Content uploaded by Michael F O'Sullivan
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Michael F O'Sullivan on Feb 05, 2020
Content may be subject to copyright.
Authentic Subjectivity as a Methodology for Studying Spirituality
Rev Dr Michael O’Sullivan, SJ
[A paper given at the international conference on “Evolving
Methodologies in the Study of Christian Spirituality and Spiritual
Theology” held at the Pontical University Antonianum, Rome
(25-28 September 2019) and published in the online journal
Mysterion 12 (2019/2): 271-278]
According to Bernard Lonergan ‘communications’ is the final functional specialty in method
in theology. All the other functional specialties, namely ‘research’, ‘interpretation’, ‘history’,
‘dialectic’, ‘foundations’, ‘doctrines’, and ‘systematics’, head cumulatively into
‘communications’.1 This paper approaches the conference theme influenced by the need to
take ‘communications’ first (as well as last). Although a Jesuit priest and originally working
as a systematic theologian, my approach to the study of spirituality is guided by the current
situation in my native country, Ireland, and my work with the British Association for the
Study of Spirituality. My experience working in these contexts, and with an apostolic desire
to be fruitful in what I do, leads me to evolve a methodology for the study of spirituality that
is not overtly theological or faith-based. But that is not to say that my Christian faith and
theology are not also involved in how I now proceed.
Sandra Schneiders is, perhaps, the most influential scholar in the development of the
academic study of Christian spirituality. She writes of spirituality as “the experience of
conscious involvement in the project of life-integration through self-transcendence towards
the horizon of ultimate value one perceives”.2 For the Christian this horizon is the loving
Triune God of Christian revelation. In my view, Schneiders’ formulation is at the level of
1
description. In this article I will move to an explanatory level by getting into the methodology
of interior praxis through which self-transcendence travels the path of life-integration towards
a horizon of perceived ultimate value.
An Explanatory Approach
In order to develop my position, let me state that what makes a field of study
spirituality study, in my view, is not the material studied, but how the field is studied.
Because the subject is spirituality, the field needs to be studied from a foundational level and
in a horizon of ultimate meaning and value. On this view the content of the field is derived
from a methodological foundation. Authentic subjectivity in common human knowing and
choosing is a methodology that meets these criteria of how to study material in terms of this
understanding of spirituality.3 I will illustrate how it does very shortly.
Before doing so let me add that my position means that spirituality studies how people
perform at the foundational depth of spirit in their subjectivity in relation to the issues, etc.
they are faced with or engage with. It studies such inner performance in the context of
people’s historical era and personal situation since the people studied are not abstract beings
but socially located and subject to finitude.4 It does so, also, on the understanding that the
foundational spirit of authenticity in finite and socially situated persons is oriented to a
horizon of ultimate meaning and value.
As well, therefore, as studying the conduct of people in their foundational,
contextualised, and finite subjectivity, spirituality also studies what such conduct produces in
the form of lives, relationships, texts, organisations, and traditions, etc. It studies these lives
and texts, etc. as embodiments of the level of authenticity-inauthenticity that produced them.
Researching these, then, in terms of their spirituality is about enlightening people regarding
the quality of authenticity present or absent in the lives, texts, traditions, situations, etc. and
2
about empowering people towards conformity or transformation, depending on which is
called for in the light of the material studied.
Establishing the field of spirituality according to how it is to be studied means that the
scope of the field is, necessarily, all that has been, is, and can be known and chosen. It also
means that the “field-encompassing field”5 character of spirituality pertains to not only its
object of study but also the resources with which it does such study. On this view art, music,
literature, psychology, sociology, etc. and practices like prayer, pilgrimage, spiritual
accompaniment, etc. can all serve as suitable resources for gaining greater insight into, or
fostering fuller responses to, the spirituality of authenticity in lived experience.
Following on from these clarifications about my position I turn now to an imaginative
experiment. I do so to illustrate how authentic subjectivity in common human knowing and
choosing provides a foundational methodology and correlative ultimate horizon of truth,
goodness, and love to study and respond to lived experience at spiritual depth.
