A Profound Ignorance: Modern Pneumatology and Its Anti-modern Redemption

By Ephraim Radner

In the march of modernity and the opening of global boundaries, the face of the world changed. How we understood the world, and our place in it, changed. And with that great shift, our concept of the Holy Spirit also changed. Now the third person of the Trinity became a diffusive power in a universalizing attempt at resolving the expansively harsh realities of human existence.
 
In  A Profound Ignorance, Ephraim Radner traces the development of pneumatology as a modern discipline and its responses to experiences of social confusion and suffering, often associated with questions linked to the category of theodicy. Along the way, study of the Spirit joined with natural science to become study of spirit, which was at root study of the human person redefined without limitation. Radner proposes that the proper parameters of pneumatology are found in studying Israel and her historical burdens as the Body of Christ, showing how the Spirit is the reality of God that affirms the redemptive character of Christ, the Son.
 
The traumas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have brought to the fore the problematic distance between earlier and more modern approaches to the Spirit. Drawing on writers from Paracelsus to John Berryman, and including theologians and philosophers like Anne Conway and John Wesley, as well as literary figures from d’Aubigné to Duhamel, Radner attempts to locate modern pneumatology’s motives and interests within some of the novel social settings of a rapidly globalizing consciousness and conflicted pluralism.
 
It is by following Israel into the Incarnation of Jesus, Radner contends, that humans find their unresolved sufferings and yearnings redeemed. The Holy Spirit operates in deep hope, the kind of hope that is inaccessible to simple articulation. Finally, Radner argues for a more limited and reserved pneumatology, subordinated to the christological realities of divine incarnation: here, creaturely limitations are not denied, but affirmed, and taken up into the life of God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781481310819

Ephraim Radner

Ephraim Radner is Professor of Historical Theology at Wycliffe College, Toronto. He is the author of several volumes on ecclesiology and hermeneutics including The End of the Church (1998).

Book preview

A Profound Ignorance

A Profound Ignorance

Modern Pneumatology and Its Anti-modern Redemption

Ephraim Radner

Baylor University Press

© 2019 by Baylor University Press

Waco, Texas 76798

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press.

Cover design by Savanah N. Landerholm

Cover image: Kendall Cox, Emanate, gouache and ink on paper, 2016.

Book design by Baylor University Press, typesetting by Scribe Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Radner, Ephraim, 1956- author.

Title: A profound ignorance : modern pneumatology and its anti-modern redemption / Ephraim Radner.

Description: Waco : Baylor University Press, 2019. | Summary: Charts the rise of pneumatology alongside developments in modern history and proposes an alternate doctrine of the Spirit to address perennial existential questions-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018058130 | ISBN 9781481310796 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781481310833 (pdf) | ISBN 9781481310819 (epub) | ISBN 9781481310826 (kindle edition)

Subjects: LCSH: Holy Spirit. | Holy Spirit--History of doctrines.

Classification: LCC BT123 .R27 2019 | DDC 231/.3--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058130

To V. and E.

I have spoken too late and too little.

Yet He has spoken first and it is enough.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I. Corruption

1. The New World, a New Spirit

2. The Modern Invention of Pneumatology

3. A Short History of Pneumatic Human Being (I)

4. A Short History of Pneumatic Human Being (II)

5. The Spirit against the Body

II. Redemption

6. Jesus and the Spirit

7. Life in the Spirit

Conclusion

Notes

Index of Subjects and Persons

Index of Scripture

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to many students at Wycliffe College and the Toronto School of Theology who have patiently listened as some of this book’s ideas were raised in the midst of their long and difficult reading of early modern authors. Their comments and challenges and, more importantly, their own desire to live faithfully have inspired my efforts. I thank the American Theological Society and Kendall Soulen for an invitation to present what ended up being the basis for chapter 2 at one of their annual meetings. My colleague Joseph Mangina has been a faithful interlocutor over several years, and I owe him much. A sabbatical offered by Wycliffe College afforded me the time to complete this manuscript, and I remain in the college’s debt for this privilege. While writing much of this, I was supported by the friendship and prayers of the Chemin Neuf community in Chartres, France, faithful witnesses to the Spirit in their common life. I offer them my gratitude. Carey Newman, of Baylor University Press, has been a constant source of encouragement, discipline, and generosity. No better colleague in the world of letters could be hoped for. Finally, I am thankful to my wife, Annette, for her willingness to be part of what makes this life the divine gift it is.

Introduction

This book, despite its scholarly detail, falls more into the genre of masked confession than of theology. It is, hence, more autobiographical than dogmatic, at least in its impulse. I have long wanted to explain why I have chosen to live, and to keep living, until death comes, and this volume is a partial fulfilment of my desire.

For many people, such a choice to live seems so obvious as to recede into the shadows of simple existence, taken up with unapologetic energy, or at least without concern. Yet for others, what seems obvious is in fact a struggle, often a terrible one. Whether or not this struggle is more common in our day and culture than in the past or elsewhere is probably impossible to tell. Yet our culture and era, in North America in the twenty-first century, have certainly made the decision over living into something that is now thrust upon people as a demanded judgment, to be made over and over. Not only are the elderly and the ill now faced, in many countries, with the legal possibility of ending their lives, but the fraught economics of medical care and social assistance have created an environment of constant calculation over life: how much will it cost to stay alive, what kind of burden does it amount to upon families, and what options are offered by this or that form of insurance?¹ Thrown into this calculating mix are the ever-present realities of pain, which, in the new social frameworks of monetary appraisal, have become a determining factor in a way that was never the case in previous eras. Suffering is now a quantifiable element, stacking up alongside savings accounts, insurance regulations, and the store of family energies that together define the task of elective living.

