Getting Our Spiritual Foundations Right

"Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in moulding life than nationalism or a common language." ~ Hilaire Belloc

From The Imaginative Conservative

By David Torkington

Although we seem to be in an unholy mess, the answer to our present plight is to return immediately to the selfless, sacrificial, redemptive, and contemplative spirituality that was not just lived by the first saints but by all the saints who followed them.

Before the heresy of Quietism, Systematic Theology—which taught how to come to know God with the mind—and Mystical Theology—which taught how to come to love God with the heart—were complementary to each other. After the condemnation of Quietism, however, Mystical Theology mostly disappeared.

As the historian Msgr. Philip Hughes pointed out, it was replaced by Moral Theology, down to the present day. It introduced a new Moral Spirituality that sets before us the exemplary moral life that Christ Himself lived and then calls upon us all to live that same life. However, it often does this without the infused supernatural love that Christ received from His Father in the contemplative prayer to which He turned every day of His life. This profound prayer was taken out of mainstream Catholic spirituality after Quietism. It led to the disastrous moral malaise that we all experience today.

Since Quietism then, when the new Moral Spirituality took over, the faithful have been reading the life of Christ and the lives of the saints backward. In other words, they saw and were inspired by the impeccable moral behavior of Christ and the saints and were led to believe that the way to follow them was by trying to imitate their perfect moral behavior themselves. If they had only read their lives forward, instead of backward, they would have seen that the perfect moral lives lived by Christ and the saints were only possible because of the love of God that they had firstly received in prayer—more precisely, contemplative prayer. It is only here that true, selfless “divine loving” is truly learned that can alone open us to receive what St. Thomas Aquinas called the fruits of contemplation, which enable us to do what is quite impossible without them.

When Contemplative Prayer was taken away from the faithful, it was replaced by a Moral Spirituality that not only called upon them to practice the moral teaching of the Gospels but the moral teaching of the stoics too, thanks to the Renaissance; for they were taught side by side in Catholic schools. No wonder Catholics have, for centuries, been caricatured as “guilt-ridden hypocrites.” They have all been taught the moral teaching that we see lived to perfection in Christ, and even those practiced by the ancient stoics, but without the infused graces given to Him in contemplative prayer. So, failure to live up to that teaching was inevitable.

True imitation of Christ means, first and foremost, beginning the spiritual life by learning how to follow Christ first by imitating how He prayed, in such a way that He received the love of the Holy Spirit who can alone make all things possible that are quite impossible without Him. Remember how, at the Last Supper, Christ promised that those who followed Him would be able to do even greater things than He had done—like transforming a pagan empire into a Christian empire, for instance, in such a short time.

This was only possible because the sublime prayer of contemplation—which we think is only for monks in their monasteries, friars in their friaries, or hermits in their hermitages—was, in fact, practiced by “ordinary” Catholic faithful many years before these new religious forms of life were even thought of. Every human being can love. And contemplation is the prayer in which our love is directed toward God in Christ, where it is purified and refined until it sufficiently resembles His love for the union for which we yearn to take place. Without the infused virtues and the fruits and the gifts of the Holy Spirit that were given in contemplation, that were received by even the youngest members of the family, the transformation of the ancient world into a Christian world with such speed could not have taken place.

A secular world that sees a community of Catholics as “guilt-ridden hypocrites” because they cannot live the moral teaching that they proclaim will never attract others, nor will it change the world. But a secular world that sees Catholics as belonging to “a community of saints,” as they were called in the early Church because they were redolent with the love of God, can not only change the world but inspire those who have never seen such love before to come knocking on the door.

After Quietism, the new Moral Spirituality received a shot in the arm from a secular movement that arose as Mystical Theology declined. The Enlightenment, which proclaimed the “primacy of reason,” had no time for a form of theology that could not be subjected to reason. This was, however, not because divine love was subrational but because it was superrational, and therefore beyond the material minds of the latest fashionable intellectuals. Nevertheless, the rationalism that was the very soul of the Enlightenment began to seep into the mindset of the Catholic Church too.

Although the Catholic Church once feared that the French Revolution would undermine its authority, if not its very existence, the reverse happened. Now that the monarchies were undermined, if not destroyed, the Vatican suddenly found that rather than seeking their sanction they could now go directly to the faithful in every country, with little let or hindrance. This new power base was solidified by the proclamation of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council.

