Sadly, the “Devout Humanism” that has been all but universally accepted since the condemnation of Quietism, without the majority even realizing it, has been transmitted to the faithful, instead of the profound mystical theology that Christ first gave to them in the early Church.
Please do not think that I am only singling out the Jesuits for criticism, because all the other religious orders and congregations and secular priests have also been affected by ignorance of mystical theology since the condemnation of Quietism. However, the Jesuits have to be singled out because they are different. Why? Because since the Council of Trent they have been numerically bigger than all the other religious orders and their influence has been correspondingly greater too, particularly after the condemnation of Quietism at the end of the seventeenth century. The anti-mystical lobby in the Church that was busy seeking out and destroying every vestige of mystical theology in all the other religious orders left the Jesuits untouched, because they did not have any mystical theology or mystical tradition to destroy. Further to this their particular brand of, what the spiritual theologian Louis Cognet called ”Devout Humanism” was seen as the ideal from which other religious could learn and incorporate into their own spiritualities to fill the gap left by the absence of mystical theology. The spirituality therefore that you can find writ large in capital letters in Ignatian spirituality is to be found in lower case in other orders. So virtually all religious orders today, even those who have a mystical tradition, have been stripped of mystical theology.
In doing this they have been deprived of the unique prayer that has from earliest times been the place where selfless loving is learnt, enabling the purification to take place that enables them to be united with Christ and with his mystical contemplation of the Father. This is the only way that we can participate in Christ’s redeeming action and it is therefore the only way that we can attain our destiny, the destiny that God has conceived for us from the beginning. Sadly the “Devout Humanism” that has been all but universally accepted since the condemnation of Quietism, without the majority even realizing it, has been transmitted to the faithful instead of the profound mystical theology that Christ first gave to them in the early Church. It prevents them from doing for a modern pagan world what they did for the ancient pagan world. Jesuit spirituality is still the most influential spirituality in the Church today. The terrible irony is that religious orders who were originally fountains of authentic Catholic spirituality have become the purveyors of the Devout Humanism in which human endeavour attempts to do what only the love of God, his Holy Spirit can do through those who abandon themselves to receive him.
This is the modern malaise from which contemporary Catholic spirituality is suffering. However, what is particularly worrying and that is why I have highlighted the Jesuits, is that while the older orders like the Benedictines, the Dominicans, the Franciscans and the Carmelites do have a long and rich mystical tradition to which they can return, the Jesuits do not, and, in their ignorance, they continue to oppose others, both lay and religious who seek to return to the mystical origins first introduced into Christianity by Christ himself.
For other religious orders, training on how to cooperate with the Holy Spirit to enable him to purify their weak human love for union with God, was of paramount importance before the rise of Quietism. From the time of St Bernard to the condemnation of Quietism the greatest mystical works ever written were produced by the greatest number of mystical writers the Church has ever known. But there have been virtually no Jesuit mystics or mystical writers, and the very way their spirituality is insulated from all others, ensures that no other spirituality is allowed to influence them. The Exercises that are used continually during their training are returned to year after year. For years they insisted that no religious from another order was allowed to give them retreats, for fear that the purity of their own tradition be sullied. So they have insulated themselves from any possibility of being influenced by authentic Catholic Mystical theology. Their retreats are always based on the Ignatian Exercises that clearly only deal with the very beginning of what has been called the purgative way.
It was my admiration for the Jesuits that happily introduced me to the way St Ignatius had perfected the meditation that is always taught to spiritual adolescents. However, I am only referring to the meditations, or what he calls the contemplations, that concentrate on the person of Jesus Christ and on his love, not those calculated to fill us with fear. As I have already described, it was in practising what he calls “contemplation” in the middle of my noviciate that I was so filled with the love of God, made flesh and blood, in the person of Jesus Christ. It was this love that made me yearn for some deeper and more lasting union, that induced the Holy Spirit to lead me on and into the mystical prayer where I was to be purified. It was as if, at this point in my spiritual journey I had so consistently shown my desire for the real thing that it was as if the Holy Spirit said to me, “If that is what you really want, come, I will lead you forward.” Without the knowledge that I could not find in Jesuit spirituality I would have been destined to languish without help and succumb, as so many do, to what the Desert Fathers called Accidie before giving up what appeared to be a senseless and pointless journey. Fortunately, I came across or was led to the great Carmelite mystical masters.
