Spirituality: Forms, Foundations, Methods (review)

The Catholic University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands has a distinguished history of interest in matters of spirituality. It was in the 1920s that the Dutch Carmelite and Nazi resistance figure Blessed Titus Brandsma (died in Dachau in 1942; beatified in 1985) founded an institute for the study of Dutch mysticism. Today, the same university has an institute for the study of spirituality named in honor of Titus Brandsma founded in 1968. Readers of this journal may well be acquainted with their monograph publications as well as their annual publication Studies in Spirituality.

This present volume by the Dutch Carmelite Kees Waaijman who is associated with the Titus Brandsma Institute is the eighth in a series of supplements to the Studies in Spirituality and weighs in at just under a thousand pages. Spirituality is obviously the summa of many years of teaching, research, and lecturing. As Daniel Berrigan once said of another massive book of a quite different kind (he was reviewing the Collected Poems of Thomas Merton), one does not read this book, one climbs aboard. It is certainly not a work to read amid distractions and it is certainly a book in which one could get lost without a clear grasp of how the author wished to proceed and of the architectonics of the work as a whole. In my own case, I kept the work at home and read some of the sub sections (the work as a whole is divided into three parts that correspond to the subtitle of the book) every morning before leaving for work. It took me the better part of an entire semester to finish the whole. Subsequently, I have gone back and reread parts to refresh my memory before teaching topics which the author describes in his own fashion. The introduction to this book describes it as a "research tool" and it is exactly how I used it after having read it as a whole—it is a work that one can go to in order to find an extended excursus of a topic of interest even though the author has an argument for the whole.

First, a word about the general structure of this work which does conform more or less to the subtitle of the whole. This general structure, unfortunately, does not give full justice to the attempted comprehensiveness which fleshes out the three general sections of the book. The wide ranging references, naturally enough, reflect the basic phenomenological approach adopted by the author and which is somewhat characteristic of the work of the Nijmegen institute as a whole. Furthermore, as the book proceeds, subdivisions within larger divisions unfold so that the overall impression of large categories or forms ramify out in subsections.

A specific example might make the entire process clearer. Part One concerns itself with three forms of lived spirituality which are designated as Lay spirituality; Schools of spirituality; and what are called "Countermovements." Each of these large categories, in turn, have a series of subdivisions. Under lay spirituality, for example, separate sections discuss upbringing and formation, the home, spirituality of marriage, mercy in mutuality, and piety in the context of death and dying. Schools of spirituality live in the "public domain" though liturgy, religious communities, encounters with culture, through movements of reformation and movements that tend towards the future. Countermovements deal with such topics as liberation, devotional practices, "antagonists" (movements against the regnant powers), uprootedness, martyrdom, and eschatological tendencies like, for instances, groups like the Spiritual Franciscans.

Part Two puts forward answers to two basic issues: what are the basic characteristics which define the area of reality to be studied?; and, secondly, what methodology or research strategy is best suited to study that area of reality? It is at that level that the whole issue of "spirituality" opens up in terms of how to describe the field itself (or, at least, to delineate its "family characteristics" to borrow a phrase from Wittgenstein). In this part of the book a number of names familiar to anglophone students of the field...