Elective existence as a political-economic reality is now being thrust upon the cultural and interior consciousness of younger people as well. In societies of state-sponsored assisted suicide, teenagers are being included now in the cohort of the intolerably suffering, a group defined by elements bound up with the larger social arithmetic of drugs, personnel, regulation, and relational capacity.² Mental anguish and confusion are now weighed against the competencies of youthful decision-making, and life is given over to the purity, so it is claimed, of autonomous human judgment. Perhaps this result constitutes but a clear version of what has always been the case in a world of violence and warfare, where decisions for life or against it were constantly given over to the hands of creaturely decrees. Yet the cascading sense today, among so many young people, that they must become the judges of their own life’s worth is manifest in the driven need to seek confirmation among others, to escape the burdens of their own place, to remake themselves over and over, and finally, in the face of this load, to find solace in withdrawal. The old are now told that they must choose to live or to die; and the young—detached from the confidence, let alone perseverance, of their elders—are left to determine the value of their being according to some unknown and unexampled standard.³

When I was still a teenager, in the wake of my own mother’s suicide, I made an attempt on my own life, swallowing a bottle of pills, heading off to bed, and falling into what I suppose I hoped would be a fogged and final disappearance. For some time, I had been drifting into a deeper and deeper cavern of sorrow, and the very person that, in part, I was mourning had somehow determined to delete from my landscape the model by which I might have navigated my loss. No greater human negation, in the normal course of events, can be conceived, though it is enacted time and again. A determined decision to die is always, for someone else, the opening of a door to emptiness. By what I consider to be God’s grace, I survived my choice to go through such a door. I was, as it were, dragged back across the threshold to the place I had never sought but had simply been given with my own self—that is, back across the threshold of life itself. There were years of further sadness that came to me, the burden of which eventually pulled me to the brink of the threshold once again. With this tottering balance on the edge came critical medical intervention, a long struggle upheld by a range of professionals, and the unremitting encouragement of those who loved me. I continued to live, yet in a world I never expected to know as a child, one where, again and again, I was made to choose in an exhausting movement from year to year. The choice, however, while never in the shadows, has also been clear, over and over again. I have chosen, and have been choosing continuously, to live.

These are not confessions I feel comfortable making. Their very articulation marks a betrayal of a secret I have always thought was best kept for the sake of hope itself. I had wanted never to expose it. It is easier, because in a way more tender, to carry on, in work and conversation, as if the ground is solid, and one is simply walking along with others in a peaceable space, without question and without worry. But in this era, in this place, I do not believe we can afford to bracket, let alone delete, the models for such a choice, even if the decision itself seems so novel in the spread of its insistence—or perhaps just because of that. I now have children, born of that most unexpected intimacy that spousal friendship embodies. It is not so much that I decided to give them life, as that my life is the basis of their own, and now theirs of mine. I consider this to be the most heart-filling and heart-rending reality I have been permitted to encounter. We cannot disentangle ourselves from the life of others. Even death cannot achieve this. Our inextricable ties to others expose an obvious responsibility, that one should rightly extend to the network of our families, generations, and communities. If we are now forced to choose, then I must make my choice for living an open one, at every step and in every place, for I am not my own.

Furthermore, just because the choice and its responsibility are upon us, we must confront the reality of what has made them necessary. Examining what lies behind the contemporary world’s inescapable demand that we become agents for our own continuance forces us to see things and, whether we like it or not, to measure things, in ways that are necessarily confusing and disorienting. I can say that by God’s mercy I am alive and am able to choose this life, as now I must say it. Yet simply by making that statement, or sensing its conviction, I throw the consequences of that grace into an arena where it can be questioned, compared, held up in proportion to other lives and other choices. Such an arena includes my own family, to be sure. But, once entered, that space of contestation opens its boundaries to all the earth and into all time’s corridors. The one threshold and doorway of choice for life or not, once faced, turns out to structure the great architecture of the world. We see around us, once our eyes are attuned and directed, fields of inequities and divine disproportions, mercies seemingly offered and withdrawn. Now that elective existence has become a legal norm, the world appears disrobed, almost calling for spectators to count its deformities.

All these discoveries on my part hardly amount to a special insight. People, in an increasingly self-conscious fashion, are facing into the shape of the world’s ordering in ways that constantly uncover the threshold of life’s choice. They are asked, by the chaotic unraveling of social and familial commonalities, as well as by the legal requirement to accept this chaos, to define and certify their hidden desires, to establish the value of their uncertain labors, to confect the responsibilities of created friendships, to adjudicate forms of procreation and generation, to determine the scaffolding of human well-being, to select their own place within a crowded and disordered human and even nonhuman universe. Suffering becomes one of the few common measures of existence; yet, left to be engaged like some intransigent but otherwise inexplicable encounter, it has no common meaning. Pain seems to be the one thing one does not make up on one’s own, but because of this it cannot be assimilated into an enforced and fabricated self, and it is left merely to push and trample.

In having to face all this, maturing youth are indeed locked inside a calculating mechanism whose gears are simply too complex to manipulate. The numbers that add up to worth—life is worth living—seem too often unsteady and incommensurable with the inrushing data at hand. There are many ways to numb the confusion, to sink into it and let it simply carry one along, to push against it, or, finally, to walk away, through the open doorways of life’s threshold.⁴

For my part, I struggled as a young person to search for models for staying put, but ones that, by definition, would be realistic and truthful to the now-exposed world in which I chose, and was granted the grace, to stay. Theologically, I turned not to an explanation of suffering or evil but to the uncovering of some more fundamental solidity and integrity to the world where such explanations did not seem ostensibly purposeful. My own choice to live was not one bound, in any case, to a calculation. I barely knew the why, only the that. So it was the that of life that I pursued, the presupposition that might govern the case that my life is a life to live, in any situation. I had been given life; I had been pulled back into life; my choices were secondary at best.