Imaginative Experiment
Imagine that each of us reading this article is sitting quietly in a public park when suddenly
there is what sounds like a child’s cry for help. If we are attentive to our experience, we will
hear the cry; if we are reflective in relation to experiencing the cry, we realize that
experiencing the cry means our interiority is inherently relational in how it is constituted in
the sense that it is naturally open to the wider world. This also means that how we receive the
cry, and how we respond to it, will reflect our existing quality of self-presence which is
foundational for how we relate to ourselves and the wider world.
So what do we do in relation to our particular experiencing of the cry? Is our way of
being present to our reflexive and relational self of a kind that we ignore the cry, or is it of a
quality that moves us to attend more acutely to the cry? If the latter, do we find ourselves
3
moved beyond the experience of hearing the cry to a higher form of self-presence that
enables us, not only to attend to the data that is the cry, but also to seek an understanding of it
by asking questions like, what does the sound I have heard mean? Does it mean that someone
is in trouble, or does it mean, for example, that there might be a drama group nearby who are
practicing their roles? Given that both are possible, do we find ourselves being pushed or
pulled to move on to a higher level again in ourselves where we are engaged in not only
understanding, but also judging between different possible understandings. How do I know
which understanding of the situation is correct? This is a question rooted in a self-presence
that relates to reality out of a desire for truth. If we find that further question surfacing within
us, does it not mean that there is within us a dynamism by which we can move from
experience to understanding and beyond understanding to judgment and that the criterion to
guide such movement is inherent in it?
Staying with our practice of self-attention to our lived experience in the park do we
not find that the dynamic desire at work in us does not leave us content with coming to know
what is happening, but continues to prod us until we decide to act consistently with that
discovered meaning of the cry. For example, if we discover that someone really is in trouble
there arises from the interior ground of our subjective experiencing, interpreting, judging, and
deciding a desire or an imperative that we do something about that situation by, for example,
calling the police, or seeking the help of others who are also in the park.
Our participation, therefore, in the illustrative imagination-experiment discloses that
we connect with reality methodologically, not by bypassing our subjectivity, as though reality
was already out there now only waiting to be looked at, but by participating authentically in
our subjectivity.
The imagination experiment discloses that we share a dynamic desire for authenticity
at a foundational level of our common human subjectivity, and that it is detected differently
4
depending on which operation of knowing and choosing – experiencing, understanding,
judging, or deciding6 - the researcher, or the reader, is engaged in at a particular time.
The spirited desire in humans for authenticity is detected by the researcher at the level
of his or her experience through experiencing a call or push in his or her interiority to become
aware of and attend to all the relevant data regarding the text, tradition, life, situation, etc.
that he or she is researching, including, reflexively, the data about the quality of experiencing
they bring to their research; the dynamism of authenticity is detected by the researcher at the
level of his or her capacity to understand through the researcher's questioning of the
experienced data by calling him or her to raise all the relevant questions about the data of the
text, tradition, life, situation, etc., and the quality of their own questioning; the dynamic
desire for authenticity is detected in the researcher's judging by calling him or her to seek
what is true or most probably true among the different possible interpretations of the text,
tradition, life, situation, etc. that are the object of their research, and to do so taking account
of their own subjectivity in terms of the quality with which it makes judgments; and the
dynamism is detected in the researcher's deciding by calling him or her to seek consistency
between the judgement of fact they have arrived at regarding their research, and the
judgement of value of what they ought to do on the basis of that knowledge. Self-attention
discloses that the dynamism for authenticity can also move the researcher to go beyond doing
what is good, or just, to what is in keeping with gratuitous loving.
At one and the same, therefore, the researcher develops the quality of their personal
subjectivity and discovers the objectivity of what they set out to research in a life, text,
tradition, or situation, etc. This position means that authentic subjectivity in the researcher
and objectivity in their research outcomes are correlative. It also means that the researcher’s
research is a self-implicating activity and implicating for those who engage with the research.
5
The Methodology in Downward Mode
As well as functioning in an upward movement from experience to decision, as in our
imaginative experiment, this process of knowing and choosing under the impact of the core
dynamic desire for authenticity also functions in the reverse order. It also operates by
descending from an originating decision to a terminal point in lived experience.
