“Spiritual reading” is usually associated with patristic, monastic, and medieval modes of reading. It's fruitful, however, to shift the focus and ask what the Spirit has to do with our reading.
The Spirit is the enlivening breath of God, the water of God who makes us into a fruitful garden. Paul warns us not to quench or grieve the Spirit, and we are to walk by the Spirit in everything. This includes our studies.We are to cultivate the virtues and fruits of the Spirit, and exhibit them, in the way we study. The classroom isn't a Spirit-free zone.
How do we read in the Spirit?
First, by reading with love. Love is the first fruit of the Spirit, and the second great commandment is to love our neighbors as ourselves. We keep company with neighbors by keeping company with books. Books present themselves to us as friends or enemies. Either way, we're called to love, in the Spirit.
Love requires attentiveness. When we love someone, we are attentive to their needs and desires. When we love a book, we are attentive to what the author is presenting. Reading in the Spirit, we don't drift from the page every three seconds to check our text messages.
Love is patient. Reading in the Spirit takes time. Reading in the Spirit, we don't just to conclusions about what the author is saying.
Some readers have a well-trained eye for such things, but learning the contours of a fictional world or the intricacies of an author’s methods always takes time. Robert Penn Warren commented that the most “intuitive and immediate” reading of a poem will likely not come at the first reading, but rather at the tenth or even the fiftieth reading. To grasp the whole, one must, he speculated, be able not only to remember the beginning of the poem, but remember its end; one must be able to “remember forward.” Patience, in short, is an essential quality of a good reader.
Patience is necessary not only to learn the contours of a particular work, but also to learn how literature works. A patient reader takes time to mature as a reader.
Flannery O’Connor noted in one of her essays that some works of fiction should be commended only to mature readers. She acknowledges that works should be judged according to their “total effect,” not by isolated passages. A book may have sexual content, for example, and not be pornographic or immoral. But O’Connor wisely goes on to say that an immature reader lacks the tools and literary maturity to feel the “total effect.”
Immature readers will not be able to integrate passages that arouse passion into the total experience of reading a book. They may return again and again to the sexy passages to reexperience the original titillation, without ever realizing that the sexy passages are in a book that challenges cheap sex. Only long exposure to literature develops the skills necessary to recognize what a particular book or author is up to. O’Connor ended the essay by protesting that high school reading should not be selected by what the students wish to read: “Their tastes should not be consulted; they are being formed.”
Love is not arrogant. Reading in the Spirit, we honor and humble ourselves before the author. A “suspension of disbelief” is elementary to reading fiction, but it is rarely recognized as an act of humility. As G. K. Chesterton said, humility makes us small, and that means that everything around us becomes large and astounding and magnificent. Humility before the world that the author presents means that we allow him to set the rules, but it also gives reading an element of play.
Loving humility before the author is not only a matter of the minimal “let’s pretend” acceptance of his world. It also includes following the contours of plot, imagery, and character by which a work of fiction progresses.
The Spirit who produces the fruit of patient, humble love is also the Spirit of creativity. Contrary to modern conceptions, free creativity isn’t fundamentally incompatible with submission to authority. Humility is the only possible starting point for creativity. Man cannot produce anything that is absolutely ex nihilo, and attempting to do so is of the essence of original sin. Pride is never creative, except of Pandaemonium.
Though not creative as God is creative, humans are creative beings. And creativity in every art presupposes a recognition of the qualities and contours of the materials being used. A sculptor must submit not only to the characteristics of marble, but to the peculiar shape and pattern of this piece of marble.
Reading is not, of course, creative in the same sense as writing or composing or painting. Yet it is creative in much the same way that performance of a piece of music is creative. Pianists and violinists, like the composer, are artists, and like all artists they must recognize the auctoritas of the material that has come from the hand of the auctor. In the case of a musical performer, the material is the pre-existing composition. That composition “limits” the creativity of the performer; if he is going to play this Bach fugue, he must play these notes, count out this rhythm, maintain this pace.
Humility before the text means entering the text and the world that it creates, and coming to know your way around. Once you become familiar with the hallways, floor plan, and general layout, you may be able to find hidden passageways. But it would be illegitimate -- not to mention impolite -- to create hidden passageways in a work before you learned your way around.
None of this means that Spiritual readers merely accept whatever the author tries to sell. The Spirit is the Spirit of truth; He is the light that flushes vermin from dark places. So the Spiritual reader is also the properly critical reader, the reader who must reject an author's lies and correct his misjudgments. But the Spiritual reader rejects and corrects with the same Spirit he reads, the Spirit of love.