by Fr Ian
Christian spiritual life begins with what Jesus and the gospel writers called metanoia, a Greek noun usually translated into English as repentance or conversion. They also frequently used the verb metanoein, ‘to repent’.
The literal meaning of metanoia/metanoein is ‘after thought’ or, better, ‘to think again’ or ‘to change one’s mind’, from meta (‘after’ or ‘beyond’) and noein (‘to think’, from nous = ‘mind’.)
In ancient Greek and Roman culture the word metanoia typically had a non-religious and a non-moral meaning. It often meant simply a change of mind on any subject and on occasions it was used to describe the sense of regret at having failed to seize an opportunity. But in the preaching of John the Baptist and Jesus, as recorded in the gospels, metanoia had a very definite religious connotation. It signified the abandonment of sin and the start of a new commitment to God.
The English word repentance, along with words like penance and penitence, comes from the Latin verb paenitere, meaning ‘to cause or to feel regret’. So repentance refers more to the turning away from sin aspect of metanoia. The word conversion, on the other hand - to change, to turn around - describes more the moral and spiritual reorientation aspect, the fundamental change of direction that takes place when an individual experiences the holiness of God in some way and awakens to the reality of his or her own sinfulness.
According to the testimony of Sacred Scripture and Christian Tradition, human nature is fallen and damaged and human society - ‘the world’ - is largely ruled by the devil (Jn 12:31). To enter friendship with God we have to identify and renounce the ‘evil thoughts’ which arise from deep within our own heart and conscience (Mk 7:21-23) and we also have to extricate ourselves from the pride, greed, deceit and lust which dominate so many aspects of the world around us (Eph 6:12-13; 1 Jn 5:18-19).
Christians sometimes use the word ‘conversion’ to describe the exact moment when they decided, finally and categorically, to turn away from sin and towards God. Many of us can identify this moment, or at least a specific period in our life, when we decisively ‘turned’. But in most cases there will have been a long, gradual process of moving towards this crucial moment, much of it below the level of conscious awareness. Afterwards, the new believer is summoned to embark on a lifelong journey of continuing conversion, of growing intimacy with, and deepening surrender to, God. [1]
Unlike the society of Jesus’ time or that of the mediaeval Christian commonwealth modern Western culture denies God’s existence and the reality of the supernatural realm. So today Christian conversion doesn’t only involve a turning away from past sins and a shift in moral attitudes. It also involves a huge change of intellectual outlook in the sense that, for many newcomers to faith, an atheistic or purely humanist mentality gives way to the realisation and experience of supernatural revelation, grace and love.
Reality is no longer interpreted by reason alone but now also by faith, which is the response we make on our part to God’s revelation of himself, his grace and his love. A purely naturalist and materialist outlook gives way to an awareness of another realm, above and beyond the natural and material. Earthly life is no longer seen as the sole reality. Faith brings the knowledge that ‘death is not the end’, that our life in this world is brief and transient: when it draws to a close we will pass into a new phase of existence which will last forever.
Of course there have always been people who never renounce a self-serving way of life and turn towards God. They neglect or refuse to ever think about God or prayer or life after death, about the harmful consequences of self-centred behaviour or the deeper, ultimately transcendent, meaning of love. It’s only when an individual starts to ponder such thoughts and stirrings of conscience that he or she will begin to move in the direction of conversion and relationship with God.
Hardened sin and surface Christianity
In the gospels Jesus describes an attitude of stubborn self-centredness as ‘hardness of heart’ and ‘blindness’. In his parable of the sower (Mt 13:1-23) he spoke about those men and women who reject the message of God’s Kingdom immediately because, as he puts it, the devil comes along straightaway and removes what was sown in their hearts. Similarly, his encounter with the rich young man shows that some people, confronted with the invitation to rise to a higher stage of spiritual commitment, cannot renounce certain worldly comforts and attach themselves more single-mindedly to God (Mt 19:16-30).
