Some of the best theological reflection and insight is provoked by reading biography. I learned that from the Methodist preacher W E Sangster. In his book on The Craft of Sermon Illustration he claimed there were very few bad biographies. He claimed that almost every one he had read contained a life story, a lesson in human psychology and relationships, and often an exploration of a particular life's purpose, significance and context.
Every year of my reading life I've read a number of biographies. Sangster was right. There aren't many that were unproductive, uninteresting or barren of ideas worth pondering. Over the years I've read the life stories of people such as Aggrey of Africa, Karl Barth, John Chrysostom, Denise Levertov, Elizabeth Fry, Albert Einstein, Frances Ridley Havergal, Marie Curie, Dag Hammarskjold, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Dorothy Sayers, Baron Von Hugel, Evelyn Underhill, Shirley Williams, Beethoven, Van Gogh, Charles Dickens, Keir Hardie, Jonathan Edwards (theologian), Jonathan Edwards (triple jumper), Sir Alex Ferguson, Sheila Cassidy, several US Presidents, British Prime Ministers. I think all of these found their way into sermons, or the thinking that gives birth to ideas that helped me understand better those who take the time and trouble to hear me. They also encouraged me to love and puzzle over the world in which we live, and to better interpret and care about the longings, hopes and fears of the human heart, especially my own.
Some highlights not listed above include:
H.R.L. Sheppard. Life and Letters, R.E. Roberts I think the most perceptive and psychologically sympathetic biography I've ever read,
The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mary Bosanquet – one of the earlier critically appreciative accounts that avoids making Bonhoeffer a hero, and succeeds in portraying his inner tensions between the moral complexity of his world and the personal integrity of a Christian pastor and disciple.
George Eliot. A Life, Rosemary Ashton – which combines literary criticism of the novels with careful attention to the woman who wrote them. Ashton knows well the culture and society of Victorian England and fits Eliot into that richly textured context.
George Macleod, Ronald Ferguson – an outstanding narrative of one of Scotland's great personalities, and one of the Kirk's most irascible and beloved ministers.
The best biographies are an attempt to understand a life. Each is a written book seeking the truth of the living document that is a person, character and story. Helen Waddell. A Biography, Dame Felicitas Corrigan meets those criteria. It is beautifully written, meticulously researched, and unfolds the life and character of Helen Waddell with humour, humanity, and the undisguised affection of one scholar for another.
You're entitled to ask, who is Helen Waddell anyway? Here are some extracts from the dustjacket:
"She was born in Tokyo, of missionary liberal minded parents, and was grounded in the Scriptures; but her father would encourage her to explore a Shinto temple while he quoted Greek poetry and a shaven priest gave them sweet cakes from the altar. Later her father died on the eve of retirement and her stepmother became a domestic tyrant. But Helen was a free spirit whose mind could not be controlled. Her early maturity was extraordinary. At the age of nine she felt a "sheer reverence" for Latin; in her early teens she was already a thoughtful rebel against religious orthodoxy…
Her first literary success was the Lyrics Translated from the Chinese. But it was Oxford, with the offer of a Fellowship, that enabled her to undertake years of research into medieval Latin literature, in Paris, London and resulted in the remarkable flowering of The Wandering Scholars, Medieval Latin Lyrics, Peter Abelard, and The Desert Fathers."
I bought this book on publication in 1986 and read it for the first of three times, and I'll read it again soon. What makes a book worth re-reading is what that book does to you, the reader. We are introduced to a mind of great originality, a translator of poetry whose work showed as much genius as the originals; you can test that by reading her. In Waddell, intellect and imagination, emotion and spirituality, historical research and lyrical precision, came together in a woman denied many of the opportunities that would have enabled freedom to flourish in a male dominated academia. And despite the limitations of her life, she produced what have been called "striking and original masterpieces that are amongst our (20th) century's greatest treasures."
Corrigan writes about Waddell's theological mind:
"This is what gives her writing its vigour, power and personality: unconsciously she brings her spiritual perception, her faith and her humanity to bear upon and interpret the matter in hand so that they become the drapery of thought which is weighty yet simple and intelligible. She was possessed of a kind of interior sanctity that saw truth as a living thing expressed, not only in revelation, but in the myriad relationships of facts, circumstances, and the realities of nature to one another. (p. 175)
Felicitas Corrigan spent 10 years editing Waddell's letters and papers, and preparing this biography. She never met her, but in the reading and editing she gained a sense of Waddell's fragile health, emotional insecurity, capacities for faithful friendships and the long haul of lifelong relationships.
Having Corrigan as her biographer ensured that Helen Waddell's scholarly work and ways of working, were given their due. But more than that, Corrigan as a nun, spiritual director and expert musician (she was organist of Stanbrook Abbey from 1933-1990) was that rare biographer, sympathetic without being sentimental, critical without being judgemental, and with the skill to compose harmonies out of the notes and chords of a life like that of Helen Waddell.
Corrigan is able to admire Helen Waddell's brilliant intellect while doing justice to a heart capable of joy and agony, confidence and self-doubt, exuberant conversations and silent withdrawal. She had taken the trouble, and had the patience, to listen and allow her subject's life to speak for itself. That's what makes this biography a rich and satisfying story of a life too interesting told, too humanely honest and understanding, and therefore too spiritually significant to be forgotten. This is the precise opposite of celeb tell all gushiness – it is an exercise on how theology can be a lived human document.
More tomorrow, this post is long enough.