The teaching of the two great saints raised up by the Church as Mystical Doctors, namely St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Ávila are, at least practically, unknown to Ignatian Spirituality. Yet it is the Church who calls upon us to listen to and implement their teaching for the good of our spiritual lives. These two spiritual giants sum up better than any others the teaching of their predecessors, in particular those myriad mystics who adorned the Church since St Bernard. In the Catholic Mystical tradition, any spirituality that excludes them will not only be impoverished, but condemned to leaving their adherents to remain, at best, as spiritual adolescents, ignorant of the mystical teaching that can alone enable them to grow to full spiritual maturity. This spiritual maturity is attained in years of selfless giving in mystical prayer where human love is so purified that, through union with Christ it can enable them to be led on, in, with and through him into union with God. Until self-centred human beings, and that is how we all begin, are purified they cannot be united with Christ, nor through him with the Father. Nor can this union be attained in months, or even years, more likely in decades of dedicated dying to self, at least for most of us. Surely this is not some sort of esoteric knowledge reserved for a chosen few. Ordinary common sense should make this truth evident to any objective reader. The imperfect cannot be united with the perfect until all the imperfections that prevent this union are purified away.
The daily practice of the “prayer of the heart”, under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit, will be the main support that will help believers to keep raising their hearts and minds to God come hell or high water. A spirituality for beginners, no matter how great these beginners might be in human terms, will not be sufficient to remake and remould them into the person of their Risen Lord. Nor will continually returning to them to recharge their batteries throughout the rest of their lives do it either, as if they were continually returning to their prep-schools to be re-invigorated to change the world with a spirituality that is no more than a beginning for beginners. Sadly, without the deep and penetrating purification that their spirituality knows nothing about, they will never be more than pilgrims trapped in a spiritual no-man’s-land. This spiritual no-man’s-land is located between the first fervour that once set them on fire, and the “mystic way” that has not yet begun, because no one has taught them how to journey onwards, into and through it. In fact, they have been knowingly insulated against it, although to the world they may appear as intellectual giants.
The deep mystical purification about which the great mystics write, not only enables us to observe the first of the new commandments that Christ gave us, but the second too, which is to love others as he loves us (John 13:34–35) and (John 15:12–13). The very idea that a person who has not yet been sufficiently purified to receive the same love that animated Jesus Christ can love others as he did, is to believe that pigs can fly. In his book Ignatian Spirituality David Fleming SJ says that Jesuits show their love for God “not in words, but in actions”. But a person who has not been purified of the selfishness that always perverts the best of human actions, performs them, without realizing it, not predominantly for the honour and glory of God, but for the honour and glory of themselves. That is why perhaps the only Jesuit mystic that I know of, Louis Lallemant SJ (1578–1635), said that “you can do more for God in a month with contemplation than in a life-time without it.”
And the same is true for those who believe that the semi-self-generated love that develops in meditation, or as St Ignatius would call it “contemplation”, can permanently change anyone. For the truth is that it is nothing more than the love of a spiritual adolescent. Spiritual adolescence is not, however, unimportant, any more than is the honeymoon period in any good marriage. The love generated and experienced there will fill the heart and mind with feelings and with beliefs that will be stored up in the memory to sustain them “when the well runs dry”. Furthermore, it strengthens the will and sharpens its desire so that it wants nothing more than to leave all else behind to reach out to the One whom they now desire above all else. However, only prolonged purification in the Night can transform a person permanently for the better. For only purification can transform our inadequate human love into the love with which Christ loved his Father, and the love with which he loved others. St John of the Cross’ masterwork, The Dark Night of the Soul, is written precisely for those for whom the first fervour that reaches its heights in the emotionally-filled feelings of adolescent love suddenly comes to an end. The end comes when our heart’s desire for God is resisted by the Holy Spirit to attention on God, not as we imagine him or have tried to depict him, but as he is in himself, or in his Son through whom we reach God, when the purification that is about to begin is sufficiently completed.
This purification constituting 90%, if not more, of a believer’s spiritual journey here on earth, cannot be completed by endlessly going back to a spirituality devised for beginners to revive the love that can only be brought to perfection in the Dark Night of purification. Long before the sort of experiences of God’s love are felt in this journey, as described in St Teresa’s Interior Castle and without realizing it, the humility that is learnt in perseverance enables the Holy Spirit to give wisdom to those who believe they are receiving nothing. And this wisdom is given ever more fully as they soldier on through the Night. Only perseverance in the purification of the dark night will generate the true purity of heart, and the true humility that will enable them to become true apostles filled with the God-given love, and the wisdom that it is their privilege to communicate to others.
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This essay is chapter fifty-seven of The Primacy of Loving and is published here by gracious permission of the author.
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