The Unitive Way

By Fr Ian

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

Saint Thomas Aquinas in Prayer by Stefano di Giovanni (c. 1400-1450)
© Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

‘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.’ [1]

In the final, unitive, phase, the individual reaches the point of being free from even minor sins and imperfections, with only the most trivial and inconsequential exceptions, and now enjoys a relationship of constant loving contemplative union with God, perfect love of neighbour and a positive loving regard for the world and everything made by God.

Spiritual progress to this level is beyond the experience of the vast majority of ordinary Christians (though not beyond the realm of possibility for any of us!) and for the most part we’re reliant on the testimony of the Church’s saints and mystics, and those who knew them well, for a description of what this state of holiness and perfect loving union with God consists of.     

Throughout the entire Christian journey believers experience moments of intimate love and communion with God which tend to be occasional, brief and fleeting. But at the unitive stage they reach the highest possible degree and are now more-or-less habitual and constant.

This fruit of long co-operation with grace also manifests itself in a disposition of habitual love of neighbour. The nature of love, after all, which has its source in God, is to dissolve all hatreds, jealousies, rivalries and antagonisms, which divide and separate us from each other, in favour of a radical and all-encompassing communion, which human and natural capacities alone cannot bring about. 

‘[T]he Lord asks only two things of us,’ wrote Saint Teresa of Avila: ‘love for His majesty and love for our neighbour. It is for these two virtues that we must strive, and if we attain them perfectly we are doing His will and so shall be united with him’ (my emphasis). [2]

Believers who reach the unitive stage also advance to the highest possible degree of prayer. Prayer is radically simplified and becomes contemplative rather than discursive. Awareness of God and surrender to God’s providential will for us becomes constant:

Whilst previously there were set hours of meditation and prayer, now life is a perpetual prayer: whether working or recreating, whether alone or in the company of others, we continually rise towards God by conforming our will to his…This conformity is but an act of love and of abandonment into His Hands: prayers, ordinary actions, sufferings, humiliations, are all but so many means of manifesting our love for God: “My God and my all”.[3] 

A. Dominant characteristics of the unitive phase

The Christian who spends a long time in the disciplines of the purgative and illuminative stages and finally reaches this level of perfection of love and prayer will have acquired certain characteristics:

1.         Great self-control, or self-mastery: the complete elimination of bad habits; a near-complete ease in dismissing temptations; an intuitive and instinctive exercise of all the Christian virtues as dimensions of the overall virtue of love;

2.         Great purity of heart: single-minded focus on God; the complete absence of self-serving, egotistic, utilitarian motives towards other people and a pervasive positive regard and concern for others’ genuine welfare; complete detachment from created realities;

3.         Complete abandonment to the will of God and union with the will of God;

4.         Habitual recollection: a sense of being constantly in God’s presence and being directed by him;

5.         A further change in the form of prayer, from acquired to infused contemplation, in which God take control completely and leads the individual into communion with him. But this isn’t an experience of a never-ending interior bliss. Authors like Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross, and others, have described how, as believers enter this highest stage of Christian spiritual growth, God allows them to experience aridity and uncertainty and leads them through a spiritual desert experience, which Saint John has famously described as the ‘dark night’ of the senses and of the soul.

6. Peaceful submission to experiences of suffering, interior and exterior.

B. Obstacles and difficulties

No Christian, no matter how holy, is ever beyond the reach of temptations, or the resurgence of sinful dispositions. In the unitive phase the dangers to look out for are:

1.         Spiritual pride or elitism; self-satisfaction about ‘being a mystic’ or ‘a contemplative’. Of course this set of attitudes is more often a delusion on the part of individuals who want to believe that they’ve reached the higher stages of Christian virtue and prayer when they haven’t. In reality they’re motivated by a desire to feel superior to their fellow-believers and to be admired and respected as a spiritual expert.

2.         Impatience and rash spiritual ambition. We should aspire to tread the path of ordinary, daily, un-dramatic spiritual progress, co-operating with God’s grace, fighting sins and temptations, cultivating the Christian virtues and praying simply and regularly. Hankering after unusual mystical experiences or extraordinary graces is usually motivated by pride and egocentricity.

3.          The interference of the devil. Whenever we try to advance spiritually and serve God more conscientiously the devil always tries to confuse us and knock us off course.

In the earlier stages his favourite tactic is either to try to convince us that spiritual mediocrity and lukewarm faith is good enough, or, alternatively, he’ll try to foster the belief that the goal of holiness is unattainable, feelings of discouragement and failure that make us consider giving up.

But if we manage to make substantial progress in our spiritual life the devil changes tack and tempts us to a spurious sense of achievement, with the vanity and imperiousness that can easily accompany it. Another common temptation is that of excessive individualism, relying only on our own subjective insights and interior feelings and dismissing other people’s views or advice and the wisdom of the Church’s spiritual tradition.

Conclusion

To finish with let’s list the most important facts about the three phases in the personal journey of Christian faith that each of us makes.

First, while it’s true that every believer is called to the same pattern of Christian holiness, the same Christian virtues, the same Christ-like attitudes and qualities of character, it’s also true that we all have a unique personality, background, life-experience and so on.

This means that each of us has a unique relationship with God and a unique path to follow towards Christian holiness, guided by divine grace and providence. God leads each one of us to our own personal realisation of sanctity.  

Second, as already remarked, the circumstances of modern life are often complicated and for lots of men and women the path to holiness, which is never easy and effortless, is strewn with all kinds of moral and spiritual obstacles.

The Church, in its spiritual guidance of individual souls, certainly needs to exercise great patience and sensitivity, but it’s no solution for Christian communities to belittle these obstacles by blithely accommodating the Gospel message to the values of modern culture. The result is a false and misleading version of the Gospel message, which Christ warned us against (Mt 15: 14; 18:6).

Last of all, we should always keep in mind that the three elements of Christian spiritual life are never totally distinct and separate from one another. Aspects of all three of them are experienced to some degree at every stage along the way.

In fact one of the effects of conversion to Christ and the growth of our relationship with God is that our spiritual desires and aspirations change. We start to experience a great longing, or yearning, for all three of these facets of Christian spiritual life. 

We long to be purified of all selfish, sinful motives and to express a more real and sincere penitence for past sins.

We long to be cured of all forms of spiritual blindness, to learn and be enlightened more and more by the truths of faith; to grow in Christian wisdom and understanding and love.

And we long for an end to all antagonisms and refusals of love and for the union of love with God and our neighbour.

I would argue that, at their most basic level, these three movements of the soul are not even specifically or exclusively Christian. There are many men and women, who have no religious beliefs, who nevertheless experience these yearnings to some degree or other because they arise from our inbuilt human need and longing for God.

If these individuals don’t forcibly stifle their spiritual yearnings, if they cultivate and co-operate with them instead, God will eventually lead them into the full truth of the Christian revelation.

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NOTES

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

2. Saint Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, ed. and trans. by E. Allison Peers, Dover Publications, Inc., Mineola, New York, p. 78.

3. Adolphe Tanquerey, The Spiritual Life, pp. 604-605.