My initial turn was to the Holy Spirit. I was impressed by the reality of divine impulsion within this world, something that simply was and therefore could be used as a datum that resisted calculation’s control. I looked for human examples of courage, strength, openness, perseverance, and joy. I sought out accounts of people enlivened with extraordinary love, extravagant hope and self-offering, steadiness in face of fire and disregard, and patience across spans of time that, from my own experience, I now knew were frightfully unpredictable. I sought to grab hold of such models and of what might inform them, and to run with what I uncovered. The Holy Spirit seemed to be just this founding impulse (as I believe it is), and I set about trying to understand how this might be so. Over the years, I collected piles of notes on the Holy Spirit—in witness, historical testimony, liturgical adoration, theological discussion, philosophical speculation. I prayed with others, sought to open my heart to pneumatic welcome and expression, and I scoured human experience for images of the Spirit’s underlying, sustaining, and often explosive self-manifestation.

I have discovered at least two things in the course of what has now been over thirty years of reflection on this topic. The first is the world’s stubborn imperviousness to sorting this out consistently. The givenness of life—that life is something we are handed in our own existence and that we engage through some panting press to the end—is surely fundamentally bound up with the Spirit. But this too-often-difficult givenness is precisely what has driven us to seek out the Spirit’s impulsive consistencies in the first place. If the world, or even the Church, is pneumatically charged, it is not so in such a way that the pieces of that world fit together well. The world of the Spirit is a world where all the doorways leading away from life remain on view, opened, and compelling at this or that time, in this or that place, for this or that person. We cannot make this world over by asserting the Spirit’s truth; and therefore the Spirit’s truth must find its articulation just here in a world where life appears and disappears, lightly or in anguish.

When I came to write on the Spirit initially, I had wanted to investigate the binding power of pneumatic grace within the world, something that might hold life together in the midst of whatever forces would unwind its fibers. Focusing on a movement—Jansenism—for whom the impulsive power of grace was a central conviction, I turned to one of the great episodes of miraculous healing in the modern era, the prodigious eighteenth-century cures that took place around the tomb of the saintly François de Pâris.⁵ Witnessed by many, and documented in detail by doctors and lawyers, the miracles of Saint-Médard, however, proved to provide little clarity regarding pneumatic action and reality. Instead, they gave rise to relentless and often wrenching conflict and contestation. In the end, these miracles were officially—by the Church and state—rejected as demonic or at best deluded, and those who promoted them were arrested, driven away, or pressed into increasingly bizarre reactive postures. Protestant observers, for their part, tended to mock all sides in the affair. By the end of the episode, dragged out over many years, local and national churches were more divided, healing seemed more transient, the Spirit more veiled.

Such confusion in the face of purported divine epiphany turns out, from one perspective, to be a constant theme in Christian life: Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword (Matt 10:34); I am come to send fire on the earth (Luke 12:49), and to give division (v. 51). Oddly, this view of what pneumatic reality accomplishes is a familiar, if cynical, claim and is hardly confined to Christians. Pursuing the Spirit led me back into the world of which the search for the Spirit was meant to make sense in the first place. That world remained as opaque as ever, with its scattered graces and widespread darkness; only it was now a world, the very world, where Jesus, such as he is, was sent and gave his gifts. While this conclusion should not have surprised me, given my intuition regarding the need for any investigation of the world’s value to be realistic, it was a disappointment of sorts nonetheless.

A second thing I have learned in my study of the Holy Spirit is that just this world where Jesus is sent and gives away his gifts (Eph 4:8-9) is one that the study of the Spirit has been steadily and with increasing insistence denying for centuries. My disappointment, that is, over not discovering a world remade by the Spirit, was in part born of unconscious, if inadequate, pneumatic expectations. This book is a small effort to trace these misplaced expectations. The motive for such an analysis, however, has been my growing sense that the expectations themselves are somehow caught up in the very dynamics that have defined the contemporary demand to choose our lives, to decide for them and thus judge them. Modern pneumatic expectations have not caused these demands, but they have reflected them. Ours is a world—a life—where the Spirit does not remove our physical limitations, the barriers to our hopes’ present fulfilments, the rejection of our desires, or the grating and often sharp edges to our losses and suffering. That world, such as it is, is also a world often—though not for all—filled with gleaming wonders. But this glorious astonishment and distressed suffering at best coexist in the world; they do not integrate into some third entity of transfigured being.

In the end both wonder and pain come up against the fact of our final loss of all things that we know in crossing the threshold of our deaths. Pneumatology as a theological discipline is a modern invention, as I shall argue in this volume; and the pneumatological expectations of this invention have misled us by making us think that the world as it is, as a creation by God in all its intrinsic mortal limits, is without hope unless and until it is left behind, and all becomes spirit in an inclusive, limitless affirmation. In this way, pneumatology, as it has been invented and developed over the past three or four centuries, is the mirror of modern nihilism, running from the ripples of the fearful mortal body. As the great French-Romanian pessimist Emil Cioran has written:

Everything exists; nothing exists. One or the other formula brings a similar serenity. The anxious man, to his misfortune, is stuck between the two, trembling and perplexed, always at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of fixing himself in the security of being or in the absence of being.⁶

What those who choose to live require—and it seems we are all now asked to choose—is not another world but the finality of a choice for this world that somehow stands beyond and beneath our decision, not only as an enabling power or an inspiration, but as a revelation, an establishment. What we require is an Amen to our life that, in its very utterance, establishes its worth, in the face of all that clamors for its inadequacy. Such an Amen is a person, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God (Rev 3:14), an Amen who comes, who speaks and teaches, who lives as a creature and dies as one in particular ways and forms, and in so doing takes to himself what is just this life as it is created and so oddly laid out into the heart of God. Those who choose to live require first the choice that God has made to live this life that they were given. I confess: there is no other model, figure, form, or truth.

