These two 'spiritualities' - of self-discovery and of self-making - possess, as it were, different moods. In the one predominates the mood and the language of passivity, of calm certainty, an untroubled sense of everything having been in place all the time; it is a spirituality whose metaphors of spiritual progress are those of restoration of lines of continuity which in fact were never wholly severed, so that what is restored is the sense of how things truly are and always have been - indeed, in at least an implicit and inchoate sense, were always recognized to have been.
It is a spirituality in which sin and failure are represented as the rupture of the conscious, actively desiring and knowing self from its true relationship with its true centre, in which sin is the condition in which the conscious self is focused upon a point 'outside' that centre within, like an image in double focus. It is therefore a characteristic of this spirituality of self-discovery that the goal of the spiritual life is reintegration, the readjustment of the image into single focus, the re-establishment of a unity, which sin has fractured, between conscious empirical selfhood and the pre-existing depths of one's being from which God can never be expelled.
The mood of the spirituality of self-making is, we might say, more 'existential'. If the emphasis of self-discovery is on continuity, the emphasis of self-making is on breaks, crises and novelty; less on the Plotinian theme of the soul's return to its source, more on the soul's reaching out to that which is not yet; less on the domestic emotions of return to what is already, however dimly, known, more on the erotic passions of a yearning for the inaccessible.
And the narrative of the soul's progress in the spirituality of self-making is punctuated by crises of loss of the familiar and of startling encounters with the unexpected, for it is the spirituality less of memory as recollection than of memory as reconstruction, of memory constantly challenged to re-make the past in new terms and, as of the past, so of personal identity. For the spirituality of self-discovery, I am what I was in my origins; for the spirituality of self-making, I am what I may hope for.
The Darkness of God Denys Turner
