The Purgative Way

By Fr Ian

This is the second of four articles on the three main stages of Christian spiritual life, as understood in the tradition of Catholic spiritual theology 

‘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.’ [1]

The initial phase of Christian spiritual growth is the period of consciously and deliberately dying to sin and self. It’s a process of eliminating sinful tendencies and moderating our attachment to various pleasures, which aren’t necessarily sinful in themselves, but which easily lead to self-indulgence and obstruct our ultimate goal of living in a close communion of love with God. (Our natural attraction to pleasure, which can over-ride the demands of love and our moral duties towards others, is what the Christian spiritual tradition calls ‘concupiscence’). 

Jesus told his followers that God cuts and prunes the branches of the vine to ensure that it produces good fruit, and this is a helpful image of the sacrifices and purifications that need to take place in the initial, purgative, phase of Christian life ((Jn 15:2).

A. Those in the purgative way

There are basically three types of people who belong to the purgative stage of spiritual development:

1. Those who are still innocent and inexperienced in the life of Christian faith, usually the young. They haven’t yet encountered serious temptation or testing moral dilemmas and haven’t yet committed grave sin. Their level of faith, Christian knowledge, virtue and prayer are sincere but relatively undeveloped and they need to be strengthened and matured against inevitable future challenges.     

2. Those who have come to experience regret, guilt and shame for past immorality, or blindness towards God, and have reached the point of first conversion.

These men and women share the experience of the prodigal son in Jesus’ well-known parable: they were dead, but have now come alive, they were blind, but now they see, they were lost, but now they are found.

Saint Bonaventure highlighted this aspect of the purgative stage by calling it the sting of conscience: individuals experience a moral and spiritual awakening which brings with it strong feelings of contrition and a sense that they now have to do penance and make reparation for past wrongdoing.

Also, new converts to faith who have never prayed before need to learn how to pray and meditate ‘from scratch’.

3. Those who have already made good progress in their life of Christian faith but have now, for some reason, lost their earlier momentum and fallen back into spiritual mediocrity and habits of sin, venial or mortal.

To some degree or other this third category applies to all of us. Most Christians go through periods of spiritual decline and failure, especially in the early stages of conversion, but sometimes much later as well. To realise that sometimes we lose our way in our relationship with God and our pursuit of holiness, so that we have to go back to the beginning and start again, is one of the ways that God shows us how completely we need to depend on him and his grace for any progress we might make. As Christ told us: ‘Apart from me you can do nothing’ (Jn 15:5).     

Here we can mention again Jesus’ parable of the sower, which envisaged very accurately the various all-too-human motives that can lead to a failure to embrace, or to persevere in, the life of Christian discipleship.

The Parable of the Sower from the 12th century Hortus Deliciarum (Garden of Delights)

by Herrade,abbess of Hohenburg Abbey, France

The parable sheds light on important aspects of the purgative phase of our spiritual life: the need to be vigilant against shallow enthusiasm; the need for endurance in the face of opposition or persecution; the need to avoid allowing our commitment to be ‘choked’ by material worries or the ‘delight of riches’, and so on.

B. Dominant characteristics of the purgative phase

Catholic spiritual theology puts forward the following measures as essential to the beginning stage of spiritual growth:

1. penance, motivated by compunction/contrition, for past sins;

2. mortification of appetites and instincts by way of asceticism and greater self-discipline, to help prevent us from committing sins in the present;

3. recognising, understanding and resisting temptations;

4. identifying and resisting the seven main sinful motivations, the seven deadly sins of pride, envy, anger, avarice, gluttony, sloth and lust;

5. taking the first steps to acquire a habit of prayer.

The purgative stage involves a lot of effort on our part, similar to learning any new subject or acquiring any new skill, but in this case always aided by God’s grace. For this reason spiritual writers, following the great Carmelite mystic, Saint John of the Cross, often describe the purgative phase as mainly a time of active purification - ‘active’ in the sense that turning away from sin, growing in Christian love, learning to pray and opening ourselves to God’s grace all require energetic effort on our part.

In this phase we’re liable to experience for the first time what the Catholic spiritual tradition calls consolations and desolations. That’s to say, sometimes we’ll experience feelings of enthusiasm and relative ease in carrying out our intentions, but at other times we’ll go through periods of doubt, difficulty, discouragement, depression and backsliding.

