Few serious books on spirituality are predicated upon a pun, but Michael Demkovich's A Soul-Centered Life: Exploring an Animated Spirituality is certainly not like most of these books. Both a thoroughgoing critique of the current state of spirituality, as well as a creative contribution to the field itself, Demkovich's latest showing is ultimately a plea to re-appropriate the Thomistic teaching on the soul and so literally to reanimate both the Church and the academy in light of the classical teaching.
The author takes on two distinct yet related problems: the first concerning those who self-identify as ‘spiritual, but not religious’, and the second concerning the state of spirituality in the contemporary academy. While he stops short of identifying an actual causal relation, Demkovich does seem to suggest that if the intellectual pursuit of spirituality were better grounded and more coherent then it is likely that the confused state of contemporary spiritual practice would reflect that stability. In fact, he structures his book around the connection: the first part lays out the author's critique of various contemporary models and offers his own alternative methodology; the second part introduces a fourfold schema which is intended to serve as a model for how academic spirituality can be accomplished in a truly integral way; the final part returns to questions posed at the beginning and further argues against the ‘spiritual, but not religious camp’ in a way that is meant to be compelling both to spiritual theologians and everyday undergrads alike.
Demkovich's major critique with the established schools of spirituality present in the academy is that in one way or another they all focus too exclusively on particular practices. In the critique section of the first part the author addresses a number of popular approaches: spirituality as liturgy, as academic discipline, as history, and as theology. For Demkovich none of these will do. When seen as liturgy, spirituality tends to lock practice too fixedly into the rites and rubrics of public worship. As history, it can become too heavily contexualized and so seem remote. And as theology, it tends either to become so distinct an academic discipline as to masquerade as autonomous or to become simply another distinct hermeneutic or analytic method in the context of some broader theological inquiry. Demkovich proposes an alternative vision, of a discipline which sees the soul as the integrating factor of the human person and so spirituality as the integrating field or discipline which binds theology to all other fields as well as to the life of the everyday Christian.
Because the soul is the intellectual skeleton-key for Demkovich, this new methodology is necessarily personal. That is, investigating specific people's spiritualities will be what yields an account of the human person in relation to God that is at once intellectually significant and morally desirable. Most of the book is taken up with case studies in his new method, focusing on the characters of Maximus the Confessor, Catherine of Siena, Ignatius of Loyola, and Teresa of Calcutta. These sketches attend to three major factors that constitute the person's spirituality: the self, life, and doctrine. Doctrine is of particular interest to Demkovich and so as he associates a particular type of spirituality (ascetic, mystical, aesthetical, and social-critical) with each of the subjects, likewise he identifies a particular doctrine that he identifies as central to their way of life. For instance, the ascetic spirituality of Maximus the Confessor is associated with the mystery of the Incarnation, whereas the speculative mysticism of Catherine of Siena is focused particularly on the Blessed Trinity.
As important as the methodological move is for Demkovich, the real upshot comes in his conclusion where he returns to the question of being spiritual but not religious. The critical study of spirituality as presented in the book will always yield both a morality and a doctrinal framework of theology operative in the life of the individual practitioner. The very spiritual person, then, who distances themselves from organized religion out of a fear of dogma and an exclusive moral order, has only succeeded in producing yet another religion. Further, to study any individual spiritual writer or their practices outside of their historical and doctrinal context will necessarily yield a very flawed picture, and any attempt to emulate those practices devoid of their doctrinal content will always be wanting, for the animating force, the very life of the practice, is the doctrine. As Demkovich leaves it, then, the problem of spirituality without religion is either that it is no spirituality at all, or that, in one's effort to live a given spirituality apart from the religious tradition in which it emerged, one succeeds only in producing an entirely new religion and spirituality.
Demkovich sets an enormous task for himself, both to offer a new and insightful approach to spirituality as a discipline as well as to give answer to the question which he associates with the great hunger of the human heart, and the critical importance that doctrine and religious practice have in responding to that need. He accomplishes the latter by way of the former, and in the process takes the reader on a rollicking and sometimes breathtaking romp through the history of largely Western Christian spirituality. This book will serve as a helpful resource to both critical scholars in the field and pastoral care workers, and may just help to answer, at least for some, why ‘spiritual, but not religious’ just won't cut it for serious thinkers.
