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The Theology of Christian Spirituality |
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Edward Yarnold
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Each Church, and probably each theologian within each Church, would produce a different theology of spirituality. This essay, therefore, cannot be expected to satisfy all. But I hope that most Christians will be able to find in it some ideas with which they feel at home. In any event the bibliography points the readers to other treatments of the subject based on different Christian traditions.
I shall take as my starting point Geoffrey Wainwright's definition of spirituality as the 'combination of praying and living'.1) It is this embodiment of prayer in life that the NT writers describe in such phrases as 'a living sacrifice', 'spiritual worship' (Rom. 12.5; cf. 2.9), and 'a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name' (Heb. 13.15). Christians are to be 'a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ' (1 Pet. 2.5; cf. 2.9). In the search for understanding of this priesthood we shall consider the nature of the God who called us to it, the human nature which God designed for the fulfillment of this priesthood, and the sin and grace which respectively frustrate this priesthood and make it possible.
GOD THE CREATOR
God made us because it is his nature to create; not out of need, as if he would be bored or unfulfilled without creatures to interest him, or impotent without creatures to serve him, for then God would be reduced to our own level. God creates because his nature is to love (cf. 1 John 4.8, 16). Nothing could exist unless there were such a God whose being is loving. Descartes proposed the one basic, indisputable truth: 'I think, therefore I am.' Perhaps we can formulate a second, even more basic truth: 'I am, therefore there exists a God whose nature is to love.'
Human love, despite the mystic confusion of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde who wanted to become totally one in annihilation, respects the otherness of the loved one and wishes to be united with that other in their otherness. The same is true of God's love. In John Macquarrie's evocative phrase, derived from the first chapter of Genesis, God 'lets us be' in the double sense of bringing us into existence and respecting our otherness.2) But he also enables us in our otherness to be united with himself. There are accordingly three coefficients in God's love: he is the those beings with himself. Christian tradition, following the NT, has identified these three coefficients as the Father who is the source of being, the Son or Word through whom all things are made, and the Holy Spirit who unites personal beings with God as his sons and daughters (cf. Rom. 8.15-16).
What has been said so far contains a paradox. It is God's nature to create, but he does not need to create. The explanation of the paradox is found in the doctrine of the Trinity. The threefold movement by which the one who is self-sufficient being gives existence to another and is united with that other in love, which we saw in God's relation with ourselves, is found primarily and wholly fulfilled within the unchanging and indivisible nature of God. From all eternity, independently of creation, God is satisfied love, that is to say, he is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But his nature as love is such that freely, without necessity or need, it is also expressed outside himself in time when he creates other beings who can love him in return. The doctrine of the Trinity is the doctrine of the altruism of God.3)
HUMAN NATURE
God did not create because he wanted toys to play with. It would be unworthy of him to create except for the sake of entering into a relationship of mutual love with his creatures. Therefore the existence of personal creatures, who are capable of loving, must be the reason for the existence of impersonal creatures too;4) the impersonal exist in order to help the personal to attain and express that love. It is by providing this opportunity for personal beings that material objects that material objects fulfil what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called their 'spiritual power'.5)
Yet of themselves not even personal beings are capable of entering into a relationship of love with God: to believe otherwise would be to bring God down to our own level. For this reason Catholic tradition has called this relationship 'supernatural', meaning by that term that such a relationship with God is utterly beyond the powers of any created beings. God's love is creative and transforms his creatures, and becomes a principle of new life in them, so that they become capable of loving him. This creative power of God's love is often called 'grace'; sometimes it is called 'sanctifying' or 'habitual' grace, terms which imply that it is not just a momentary help, but a permanent, vital source of holiness. The NT writers express the same idea in other terms: for St Paul Christians 'in of Christ' become a 'new creation', so that Christ is their life; 2 Peter speaks of Christians becoming 'partakers of the divine nature'. Grace is the presence of the Holy Spirit, who makes us God's sons and daughters.6) Eastern Orthodox writers have often applied to this transforming power of God's love the startling description of 'deification'.
God designed human nature specifically so that we might undergo this creative transformation. Here we are brought up against a second paradox. God's transforming grace is supernatural; yet it could not transform us unless god had already set in our natures and affinity to himself. To express this affinity many writers have borrowed from the first chapter of Genesis the phrase 'the image of God.' Thomas Aquinas, who spoke of the fundamental urge in each being's nature as its 'natural desire', believed that the natural desire of human beings was for God.7) St Augustine was making the same point when he wrote: 'You have made us for yourself, and our heart knows no rest until it finds rest in you.'8) God could not enable a doll to become his daugher, because to do so it would have to cease to be a doll, because there is in a doll no affinity to God. But because there is in human nature the image of God and the natural desire for him, he can make us a new creation so that, while remaining ourselves, we are able to become his daughters and sons.
