Abstract
Spirituality is impossible to define, but numerous, common themes can be discerned. I suggest a model of spirituality based upon the oeuvre of Julia Kristeva, the Bulgarian/French philosopher, semiologist, and psychoanalyst. She is an atheist who has a great respect for belief. Her therapeutic work reveals compassion and a desire for the creation of a safe, psychic space between analyst and client. This is only possible with the existence of language, the love that can face oneself and recognise the Other. Also, without a sense of the beyond-the-self, then the other three themes could not work together. Language is a human construction, and a Kristevean model of spirituality is derived from poststructuralism/postmodernism. There needs to be a constant reminder that we do not possess fully objective truths or a private language. Language is formed by both the social contract and the interior desire to think, feel and wonder. The inner life is impossible without external relationships, a reality that can only ever be filtered through our interpretation. To use terms of my own coinage, there is ‘interiority with reciprocity’, where events are ‘encounters through interpretation’. Such an inclusive interplay, in a Kristevean model, is spirituality, allowing the Moral, the Social and the Cultural to be part of the dynamic of spirituality. What ‘spiritual’ might mean in SMSC is a form of interiority, but this is inseparable from inter-relationship. Modelling SMSC as spirituality can have creative effects on not only Religious Education (RE) but the whole curriculum.
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Notes
Translations of Kristeva’s texts are published by the Columbia University Press.
A very basic analogy would be a chair. Chairs have a history of craftsmanship and design. Chairs can be made of various materials. Yet, if we were to examine a chair microscopically, we could see swirls of particles. We have various words for ‘chair’ in different languages. These are all relative. We ‘make’ a chair in our own minds. However, we sit on it. It works; it is adequate for the task. A chair is an ‘encounter through interpretation’.
Surprisingly, Kristeva does not mention the role of hyperbole in Aristotle writing about friendship in his Nichomachean Ethics. Aristotle recognises the need for lovers to move beyond the rational in an excess of love.
It can be helpful to consider examples in more modern fiction, such as the unable to grieve Miss Havisham in Dickens, or the self-obsessed, withdrawn Gollum in Tolkien.
Kristeva does not mention the more primitive assertion by Jesus that he was to be found in the stranger as the poor, the sick, the prisoner and so on (Matthew 25:31–46). This should have precluded baptism?
Cixous (in Sellers (ed), 1994, p. 27) for example, writes, “…to look straight at God, look him in the eye, which is none other than my own face, but seen naked, the face of my soul. The face of ‘God’ is the unveiling, the staggering vision of the construction that we are…”.
Irigaray (1993, p.28) suggests that male/female see each other as “this wonder which looks at what it looks at forever, always for the first time…”.
Kristeva [writes about Bernard of Clairvaux as having a theology of love, whereby love is innate in human beings as created in the image of God. God’s love for a person is reflected in the human desire to allow the Other to be, or ego affectus est. Love is then that which must always exist as Beyond to be love for the Other, and innately pre-existing ego formation. Is Kristeva’s religion of love an unconscious theism?
When conducting a cross-curricular audit of spirituality in a large secondary school in the 1990s, the Science department engaged with great enthusiasm, displaying posters and writing slogans.
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O’Donnell, K. Spirituality as Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural education (SMSC). Using Julia Kristeva to rethink a spirituality of education. j. relig. educ. 71, 109–122 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40839-023-00199-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40839-023-00199-9