The Church’s newfound authority led to what was later called “creeping infallibility” because the faithful came to believe that the same weight given to proclaiming and guaranteeing the dogmatic teaching of the Church was given to almost every pronouncement that came from Rome. Nor did anyone in authority correct this misconception because it had its advantages to a new authoritarian Church.

This authority began to look more like that held by the dictators of the 20th century than that of Christ the King, who insisted that He did not come to lord it over others but to serve them. In the hands of good and saintly leaders, it could be used for the good of the Church; but it would be disastrous if it were to fall into the hands of felons! Then the docility and spirit of compliance with which the faithful had been groomed over many years could be used to disorientate, divide, and even destroy them, as we can see happening in the contemporary Church.

It was this authority that helped to solidify the new but alien Moral Spirituality that had long since replaced the Mystical Spirituality that was anathematized in the wake of Quietism. It was this spirituality that I was brought up on before the Second Vatican Council, when I felt called to religious life. All the courses and retreats that I attended in preparation for joining the religious life in the 1950s, before the Council began, urged me to come to know and practice all the virtues so that I could become a Christ-like person.

The novitiate merely reaffirmed this teaching, as did every novitiate at the time. And to help me make myself a perfect Catholic stoic, the novitiate library was overflowing with books on the virtues. Failure to make myself perfect—and the failure of all the other novices to make themselves perfect—produced armies of religious and priests who gave up trying to live deep spiritual lives. Sadly, they settled for seeking salvation instead of the perfection to which God had called them. Nor did they find the joy in practicing the spirituality that gave so much spiritual pleasure to their forebears.

St. Thomas Aquinas said that if a person does not find pleasure in the spiritual life, then they will seek it elsewhere. We have seen this happen on an industrial scale, both before the Second Vatican Council—as I saw for myself—and after the Second Vatican Council—as we have all seen, even in the highest places in the Church. It should not be surprising, then, that although the Second Vatican Council did produce a liturgy taken from early Christianity, it did not produce a document on the profound sacrificial and contemplative spirituality that inspired it, for the simple reason that such a spirituality had been taken out of mainstream Catholicism since the condemnation of Quietism.

When, after Quietism, the faithful were deprived of the supernatural strength that comes from the contemplation that is taught in Mystical Theology, they had to find it elsewhere. They began to choose their own spiritualities—as children choose their own goodies at the pick-and-mix counter in the supermarket. And in so doing, far from fulfilling the prayer of Christ at the Last Supper—“that they may all be one”—they all became disparate and different from one another.

You will hardly find two Catholics alike today united in the same spirituality that once made their first forebears one. All have their own favorite devotions, their own self-chosen spiritual exercises, their own devotion to this or that saint, or to this or that religious order, to private revelations of dubious mystics, or to their own best-loved liturgical practices. They are all mixed together in a unique spiritual cocktail that, like all cocktails, may enable us to feel good; but it is, in fact, eons away from the only true perennial spirituality to which we must return without delay.

Nor does it sufficiently suffuse and surcharge us with the spiritual power given in contemplation to enable us to say, as St. Paul said before them, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” The myriad devotional practices to which I refer above are not necessarily bad in themselves, far from it, but they are excentric in the strict sense of the word because they can draw us away from the essential perennial Catholic spirituality given to us by Christ Himself, that unites us all together as one.

This is the fragmented and impoverished form of spirituality that not only characterized Catholics on the threshold of the Second Vatican Council but also the cardinals, bishops, and theologians who took part in it. That is one of the reasons why they were unable to produce a satisfactory document on Catholic spirituality as a prequal to the document on the liturgy. This, as we all know, is the same diverse and disparate spirituality that continued after the Council, down to the present day.

The saints who should be our inspiration and our guide did not base their spirituality on that of previous saints, on the private and questionable revelations of dubious mystics, or on their own personal liturgical preferences. They based their spirituality on coming to know and love Jesus Christ, and on living the spirituality that He bequeathed to the early Church. Needless to say, this does not include the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross, devotion to the Sacred Heart, and similar devotions; these help the faithful to live and maintain the true Catholic perennial spirituality.

Although we seem to be in an unholy mess, the answer to our present plight is to return immediately to the selfless, sacrificial, redemptive, and contemplative spirituality that was not just lived by the first saints but by all the saints who followed them. If you want to study and make this profound spirituality your own without delay, please go to essentialistpress.com, where I have summarized it in fifteen free lectures on video.

The featured image is “A prayer in time of drought” (between 1878 and 1881), by Grigoriy Myasoyedov, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.