Meaning of Lives: Biography, Autobiography, and the Spiritual Quest, The

The Meaning of Lives: Biography, Autobiography, and the Spiritual Quest. By Richard A. Hutch. London and Washington, D.C.: Cassell, 1997. xii + 225 pp. $79.50 (cloth).

In The Meaning of Lives Richard Hutch claims provocatively that biography-stories of lives-read and pondered with "emphatic introspection" (passim) can help us to understand ourselves better. Biographies and autobiographies can augment our repertoire of images and ideas about what it means to be a human being. Because of this, studying lives is a moral activity, a "personal spiritual quest" that can be converted from "private rumination into public resolution" (p. 49). Writing and reading lives is also a sensuous activity, requiring the student of lives to use her own body experience to reconstruct the immediacy of the other's lived experience.

Hutch describes the biographer's search for the truth of the life of his subject as requiring identification both of a "coherent character" and of the "fateful ironies" that interrupt, disrupt, and propel that life in unanticipated directions. Examining Erik Erikson's biographies of Martin Luther and Mohandas Gandhi, he argues that lives, explored with appropriate complexity and subtlety, can have soteriological import for writer and readers. Awareness of death is the essential starting point for both subject and writer or reader, and from this perspective comes recognition that one's body, as a link in a genetic chain, exists to be recycled through the turnover of generations. The second "law of the mortal body," according to Hutch, is "active biological/gender complementarity" (p. 88).

Early in the book Hutch insists that what he means by "body" is not the concept of body, but something rather more concrete. It becomes clear only gradually that for him "the body itself ' is not to be understood as the subject's dental history, blood pressure, what he eats or how he exercises, but the form or shape of physical/biological life characterized by natality, sexuality, and aging toward death-mortality. It is in these biological processes that "Otherness, or God" is encountered (p. 107). John Updike's autobiography, SelfConsciousness: A Memoir is Hutch's example of an autobiography deliberately structured by awareness that "living is an experience of a dying body" (p. 152). The memoir, An Evil Cradling, Brian Keenan's account of his incarceration and torture, supports Hutch's emphasis on the frequently "forgotten" dark undertow of human life-the presence, in life, of disintegration and death. Narration of his own vivid experience of disintegration exemplifies his conclusion that "spiritual wholeness comes about only by means of the bodily expenditure of life, and that 'wholeness' comes in only second to `falling apart"' (p. 123). Ultimately, he blames Augustine and Thomas Aquinas-evidently authors with whom he is largely unfamiliar, or he could not have done so-for the repugnance toward bodily nature that renders much of Western theology superficial and fantasy-laden.

Hutch's persuasive argument for a body-based sense of writing and reading lives is flawed by the centrality and prominence he gives to the principle of biological/gender complementarity. He defines homosexuality as "a cultural epiphenomenon with a biological appearance" (n. 18, p. 181). Although he acknowledges that reproduction occurs socially and culturally as well as biologically, he claims that "men and women reproduce the best of themselves together." Moreover he advocates that the way to encounter God is to obey the dual laws of generational turnover/succession and "biological/gender complementarity in all you think, feel, and do." This makes it very clear that Hutch considers heterosexuality (p. 103) crucial for conducting a rich and accountable moral and religious life. Perhaps more biographies of people of sexual orientations other than heterosexuality are needed to diversify and enrich our models of exemplary lives. For, as Hutch persuasively argues, "studying lives is a guide to living together" (p. 93).

MARGARET R. MILES

Graduate Theological Union Berkeley, California

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Winter 1999
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