If the Holy Spirit does not resolve the world as it is—and the Spirit demonstrably does not do this—and if pneumatology has mistakenly insisted on such a resolution, we must move more deeply into the world itself, into the primary choice for the world that God has made and in the way God has made it. We shall there discover the form of that choice as that which is therefore most truly of the Spirit. On this basis, I have slowly altered my sense of the pneumatological foundations for theology. Such foundations must resist theories, metaphysical frameworks, instrumentalist promises, and fantasies. They must, instead, approach the Spirit as the God who establishes the world as it is such that the form of life that Jesus lived and died within it is of God, utterly.

This world will, of course, change, and in this way or that way, as it has. It will, we can imagine, some day disappear. While we can assert the Spirit’s life as somehow wrapped up with all such change, the purpose of pneumatology cannot be to specify the ways of transformation. Just such intractably unspecified change is part of the world we cannot fathom, and that drives too many to run from it altogether. Rather, pneumatology—austerely chastened—is, like philosophy, meant not to change the world but to speak truly of what it is: in theological terms, to speak truly of the world’s worth and of human life’s worth, precisely given in the life lived by the Son of God. It is not for me to offer this as an apology for life. God already has, such that I can only wonder that I am worthy of it.⁷

To some extent, I have already pursued some of this work in an earlier volume, A Time to Keep: Theology, Mortality, and the Shape of a Human Life,⁸ which loosely laid out the scriptural form of the time-circumscribed life we have been given by God as creatures. Although I examined a few difficult elements of human life in that book, I did not deliberately attempt to explore what makes life difficult in the first place, or what significance there is, if any, in the fact that life is difficult for many people, more so today, perhaps, than in many eras. The present volume, then, is a small attempt, in a more systematic and historical way, to make theological sense of this difficulty, not so much in order to solve a problem, but to reveal the nature of the problem itself as something that is worth taking seriously at the deepest existential level.

Lurking behind the theological and historical arguments of this book, then, is a deeply personal confession, yet, for all that, the book is not a memoir, or a pastoral or political program, as anyone reading it will quickly discover, perhaps to their disappointment. It is about ideas mostly, placed within the historical context of broad, popular, and in some cases individual questions and experiences. In this way, the volume constitutes an intellectual plea to Christian theologians to be careful in how we frame our ideas, in this case about God and about the Holy Spirit in particular, and to be attuned to how our reflections actually depict the character of human life as it is lived by many people. We have too frequently ended by presenting pictures of God that actually devalue the hard and opaque work of bodily existence, with the result that we have offered stunted tools for grappling faithfully—and to some extent joyfully—with the actual demands of growth, relationship, self-giving, loss, and finally death itself. Most theologians in the modern West are utopians. God is not.

Some will no doubt find this plea for existential caution—and as readers of the book will discover, for forthright engagement with the reality of human suffering and ignorance as a given—to be oddly grim. It leaves aside a central focus on the Fall, not to minimize its reality, but to keep clear that the Christian Gospel of redemption is not, in itself, a formula to do away with sin and its effects, but a testimony to God. A proclamation of God’s life, and life-giving Spirit, can only truthfully be made within the many elements of existence that are the source of our dissatisfactions and often outright sorrows. One does not need to decide the question about whether Adam and Eve might have lived forever without sin. Nor does one need to reject Paul’s clear sense that death as we experience it is the product of sin, and not God’s will. My point is simply that, in a fallen world, we physically die and lose all—though God promises a new creation—and the Holy Spirit is not some entity that saves us from the reality of this kind of life and death. And whether fallen or not, this kind of life and death is still God’s, and hence is still utterly and incomprehensibly valuable.

Grimness, then, is hardly my intention. The world, as it is, is filled with joys, the only joys in fact that exist and that, because they come from the gifts of God, are immeasurable and even overwhelming in their abundance. Yet modern contortions of putative pneumatic life have so refashioned and constrained the character of joy as a world-escaping sentiment that many of us have come to assume that the struggles of created existence and joyfulness are contradictories. I am, in any case, not writing this to cheer people up. I am writing only to outline the realm in which cheer is to be offered and, by grace, necessarily to be found.

In the chapters that follow, I will outline a story of sorts, which attempts to draw together the development of certain ideas about the Holy Spirt with a set of existential experiences tied to what we call modernity, beginning in the sixteenth century. These experiences were ones whose cascading breadth—in violence, in geographical bewilderment and baffling human encounter and debasement, in political confusion, and in extensive social and personal loss—posed inescapable moral questions whose very insistence often proved personally and socially explosive. I will argue that the rise of pneumatology as a specific discipline was an intellectual and finally theological partner to these social changes, aimed mainly at making sense of their burdens.

My argument is made in summary in the first two chapters. I then elaborate it in the next two through brief examinations of a series of key theological figures—some well-known (like George Fox and John Wesley), others less so, and finally some (like the poet Walt Whitman) whose celebrity has little to do with theology yet whose influential outlooks had everything to do with pneumatology. All of these discussions are, at best, intellectual vignettes meant to indicate articulate moments along the developing pathways that contributed to the rise of pneumatology as a formal theological discipline, diverse in many respects, but also unified by a general orientation toward creaturely escape. That orientation, which I dub the Pneumatic Human Being, was geared to imagining a human life that could somehow stand apart from bodily existence or, conversely, allow itself to be swallowed up by all external reality into a single grasp. Some of these strands ended in forms of pneumatic pantheism; others, in reductionist but comprehensive materialism. Yet they were bound by a common hope, not so much that this world is not all there is—a traditional Christian claim, after all—but that all there is must necessarily relegate this world to a fundamental impertinence.