I have elsewhere9) referred to grace as God's 'second gift', the first gift being his creation of humanity in his own image. However, such terms as the supernatural and the second gift do not imply that God could ever leave human beings without the offer of grace. It seems imcompatible with God's goodness to make us capable of receiving his transforming love and to deprive that receptivity of this fulfillment. But grace is a second gift. It is one thing to make us capable of receiving his transforming love, and another actually to transform us; it is one thing to make us capable of receiving his Spirit, and another actually to give us his Spirit.
The life of the person who has become a new creation in Christ and the son or daughter of God is a relationship based on knowledge and love of him. 'This is eternal life, that they know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent' (John 17.3). 'God's love has been poured out into our hearts through Holy Spirit who has been given to us' (Rom. 5.5). Therefore, to return to the question we raised at the beginning of this chapter, the nature which God must give to a being he has created to exercise a spiritual priesthood must involve a capacity, not yet to know and love God, but to be transformed by his love into a creature who can know and love him. If the doctrine of The Trinity is about the altruistic God, the doctrine of human nature is about the restlessness of God in the human heart.
Several attempts have been made to define that aspect in our nature which makes us capable of being transformed by God's grace.10) Perhaps one can recognize it in two human capacities. The first is our ability to make moral choices; in such decisions, when we reach for the highest good we know, God is leading us on the himself, whether we recognize the fact or not. The second is our ability to know and love other human beings. God does not allow our love to stop there, but enables it to reach through the other human being to himself. This is one way in which the second great commandment, to love our neighbour, is 'like' the first commandment, to love God (Matt. 22.37-9). Whenever we act as responsible, loving persons, we are in the field of grace, and exercising our spiritual priesthood.
SIN
Sadly, however, the gulf between God and man which grace has to bridge is not just that between the infinite and the finite: it is also the gap between the All-holy and the sinner. 'All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God' (Rom. 3.23). Nor can we find security in the thought that we used to be sinners, but by the grace of God are sinners no longer. We should take seriously the confession of present sinfulness that is often found in the lives of saints, and is typified by this remark of St Bruno's, addressed to the members of the Carthusian order which he founded: 'I rejoice indeed, as is right, for the growth of the fruits of your virtues, but I lament and am ashamed that I lie inert and torpid in the filth of my sins.'11) Therefore God's love and his grace always need to be forgiving.
The Catholic tradition maintains that, even though the gift of grace, which is the presence of the Holy Spirit, becomes part of our own being, making us essentially holy and pleasing to God, we will often fail to reflect that essential holiness in our everyday choices. Human beings in this life are never perfectly integrated. The doctrine of venial sin expresses this gap between the two levels of our being. It implies that ordinary Christians at the deepest level of their being will have made a choice of values which can be described as a 'fundamental option' for God, while repreatedly failing to express that option fully in their everyday choices.12) Thus ST Paul bewailed the discrepancy between his ideals and the reality of his life: 'I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do' (Rom. 7.19). Paul Tillich, adapting scholastic terminology, spoke of this disharmony as the distinction between essence and existence.13)
The gap, then, which separates human beings from God is both ontological and moral. Accordingly we have a double need for God's grace: so that we may share in his nature, and so that our sins may be forgiven and healed. The Catholic and Orthodox traditions on the one hand, and the Protestant tradition on the other, have tended to emphasize different aspects of this double action of God's grace. The former stress the need human beings would have for grace even if there were no sin; the second stresses the fact that in practice everybody is a sinner requiring forgiveness. Hans Küng's first, and perhaps his best, book, Justification, and the pioneering ecumenical work by Charles Moeller and Gérard Philips on grace suggests that the Chatholic and Protestant viewpoints need not be incompatible.14)
THE GRACE OF CHRIST
The highest and unique instance of God's felf-giving is his entry into the world in the person of Jesus Christ. The highest and unique fulfillment of the human capacity for God is found in the life of Jesus Christ. But the incarnated divinity and the God-filled humanity of Jesus are not only for himself; they are 'for us and for our salvation'. In order words the grace which we have been discussing as the vital principle of all spirituality is the grace of Christ. This means not only that Christ won this grace for us by his death and resurrection, but also that it is a share in the life of the God-man himself. Accordingly St Paul could describe the life of the sprit by saying equally that we are in Christ and that Christ is in us. In him is the life which is the light of humanity (cf. John 1.4). Consequently the imitation of Christ, which has been a theme of spiritual writers from the time of the NT, is not just the copying of Jesus as a model, nor just the acceptance of Christ's values: it means that we share Christ's own life organically, as the scriptural images of the vine and the body imply, so that we grow from within into the likeness of Christ, unless by sin we distort our development.15)
The life of Christ that we share is the life of the risen Christ, who still in the resurrection bears the marks of the passion (cf. Rev. 5.6). According to the Fourth Gospel, the passion is identical with the glory of Christ (cf. John 17.1). One interpretation of the great christological hymn in Philippians 2 is that Jesus Christ's divinity is expressed in self-emptying and humiliation, and not concealed by them.
