The Christian Spiritual Tradition has its enduring classics, not all of which stand the tests of time, or postmodern-critique. The Imitation of Christ, so introspective, guilt inducing and Pelagian in its emphases towards self improvement; the Letters of Fenelon, patronising and patriarchal in their assumptions about feminine spirituality, yet written with an affected feminine tone which some 21st C women may well find irresistibly funny if not ioffensive; Teresa's Interior Castle, a kind of handbook on spiritual Grand Designs for a residence fit for a king; Julian's Revelations of Divine Love, an uncomfortable combination of morbid fascination with death and a level of denial about the reality and perhaps irrevocability of tragedy, evil and divine failure; The Cloud of Unknowing, that strange mixture of Dionysian mystical strategies and structures and The Dark Night of the Soul of John of the Cross, whicvh may be one of the most helpful guides for a culture utterly sated with its own desires and dying of its own surfeits.
I've read all of these, and taught them in classes as substantial building blocks in Christian spirituality, acknowledging all these weaknesses but still insisting that these are the legacy of souls who struggled with the cost and consequence of seeking God.
Each of those spiritual classics is the product of a life lived Godward, and a desire to leave a few footprints for others to follow. (The photo is of my 1831 edition of Fenelon's Lettres) And yes they can be shown to be limited, flawed, less relevant, even harmful in the way they can perpetuate oppressive ideologies and attitudes if read uncritically and without regoard to context. And yet. The wisdom of some of the Christian tradition's greatest thinkers and explorers of the spiritual life is that these classics of devotion are gold, albeit mixed with the dross of their own times and contexts and normative frameworks. So every now and again I go back to one or other of them and recalibrate my own spiritual sensitivities, push back my hermeneutical horizons, revisit landscapes which I remember but which on returning I find to have changed, or perhaps that I have changed and can never see things this way again.
For most of my intellectual life as a Christian I have found spiritual and intellectual sustenance, stimulus and enjoyment in another kind of reading altogether. The biblical commentary is a particular genre of biblical studies, itself a major discipline under the wider roof of theology, subsumed under the canopy of the humanities! In these later years of semi-retirement when there is time for more discretionary reading I confess to indulging in more of what I;ve always done – reading commentaries. Yes commentaries are for consulting, they are reference wqrks, they gather in one place as much of the relevant information needed for responsible intepretation of the text, and I use commentaries in that way. But I also read them; like a story, with a plot, characters, tensions, resolutions and ongoing questions about where this is all going.
Commentaries have always been my manuals of devotion, to be placed alongside the classic works of that genre, and often to be given more time, and in return they give more for the effort and time spent. One example. The story of Martha and Mary and Jesus occurs in St Bernard, in the Cloud of Unknowing and in Meister Eckhart and Thomas Merton. Each of these treatments eventually commends the contemplative over the active. But pursuing this gospel story through several academic commentaries opens up other interpretive possibilities and perspectives. I haven't looked at so called devotional commentaries on Luke, whatever they might look like. Instead I spent a while with the scholars who have dug deep into the text, who know the layers of cultural and social signals, who are alert to the assumptions and constraints that can skew a text and load an intepretation. The result is a profound sense of gratitude for the residual ambiguities in the story; is Jesus rebuking or comforting Martha? Will Jesus refuse the bread Martha has baked in the hot and bothered kitchen? Can the church ever thrive on the false dichotomy of contemplative prayer versus hand dirtying service?
The Bible remains the primary text of the Christian Church. For two thousand years saints and scholars, readers and writers, prayers and preachers, have found there words that have become the Word of God to them. The immense learning and energy that has gone into the work of biblical interpretation is one of God's great gifts to the church. And while I fully recognise the market pressures and commercial advantages of publishers multiplying commentary series and finding increasingly flimsy justifications for yet another allegedly indispensable, authoritative, ground-breaking, innovative or whatever else seem plausible reasons, the work of biblical interpretation remains a vital and vitalising activity of the Christian Church.
Were I to reduce my library to a hundred volumes, I'd want more commentaries than classic manuals of devotion and systematic theologies put together.
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