The last three chapters of the book hold up the Pneumatic Human Being to moral and experiential scrutiny, first in the context of the twentieth-century onslaught of human violence and then through the goading examples of especially contemporary Christian and Jewish martyrs. These latter, I will suggest, point both to the true character of human life as it is given by God and therefore to the very plain inadequacies of modern pneumatological alternatives. The martyrs unveil, perhaps paradoxically given their deaths, the utter worth of human life, by unveiling that life’s worth given in the body of Jesus. The body of Jesus forms, in the end, the theological center of my plea for a different, anti-modern, theology of the Spirit, one where the reality of our createdness opens up our existences, including their often corrosive confusions and sufferings, to the mysterious grace of divine sufficiency. If Jesus’ body both establishes and reveals this opaque sufficiency, one received in obedience, it is the Spirit that holds this truth in place: divine self-giving, the fullness of whose source is unattainable.

Trinitarian reflections on the Holy Spirit, if they do not end in sweeping human projections, tend toward functional abstractions. My own conclusions will hardly do better, I realize: the Spirit is God’s intrinsic and motive self, always enough, yet never understood, clothed in majesty, grace, terror, and joy. The fact that God is Spirit and not only Father and Son, let alone one or the other, is in part why our own lives are so hard and so wonderful both. They are hard because, in our experience, they are not ours and thus are ultimately impervious to our demands; they are wonderful because they are not ours, and belong to God, who because he has made us is too marvelous to comprehend. Life in the Holy Spirit is just this life.

In these later chapters, I move to a reflection on martyrdom and especially on the troubling witness of both Jews and Christians during World War II. I do so cautiously and even with reluctance—much as I write this book as a whole. Appeals to the extremes of human experience in order to bolster otherwise common and quotidian arguments have become an easy rhetorical step to make given our era’s popular and sorrowfully accessible store of publicized human tragedy. Arguing this way runs the deep risk of degrading such human experience itself. In the present volume, however, my theme involves the way that the challenge of life (and finally of death) in extremis lies very much behind the pneumatological developments that have sought to turn us from an honest reception of human existence as God gives it, in its fullness. The result has been just the wavering and confused encounters before the threshold of existence itself that mark our cultural moment, ones where that existence’s proper scope as God’s utter creative grace at work has been missed. One can only address such a situation by addressing it on the terms of its own quandaries, that of life and death. Suffering has become a platitude and a posture, I realize, within the conflicted debates over self-construction in our era. My point in talking about it here is only to point to its inevitability as ingredient to life that is in fact grace. This seems to be at least an essential part of proclaiming the Gospel.

A note on terminology and rhetoric: I have tried to be consistent in using the word pneumatology to refer only to early modern and modern developments in the theology of the Holy Spirit, ones that share certain common features as I will outline them. The alternative to (modern) pneumatology is simply the phrase theology of the Holy Spirit, which I will apply to pre-modern reflections on the Spirit, from whatever period. The distinction is sometimes awkward. It is also, I avow, sometimes misleading. Not all self-described pneumatology of today is in fact wedded to pneumatology as I will describe it, nor are all contemporary pneumatologists willing adherents to modern pneumatological outlooks. Pneumatology is not a term we will dispense with, and, having made my rhetorical point, I readily offer the term back for general use.

My goal in the distinction is not to identify saints and villains. Far from it: modern pneumatology was inevitable and, in any case, morally compelling in many necessary ways. That the converging consequences of modern pneumatology’s reflections, the Pneumatic Human Being, have ended up subverting fundamental graces and responsibilities of creaturehood is a matter today to be confronted with self-awareness and self-correction, not with blame. All the same, this awareness, correction, and, in some cases, repentance remains an urgent calling, for myself as much as anyone. This book, I realize, may seem like the reflections of someone growing old, who is only dimly remembering a past onto which he projects hopes and yearning. My goal, however, is at least to provide a theological bridge for the young, across which they might project their hopes and yearning onto the old, in whom they must, willy-nilly, find a way to place their trust. For this, God grant us all a change of heart.

The poet John Berryman is someone from whom I have learned much, as both warning and gift. He will reappear later in this book. Deeply wounded (as he admitted later in his career) by his father’s suicide, Berryman long struggled with almost unremitting bouts of self-destructive behavior that, in the end, finally overcame him. In the whole course of his life, however, he was acutely attuned to the challenge and beauty that normal life and its givens offered him—friends, family, children, food, the panoply of the earth’s vibrant and conflicted surface. He understood their hold on his moral and psychic commitments, even if he could not understand the source of their grip and value. Toward the end of his life, however, Berryman experienced a reawakening, a new awareness, a new repentance, ushered in, as he would say, by God’s grace and person. Some of the poems from this late time of fleeting conversion are exquisitely penetrating visions of what it means to live again as a creature made by God, readied, worthy. They summarize central aspects of life in the Spirit:

Under new management, Your Majesty:

Thine. I have solo’d mine since childhood, since

my father’s suicide when I was twelve

blew out my most bright candle faith, and look at me.

[ . . . ]

Then my poor father frantic. Confusions & afflictions

followed my days. Wives left me.