For example, similar to Dag Hammarskjöld, the late and inspiring Secretary-General
of the United Nations, who once said that at some moment he decided to say ‘yes’ to
Someone or Something, and that that made all the difference for his life from then on, 7 the
spirituality researcher may decide, firstly, to trust that God exists and is a God of love, and,
secondly, on the basis of that ‘yes’ make the judgement of belief that there could be an
Incarnation as a self-communication of God's love to and for the world, and, thirdly, on the
basis of that judgment of belief in such a God seek to work out an understanding of the
maleness of Jesus that is also liberating for women, and, fourthly, on the basis of that
understanding seek to communicate with lived experience regarding the situation of women
in ways that can transform it.8
This explanation of the movement of the spirit of self-transcending authenticity in
human subjectivity in and in relation to lived experience means that there is a dynamic
orientation to authenticity in us, that it is a common human existential reality in the sense of
belonging to the structure of our humanity across differences of gender, race, ethnicity, and
religion, etc., that it is receptive,9 relational, 10 reflective,11 responsible,12 and reflexive 13 in
character, and that it enables and empowers our knowing and choosing to reach higher order
levels, so that we can live with greater self-transcendence and in the process lift life around
us to higher levels of beauty, intelligibility, truth, goodness, and love.
6
The Methodology is also a Communal Achievement
It must also be added, of course, that the quality of authentic self-presence with which
a person functions at a particular time is open to higher religious experience, and that the
social and historical ground in and in relation to which a personal, deep, spiritual self-
perception and self-presence functions, conditions the transition of personal self-presence
into an effective institutional or collective self-presence. The achievement, then, of a
spirituality of truth, goodness, and love in society and in a religious tradition through the
practice of the methodology of authentic subjectivity is not only a personal but a communal
achievement. This communal achievement, as well as taking on board valuable individual
perception of where authenticity in life lies, may also be needed to correct such perception.
The Methodology at Work in a Life
In order to illustrate this latter point about the corrective role of the collective
regarding the functioning of authentic subjectivity in a person, consider the young man who
wrote the following in an end of school essay when he was 17 years old:
The main principle which must guide us in the selection of a vocation is the welfare of
humanity...If a person works only for himself he (sic) can perhaps be a famous
scholar, a great wise man, a distinguished poet, but never a complete, genuinely great
man...When we have chosen the vocation in which we can contribute most to
humanity, burdens cannot bend us because they are only sacrifices for all.14
The young man who wrote these words was Karl Marx (1818-83). His words give us an
insight into the inner Marx. They testify to how he is thinking, feeling, and imagining at a
young age about his life ahead of him in relation to the world of his time. They show him
7
moved by inner desire to be a “genuinely great man” (my emphasis). They show that for him
this meant dedicating himself to the welfare of humanity as a “vocation” (my emphasis) and
that this vocation would not be weakened by the sacrifices it involved because they would, as
he put it, be “sacrifices for all”. We can say that at 17 he was engaged in an aesthetic
conversion to the welfare of humanity as a beautiful horizon of meaning and value at an
ultimate and, therefore, spiritual level of significance. At 18 he wrote:
Never can I be at peace, for my soul is powerfully driven
There had to be some fault in the universe,
The dumb agony of pain wrapped all round her,
......
Chained, eternally chained, eternally
......
We are the apes of a cold God.15
These words show that Marx experienced a powerful drive in his “soul” (my emphasis) to
transform the world of his time by breaking the chains imposed on it by, as he put it, “a cold
God” (my emphasis).
Marx’s passionate soulful words as a young man express what can be called his
spirituality, understood as the determined and sustained desire to live authentically, as he
perceived it, the first and only edition of himself.
This approach to the study of Marx’s life and writings through the lens of spirituality
being about perceived lived authenticity allows us to conceive his life and writings as being
rooted in a soulful experience for him of being called, and driven even, to dedicate his life to
8
the welfare of humanity and to cast aside in the process the God of his time as a cold God
who did not empower the masses to transform their suffering but chained them to it.
