Revelations and Story: Narrative Theology and the Centrality of Story by Gerhard Sauter John Barton

Author:Gerhard Sauter, John Barton [Gerhard Sauter, John Barton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781315184586
Google: TSWBtAEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-01-15T05:16:22+00:00

Six

Allegoria: Reading as a Spiritual Exercise

Graham Ward

Wim Wender's film In weiter Ferne, so nah!, which won the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes in 1993, opens with a quotation from Matthew's Gospel: 'if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness' (6:22). The film narrates the story of one angel's experience, Cassiel's. So concerned is he with humankind that he asks to become human and his wish is granted. Separated from his angelic state and angelic company he experiences the nature of being human. He sinks into drink and despair. He prays to his angelic friend Raphaela: 'We humans are confined by what is visible, Raphaela! Only what we can see matters. It is all we believe in. Invisible things don't count. Only the things we touch truly exist for us.' The film offers a beautiful and imaginative critique of materialism along the lines of Walter Benjamin's belief that 'Materiality – but here soulless materiality' is the home of the satanic.1 Benjamin calls for a reassessment of allegory as a form of cultural critique countering that materiality which is 'emancipation from what is sacred'.2 Wim Wender suggests something similar: we have to learn to see things otherwise.

The title chosen for this chapter bears the traces of its genealogy. With the association of allegory and spiritual reading I am interweaving my text with those mediaeval forms of interpretation which, drawing upon the exegetical methods of the Alexandrine School, systematized a fourfold reading of Scripture: the historical, the allegorical, the tropological and the anagogical. The central division was between the literal and the spiritual senses. As Aquinas notes, and here he is only following in the wake of a pronounced tradition, 'Of these four, allegory alone stands for the three spiritual senses' (Summa Theologica, I.Q.1 Art 10). It is important for what I wish to argue for here – a theological understanding of materiality or phenomena – that allegory as such was intimately connected in the mediaeval mind with a doctrine of creation. The second discourse my title is associated with is the set of meditations composed for the training of the Jesuits by their sixteenth-century founder St. Ignatius Loyola. These meditations, entitled The Spiritual Exercises,3 employ imagination as a methodical principle. The Scriptures are not simply read, they are internalized as prayer. Reading here is not a process of decipherment and the biblical text does not stand as an object before a subject. Reading here is a spiritual exercise; it is a form of 'touching, as being touched', to cite the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy.4 Subject and object both possess permeable membranes and the reading effects a transpositioning (in the full, rich meaning of that word). The third discourse my own text is in dialogue with is the work of the Dutch-American literary critic and theorist Paul de Man. De Man, in 1979, published an influential volume on the work of Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust, entitled Allegories of Reading.

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