Bankrupt I closed my doors. You pierced the roof

twice & again. Finally you opened my eyes. [ . . . ]

Make too me acceptable at the end of time

in my degree, which then Thou wilt award.

Cancer, senility, mania,

I pray I may be ready with my witness.⁹

I

Corruption

1

The New World, a New Spirit

The sea took pity: it interposed with doom:

"I have tall daughters dear that heed my hand.

Let Winter wed one, sow them in her womb,

And she shall child them on the New-world strand."

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, fragment 173¹

Modern pneumatology is a series of human projections, involving desires, hopes, fears, and even strategic programs. Most of these have functioned as inclusive theories, explaining the world and human experience in quasi-systematic ways. Earlier Christian discussion of the Holy Spirit by contrast, even in some of its most elaborate forms, tended to be piecemeal, bound to the scattered scriptural record, and driven mostly by other, more coherent, aspects of the Christian faith, especially the life of Christ as given in the Gospels and their figural reach. What turned this earlier discussion of the Spirit into modern pneumatology—a mostly Western European phenomenon now exported globally in both liberal and conservative Christian forms—was the experiential metamorphosis of the sixteenth century, with its rejigging of familial, religious, national, and even ethnic and global geography and social encounters. We are still swimming in the wake of the tidal waves and altered currents of these cultural changes. Shifting ideas about human and divine nature were part of this metamorphosis, of course; but more important were the stark, if historically complex, existential transformations that gave energy to ideas, called them forth, beat them down, gave them voice, or silenced them. The story of modern pneumatology is more about these experiential changes than it is about the evolution of theological ideas.

Theologians, of course, tend to pursue ideas and the individuals and institutions who articulate and propagate ideas. Delving into this history of ideas is inevitable, not only because theology’s business is to scrutinize words ordered by and to God. But precisely because God is the center of theology’s interest, the works of God that found historical experience always end up as words for theologians, formulated addresses bound to Scripture, doctrine, or moral discourse. There is no way around this. The temptation, however, is to lose sight of the works themselves in all of this. The study of modern pneumatology, then, is distorted if modernity itself is viewed primarily as a new conceptual network.

Such a conceptualist vision remains common in scholarly and even popular circles. And when the sixteenth century is seen as a jumble of powerful ideas drawn from Luther or Erasmus, nominalists and humanists—about the individual, the nature of grace, the locus of social authority—with whatever consequences, certain elements tend to grab primary interest: new doctrines, refashioned images of the Church, novel conceptions of the self, shifting political ideologies. The intellectual categories of doctrine, image, conception, ideology, in the hands of theologically inclined Christians, tend to become the explanatory filter for God’s relationship with the world.² At best, human existence tends, in the process, to be reduced to a set of cognitive frameworks, in which the reality of creaturely life appears as a set of possible projections onto a cultural screen. These existential possibilities, framed by conceptual logics, are then evaluated retrospectively by a range of moral criteria—rights, equality, freedom, goodness—drawn from shrouded sources. Charles Taylor, who has offered among the most sophisticated and nuanced attempts to describe the way ideas and experience intersect historically, has nonetheless been unable to escape the gravitational pull of idealism, where reality is ineluctably dragged back into the throne room of the commanding Idea and its councilors.³ Certainly among Taylor’s followers, modernity is explained as a set of developing ideas, however socially embedded; and the fight against modernity’s ills is carried out with an opposing set of idealistic weaponry, aimed at overthrowing the despotic intellectual monarch.⁴ Salvation, in this perspective, is bound to thinking better and to getting others to think better along with us. The discipline of historical modernology, in its cognitive and political search for what went wrong in the modern world, becomes a redemptive ascesis.

Modern pneumatology is indeed given in a set of ideas. But pneumatology’s ideas are generated by experiential demands and always driven by these demands; and even more than most theological categories, modern pneumatology is a practical discipline. While typical theological discussions of sixteenth-century European transformation focus on doctrine, Church, and perhaps (from a more philosophical vantage) political economy, social historians have long been scrutinizing other areas of change during this period.⁵ Even these social analyses, when put to use, often seem to be transfigured into ideas (and ideologies), but they at least maintain a rootedness in human experience that theologians usually ignore. Theologians of the Spirit, that is, need to examine how pneumatology’s modern development is bound to experiences like (and in no particular order) mobility, famine, family reconfiguration, war and violence, disease, novel human contacts, geographical confusion and expansion, rearranged social roles, experienced cultural pluralities, unexpected natural phenomena, civilizational threat, the expanded scope for expressed human desire, institutional instability and change, religious coercion, cognitive dislocation, perceived cosmic reorderings, and more. Modern pneumatology arises out of this thick soil, long before its conceptual theological form is given doctrinal articulation.

The soil itself is one filled with astonishing things, as the developing baroque sensibilities of the late sixteenth and later seventeenth centuries demonstrated in their cultured expressions. Wonder and astonishment, along with other breathless baroque attitudes, were also bound to confusion and fear, much like the ocean itself, now become a permanent part of the existential yearning and resistance of Europeans. The ocean is an image that is especially pertinent to modern pneumatology’s emergence: vast and voracious, as well as beautiful and tempting, the great seas and their traversal became the source of new worlds, peoples, unleashed desires, and unheard-of brutalities. The upheavals of European existence in the sixteenth century sought overcoming, resolution, and even solace in the Indies and Asia, in the southern seas and yet-undiscovered lands on the globe’s far side. What Europeans found there, however, was a realm of unmeasured struggle and human expenditure, whose scope bound East and West, North and South together in one large question regarding the meaning of creaturely life, utterly novel in its insatiably inclusive reach. Along with theodicy, its early modern twin, pneumatology has been the Christian runner in this race—trying to answer all the whys, determine the place of all the players, order the course in a well-marked path, map the ditches and pitfalls, turn a ravenously confused world, perhaps through some hard sifting, into one of navigable harmony.