Marx’s initial judgment that God was a cold God was made in the context of an
aesthetic conversion and perceived soulful vocation to the welfare of humanity in what he
called a universe wrapped in pain. His later judgement that God was not an independent
reality of any kind but a socially constructed fantasy was made in a context where the
hegemonic form of Christianity in his time regarded a strong commitment to social
transformation as a reduction of authentic Christian faith.
However, Marx did not consider that the Christianity he knew and authentic
Christianity could be significantly different and so his dynamism for authenticity could be
said to have malfunctioned. It did so, however, in a social and historical context that preceded
the emergence of liberation theology. This theology has made a powerful case for the
Christian God having a preferential option for the economically poor.16 The spirituality
researcher seeking personal authenticity and an objective reading of how to understand and
live the relationship between Christianity and social justice will take this theology into
account. Living and studying spirituality in the way I have advocated in this paper, namely, to
be led to beauty, intelligibility, truth, goodness, and love along the methodological grounds of
fidelity to his or her authentic subjectivity in its historical context, he or she will be led to
argue for a different understanding of where a vocation to the welfare of humanity, and now
also the planet, lies.17
Conclusion
I have argued that spirituality study is grounded in the researcher who carries out the study, so
that it is essential for the sake of objective research that the researcher has self-appropriated
how they know and choose foundationally, and that they perform their knowing and choosing
9
regarding texts, traditions, lives, and situations, etc. to the standard of authenticity in their
subjectivity.
This methodological subjectivity in human knowing and choosing that is actualized
and directed by a dynamism of self-transcending fidelity to the norms for authenticity
inherent in the differentiated and interrelated operations of experiencing, understanding,
judging and deciding of historical persons leads the human subject to practice forms of
experiencing, understanding, judging and deciding with respect to situations that will select -
or develop - and employ the resources these situations need to be transformed into situations
of greater beauty, intelligibility, truth, goodness and love.
For the Christian, rooted in conversion to a relationship of being in love with God,
such beauty, meaning, truth, goodness and love will be related to God’s beauty, meaning,
truth, goodness and love that he or she desires to share and bring to fuller expression in the
world.
Doing research according to this methodology of authentic subjectivity is a
contemplative and rigorous spiritual practice and allows both the field of spirituality studies
to be set by the unlimited scope of the dynamism for authenticity and the resources it draws
on to do such studies to be open-ended.
Doing research according to this methodology means that no discipline, no field or
form of study and action, is outside the reach of spirituality since it is impossible to escape
the functioning of the human spirit of experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding in
how we know and choose. And while it is possible in practice to deviate from or be misled
about its path to beauty, truth, goodness, and love as ultimate dimensions of reality, the
inherent normativity of this path remains.
At the same time, I also wish to say that spirituality is more evidently manifested in
lived experience like that of Hammarskjöld referred to above. His experience appears to fit
10
what Calvin Schrag might describe as experiences of where something excessive breaks
through and we are lifted out of the ordinary and called to allow such experiences play a
formative role in the narrative of our life-journey.18 Such experiences make us more aware of
what is embedded, but not always apparent, in all lived experience, be it ordinary or not.
Spirituality, therefore, in my view is a term that applies to both every situation of knowing
and choosing when they are approached through the methodology of authentic subjectivity
and the less frequent break-through experiences of excess meaning and highly transformative
effects.
11
1NOTES
Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1971).
2 Sandra Schneiders, “Approaches to the Study of Christian Spirituality,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Study of
Christian Spirituality, ed. Arthur Holder (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), 16.
3 I was introduced to the notion of authentic subjectivity through my study of the writings of Bernard Lonergan in the
mid-1970s. However, Lonergan’s work on method is not grounded in ideas or theories. Instead it enables a person to
engage in a lived practice where they can affirm and self-appropriate the dynamism for authenticity in their subjectivity
and the structure of that subjectivity in knowing and choosing. As a result, a person comes to hold what they do in their
knowing and choosing, not, ultimately, because they have studied Lonergan, but because of what they have learned
through attention to their interiority. As Haughey says, “His (Lonergan’s) method is not his method but our method if
we can see (sic) what goes into thinking our thoughts and making our choices.” [ John C. Haughey, “Responsibility for
Human Rights: Contributions from Bernard Lonergan,” Theological Studies 63 (2002): 764-85 at 783].
