Matthew Wickman’s Life to the Whole Being: The Spiritual Memoir of a Literature Professor is a remarkable book. On one level, it is a nuanced study of the relationship between spirituality and literature. It discusses inspiration and the limits of technique, how both spirituality and literature train our attention and allow us to see things anew, and how we need poetic language (metaphor, analogy) to talk about God and spiritual experience. Lively readings of poems and novels intersperse these discussions: poems by Denise Levertov and Gerard Manley Hopkins, novels by Louise Erdrich and Fyodor Dostoevsky. On this level, Life to the Whole Being is the work of a master scholar who can write about complex ideas in the clearest of prose. But on a deeper level, Life to the Whole Being, as its subtitle suggests, is a work of autobiography, of honest soul-searching. On this deeper level, the Brigham Young English professor explores the relationship between spirituality and literature in his life. The resulting work is by turns wise and questioning, witty and candid, self-effacing and impassioned.
When it comes to spiritual memoirs, Augustine’s Confessions casts a long shadow. Wickman does sound some “Augustinian” notes, but ultimately his story does not fit Augustine’s template. Life to the Whole Being recounts a lifelong integration and continual reconversion rather than a singular dramatic conversion. The book’s departure point is a difficult teenage decision. Wickman decides to postpone a potential acting career to complete a Latter-Day Saint mission in France. He is moved by the experiences of converts but troubled by how many people seem indifferent to spiritual questions. He begins reading Sartre, Camus, and Dostoevsky, who sharpen his existential concern. He ultimately never returns to the acting career. Existential concern instead leads him into the academy. It also keeps him in the LDS church. He is at times frustrated by both institutions. The church can be saccharine. The secular academy can be smug. Both, in their own ways, can be small-minded. There are serious tensions between them. In a second major decision, in the middle of this book and the middle of his career, Wickman has the chance to permanently join the faculty of a prestigious Scottish university. His first two books were scholarly treatments of Scottish literature and philosophy, and he and his family love life abroad. Ultimately, though, he decides to return full-time to Brigham Young to lead a newly founded humanities center. In doing so, he decides to move spirituality and literature to the heart of his academic work. Wickman thus tells a story of deepening (albeit imperfect and ongoing) integration between the literary study he pursued in the academy and the spirituality he cultivated in the church. Ultimately, he tells a story in which the spirit of God works through both to bring “life” to his “whole being.”
While Wickman discusses dramatic forms of spiritual experience, he focuses on attention and discernment. Art has the power to defamiliarize, to help us see in new and deeper ways. Wickman observes that “literature is, formally, a revelatory exercise: through it, we see the world afresh.” Lyric poetry, for instance, can stir wonder at the natural world. It can help us see “God’s Grandeur,” to borrow the title of Hopkins’ famous sonnet, which is too often obscured by habit and sin. Literature can help us see others in deeper ways. Curiously enough, reading a certain kind of literature in a certain way can remind us that others are not mere secondary characters in our own story. Literature can also encourage self-reflection. Wickman claims that “Life is literary in its way: nuanced, layered. And literature is teaching me to read it a little more deeply, appreciate it a little more fully.” In the memoir sections of the book, Wickman is quick to acknowledge his missteps, but I was struck by how in his interactions with others—including with those who seem difficult, frustrating, or boring—he is continually surprised by them. He comes to see them in new ways and to learn from them. There is an openness involved in this, a readiness to realize that one is not seeing deeply enough or is seeing in a distorted way. Undoubtedly, this is the product of long years of church membership and leadership, of praying with others, listening to their concerns, and offering counsel and spiritual direction. Undoubtedly, it is also the product of reading novels and poetry with sensitivity, of participating in searching classroom conversations about them.