Mixed metaphors abound: soil, racing, ocean. Yet these metaphors point, in their mixture, to the confusion of material energy, organic change, expended force, and enveloping power whose existential confluence marks pneumatology’s formal emergence in the seventeenth century. As an existential plant, sown and grown in an inescapable soil, driven across seas of new human encounters, and pursued with a responsive thirst, modern pneumatology was probably inevitable as an expression of an intrinsic human need to problem-solve. So too was pneumatology’s twin, theodicy, as it unavoidably took form in the face of human suffering, experienced and depicted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries now as an extended tragedy touching millions of souls. Certainly, the history of modern pneumatology’s genesis and growth cannot be overleapt. Yet as a specifically human response to a set of historical contexts, as a set of what became practical ideas, one must question whether modern pneumatology has itself obscured the divine work that just such a history embodies. Pneumatology has done just this; and in obscuring God’s actual working in this difficult history, pneumatology has contributed to an ever-deepening sense of the world’s and of human life’s fundamental inadequacy. As an explanatory framework, even in its embodied practical application, modern pneumatology has foreclosed the questions in whose midst and wake it developed, it has blunted the existential edges that drove its development, and it has cloaked the unmanageable hands of God, whose obscure power ordered its first yearnings. Modern pneumatology has turned the Holy Spirit, mysterious and blessedly without shape, into a human form, stripped of its lamented and despised limitations. In so doing, modern pneumatology has presented Christians and their communities with a created world that must ever seem unacceptable, insufficient, and ultimately godless in its core.

The experiential contours of that realm from which modern pneumatology arose can be distinguished from pneumatology’s initial forms themselves. Each must be studied in turn. Both topics, however, are historically too huge—the existential crucible of the sixteenth century as a whole and the theological discourse on the Spirit at this time—to treat systematically. A few small historical strokes will suffice to indicate the larger shapes of concern that the century sparked, and a few of the pneumatic shadows that hovered about this period. The formal articulations of these pneumatic penumbra are ones that will be taken up, refined, refashioned, and then aimed at suppressing their very existential origins, by offering an alternative history of human hope devoid of God’s hard facts.

Modern pneumatology, after all, does not burst onto the theological scene. It arrives in drips, trickles, rustlings, and seeds. What counts in making pneumatology a wholly modern phenomenon is the context—whether seen in terms of soil or ocean—in which these tiny fluxes move. Taken together, these fluxes provide a measure to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their more seismic shifts of experience and attitude. In this context, whose ingredients themselves demand an ocean of analytical treatises, rivulets become channels, stirrings become upheavals, and seeds put down deep, fierce, and obstinate roots.

The historical vignette that follows is one that at least stands as an exemplar of how human and global context worked to galvanize pneumatic attraction, if often in conflicted ways. One could multiply these small stories, stand back, and then watch the unfolding of a new Christian struggle, now with the Holy Spirit, at least humanly understood, at its center.

Quirós

On May 3, 1606, three Spanish ships—the San Pedro y San Pablo and the San Pedrico, along with a launch, the Los Tres Reyes—reached the New Hebrides islands, now the nation of Vanuatu. Under the command of Pedro Fernandez de Quirós, they entered and anchored in the Big Bay of the Island of Santo, as it is known today. It was the first time Europeans had visited this part of the world. They had left Callao, Peru, the previous December, in search of the long-reputed southern continent. Quirós, who had been part of the Spanish expedition that had reached the Solomon Islands ten years earlier, was determined to find the elusive continent and claim it on behalf of the Church and Spain. Delighted at the safe harbor they had discovered, and observing the richness and beauty of the land, with its lush vegetation and looming mountains, Quirós was certain they had reached their goal. After some tense encounters with natives in canoes, and a few shots fired, the Spanish landed on the beach. Interaction with the islanders on solid ground fared worse, however, and some of the natives, including an elderly chief, were killed. In one case, the crewman mutilated and exhibited the corpse, hanging the head and a foot from a tree. Quirós was distraught at what his men had done, but he carried on.

In the coming week, Quirós organized for a camp to be set up, one that could be protected, but that would also prove the center for future settlement. On May 13, the eve of Pentecost, he then announced to the assembly the formation of a new religious lay order, the Knights of the Holy Spirit, which he invited the officers to join. He distributed small crosses made of blue cloth as the order’s insignia, addressing his men with an exhortation to serve God and the Spanish monarch faithfully and courageously:

I pray heartily that the Knights may know and esteem the value of this cross, gained with a determination to win much higher honours; and they must bear in mind that, though it has not cost much money, labour, sickness, nor time, that which it remains in their power to pay in this very high enterprise is very great, for it is now known that the enterprise holds a world for its heaven and its earth. . . . I charge you all to be, as it were, members of one body; and I announce to you that from this day forward your obligations will be greater, and the rewards or punishments greater which are merited for good or for bad deeds.⁶

The men were called to make confession to the clergy accompanying the voyage—there were four priests, along with seven Franciscan brothers—in preparation for the next day, which was the Feast of Pentecost:

On that night all three vessels displayed many lights, and they sent off many rockets and fire-wheels. All the artillery was fired off; and when the natives heard the noise and the echoes resounding over hills and valleys, they raised great shouts. We sounded drums, rang the bells, had music and dancing, and had other forms of rejoicing, in which the men showed great pleasure. The Captain said to all: Gentlemen, this is the eve of my long-desired day, for which there should be no empty hand nor person for whom the appointed good things are not welcome, and as much more as the part he takes may deserve.⁷