The spiritual masters advise that we eventually learn to detach ourselves from, and ignore, both of these experiences in the sense of refusing to interpret them as indications of either spiritual success or failure. The best reaction is to thank God for the times of consolation and to see the periods of desolation as tests of our faith and perseverance, sent to us by God to strengthen us. 

C. Awakening to prayer

At the start of the purgative phase we hopefully become aware, possibly at some vague, intuitive level, of the need to begin cultivating more regular and disciplined prayer, more direct personal contact and communication with God.

This is more likely to be true if our conversion experience involved not just the realisation of our need for moral reform but also some kind of revelation of transcendence, an intuitive new awareness of God as the source of all love, goodness and truth and of the essential unity of everything that exists. At the start of the purgative phase it’s helpful to recognise our need to join other Christians in prayer, and to obtain the graces that are available to us especially in the sacraments of Confession and the Eucharist.

D. Attitudes and dispositions to be cultivated

First we need to be patient with ourselves, especially if we’re inclined to want rapid, visible results, a characteristically modern attitude. To become holy after the pattern of God’s own holiness isn’t a quick and easy process and we need to fortify ourselves against disillusion and discouragement. Many experts in Catholic spirituality wisely and accurately depict the journey of Christian faith with images such as climbing a mountain (Saint John of the Cross) or a ladder (Saint John Climacus, Walter Hilton) or making our way from the outer court of a castle to its innermost centre (Saint Teresa of Avila). 

Second we need to form a habit of daily prayer and spiritual reading. To begin with a manageable discipline of fifteen or twenty minutes at the same time every day is better than ambitious plans for copious reading and meditation which we soon find ourselves carrying out haphazardly and sporadically.

Setting time aside every day to meditate prayerfully on Scripture, especially the Gospels, is one of the most helpful activities we can adopt, filling our minds, so to speak, with Christ and his teaching and strengthening our resolution. At the outset one of the most important skills we need to learn is that of recollection: the habit of being able to become quiet and still in order to concentrate our attention on prayer, spiritual reading, reflection and personal contact with God.

There are many introductory guides to Catholic prayer and books of prayers, such as morning and evening offerings, litanies and novenas and so on, which help to train us in addressing God with adoration, thanksgiving, contrition, petition and intercession, giving us the right language and sentiments until we learn to pray more spontaneously in our own words.

Third, as an exercise in the virtue of penance, we need to engage in a regular examination of conscience, concentrating on what seems to us to be our dominant fault or defect and resolving to fight against it and remove it.

E. Obstacles and difficulties

At the earliest stage of spiritual development we’re hampered, inevitably, by our ignorance and inexperience. We deal with these obstacles, as just mentioned, by spiritual reading and by studying and reflecting on the truths of the faith (using the Catechism of the Catholic Church, for example), by forming a regular habit of personal prayer and also by going to Confession regularly and participating in Mass on Sundays and on other days when possible. When we approach all these activities with trust in God and with an explicit request that God strengthen us with his grace, we can be certain that he’ll respond to us favourably.          

A big difficulty in the purgative phase is our continuing attraction to sin, which can lead to bewilderment, discouragement and emotional fluctuation in our commitment. We’d like to see and feel that we’re making good progress and we can be tempted to give up when temptations continue to affect us. Some converts do give up, in a mood of despair that they’ll never overcome their weaknesses.

Here the two things we should never lose sight of is - again - that spiritual growth is a long, slow and difficult climb and also that God is completely forgiving and merciful and will never come to the point of dismissing us or abandoning us because of repeated failures.     

But today especially, perhaps, newly-converted believers are in danger of being led into the opposite error by the many varieties of ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ Christianity, which are eager to affirm whatever values happen to be fashionable in contemporary society.

Progressive versions of Christian faith downplay the role of sin in separating us from God and often have a very weak sense of the need for penance and mortification in order to grow in love and holiness. They imply that God’s ‘understanding’, ‘compassionate’ and ‘loving’ nature means that he always excuses sin and never punishes it (unless, perhaps, it takes the form of racial or sexual discrimination!). 

Liberal Christians are also inclined to believe that a committed, exclusive faith in Christ isn’t really necessary for salvation, because God’s grace is present, in abundance, anywhere and everywhere, among the other religions, for instance, and in the lives of those who explicitly reject the Christian faith.           

The grace of real conversion helps us see through these deceptions and the shallow, confused, compromised spirituality that they engender.

__________

[1] Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, Question 24, Article 9, Whether charity is rightly distinguished into three degrees, beginning, progress, and perfection?