There are also those who think of themselves as Christian believers, but whose commitment to Christ and the Gospel is superficial. Their real underlying attitudes are basically self-serving and self-aggrandising. Their moral behaviour is dominated by the desire for selfish enjoyment without personal sacrifice, without any yearning for change and also without any remorse. They rarely engage in prayer. They either never reflect on the prospect of God’s negative judgement at the end of their life on earth or they perhaps believe that God readily excuses their offences against his commandments, which they regard as trivial and unimportant. Such individuals cannot be said to have undergone genuine metanoia.
The famous Cistercian spiritual writer Dom Jean-Baptise Chautard (1858-1935) described the first of these attitudes as ‘hardened sin’ and the second as ‘surface Christianity’. [2]
The pattern of Christian spiritual
life: death and resurrection
By way of opposition to these attitudes the first generation of Christian believers saw Christian spiritual life as having two essential aspects to it, which mirrored the two aspects of Jesus’ paschal mystery: his dying and rising, his death followed by his resurrection. After conversion every new disciple begins a process of dying to sin and rising to the new life of love, imparted and sustained by God’s grace.
Jesus himself, during his ministry, told his followers about the need for this personal spiritual death and resurrection: ‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me’ (Lk 9:23).
There can of course be many positive emotions associated with the moment of conversion and a kind of joy at having reached a definitive decision about the meaning and direction of one’s life. But Christ wanted to caution his followers that in a fallen world they will inevitably face hardships, sacrifices and suffering as a consequence of their loyalty to him and his teaching. And then there’s the other essential meaning of Jesus’ words about carrying the cross: the combat that we all have to enter into against the sinful intentions which are often deeply-rooted within us.
Jesus addressed this second aspect of Christian conversion when he informed Nicodemus: ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God’ (Jn 3:3). To embrace the Gospel is to undergo a second birth and embark on a new life, the life of salvation through Christ and sanctification by God’s grace.
Saint Paul wrote about the same thing in his letter to the Romans:
How can we, who died to sin, still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life…We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin...But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him…So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus’ (Rom 6: 2-4;6;8;11).
We could call this commitment to crucifying all selfish and egotistic motives (‘our old self’) and breaking free from the slavery of sin the negative aspect of Christian spiritual life. The ‘walking in newness of life’ and being ‘alive to God in Christ Jesus’ is the positive aspect, the life of openness to grace which brings a growing likeness to God in his qualities of love and holiness.
The three ways
Not long after the period of the first apostolic missions and the establishment of the first Christian communities the Church’s pastors and theologians began to describe the pattern of Christian spiritual growth in terms of three, rather than two, essential elements. They referred to these as the purgative, illuminative and unitive ways.
By using the word ‘ways’, meaning ‘paths’, they underlined the fact that Christian spiritual development is a journey that takes place in three main phases, each with its own distinctive features: purification of sins (purgative phase), growing spiritual enlightenment and understanding of the mysteries of faith (illuminative phase) and finally perfect holiness of life and communion of love with God (unitive phase).
Beginner, advanced, perfect
The three ways also came to be known as the stages of beginner, advanced and perfect, or childhood, adolescence and adulthood. These terms emphasise not so much the inner dispositions and actions specific to each stage but the progressive or ‘ascending’ nature of Christian moral and spiritual growth, which follows the same pattern as normal human physical and psychological maturing.
Our bodies, our minds and our consciences mature as we get older. Generally speaking, and assuming that we don’t remain stuck in a state of stubborn, hardened sin, as outlined a moment ago, our understanding of right and wrong, our intellectual understanding and our capacity for love expand and deepen as we move from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. And since God’s grace builds on our natural human capacities, which were never completely destroyed by the effects of original sin, it follows that, as a rule, the supernatural growth of our relationship with God takes place in parallel with what should be our natural human development.
So, for example, we can usually only begin to grasp the concept of God’s transcendence, engage in some form of contemplative prayer or reach the depths of selfless love, once we’ve achieved a certain degree of intellectual and moral maturation.
God’s grace, of course, can create exceptions to the general rules of psychological development, and there have been Christians who have advanced spiritually very rapidly, perhaps at a very young age (Saint Maria Goretti, or Saint Carlo Acutis, for example). But for most of us the path of deepening conversion and growing holiness is long, slow and hard, and we retain imperfections and immaturities which probably won’t be fully overcome until we pass through the fires of Purgatory.