The same truth seems to underlie such sayings as that it was 'necessary' that the Christ should suffer before entering his glory (Luke 24.26; for Luke the passion precedes the glory and is not identical with it), and that it was 'fitting' that the Saviour should be made 'perfect through suffering' (Heb. 2.10). It was necessary because the Father willed it. But that answer gets nowhere near the heart of the matter, for why did the Father will it? If we say it was because the Saviour had to conform to the pattern of all human nature, which must achieve fulfillment through self-emptying like the grain of wheat which must die if it is to be fruitful (John 12.24), then the question still remains why God made human nature so that it must follow the law of the grain of wheat. May one suggest that the answer is that human nuature is made in God's own image? The law of the grain of wheat reflects God's own nature: the glory of God himself lies in self-giving.
The members of Christ's body, then, share the life of the Head, who bears a crown of glory which is still a crown of thorns. If both are seen in their full significance, there is no distinction between a spirituality of the cross and a spirituality of the resurrection.
MYSTICAL PRAYER
It follows from what has been said so far that all prayer, and therefore all spirituality, is the fruit of God's grace. It is the Holy Spirit who makes it possible for us to pray 'Abba, Father' (Rom. 8.15-16), just as he makes it possible for us to make an act of faith in the lordship of Jesus (I Cor. 12.3). All prayer, then, is supernatural. Nevertheless, some writers, including one no less authoritative than St Teresa of Avila, reserve the term 'supernatural' for the higher stages of pyayer, such as St John of the Cross describes as 'infused contemplation', and which are commonly referred to as 'mystical prayer'.16)
The point at issue is not whether prayer is possible without grace: none of the great Christian writers on prayer has suggested this. In its dependence upon grace, all prayer is supernatural. The truth underlying St Teresa's confusing terminology is that the higher stage of prayer are a grace which God does not seem to offer to everybody. Some writers, like A. Poulain, make the difference between ordinary and mystical prayer a difference of kind, so that ordinary prayer does not contain 'the least germ of the mystic state'.17) Others seem to make the distinction rather one of degree, Hans Urs von Balthasar, when he writes that all forms of prayer depend fundamentally on 'grace as election, calling, justification by God the Father'.18) David Knowles, while making the difference one of kind as well as degree, concurs with von Balthasar's description of the mystical life as 'a full expansion of the Christian life of grace'. So too for Friedrich von Hügel mysticism is one of the essential elements of religion.19)
THE DARK NIGHT
Many of the great writers on spirituality have spoken of mystical prayer in terms of darkness. Sometimes writers, such as Gregory of Nyssa, have used the metaphor of darkeness to state that human concepts are inadequate to express God's nature, for God is 'separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a darkness' (Life of Moses, ii. 163. See pp. 166-7). More often, however, the image of darkness is applied, not to human thinking about God, but to prayer itself. Thus in the fourteenth century the author of the Cloud of Unknown spoke of a cloud which 'hindereth thee, so that thou mayest neither see him clearly by light of understanding in thy reason, nor feel him in sweetness of love in thine affection'.20) All that we may be aware of is a 'naked intent unto God'. St John of the Cross provided the classical discussion of this experience in the Dark Night of the Soul.21) The experience serves to purify the intention, stripping the will of all unworthy motives for praying and leaving only the desire of God for his own sake. Most writers agree that the dark night is often felt as an inability to pray, but the inability is only apparent. The spiritual darkness is really a light, which 'the soul which is not enlightened and purged' is unable to recognize, because it 'darkens' the act of the 'natural intelligence'.22)
In other words, such darkness is not inability to pray but pure prayer. Often when we pray we use words or are aware of religious affections. but the essence of prayer is not words or feelings, but the movement of our wills to God in response to grace. In the prayer of darkness this movement of our wills is 'naked', stripped of words, ideas and feelings. People who are experiencing this form of prayer, and perhaps have been experiencing it for a long time, may have great difficulty in recognizing it, even though they have read all about it. and frequently despair of their ability to pray.23) The spiritual director will need to help them to recognize genuine prayer of darkness, not their own self-esteem, but to prevent them from discouragement or even from giving up serious prayer altogether.
At the beginning of this chapter we recalled St Paul's description of the Christian life as a living sacrifice. This insight into the connection between life and worship is expressed in the well-known saying laborare est orare (to work is to pray). But the principle is open to abuse. Work will be prayer only if there is also prayer which is not work. We cannot expect our whole life to become a continuous act of worship unless there are regular times when we lay aside our worldly occupations and raise up our mind and heart to God in prayer.
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