper suggests, however, that the poet followed the tradition which had started earlier. The following “hagiographical” elements may be distinguished in the analyzed non-fiction texts: 1) (semi-) anonymity of several texts; 2) frequent use of the adjective “saint” in reference to Woolman; 3) overestimation of Woolman’s historical significance as “the first abolitionist”; comparisons with famous saints; 4) the motif of being born in “a pious family” and “eulogizing on the birthplace of the saint”; 5) historically inaccurate portrayal of Woolman as a poor and semiliterate person; 6) emphasizing such psychological traits as childlikeness and absolute truthfulness. The conclusion is that Woolman’s sanctification was promoted by the historical situation in the USA of the 1850–1940s as well as by The Journal itself and a certain “flexibility” inherent in Woolman’s autobiographical text.

Sehnsucht as Signpost: The Autobiographical Impulse of C. S. Lewis

AbstractFor half a century, readers of C. S. Lewis had only two problematic and at times obscure spiritual autobiographies (The Pilgrim’s RegressandSurprised by Joy) to use in attempts to understand Lewis’s journey to faith through what he called Joy, Sehnsucht, or longing. Both books, though important and full of key insights, in some ways hid more than they revealed. Recent discoveries, however, have widened the arc of autobiography. Lewis’s landmark pre-Christian account of his conversion to theism, ‘Early Prose Joy’, published in 2013, monumentally widened and deepened our understanding of Lewis’s spiritual journey to faith. And the fragmentary poem ‘I Will Write Down the Portion that I Understand’ also adds significant insight, at least into Lewis’s composition process of grappling with conversion. Insightful recent scholarship by Alister McGrath suggests widening the scope of what we consider spiritual autobiography in Lewis to includeA Grief Observed; this idea opens the door to a broader view of how autobiography functions both in Lewis’s compositional life and in the categorization of his writings. This essay accepts that invitation, finding clear autobiographical efforts to capture the role of Joy in Lewis’s early poetry, includingDymer, and in his late novelTill We Have Faces. That last book, written with soon-to-be-wife Joy Davidman, serves crucially to change the focus of Lewis’s spiritual autobiographies from Joy to love. By thus expanding and exploring Lewis’s autobiographical arc, this essay brings to light an almost teleological understanding of love and the central theme of Lewis’s life and work.

Early American Women, the Novel, and God

Early American Women, the Novel, and God

When Novels Were Books

When Novels Were Books