The Christian tradition believes that the truest sense of oneself is rooted in God's love, and our fulfillment entails a lived awareness of that communion. Within the tradition, spiritual exercises concern contemplative paths that help the human person see, accept, and participate in that intimacy.
In contemporary scholarship, the concept of spiritual exercises has received significant attention from the spiritual theologians, and it is finally receiving attention from fundamental and systematic theologians. This work of Ryan Duns offers a systematic reading of the philosophy of William Desmond to help the contemporary person discern a way of life that leads to a lived intimacy with God in the world. Thereby, Duns provides an intricate philosophical and theological account of spiritual exercises, showing the intelligibility of one's response to the call of God in the very interiority of one's life and in one's world.
At the start of Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age, Duns uses Charles Taylor's philosophy to orient the reader to the wintry landscape of faith in the modern West. The author moves to deploy Desmond's metaphysics, which emerges in the midst of being. This metaphysics is concerned with life as it unfolds within and upon one's existence. Then, Duns draws from Pierre Hadot's philosophy of spiritual exercises to augment Desmond's metaxological metaphysics. Duns argues that readers would better apprehend Desmond's philosophy not for its content about reality but as a way of knowing reality. Such an approach allows Duns to invite readers to a set of spiritual exercises for the sake of attuning them to the presence of God. The work ends with a speculative consideration on how seeing the divine amid one's life can lead one to think, feel, and act in a particular way.
Though the last chapter is his most theoretical, Duns offers concrete assistance in how contemporary philosophers, theologians, and ethicists can gain from engaging Desmond's philosophy. Duns shows a more robust way to perform philosophical and theological reflection. Instead of relying on the creative tension between orthodoxy and orthopraxy, Duns offers a more integrative and holistic way of helping scholars and their students grasp their “emplacement within the world,” proposing a fourfold tension among orthodoxy, orthopraxy, orthopathy, and “orthoaesthesis” (274–77). Right practice is the cost of right belief, and right feeling is the fruit of right seeing. Duns's last chapter reminds the reader how contemporary education has truncated knowing. Truth is adequated to the rational intellect and has ignored mysticism—education in the power of charity. Too often, the height of the educational ascent is reduced to the intellect.
Duns’ well-written, engaging, and challenging work can speak to persons in the field of evangelization, for example, formators in a seminary, of the importance of spirituality: living in intimacy with God and others. His book also serves as a corrective to a contemporary distortion of spirituality, tainted with excessive individualism and removed from critical philosophical and theological thinking. Importantly, Duns’ book can speak to persons in the field of education, including Catholic higher education, reminding educators that their colleges and universities should orient students toward an integrated way of life. At the end of their education, college graduates can perceive a meaningful whole and not merely matriculate with a broad general education.
Lastly, and as a humble suggestion, I hope that Duns’ next book project bears a stronger Christological impression. The Christian spiritual life is Christo-centric, trinitarian, and ecclesial. Such a retrieval can advance his work on the philosophy and theology of spiritual exercises.
