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SpecialThe Drama of theIssue Spirit THE DRAMA OF THE SPIRIT Essays in Memory of Michael Paul Gallagher sj Edited by Francesca Bugliani Knox ®CSI IGNAZIANA 2017 The Drama of the Spirit rivista di ricerca teologica Preface by ROSSANO ZAS FRIZ DE COL SJ In November 2016 the Heythrop Institute for Religion and Society (Heythrop Col- lege, University of London), directed by Michael Kirwan, SJ, hosted a two day confer- ence in memory of Michael Paul Gallagher, SJ, who had died twelve months previously. The Conference, entitled ‘Dive Deeper: Explorations in Faith, Poetry and Culture’, was organized by Francesca Bugliani Knox. After the conference Francesca wrote to me asking whether Ignaziana might consider publishing the papers, ‘most of which’, she mentioned, ‘were written in an Ignatian mode’, as a special issue. If such a publication were possible, the papers could then appear as a structured whole rather than be dis- persed in journals and other forms of publication. The Editors of the Centre for Igna- tian Spirituality of the Pontifical Gregorian University replied enthusiastically, saying that such a publication would indeed be possible. It would, they added, provide a fitting memory of Fr Gallagher, who had been for many years a professor at our University and had devoted much of his life to exploring how faith could enter into fruitful dialogue with contemporary culture. Spirituality was not for him an academic exercise, familiar though he was with the scholarly literature on the subject. Rather, it was a living engage- ment both in a secular and in a Christian, specifically, Ignatian sense. This approach is apparent in his many books and articles, and, we hope, in the essays included in this special issue. May they enlighten and nurture the hearts of those who knew him and equally those who did not. PREFACE 2 The Drama of the Spirit rivista di ricerca teologica ‘Faith can be stifled by mere prose: it needs some touch of poetry to find its fire’ 3 The Drama of the Spirit rivista di ricerca teologica Introduction by FRANCESCA BUGLIANI KNOX Following an intellectually challenging gap year (1960-1961) at the University of Caen Normandy, Michael Paul Gallagher felt called to explore the reasons of the existing split between faith and culture, later defined by Paul VI as ‘the drama of our time’ (Evangelii Nuntiandi § 20). When, shortly after, he entered the Society of Jesus as a novice, he did so ‘with an intuitive sense of a mission of making faith real in a world of unbelief’, a world for which, as a result of his stay in France, he had now ‘much more feeling and sympathy’ (‘A Passion for Faith’ 86). He had parted with a ‘world-despising spirit’ and discovered the passion of his life which was to ‘focus and develop slowly in the years ahead - a passion to make sense of God for people today’ (‘A Passion for Faith’ 85). The ‘convergence’ of his life, as Gallagher explained later, asked him ‘to stand at various crossroads or frontiers and to reflect on what he found there’ (‘A Passion for Faith’ 92). Long before he was invited, in 1990, to work in the Holy See’s Pontifical Council for Dialogue with Non-Believers, Gallagher had uncovered the silent obstacles to faith present in our culture from the standpoint of the frontier explorer. In his writ- ings he had highlighted experiences of belief and unbelief shaped by contemporary cul- ture, listening attentively to the world around him and applying constantly Ignatius’s principle of presupposition and Ignatius’s manner of helping souls. Hence Gallagher’s reflections, although solidly anchored in orthodoxy and the Tradition, were not born out of books, theories and ideas but out of his many personal experiences with people he had accompanied, in answer to their needs. Help My Unbelief (1983), for example, aimed at helping readers puzzled about why God seemed unreal to them and so paved the way towards a new ecumenism of believer and unbeliever. Free to Believe (1987) unveiled the importance of personal self freedom before any journey to explicit faith. Struggles of Faith (1990) commended the role of the imagination in literature and the liturgy as a way to lead people to be receptive of mystery. Where Is Your God? (1991) was a response to the spiritual hunger he had detected among young university students. Gallagher’s early works were inspired by the conviction that faith could not be arrived at slowly through a cerebral approach. At a time when explicit atheism was becoming rare and religious indifference was spreading, faith could only be discovered, he thought, within a certain disposition or attitude. Like Ignatius of Loyola in the sixteenth century and Karl Rahner in the twentieth, Gallagher promoted the liberating power of the heart and the imagination, shifting the agenda of faith from issues of truth to issues of freedom, from doctrinal content to spiritual experience. His ministry in the