Beyond East and West: What ‘Ladder’ Did John Wu Use Towards This Goal? (Part Two)

John Wu Jingxiong (1899-1986) was a diplomat, scholar, and authority on international law. He was also a prominent Chinese Catholic convert. His spiritual autobiography Beyond East and West (1951) reminds us of the Confessiones of St. Augustine for its moving description of John Wu’s conversion to Catholicism in 1937 and his early years as a Catholic. The very title of Wu’s autobiography points to his spiritual ideal which let humanity go beyond cultural particularities (be they Western, Chinese, or other). John Wu found wisdom in China’s great traditions, i.e., Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism, pointing to their universal truths that come ultimately from, and are fulfilled in, Christ. The author of this contribution has searched for John Wu’s universal traits which go beyond any culture and calls them, metaphorically, a “ladder”. He has found a threefold ladder, i.e. that of the Christian faith, of human friendship and human and divine love, and that of natural law.

Jarena Lee

Chapter 3 presents the life, spiritual awakening, and preaching ministry of Jarena Lee. Beginning with a contextual description of the early United States of America, when freedom and equality were declared for all but were actually reserved exclusively for white men, this chapter narrates a black woman preacher’s fight against racial inequality and gender discrimination. Lee’s powerful experience of divine call enabled her to face her own doubts and confront the institutional obstacles toward accepting her religious vocation. The chapter sheds light on her resolve to do the work of evangelism as an unlicensed itinerant preacher. Through an analysis of the private rhetoric of her spiritual autobiography, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, this chapter reveals the tactics that Lee used in claiming her call and using her voice to construct a narrative to persuade others of the veracity of her divine call.

„O cierniu który rozdziera nasze oczy usta teraz i w godzinie śmierci”. What and what is it about Matka odchodzi by Tadeusz Różewicza?

The article is an attempt to defi ne the subject and genre of the book Matka odchodzi (2000), ascribed to Tadeusz Różewicz. Its authorship and composition, including the role of photographs, are analysed, as is the effect of transferring previously published poems and prose pieces to a new context. The book might be described as a spiritual autobiography (confession) with elements of witness and of challenge to the reader, as in Małgorzata Czermińska’s work on autobiographical writing; but other possible defi nitions are also considered, including two of Różewicz’s own rather surprising suggestions: a beggar’s threnody, a little book that is a prayer. The Marian piety of Stefania Różewicz is seen to infl uence even unconsciously her supposedly „godless” son’s way of seeing the world.

“A Handful of Loose Beads”

Amy Coté, “‘A Handful of Loose Beads’: Catholicism and the Fictional Autobiography in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette” (pp. 473–494) This essay considers the influence of confession as a Catholic liturgical sacrament and as a literary genre informing the fictional autobiography in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). In her earlier novel Jane Eyre (1847), Brontë used the tradition of Protestant spiritual autobiography as a literary genre focused on the individual’s spiritual development. Villette, written as it was at the height of a wave of anti-Catholic sentiment in England in the 1840s and 1850s, has understandably been read as a nationalistic rebuke of Catholicism. This essay complicates this narrative, and shows how Brontë looks to Catholic liturgical traditions, most notably the sacrament of confession, to trouble the generic conventions of the Protestant spiritual autobiography and, by extension, of fictional autobiography.

‘The solitary saint walks forth to meditate at even-tide’

This chapter illustrates a strong connection between prayer and what I term radical interiority—a self defined by the authenticity of a supposed depth or secrecy—across the work of Evangelical poet William Cowper. Expressing this inward and grace-filled self is always accompanied by and conceived on the model of intense prayer; by contrast, prayerlessness equals spiritual desolation. The connection is particularly torturous in melancholic early texts such as Adelphi (his spiritual autobiography) and the Olney Hymns. In his most famous poem The Task, a poetics interlinking prayer and interiority continues: despite an initial elision in favour of hymning the natural world and focusing outside the self, it is reasserted through a quietist turn. Cowper’s final praying self retreats from the world, meditatively into itself but also in occupying hidden physical spaces as prayer closets, a combination inspired by his translations of French mystic, Madame de Guyon.

Letters of N.S. Sokhanskaya (Kokhanovskaya) as an Attempt of “Spiritual Autobiography”

Continuing the study of the life and work of Kokhanovskaya (N. S. Sokhanskaya), in this article the author introduces into scientific circulation large fragments of her unpublished letters to A. V. Pletneva (P. A. Pletnev’s widow) and M. O. Mozgova (Kokhanovskaya’s niece) and comes to the assertion that these epistolary materials can be considered not only as confessional prose, but as examples of Christian ascetic and teaching literature. A similar approach to Kokhanovskaya’s letters was outlined back in the 19th century by the famous bibliographer S. Ponomarev, who vainly tried to interest K. P. Pobedonostsev in this subject. The quoted texts, which constitute a kind of continuation of Sokhanskaya’s famous autobiography, refute in the best possible way the opinion voiced in one of the modern articles about Kokhanovskaya, the author of which called the writer’s life “a joyless vegetation”.

From Romance to Vision: The Life of Breath in Medieval Literary Texts

Breath and breathlessness are flashpoints in medieval literary texts. Medieval medical theories, rooted in classical thought, emphasise the bodily spirits and in particular, the ways that motions of the ‘vital spirit’—closely connected with breath—cause powerful physical responses that write emotions on the body in sighs, swoons, and even death. Physiological theory was complemented by theological notions of pneuma, the Spirit of divinity and life. The movement of breath plays a key role in depictions of emotion from love to grief, and in visionary or mystical experience. This essay explores breath and breathlessness in a range of English secular and devotional literary texts: popular romance writing, the medically alert fictions of Chaucer, and visionary works including the Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich and the spiritual autobiography of Margery Kempe. In all these works, concepts of the vital spirits and the role of breath in emotion are central. The play of breath underpins and shapes depictions of romantic love, explorations of the boundary between life and death, and ideas of spiritual revelation, creating narratives of profoundly embodied, affective experience.