4 It is important to keep in mind that the constraints on the exercise of authentic subjectivity are not due simply to
personal or socially situated factors, but are also the result of being finite in virtue of being human.
5 Sandra Schneiders, “Theology and spirituality: Strangers, rivals, or partners?” Horizons 13 (1986): 253- 274 at 274.
See Van A. Harvey, The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966): 54-59.
6 Lonergan gives the following list as operations: “seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, inquiring, imagining,
understanding, conceiving, formulating, reflecting, marshalling and weighing the evidence, judging, deliberating,
evaluating, deciding, speaking, writing” (Method in Theology, 6). The operations of experiencing, understanding,
judging, and deciding are arrived at by denoting the various operations on the four levels of experience, understanding,
judgement, and decision by the principal occurrence on each level.
7 Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings, translated by W.H. Auden and Leif Sjöberg (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), 169.
8 See Michael O’Sullivan, How Roman Catholic Theology Can Transform Male Violence Against Women (Lewiston,
New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010), chapter 5.
9 By ‘receptivity’ I mean the disposition and capacity to receive evidence in one’s subjectivity that is consistent with
beauty, intelligibility, truth, goodness, and love in life.
10 By ‘relationality’ I mean the capacity in one’s subjectivity to connect to what corresponds to beauty, intelligibility,
truth, goodness and love in the concrete.
1111 By ‘reflectivity’ I mean the capacity to distantiate from the given for the sake of higher order attentiveness, insight,
judgement, and decision-making regarding the given.
12 By ‘responsibility’ I mean the capacity to deliberate and decide in accordance with the standard of value and not
simply according to what is convenient, pleasurable, satisfying or personal or group interest. The latter may cohere with
the standard of what is truly good and lovable but are not foundational in what is decided.
13 By ‘reflexivity’ I mean the capacity to reflect on and evaluate the quality of one’s receptivity, relationality, reflectivity
and responsibility in terms of their correlation with beauty, intelligibility, truth, goodness, and love in life.
14 Karl Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans & ed. D. Easton and K. H. Guddatt
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., [1967] 1997), 39.
15 R. Payne, Marx (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 61, 71.
16 See, for example, Michael O’Sullivan, The Saving Grace of God’s Love as the Basis for the Preferential Option for
the Poor as the Basis for the Saving Love of God’s Grace in the Theology of Gustavo Gutiérrez (unpublished MTh
thesis, 1984, available in the Regis College Library, Toronto).
17 Lonergan distinguishes between major and minor inauthenticity. Major inauthenticity refers to inauthenticity at a
macro level such as a religious tradition; minor inauthenticity refers to inauthenticity in individuals. For an example of
how fidelity to major inauthenticity can lead individuals seeking to be authentic astray, see Michael O’Sullivan,
“Reflexive and Transformative Subjectivity: Authentic Spirituality and a Journey with Incest,” in Sources of
Transformation: Revitalising Christian Spirituality, ed. Edward Howells and Peter Tyler (London and New York:
Continuum, 2010), 173-82.
18 Calvin O. Schrag, The Self after Postmodernity (New Haven: Yale University Press), 1997.
12
13Bio
Rev Dr Michael O’Sullivan, SJ is Director and co-founder of the Spirituality Institute for Research
and Education (SpIRE) (www.spiritualityinstitute.ie) in Dublin, Ireland, and Programme Leader of
the Waterford Institute of Technology MA in Applied Spirituality (https://spiritualityinstitute.ie/ma-
applied-spirituality/). He is a founding member of the International Relations Committee of the
Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality (SSCS) and a member of the editorial board of
Spiritus, the Society’s journal. He served previously on the Board of Directors of SSCS and on the
Steering Committee of the Christian Spirituality Study Group of the American Academy of
Religion. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the British Association for the Study of
Spirituality (BASS), a Research Fellow with the University of the Free State, South Africa, a
Fellow of the European Institute for Spirituality in Economics and Society, a member of the
management team of the Centre for the Academic Study of Spirituality at the University of Zurich,
and a Research Associate of the Centre for the Study of Spirituality, University of Hull.
14.
15
16
17
18