zones of disposition and desire was a way of re-thinking ‘pre-evangelization’. ‘Religiousness of the spirit is INTRODUCTION 4 The Drama of the Spirit rivista di ricerca teologica deeper than our religion of the Church’, Gallagher wrote echoing Karl Rahner, adding that ‘ultimately they need each other for a full language of faith’ (Where Is Your God? 19). Not surprisingly, Gallagher maintained that literature and the arts had a vital role to play in opening up the heart and the imagination to faith. As a university student, and later as a lecturer of English literature, he became aware that people were ready for the recognition of God only if their roads towards truth could find room again for the aesthet- ic, the symbolic and the affective. In a culture where the absence of God was ‘an unques- tioned assumption’, delving into works of literature could lead, he thought, to a richer and more personal road to meaning than the colder paths of rationality (‘What Might St Igna- tius Say About Unbelief Today?’). His first publication (1977) was a study guide to T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, a play which divides up its characters into those of great- er or lesser spiritual awareness and also raises the spiritual responsiveness of its audience. As the knights in the play step forward and, in modern language, try to rationalize away the spiritual significance of the event, the audience is forced to undergo a trial of discern- ment (T.S. Eliot:’Murder in the Cathedral’ 13). Like the women of Canterbury of Eliot’s play, they eventually ‘glimpse a sanctity that is rare and beyond them’, which is at the same time a sanctity that ‘reveals the cowardice that cramps their vision’. In short, the spectators become ‘conscious of this and aware of their weakness’ (37). Since that first publication Gallagher often drew on literary texts facilitating the process by which a work of art can reach our feelings, awaken our imagination and call for discernment. At the end of the five years during which he served as a research officer of the Secre- tariat for Dialogue with Non-Believers in Rome and also wrote What Will Give Us Hap- piness (1992) and Letters on Prayer (1994), Gallagher published, in a spirit of service and with great sensitivity to human realities, the acclaimed What Are They Saying About Unbelievers? (1995), a learned and timely survey of theological and pastoral approaches to unbelief. When, in 1995, he began teaching fundamental theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University Gallagher continued to regard himself as ‘a convergence thinker asked to communicate between worlds’ (‘A Passion for Theology’ 90) and kept investi- gating the intersections between faith and culture (Clashing Symbols 1997), literature and spirituality (Dive Deeper 2001) and theology and culture (Faith Maps 2010). Clash- ing Symbols, the more academically learned of the three, intimates that in dealing with contemporary culture from the perspective of faith we need a richer and converging spirituality which embraces cultural realities with hope, discerns them, transforms them with love and trusts the guidance of the Spirit towards unity-in-diversity. Dive Deeper (2001) shows in practice how literature and creative writing, including the dialogues between authors and thinkers imaginatively envisaged by Gallagher in his book, can open the readers up to a disposition towards faith, put them in touch with the depths of their hearts and guide them to discover unexpected correspondences between diverg- ing standpoints. Faith Maps surveys difficult theological questions by ‘translating’ into accessible language the work of major Catholic thinkers and theologians of the last one hundred and fifty years, from John Henry Newman to Joseph Ratzinger, through, among others, Maurice Blondel, Rahner and Bernard Lonergan. The distinctive paths to faith offered by these major Catholic thinkers in response to contemporary cultural challeng- INTRODUCTION 5 The Drama of the Spirit rivista di ricerca teologica es, reveal one common direction, that is, the necessity to go beyond conceptual faith. By balancing scholarly competence and imaginative skills and restoring a community of intent among modern theologians and thinkers – the novelist Flannery O’Connor in- cluded – Faith Maps becomes in itself a faith map for common readers. That Gallagher envisaged an audience of non-specialized searchers is obvious. ‘I never felt called to highly specialist work’, he wrote, ‘instead I chose, rightly or wrongly, to serve a “middle-brow” or popular market’(‘A Passion for Faith’ 90). Some saw in his attitude a danger of eclecticism, of simplification, of vagueness even. By contrast, he saw that highly specialized work ran the risk of becoming self-referential and narcissis- tic and he took on himself the difficult task of showing how academic work could be less esoteric.

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