The next day, after they had set up a small altar on the beach, an elaborate ceremony unfolded. A large wooden cross was raised, with prayers in the name of Jesus Christ, Son of the eternal Father, and of the Holy Virgin Mary, true God and man, this sign of the Holy Cross, on which His most holy body was crucified, and where He gave His life as a ransom for the whole human race.⁸ Then came a series of declarations of possessions, in the name of the Trinity, in the name of the Catholic Church, in the name of the Franciscan order, in the name of the order of John of God, several of whose members were present:

that the same Brotherhood might found, administer, and maintain by their professed charity all the hospitals there may be in those parts, so necessary that the natives may learn all our methods, and hold us in the love and veneration which the sight of our curing the native sick, and giving them other benefits, deserve.⁹

Possession in the name of the new Order of the Holy Spirit was made, and finally in the name of the Spanish monarch. It is at this point that we hear for the first time of the name given to the land as a whole: Australia de Espiritu Santo—the Southern Land of the Holy Spirit. (Quirós also used the phrase Austrialia, as he later explains, punning on the Austrian family line and realm of his monarch, Philip III.)

After this, four masses were celebrated, followed by a long display of banner waving, flywheels, and more drums and gunshots. In the middle of all this noise, all shouted with almost infinite joy, and many times: ‘Long live the Faith of Christ!’ And with this the celebration of the festival came to an end.¹⁰

But the events of the day had not been exhausted. Officers came to seek pardon for unknown crimes before Quirós. Two slaves who had been brought along on the voyage were granted their freedom. And that afternoon, Quirós announced the founding of a city, to be called New Jerusalem, complete with a government of magistrates, justices of the peace, and financial officers, whom Quirós appointed from the crew following general elections. The next seventeen days, culminating with a grand celebration of Corpus Christi, were spent planting gardens and orchards, exploring inland aways, skirmishing with natives, and naming the land. The bay was dedicated to Saints Philip and James, since it was entered on their feast day. The port was called Vera Cruz, or the True Cross. The two rivers flowing into the bay were named Jordan and Savior (Salvador) respectively. The land itself, as well as local dietary customs and health among the natives, was carefully described:

It is to be noted that we had not seen cactus nor sandy wastes, nor were the trees thorny, while many of the wild trees yielded good fruit. It is also to be noted that we did not see snow on the mountains, nor were there any mosquitos or ants in the land, which are very harmful, both in houses and fields. There were no poisonous lizards either in the woods or the cultivated ground, nor alligators in the rivers. Fish and flesh keep good for salting during two or more days. The land is so pleasant, so covered with trees; there are so many kinds of birds, that, owing to this and other good signs, the climate may be considered to be clement, and that it preserves its natural order. Of what happens in the mountains we cannot speak until we have been there.¹¹

By June, Quirós was eager to get a better sense of these mountains and decided to take the ships on an exploratory expedition up the coast, as he conceived it. Besides, he wanted a respite from hostile interaction with the natives. That interaction had proved to be a relationship that the Spaniards had poisoned through unnecessary violence, in Quirós’ view. Quirós himself, however, had no qualms about forcibly removing several local boys who were meant to be trained as Christian interpreters. (Two were in fact later baptized when the party, on its return to Mexico, neared the Gulf of California, with Quirós as their godfather. Both boys—one of eight years, the other of around twenty—died in Mexico.¹² The older one, at least, having learned enough Spanish to share his story with Quirós, was able to describe other islands and customs in the area of Espiritu Santo.) Not all of Quirós’ men were happy about this new exploratory mission. Some insisted that they stay behind and search for gold. But Quirós responded that their vocation from God lay in discovering this new land for the sake of future Christian settlement, not wealth.

Having set out from the bay, however, a sudden gale and adverse currents forced the ships to stray into areas they did not expect. The ships were separated on June 11. The second vessel was able to regain Espiritu Santo and waited in vain for their compatriots for two weeks before leaving. But Quirós and his ship could never find their way back again to their settlement. The New Jerusalem was abandoned after not even two months. Luís Vaez de Torres led the second vessel back to Manila, passing by New Guinea (and later having his name associated with the famous strait separating the island from Australia). For his part, Quirós was disconsolate over the turn of events. Threatened with a near-mutinous and increasingly ill crew, he finally made his way back to Mexico in November. Returning to Spain, he spent his remaining years trying to convince the Crown to fund another voyage.

Quirós has never achieved the fame of many other Iberian explorers. Yet his near-miss reaching of Australia—Torres probably saw the continent without realizing it—has kept his name alive in specialist circles, with relevant documents still being discovered well into the twentieth century and put to use in disentangling the drama of his failed mission and his mysteriously sudden return to Mexico. At the center of this historical discussion lies the navigator’s seemingly strange religious gestures. Crowning geographical discoveries with Christian nomenclature and celebrating them with prayers and masses were common enough.¹³ But Quirós’ intricate and extended religious ritual and articulated vision at Big Bay was, in his own time, viewed by some as problematic, and only more recently as intellectually intriguing.¹⁴

Only in the early twentieth century was a manuscript discovered that was written by Diego de Prado y Tovar, a subordinate of Quirós (later a monk in Madrid).¹⁵ Prado y Tovar and Quirós were known to have disliked each other, and the latter had, before the crucial separation of the two ships, sent his enemy over to Torres’ ship to get him out of his hair. Prado y Tovar’s long-lost account of the voyage seemed to answer some of the questions about the commander’s sudden disappearance. Quirós was, in Prado y Tovar’s eyes, a fool, and his crew understandably mutinied and took the ship home as fast as they could. Prado y Tovar would later write to