Other descriptions of the three ways
Some of the Church’s first spiritual writers, such as Saint Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 - c. 215) and the monastic author John Cassian (360 - c. 435), described the three ways in the following terms:Christians in the early stages of their spiritual growth are motivated to pursue the Christian life by fear of God’s anger and the threat of eternal punishment, like a slave’s attitude towards his master. Then, as they advance, their motives take on more of a ‘mercenary’ character, centred on the hope of God’s reward for good behaviour. Finally, their motives become purer and almost completely uncontaminated by selfish calculations and they move towards a wholly disinterested love of God and neighbour.
‘The enkindling of love’
All these saints and theologians understood, of course, that we can only advance in holiness under the influence of God’s sanctifying grace, grace being the magnetic and ‘attracting’ quality of God’s love, drawing us into communion with him and enhancing and perfecting our natural human desires for love and virtue and self-transcendence.
Whatever words and images the spiritual masters of the past chose to use the basic truth is that, in our relationship with God, most of us have to proceed by degrees, starting as beginners, improving gradually and with sustained effort, and eventually, perhaps, becoming perfect, like the saints.
Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), an exact contemporary of Bonaventure, summarised the ‘three ways of the spiritual life’, as they had long come to be known by that time, as follows:
The first duty which is incumbent on man is to give up sin and resist concupiscence, which are opposed to charity; this belongs to beginners, in whose hearts charity is to be nursed and
cherished lest it be corrupted. The second duty of man is to apply his energies chiefly to advance in virtue; this belongs to
those who are making progress and who are principally concerned that charity
may be increased and strengthened in them. The third
endeavour and pursuit of man should be to rest in God and enjoy Him; and this belongs
to the perfect who desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ.4
So in the following articles I'll try to describe the distinctive features of each of the three ways in some more detail.
1. The anonymous author of the book Interior Prayer, a Carthusian novice master, describes conversion as follows: ‘Conversion means turning your back on a certain way of living, a certain scale of values, and turning yourself towards God; it is an existential act of prayer. Conversion implies a considerable effort of ascesis, in order to establish, or re-establish, the harmony of our being: submitting our passions to the order of reason, and opening our reason to the light of the Spirit. We learn how to situate ourselves in the presence of our Redeemer and the mercy of the gospel. It is a time of light and of obscurity – for it is all so beyond us that our eyes are weak. It is a time of struggle and of self-discovery, full of the joy of living in accordance with what we really are. There is a feeling of being in harmony with the universe, and a certain openness towards our brothers. It is springtime.’ Interior Prayer, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1996, p.126.
2. Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard, O.C.S.O., The Soul of the Apostolate, Tan Books, 1946, pp. 176-177. Dom Chautard’s book was originally published in French, in a series of revised and enlarged editions, before and after the First World War.
3. Saint Bonaventure, The Enkindling of Love, or The Triple Way, edited and arranged by William I Joffe, St Pius X Press, 1956.
4. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, Question 24, Article 9, Whether charity is rightly distinguished into three degrees, beginning, progress, and perfection?
1 comment:
Dear Father Ian,
I think I might be in trouble if the nature of Christian moral and spiritual growth is ascending as I feel sure my own experience is more of an 'up hills and down dales' sort of journey or even 'one step forward two steps back' with not much in the way of ascending.
You used the expression 'treading water' in a recent homily which is a great way of describing the lack of progress we often make in stages of our spiritual development.
I think it is important to recognise that most of us do get distracted from that neat trajectory and can get to feel a bit despondent when we realise that we have allowed ourselves to become complacent or lazy.
I would say that the most important thing is not to feel discouraged but persevere in faith and whenever the opportunity arises spend a little time in prayer and reflection to try to regain that lost ground.
It is thought provoking reading the articles and comments on this forum for instance and even by writing this reply perhaps I have turned my thoughts into prayers. So thank you for the nudge in the right direction.
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