One of the oldest, and to my mind most frustrating, debates about literature is whether reading it leads to virtue. In the Western tradition, it is an argument that goes at least as far back as Plato and Aristotle (and Aristophanes). Arguments about this continue apace, with examples and counter-examples produced ad infinitum. The problem is that the question is often framed too broadly and categorically, as if reading (all?) literature (in any way?) either does or does not make one a better person. Framed this way, the question strikes me as hopeless. I’d instead say that reading literature may lead to virtue, depending on the literature studied, the concerns brought to it, and how reading practices are integrated with other ethical and spiritual practices in one’s life. Wickman does not dwell on the argument in the abstract, but his memoir is a nuanced and thoughtful exploration of how literature can contribute to moral growth. We see him not only analyzing certain novels’ sensitivity to others’ perspectives but practicing this sensitivity himself. We also see how his spiritual practices and community membership reinforce this approach to literature. Literature helps illuminate the “wholeness” of his life, but literature is also just one part of that wholeness.
Furthermore, while Wickman is well-attuned to the ethical affordances of literature; he sees the impediments it can produce. Those existentialist novelists deepened his seriousness about the big questions, but he also reflects on how he at times played the part of melodramatic and oh-so-complex existentialist in his life. Consider this self-deprecating and humorous passage:
I’ve never seen myself as the church leader type….I spent the first couple decades of my adult life as the existentially overwrought dude sitting on or near the back row. I had long hair, then shorter hair but a goatee, then no goatee but a thick moustache that was a little too, well, itself. Then I was clean-shaven but refused to wear a white shirt. Then I wore white shirts but spoke in academic jargon and talked about scripture by way of philosophy. In short, I was obnoxiously, implacably idiosyncratic.
Wickman is also aware that while spirituality and literature can bring “life to the whole being,” while they can grant a contemplative depth to action, they can also be ways of retreating from reality or justifying a spurious elitism. Wickman acknowledges the temptation toward the latter, not only in general but also in his own life.
Of course, another criticism of the debate about literature and virtue is that it reduces literature to ethics. This is perhaps a particular danger of Christian approaches to literature. Christianity itself has been accused of conflating religion with ethics, of reducing the numinous to the normative. Here, too, Wickman is thoughtful and expansive. “But religion is not truly itself,” he writes, “until we ask it to do the impossible—until, fasting, praying, and serving, we petition it to help bring us, mere mortals, into the presence of what is most sacred.” Literature, too, can be a conduit to the sacred. Serious literature—especially spiritually serious literature—is always running up against the limits of what can be said. It involves gaps, uncertainties, mystery, a sense of “more.” Here again, spirituality and literature converge: “Spiritual representation, like literary representation, thus reminds us that there is something perpetually more to encounter, something previously unappreciated or unseen—something newly if not yet fully defamiliarized—in what we deem most important.” This has its positive side, always delving deeper into the richness of Creation, of relationships with others—always delving deeper into the infinite of God. There is a sublimity and a sense of adventure here.
But gaps and uncertainties can also be disturbing. The “more” can at times seem to be an abyss, the richness an emptiness. This is a memoir of doubt as well as faith, of learning to live with frustration and uncertainty. It is a memoir that takes evil, suffering, and lifelong disappointment seriously. Here, too, literature plays its part as a school for living in uncertainty. Pope Francis recently released a letter “on the Role of Literature in Formation.” The letter makes good companion reading for Life to the Whole Being, and this passage could be an epigraph for Wickman’s book: “It is clear, then, that the reader is not simply the recipient of an edifying message, but a person challenged to press forward on a shifting terrain where the boundaries between salvation and perdition are not a priori obvious and distinct.” Wickman, too, presses forward on shifting terrain. “My story is of a pilgrim more than a guru,” Wickman writes, “of a seeker more than a sage.”
Wickman’s book is written for an LDS audience, and especially for young people like his students at BYU who are struggling with the deep questions. He draws insights throughout from LDS tradition. A remarkable passage by Parley Pratt on the varied gifts of the Spirit serves as a touchstone. It will appeal to bookish believers from a variety of traditions, though. As a Catholic English professor, I found it moving and instructive. I learned from its high-level discussions of, say, apophaticism and language, but I benefitted even more from Wickman’s attempts to live more fully through spirituality and literature.
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